Existence
Our Existence
This post is to help those who question the source of our existence. There is no more fundamental issue than our existence. The following is from my book, “What Is life All About?” It represents about 25% of chapter 40 on the subject of our existence.
CHAPTER 40
EXISTENCE: THE FIRST UNDERSTANDING
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
—Romans 1.20
THE MOST BASIC understanding of what life is all about has to do with our existence. The book, “What Is Life All About?” deals with religious deception, and the most fundamental deception deals with God’s existence and consequently the existence of everything including mankind. The next critical realization has to do with God being the God of the Bible and consequently His ability to accurately provide mankind with the truth. Much of the book has to do with man-made religions and most frequently as the result of misusing the scriptures. Actually, all we know about God, the reason for our existence, and how to be successful in life, resides in the Bible. This section discusses existence as the result of a creator or as something that just happened from nothing.
40.1 Existence
We exist; the universe exists, but why? Good science supports truth, and bad science misleads millions of people who want to believe it is true. We do not understand the difference between good and bad science. We are overwhelmed with what science and engineering have accomplished, and the things that work are good science and engineering. You do not see all the trials and errors made to arrive at things that work. You would be amazed at how many times science and engineering were so sure something was right only to find out when tested it did not work. Good science produces much collaborating data, which leads to new theories and eventually validates the latest theory. It is a process, and in some areas of science, it is difficult to test theories. I would suggest the subject of existence and our beginnings is not provable or explainable by science because it is outside the realm of human understanding. However, I also believe we can understand that it is outside the realm of our understanding with some certainty. We need to allow good science to take us where it takes us.
40.2 Existence—How Did All This Happen?
Since the earliest of times, man has thought about and written about the wonder of man’s existence. If you give this serious consideration, one can rationally conclude that man as well as the universe should not exist. There should be nothing much less having intelligent thoughts about existence. There should be nothing and not even the idea of nothing, not a single particle of anything. There should be no electrons, no protons, no air, no space, and no reason for anything to exist. Yet here we are! Then you have people saying everything happened naturally from nothing, but what is natural in nothingness, and why would there be an event when not even events or time exists? Why would time exist in nothingness when not even nothing exists? Yet there is all this and all this order and humanity, who can contemplate all this. Then you get a headache—it is all so amazing and frightening. It leads to only one conclusion, and that is there is a creator. The existence we experience is not just something that randomly happened as in the big bang theory. Those who believe “big bang” would say it is not an explosion, a bang, but the ever-expanding universe beginning with creation of matter from nothing or more scientifically the universe emerged from a singularity at time zero. They want you to believe that there was nothing, and then there was something. The truth is scientists want to be able to explain our beginning, and they cannot. They cannot because the creation is the product of God’s intention to create the physical world for man, and He did it in a way to achieve His purpose. Man in his limitations defined by God of three physical dimensions and time cannot conceive of creation. God, who likely exists in infinite dimensions, can easily create our world and our existence, but man in his limitations will never comprehend how.
Man’s theories will continue to evolve with each new one replacing the previous one, and there will never be certainty—just theories. The only certainty is that these persons of science will die, as will their theories. Different theories will come and different people of science
will take their place.
Pause to gain a little better understanding of “dimensions”
Many years ago, someone told me about the premise of a book written by Edwin A. Abbott called Flatland published in 1884. I never read the book, but the concept, as I understood is one I have used at various times. It turns out his idea is a good way of describing in very simple terms why we may not be able to understand something that would occur in a different dimension or, more exactly, in a dimension greater than our own.
