A COMMON MISREPRESENTATION OF THE AGE
(forcing a 'default' position on an unsuspecting generation)
A common tactic used in today's secular world, especially in the modern media, is that of lumping all religions together and setting them as one against Atheism. This hijacks the debate, it is a cheap trick designed to 'stack-the cards' or 'cook-the books' before the subject is even properly looked at. This approach sets the scene as 'irrationality' against 'reason', or 'religion' against 'science'. This ensures an uneven playing field, one with a bias meta-narrative. However, true science is no enemy of religion and never has been (some of the greatest scientific minds being Christian men of faith- Michael Faraday, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir James Young Simpson to name but a few). This misrepresentation gives a false starting point designed to build a skewed argument upon. Since when did Atheism become the default position?
However, the Bible has another starting point, equally valid. A starting point that puts, for example, Islam, Atheism, even false forms of Christianity in the same camp, and true belief in the opposite. Everyone believes in something and disbelieves in opposing things. Atheism is no more sure to be true because it shuts it's eyes to God and says I will not believe. In fact Atheism is just as much a belief as everything else, with absolutes that you cannot test. It is just a belief in a negative. Science used to be noble, and aware of it's limitations. After all it can only study and 'know' about what it can measure and test. It used to be a way to look more deeply into the mysteries of God's physical creation. However, it has been made by it's modern atheistic proponents, supremely arrogant and self-deluded, unaware of it's boundaries and denying even man's basic make-up and senses, like that of his own soul and conscience. Men in effect saying “Because I can't see, measure or test something, it therefore doesn't exist!” Well, that's not even good logic, let alone good science. Science can only be the study of the physical world, and simply cannot hope to address spiritual matters undetected by the physical senses. Science has come to mean so much more to a human race desperate to understand reality, but only on their own terms. It has become a foundation on which to build a house of supposed truth in which the stubborn occupant locks himself away from God. Locking Him out from any explanation. Increasingly men now demand proof in order to believe, and scorn at faith as irrational, but you wonder what proof they'd accept!
Since when did we demand proof in order to believe? Most of our lives are lived by faith, and rightly so, otherwise life would become liveable. We find it reasonable to put our trust in things we cannot fully prove on an everyday basis. Ask yourself whether you believe that a city exists, one you have never physically been to, although you haven't experienced it with your senses. Or, ask yourself whether you know as fact that those people you may know as your parents are in fact your mother and father; have you seen the proof? And have you ever demanded to see the proof that would convince the stubborn sceptic? Probably not, you take many, many things in life on faith, but not blind faith. It is so with God. We have an inbuilt sense of Him, a need for Him, a conscience tuned to His moral law, and a nature with a need to worship. Needless to say, the foolish attempts to explain this away with chemical and genetic explanations ('Religious' parts of the brain etc) fail utterly by suggesting that explaining how the body is used to process and sense the physical world is an explanation of the, much greater, why it does so. Not being open at all to the God behind these processes. The scientist is only capable, as far as he/she is able, to answer the question 'what' and to a certain extent 'how', but not the 'why'. For example, Christians have always understood a bolt of lightening to be a physical process
with cause and effect, but just because we can understand the physical process, it does not negate the belief that these natural processes are ordered and governed by God's providence, just as understanding how the internal combustion engine works does not negate belief in the fact that the car is made for a driver on a journey. What is more reasonable or rational; that everything (all the complexity and order and fine tuning of the natural laws of the cosmos) came from literally nothing, with no intelligence behind it; or that everything was created supernaturally by an intelligent God the creator and sustainer of all things? What better answers the questions that arise when we look at the natural world around us? What would the most natural reaction be of a group of nomads, for example, who had never seen a car before finding the wreck of a car in a desert? “Look, who made this and left it here?” or “Wow, this must have formed over a long time through natural processes, if we leave it, it may work one day!” Of course, most would conclude the second response is to deny the obvious. The fact that most modern evolutionary thinking discounts something so obvious as an intelligent designer God, is rather the same as ignoring the elephant in the room; or missing the wood for the trees; or the police inspector coming up with a rather prejudiced explanation of a murder from the evidence in a crime scene, which Sherlock Holmes can deduce a far better explanation that fits all the facts, and answers so many more questions. One last illustration; If a modern electric kettle was transported back to a time before electricity had been discovered, and given to a rather prejudiced, non objective scientist, and he was asked to explain how it worked, but was not prepared to believe in an invisible force which powers things that he could not understand. No matter what seemingly clever explanation he came up with, it would be wholly wrong because he had wilfully ignored an important possibility. It is the same with much of modern scientific thinking in relation to God. Man seems to be determined to find a theory of everything that excludes a God they are prejudiced against. The truth is, man cannot be truly objective in this, because to accept the idea of a God would have personal implications for him. Are you really prepared to believe that time, space and mass/energy have exploded into existence to form atoms, then made an impossible leap to life, which has then been organised into animals, then mankind, who has somehow become self-aware, and then asks the question “What is an atom and who am I?” The current embarrassment on the part of theoretical physicists is palpable when it comes to unifying the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics in the singularity of quantum gravity and the supposed Big Bang.
