How can we know anything about anything
To try to explain truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. George Macdonald
Do we have to make a choice between science and the Bible?
NO!
That is NOT where the problem is, but that is what everyone seems to want to talk about.
Take science as an example.
How can we know anything about the created material world around us?
How can we know anything from what we can see using natural sciences?
We all see the same things in the material world,
but we don't come to the same answers.
Why is that?
How can we know anything about the Bible and what it teaches?
Every person believes different things about the Bible and how it should be read.
Why is that?
Same scientific facts. Different answers.
Same Bible. Different answers.
Why is that?
The true question is this: How do we come to our answers that we get
from what we can see through science
or what we can read in the Bible?
How do we think about what we see using science or what we read in the Bible?
How do we analyze what we have seen and read?
How do we interpret what we have seen and read?
We use logic, but logic always has a foundation. Jesus talked about building on the Rock.
That Rock is Jesus Christ. He is the true foundation.
There are also the false foundations of the ungodly.
An example might help.
Question: Why do you believe in evolution?
Answer: Because my science teacher told me that evolution is scientific fact.
Question: Why do you believe your science teacher?
Answer: because he agrees with the textbook he assigned us to read.
Now, we have asked, "Why?" twice.
If we continued to ask, "Why?" we would come down to the foundation of this person's thoughts.
When we get down to the foundations, there are no more questions that can be answered.
So where to the foundations come from?
There are three possibilities.
- things that we make up, pulled from the air
- demonic lies
- divine revelation
Question: Why do you believe in creation?
Answer: Because God revealed this to me. He spoke to me through the Bible and gave me His faith
so that I could believe Him.
See how quickly we got to the foundation.
This is a belief that has a foundation that is solid and that cannot be moved.
In reality, the things that we make up, that are pulled from the air,
are actually from demons and all the lies of demons spring from the prince of demons, Satan.
So these are one and the same.
Divine revelation comes from the Almighty, Creator, God, Jesus Christ.
So there are only two choices, but how do we know there are only two choices?
Because God has revealed this truth to us.
The question then is how do we tell the difference between the revelation that comes from God
and the lies of Satan?
The answer is that everyone who sincerely wants to do the will of God will know.
Jesus said, "If you really want to obey God, you will know if what I teach comes from God or from me"
The rejection of the revelation that comes from God is not an intellectual problem.
It is a moral problem.
Jesus said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you:
For everyone who asks receives; and he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks it shall be opened."
*
Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?
If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?
Matthew 7:7-11 *
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
You can set the truth before someone, but you can't make anyone believe
those things that they don't want to submit to.
They have to want to obey God.
How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone fails to justify itself. Richard M. Weaver
Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32)
"If we are not prepared to buy the truth at the cost of our own humbling we shall not receive it"
Lies appear to have no price upon them.
They seem cheap and they abound everywhere.
But for the truth there is always an obvious price to pay.
"[God] has set a day when He will judge all the world's people with fairness.
And He has chosen the man Jesus to do the judging for Him.
God has given proof of this to all of us by raising Jesus from death" (Acts 17:31).
"There is a judge for the one who rejects Me [Jesus] and does not accept My words;
that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day" (John 12:48)
That also stands for every person who speaks the utterances of Jesus.
When we hear them, we hear Jesus Christ, and we either accept or reject.
Every person who follows Jesus Christ is commanded to only speak His utterances and not their own.
"When we love others, we know that we belong to the truth, and we feel at ease in the presence of God" (1 John 3:19)
Ravi Zacharias did two open forums in a university.
On the second night, one man told him that he had brought two Atheists in the night before
who said that the arguments presented were so strong that they could not contend with them,
but they were going to remain Atheists because that is what they prefer to be true.
In another case of just listening to an unbeliever and drawing out his reasoning,
the unbeliever finally came to his foundations.
They turned out to be assumptions that were pulled from the air.
When asked why he believed his basic assumption,
the unbeliever looked startled and blurted out,
"I guess I'm making the whole thing up."
It was quite a revelation to him since he hadn't even known that he had any assumptions.
However, he decided to remain an Atheist because he didn't want God to rule over him.
If a person were going to be an evolutionist, he or she must keep reworking the hypothesis to fit the unsupported assumptions upon which evolution is based, ever going further out on the limb. Evolution isn't science. An evolutionist must fall in love with the presuppositions of Humanism to be able to keep defending this unworkable, improbable hypothesis. This is not an intellectual problem. It is a spiritual problem.
"I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: [SIC] a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level preschool day care or large state university."
The Humanist, January/February 1983, "A Religion for a New Age."
