Reality As a Sheet of Paper

Reality As a Sheet of Paper 

Take this sheet of printer paper and lay it out on a flat surface (or hold it up in front of you--it doesn’t matter much for the illustration). Let the paper represent reality-as-it-is, which can mean many different things depending on the philosophical or religious viewpoint of

the individual or collective entity that holds it.

For the purposes of this illustration, the paper has always existed. It had no beginning and will have no end. Nothing exists outside of the paper for there is no outside for it it to be. For the atheistic philosopher, the paper represents the cosmos. As the late scientist and communicator of science, Carl Sagan, proclaimed in his well known documentary series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be”. Well, it’s easy to say that, but atheistic science, for all its brainstorming, equation scribbling and simulation running, has come away with nothing. Yes, they may(or not) succeed in pulling a universe or multiverse, as the case may be, out of the proverbial hat but they can’t explain the origin of the hat.

The only other alternative is an intelligence of some sort that has always existed and always will exist, without beginning or end. As far back as we are aware, the human race has believed in the concept of a personal god or gods to create and sustain the cosmos. The late atheistic physicist, Stephen Hawking, dismissed this belief as “a fairy tale for those who are afraid of the dark”. But Stephen Hawking died stumped, unable to put his own belief to the test.

Of the various religious belief systems, past and present, we may dismiss all but monism, or the belief in one ultimate creator, God, as being beyond rational explanation. Of the few monistic systems, three, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are worthy of further consideration. Judaism and Islam fail the test because they do not acknowledge that the one creator God must exist as a three-in-one entity, one essence, one mind from eternity in order to create, sustain and relate to his creation, reality-as-it-is. Their hope of a good life beyond death rests in essence on the same concept of life weighed in the balances as their predecessors. Christianity holds humanity to exist apart from God in a hopelessly corrupt state and whose only path to life with God here and beyond the grave being by owning the redemption bought, paid for and offered through the sacrificial death and resurrection of the Son taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ for that very purpose.

Nothing whatsoever exists or can exist outside of God; that is an absurdity. Everything that is, was or ever will be exists within God the Father, created in conjunction with God the Son and God the Spirit, the Son being the direct agent of creation. All that exists is God’s creation and not part of God. He created it and can dismiss it and deal with it at will.

All creation exists within God the Father. The apostle Paul stated as much in his debate with the Athenian philosophers by quoting the Stoic philosopher Aratus, “For in him we live and move and have our being”(Acts 17:28). He is in total contact with and control of his creation but cannot “go” anywhere within it because creation is in him. That is where God the Son and God the Spirit come in because they can and do manifest within the creation in direct communication and conjunction with the Father. You may refer to them as avatars or agents if you will, to help grasp the reality, but they themselves are eternal within the Godhead. As I said, the Triune God is of one essence and one mind from eternity. There was never a time when the Three-in-One were not.

This is where Judaism and Islam fail. By owning the Father they do well, but by rejecting the Son and Spirit they place their souls in serious danger. To quote John 3:16-18, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son”. And again in 1st John 1:23, “No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also”.

OK, the above looks sloppy, but the link below in PDF will let you save the text and print it out condensed on one sheet of paper (trust me, it looks better) which is great for sharing. No, it doesn't dot every "i" and cross every "t" of the argument.