"An utterly fanciful idea".Is Mr Sellick's response to the cosmological argument.

What a relief! Philosophers the world over can retire and tend their garden full time.

The thought that Mr Sellick might do serious business with the cosmological, teleological (design/fine tuning), moral, or historical argument for Christianity he has proven now is the truly 'fanciful idea'. Mr Sellick as responsive to criticism as a black hole, ought now be treated as a hostile witness to Christ.

Of Christian orthodoxy he in effect says:

"God would never work THAT way! How vulgar! Too simple too innocent. Much more respectable is if God conformed himself to my understandings, complexifications, and theological obfuscations. Then everyone who wishes to approach God would have to go through me!"

There is no contradiction between orthodox Christianity and science (see David B. Hart's 'Atheist Delusions' or Ed Feser's 'The Last Supersition') it is a secular myth that Mr Sellick persistently repeats. Orthodoxy in his schema must assimilate itself into a spiritualised physicalism; but this is just a philosophical prejudice and one Mr Sellick is simply allergic to expressing in plain language.

That thundering chariot wheeling through the ages we know as orthodoxy is a frightening thing to be on. In a moment of cowardice we might be tempted to leap off. Seeing its trajectory utterly unaffected by our absence, and refusing to face up to our cowardice our guilty conscience will need rationalisations. It will prompt our active recruitment to our rationalisations for a 'comfort in numbers' (an aping of authentic repentance and return to the moral community.)

Proposing this new tradition -a Christianity/Mumbo Jumbo theological obfuscation - utterly at odds with western biblical tradition is placing obstacles in the paths of Australians. IMO it is not a proposal that should be considered any viable part of Australia's future.

Is a god the cause of the world? No. But belief in it of one kind or another is the cause of most of the pain and suffering in the world. That's the one after another thing..cause and effect.

One could argue that the Creator did not create the world until you read the fairy tales pseudo science offer as an alternative. It is nothing short of foolishness to suggest that a big bang took place. The evolution fantasy will continue to change as men continue to deny the obvious.

"What is created by Word and Spirit is nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth. This means that creation is an ongoing activity towards a goal that the Bible calls “the kingdom of heaven/God” when every heart will be transformed by the love of God..."

I hear the message Peter, it sound beautiful until you start to think about the implications. Peter, please tell me how you visualise your "Kingdom of God", with everyday people trying to feed their families, competing on the job market, being stuck on the Freeway to work. The way I see it, a kingdom of God could only work for a person unconcerned about making a living, unaffected by troublesome neighbours and with no social ambitions; it could only work for an omniscient, all-powerful (no competition) endity. The moment a second identity is introduced, conflicts are bound to become part of it. So with multiple needs and multiple ideas it cannot prevail in the idealised condition.

For two thousand years this Utopia has demoralised humanity in its inability to bring it about. Peter, isn't it time the vision was demystified and put on a practical footing?

An interesting article that makes some sense, I would think, from the Christian perspective. Certainly, when the bible was written contemporaries had no idea of modern cosmology, though they had their theorists, no doubt, who speculated (hypothesised) upon the causes of natural phenomena. Those today who take an objective interest in observing nature, for instance cosmologists, are just as few, per head of population, as they were back then; but today they form a dedicated cohort and their peer-reviewed conclusions are documented and circulated rather than burned.
During biblical times, I do not believe that communities accepted tribal lore/explanation unskeptically. Human beings are nothing if not inquisitive; and then, as now, there would have been individuals obsessed with explaining astronomical wonders, and dissatisfied with supernatural explanations. But these individuals were unable to form a cohort, compare notes, or circulate their ideas; moreover, like Galileo, they were no doubt constrained by the dominant ideology from airing them.
Christianity began as an obscure sect whose beliefs could only have been nonsense to those versed in other traditions. But of course Christianity spread and was gradually taken up or imposed around the world, its scriptural "truths" adopted willingly or by force. Free-thinking was severely punished and Christian ideology was draped syntagmatically over all phenomena--a tyrannical idealism still with us today among the masses for whom free-thinking is either dead, dormant or effectively suppressed.
Peter's idea has the virtue, at least, of releasing the wonders of the phenomenal universe from the dreary purview of sequestered and primitive thought.
A futile exegetical revisionism, but an improvement on universal religious arrogance.

Faith is a funny thing. Once we can accept that faith means belief in something that cannot be proven (or disproven), then we have no need to explain or rationalise it.

Physical science allows us to know more and more about our world and our universe. The more we know, the better we can understand how things work, and the better we can explain how the universe is.

The "big bang" demonstrates well. We now have models which explain and predict the behaviour of the universe down to a very short time after it's creation. Even if we were to explain how the universe evolved down to nanosecond after matter/energy were created, we would still be no closer to knowing how it came into being. This is something that we will likely never "know", as it is outside our universe, which means we need to know something about what is outside our universe to explain it.

The only difference between the Biblical account(s) of creation, and the big bang theory is the sophistication of explanation. While the Biblical accounts are easy to disprove as matters of pure fact, it remains that scientific accounts will always remain unprovable as well, if certain assumptions are not taken on "faith".

To explain the mechanics of God's hand in the universe, using the Trinity or the Big Bang Theory, or anything else, will always require faith.

So, is God the cause of the world? If you reckon.