The Loss of Antithesis

Posted on April 7, 2012 by falcnjet

Recently, a friend brought up the idea of relativism to me and it reminded me of an article I published about a year ago.  I thought I’d post it:

(antithesis ⎯ noun; irreconcilable opposition or contrast.)

Ever since the sixteenth century, sometimes slowly and haltingly, but lately with breakneck speed, western society has lost something.  It hasn’t been lost completely, but like a true gentleman or a proper lady, it has become something that you don’t run into every day in our culture. What has been lost is a way in which people used to think.

The Christian world view includes the belief that humans are made in the image of their Creator. This means many things. For instance, we are spiritual beings like the One who imagined and crafted us. We are not just entropic arrangements of material compounds destined to pass into non-existence as soon as we wear out. We are temporarily embodied, eternal spirits.  We are also beings who love good and value truth and justice, again because our Creator patterned our natures after His. He is the personification of truth and justice and the Author of everything that we think of as good.

In the same way, we are logical beings, because God is logical. God cannot contradict Himself because His nature is one of consistency and reliability. He cannot be caught in fallacious arguments because fallacies are breeches of truth-finding rules that He himself laid down. To be illogical would be to deny His nature. We honor and value logic because we know that it is the path to truth, and we struggle to perfect our use of it so that we can understand our existence.

Unfortunately, we are fallen, limited and imperfect replicas of our Creator. We are capable of strong logical progressions of thought, we seek desperately to understand our environment and explain our existence, we demand justice for inequities and offenses and we value love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance (Gal. 5:22,23), along with many other things that we believe are “good.” We pursue these things naturally because we are preprogrammed to value them in accordance with the nature God has placed in us. But because we are finite copies of an infinite Original, we will always fall short of fully achieving these things for which we instinctively strive. Sometimes we fall a little short, sometimes a little more than a little.

Lately, our culture has been falling more than a little short in understanding the nature of truth.  Until just a couple of centuries ago, Christian philosophy dominated the world views of most of mankind. But over time, man’s philosophies have moved further and further from his own nature and from that of his Creator. Through the throes of the philosophical changes that took place during the Renaissance, the so-called Enlightenment and our secular age, the diseases of rationalism and relativism have infected society to the point that we believe people can have personal ‘truths,’ even if these truths are in direct opposition to other ‘truths,’ and that these truths are equally true (my head spins when I describe this!). To a large degree, our society has lost its sense of antithesis ⎯the idea that when a thing is true (i.e. in accordance with reality) then anything that contradicts it is, by definition, false.  And because we now give equal credence to discordant ‘truths,’ it naturally follows that good and evil are also relative, not to each other, but to other ‘goods’ and ‘evils.’  No longer is good a word with an objective definition. There’s good for me and good for you, and we profess that enlightened people understand that my good and your good have equal validity.

It wasn’t always so, of course. Before this migration to conditional truth people accepted the concept of antithesis in the areas of morals, epistemology, why we exist, and so forth, and they could reason effectively together on the basis that whatever is true prevents it’s antithesis from being also true. There was a basis on which to argue a point.  If one could show the truth of something, both parties would understand that anything that conflicted with it was not true. Today, though, it is often useless to construct a logical argument for the truth of a proposition because your opponent may not care whether your claim is true or not.  He is free to label it “your truth” and still hang happily on to his own, no matter how mutually exclusive the two may be.

If you’ve tried to deal with any young people on any subject related to understanding life lately, you know that this sort of relative thinking is especially prevalent among their kind. It could be argued that this accounts for much of the separation between the young and the old in our generation. Youth from Christian families who attend church regularly are taught that objective truth does indeed exist and that it proceeds from a Law Giver that exists in reality. But over time, as they mature, they become confused and overwhelmed by this ‘new’ concept of truth that permeates their culture. All age groups and professions are effected (including, sadly, clergy) but the idealistic young are most easily led into this kind of thinking.

Taking this even further, many in our culture now believe (in step with some famous Renaissance philosophers) that ideas about good vs. evil have nothing to do with “rational” inquiry.  Antithesis is allowed in objective pursuits, such as gathering facts about the physical world and then reasoning from them to reach indisputable truths; but building an understanding of morality, faith, goodness and so forth is a separate, more subjective goal. The two truth-finding efforts don’t intersect. So under this philosophy, any concept that may come up for discussion has either to do with the rational world, or the moral/spiritual one, but not both. This approach to truth elevates human thinking to an ultimate level and imprisons spirituality in its own comfortable room where it can have no influence on explaining reality. Much of scientific inquiry today operates under this philosophical concept.

But if Christians believe that they are made in their Creator’s image, this kind of thinking must surely create tension within their worldview. Any Christian who sees the world as created and ruled by an Ultimate Authority and who reads in his or her bible that this Authority has made many truth-claims about reality would have to feel unsettled buying into his or her culture’s insistence that each person’s truth is of equal value. According to this philosophy, God’s truth is right “for Him,” and mine is right for me! Is there any cogent reason, then, for me to be worshipping Him and studying His truth-claims?

Many, though, do seem to think in exactly this way. It is seen in church youth groups and pastors, large youth-oriented Christian organizations and even in some entire movements within the Christian church.

If we try to synthesize the fundamental claims of Christianity with relativism, we weaken and wound the whole message and purpose of our faith, perhaps mortally so. Our young people see this clearly, and it is part of the reason that we are losing them in large numbers. It has always been one of their more irritating qualities that they quickly see inconsistencies in the thinking and the behaviors of their elders. They often see that the work of Christ cannot be the only way to redemption and justification if  their Christian elders seem to respect the proposition that God will ultimately honor all who seek Him by whatever means. God’s word cannot be objective truth if we appear to respect the word of Mohammed, Buddha, Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy as well. And if we try to integrate human interpretations of natural history into our thought, why in the world would our children feel compelled to believe in the Creator God that is clearly described in scripture?

The great Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer once said that “…the greatest antithesis of all is that God exists as opposed to His not existing; He is the God who is there.” That’s the beginning point for the authentically Christian world view. God exists and He has communicated many objective truth-claims to us. We have the freedom to take them or leave them, but we do not have the option of putting them on the same plane with conflicting truth-claims. Objective, transcendent truth is claimed often by our Creator. Any opposite claim must be either untrue or true. Both opposing claims may be untrue, but by truth’s very definition, both may not be true. If we are to reason at all, we can’t redefine truth.  Antithesis exists no matter what philosophy may currently be prevalent among men.

As the body of Christ, we need to return to a strong sense of antithesis in our doctrine and in our lives. If we don’t, we lose all credibility in the culture in which we find ourselves. The culture says, “Respect all truths.” Christ said, “I am the…truth…”  Obviously, He didn’t have the benefit of modern thinkers to set Him straight, but He did say it. Some in the modern church seem to be okay with modifying and “explaining” His claim to suit the itching ears of society. If it is the cost of standing up for truth among our peers that we fear, we should weigh it against the cost of losing the next generation to the quagmire of relativism. If there is no objective truth, there is no Christianity.

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What Should Our Children Be Taught?

Posted on March 5, 2012 by falcnjet

A few days ago in my local paper I saw an opinion letter complaining that one school in our area was considering allowing a local creation science expert to teach a class giving the students the other side of the origins debate.  The classes would be voluntary, approved by each kid’s parents or guardians and would be conducted off-campus (although during school hours).  I thought I would share the short (200 word limit) article with you and my response:

Creationism: Shouldn’t be taught in school

As a former science teacher, I found the subject of the article “Off-campus creationism classes proposed” (The News, Friday) to be a terrible idea.  Why teach something that is scientifically false?

