It is easy to get discouraged when you are a
Christian living in the pluralistic, materialistic, secular,
post-modern world in the early twenty-first century. Society has
decided that belief in God, absolute standards of morality and
behavior, and family values are archaic and destructive. The Church as
a whole has decided that the only method of growth is to provide
competitive entertainment, and that the Christian system of living is
of historical interest but has no practical application to daily life.
While these statements are generalizations, and obviously do not apply
to every person, we all run into these beliefs on a daily basis. The
world we live in can literally grind us down to wanting to withdraw.
How do we avoid this pessimistic mind-set? What can individuals do in
the face of declining involvement in meeting the challenges of our age
by church leaders and fellow Christians in general?
DON'T GIVE UP ON
THE BIBLE.
We sometimes
get the idea that we face a situation that is new to Christians. The
fact is that everything mentioned in the first paragraph has happened
before. Throughout history famous leaders have predicted the end of
Christianity and the demise of the Bible. Voltaire, Marx, Lenin, and
Bertrand Russell are just a few of a host of famous people who were
convinced that man had outgrown the Bible. When other standards of
living and ethics were incorporated, they brought disaster and people
turned back to the Bible and to the system God has given man — the
system that has been proven to work. It may well be that our
civilization will end, but the lesson of history is that Christianity
will emerge out of the rubble. It will be given new life as it provides
a proven rule of conduct for men and women.
Our culture is
full of people poking fun at the Bible and making wild claims about
contradictions and conflicts within the Bible’s pages. For a marginally
trained Christian these challenges are easy to answer, and this journal
is dedicated to answering them. We need to be aware of the
challenges — and the answers to them. We should be encouraged by the
fact that the challenges themselves are desperate claims by people who
want to live uninhibited by the wisdom of the teachings of Jesus
Christ. (We urge the reader to look at the article titled “Why Biblical
Christianity?” in the March/April
2010 issue of this journal for more on this subject.) The evidence
is that the biblical system works, and even the rankest skeptic has
trouble criticizing the teachings of Jesus in Matthew
chapters 5
through 7. Do not let the flood of hostility cause you to reject
the
only teaching that can bring peace, love, and security that means
something.
DEMAND EVIDENCE,
NOT JUST WILD CLAIMS.
I had an e-mail not long ago from a guy who claimed
he could prove that Bugs Bunny hit Elmer Fudd on the head with a
shovel, and that the pieces that flew off became the creation. I
replied by saying, “Very funny,” thinking this was a man just playing
games. I found that he was deadly serious. At a fair booth in 2009 we
had a guy who claimed he could prove that his cat was his reincarnated
father. The man became incensed when I suggested that the cat had no
relationship to him or his father and offered genetic proof of that
statement. The man became enraged with that suggestion and said I did
not understand how reincarnation works. The point here is that people
can propose anything! For the most part, we live in a society where
there is freedom of speech, and if someone wants to propose a
completely fictitious and bizarre explanation of something, he can do
so.
Whatever someone believes about how the creation
happened needs to be substantiated by evidence. Scientific theories
that have no evidential support cannot be seriously entertained.
Scientists use the word “falsify” to describe this process. If there is
not a way to test a hypothesis, the suggestion cannot be considered to
be science. Much of what appears in the media as science is in fact
wild speculation that cannot be tested (falsified) in any way. Like the
Bugs Bunny nonsense mentioned above, it is just a wild suggestion
thrown out as science, but which is really just human opinion. Many
scientists have pointed out in recent months that “string theory” and
“virtual universe” theories fall into this category.
Religious theories which conflict with known fact
need to be discarded also. In both science and religion there is a
point where faith enters into what we believe. The process by which
time, energy, and space were created cannot be answered scientifically
and probably never will be. Atheism or wild religious ideas should not
decide what we will believe about how the world came to be. What we
must do is to accumulate evidence and see what understanding fits that
evidence. Cyclic and reverse models of time do not fit scientific
evidence. Atheistic or religious proposals that assume cyclic time or
reverse time need to be discarded. This is just one example of how
modern people can evaluate the evidence for the existence of God and
the credibility of the Christian system. We have more evidence than at
any time in the history of mankind, and that evidence strongly supports
the concept of an Intelligence outside of space/time as the Creator.