Any one of the flaws in the hypothesis of evolution is enough to invalidate it, but there are many more than a few flaws. Despite tremendous governmental financial backing, evolutionists have been unable to redesign the hypothesis to make it fit observable facts; yet this unworkable dogma is being taught as fact using tax dollars. Evolutionists stand defending evolutionism today like the scientific establishment of the not too distant past that defended the theory of the earth being the center of the universe.
As it became impossible to find a set of assumptions that could possibly explain the nonsense called evolution, evolutionists were forced to compartmentalize the parts of their theory into ever smaller chunks. They, in essence, created many mini theories. They sought a universal theorem, but they found that there was no way to avoid the fact that the precepts of Humanism could not be shown to be anything other than a nasty lie.
Since they loved the lie more than the Truth, they were forced to do some pretty crazy things to preserve the lie. Evolutionists were forced to create a different set of unproven axioms (rational-lie-zed speculations) for each of the many stories that they were telling. I use the word, stories, because it is a word that is used by the evolutionists themselves, and it shows the Fairy Tales-like nature of the dogma. Each part of the evolutionary process became its own compartmentalized story with its own compartmentalized set of assumptions. Evolution is Just Story Telling None of the evolutionists seem to want to face reality. The assumptions of one evolutionary Fairy Tales conflict with the assumptions of the other evolutionary Fairy Tales, but they refuse to see this as a problem.
So, they tell a story about the so-called big-bang with one set of rational-lie-zed speculations. Then they talk about the spontaneous generation of life with another set of rational-lie-zed speculations. Just as the earth-is-the-center-of-the-universe scientists of long ago, they try to wind their listeners up in a web of complexity. An evolutionist needs to have a goodly amount of skill as a flimflam con artist... but, in each evolutionist's heart of hearts he or she knows that the whole theory doesn't make a bit of sense. They know that they are in denial. They don't want an almighty God to which they must answer. They don't want the Bible to be the Word of God. They want to do what they want to do.
Now you can see why evolutionists avoid a debate with creation scientists. If they do have a debate, the evolutionist wants to explain both sides of the debate. They want a mock debate.
Remember the story about the emperor's new clothes? The con-artists got the king so worried that he might look stupid that he walked down the street naked. These con-artists also walked away with all the government money in the process and added nothing to solving any problems at all. The story fits like a glove. The con-artists of the New Age and Humanist religions are continually cheating all the people out of their hard-earned tax dollars. And the theory of evolution has solved no problems for all the money spent. It has solved nothing. None! It has caused problems.
Today, people who want to seem to be intellectual are very careful to kowtow to the precepts of the New Age and the Humanist Religion. They don't want to appear to be stupid. Of course, one of the main dogmas of Humanism is the dogma of evolution, so would be intellectuals support evolution at every opportunity. Most of them don't even understand the own theory. Most of them don't realize that they are saying, for instance, that random chance is adding to and organizing the information in a DNA molecule, which would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
The Evolutionists will tell you a half truth about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Evolutionists will tell the half truth: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics only applies to isolated systems, so it's not relevant to evolution, because the Earth is an open system." This is a clever lie. Here is the part of the truth that they are withholding: the Second Law of Thermodynamics was derived using theoretical isolated systems, but it applies to all systems, and can only be overcome locally and temporarily in open systems when stringent conditions are met. Not only that, but we are not talking about the Earth. The Earth is just a subsystem of a much larger system called the Universe. The Universe is an isolated system. Evolutionists claim that Evolution took place in this isolated system, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that their story is a myth.
Most of them don't know that all their methods for guessing the age of an object are based on circular reasoning. In fact, scientific method does not, in itself, have the capacity to prove either a young or an old Earth. Both positions use the same scientific facts to come to very different conclusions based on either presupposition or direct revelation. Some would say it this way: the differences are in the beliefs, and those beliefs are based either in presuppositions or in revelation. The same applies to Evolution. Scientists apply scientific method in order to use their beliefs to make speculations that are consistent with those beliefs about what happened in the past. Some are aware that this is the process that they are using, but most, especially those on the side of Evolutionism and Old-Earthism, are totally oblivious to their bias. Logic can only have at its basis one of three things: revelation, circularity, or assumption (which is vapor).
Most of them don't know that the geologic column that exists in textbooks exists only in textbooks, and that the actual geologic column shows evidence for a worldwide flood rather than an old earth and evolution. Most of them don't know that the fossil evidence does not support the idea of evolution. Most of them don't know that species are simply a contrivance and cannot be used to prove anything, except that a wide variety of objects can be placed in some sort of order.
Most of them don't know... and those who do know don't care, because they think that there is no Truth. They believe in post-modernism. They believe that there are only winners and losers and there is no right or wrong.