I often ask people who do not believe in evolution how can they explain that bacteria evolve and become immune to drugs, if not for evolution.  No one who does not believe in evolution has ever given me an answer.

The Bible is not a science textbook.  It is myth, legend and history.  The proper place to study it is known as Sunday school.  Teaching creationism during regular school hours off campus and giving school credit for it is ridiculous.

Doesn’t our Legislature have enough problems to deal with without taking up its time discussing a bill to allow this?

Signed by a local woman.

Response:

Monday, the News published an opinion on the proposed off-campus creation classes.  Some claims were made which require a response.

First, labeling creation as “scientifically false” is arbitrary and untrue.  The claims of creationism are completely consistent with the observations of real science.  But these extensive claims can’t be argued in one short piece.

Particularly entertaining was the idea that no one can answer the assertion that bacterial variation in response to antibiotics proves evolution.  This is a discredited claim that scientists understand should not be made.  Bacteria, like other living creatures, have a limited range within which variation occurs.  Yes, natural selection allows many bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics, but no known mechanism allows these bacteria to become anything but bacteria.  They were created bacteria and will always remain bacteria, no matter how much change occurs within their DNA.

It’s true, as the writer says, that the Bible is not a science textbook.  It is the inspired Word of the Creator and is by far the best documented, most scrutinized, and most enduring work in history.  Its claims are supportable and consistent with everything science knows.

These are the things that our young people need to understand.

 

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The Leaves on a Thousand Hills

Posted on February 15, 2012 by falcnjet

This afternoon I was doing some long-neglected raking of leaves in my back yard. When I’m doing monotonous tasks that don’t require much concentration, I often use the time to think about important things that are on my mind or to talk casually to God. As I looked at the mountain of leaves I was creating, I wondered how many there were. There had to be at least tens of thousands, I thought, but I wondered if it might reach a million. Wondering about huge numbers like that reminded me that the Creator has written in His word that He “determines the number of stars, and calls them by name,” (Ps. 147:4) and that “the very hairs of [my] head are numbered” (Matt. 10:30), which, incidentally, requires constant updating nowadays.

So I asked my Heavenly Father, “Do you really know how many leaves are in these piles?” It seems a trifling question in a way, but really, if He knows the number of hairs on my aging head at any given time, I guess He must know the number of leaves in any given pile.

And that raised another question in my mind as I tugged away at the rake. I thought about how God knows the number of leaves in my yard, but I could look at them all day and not have a clue how many there were. His mind is so much more powerful than mine that the difference can’t even be described adequately. Numbering leaves is a trivial thing compared to speaking my whole reality into existence by the power of His mind. So the next question I had was, “Why did you make our minds so much less capable than yours? Couldn’t we have been at least a little closer in brain power? After all, if we understood more, it would be that much easier for us to understand the truth about life, and more people would respond positively to the message of salvation. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

I’ve thought for most of my life that the deep, important truths about reality are just too darn complicated for a lot of people to ever understand them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that most people are unable to understand. I’m saying that most people, for a great number of reasons, don’t get the chance to have the truth presented to them or don’t want to go to the trouble of finding it. Many times their life experiences have served to obscure the truth, making it hard for them to ever get to it. For an awful lot of people, it would take a will and determination beyond reason to understand and accept the truth about life. They’ve learned to ignore it, ridicule it and otherwise deny it by every strong influence in their lives, so when presented with it, they squelch it in a million different ways before it can be truly considered.

But as I was raking the leaves I thought, “…but if the truth was more obvious; if our minds were more capable of seeing it, maybe more people would come to accept it.”

In just a couple more strokes of the rake, though, God touched my mind with the answer. I realized that it is something I already know: Humankind does know the truth ⎯their minds are already powerful enough to know, and no healthy person has ever been born who does not know. The truth that God exists is all around them. The Bible, in Romans 1:20, teaches that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities ⎯his eternal power and divine nature⎯ have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” As I raked the leaves, God led me to realize that if men’s minds were more powerful, they would only invent more creative reasons for their unbelief. Instead of the silly stories about big bangs and a world that created itself, they would just contrive less laughable reasons for not believing.

I realized that the God who knows how many leaves lie on a thousand hills is wise enough to have made us just as smart as we need to be to relate to Him, to love Him and to understand that He has made the truth known to us.

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Reasons for the Young-Earth Creationist Position

Posted on December 29, 2011 by falcnjet

From an article by  Dr. Jason Lisle and Tim Chaffey,  AIG, 12/29/11

The Plain Teaching of Scripture

Young-earth creationists have argued that their position is the clear teaching of God’s Word. The Bible teaches that God created everything in six days, and that Adam was created on the sixth day. The genealogies recorded in Scripture indicate that Abraham lived about 2,000 years after Adam was created. And since Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago, this means the earth is about 6,000 years old. The earth could be much older if and only if there were substantial gaps in the genealogies, or if God had taken much longer than six days to create. One young-earther put it this way:

“Taking Genesis 1 in this way, at face value, without doubt it says that God created the universe, the earth, the sun, moon and stars, plants and animals, and the first two people within six ordinary (approximately 24-hour) days. Being really honest, you would have to admit that you could never get the idea of millions of years from reading this passage.”
This statement offers an accurate summary of the young-earthers’ claims on this point.

The Bible should be allowed to speak for itself. If it states that God made everything in six literal days, then it does not matter that the majority of scientists disagree with it.
Some old-earthers admit that this is a major strength of young-earth creationism but still adhere to an old-earth interpretation because of their acceptance of modern scientific theories concerning the age of the earth. Biology Professor Pattle Pun of Wheaton College stated:
“It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of Genesis, without regard to the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science, is that God created the heavens and the earth in six solar days, that man was created on the sixth day, and that death and chaos entered the world after the fall of Adam and Eve, and that all fossils were the result of the catastrophic deluge that spared only Noah’s family and the animals therewith.”

Pun is not alone in making this type of claim. The late Dr. Gleason Archer, an Old Testament scholar, wrote:
“From a superficial reading, the impression received is that the entire creative process took place in six twenty-four hour days. If this was the true intent of the Hebrew author (a questionable deduction, as will be presently shown), this seems to run counter to modern scientific research, which indicates that the planet Earth was created several billion years ago.”

Notice that both of these men agree that the plain reading of the text is that God created everything in six ordinary days. It is only because of the “hermeneutical considerations suggested by science” that they will not accept the plain words of Scripture. This is a dangerous approach to the Bible.

In addition to this concept of the plain reading of the text, young-earth creationists point to Exodus 20:11.
“For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”
This passage is found in the midst of the Ten Commandments. God told the Israelites that the reason they were supposed to work six days and rest on the seventh is because that is precisely what He did during the creation week. Some old-earth creationists interpret each of the days of creation as long ages (many millions of years each), rather than ordinary days. But Exodus 20:11 precludes this possibility. It would be silly to think that we are supposed to work for six long ages (millions of years each) and then rest for one long age. This statement is repeated in Exodus 31:17 and in this passage we are told that God wrote the words himself. It is important to point out that the word used for “day” in these passages is the same as the word used in Genesis 1.