The truth, according to God's word, is that God has not left Himself out of reach, although there is a separation (the reason for this we will come to). In fact it should be so obvious to us, that the Bible declares that "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”Psalm 14.1, and elsewhere "..men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; ...they are without excuse; because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God..” Rom 1.18-20. 'Hold the truth' here means 'hold down' or 'suppress' the truth in unrighteousness. That is why believing there is no God is wrong, and it is wilful ignorance of a truth which should be self-evident to us. This is why God will hold us responsible for our wilful rejection of Him. So, in conclusion, the reason man so often, when confronted with God, demands proof, is because he doesn't want to believe, not because he does want to.
This brings me to that separation. Unrighteousness and wrongdoing are words for sin. Sin by definition is a transgression of God's Law. This is what the conscience of man senses (although the conscience can be damaged and mistreated). This sin is what separates Man from a pure and holy God. The house, modern mankind has locked himself into, has a shaky foundation, built on imperfect human reason. The wise man will not put his trust in fallible men, the central verse in Gods word tells us that "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.“ Ps 118.8. That Word (Jesus Christ) who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, came to perfectly show us the truth of God, and then died to atone for us so that we might be saved from our sin, guilt and blind ignorance. He told us not to build the house of our lives upon the sand. So I would implore you to listen to Him, to put your faith in Him and not to deny your humanity by locking yourself into a house destined to be your prison for life and your tomb in death.
Notable Quotes:
That atheistic philosophy which makes the whole world to be a chance production which grew itself, or developed itself by some innate force, is a very dreary piece of friction to the man who delights
himself in the Almighty.
C.H.Spurgeon
The worst sort of clever men are those who know better than the Bible, and are so learned that they believe that the world had no Maker, and that men are monkeys with their tails rubbed off.
C.H.Spurgeon.
This century's philosophy will one day be spoken of as an evidence that softening of the brain was very usual among it's scientific men.
C.H.Spurgeon
Will not anyone be willing to exchange a dark prison for a king's palace? Will he not exchange his brass for gold? You who become godly change for the better: you change your pride for humanity, your uncleanness for holiness. You change a lust that will damn you for a Christ who will save you. If men were not besotted, if their fall had not knocked their brains out, they would see that it is the most rational thing in the world to become godly.
Thomas Watson
However, the Bible has another starting point, equally valid. A starting point that puts, for example, Islam, Atheism, even false forms of Christianity in the same camp, and true belief in the opposite. Everyone believes in something and disbelieves in opposing things. Atheism is no more sure to be true because it shuts it's eyes to God and says I will not believe. In fact Atheism is just as much a belief as everything else, with absolutes that you cannot test. It is just a belief in a negative. Science used to be noble, and aware of it's limitations. After all it can only study and 'know' about what it can measure and test. It used to be a way to look more deeply into the mysteries of God's physical creation. However, it has been made by it's modern atheistic proponents, supremely arrogant and self-deluded, unaware of it's boundaries and denying even man's basic make-up and senses, like that of his own soul and conscience. Men in effect saying “Because I can't see, measure or test something, it therefore doesn't exist!” Well, that's not even good logic, let alone good science. Science can only be the study of the physical world, and simply cannot hope to address spiritual matters undetected by the physical senses. Science has come to mean so much more to a human race desperate to understand reality, but only on their own terms. It has become a foundation on which to build a house of supposed truth in which the stubborn occupant locks himself away from God. Locking Him out from any explanation. Increasingly men now demand proof in order to believe, and scorn at faith as irrational, but you wonder what proof they'd accept!
