Defining God April 13, 2012
‘Sarita’ asks;
What is God? I mean what are the “properties” of a god. If god is a thing then we must be able to define it in terms of “properties”.. What makes a god a god? We all have our own conceptions of God–the god of the bible the Hebrew god most of all. Can we have a generic description of what a god is? So I can recognize what a god is not. How do you know what a god is? How can I recognize a god?
REPLY. Thank you Sarita for your question. Let me try to answer it by giving my own experience (which I posted recently on the Christian Apologetics Alliance website).
“I was converted to Christ as a 19 year old by reading the New Testament. No one told me I had to believe its authenticity. No one even told me I should read it. I wasn’t brought up in a Christian family nor did I attend church as a child. In grade school ‘Religious Instruction’ was my worst subject … I couldn’t get my head around it at all. I didn’t even own a Bible. Yet a day came when, as a physics student, I felt an irresistible desire to read the NT. I borrowed a copy from a friend and began to read. The overwhelming sense I had was of the reality and truth of what I was reading, and above all of Jesus Christ as a living Person. I had been an avid reader of classical novels, poetry and all kinds of fiction, but the NT was totally different and it was so true that I embraced its teaching … a life-changing experience. Now just 60 years later I have the privilege of preaching that same gospel truth each week. The authenticity of the NT writings is for me not just something derived from historical arguments, good though they are, but was a matter of personal experience long before I heard those arguments!”
If you haven’t read my book “Who made God?” I suggest you would find it really helpful in answering your question because its approach is to advance as an hypothesis that the God described and defined in the Bible does exist and then to work out the predictions of this hypothesis, comparing these predictions with the kind of world and universe we experience in reality. I find a close agreement between predictions and observations … which therefore validates for me the definition of God given in the Bible (the self-existent Creator of all things ex nihilo, a transcendent spiritual PERSON who created man in His own image and who sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world to redeem the race that had rebelled against Him … and so much more of course).