Thank you, John, for that wonderful, warm, and gracious introduction, even though I’m giving you my gratitude right now, months before the introduction. So, I’m working on the assumption that as you’ve introduced me to our friends here in Minneapolis, that you have been kind because that’s the way you always are. I’m sorry that I am not able to be with you all live and in person. And because of that, we’ve decided to videotape this message in advance, and I hope that it will be helpful for all of you who are in attendance this week.

I’d like to begin by reading a portion of the New Testament from the book of Acts, from Acts 17, where we read these words:

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” — because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

     ”‘In him we live and move and have our being’;

as even some of your own poets have said,

     ”‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ (Acts 17:16–28)

1. The Primary Philosophical Questions

I’d like to go back in history before Paul’s visit to Athens, to the month of May in the year 585 BC. That day recorded the first ever predicted solar eclipse. That solar eclipse was predicted by a man by the name of Thales of Miletus. And Thales is often acknowledged as the father, not only of Western philosophy, but also the father of Western science. The very word science means in its origins, knowledge. And the task of the scientists, the task of the philosopher — the task of the theologian — is to pursue knowledge wherever it may be found, and whatever the consequences of that search may be.

Thales was captivated by a pressing problem that not only caught him in his imagination as a mystery but was something that all thinking people in the ancient world were concerned about. And the question was this: How can I make sense of all of the diversity of my experience in this world? I see a variety of things. I see trees and horses and bushes and people and the moon and stars and all these different things. How do they all fit together? How can I have a coherent or unified sense of my knowledge and of my experience?

In other words, the quest was for a universe. That’s how the university system began, by building institutions that were committed to searching out an understanding of the universe. But where does that word, universe, come from? It’s a hybrid term. It comes from bunching together two distinct words. The word unity and the word diversity. And so you take the word unity and the word diversity and you sort of scrunch them up together and you get the word universe or university.

This was the thing that preoccupied the quest of a man like Thales. He says, “I see all these many things, the diversity, but where is the one, the unity that will make sense of all of this diversity that I experienced?” And so, he was trying to solve the problem of what we call unity and diversity, the problem of the one and the many, in order to have an intelligible understanding of the world in which we live.

Cosmos, Not Chaos

Some of you recall the television series that later became the book written by Carl Sagan entitled Cosmos. In the first page of his book, in the first episode of his television series, he made the observation that as a scientist, we are searching to understand a reality that can be understood, that is “cosmos,” not “chaos.” If all we had were undifferentiated, a vast array of dissimilar sensory experience without anything to tie them together, without any principle of unity or coherence, we would have chaos, not cosmos.

And that was the quest of a man like Thales. And so, he was looking for the ultimate reality, the monarchy, the single archae or chief principle that would explain everything in existence.

All Is Water (Thales)

And you may be amused when you hear the answer he found to his question. In the first instance, he said, he came to the conclusion that ultimate reality, the singular principle that will make sense of everything else in this world, is water. Imagine a philosopher or a scientist saying that all reality is given its coherence and makes sense because fundamentally, all reality is one form or another of water.

Well, why did he come to that conclusion? Well, the first thing is that he noticed that in everything that he experienced in this world, he saw that it appeared in one of three forms. It was either a solid, a liquid, or a gas. And because of that, he looked for some element that had the ability to manifest itself in all three of these forms.

And so, the perfect answer to his question was water, because it appears as water in its liquid form, as ice in its solid form, and as steam in its gaseous form. And since water has this ability to change its forms to all three types, then it must be the ultimate reality that makes up everything.

The Problem of Life

Then he asked the next question: What is it that is most important to answer the question of life, its origin, its significance, its power? And again, Thales came to water because he noticed that for anything to flourish that is alive, as we understand life to be, that those living things required the nourishment gained from water. Human beings will perish in a short period of time if they are deprived of water. You know what happens to your grass or to your flowers when the drought comes and the water source dries up — so these plants perish with it. And so again, he saw the power of life must be invested in water.

