“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him….” (Genesis 1:27). This verse, found at the very beginning of the Bible reveals an interesting characteristic of humankind. People often read this verse and take the meaning of this as literal. They think that we physically resemble God; however, that isn’t what this verse is trying to communicate. To be made in the image of God speaks more toward our spirit and nature as human beings. We are created in the image of God, because we are to carry out the plans and dreams that God has given to each of us as individuals. Since we are made in the image of God, we possess attributes that reflect God and his character. We can develop a better idea of who God is by looking at the human person and analyzing common characteristics to humans. These characteristics, however warped they may be, probably reveal something about God’s nature.
The first thing we can learn about God through looking at a reflection of Him in humans is that He is rational. We as people have the ability to reason and develop arguments defending positions or ideas we feel strongly about. Our parents, teachers, and other adults have taught us the importance of understanding our position and being able to defend that position using facts and personal experiences. These personal experiences relate faith to reason. Once we have experienced something, we expect to obtain the same or similar results each time we encounter a similar situation. We believe that this will happen on the basis of faith in the desired or normal outcome, and reason that it will happen because of our background knowledge of why that result usually happens. This concept is somewhat complex, which makes it nearly impossible to be...
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... woman ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, causing sin, destruction, and death. The distortion brought from the fall makes it harder to discern the attributes of God humans have, but not quite impossible. The fact that humans have the ability to reason and can rationally understand things that they have faith in speaks to the idea that God is rational. If God is rational, there must be a reason why he created people to live in community, know, and love. God as the Trinity is reflected in humans through our need for community. The fact that we seek out knowledge and love demonstrates that God must also love and know about his creation. When we look at creation with the idea that humans are made in the image of God, we begin to realize that sometimes, our distortions give us a better perspective of who God is and where we fit in the order of creation.
Then he goes on to conclude by saying that, “The lessons learned from observing people and their beliefs support the position that I have defended: rational people may rationally believe in God without evidence or argument” (Feinberg 142). In schools today, students grow up listening to lectures that are subjective and then later are tested on what the teacher thinks and believes. Whether or not the taught perspective is factual or not, it teaches students from a young age to just take what the teachers, adults, and any authority says as truth, as a way to respecting authority. In the same way that it is reasonable to believe respectable authority, it is rational to have belief in God without specific evidence because we are created with the inclination that a higher being exists and God has shown Himself to be true to every generation. Furthermore, God has placed in every human the inkling to believe what is right or wrong, so when it comes to deciding whether to act a certain way, we can rely on our gut feeling if it is a good action or not. It is a very common and suggested thing to trust one's gut feeling when making a decision, even though it does not require any evidence to see if it is actually the right decision to
In order to understand the truth, people must have solid justified beliefs to prevent diminished autonomy. As humans, we are motivated to practice morally good actions since God provides love. His act of caring is compelling and promotes gratitude.
Faith is in the heart and as has been said, the heart has reason which reason cannot understand. So if it were a fight over finding rationality, it would not be fully supported because finding the complete and total reason for faith will never be found.
This thesis is shown by John Hick in his article Evil and Soul-Making. As Hick explains, humans already exist in God’s image but have “not yet been formed into the finite likeness of God . . . Man is in the process of becoming the perfected being whom God is seeking to create. However, this is not taking place – it is important to add – by a natural and inevitable evolution, but through a hazardous adventure in individual freedom . . . this involves an accumulation of evil as well as good” (Hick 1-2). In other words, humanity is slowly progressing toward a world in which evil does not exist, as implied by the term “finite likeness of God,” but in order to reach that state, we must first deal with acts of evil, in order to learn what good truly is. On a personal level, this is known as soul-builder
Many people struggle to properly defend their faith when confronted about it and even waver in their faith when presented with doubts against their faith that sound convincing. This is because many do not move beyond a basic understanding of their faith and fail to learn the fundamentals of Christian faith. The book Truth Matters: Confident Faith in a Confusing World by Andreas Köstenberger and the film God’s Not Dead (Harold Cronk, 2014) present both similar and different viewpoints on defending one’s faith adequately. Arguments addressed by both the book and the film include the credibility of people, a concept of morals, and the existence of evil.
So let’s look at them together, and later analyze them separately. In the book of (Genesis 1:26), God said… “And let us make God human beings in our image, to be like us.” The first chapter of Genesis recounts the story of creation and verse 26 talks about the creation and origin of Adam. Unlike the previous, parallel verse, there is a distinct difference in verse 26. Verse 26, talks
2 Corinthians 3:18 states, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” God transforms Christians into His likeness. Genesis 1:27 reveals that, in the Garden, we were completely in His likeness: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” To the artist, in the image of God means something different than what is often taught in Sunday schools. According to Sayers, “Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? . . . Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created’. The characteristic common to God and man is that: the desire and the ability to make things” (Sayers 17). The artist, like God, creates something out of nothing. But, there is an important distinction between something beautiful and poetic and something shoddy and cheap.