Since when did we demand proof in order to believe? Most of our lives are lived by faith, and rightly so, otherwise life would become liveable. We find it reasonable to put our trust in things we cannot fully prove on an everyday basis. Ask yourself whether you believe that a city exists, one you have never physically been to, although you haven't experienced it with your senses. Or, ask yourself whether you know as fact that those people you may know as your parents are in fact your mother and father; have you seen the proof? And have you ever demanded to see the proof that would convince the stubborn sceptic? Probably not, you take many, many things in life on faith, but not blind faith. It is so with God. We have an inbuilt sense of Him, a need for Him, a conscience tuned to His moral law, and a nature with a need to worship. Needless to say, the foolish attempts to explain this away with chemical and genetic explanations ('Religious' parts of the brain etc) fail utterly by suggesting that explaining how the body is used to process and sense the physical world is an explanation of the, much greater, why it does so. Not being open at all to the God behind these processes. The scientist is only capable, as far as he/she is able, to answer the question 'what' and to a certain extent 'how', but not the 'why'. For example, Christians have always understood a bolt of lightening to be a physical process
with cause and effect, but just because we can understand the physical process, it does not negate the belief that these natural processes are ordered and governed by God's providence, just as understanding how the internal combustion engine works does not negate belief in the fact that the car is made for a driver on a journey. What is more reasonable or rational; that everything (all the complexity and order and fine tuning of the natural laws of the cosmos) came from literally nothing, with no intelligence behind it; or that everything was created supernaturally by an intelligent God the creator and sustainer of all things? What better answers the questions that arise when we look at the natural world around us? What would the most natural reaction be of a group of nomads, for example, who had never seen a car before finding the wreck of a car in a desert? “Look, who made this and left it here?” or “Wow, this must have formed over a long time through natural processes, if we leave it, it may work one day!” Of course, most would conclude the second response is to deny the obvious. The fact that most modern evolutionary thinking discounts something so obvious as an intelligent designer God, is rather the same as ignoring the elephant in the room; or missing the wood for the trees; or the police inspector coming up with a rather prejudiced explanation of a murder from the evidence in a crime scene, which Sherlock Holmes can deduce a far better explanation that fits all the facts, and answers so many more questions. One last illustration; If a modern electric kettle was transported back to a time before electricity had been discovered, and given to a rather prejudiced, non objective scientist, and he was asked to explain how it worked, but was not prepared to believe in an invisible force which powers things that he could not understand. No matter what seemingly clever explanation he came up with, it would be wholly wrong because he had wilfully ignored an important possibility. It is the same with much of modern scientific thinking in relation to God. Man seems to be determined to find a theory of everything that excludes a God they are prejudiced against. The truth is, man cannot be truly objective in this, because to accept the idea of a God would have personal implications for him. Are you really prepared to believe that time, space and mass/energy have exploded into existence to form atoms, then made an impossible leap to life, which has then been organised into animals, then mankind, who has somehow become self-aware, and then asks the question “What is an atom and who am I?” The current embarrassment on the part of theoretical physicists is palpable when it comes to unifying the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics in the singularity of quantum gravity and the supposed Big Bang.
The truth, according to God's word, is that God has not left Himself out of reach, although there is a separation (the reason for this we will come to). In fact it should be so obvious to us, that the Bible declares that "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”Psalm 14.1, and elsewhere "..men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; ...they are without excuse; because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God..” Rom 1.18-20. 'Hold the truth' here means 'hold down' or 'suppress' the truth in unrighteousness. That is why believing there is no God is wrong, and it is wilful ignorance of a truth which should be self-evident to us. This is why God will hold us responsible for our wilful rejection of Him. So, in conclusion, the reason man so often, when confronted with God, demands proof, is because he doesn't want to believe, not because he does want to.
This brings me to that separation. Unrighteousness and wrongdoing are words for sin. Sin by definition is a transgression of God's Law. This is what the conscience of man senses (although the conscience can be damaged and mistreated). This sin is what separates Man from a pure and holy God. The house, modern mankind has locked himself into, has a shaky foundation, built on imperfect human reason. The wise man will not put his trust in fallible men, the central verse in Gods word tells us that "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.“ Ps 118.8. That Word (Jesus Christ) who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, came to perfectly show us the truth of God, and then died to atone for us so that we might be saved from our sin, guilt and blind ignorance. He told us not to build the house of our lives upon the sand. So I would implore you to listen to Him, to put your faith in Him and not to deny your humanity by locking yourself into a house destined to be your prison for life and your tomb in death.
Notable Quotes:
That atheistic philosophy which makes the whole world to be a chance production which grew itself, or developed itself by some innate force, is a very dreary piece of friction to the man who delights
himself in the Almighty.
C.H.Spurgeon
The worst sort of clever men are those who know better than the Bible, and are so learned that they believe that the world had no Maker, and that men are monkeys with their tails rubbed off.
C.H.Spurgeon.
This century's philosophy will one day be spoken of as an evidence that softening of the brain was very usual among it's scientific men.
C.H.Spurgeon
Will not anyone be willing to exchange a dark prison for a king's palace? Will he not exchange his brass for gold? You who become godly change for the better: you change your pride for humanity, your uncleanness for holiness. You change a lust that will damn you for a Christ who will save you. If men were not besotted, if their fall had not knocked their brains out, they would see that it is the most rational thing in the world to become godly.
Thomas Watson