The Problem of Motion

But wait, there’s another question that he found so befuddling as a philosopher and as a scientist. There was a problem that plagued the ancient thinkers, and it was the problem that we call the problem of motion. How can we explain motion at all? When we look around ourselves, if we see anything that is moving, we come to the conclusion that whatever is moving is being moved by something else.

Stones don’t get up off of the ground and throw themselves through the air. Somebody has to pick up the stone and throw it. Or even something must be driven by the wind to move. The pool ball stays on the table until somebody takes a cue stick and hits the cue ball against the object ball in order to get the movement going for a pool game to take place. There’s not much fun in golf if the ball never moves, if the club is never swung.

And so the observation was a primitive form of inertia. The theory that later became defined as bodies that are at rest tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outward force, and bodies in motion tend to stay in motion unless they are acted upon by an outside force.

This is the problem that is still one that is faced by the advocates of the big bang theory of cosmology, which postulates that for all eternity, the state of reality was in a state of absolute organization. All matter and energy compressed into an infinitesimal singularity forever—until one Thursday afternoon at two o’clock, the thing explodes.

And we want to explain that, of course, without the intrusion of an outside force. I once had some correspondence with Carl Sagan about that very question. And I said, “How do you account for the change from that inert state that was eternal?” And his answer was simply this, “Well, I really don’t want to go there. I don’t think we can go anywhere except at the billionth of a microsecond before the big bang. But then after that, there’s the mystery.” I said, “You’re a scientist. You’ve got to ask the question. You have to ask the question, who moved? Why the change?” In other words, why the motion?

Hylozoism

And as Thales wrestled with his question in his primitive form, he looked for something that had the capacity for hylozoism. And that’s probably a term that most of us aren’t too familiar with: hylozoism. And hylozoism was just an ancient word, similar to our word automobile or automobile.

An automobile is called an automobile because it has the ability to move itself, unless you run out of gas or unless the engine breaks; then you have to get the tow truck to come along and move your car. But when it’s performing the way it’s supposed to, it has the ability to move itself down the highway. And so we call it an automobile.

Well, hylozoism in the ancient world was that principle that people sought to explain motion by finding something that had the ability to move itself without being pushed, without being pulled, without being thrown but just by itself could move.

And again, in his investigations, Thales came to the conclusion, “Well, it must be water,” because if we observe waters, we see oceans, we see the tides, we see the waves rolling up onto the shore, we see rivers and their current, and streams moving. And we don’t see anybody pulling them or pushing them.

Of course, Thales was not aware of the gravitational pull of the moon and the cause of tides, as we look at it from our modern perspective. And so for Thales, water seemed to solve the problem, the problem of ultimate reality, the problem of life, the problem of motion. And that would be the end of the philosophical inquiry, except that those that followed after him suggested other alternatives.

Men who came along, such as Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras. But the ultimately two most important philosophers who came along before Plato and Aristotle were Parmenides and Heraclitus. And they were wrestling principally with the same questions that Thales had been examining.

’Whatever Is, Is’

And Parmenides, whose works have all but vanished from the face of the earth, except for a few segments that have been fragments, that have been discovered, was famous for his profound statement wherein he said, “Whatever is, is.”

He wasn’t running for President of the United States when he said that. And I’ll never forget when I was a student in college, and the professor very soberly made that announcement in the classroom, that whatever is, is. I said, “And this guy’s famous?” But I, at the same time, have to say that in the study of philosophy, I’ve never heard anything with deeper significance or greater profundity than that observation by the philosopher Parmenides that whatever is, is.

What was he getting at? He said, “If something is real, it can’t not be.” Nonbeing is nothingness. Nothingness has no ontological status. It simply is not. We have a man in our live audience today here in Orlando whose last name is Arndt. And every time I see him, I say, “How are you?” And he says, “I Arndt.” He is not. So he’s just a fig newton of my imagination, I guess.

