Crisis of faith: Why do you hold the belief that God is personal?

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Crisis of faith: Why do you hold the belief that God is personal? Christanon 08/04/19 (Sun) 17:59:49 7eb1c4 No.824979

This realization couldn't have come at a worse time. I'm literally weeks away from enrolling the RCIA. For some time now I have tried to suppress some difficult questions, but I feel like I can’t go on and deceive myself unless I deal with these questions first. Why do you believe that God is personal? An impersonal God would solve virtually all the problems that Theism faces. Something can not come from Nothing, which is why I reject Atheism… But that rejection of a lack of belief in a creator shouldn’t logically lead one to believe in a personal God, or Theism. This is what I have come to realize. Deism asserts that the Creator, for whatever reason, does not interfere with his own creation. This naturally leads me back to Nihilism, which is what I wanted to break free from ergo why for the last two years I have been preparing to convert to Christianity.

I want to be a staunch believer in Christ, but I can’t pretend, I want to truly believe with all my heart.

I need resources to deal with this. Anything will do i.e Books, Videos, Blog posts… The question of an impersonal God must have been dealt with throughout Church history. I have dealt with some difficult questions before, 2000 years of Church history has its benefits. I reckon that most questions have been dealt with by now.

____________________________

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Christanon 08/04/19 (Sun) 18:19:54 fb2b68 No.824984

File: e8d451f51373a9e⋯.png (245.52 KB, 1002x989, 1002:989, 2019_07_19_050635.png)

>>824979

God is most definitely personal. He has already answered my prayers multiple times. He created you personally when you were in the womb. He knows every hair on your head. I don't see how God couldn't be personal with His creation.

>pic unrelated

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Christanon 08/04/19 (Sun) 19:08:01 061c13 No.824988

>>824979

God does not interfere with us specifically because he loves and respects us. God loves us so much he came as the Son Jesus and willingly suffered and died for us to show US that he knew our suffering.

God who is infinite knows you better then even you know yourself he has seen your faults and he has seen your glories. He willingly forgives you for every bad choice you make something he didn't even offer the angels.

God is personal because he is always with you. Always talking to you but his voice is in silence. It is up to you to listen to the voice of the Lord.

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Christanon 08/04/19 (Sun) 22:03:09 1fe057 No.825010

Because an impersonal God implies that God flies in the face of the Bible, and especially of Jesus. I recommend that you look into Jesus, in particular, the sheer volume of historicity involving Him. In summary: only a blind fool would deny the existence of Christ in history, and only a willingly blind fool would deny that He said what is claimed by his apostles that He said. If this is so, then He was either a complete schizo, a conman, or He was really God in the flesh. The two former don't really budge well with history since the coming of Christ unless you apply really big historical snobbery. To deny a personal God is to deny Jesus, is to brush off something that is irrefutable, is to deny reason.

Further, I have a very big contention with Deism, having been one myself. And that is that it is a response to the world having accepted the parameters of the world. Meaning, that it is a justification fo God using the worldview of those who hate God. It really is not an earnest belief for most people, it is a desperate cling to comfort because one has accepted the world as told by the secular, "reason"-worshipping world. It not only denies the Bible on the grounds of these padagrims ("miracles, etc don't happen!!!!"), but it also denies a completely fundamental attribute of God as an entity, and that is sovereignty. If God exists, then He must be sovereign over the world, and furthermore it would be expected for Him to make use of this sovereignty. As you've mentioned, to suppose that the universe, which has rules, came from an unreasonable force is madness. If then, this force is reasonable, then it would not make sense that it would make something so incredibly complex just for nothing, as is tht implication of the "great clock maker" point of view.

i.e. if God exists, then it would not make sense that He be an impersonal God. Your problem, as was mine, is that you've accepted the world as described to you by those who hate God.

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Christanon 12/21/19 (Sat) 15:50:43 9c50cc No.825299

>>825010

/thread

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Christanon 12/23/19 (Mon) 04:30:36 5b7f1d No.825328

An impersonal God wouldn't create. Even if God abandoned the universe (He didn't), that would be the act of something personal.

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Christanon 12/23/19 (Mon) 09:38:12 7d73a6 No.825330

File: a9b736a47ed60eb⋯.jpg (166.55 KB, 1536x989, 1536:989, a9b736a47ed60ebc52b56e723a….jpg)

>>824979

>This realization couldn't have come at a worse time. I'm literally weeks away from enrolling the RCIA

I'd say it's pretty well timed. Hopefully, you'll find some answers in the RCIA, and your doubts will help you think more about what your being taught. Doubts are really uncomfortable, but they help us refine our faith.

First, let me advice you: think about your faith, but also act. Do stuff, practice love. I was a Deist and it all felt stupid, empty, vain, mainly cause you cannot merely get to know the divine through the intellect. God is order, and you have to live in that order, kind of align yourself with it (order, existence, love… they are different ways to experience the same thing; "I am YHWH" could be translated as "I am the source of existence" or "I am he who always was, is and will be").

Now, one thing that's important is that God follows that order too. Not because He's subjected to it, but because He is the order. He's not going to break the order but act within it. He's eternal, He doesn't act like you and me. When you feel loved by God, you feel he has always loved you. You need to walk with Him. How? Do what you know you're supposed to do, and love. Love those around you as much as you can. Prayer helps a lot, even if it's only used as personal reflection.

Try to "feel" His order and follow it.

>>825010

Good post.

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Christanon 12/23/19 (Mon) 20:21:27 300435 No.825345

First, you need to understand why God is not merely an impersonal First Principle of the universe. For me, I would say reading Edward Feser on classical theism could be helpful. A good start is Five Arguments for the Existence of God. He does more than just argue for the existence of God - he argues the what is the nature of God that is necessitated by each argument - namely that God is one, immutable, eternal, immaterial, omnipotent, perfect, fully good, and yes - intelligent, because forms and patterns can only be grasped in the intellect. Thus, God has a "mind" and is intelligent and "personal" (although certainly he is not personal in the exact same way that humans are ). From Feser you can graduate to more meaty stuff like reading Aquinas himself.

Secondly, you need to understand that this personal, intelligent God actually cares about creation. Here natural theology is insufficient. You need to read Scripture, which speaks about how God has indeed spoken to his people throughout history, most perfectly in the form of the Incarnation - Christ, who is the perfect revelation and exact imprint of God (Hebrews 1:1-3). For a skeptic, I would say that the evidence for Christ's resurrection is one of the most powerful testimonies of who he is and why Christianity is not a false religion. There's a lot of material on that out there as well.

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Christanon 12/28/19 (Sat) 05:45:00 1e23a2 No.825449

>>824979

God is neither impersonal nor personal, and he is both personal and impersonal. You can't say that God is a being in time, yet God planned a world with you in it. So I can't see the dichotomy. Supposing for the sake of argument, that God is a Deist, and He just set the universe in motion. But He is also all-knowing, so even if God never interferes directly in time, He chose before time to speak through the prophets and everything else He does and did to reveal himself, and be incarnated.

So an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and timeless God, doesn't have to work with the standard causality of time-bound creatures. Deism is atheism not because it misunderstands God's relationship to time, but rather it misunderstands Him in His being. A deist will say "I grant that God made the universe, but I think He thereafter ignored it." Therefore God to a deist is all-powerful, but not all-loving and perhaps not all-knowing either, or at least He doesn't care, therefore the deist God is not God and not worth praising and worshiping. Deists basically ignore most of the concept of God by these kinds of plausible omissions.

So in closing, God is not within time and space, so God is indifferent to the dichotomy between personal love and impersonal deistic being. God is within the soul, and beyond all things all at once.

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