“Yom” in Context

This brings us to the next argument. A major point of contention centers on the definition of the word day in Genesis 1 and 2. Just like the English word “day,” the Hebrew word yom (יום) can refer to the daylight portion of a day, a 24-hour period, or an indefinite period of time. The proper interpretation is dependent upon context and is usually not too difficult to discern. This is true even when the same word is used multiple times in the same passage. To illustrate this point, we could make this statement, “Back in my grandfather’s day, it took ten days to drive across America, driving only during the day.” It is easy to understand how the word “day” is used in all three instances. Why is it that no theologian disputes whether the Israelites marched around Jericho for seven days as opposed to seven thousand years? It is because the particular context demands that yom in Joshua 6:14-15 is referring to a 24-hour time period.

Young-earth creationists often point out that every time yom is paired with the words “evening” or “morning,” it refers to an ordinary day. For that matter, the phrase “evening and morning” by itself would constitute an ordinary day. When the word “night” is paired with yom, it also refers to an ordinary day. Whenever yom is used in the Old Testament with either a cardinal number or an ordinal number, it always means a literal day. In Genesis 1, yom appears with a cardinal number on the first day and with ordinal numbers on the second through sixth days. It also appears with the words “evening” and “morning” on all six days and the word “night” on the first day. Any one of these contextual clues would be sufficient to indicate that the days of creation are ordinary days. Yet, Genesis 1 uses all of them. It seems as if God really stressed this fact to make sure we understand the days are literal, ordinary days.

Cardinal Number:  The name given to number words (one, two, three, etc.).

Ordinal Number:  A number designating a place in a numbered sequence (first, second, third, etc.).

Genealogical Evidence

Since Adam was created just days after the earth, the length of time between the creation of Adam and today is the approximate age of the earth. A natural reading of the biblical genealogies reveals that the earth could not be billions of years old. Genesis 5 gives a record from Adam to Noah, and Genesis 11 provides the line from Noah to Abraham. Scholars generally agree that Abraham lived around 2000 B.C. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 add roughly another 2,000 years. When one adds the 2,000 years since Christ, we get an age for the earth of about 6,000 years. The old-earth creationist is forced to try to insert numerous gaps into the text when there is strong evidence against such gaps. Even if such gaps existed, they couldn’t involve more than a few thousand years without making the genealogies meaningless and ludicrous. They certainly would not allow for the billions of years to be inserted. So adding gaps does not harmonize the Bible with old-earth geological and cosmological theories.

Death and Suffering before Sin

Young-earth creationists also point to several theological difficulties and contradictions created when one attempts to insert vast ages into the Genesis record. The most serious error is that this practice necessarily places death, disease, and bloodshed before sin. If there are fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old (as old-earthers believe), then those animals must have died before Adam sinned (since we all agree that Adam was not around millions of years ago). Some fossils have evidence of disease in them, such as cancer, arthritis, and tooth disease.

By inserting billions of years into the Bible, the old-earth view places death and suffering before sin (and therefore death and suffering could not be the result of Adam’s sin). In the process, this undermines the foundation of the Gospel message itself. Old-earth creationists are not being accused of denying the Gospel, but their view necessarily undermines the foundation of the Gospel message. If animal death and bloodshed occurred before sin, then God pronounced these as “very good” in Genesis 1:31. If millions of years had occurred, then the curse pronounced on the animals and the ground (Gen. 3:14 and 3:17) had no effect—there was already animal death and disease and the ground was already producing thorns and thistles. Thorns and thistles are found in fossil layers that old-earth geologists say existed 300–400 million years before man came on the scene. Yet, the Bible teaches that thorns and thistles are the result of sin—part of God’s curse on the ground after Adam sinned (Gen. 3:18).

**(Blogger comment:  Although I greatly respect these two authors and rarely disagree with them, it is my belief that their organization, Answers In Genesis, makes too much of Genesis 3:18.  For me, the very fact that God mentions thorns and thistles indicates that they were something that Adam probably understood from his experience.  Extending the mention of them to mean that they didn’t previously exist is an unjustified, arbitrary claim.  Although this is an extremely minor point of disagreement, I think that extending God’s statements beyond their plain meaning, something that Answers In Genesis strives hard not to do, weakens these otherwise-very-strong arguments.)

The idea that death existed prior to Adam’s sin is also refuted by the original diets prescribed for both man and animals in Genesis 1:29-30.
And God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food”; and it was so.
Why would God command a vegetarian diet for all living creatures? The obvious answer is because death was not a part of the original creation. People were not supposed to kill animals and animals were not to kill each other. In some cases, we find fossils of animal parts inside other animals; the fossil record does contain abundant evidence of meat-eating animals. From the Scriptures, we know that this carnivorous behavior among some animals must have come after sin, as a result of the Curse. So, the fossils cannot be millions of years old.

What Does the New Testament Teach?

When Jesus Christ was in His earthly ministry, He confirmed that the earth is young. When questioned by the Pharisees concerning divorce, He replied, ““But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female’ ”” (Mark 10:6, Matt. 19:4). The obvious implication here is Jesus knew that Adam and Eve were created “from the beginning.” If billions of years had passed prior to their creation, then Jesus’ claim that Adam and Eve were from the beginning of creation would simply be wrong. The only possible way for our Lord’s response to be accurate is if the days of creation were literal 24-hour days. Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day of the very first week (which would be the beginning from Jesus’ vantage point 4,000 years later)—not 14 billion years after the beginning.

The New Testament contains other similar statements. For example, Romans 1:20 states:
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
While reading this verse, Christians usually focus on the concept that general revelation reveals God’s attributes (or characteristics). Certainly this is taught here. But there is another interesting point about that general revelation. It states that God’s attributes are clearly seen and understood “since the creation of the world.” This important point cannot be emphasized enough. In order for His attributes to be “clearly seen” and “understood” since the creation of the world, someone had to be there to do the seeing and understanding. This someone does not refer to angels. The entire context of this passage deals with mankind. In other words, Paul is saying that men were around since the beginning of creation, and they were able to clearly see God’s invisible attributes. This is only possible from the young-earth perspective. If billions of years had passed before man came on the scene, then Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was gravely mistaken.

Restoration of Paradise

Isaiah 65:25 prophesied of a peaceful time when “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together” and “the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” This restoration hearkens back to the original creation when all animals were vegetarian (Gen. 1:30). This is problematic for the old-earth creationist because he does not believe that all creatures were originally vegetarian. Recall that evidence of meat-eating creatures is found in the fossil record. Since the old-earther believes these fossils are millions of years old, he is forced to believe that carnivorous activity existed long before the time of Adam. But this runs contrary to Genesis 1:30.

In the future, God will create “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). To our knowledge, no Christian believes this will take God billions of years to create. Why then insist that it took this long the first time?

Several other theological problems could be listed, as well as scores of scientific difficulties, but these will suffice to give a summary of the young-earth creationist’s major biblical arguments.