And he would give all kinds of problems to Parmenides. And so, Parmenides said, “For anything to exist, there has to be something that is pure, unchanging, immutable, fully actualized being.” Something that had no potential left to be realized, but was all together fully actualized. Because that which is, as Aristotle would observe later, that which is fully actual has no potential. And that which is only potential has no actuality. And so, if a thing or a person or an object had nothing but potential, that person wouldn’t be at all.

’Whatever Is, Is Changing’

Well, over against the thinking of Parmenides came the challenge from the philosopher Heraclitus, whom many regard as the ancient father of modern existential philosophy. Heraclitus, instead of saying, “Whatever is, is,” made the assertion that, “Whatever is, is changing.” Everything that we experience in the world in which we live is undergoing change. It is undergoing some kind of mutation.

We all experience it, if only in the experience of aging itself. That even on this day, I am a day older than I was yesterday. The cells within my body are undergoing change as a result of that aging process. We’re all aware of that. There’s growth, there’s generation, there’s decay all around us. And so, the operative word to describe the reality that we experience, according to Heraclitus, is change. Or as he called it, flux. Everything, he says, is in a state of flux.

And he was famous for saying, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Why? Because as soon as you take your first step into a river, before you can take the second step, the river has moved on. And the next step that you take, you’ve stepped into a different river. The river has changed, but not only has the river changed, the riverbed has changed.

If it’s infinitesimal, microscopic erosion that no one can see with a naked eye, nevertheless, it’s taken place. And not only has the riverbed changed, and the water changed, but you have changed. And so change or mutation is the chief characteristic of everything that we experience.

And so he came to the conclusion, “Whatever is, is changing.” There is nothing that is, there’s only that which is changing. And so the distinction is made now between pure being that doesn’t change, and that which does change, which we call becoming. Whatever you are in this instant is not what you will be an hour from now. You are becoming something different from what you are at this very moment. And you can’t freeze the moment. Because what I said a moment ago, it’s history. It’s past. And what I’m saying right now is too late. It’s also past. Because we live in the framework of becoming rather than being. So who’s right?

Skepticism and the Impasse Between Being and Becoming

Well, this is what awakened Plato from his dogmatic slumbers. He said — because what happened after the impasse between Parmenides and Heraclitus was the invasion of ancient culture with the spirit of cynicism and skepticism — that if these two intellectual giants can’t figure out this question between being and becoming, unity and diversity, all the problems that we are searching for, then the whole scientific enterprise falls by its own weight.

The whole quest for ultimate truth and ultimate reality becomes a fool’s errand. And so the skeptics stepped into the stage and said, “We really can’t have any lasting or significant knowledge.” Knowledge itself becomes possible. It sounds like a page out of the modern newspaper that says everything’s relative. There are no absolutes; can’t know anything.

Both Are Necessary (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle)

Until this gadabout in Athens started disturbing the skeptics by asking them penetrating questions and driving them to different conclusions, and his name was Socrates, and his most famous student was Plato. They said you can’t have a coherent view of science, you can’t have a coherent view of philosophy, you can’t have a coherent system of any kind of knowledge unless you account for both being and for becoming.

Both are necessary. You can’t have a coherent philosophy. You can’t have a coherent worldview. You can’t have a coherent science without unity and diversity.

And so, Plato constructed his massive theory of ideas in order to solve this problem. But he was left with a few unresolved difficulties that his most famous student sought to resolve, and his name was Aristotle. And even though Aristotle came to a different conclusion from his master, Plato, he was driven by the same concerns, driven by the same issues: being and becoming, unity and diversity, the problem of motion.

Aristotle postulated his idea of God that he called the unmoved mover. There has to be some being that is the source for all motion, who himself is not the result of somebody else’s motion. And so he postulated the first cause or the ultimate cause is God, as it were, who he called the unmoved mover, who, like the King of England, as Will Durant said, “Reigns but doesn’t rule.” But again, a new period, a new wave of skepticism flooded the ancient world. Because if there were real titans of philosophy in science, they were Plato and Aristotle.

