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.
We know for certain, by revelation, that the creation took place relatively recently. Old-earthers guess that the earth must be very old by circular reasoning and wishful thinking.
There is only one place in Scripture that would possibly allow for an old Earth, but that place would not allow for any form of Darwinism. In fact, even in that one place, the only reason anyone would want to say that enormous amounts of time had passed would be based on speculation alone, and God forbids such speculation regarding His revelation. Those who follow Old-Earth teachings need to listen to Jesus when He tells them that it is in Him alone that they can find life, peace, joy, fulfillment, love, righteousness, and every other good thing. They think that millions of years of random chance have formed the Earth and reject the idea of a sovereign God. They think that death preceded sin, but the Bible tells us that death is caused by sin. There is no such story in any implied in Scripture, in the creation, or by the Holy Spirit.
It should be mentioned that 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).
The Old-Earth Cult is a dogma of Atheism. Atheists don't realize that they were created to be joined to Jesus Christ, to have a continual flow of the Anointing of His Holy Spirit through them so that the Spirit will continually lead them and the Creator will do His work through them. Many Christians have followed such teachings and found themselves living as if they were Atheists, accepting such doctrines as Naturalism, Materialism, and Uniformitarianism, the axioms based solely on circular reasoning. Those who believe the teachings of the Old-Earth Cult are often blind to the fact that they were created to walk from glory to every-increasing glory by the Spirit of God. They don't realize that God created things that were good, knowing that mankind would sin but also knowing that He could win mankind back to Himself through love, and that the final state of creation would be far superior to the beginning state. Those who believe the teachings of the Old-Earth Cult are trapped in their own desires and tangled in the many lies that come from the father of all lies. If they did listen, God would set them free.
There are many indicators of the age of the Earth. One of the problems in using them is the fact that every method used to determine the age of the Earth uses circular reasoning. What that means is that certain assumptions must be made in order to do the mathematical calculations to determine the age of the Earth. These assumptions are just pulled out of the air. They are simply rational-lie-zed speculations, otherwise known as SSWAAFTs. One set of assumptions could be used just as well as any other.
One type of SSWAAFT is to use an unproven formula to calculate. Now the pseudo scientist can plug in known values into the formula and come up with an answer. The answer is bogus of course, but the pseudo scientist can fool a lot of people with his or her phony formula. This method can be used to "prove" everything from age-of-earth to hole-in-ozone to warming-of-globe to who-knows-what-they'll-think-of-next.
Uniformitarianism is one of the assumptions that evolutionists like to use. The fact is that evolutionists need this assumption. Basically, uniformitarianism is the incorrect assumption that there was no flood and there was no creation. It should be noted that Noah's global flood is one interpretation of most of the fossil record while old earth theories are another interpretation of the fossil record. It cannot be both. One of these caused the fossil record and the other did not. A global flood on the order of the flood described in the Bible would have wiped out any previous fossils. There is actually one totally speculative old earth theory that cannot be disproved by science or by the Bible. Why we would care about that, I have never been able to figure out.
Skilled evolutionists, must remember not to mention the fact that they are assuming the very things that they are trying to prove. They just keep that a secret. If someone asks them about it, they pretend that person is closed-minded. If that person who questions the evolutionist is a student in the evolutionist's class, guess what is going to happen to the grade point average. If you're an evolutionist, you don't really want anyone to think about your loopy logic. You don't want them to ponder the fact that your logic starts by assuming the answer that you want, and then it works the problem backwards to arrive back at the same answer as your original assumption.
Anyway, ignoring, forgetting, and hiding the fact that the evolutionists are assuming the things they are trying to prove, uniformitarianism has another serious problem. Uniformitarianism doesn't hold up to a simple test. If the assumption were not false, then you could take one set of assumptions and apply that set of assumptions to the many indicators of the age of the earth and come up with the same age. The problem with Uniformitarianism is that if you take one indicator of the age of the Earth, you will get one age. If you take another indicator, you will get a wildly different age. Most of the indicators will tell you that the earth is only a few thousand years old--no good if you have to probe the impossible theory of evolution that requires the magic wand of millions of years. The differences are not small between the age-of-the-earth calculations using different indicators. They are huge. That exposes the fact that the SSWAAFT of Uniformitarianism is wrong. Uniformitarianism is a fib.
If we plug a great flood into the equation about 4,000-5,000 years ago, all the data begins to make sense. If we plug a creation into the equation a little before that, then everything starts to make even more sense. The SSWAAFT of uniformitarianism is, however, widely used, because using it will make it possible to come up with scientific sounding calculations that say the Earth is very old. Evolutionists have to remember to keep certain pieces of information hidden, though. The evolutionists tell people that the calculations are very hard to understand. In this case they aren't really lying. The calculations actually are hard to understand, because they don't make any sense. However, evolutionist's calculations do serve the important role of confusing people, which is the real basis of the evolutionary paradigm. Besides, when someone is having so much fun sinning, who wants to think about a God who judges sin and a nasty old flood anyway? And, for those who like to do their own thing, who wants to think about a God who wants obedience?