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The Month Before Christmas

Posted on December 14, 2011 by falcnjet

Several days ago, I came across this poem expressing the frustrations of Christians and others about the systematic effort to remove the meaning of Christmas by our friends on the left:

‘Twas the month before Christmas, and all through our land,
Not one Christian was stirring nor taking a stand,
For the PC police had controlled what we say;
The meaning of Christmas was taken away,
‘Cause the children were told by their schools not to sing
About shepherds and wise men and angels and things.
“It might hurt someone’s feelings,” the teachers would say,
“Let’s keep it to Santa and reindeers and sleighs.”
While the shoppers were ready with cash and with credit,
Even pushing folks down to the floor just to get it;
A CD, an I-Pod, a Kindle, an X-box,
A nice tie for Dad and for Sis Lego blocks,
The stores mentioned Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa
In hopes to sell books by Al Franken or Fonda,
While the Targets’ were hanging their trees upside down,
And at Lowe’s “Merry Christmas” was met with a frown.
At K-Mart and Staples, Best Buy and Sears,
That divisive word, “Christmas,” had been absent for years.
Inclusiveness, tolerance, “dee-verse-a-tee;”
Were the words that were used to intimidate me.
Now Daschle, now Blitzer, now Durbin and Sharpton,
On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry and Jackson!
To the top of the Senate and raise such a clatter
That Jesus is excised from all public matters.
Well…
We spoke not a word as they snuffed out our faith
And forbade us to speak of salvation and grace.
The true gift of Christmas was spoiled, discarded—
A reasonless season of hopelessness started.
So as “Winter Break” dawns by your “Holiday Tree”
And you’re sipping your Starbucks, think carefully!
Choose your words wisely and watch what you state…
… And shout “Merry Christmas!” those words that they hate.

I think it speaks for itself…  Have a very Merry Christmas!

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The Problem of Evil in the World

Posted on November 2, 2011 by falcnjet

Epicurus (342 – 250 b.c.), one of the first empiricists, posed these questions about God based on his observation of evil in the world:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?”

Good questions, many think.   If you’re one of them, let’s look at how you’re thinking, and see if it holds up logically.  You’re certainly among a large group of humans who have reasoned, just like Epicurus, that the very existence of evil and suffering in the world precludes the existence of a Creator God who is both powerful and good.

Charles Darwin, for instance, came to a similar conclusion when his beloved daughter Annie died at just ten years old. In their biography of Darwin, Desmond and Moore write: “Annie’s cruel death destroyed Charles’s tatters of belief in a moral, just universe. Later he would say that this period chimed the final death-knell for his Christianity . . . Charles now took his stand as an unbeliever.”

Media mogul Ted Turner, an avowed enemy of Christianity, began his life as a deeply religious boy, even announcing an intent, at one point, to become a missionary. But during his teen years, Turner’s younger sister, Mary Jane, contracted lupus and suffered a painful, lingering death. Turner prayed an hour each day for her recovery, but without the wished-for success. Today an atheist, he asks the question, “How could God let my sister suffer so much?”

These are the experiences and conclusions of only a couple of famous people, but they are representative of millions. How on Earth could the various kinds of horrible evil and suffering that exist in our world be consistent with a loving and powerful God?

Before we get into these questions too deeply, let’s get something out of the way: Atheists can’t use the idea of an angry and unfair God as a reason for their unbelief. This is an internally inconsistent claim. The fact that you don’t like God doesn’t make Him non-existent. If there is no God, then there is no “angry God,” so there is no one to complain about. To continually hammer away on His cruelty concedes that He exists and, cruel or not, He has authority over His creation.

Furthermore, one could ask an atheist what exactly his or her criterion is for judging a thing cruel or evil. Since atheists believe God doesn’t exist, they reject the existence of a universal moral standard (see my blog entry, “Atheist Summer Camp.”) So why should we give any credence to their claim that God (who doesn’t exist) is cruel?

In a basic sense, there are three approaches to explaining evil in a world ruled by an all powerful, benevolent God:

  • God is real, evil is an illusion.
  • Evil is real, God is an illusion.   - Or; evil is real, God is limited.
  • Both God and evil are real.

Some mystical (pantheistic) philosophies, Christian Scientism and others take the approach that there is a real god or gods who are benevolent and good, and that evil, pain and suffering are an illusion man perpetrates on himself because of his lack of enlightenment. This view of the world is completely arbitrary and is an obvious case of groping for something to fill peoples’ spiritual needs without understanding that truth must comport with reality. We will ignore this option because arbitrariness cannot be reasoned against.

Approach number 2 embodies atheism and beliefs in a limited God.

Approach number 3 is the theistic (Christian and others) approach to the problem.
Let’s talk about these.

First, let’s clarify the problem: When we wonder about God’s relationship to evil and begin to question His goodness, we are thinking like this:

  • God created all things
  • Evil is a thing.
  • Therefore; God created evil.
  • To create evil is to be malevolent.
  • Therefore; God is malevolent (not good).

This was the thinking of Thomas Jefferson when he made this famous statement:

“The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him.”

But the Bible is clear that God created only good things. Looking back on His creation, God said that it was “very good,” so it could not have included anything evil. This is why one can’t believe God and also believe that Eden stood atop layers of fossil evidence of violence and suffering. I Timothy 4:4, in the New Testament, confirms that “Everything God created is good.” So the Christian stand would be that God did not, in fact, create evil.

The satisfying answer to this apparent dilemma is that although evil is indeed real, it is not a “thing.” Evil does not exist as a thing separate from other substantive things, so it was not created. Evil is a lack of good, a corruption of good, or a depravation of good. Evil cannot exist unless a good thing exists that it can corrupt or deny. Some analogies of evil would be: Rot in a tree, a wound in flesh, or rust in metal. These are corruptions of the intended states of these things, so in the sense that we discuss them here, they are not “things” in themselves.

So, the thinking above, even though its logical construction is valid, is untrue. Let’s correct it:

  • God created all things.
  • Evil is not a thing.
  • Therefore; God did not create evil.

Okay great. So God did not create evil. Nevertheless it does exist, so why doesn’t He stop it?  When we ask this question, we’re thinking this way:

  • God claims to be sovereign (in omnipotent control over the world).
  • Evil happens in the world.
  • Therefore either: a) God chooses not to control evil, or b) God cannot control evil (He is limited).

Again, though, the bible claims that there is nothing that happens apart from God knowing it and controlling it for His purposes. So why does He allow evil to reign almost unrestricted in the world?

The key that unlocks the door to understanding this problem is the concept of free will. Free will is an essential element of God’s plan for His creation. Remember that God is all about relationship. Free will ⎯the right to make choices on the part of each party⎯ is an essential element of any relationship. God could not create the world that He wanted without it. Robots programmed to do right and avoid evil are not very satisfying friends. So a correct line of reasoning, once we understand that free will is necessary, goes like this

  • God created only good things.
  • Free will is a thing.
  • Free will allows choices.
  • Mankind is limited and physical (he is finite).
  • Finite reasoning leads to error and evil.
  • Therefore; Men will fail and some of man’s choices will be evil.
  • Men will fail and some of their choices will be evil.
  • Therefore; evil and suffering will exist in the world.

Now, this reasoning really only helps us understand why evil and suffering exist in our world. But the Bible also tells us that God upholds all of nature. If He can do that, couldn’t he stand in the way of tragedies and the consequences of evil? Of course He can, and experience teaches us that He does. But He does it only within the bounds of His perfect understanding and will. In his novel, The Shack, William P. Young’s character representing God says this:

“No one knows what horrors I’ve saved the world from ‘cuz people can’t see what never happened. All evil flows from independence, and independence is your choice. If I were to simply revoke all the choices of independence, the world as you know it would cease to exist and love would have no meaning. This world is not a playground where I keep all my children free from evil. Evil is the chaos of this age that you brought to me, but it will not have the final say. Now it touches everyone that I love, those who follow me and those who don’t. If I take away the consequences of people’s choices, I destroy the possibility of love. Love that is forced is no love at all.”

