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.
It is hard to understand why tax dollars are still being used to promote evolution. Evolution, as it is taught in the schools, is a fabrication that few believe. Evolution isn't science. Evolutionism, a set of concepts developed hundreds of years ago and debunked today, is a New Age religious doctrine for which there is no scientific evidence. Since evolutionists have no evidence, and since the New Age religion does not condemn the practice but rather honors the practice, evolutionists have become very skilled at telling Fairy Tales, that is lying. Though few people really believe that they are the decedents of fish, or, sillier yet, a rock, evolution is destroying our society because it is used as an excuse for bad behavior.
Though the story of Evolution is an amazingly creative fabricated story, you will find that evolutionists avoid calling it a lie. It's like the story about Santa Clause. They tell people this story, and they don't want to burst anyone's bubble, so they keep telling everyone that it's really, really real. I suppose they could just call this fabrication, a SSWAAFT. That's an acronym for Scientific Sounding Wild And Amazing Fairy Tale.
The Evolutionists tell their SSWAAFT, and the free Government tax money keeps coming in to them. Then, they can use some of the Government tax money to try to elect worldly politicians who are members of their own religion, Humanism, sometimes called Secularism. Those politicians who seek to propagate Humanism, in turn, make sure that they get more free Government tax money. It works out well for everyone... except it doesn't work out too well for the rest of us.
Every time evolutionists start a creative story with "Millions and millions of years ago..." you know that you are now going to hear a fairy tale. They could just as well start with, "Long ago and far away..." or "Once upon a time..." Evolution is just a fairy tale about the origin of the world and about life itself. You and I know that, but the job of the evolutionist is to convince people that evolution is more than just hype.
Hundreds of years ago, the evolutionistic speculative rational-lies-zation was made up using some sketchy facts and plenty of imagination. Now, in the light of present-day knowledge, these stories appear quaint and humorous, but there was a day when people took them quite seriously. Less than 5% of the population believes in the type of evolution that is taught in our public schools, making the job of the evolutionist very discouraging.
It's difficult to make people believe that they are descendants of fish as every theory that tries to sell the idea of evolution claims. It’s even harder to make them believe they came from a rock, but that is what evolutionism claims. It may be amazing that Almighty God created everything from nothing because He was able to do it, but it is not believable to claim that everything created itself from nothing.
Increasingly, scientists are trying to distance themselves from this defunct theory of evolution. Only fanatics and the financially motivated are hanging in there. (There is great anti-creation bias and prejudice in the government tax funding of science. The Humanist religionists are in the ruling position, and they are using their power.)
Since we're just talking about a fairy tale, it's nothing to get up tight about. It's the doctrine of a religion known as Humanism. A chief teaching of the Humanist religion is rational-lie-zed speculation, which is the belief that the human mind has the ability to create miraculous revelations of truth without the benefit of observation. No one should get too attached to any idea as far out as rational-lie-zed speculation, but most everyone falls into the trap of rational-lie-zed speculation from time to time. Well, maybe a really devoted follower of the Humanist religion might get dogmatic about the concept of rational-lie-zed speculation, but I would hope for more from you. Since you're open-minded, relax, have some fun, and enjoy this guide to some of the really wacky parts evolution's wild story.
In the 1800s, scientists discovered the theory of evolution using advanced techniques of rational-lie-zed speculation. Since then, generations of scientists have used up the excess free money that government makes readily available, feverishly trying to find some evidence to support the beautiful and creative theory that they had discovered.
So far, they haven't come close to finding any evidence, but these brave warriors fight a non-ever-ending battle, trying valiantly, if not to prove evolution, to bamboozle the public into believing that they might one day be able to prove evolution. After all, if the evolutionists can get people to believe in evolution, then they can get them to believe that there is no basis for morals and that life is meaningless because everything happens by random chance. Then they will be able to believe just those things that they want to be true. They can promote drugs, depravity, dishonesty, immorality, envy, murder of the defenseless, and anything else they want to promote. They have been largely successful in this, and have quite a number of people acting like the kind of animals evolutionism tells them that they are.
Of course, the job of the evolutionist is made more difficult by the fact that the whole concept of evolution is so silly. But silliness is a great profession as long as you take it seriously. Just study Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and others who take rational-lie-zed speculation way too seriously. Notice how they can speak on many subjects, looking and sounding as if they were telling the truth, yet telling fabrications with enough fact to fool people. This is a skill that an aspiring evolutionist will want to develop.
Keep in mind, also, that each new discovery holds the possibility that perhaps evolutionists may yet be able to make some sense of the silly theory. The trouble is, of course, that each new discovery does just the opposite. Each new discovery makes it harder to believe in evolution. Anyway, you do have to hand it to those dedicated men and women, continuing to proclaim the gospel of evolution after spending all this free government money and actually just digging themselves into an ever-deepening hole. Such persistence in the face of utter failure does reflect a very high degree of dogmatism.
Evolutionists claim that evolution was the mechanism by which all the various plants and animals were created. Obviously, the only way that empirical science ever could be used to prove the evolutionist's proposition would be to go back in time and observe evolution happening. If they could go back in time, though, what a surprise they would get!
To show some evidence in the fossil record could potentially prove evolution to be possible explanation for that fossil record. However, the fossil evidence conflicts with every possible SSWAAFT of evolution, so the fossil record is of no assistance to those who think they want to prove the precepts of evolutionism.
So, how do evolutionists react to the fact that the geologic column and the fossil record look as if they happened suddenly from a world-wide flood? How do they react to the fact that the geologic column and the fossil record do not support the idea of evolution at all?
Of course, followers of Humanism are not bound by Biblical principles of truth. The evolutionists falsely continue to declare that the fossil record and the geologic column prove evolutionism's claims.
There is no evidence anywhere from which you can prove evolution. All an evolutionist has are some made-up stories. All evolution can ever be (from the standpoint of science) is a SSWAAFT.