Reason can be defined as trying to understand God and the explanation behind his decisions. We can understand God, and reason gives us hope at understanding God through scripture. Reason is a tool that we can use to discern and interpret God’s word and to gain insight into God’s character and personality. The nature of God is eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, and supernatural, and reason provides a lens to look at the behavior of God through his nature. “God is not irrational,” and there is a reason behind everything that he does (WQL 5). Reason is a valuable tool for the Wesleyan Quadrilateral but reason does not stand
With the creation of man and woman God forms them out of his image. ?And God created the human in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them? (Gen 1.27). Alter says ?him as in the Hebrew is grammatically but not anatomically masculine?. So in interpretation the first human had no gender. Then on the third line ?male and female he created them? implies the creation of gender. The importance of this is that the first form of ?man? had n...
When God created the world “by faith is we understand that the world were framed by the word of God, so that the things which we see how did not come into being out of things which had previously appeared” (Athanasius...
In today’s modern western society, it has become increasingly popular to not identify with any religion, namely Christianity. The outlook that people have today on the existence of God and the role that He plays in our world has changed drastically since the Enlightenment Period. Many look solely to the concept of reason, or the phenomenon that allows human beings to use their senses to draw conclusions about the world around them, to try and understand the environment that they live in. However, there are some that look to faith, or the concept of believing in a higher power as the reason for our existence. Being that this is a fundamental issue for humanity, there have been many attempts to explain what role each concept plays. It is my belief that faith and reason are both needed to gain knowledge for three reasons: first, both concepts coexist with one another; second, each deals with separate realms of reality, and third, one without the other can lead to cases of extremism.
Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, stated that, “Man should not seek to know what is above reason.” His argument was, in very simple terms, that men need reason to understand all of God’s truths. Yet there are certain truths that are beyond reason which men can only understand through Divine Revelation, or faith. And sometimes there might be certain aspects of faith that one day reason might have been able to prove but only a few men would know and understand this, so it is necessary that all men know this through Divine Revelation and faith.
In many aspects of our lives, the use of faith as a basis for knowledge can be found. Whether it is faith in the advice of your teacher, faith in a God or faith in a scientific theory, it is present. But what is faith? A definition of faith in a theory of knowledge context is the confident belief or trust in a knowledge claim by a knower, without the knower having conclusive evidence. This is because if a knowledge claim is backed up by evidence, then we would use reason rather than faith as a basis for knowledge . If we define knowledge as ‘justified true belief’, it can be seen that faith, being without justification, can never fulfill this definition, and so cannot be used as a reliable basis for knowledge. However, the question arises, what if a certain knowledge claim lies outside of the realm of reason? What if a knowledge claim cannot be justified by empirical evidence and reasoning alone, such as a religious knowledge claim? It is then that faith allows the knower to decide what is knowledge and what is not, when something cannot be definitively proved through the use of evidence. When assessing faith as a basis for knowledge in the natural sciences, the fact arises that without faith in the research done before us, it is impossible to develop further knowledge on top of it. Yet at the same time, if we have unwavering faith in existing theories, they would never be challenged, and so our progress of knowledge in the natural sciences would come to a standstill. Although I intend to approach this essay in a balanced manner, this essay may be subject to a small degree of bias, due to my own non-religious viewpoint.
I was unsure of what Faith and Reason were; I say that, because Faith and Reason seem to have the illusion of spiritual meanings and concepts, thus I could not accept the idea that a course of this nature would be taught in college. For me Faith and Reason express a person’s ideals, beliefs and theories on life. According to Webster’s Dictionary, faith and reason are defined as; faith being a belief and trust in and loyalty to God; fanciful or empty assumption. The images that we have come to express are not far from what the rest of the world has expressed or defined. As you continue to read my theories and ideas on the issue of Faith and Reason, you may come to understand the type of person that I am, and possibly understand how and why I believe as I do.
In the beginning of the Bible in the Book of Genesis, it is revealed to use in 1:26-27 that God has created man in his image. The text verbatim states “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” From this distinct text we can clearly conclude that when ad created man and woman, they were destined to be in God’s image and carry his image throughout his creation. Today we can see that many of us do not live in God’s image due to society becoming more secularized as it progresses through the years, however as Christians we can verse this by living in God’s image in our chosen vocations, churches, and even in the secular world.