I would substitute the words “free will” for independence in this paragraph. Free will is the element of love that prevents a lover from controlling the object of his love. To prevent the object of your relationship from making certain choices is to stop loving him/her. It would be denying, or going against, the nature of love.

So God is bound by the same rules in loving us that we can’t break in loving each other. Why? Because He wrote the book on love. Love is His nature and a thing of His making. He cannot deny Himself.

This is the logic that helps us understand why God cannot overrule evil:

  • God has the power and authority to overrule evil.
  • To overrule evil is to deny free choice.
  • God’s will is to conduct a relationship with a free people.
  • God’s nature is to carry out His own will.
  • God cannot deny His own nature.
  • Therefore; God cannot overrule evil.

The good news is that his syllogism is true only in the immediate physical sense. God is clever beyond our imagination, so it’s not surprising that He has, in fact, overcome evil ⎯in the ultimate sense⎯ while not violating free choice. His answer to this problem is to give us another choice. We ourselves can overcome evil by simply choosing to love Him back. In this way, we can be a part of the ultimate victory over evil that will occur in the end.

God knows “the end from the beginning” (Is. 46:10) and has made use of evil (the death of His Son) in order to conquer it. How clever is that? He has promised us that one day all physical suffering will be eradicated (Rev. 21:3-4), moral evils will be separated out and forever quarantined so that they cannot infect us (Rev. 20:11-15), and men and women who have made the free choice to acknowledge Christ as their Lord will be perfected and fulfilled for eternity. So there can be no question that God will and, in the ultimate sense already has, defeated evil.

So here is the final syllogism regarding the fate of evil in the world:

  • God’s will is to allow mankind free choice.
  • Free choice, in limited creatures, inevitably leads to error (sin).
  • The presence of sin in the world causes a lack, corruption or deprivation of good (evil).
  • Because God is good, He wants to defeat evil.
  • Because God is all-powerful, He can defeat evil.
  • God has promised to defeat evil.
  • Evil is not yet defeated.
  • Therefore, evil will one day be defeated!

Evil’s destiny is already decided. It cannot be avoided, so in the absolute sense, it is already defeated. This is why the apostle Paul said that death has no sting and the grave has no victory. He said that the sting of death is sin (another word for evil). But sin, death and the evil associated with them have been inevitably defeated.

How? By the paying of the just consequences for sin by a sinless entity. Jesus Christ, who is God, took on the form of a man and willingly submitted to death. He did this as a substitute for you and for me.

Equally important, He showed His power over death by rising from the grave, never to die again. Because of this act of unheard-of love, and show of awesome power over the grave, we need not suffer eternal separation from the Creator of everything good.

For more information about this, go to www.BecauseIThinkIBelieve.com.

God bless!

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Atheist Summer Camp

Posted on August 11, 2011 by falcnjet

This past weekend, I picked up my local newspaper and noticed an article reporting on “Camp Quest,” a summer camp for young atheists in the Chesapeake Bay area. At Camp Quest, rules include such things as “being friendly to everyone,” and values are stated to be “mutual respect, ethical living and critical thinking.” Hmm.
The article implied that at the camp they spend a lot of time on values and rules, and I get the point the camp is trying to make: atheism doesn’t make people evil, atheist kids are just like other kids, and atheists have similar values and ethical standards to the rest of society. I hope that states it fairly.
I think this is completely true. There are many, even most, atheists who are upright, moral citizens. I have no problem believing that.
My question is, why?
In the world view of atheism, these highly intelligent, massively complex young humans exist only because of an astronomically unlikely series of accidental molecular collisions over vast eons. And these young people, when their allotted three-score-and-ten has expired, will return to the molecular chaos from which they were formed. Given this stated belief, why are they spending their precious time cheerleading for moral and ethical behavior? If humankind is really rearranged pond scum, why would anyone be interested in anything but his own best interests? Why would an atheist want to go to camp to learn how to be a nice person? Being nice is great when it serves your purposes, but why be nice when it doesn’t?
Atheists answer to no ultimate moral authority except themselves. So a learning-to-be-nice summer camp makes no sense in their worldview. Without a final moral authority, moral standards are established in the mind of each individual. Why would any outside authority establish a standard of morality for such an individual, except when it either happens to benefit that individual or when that individual feels that he has no choice. Outside of these two exceptions, a person who answers ultimately to no one should be free to do what he sees as beneficial to himself. That’s the law of nature that atheists hold in high regard. This would include crimes against fellow humans that society considers heinous and appalling. Murder, rape, hate, theft of all kinds, cruelty and greed are no problem in this world view because there is no one to answer to. It is only oneself that limits one’s behavior (absent the two exceptions above.)
But there is in fact some kind of limit that exists in each and every healthy human, isn’t there? The idea that mentally healthy people would commit murder or rape if they could get away with it is repugnant to all of us. We call this phenomenon conscience. But in a naturalist world view, where did it come from?
I submit that atheists, when they proudly proclaim their high values and commitment to moral behavior, are borrowing from a competing world view that, unlike theirs, does acknowledge a powerful Law Giver and ultimate Moral Authority. Although they answer to no one under their belief system, they act as though they do. This is inconsistent and illogical.
Trying to live out an inconsistent belief system creates relentless tension within the human psyche. Insisting that some foundational belief is true because you want it to be true may feel like freedom, but if one of your goals is “critical thinking,” as it is at Camp Quest, you shouldn’t exclude your own world view from that criticism. When I realized this some years ago, it made all the difference in my life. Subjecting Christianity to the strongest possible light of rational inquiry is what gave me a kind of peace and fulfillment that I had never before enjoyed. I urge my atheist friends to do the same with their world view.

What do you think?

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Why Are There So Many Different Views of God?

Posted on July 4, 2011 by falcnjet

In reading the Bible, one finds woven into the powerful accounts of creation and God’s people the true historical backdrop of events that led to the many misconceptions about God that prevail around the world. The modern problem is that as man has been digging up fossils, discovering radioactive decay rates and analyzing rock strata, few have based their findings and hypotheses on the only written history of the world’s beginnings. Had they done so with an open mind, they would have been awe-stricken by the complete consistency of what we find today with what ancient men wrote thousands of years ago.

This history teaches clearly that less than two thousand years after creation, the curse of original sin had affected man so profoundly that he could do nothing but evil continually, so God judged mankind by sending a flood to cover the entire earth (an earth very different from the one we know today) for the purpose of killing all land-dwelling, air-breathing life, save the eight members of one righteous family and a small sampling of each of His created kinds of animals. The belief that this account of the greatest catastrophe in recorded history is true is highly defensible intellectually and supported by much evidence found all over the world today, not the least of which are the presence of marine fossils on many of the mountaintops of the world and the existence of myriad layers of sedimentary rock, sometimes extending unbroken across entire continents and containing fossils of countless creatures entombed suddenly in some unexpected event. A song often used by a popular ministry supporting Biblical creation puts it this way:

“If there really was a worldwide flood, what would the evidence be? Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water, all over the earth!” [Buddy Davis, “Billions of Dead Things” (Petersburg, KY: Answers In Genesis)]

Well, if one presupposes that the Bible is true, that is indeed what he would expect to find. Oddly (in the view of secular science), that is exactly what we do find. In fact, the earth’s geology is a screaming testament to the truth of the flood account and the veracity of God’s word. This is why denying the idea of a worldwide flood is so essential to the agenda of atheist scientists. The truth, though, is that this is what we find with all historical accounts found in the Bible⎯they are fully reasonable in light of current knowledge if not rejected a priori.

