A Quote by Joseph Priestley
When we say there is a GOD, we mean that there is an intelligent designing cause of what we see in the world around us, and a being who was himself uncaused.
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Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
You say you're a Christian, Cause God made you, You say you're a Muslim, Cause God made you, You say you're a Hindu and the next man a Jew, Then we all kill each other, Cause God told us to? Nah!..
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.
God will of necessity always be a hidden God. His loudest cry is silence. If he does not manifest himself to us, we will say that he hides himself. And if he manifests himself, we will accuse him of veiling himself. Ah! it is not easy for God to make himself known to us!
I always say to my students that being a scientist is like being an explorer, and I really mean that because, in a sense, I think in science we explore the world, the universe around us.
An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality - the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else.
What is the cause of all God's purposes towards us? Himself. There is no other cause.
God thus excludes the world; he is only its cause; in no sense is he effect, of himself or anything else. Pantheism (better, "pandeism," for again it is not really the theos that is described) means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there, is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects.
It's the fact that your body and your personality are not God. God is you. But you can't say you are God just as the ocean is all the waves, but you can't say one wave is the ocean. And so you manifest God in a way that you don't understand. Man himself is the image of God, but he doesn't see that image in himself. And you need to meditate, and there will come your answer, not looking in the mirror.
God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge. He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with Himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits. (King Follett Discourse)
The law of giving and receiving is fundamental, and relates just as much to God as it does to us. As we go through the door of giving ourselves to God in worship we find that God comes through that same door and gives Himself to us. God's insistence that we worship Him is not really a demand at all but an offer-an offer to share Himself with us. When God asks us to worship Him, He is asking us to fulfill the deepest longing in Himself, which is His passionate desire to give Himself to us. It is what Martin Luther called "the joyful exchange."
Atheists themselves used to be very comfortable in maintaining that the universe is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that they can no longer hold that position because modern evidence that the universe started with the Big Bang. So they can't legitimately object when I make the same claim about God - he is eternal and he is uncaused.
The atheist risk everything for the present and the future, on the basis of a belief that we are uncaused by any intelligent being. We just happen to be here. That one is willing to live and die in that belief is a very high price to pay for conjecture.
Bread is a second cause; the LORD Himself is the first source of our sustenance. He can work without the second cause as well as with it; and we must not tie Him down to one mode of operation. Let us not be too eager after the visible, but let us look to the invisible God.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
I — I mean," Kate stumbled on, "that with us there is a time past and time present, and time future, and with your gods perhaps there is time forever; but God in Himself has the whole of it, all times at once. It would be true to say that He came into our world and died here, in a time and a place; but it would also be true to say that in His eternity it is always That Place and That Time — here — and at this moment — and the power He had then, He can give to us now, as much as He did to those who saw and touched Him when He was alive on the earth.
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