Impersonal? Impossible! …A Creator God must be a personal Being, Not an Impersonal ‘Force’.
The cosmological argument we discussed last week is a sound one. The universe began. This is backed up by both science and philosophy. Something had to cause that beginning. That something, the ‘First Cause‘, had to be timeless and eternal. Since its actions created time, it had to exist outside of time… before time began…but that’s as far as we got.
Can we actually know anything about this First Cause?
Was it a force that exists as an impersonal entity like “The Force” of the Star Wars movie series?
or
Was it a personal being who decided to create the universe?
First let me talk about what I mean by a ‘personal god‘ in this context:
I’m talking ‘personal’ in the context of ‘personhood‘. A personal mind that can make decisions and decide to act on them.
I’m NOT talking about a ‘personal god’ as in your own personal opinion of who God is. Our society today, at least in North America, has a very strong tendency for each of us to make up the God we think would best suit us…then claim him or her as our own ‘personal god’.
It’s much easier that way. No need to work at searching for truth when you can make up your own.
So why would I think the power that caused the universe to come into existence was a personal being?
There are actually several lines of thinking that lead to a personal creator God.
First of all, we’ve already discussed how the ‘beginner’ of the universe must be beyond space and time to have created space and time…therefore it cannot be physical or material.
There are two things that are not physical or material;
- Abstract objects like the number 7, for example.
- An unembodied, intelligent mind.
The number 7 (or whatever other abstract object you can think of) cannot create anything or be the cause of anything. This leaves our only other option – the universe must be the result of an external, transcendent, intelligent mind.
Whomever or whatever caused the beginning of the universe also had to be existing in a changeless eternal state prior to that beginning. The cause had to be eternal, but the effect is temporal. If the necessary conditions for the existence of universe were eternal, the universe would have always existed ans would be eternal as well. Science and logic shows it is not.
If the conditions for the universe’s existence are not eternal, something would have had to change them to cause the beginning of the universe and then we’d be back to square one…what caused that change? A personal being, however, can maintain all of his unchanging, eternal attributes while intentionally deciding to act and create by making a change to the status quo.
Without an eternal universe, there are no other options but a ‘personal’ god and any theory of an impersonal force as the cause of creation of the universe is very difficult to support.
Again, this reasoning doesn’t lead specifically to the Christian God that I believe in…there are other reasons to support that idea…but it does lead to an intelligent cause for the universe in which we find ourselves.
There are a few additional lines of reasoning that come to similar conclusions. These involve discussions on design in the universe and the origins of morality, which are also part of the reasons to believe God exists at all.
Next time we’ll be discussing design in the universe…not so much biological design, though I think that’s an interesting topic in itself, but the ‘fine-tuning’ of the cosmos. Infinitesimal changes in many attributes of our universe or the laws of science would render life on earth impossible…
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