So there really was a flood that covered the whole earth, a catastrophe of epic proportions, and after it subsided, the remnant of man and animal kind inhabited a new world, vastly changed from the one they knew.

The Effects of the Great Flood

During the flood year, God had repainted His earth in a new expression of His creative power. As the earth gave up its subterranean water stores, continental plates broke apart, slid (possibly on a lubricating layer of water) and came to sudden, crushing stops in various places against the underlying mantle. Great mountain ranges were formed by the crushing, over-thrusting and bending of impossibly huge masses of rock, while megatons of sediment were distributed over them by the flood waters. Over the following centuries, these colossal land masses settled haltingly into their final resting places, being moved, sunken and raised by the geologic forces begun by the flood. The remnants of this greatest friction event of all history give us much of the volcanism, earthquakes and other geological activity we see today. But in the first few centuries following the flood, molten crustal material oozing and bursting from the earth must have been the norm in many places.  In fact, it is likely that an ash cloud covered most of the earth for decades or even centuries, which, together with the warm oceans created by this incredible geological activity, was a critical element in causing the ice age.

Because of the strong influence of current naturalist thought, many who read the foregoing paragraph will be incredulous of the idea that all of this happened in a relatively short time during and after the great flood. Yet all geological and other evidence, when looked at through the eyeglass of scripture, points to a scenario something like this, and there is no known, responsible science that can refute it. So it is a reasonable hypothesis, given the evidence seen through the glasses of scripture. Do we know in an empirical sense that this is what happened? No, of course not. Neither Christians nor secularists were there, and neither the Bible nor the evidence left today describe fully how the geology of the earth reached its present state. So we can only construct reasoned speculations. However, changing this hypothesis of the earth’s geological history to one of uniformitarian processes over billions of years and numerous ice ages does nothing to establish its veracity. Arriving at such a hypothesis merely requires putting on your “no god, no flood” glasses and interpreting the evidence in that light. The difference is one of world view, not one of evidence. Christianity chooses to presuppose that the amazing record provided for us by the infallible God of creation is a better basis for theorizing than fallible mankind’s imagination.

The unparalleled catastrophe of the great flood did eventually subside. The remnant of man and animal kind survived, and over the ensuing years, began to proliferate.

The Scattering of Mankind over the Earth

God commanded the budding population to disperse and populate the whole earth, but in mankind’s usual way, people ignored the command, and over the next few generations, they stayed close together in one area, apparently a rich plain, as the population re-grew. Fearful of striking out, they lived there, working to build a new life over about the next eleven decades, everyone speaking the same language and putting to use all the knowledge gained since the creation to build a great city. The Bible records that they decided to build a majestic tower as a unifying factor for the new culture, so that they would remain united as one people and not scatter over the earth, thus revealing an opposite motivation to the command they had been given. This is just one story in the unbroken litany of examples of man believing that what he reasons for himself should overrule the reasoning of his Creator. The tower became a monument to their commitment to disobedience. Apparently, even the disaster of disasters, the great flood, wasn’t enough to dissuade Noah’s descendants from ignoring their God.
Knowing that the opportunity to populate the entire earth would be limited due to the continuing changes in earth’s geology in the next several centuries to come, God imposed His will on men by compelling them to speak different languages for the first time in history. Confused and frustrated by the sudden inability to understand anyone but those of their own small language group, the groups separated from each other and began roaming the earth looking for a place in which to flourish. If only man could learn that God’s purposes cannot be thwarted.

The Apparent Primitiveness of Early Man

If you take the evidence of early peoples we find today and compare it to this Biblical description of the dispersion of people- groups at the tower of Babel, it is easy to infer from it that relatively small people-groups became, in effect, exiled to various parts of the world, creating genetic bottlenecks and isolating technical knowledge in different locations. Instead of dreaming up wild stories about “ape men” and a “stone age” and so forth, modern mankind could have simply read the history and seen what happened. Some of these isolated people-groups may have wandered for centuries looking for a better environment, making use of the land bridges that likely still connected the continents and the ice bridges of the one ice age caused by the aftereffects of the flood; along the way, they may have left behind even smaller isolated groups. Some groups would have possessed much of the knowledge of the larger post-flood society; some would have become primitive because of the lack of such knowledge (and accordingly, lived in caves when they were available). This is why we find such a wide variety of ancient cultures. The historicity of this forced-dispersion story, like that of the flood, is consistent with modern evidence and scholarship. For instance, studies of the geographic history of languages appears to trace them all back to the general area of Mesopotamia, which is thought to be the cradle of post-flood civilization. Moreover, we find a great deal of evidence that some ancient cultures were not as primitive as our educational programming leads us to believe. We find evidence all over the world of societies that appear to have understood many things that our vanity has led us to assume we were the first to know. Several cultures apparently understood our solar system to a high degree of accuracy; many were outstanding architects and builders, in some cases astounding us with the massive, intricately fitted stone structures that we find today in many places; some, thousands of years ago, apparently knew of and harnessed electricity and constructed complicated mechanical computers. At the same time, many were struggling and isolated, resorting to crude techniques to support basic survival because their language group lacked technical knowledge and their geographic location presented them with severe obstacles to their survival. Here again, history and scholarship, when fully understood, always support the Biblical accounts.

The history of mankind given in the Bible up until the tower of Babel was the story of the whole of mankind, because the human species at that time lived relatively close to one another. They were all one people group. Until the flood, there was only one land mass, and man had never had a notable incentive to wander. After Babel, when mankind was split into different groups because of language barriers, the Bible history began to follow a particular people-group in whom God chose to entrust His story. There was only one history being written at this time, fortunately an infallibly accurate one, and by the Creator’s choice, it recorded one group’s history. We know a great deal about this chosen people and a little about some of the groups that interacted with them over time, but of the other groups, we know only what the evidence we find in the present implies. To the atheist, this evidence implies that there were forerunner versions of our species, and a Darwinian mindset leads to stories of multiple branches of pre-human species leading to the various races of modern man. To the Christian, seeing it through Biblical glasses, it implies that some groups of God’s highest creation survived and thrived while some suffered illnesses or encountered hardships that affected their genetic makeup, and in some cases, even led to their extinction as a group. A clear view of this history also leads us to understand that mankind is divided into what we call “races” over the minuscule genetic differences caused by the combination of genetic isolation and environmental influences. If we understood this history clearly, it would be easy to see that in fact we are all of the same “race” ⎯the human one.

The Origin of Conflicting Religions

In the same way, if one accepts the Bible’s account as Christianity does and views the issue of competing religions in its light, it isn’t hard to see how the understanding of God among diverse people groups became varied. The Bible doesn’t record what happened to the various groups, but it’s reasonable to expect that any given group, once separated from the whole, would possess among its members only a partial understanding of the history of God’s interaction with man, just as it would possess only a partial pool of the larger population’s genes, or only a portion of its technical knowledge. The accuracy and completeness of the collective memory regarding God in any of these isolated societies would vary based on which members of the former whole were captured into that language group. Moreover, this level of accuracy would likely decrease with time as verbal records were handed down by imperfect human memories. In any given language group, caretakers of the historical record, at least for several generations, would have been few because such a pursuit would have seemed trivial compared to the daily battle to survive in an unfamiliar part of an ever-changing world. In addition, the verbal records would soon have succumbed to human nature as they were re-shaped by those who sought to use them to gain power and influence over others.