A person exists on a two-dimensional piece of paper. He has height and width and lives in a time world, making him a three-dimensional person (practically for the example the paper has no thickness). We created this person by drawing him and somehow gave him life. We are going to interact with this person, and we are, of course, four dimensional beings (height, width, depth, and time). I will call our friend on paper 3-D man. The 3-D man seems like a happy person since he has a smile, but we are going to disturb his world. You or I take a sphere and touch it to the paper, and “3-D man” sees a dot appear, and He wonders, how did that happen? Then we begin to pass the sphere through the paper, and he sees a circle that is growing in diameter until some point where it begins to diminish in diameter, finally is just a point, and then disappears. 3-D man is baffled—what happened, how did it happen? In his world, there is no depth, and thus he is not able to solve this puzzle. He does develop many theories, tests them, and changes the theory regularly, but he cannot prove his hypothesis.
Now God may exist in infinite dimensions, and we are 4-D men. We cannot understand this magnificent creation; it is incredible, and yet for God, it is very simple. I would suggest as simple as we understood what 3-D man could not understand. Of course, I do not know in how many dimensions God exists, but in our example, the creator (us) existed in one more dimension than the created. This story is to illustrate in human terms how it may be impossible to understand the creation or our existence. I know it is not important for our eternity to have a technical understanding of those things. I also realize this is an illustration. It would only be true if God revealed it, but of course, He did not. Nonetheless, I hope it has value in making the point.
We need to see God as creator
There is one thought that seems to me to be very important. If you contemplate why we exist, it can be difficult but helpful. Ask yourself, why are we here? It’s “impossible” to conceive of our existence. Therefore, man’s best scientific effort is the big bang theory, or in other words, something happened. So from the inanimate came an ordered universe and intelligent life. Well, that does not seem reasonable, so let us say it took millions, no, billions of years, even the current scientific estimate of 13.7 billion years. I always at this point come back to the scripture “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” That statement came from the creator, God, and it makes a lot of sense to the One who made it in light of how He created us with processes we are not capable of comprehending. Yet He made the statement since man can easily comprehend a greater power is involved. I am sorry men have not stepped up in general and admitted there is something they do not know and certainly will never be able to understand. The “existence of anything” points to something well beyond the scope of mankind to determine. Someone might say aliens created man and the universe. Well, good, you are right, that alien was God, and we know that by studying scripture. You can in fact understand God reasonably well. There is incredibly more reason to believe the scriptures than there is to believe that this all just happened. God is very definitive regarding His expectation of man being able to discern Him as the creator and makes that clear in Romans 1.20, which is the verse at the beginning of this chapter.
Man’s theories will continue to evolve with each new one replacing the previous one, and there will never be certainty—just theories. The only certainty is that these persons of science will die, as will their theories. Different theories will come and different people of science
will take their place.
A person exists on a two-dimensional piece of paper. He has height and width and lives in a time world, making him a three-dimensional person (practically for the example the paper has no thickness). We created this person by drawing him and somehow gave him life. We are going to interact with this person, and we are, of course, four dimensional beings (height, width, depth, and time). I will call our friend on paper 3-D man. The 3-D man seems like a happy person since he has a smile, but we are going to disturb his world. You or I take a sphere and touch it to the paper, and “3-D man” sees a dot appear, and He wonders, how did that happen? Then we begin to pass the sphere through the paper, and he sees a circle that is growing in diameter until some point where it begins to diminish in diameter, finally is just a point, and then disappears. 3-D man is baffled—what happened, how did it happen? In his world, there is no depth, and thus he is not able to solve this puzzle. He does develop many theories, tests them, and changes the theory regularly, but he cannot prove his hypothesis.
Now God may exist in infinite dimensions, and we are 4-D men. We cannot understand this magnificent creation; it is incredible, and yet for God, it is very simple. I would suggest as simple as we understood what 3-D man could not understand. Of course, I do not know in how many dimensions God exists, but in our example, the creator (us) existed in one more dimension than the created. This story is to illustrate in human terms how it may be impossible to understand the creation or our existence. I know it is not important for our eternity to have a technical understanding of those things. I also realize this is an illustration. It would only be true if God revealed it, but of course, He did not. Nonetheless, I hope it has value in making the point.