Were you there when God created this universe?

( An email from a scientist friend T to me and J; my reply in purple colored fonts in ())

Dear two:

Thank you two for sharing an article each with us. Both discuss the meaning of life, which is the topic I have been searching for lifetime and have yet to get any satisfactory answer. (If you get to know our Creator God, your search will come to a perfect end, very satisfactory answer indeed. How I wish and pray you get to know our Creator God soon! )

For a person firmly believing everything came from nothing (You can always give "God hypothesis" a consideration since you were not there when God created this universe. (How do you know everything came from nothing, if you were not there?) I tend to think there is no real meaning for a life. (What a pity! Sorry to say so.)But for those who believe life has a or even many meanings, I'd like to congratulate them if they formed the belief from their own thought process.(You have raised a very good point indeed. I have tried very hard to point out to you that prophecies in OT Bible are truly amazing, think about the Book of Daniel. ( the prediction covers more than 450 years ahead of Daniel's time. from 600 B C to 241 BC) and the prophecies were all in details and became historical events one by one. Why do I keep telling you the fulfillment of OT Prophecies? Because that shows us supernatural source is involved. Namely, it was God who revealed future events many hundred years or even thousand years ahead of the time to those prophets, Moses, Isaiah, Daniel...etc. Those prophecies are evidences and represent reasonable " thought process" you are talking about. It proves the God of Bible is God of miracles; miracles recorded in Bible are not mythologies at all. Your younger brother thinks if Jesus really performed those miracles recorded in 4 gospels, then He is God. I would focus on Jesus' resurrection; if Jesus has really risen from death and lives forever then He is God. if Jesus is God, then He surely can do all the miracles recorded in the Gospels. ( If Jesus is God, doing these miracles are just pieces of cake for Him, don't you think?) And there are just too many evidences around Jesus' resurrection that you can check into them like a cold case detective or like a judge.

The book of Daniel presents an extraordinary display of prophetic foreknowledge of the succession of empires from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian king about 600 B.C. to the Roman Empire which began to come into power around 241 B.C. Additionally Daniel 11 spans the centuries from Cyrus The Great to the reign of the antichrist and the end of the age.( note: this end time prophecies will be fulfilled in the future though.)

If there is a supernatural God who knows the future, then there is no reason He cannot predict it in advance. Hence dating Daniel after the events of world history which he forecast is based at root on a rejection of the supernatural.

However there is plenty of evidence to show that Daniel lived and prophesied in the sixth century B.C. making his detailed description of future world events supernatural predictions... (For details, click the link below.)

Daniel's Amazing Prophecies

Also click

HOW CRITICS FARE IN THE FIERY FURNACE

Another word, I think the meaning, if any, is very personal instead of being universal.(the good news is the meaning is personal and subjective yet it is also universal and objective. Since our Creator God does exist and He is like the Sun, objectively exists whether one acknowledges Him or not, He exists from eternity past to eternity future. please also refer to the link below, my dear friend.)

A Cold-case Detective is Speaking

In the end, I came to the conclusion that the gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts that delivered accurate information about Jesus, including His crucifixion and Resurrection. But that created a problem for me. If Jesus really was who He said He was, then Jesus was God Himself. If Jesus truly did what the gospel eyewitnesses recorded, then Jesus is still God Himself. As someone who used to reject anything supernatural, I had to make a decision about my naturalistic presuppositions.

The evidence for the reliability of the gospel eyewitness accounts caused me to reexamine the evidence for God’s existence in general. If Jesus rose from the dead, miracles are possible. If Jesus, claiming to be God, could raise himself from the grave, there was little rational reason to disbelieve any miracle attributed to God, including the miracle of creation. The gospel accounts became the foundation from which I examined the cosmological, axiological, teleological, ontological, transcendental and anthropic arguments for God’s existence. I didn’t begin generally and then move to Jesus specifically, I began with Jesus and then moved “backward” to the broader evidence for God’s existence. As someone who worked regularly with cumulative circumstantial cases (as a cold-case detective), the connectivity of all the available evidence seemed obvious as I assembled the case. Any one of these pieces of evidence was sufficient to make the case for God’s existence, but when considered cumulatively, the weight of the evidence was overwhelming.