In other words, knowledge of the reality of a supernatural Creator-God was present in all post-Babel cultures, but details were lost, obscured, and deliberately distorted with time. This is why God chose a particular people group in whom to vest an accurate, written history of the early earth. Moving chosen individuals to write down His history, He set the record straight permanently, and over time, He charged the keepers of this history with the responsibility of sharing it with the rest of mankind. This history, of course, is only a small part of what God had to say to us through those to whom he revealed His word. It would have done mankind no good to merely have an eyewitness record of the history of the earth. If God had stopped there, we could not have known Him fully. Happily for us, His word also records who He is, how we can know Him personally, why He made us and what His plan is for us.

So, the post-flood dispersion of mankind over the earth and the loss of connection between the various people groups answer the basic question of why, over time, we have had these many different expressions and characterizations of this God who, we know from our birth, must exist. Although nature was always intended to be only an expression of the character and power of the Creator God, some groups, over time, began to revere the created elements of their environment as god, rather than of God. In addition, and again over dozens of centuries, individuals arose in various cultures claiming to have received personal revelations from God, or from a god or the gods, in accordance with what they believed their culture might accept. Occasionally, they even claimed to be a god, or to be God’s sole chosen intermediary with mankind. This continues from time to time to this day.

There is another important point to be made about the rise of confusion over God across the centuries. One might reasonably ask, why wouldn’t the various people groups, in their struggle for survival, just forget about the idea of God over time? Why would they need to keep characterizing Him, defining Him and maintaining some form of belief in Him? The answer is that human beings are born with an innate belief in, understanding of and need for God. These so-called “primitive” peoples were no different than we are. They deeply needed to know who their Creator was, and how they could relate to Him.

The Bible is our source of revelation, which is the only place we find truth from outside of our own intellect. It is the benchmark by which the Christian measures truth. While nearly every culture and “religion” on earth has traditional stories about creation, a flood or floods, language confusion, and even a “savior” figure, no culture has the whole truth unless it has, and accepts as true, the scripture that God has given and preserved through the ages.

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Finding Your World View in a One-Sided World

Posted on May 26, 2011 by falcnjet

I just finished reading a blog entry by one John Carlton, who I don’t know from Adam’s house cat (as my wife would say). His blog is entitled, “The Marketing Rebel Rant,” so apparently he’s a marketing rebel (www.john-carlton.com/2011/05/congratulations-now-stop-being-a-wuss). In this particular entry, Mr. Carlton rants about the higher education system and advocates self-education if a person really wants to learn something. He suggests that a person read everything written on their subject of interest. Then in order to really understand their subject, they should look for opportunities to debate and defend the positions and beliefs that have arisen from their study. This exposes weaknesses in their reasoning and deepens their convictions on the subject. He even suggests that they look for opportunities to defend the opposing position in order to fine tune their beliefs.

I say, “Bravo Mr. Carlton,” especially if you’re interested in knowing the truth about life and perfecting your view of the world. (I would also add; teach others what you believe if you are blessed with the opportunity because there is nothing like building a lesson plan and fielding students’ questions for exposing difficulties with your arguments.)

What I have against the education system in our country is that it teaches and supports a faith-based belief system ⎯a religion no different from Islam, Christianity or any other. In the United States and most of the Western world, education is committed to philosophical naturalism, a world view that insists on the impossibility of any supernatural influence on reality. If there really were a constitutional prohibition against expression of religion in public life (which there is not), our education system would be in violation of it. What has happened in the last few decades is not that religion has been removed from public education, it’s that Christianity has been replaced by a different, state-supported religion.

How is naturalism a faith-based religion? Thanks for asking. Any philosophy based on atheism requires faith that certain things are true about reality that cannot be defended logically. Let’s look at three of them.

First, atheistic philosophies cannot account for the origin of matter. There is an axiom of logic that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. Things exist. So philosophical naturalism has a problem. I know, there’s the big bang theory and all, but the big bang is just a big idea based on the observed expansion of space. Put all that expansion in reverse and eventually you end up with all matter in a period-sized dot. But no one has every postulated a theory (at least a reasonable one) about where that crazy dot full of universe came from. (My own personal theory is that no one really, in their heart of hearts, believes this. It’s a theory that arises from my basic belief in the primacy of human common sense.) So the atheist world view requires faith, and a lot of it. This is the kind of blind faith that they’re always accusing us Christians of having. There is no natural explanation for the origin of matter, but one day “science” will find one. That’s a faith-based belief system.

Another thing that philosophical naturalism has no explanation for is the origin of life out of non-life. There are few (if any) scientists today who don’t recognize that the odds against life forming accidentally are astronomical. There are layers and layers of barriers to this accidentally happening in nature. You’ve got to accidentally get the right kind of amino acids that accidentally bond into a useful protein and that protein has to remain viable while nature accidentally comes up with the right kind of amino acids again and those acids accidentally bond into another useful protein, and then these proteins have to wait patiently until nature accidentally repeats this process 300 to 600 times (the minimum number of proteins necessary for the simplest single-celled life form). And we’re not talking about just any 3-600 proteins. They have to be a variety of specific types of proteins necessary to make a living cell work. The idea that this can happen is beyond idiotic and scientists know it. Many though, believe with the late cosmologist Carl Sagan that it’s “amazing that it happened anyway.” Yeah, I’ll say. Talk about blind faith.

Finally, atheism in its many forms cannot account for the existence of objective morality in the world. Under an atheistic world view, we live in an accidental universe, somehow formed out of a chaotic explosion. We humans are, in essence, rearranged pond scum. As such, we have no inherent value, or at least no more than the value of our component molecules. Everything is accidental, formed without purpose by no one. Accordingly, there is no authority that stands above nature and rules it from outside. No creator, so no one owns or rules over us. No law giver, so logically, no law. Now, I know that cultures establish laws that they think are in the best interest of society, but under atheism, why should we follow them unless we believe we will be caught and punished? If I wish to shoot your daughter in the head, you have no inherent right to claim foul, since morality is established in the mind of each individual. If I can get away with it, why should I not do it if it pleases me? No individual has the right to establish a moral yardstick for me any more than I do for him.
Oddly though, human beings do bear the imprint of a moral authority on their psyche. Any thoughtful person realizes this. Our nation was universally horrified at the senseless destruction of more than 3,000 lives on September 11th, 2001. Why, if humans are just a fortunate assemblage of atoms and molecules? If you are reading this, you survived, so why should you care about all those strangers? More room and resources on the planet for you, right? We feel an affront to our sensibility because we are all the product of a common Creator who has made us in His image. We feel sad because we have an inborn understanding of rightness and wrongness and we sense the importance of staying somewhere roughly within the former. There is no explanation for this in a naturalist world view. Most naturalists believe these same things that Christians do, but their world view does not justify it. They take it on faith that objective good and evil exist. There’s that word again.

