No human mind can "conjure up" god. A "god" who is the product of "conjuring up" cannot be god at all but merely a human construct who can be dismantled at ease, at will, for convenience, and can have no answers for our humanness.
To borrow from C.S. Lewis, all human beings have these "uncanny" feelings - a sense of awe (bordering on DREAD), and a sense of being under a moral law.
The feeling of awe at someone or something too big for us, or dread at "the unknown", though universally experienced, is absolutely inexplicable because there seems no reason why we should feel it....unless there really exists someone or something to be in awe of, to DREAD. C.S. Lewis uses the word Numinous for this someone or something that inspires dread in us - dread that is not based on KNOWING but actually on UNKNOWING. We do not know, nor can we guess at the STUFF of what we dread; if we did; we wouldn't be using the word dread, because knowledge does usually dispel fear. Simply, these are irrational fears of the unknown.
The same can be said of the moral law; we seem to universally know instinctively know its existence and its operation on us, but more importantly, we know, most of the time, that we are contravening this law. There is no use trying to explain away this law, or say that each individual determines his or her OWN law, it's relative, subjective and so on and so forth. If we just look inside ourselves and see how our thought processes work and our decisions are made, we will discover very shortly that we indeed operate by this moral law, even WHILE we vehemently and vociferously deny it on the outside. And we will also discover that we actually do not like it very much when we see others violating a moral code. Also, we will find that though this moral law may SEEM different for people in different cultures and in different histories, it never really has strayed very far apart so as to be polar-different.
Now, we are also aware of someone or something that wields this moral law. As with the feeling of dread, it's inexplicable, unless there really exists someone or something behind this law, which set it up to operate in our experience.
Now this being, if it exists:
- cannot be made of the same human material or stuff as us, for if this were so, we would not fear, dread or feel awe about something or someone we can see, know and explain to a reasonable degree
- unlike us, has got to know ALL THINGS, because as human beings we cannot explain much about our origins, our purpose, the WHY's of our existence
Such a being, is, however, what we all USUALLY call God.
Carrying on, because of point 1 above, we as human beings, with our minds, cannot conjure up what this God might be like. We have nowhere to start. There is only one way we can know what this God is like - if He took the initiative and revealed Himself to us in a way we can understand, as human beings. That is a very important conclusion to come to. This is precisely what the Christians have been claiming - that this God who exists has revealed Himself to us (not the other way round). And how do they say this God revealed Himself? Through the person we know in history as Jesus, and in the document known to us as The Bible.
Because of this, it would be unreasonable (at least) to say that Christians "made up" or "conjured up" a God. We can no more explain this God into being as we can explain Him away, using our minds. This explodes the charge that has been laid at Christianity's door all along - that Christians used a"conjured up" God to deceive and enslave the world through slavery to guilt and fear.
This also unmasks the poverty of the human mind and its ineffectiveness, when used in isolation, in helping us to know God. Not that the mind should NEVER be used, but it can never be the primary and exclusive vehicle of knowing. There is equal value in experience as a means of knowing - in fact, both reason (logic) and experience have to correspond - otherwise the KNOWING is compartmentalised and likely inaccurate or flawed.
Infallibility of the Bible as the revealed Word of God
Now we have established that Christians COULD NOT HAVE CONJURED UP GOD.
If this is so, it is very reasonable to understand HOW Christians can claim that the Bible is a God-inspired and written document in which this God who exists has fully revealed Himself. And since it is God-authored, for the purpose of revealing Himself, it can be nothing but infallible, being free in every respect from human taint (except the scribing of it - and the very meaning of the word 'scribe' here underscores the mere part human beings played in bringing the Bible into being - exactly as Christians claim).
So, just as the Christians claim, the Bible does not say what HUMAN BEINGS conceive God to be, but what God says to human beings in order to reveal Himself to people who cannot POSSIBLY have a clue about Him.
This throws out of the window the old humbug that people keep accusing Christianity of - "misinterpreting" the Bible. If the Bible was God-authored, only God can interpret it to us human beings. Or, to develop that point, if at all we human beings want to know what the Bible is REALLY SAYING, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY for us to do that (where and how can we hope to start??) unless we know the author and He chooses to actually INTERPRET it to us. This is PRECISELY what Christians claim - that the Bible is God-authored, and interpreted by God to people who know God.
The identity of Jesus
All along, we've been saying that God is made of different stuff than us human beings, and unless He took the initiative to reveal Himself to us, there can be no way for us to conceive what He is like, or what He has to say to us human beings by way of "revealing Himself" to us.
Now to go further, how would we understand unless we are told in HUMAN language? I mean, unless we saw this revelation IN HUMAN FORM, we cannot know this God. This, precisely, is what the Christians proclaim about the person we know in history as Jesus. If there ever was a way for us human beings to understand God, it is through Jesus.
Now Jesus, while in earthly human form, would still have to be God Himself, because no one other than God can reveal God. So, He would have to be perfectly God and perfectly man at the same time. This, precisely, is what the Christians claim - that Jesus, the man, was also God in earthly form during His time here on earth. Also, this explains why the Christians say that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit - if he were born of human seed, he could NOT have been perfectly God or perfectly man. God would HAVE to be his father.
The Bible has more to say about Jesus than this - it reveals that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity - the Son. The Son of God existed with God from the beginning. Only through Jesus does history have purpose and make some sense - looked at from any other angle, history makes NO sense whatsoever and seems to (frighteningly) lack any discernible purpose.
The Cross
Let's go back to the moral law. Now we strongly SUSPECT, as human beings, that if there is a moral law, someone behind it wields the law, to whom we are answerable. This, again, is a universal suspicion.
Now our predicament is that we are judged guilty by an agent who we DO NOT KNOW (unless we are Christians, in which case there is a more than reasonable explanation for all these things), for contravening a law WE DID NOT SET UP. Who can help us, or build a bridge to this "unknowable" one? We cannot come up with any plan, because we, just like all the other times, haven't the faintest clue where to begin. The Christian has an answer here as well - Jesus.
Jesus is, at once, the one who helps us know the unknowable one, and also the one who buys our pardon from this unknowable one. How? The Christians claim that this is through Jesus' death on the cross.
Here again I borrow from C.S. Lewis - Jesus could perfectly pay the price only because He was a perfect, innocent man - and He could only do this PERFECTLY because he was God. Only such a penitent, a perfect God-Man, can help us, and as the Christians claim, this can only be Jesus.
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So what are the odds that Christianity "conjured up" God? In reality, Biblical Christianity is not neat, tidy, ordered or always predictable, like something "conjured up" can be. If the Christians had made it up, they'd have come up with something more believable and tidy.
Truth, in reality, must be stranger than fiction, because we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
- G.K. Chesterton
