What was God Thinking?

By Robby Charters

The Intro
In this humble compilation, we try to explain things so the average atheist-on-the-street can grasp what it is that Christians essentially believe (notwithstanding, some atheists are more knowledgeable about it than most Christians)...

...or, if you will...

...so the average person-in-the-pew can better explain it to to his atheist and agnostic friends (of which I hope he/she has many)...

...or better yet...

...understand it him/herself. We steer away from many of the tired cliches, and we take a second look at what the Bible really says about some issues, what this Christian thing is about, and what it's not about.

What we won't do is dwell on the usual sticking points, such as six-day creation, and how scientific the flood narrative is or isn't. There's simply too much else to unwrap and blow our minds to wait for everyone to agree on those issues.

What we will do is discuss whether the idea of a God who's both just and omnipotent is an oxymoron, whether the Bible supports genocide, whether the picture of God as an angry jealous old man, truly describes God's nature, and what made Christianity into the "white man's religion".

We will discuss as best we can exactly what God was thinking - what is His motivation in interacting with humanity.

The seven chapters included in this were originally published as separate booklets, as follows:
* How a Slap on the Ground Saved Four Dimensional Space-Time
* Getting a Handle on Omnipotence
* How the Omnipotent One Used Politically Incorrect Methods to Fix the Universe
* The Ultimate Fix
* Salvation, and it's Components
* Why All the Blood?
* How Did Christianity Become the White Man's Religion?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robby's eBook Formtting
• Release date: Sep 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463942796

Robby Charters

I live with my wife and my son, sometimes in Thailand where I was born and my wife is from, sometimes in Ireland where my dad is from. In Thailand, I taught English as a second language. Here in Ireland, I work from home, turning people's manuscripts into e-books. Wherever I am, I write.

Book preview

 Getting a Handle on Omnipotence

Let's say you're omnipotent, and you want to make a clock. There are two ways to do it:

The first way would be to create a dial with hands that always point in the right direction in response to the actual time. The big hand would move around the dial once every hour, always landing on the twelve at the exact moment the little hand arrives at whatever o’clock it is, simply because you commanded it to. You could either command it to follow that pattern for all eternity, or else you could dedicate one small part of your infinite mind to physically moving it according to that pattern. There would be nothing of what we call clockworks inside, just a giant cosmic miracle dial responding to your decree on its own.

 The second way would be to build it with all the wheels inside meshing together, timed by the flywheel, driven by the powersource, working with utmost precision, ensuring that the hands point to the right numbers on the dial at the right time of the cosmic time progression. Any addition you made later on would be powered by and in sync with the existing clockworks. It would be designed to work all on its own without any effort from you - except you could add an input device whereby you could make any corrections, such as, increase speed by one millionth of a second. We'll talk more about this input device later.

 From reviewing all the evidence, both from science and the Bible, I'd have to conclude that a certain Omnipotent being that we know, chose the second of the two ways, the clockworks model when creating this universe. A lot of folk religion does seem to favour the miracle dial method, as well as, perhaps a few early scientific models. However, even early scientists such as Aristotle and others leaned in the direction of a clockworks type of universe.

 Religious sources are also ambiguous. While the phrase, In Him all things consist, could be interpreted as supporting the first option; there are also passages that indicate that the heavenly bodies are there for times and seasons, staying on their course on their various circuits, and having a cause-effect relationship with conditions on earth. So long as the earth exists, sowing time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease (Gen 8:22 CJB). While the other nations worshipped the sun, moon and various other forces of nature, assuming that there was a different god directly controlling each of these forces; the sweep of Biblical revelation generally discouraged that belief, suggesting instead, that these were non-intelligent but powerful forces, set in motion at the beginning by God, following their natural rhythms and cycles, naturally effecting the earth. If the scriptures don't say so explicitly, they give us a firm push in that direction. In other words, the weather is warm today, not because Ra or Apollo decided to emanate their essence more powerfully, while the god of rain kindly stood aside; but because the non intelligent forces of nature are simply following their natural course.

Furthermore, from examining the Biblical sources, it's quite evident that the the Omnipotent One we know is more interested in displaying His wisdom than naked power.

And how does science point to a clockworks model? There are the four forces (that we know of), gravitational, electromagnetic, the strong and the weak; and we now know that atoms consist of dozens of types of particles, each rendering possible, various facets of our existence, including life.

 Though we've always taken it for granted, actual life integrated with physical substance isn't an easy thing to come by. We know that rocks can't be living. Minerals can't hold life, nor can any other elements or simple compounds - although we now have very complex electronic circuitry with the right programming to make it act like it's alive - isn't that right, Alexa?

Yes, that's right.

But only the extremely intricate structure of the DNA molecule can actually hold life. We still don't know how it works, nor how to recreate it. All we can do is grow it from existing DNA.

 When God said, Let there be light, the big bang occurred at just the right intensity to divide that initial microscopic speck into a humongous mass of photons, all at the right density to enable the formation of atoms of every size and type - the clockworks that would eventually enable life. Had that big bang been even the slightest bit more intense, physicists tell us, all that would have been enabled would have been hydrogen atoms. Life could never come about. Anything ever so slightly less intense and the universe as we know it would, again, not have been possible.

 Even at the right intensity, the time still had to be right. The Omnipotent Being said, let light be separated from darkness. Ripples appeared on the outward flowing stream of light, and gravitational and magnetic forces began to go to work at pulling it together to form galaxies and stars. The nuclear reactions within each star formed the various particles into atoms, splitting them again, completely dissolving them and remaking them into atoms again, while some that had spun off beyond the outer periphery formed into planets. When at least one planet had cooled sufficiently, God said, Let the water be separated from dry land, and let an atmosphere appear. Only then, was life even possible. Everything had to be just right.

We are living in what is called, The Goldilocks Zone where it is, like junior Bear's porridge, Just right!

 So, how much time passed between these events that led to it being just right for life of any sort to make its appearance? Some say billions of years, others say only a few days. The thing about such intense gravitational force as was present at the big bang, is that it greatly speeds up time, so the first couple of aeons could have been a couple of days. To God, it doesn't make any difference anyhow, as a day and a thousand years (or a billion, as far as that goes) are all the same. It was all a part of fixing the clockworks to accommodate life, and setting up that relatively short Goldilocks zone where humanity could live and roam, and fulfil his destiny.

 There is reason to believe that at least the seventh day of creation was much longer than twenty four hours. According to Hebrews 4:3-11 we are still in the seventh day. God has been resting, and it remains for some of us to enter that rest.

 So, God told man on the sixth day, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and every living creature that crawls on the earth. God gave His creation over to humanity for safekeeping, set His alarm clock, and rested.

 Well okay, He's not exactly sleeping. Remember, there's that input device whereby He can make adjustments, and that is through interaction with humanity, to whom He gave the authority to manage things. That input device is, in fact, the life that He breathed into man that brought him to life. So, humanity is both a product of the grand universal clockworks that God had spent so much time designing and developing, and alive with the Breath of God Himself. Where other creatures are simply the products of the clockworks, and therefore subject to determinism, humanIty is above that and is capable of true creativity, making decisions that can't be predicted by knowing all the maths. So, humanity, created in God's own image, holding God's life in his DNA, both belongs in the physical universe that produced that DNA, and transcends it. He is a higher order of being, meant to be God's