Atheism-based belief systems require mountains of faith. Faith that there are some natural explanations for the many things that their world view does not explain or justify. So don’t let anyone tell you that schools have been secularized. They have, in fact, been reduced to teaching the faith doctrine of the state. We need schools that give children and young people all the facts, theories and ideas, and the logic and data that supports each one and that teach them to think and evaluate for themselves. That is what real education is. So if you want to fine-tune, strengthen and support your world view, follow Mr. Carlton’s advice. Dig it out for yourself, because your education isn’t likely to have helped much.

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Here’s What Makes Me Think The Bible Can Be Trusted Unconditionally, Part IV

Posted on May 7, 2011 by falcnjet

Fulfilled Prophesy

Well, we’ve seen the unlikely continuity of a set of writings from three continents by about 40 writers in three languages over at least 1,600 years and not added to or corrected for the last two millennia. The factual statements about science and history made by these men in a time when much of what they wrote was not empirically known have been, and are being, verified by continuing archeological research as history marches on. As yet, no verifiable error has been found in a truth claim made anywhere in this awesome tome.

But there is yet another area of evidence that the bible can be trusted unconditionally; that of its amazing record in predicting future events ⎯writing history forward as well as backward. This is a testimony to the fact that the Creator of time exists outside of His creation and is not limited by it in His thinking. Only a perfect being with these attributes is able to know in perfect detail what will occur, and when, in our time-limited perspective.

Scholars say that there are about 2,500 prophesies given in scripture, of which about 2,000 have been fulfilled exactly as predicted. The rest refer to our yet-unfulfilled future. Obviously, it isn’t practical to try to list and explain comprehensively every example, but I’ll try to skim a few that impress me greatly. Maybe they will you too.

1. Daniel’s prophesy of the 70 “weeks.”
(Daniel 9:24-27)

Let’s see if I can keep this short.
In the sixth century BC, the Jewish people were under the thumb of the Babylonian empire, many of them held captive, and their capital, Jerusalem, had been destroyed. Around that time, the Babylonians were overrun by the Persians under Daruis, and the domination of the Jewish people continued under a new empire. (This seventy-year captivity had been predicted in detail by the prophet Jeremiah, by the way.) In 538 BC, the prophet Daniel predicted that in a very specific amount of time, a decree would be issued to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and its temple. He also predicted that in a certain period after that, a Messiah would come and then be “cut off,” or killed, and that this would occur prior to a second destruction of the temple at a specific time. In 445 BC, about 93 years after this prophesy, the current Persian king, Artaxerxes, made a deal with the prophet Nehemiah in which a decree was issued to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem, as Daniel had prophesied. Now, it’s complicated scholarly stuff, but the Hebrew word translated ‘weeks’ is a word that can be days, weeks, years, or even weeks-of-years (7-year periods), depending on context. There are other places in the bible where the word clearly means seven-year-periods. I’m not going to bore you with all the math, but if you look at Daniel’s prophecy and its timeline in terms of 70 ‘weeks of years,’ taking into account from the historical context that years were considered 360 days, you find that the time lines in Daniel’s prophecy line up perfectly, even to the day, with the decree to rebuild the temple, the advent of Christ and his death, and the ultimate destruction of the temple in 70 a.d. (A good discussion of the details of this can be seen at www.christiancourier.com/articles/14-daniels-prophecy-of-the-seventy-weeks)

Daniel’s perfectly accurate prophecy can only be explained by the existence of a power outside of nature that is capable of communicating with men. This alone should prompt a desire to learn more in the heart of a truth-loving person.

2. Israel scattered among the nations.
(Leviticus 26:14-39)
(Deuteronomy 28:64-67)

In the twenty-sixth chapter of Leviticus, God lays down for the Jewish people what will happen to their nation if they reject Him and disrespect His sovereignty over them. In part, God says the following to them:

…if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, then I will do this to you: …I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you. …I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will take no delight in the pleasing aroma of your offerings. I myself will lay waste the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled. I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. …You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.

Obviously, this has indeed been the fate of the Jewish people again and again throughout their recorded history. For 2,500 years (c. 6th century BC through 1967 AD), the Jewish nation has been battered about by nation after nation, being restored mercifully from time to time by a forgiving God, but again and again, forgetting their special place as His chosen people and paying the price clearly laid out in the passages above. Although their national sovereignty has been restored today, they still find little rest among the nations surrounding them.

In my mind, the following passage from Deuteronomy 28, perfectly predicts the horror that the nation of Israel suffered during the 1930’s and 40’s:

Among [the] nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.

Though authentic Christians today love and respect their Jewish friends and revere the common heritage of our faiths, we know from scripture that they have paid a high price for failing to understand the blessing they received as God’s chosen people. And the saga of the Jews throughout history places a powerful stamp of approval on the prophecy that precedes it and demonstrates the authority of God’s word.

3. The Prophecies about Jesus Christ

It is generally accepted that there are around five hundred prophecies found in the old testament referring to the coming of a Messiah, or Savior. They predict details of His birth, life, death, resurrection and the purpose of His coming. Some were made as much as two thousand years or more before His birth. For the most part, these are not just statements that might generally refer to the coming of some person in the future, they are specific statements about details of His life that came about exactly as predicted. Some of these are as follows:

  • The prophet Isaiah predicted that the Messiah would come from the family of Abraham, the father of the Jewish race, and more specifically from the house of David:

A green Shoot will sprout from Jesse’s (The father of King David) stump, from his roots a budding Branch. The life-giving Spirit of God will hover over him, the Spirit that brings wisdom and understanding, The Spirit that gives direction and builds strength, the Spirit that instills knowledge and Fear-of-God. (Isaiah 11:1-2)

The new testament book of Matthew begins:

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

  • The prophet Malachi predicted that the Messiah would be preceded by a forerunner who would announce His coming:

Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the LORD, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 3:1)

Later Jesus, when asked whether John the Baptist was in fact a prophet, quoted Malachi, saying:

…what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written:
“‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, 
who will prepare your way before you.’” (Luke 7:26-27)

  • One of my favorites, because it is so specific, is from Psalm 22:14-18:

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. 
My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. 
My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; 
you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. 
All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. 
They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.

Here we have a look ahead at the terrible suffering of the Savior at Calvary. In the gospels we read the accounts of the events of the crucifixion in the same excruciating detail given hundreds of years before by the psalmist. Jesus was hanged naked from a cross, His bones pulled out of joint. He became terribly thirsty and was given vinegar to drink (prophesied in a different ancient prophecy), He was hanged between thieves in the company of villainous accusers and His hands and His feet were pierced with nails. This incredible prophecy even predicts the casting of lots for his robe, which was actually done at the foot of the cross by callous Roman soldiers (recorded in all four gospels).

 

These faith-building examples are just a tiny sampling of the vast store of prophetic evidence God has provided for us that His word can be counted on as authoritative in everything that it says. There are many more prophecies about Jesus. The list is long and satisfying for the Christian who wishes to look into it, and enlightening for the skeptic who values truth.

It is certainly not lack of evidence that hinders belief and faith. It’s a choice made by those who wish not to believe. All of these proofs of the veracity of scripture that I’ve shared with you here are actually already known within the heart of every man. Maybe not exactly or specifically, but the truth that lies within them is fully understood. Every man and every woman ever created were given all they need to understand the reality of their Creator. But as the great apostle, Paul, said, they “suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and…They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:18-22,25)

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