2 Supernatural Creator God is Omnipresent
Having established (see part 1 of this essay) that supernatural purposeful creator God exists in reality and that all other existence that we can know (viz. the cosmos) derives solely from God’s existence, it follows that God is omnipresent in all existence. For I have shown that God exists in reality and that the natural derives from and exists because of the supernatural. And since the supernatural is logically coincident with all of space-time, it follows that God is omnipresent in all of space-time.
3 Supernatural Creator God is Benevolent (Good)
3.1 Having established the existence of the supernatural purposeful omnipresent creator God, I now intend to prove that this God is in fact benevolent. Benevolence is defined as ‘the inclination to do good’ (Collins Dictionary), and so all I need to do is to show that creator God must have the inclination to do good (as opposed to the inclination to do bad). However within the notion that God is benevolent, many people want to add the notion that God is perfectly good, i.e., God’s benevolence stems from the quality of perfect goodness. The trouble with this notion is who should decide what is perfect when it comes to goodness? Why should a human decide what is perfect? Why can’t we just accept that if it is apparent to us that our creator God is by human standards inclined to do good, then this God may rightly be labelled by us as ‘benevolent’? And it may also be that by supernatural standards at least, that this God is also perfectly good.
3.2 My OU philosophical student friends now want to invoke the ‘problem of evil’ argument before I have even begun on my part to prove God is both personal and benevolent! So allowing this minor distraction, I first address this chestnut, by asking them, ‘Do you think that the regular laws of nature (that allow tsunamis and other risks) are a preferable cosmic design for living things than the alternative of random chaos?’ A more thoughtful one replies that living things would themselves fall apart if there were no laws of nature. So I reply, then do you not suppose a universe is also preferable where by God’s design, the immediate aid of God’s Spirit is freely available to any individual who calls on that grace in order to pursue a life of goodness even though having that positive freedom, men and women choose to ignore it (God’s grace) and instead torture their fellows: is not such a design preferable to us than one where we have no such freedom to choose God’s grace? The answer a student gives here is that being so privileged with free will to receive God’s grace, men and women have no need to ever do evil to their fellows or the world around them, and that though this design is preferable to being mere robots despite the suffering that undoubtedly ensues as a result of people choosing independence (rather than inter-dependence), nevertheless people like to blame their creator because they are not often disposed to welcome hardship and risk. I reply that nevertheless how else would creator God provide genuine and real freedom of choice to creation?
3.3 Moving back to my philosophical proof of God’s benevolence, to be purposeful, an entity (such as God) must have a centre of being and this centre of being must determine purpose. Now, if a purpose derived from an entity can be observed as existing, it follows that the entity has a centre of being however that may or may not be located.
3.4 We have shown that the first cause entity (defined as God) has purposefully created the laws that hold together the natural cosmos and so it follows that God has a centre of being regardless our capacity to comprehend such. An entity with centre of being and capacity to espouse purpose may be defined as a ‘personal being’, therefore God may be described as a ‘personal being’.
3.5 A personal being may purpose to ‘do good’ or purpose to ‘do bad’. It is not possible to be inclined to do good at the same time as being inclined to do evil, so if God is inclined to do good, God is not inclined to do evil. To purposefully do good, a being must have positive good qualities. Goodness is defined as ‘moral excellence’ and ‘generosity’ (Collins Dictionary), but to this we could add the description of ‘positive regard for the well being of other beings’.
To establish the ‘goodness’ of God we will need to establish that the ‘inclination to do good’ is evident within the natural cosmos. Therefore evidence for the ‘cosmic’ inclination to do good will be found in the created personal beings within the natural cosmos as much as from any analysis of the moral nature of the universe.
3.6 There exists much evidence of inclination to do good with humankind and there also exists evidence of an inclination to do evil within humanity. Therefore to determine whether God’s overall intention is to do good or evil in creation (e.g., in creating mankind), we will first need to establish what God’s purpose might be in the creation of the temporal and risk based cosmos in which we exist. We may then determine whether when positively exercising their freedom to choose to co-operate with God’s purposes, men and women are demonstrating an inclination to do evil or to do good.
3.7 Human beings are autonomous (freewill) purposeful beings. I have argued thus far that for created freewill to be genuinely capable of independence from its creator, it has to exist in a milieu of risk. It is risk for the creator in that freewill may turn in an undesired direction and it is risk to the created freewill since it may also not avail itself of the necessary resource to reach its potential. So in creating individuals with genuine freewill, God has created them in a temporal risk based natural cosmos and with a supernatural dimension in which each individual’s freewill can be expressed either in opposition to or in support of the preferred purpose of their creator God who accepts this risk.
3.8 There is undisputable evidence that there exists within mankind both the hope and promise of ‘eternal life’. Since human beings are free to be either inclined to do good or inclined to do evil, then autonomy must be an additional property built into the cosmos. It is therefore reasonable to suppose a purpose of God in creation may be to redeem humankind from temporality by means of our free choice. There is evidence in the religions that men and women espouse claims of revelation from God’s Spirit that such a hope of eternal life is well founded. If we accept that this evidence is real, then my case is proved, God is inclined to do good in that God espouses for men and women to share eternal life rather than extinction. However the reader may object to such a straight forward proof and so I will take this exploration for God’s purposes in creation further.
3.9 Humankind is generally conscious of the voice of conscience which inclines an individual to do good by free choice rather than to do evil. However you may suppose that conscience is derived, the fact is that all individuals are born with it and so it is reasonable to conclude that this faculty is within the purpose of God in creation. Therefore it is reasonable to suppose that God is inclined to do good (QED).
I next intend to show that our creator God is also omniscient and almighty - for this please refer to part 3 of this essay.
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