In fact, Aristotle’s nickname, to this day, is “the philosopher*. Some contemporary scholars have said that all philosophical inquiry since Plato and Aristotle is mere footnotes to the work of those two men. Why? Because for the centuries that have come and gone since Plato and Aristotle, the questions haven’t changed.

They’re still there. We are still baffled, in many ways, by the mystery of life. We still have philosophers seeking, as hard as they know how, to unravel the conundrum of metaphysics of being. And we still have scientists that are offering rewards for fully intelligible explanations of motion, and all of its intricacies.

And so the quest did not start, but because Plato and Aristotle couldn’t come to an agreement, a whole new wave of skepticism swept onto the scene in ancient Greece and brought forth the minor schools, I will call them, of the Stoics and the Epicureans.

Another Wave of Skepticism (Stoics and Epicureans)

The Stoics and the Epicureans were arch rivals. They disagreed fundamentally with many points of philosophy and of psychology, but they were both equally skeptical about the ability of the human mind to come to a final conclusion about these ultimate questions. And so, in a real sense, they abandoned the quest for ultimate reality, for ultimate truth. And they turned their attention to things they could learn, things that they could use right now.

So they would set up their schools of how to succeed in business without really trying, and they would have courses in rhetoric and practice with stones in their mouth so that they could become articulate because the goal of speaking in business was not to prove objective truth, since that can’t be done. Rather, the goal of articulating words was to persuade people.

You listen to your television commercials every day, and you’re not overwhelmed by the passion by which those who speak on these commercials are trying to convince you of ultimate reality or of ultimate truth. They’re just trying to persuade you to buy their product in a very practical manner. They want to be pragmatic, as it were.

And it’s ironic to me that the only two schools of philosophy that are ever mentioned in the Bible are these schools of Epicureanism and Stoicism. And though they were different in many ways, they were both trying to answer the same question: How can I live in this world and be happy? How can I have peace in my mind, in my soul? How can I have what they called philosophical ataraxia? And you’ve probably never heard that word, adorakia, unless you’ve taken a tranquilizer that has that brand name on it. Because the word adorakia means to the ancient Greek, “freedom from oppression and anxiety,” and the gaining of what was called by the Stoics, “a sense of imperturbability.” Don’t worry, be happy. Don’t let it get you down.

The Epicureans took a different route, different from the Cyrenaics before them who were radical hedonists. The Epicureans were refined hedonists. And hedonism is defined by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

So, the Cyrenaics that you maybe see in modeled on old movies where you see pictures of the ancient people having a banquet and gorging themselves with food, and then going out and putting their tongues, their fingers down their throat and regurgitating, they go eat more, and they drink until they’re stumbling drunk, until they vomit, and then they go drink some more. Or they’re engaged in orgys with unlimited sex to get as much pleasure as they can possibly endure.

But even in those days, people discovered the reality of what was called the hedonistic paradox: that if your desires and your pleasures were not met, you were frustrated. And if you did meet them, you were bored. And so, one way or the other, it was heads you lose, tails you lose. And people would end up hardly satisfied with that lifestyle.

That’s why the Stoics came up with a calculus, as it were, of pleasure to balance the ledger. So they have just the right amount of gluttony, and just the right amount of drunkenness, just the right amount of sexual involvement so that you could avoid the clutches of the hedonistic paradox.

That word should be very familiar for those of you who are at the conference, since the greatest advocate in our day of a spiritual hedonism, of a godly hedonism, is John Piper, who understands foundational principles of our humanity as it was created by God. Is that we will never be fully satisfied. We will never discover our ultimate pleasure until we find it in God himself.

2. The Apostle Paul Comes to Athens

But you can imagine Paul. He comes now for his first visit to Athens, the cultural center of the ancient world. The city of Socrates, of Plato and his academy, of Aristotle and his lyceum. The city of Pericles, of Solon, of Galen, and all the great minds of the ancient world within the fields of medicine, political theory, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics. All of it was there in the golden age of Greece. But since the advent of skepticism, the golden age was tarnished, and Athens had become a different kind of city.

