Thinking to Believe

If God is omniscient, then He knows everything that will happen in the future – including everything you will ever do. God knows that on x date at time t1 you will stub your toe, and on q date at time t5 you will forget where you placed your keys. God has had such knowledge from eternity past. Since God cannot be mistaken, it is certain that you will stub your toe on x date at time t1 and forget your keys on q date at time t5. How, then, can our “choices” be free? Does God’s knowledge of the future eliminate free will, reducing us to mere actors who simply perform the parts of a cosmic play written for us by God from eternity past? Are we puppets with no control over our own destiny? Is our experience of free choice illusory? Darwinist, Robert Eberle, sums up the problem nicely:

[Francis] Collins asserts that there is still free will, but fails to explain his logic for arriving at this extraordinary conclusion. Either what will be is known and fixed or it is not. An infallible god that knows what is going to happen is in conflict with the idea that there is free choice and thus a responsibility for one’s actions.[1]

I am not persuaded that God’s knowledge of the future determines our fate for two reasons. First, knowledge is not a cause of anything. Knowledge of some x is not what causes x to be. The truth of x must precede the knowledge of x.

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It’s not uncommon to hear some people characterize atheism as a religion. Is it? It depends, in part, on how one defines religion. That’s a tricky subject that does not have widespread agreement. Be that as it may, I think most people would say atheism can’t be categorized as a religion because religions worship deities, and atheism explicitly denies the existence of any deity. However, that’s not accurate. Most forms of Buddhism could be categorized as atheist or agnostic. There is no worship of any deity, and yet Buddhism is properly categorized as a religion.

That said, I don’t think atheism should be categorized as a religion. There are no “cult” practices, for example. There is no set of moral principles that atheists are bound to. Atheism is just an answer to a single question: Does God exist? A point of view on a single issue does not constitute a religion. It is not robust enough. And while it’s true that this question is properly categorized as a religious question, that doesn’t mean that every answer is a religious answer or constitutes a religion. Atheists answer the question in the negative. They do not think God exists. So atheism is a negative claim about what does not exist. How can a claim about what does not exist constitute a religion? Surely religions make positive claims about what does exist, not negative claims about what does not. As a meme I once saw expressed, if atheism is a religion, then “off” is a TV channel.

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Traditionally, the fourth gospel is ascribed to the Apostle John, who is understood to be the mysterious beloved disciple that makes so many appearances in the book. However, based on the internal evidence, I am persuaded that this identification is mistaken. Lazarus is the beloved disciple, not John. Since the beloved disciple is identified as the author, wouldn’t that make Lazarus the author of the fourth gospel? In a sense, yes, but authorship is rightly attributed to John given ancient standards.

I think Lazarus penned a written testimony to the life of Jesus, and John used Lazarus’ material as his primary source (similar to how Matthew and Luke used Mark as their primary source, or how Mark used Peter as his primary source). John edited Lazarus’ material and added some of his own to compose the fourth gospel shortly after Lazarus died (a second time), in part, because he needed to clear up a misunderstanding in the Christian community about Lazarus’ relationship to the return of Christ. What better way to do so than by using Lazarus’ own testimony as the basis for the gospel!

Check out the evidence I present in the paper linked below and let me know what you think.

Who Wrote the Gospel of John?