Hallmark (Marked Series #3) | NCT Mark AU Fiction

Chapter Seven

Pray: The Third Challenge

"For today's challenge, we'll get a little heated up. We'll be having a debate! Let's welcome our competitor for this challenge, Ms. Lily King!" Lily ran out of the backstage and to the stage. She smiles widely and greeted the crowd energetically. Just from hearing her talk fast made me furious. If she was this of a good talker, then she must be really good at debate. "And Nami Fukuyama!" I went on stage and stood awkwardly. No loud cheers, nothing.

"So you each get to have five minutes to prepare for this and the topic is 'Does God exist or does He not?'. It's a very sensitive topic which will heat up our debate and I hope you both do well in this. To be fair, we will draw your stands. Ms. King, you may do the honor of picking first."

I'm a logical, rational person. I can pull this off. You can do this Nami.

Lily glared at me as she picked one folded paper from the host's hand. The host unfolds the paper. "Ms. King will be defending God's existence while Ms. Fukuyama, of course, automatically has to defend that he doesn't."

Oh no. I. am. A Christian.

Five minutes passed by in a blur and before I even know it, it was time to deliver our arguments. I was prepared of course, even if it was a little bit heavy in my heart to defend this stand. I had to do it regardless.

"If you may, Ms. King, take the stage."

Lily stood and without hesitation, starts her argument, "If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Objective values do exist. Therefore God exists."

That opening was too strong. I can never top that.

"The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority - the authority to stand and speak in God's place. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus really did rise from the dead then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and thus evidence for the existence of God.

The immediate experience of God. This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather, it's the claim that you can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing him. This was the way people in the Bible knew God. As Professor John Hick explains, To them, God was not . . . an idea adopted by the mind, but the experiential reality which gave significance to their lives. Now, if this is so then there's a danger that proofs for God could actually distract your attention from God himself. If you're sincerely seeking God, then God will make his existence evident to you. The Bible promises, Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. We mustn't so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own hearts. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives."

"That," The emcee clears his throat. "I'm speechless, honestly. I couldn't have defended God as good as you just did."

"Thank you." Lily bowed and gives me a cocky glare.

"You got big pressure on you, Ms. Fukuyama. Ms. King gave out pretty strong arguments for you to destroy."

I stood and gulped before I started talking. "Omniscience. Let's consider God's omniscience. God knows all truths and accepts nothing false as true right? But could an all-good God know what it is like to sin? Yes, for God knows all truths; but he doesn't know all truths directly from personal experience. God knows what it is like to sin by knowing what it is like for us to sin.

Now, if God is all-knowing—if he knows everything every person will ever do—what does that mean for our free will? Is such causal liberty an illusion? Not at all. I can know my influenza-stricken, gagging child is about to vomit without causing her to vomit. Foreknowledge does not equal causality." That just hurt my soul. I'm sorry God. I love you with all my heart. I continue still.

"Omnipotence. This brings us to the claim of God's omnipotence. Is there any philosophical contradiction that can be drawn out of God's infinite power? As we have noted, God cannot sin because he is morally perfect, the perfect standard of what it means to be good. Thus God has the power to do all logically possible things—that is, he has the power to do all meaningful things. That is why he cannot create a four-sided triangle which is really nothing at all.

Nor can God create a rock that is too heavy for his all-powerful self to lift. Such a notion is meaningless, because it fails to acknowledge how God really is. A bachelor cannot forget his wife's birthday because he is a bachelor; God cannot be overpowered by any creature because he is omnipotent.

"Omnipresence. Finally, what about God's omnipresence? How can this be so? Well, as long as God is unbound by time and space there is no contradiction. Not only has God created all things, but also his presence is necessary to sustain them in being, just as the presence of hydrogen atoms is necessary to sustain water in being. God is present to all beings, but he is not all beings. That's pantheism. He is present to all things, and the existence of all things is dependent on his presence, just as the caller of a square dance is present to the dancers on the floor and the existence of the square dance depends on the mind and voice of the caller.

Thus God, who contains all perfections within himself, can rightly be referred to as all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, etc. We cannot say, by the way, that God is a pre-eminently peerless stinker—contrary to the charge of Dr. Dawkins—because stinkiness is a privation of a good; but God is perfectly good. Such an assertion of God's infinite stinkiness is an amusing bit of rhetoric, but it does not in the least follow logically from the given philosophical definition of God. It betrays Dawkins' misunderstanding of who God is.

It suffices to say that philosophical proofs for or against God's existence will not be sufficiently worked out without rigorous intellectual groundwork. Indeed, the finite limits of human reason that force us into analogies and negative statements about God can sometimes lead to frustration and headaches. But I side with G.K. Chesterton, who acknowledged the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."