And so when Paul saw it for the first time, Luke tells us he was deeply moved, not by its art, not by its medicine, not by its political structures, but his soul was provoked within him because he saw that the city was given totally to idolatry.

The best that Athens could produce, in the final analysis, was to be a center of factories devoted to the making of pagan idols. And Paul was moved, and he was moved to action. So he went to the synagogues, he went to the agora, to the marketplace. And he began to preach Christ and the resurrection from the dead.

And then he went up to the Areopagus, to Mars Hill, within sight of the agora and within sight of the Parthenon. And there, on that small piece of real estate, a sort of a mesa geographically, he encountered these philosophers, whose practice it was to meet every day to discuss what’s new.

Intoxicated with Novelty

Philosophers have always been intoxicated with novelty. We couldn’t live in our day without CNN or Fox News or some other network: CBS, ABC, NBC telling us what’s new. And yet at the same time, the law of marginal utility explains the reason why newspapers are dispensed in a different format from that where we find the dispensing of soft drinks.

What’s the difference? If you want to get a newspaper on the corner, from one of the containers you put in your money, you open it up, and there in front of your eyes are not one newspaper, but maybe ten. And if you’re a dishonest person, you could just help yourself to all ten and go home. But who wants ten newspapers? Unless your picture’s in there or there’s a story about you, one is more than enough.

And nothing is more frustrating than going to one of these containers looking for today’s newspaper, and all that they have in there are copies of yesterday’s newspaper, which is valuable for what? Wrapping fish. That’s about it. Because nobody cares about yesterday’s newspaper. That’s why you can have access to ten of them. Whereas a glass of Coke or a bottle of pop, you open up, you push in. And if there were ten bottles for the price of one, everybody would be scooping them up. That’s marginal utility. Not a whole lot of usefulness for yesterday’s newspaper.

So these people would get up every day, go up there, and they’d discuss them. What’s new? What’s the latest theory? Give us the latest scoop from philosophy and theology. Or there’s no group of people more addicted to novelty than theologians.

I was recently interviewed in the paper here in Orlando, and people were happy about it. I was semi-happy about it. And one of the things in which the newspaper reporter observed about me was that I was out teaching and preaching a “throwback theology.” What in the world is a throwback theology? I guess he thought there was a theology that ought to be thrown back rather than to be kept. But in other words, this theologian is out of touch with contemporary views and theology. I’m just stuck in the mud with classical biblical theology. But this is what Paul was encountering two thousand years ago in Athens.

And so he began to teach them. And he said, while he was standing on the Areopagus, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22). Religious, a term that usually was a pejorative term on the lips of the apostle Paul. When I was once invited to speak at a Christian college in the Midwest, it was without a president for a time. And they had been engaged in a self-study before they would call a new president to the campus. And they asked me to address the faculty and the administration on the subject, what is a Christian college?

And before I had the opportunity to speak, they gave me the cook’s tour of the campus through the class buildings, the science hall, and the student union. We went through the faculty office building, and I noticed on one of the faculty doors it said “Department of Religion.” I was a little bit surprised by that.

And so that evening when I addressed the faculty, I mentioned, I said, “Today I was observing your campus, and I see that you have a Department of Religion. And my question is this, was it always called the Department of Religion?” And they looked at me with blank stares. But there was an elderly faculty member in the back of the room, and he raised his hand. He said, “No, no, no.” He said, “When I first came to this campus, it was the Department of Theology, but many, many years ago, we changed it to the Department of Religion.”

I said, “Why?” He said, “I’m not sure.” He said, “But I think the main reason was so that our students could transfer their credits to secular universities and so on without difficulty.” I said, “Okay.” As I understand the divisions of academic investigation, the study of theology is the study of God. The study of religion should be underneath anthropology or sociology because the study of religion is the study of human beings and how they behave with whatever they regard as being sacred or cultic and the like.

Religious and Far Away from God

You can be religious and be as far away from God as it is possible. And Paul noticed. He says, “You people are filled with religion.” Of course, they were. What are idols for but false religion? He says, “I’m seeing your idols everywhere. And in case you missed one of the Gods that you have, you build an altar over here to the unknown God.”

