God of Abraham and the gods-of-the-gap

Preaching of St. Paul

The Navajo Native Americans believed that Nuu-chah-nulth, a mythical bird who resides on the top of a mountain is the one who control the rainfall, the sound of thunder is created when it flapped its wing and the source of lightning was reflected sunlight from its eyes. They believe that it is intelligent, powerful, and wrathful, one should go out of one's way to keep from getting thunderbirds angry. In the same way ancient Greek believed that goddess Iris replenish the rain-clouds with water from the sea.

How God of Christianity far outweighed the mythical gods

thus killing the gods-of-the-gap

Great ancient civilization from Mesopotamia to far away China, sees each of these phenomena (rain, lightning and thunder) as the direct activity of its god, but now, we know that rain is part of the hydrologic cycle of evaporation, condensation and precipitation which is the normal consequence of physical laws, we know that Thunder is the sound caused by lightning and we know that lightning is a product of cold air and warm air. When they meet, the warm air goes up. It makes thunderstorm clouds! The cold air has ice crystals. The warm air has water droplets. During the storm, the droplets and crystals bump together and move apart in the air. This rubbing makes static electrical charges in the clouds. [NASA.GOV] making this scientific explanation restricted thus eliminated their active gods.

“All through human history, we’ve had…questions [such as these:]. What causes thunder? What causes the lightning? I don’t know, there must be a big Thor [Norse God] up there that does it. But now, now we’ve learned about electricity. Now we don’t need that Thor anymore. We’ve erased that God, right? And as the line moves up, answering more and more questions, the gods disappear. We still have a lot more questions up here and we no longer put a God down here… He’s living in gaps, and the gaps are getting smaller…” [Atheist Dan Barker on God’s Existence debating Prof. Richard Howe at the University of Florida in 1997]

True to all mythical gods and goddesses, but not applicable to a real God presented by St. Paul at Areopagus:

So Paul, standing in the middle of the Are-op′agus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. […] this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, […]

St. Paul knew that his audience (Athenians) knows what “God” meant is, he’s not presenting his personal perception that “My God is totally cooler than your gods!” no it’s not. Not an event where a certain man named Paul who like his God better, debating to others whom so happen liked their gods better than the other gods.

I proclaim to you Paul said, The God who made the world and everything in it, invoking the book of Genesis, thus presenting the God of Abraham whom in the beginning created the heavens and earth. He outweighed the pagan gods by rendering that the bird is a mere creature and not a real god; the thunder god Thor, the sun god Helios, the goddess moon Selene, are all but a mere mythical gods, a created material entity and not a powerful person; All are basically start from ignorant position, not knowing (like what cause the thunder therefore “that is god”). Paul eliminate and put there gods and goddesses as a pure gods-of-the-gaps that cannot survive rational questioning.

Paul claimed that his God is a real one by positing The God in the beginning, who made the world and everything in it. Presenting a God which is not constrained to both time and space nor bound by that laws, uncaused-cause, the unmoved-mover (an Eternal one, an ipsum esse), destroying the universal claim that the universe is eternal but rather had a beginning, created out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo).

Of all these claims, science has eliminated none!

Modern science has been learning more and more about our universe over the last several centuries, scientific knowledge have not been closing but supporting what Christian God claim.

A Non-Eternal Universe

The universe is indeed had a beginning, but some tried to outwit the tremendous evidence that support to this claim by rending a non-workable model of an eternal universe:

Eternal inflation:  Built on Alan Guth’s 1981 inflation proposal, this model imagines bubble universes forming and inflating spontaneously forever.  Vilenkin and Guth had debunked this idea as recently as 2003.  The equations still require a boundary in the past.

Eternal cycles:  A universe that bounces endlessly from expansion to contraction has a certain appeal to some, but it won’t work either.  “Disorder increases with time,” Grossman explained.  “So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered.”  Logically, then, if there had already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe would already been in a state of maximum disorder, even if the universe gets bigger with each bounce.

Eternal egg:  The “cosmic egg” model that has the universe hatching out of some eternally-existing static state.  “Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096).” . [thesacredpage.com]

“All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, Tufts University, Boston (USA), January 2012

“several different models of the universe that dodge the need for a beginning while still requiring a big bang. But recent research has shot them full of holes (see page 6). It now seems certain that the universe did have a beginning.” Editorial: In the beginning, New Scientist 213(2847):3, 14 January 2012 **(see page 6) referred to Lisa Grossman: “Death of the eternal cosmos—From the cosmic egg to the infinite multiverse, every model of the universe has a beginning.”  Grossman, L., Death of the eternal cosmos, New Scientist 213(2847):6–7, 14 January 2012.

[Cosmological Argument and the Big Bang]

Created out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo)

Real scientist knew the boundary of science; It can only claim true theoretical knowledge in so far as a thing is "physical" and is "measurable". Science cannot in anyways explain the realm of metaphysical truth such as “out of nothing, something comes”, a boundary that speaks of a true nothingness (an absolute negation of existence) wherein a physical universe comes in to being.

That’s why Richard Dawkins tried to evade a question like: "Asking why humans exist is a silly question"

"We don't know what caused the Big Bang therefore God Did It!" another god-of-the-gaps?

And this "unknown" is God says Prof. Kreeft. Based on our observation of physical nature, the Law of Causality speaks that every beginning must have an adequate antecedent or simultaneous cause, the universe begin to exist (science says it has and already disprove the eternal universe), thus it requires a cause for its existence. We know that this cause cannot be finite or material—it must transcend such limitations. It goes beyond the Natural realm  thus it is Supernatural. The “Cause” must transcends all material limitation such as law of causality, bound by time and space; not subject to physical, empirical law, it must be a powerful eternal being that can break the natural dictum of from nothing, nothing comes rather it create something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) an existence of its own (ipsum esse).

Image source: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/eustache-le-sueur/the-preaching-of-st-paul-at-ephesus