Woodbine
Posts: 1218 Joined: June 2007
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Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 26 2015,21:47) | Quote | 25 AxelAugust 26, 2015 at 9:41 am ‘But in what way do humans have “intrinsic value” under Christianity but not under materialism?’
gun: The touchstone of all truth, of all reality, is God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. What He says, goes. You see everything as intrinsically-homogeneous agglomerations of atoms in flux, He sees what they constitute: a living shell/’tent’ for his Spirit to enliven, together with all the rest of his Creation.
To believe that we and, indeed, the whole of Creation, are not intelligently designed, even without the benefit of the physicists’ latest findings, has always been a preposterous notion to the vast majority of mankind, surely, inconceivable, from the time we first start trying to make sense of the world, as babies. What would be the sense in it – yet it is perhaps driven by our most primordial instinct, which eventually settles into common sense. We don’t think, ‘Oh I must think; our autonomic intelligence takes charge without conscious prompting. A bit of a digression there. Sorry about that.
By divine election we are his children, good and bad, each of us, unique and personal in the same way that He is, as the Incarnate son of the Father, insofar as we can know God, can understand the paradoxical mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.
God defines meaning, in the same way – although absolutely definitively in his case – as we define the meanings of worlds. People can assign different meanings to a word, not accepted by others. Our words do not have intrinsic meanings.
We can choose to repudiate our adoptive sonship of God in favour of choosing the devil as our father, but that will not render God’s fatherhood of us null. Our sonship will always be intrinsic because God is the sovereign reality and source/maker of reality.
God’s fatherhood of us is ‘intrinsic’, a relationship proper to Himself by his own choice, and to us, again by his volition. It is a matter of our possessing an intrinsic, proper Name, and non-living matter being intrinsically nonentity, not invested by God with the gift of partaking of his own eternal life.
All very abstruse, I realise, but a random mass of atoms lacks, jointly and severally, a certain something, a certain ‘identity’. Each of us has a very proper intrinsic identity given us by God and cherished by Him. |
totally not creationists. |
That's Alistair McGrath grade waffle that is.
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