What are you, hedging your bets like, what was the name? W.C. Fields. When he was dying in the hospital, one of his friends came to see him, and there he was in his bed reading the Bible. His friend was shocked because W.C. Fields was anything but a religious man. And he said, “W.C., what are you doing?” He said, “Looking for loopholes.” And that’s what the Greeks were doing. They were looking for a loophole. They had this God who was unknown.

So Paul said, “The one whom you are worshiping in ignorance, I’m going to declare it to you this day. He is the one who is the creator of all. He is the one who does not need your prayers, your gifts, your worship, your idols. In fact, he doesn’t need anything.” He said,

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. (Acts 17:24–26)

We Exist, Live, and Move in God

And then he urged them to seek God in the hope that they might feel their way and find him. Yet he was on to say, “He is actually not far from each one of us.” And then we got, I believe, the most profound philosophical statement anywhere in the New Testament where Paul quoting the pagan philosophers says of God, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Did you hear that, Thales? That ultimate reality is found in God, and only in God, who is the Creator of everything. Thales was a monist. And monism usually appears in some form of pantheism that says all is God, and God is all. And it obscures. In fact, it obliterates the distinction between Creator and creature.

And so, we are not monists in that sense, that everything is God. There is God, there is the creator, and there we are, who are creatures. And the character of God, the nature of God, is the nature of one who is absolute pure being. He reveals himself to Moses in the wilderness by the memorial name, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). He is the arche, the monarche, the supreme monarch of heaven and earth. Who alone eternally is. Who alone has pure actuality. What is God’s potential? How can the Lord get any better? He is already perfect.

I was playing golf just yesterday, par three hole. I hit my tee shot. I saw that it was going right for the flag. I didn’t see it land. I can’t see that far. And my partner said, “You hit a perfect shot.” I said, “It’s in the hole.” And I said, “No, it’s right next to the hole.” I said, “Well then it’s not a perfect shot.” There was room for improvement. But with God, there is no room for improvement. Pure being. Ultimate reality. The meta of metaphysics. The only hope for ultimate coherency and unity to make sense out of the diversity that we have in this world is in his perfect being.

He is the Creator of all. The author and the fountain of life. I sometimes cringe at some of the hymnity that we have among Evangelicals. One of my favorite hymns is “How Can It Be?” And we have that verse in there, going to be, “That Thou, my God, should die for me?” And I tell my congregation, “No, my Lord, my Savior died for me. God didn’t die on the cross. Because if God would’ve died on the cross, the cross would’ve died as well. Golgotha, the hill would’ve perished. The thieves, the guards, the Sanhedrin, the whole city would’ve vanished. The universe would’ve popped past out of existence because all life and being is in him.”

I’m a human being. More accurately, if we use Plato’s language, we would say, I’m a human becoming. Because I still have potential that has not yet been realized. I’m still changing. I’m still undergoing mutations. I am mutable. That is the very chief characteristic of creaturely existence: mutability. We change. God doesn’t. So, my being is not found in me independently. None of us created ourselves.

All of us are dependent on something before us or someone to account for our very existence; to account for our very lives. And where do you find the power of that life? Not in water, not in air, but in God, who alone brings something out of nothing. Life out of death. The God of resurrection. That’s why Paul was addressing them. He talked to them about Jesus and of his resurrection. He was talking to them about the ultimate answer to life, which is found in God and in his resurrected Son.

Motion, mobility. The universe can’t move without the providential power of God. The only thing that is hylozoistic, and in the ultimate sense, is God himself. It is because that my power to move is only secondary. I have no primary causal power. Primary causal power belongs to God, and to God.

3. The Bible Gives the Ultimate Answers

We’ll let this be just a brief introduction to the way in which biblical revelation gives to us the answers to the ultimate and persistent questions that have plagued the quest of theoretical thought. As long as there have been people, we will never find an explanation for motion, for life, or for being if we try to find it outside the being and the character of God.