Challenge:

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.

Question:

You may get a question that presupposes evolution and millions of years like this, "In the book of Genesis 4:17, And Cain knew his wife---where did she come from? There is no women to be Cain's wife." Here is another example of the same reasoning, "If God used Adam's rib to create Eve, wouldn't that make her essentially a twin of Adams? Wouldn't that mean that their sex was incest? Thus their offspring should be deformed, no?" Sometimes these questions come from a follower of Christ who is honestly searching and sometimes from a scoffer who isn't thinking clearly.

Answer:

Keep in mind that disobedience to God started the degradation of everything. This is where pain and suffering originated, but the degradation just gets worse over time. It didn't happen all at once. This degradation also affected the information in the cells of every living thng. At first, there was no degradation. It has taken 6,000 years for the information to degrade to the point where it is today.

Cain took his sister--Adam and Eve's daughter--as his wife. The human genome was still fully intact at that time, so there was no restriction on marrying one's sister. As time passed, the genome was damaged. I'll explain that a bit below, just in case you may be curious. As time passed, a restriction was placed on marrying siblings, but it was OK to marry some close relatives without fear of birth defects. Abraham married his half-sister. When the Law was given, many years later, God restricted marrying of close relatives.

This part gets a bit more technical and you may or may not be interested. The closer that two people are related, the more likely the chance of sharing genes for recessive traits that cause birth defects if they match up. So, when a baby is conceived, a single cell from the mother joins a single cell from the father and the two cells join to form a new human being. If the two are too closely related and have matching defects in the genes, then there will be a defect of some sort.

Adam and Eve and their children had perfect or near-perfect genomes. Abraham, not so perfect. Moses, even less perfect. So, there was not restriction against Cain marrying his sister. The fact that things are different now than they were then has brought some Atheists to use this as an argument against the validity of the Biblical account, but Atheists can never understand the Bible, since understanding comes from the Holy Spirit by revelation.

Genes are damaged by things like x-rays, cosmic rays, and such. Think of the information in the cells that join as two libraries of books that are joining to organize their information into a new library. Over the years of life, the mother and father are made up of many libraries (the genomes in cells) and those libraries are copies of other libraries through their lifetimes. During those lifetimes, cosmic rays and other factors have been shooting at those libraries like crazy people with pistols. When a bullet hits a book, it knocks out parts of words. The cells are really good at fixing these broken words, but some get through. No information is ever added by this process. Information is always lost. The mother and father had parents who also lost some information. Their parents had parents, and since the beginning of time humanity has lost a bit of information over the generations. We have no idea what kind of man and woman Adam and Eve might have been, especially before the fall. Even now, the way that the human body is created, even in its fallen condition, is amazing beyond our wildest imagination and we have only a very limited understanding of how it works at present.

We have witnessed that the destruction of the genome is ongoing over time. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is called a law of science because it has been thoroughly tested and no exception to it has ever been found. Things deteriorate to a lower entropy over time. That means that there is less information and organization over time. You can see this in a house that is not maintained. It also happens with the fantastic amount of information that is stored in the genetic code of each person. No information is ever created. Information is continually lost. God created our cells with the amazing ability to fix broken parts of that genetic code, but, once in a while, an error makes it past that quality control system.

This would also all apply to the question about Eve being formed from Adam's rib.

Challenge:

How can we know anything about anything

Question:

Answer:

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