REALIZE THAT NEW
UNDERSTANDINGS WILL COME ABOUT AS BETTER INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
In both science and religion we may have to give up
some previously held beliefs or traditions as new factual material
becomes available. Our belief system becomes more balanced and less
vulnerable when we have looked at all the supporting evidence. There
was a time when both people in religion and people who were studying
nature believed that the earth was flat. There was scientific evidence
to support that belief, and religious arguments to support it. The
instruments of the day were crude, and measurements did not show any
curvature in the surface of the earth. People quoted passages like
Revelation
7:1 which talks about the four 
corners of the earth to back up
the idea that we live on a flat earth. As instruments became more
accurate it became obvious that the earth was curved — just larger than
had been previously thought. A closer examination of Revelation 7
showed it was not talking about the shape of the earth and people
eventually became convinced the earth was round — but not for a very
long period of time. In Columbus’ day there were still people who
thought that if you sailed out far enough in the ocean you would fall
off the earth.
We frequently get mail from atheists suggesting that
new evidence will invalidate our position of faith in God. I am sure
that as new discoveries are made I will find things I believed that
were wrong either scientifically or biblically — or both. However, the
lesson of history is that as new discoveries are made they validate the
Bible and show how remarkable the Bible is in stating things that have
only become known in recent years. One remarkable new example is the
classification system of living things. The biblical word “kind” in the
Old Testament is the 
Hebrew
word miyn. People assumed for
many years that “kind” and “species” were
the same thing. A species has been defined as a group of plants or
animals that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Much debate
has gone on in the scientific community about whether that definition
needs to be revised, especially with recent understandings of the
genomes of living things. How different must the genomes be in order to
be considered different species? That debate will be going on for a
long time.
Since God created kinds, some believers assumed that
species could not change, and that belief has continued into the
twenty-first century. The fact is that “kind” is a very general term.
In 1
Corinthians 15:39 the Bible says there are four different kinds of
flesh — birds, fish, beasts, and man. In Genesis 1 the same groupings
are used — flesh of fish, flesh of birds, flesh of beasts, flesh of man
(Genesis
1:20
– 27). It is also seen in the flood account in Genesis 6,
that use of “kind” is not the same as species. There are many species
of birds but birds are a kind. Now biologists are talking about
cladistic classification which is based on structure, not evolutionary
theory as the Linnaeus system was. The biblical system and 
the scientific evidence are
getting closer and closer as better evidence becomes available. There
are many examples that can be given, but this one should make the point
that we need to be open to new data and new ideas. As we learn more, we
find that the scientific evidence and the biblical concept get closer
and closer together.
LET ORGANIZED
RELIGION DIE.
Religion can be defined as “man’s
attempts to find
God or meaning in life.” On an individual level religion is a good
thing. We each need to search out what we believe and know why we
believe it. There is a terrible tendency for mankind to take the easy
way out. The easy way is to let someone else tell us what to believe.
Most atheists have not thought out why they are atheists. Most
religious people are religious because they inherited that belief. I
was an atheist because my parents were atheists and I knew nothing else
as a child. I have friends who are atheists because they want to
justify their lifestyle. I have other friends who are atheists because
they have had bad experiences with people who believe in God. All of
these predispositions are understandable, but ultimately none of them
make sense.
Recently in a period of one week I received over 20
e-mails from atheists containing the same set of “bible
contradictions.” That material was posted on the Web by a well-known
atheist, and these folks cut and pasted it into an e-mail and sent it
to me. I asked each of them if they would discuss the claimed
contradictions one at a time with me. All of them either declined or
never answered my offer. This is a religious response at its worst. It
is like religious people who take something posted by a preacher or
religious spokesman and blindly parrot it to other people.
We need to know why we believe what we
believe — whether we are atheists or believers. If the only evidence we
have is what someone else says, we are blindly following a
religion — be it Atheism, Catholicism, Buddhism, or whatever. The
purpose of this journal is not to tell people what to believe or coerce
them to become a member of some denomination. Our purpose is to say you
can intelligently believe in God, and that science and faith are
complementary disciplines supporting each other in building successful
lives. Let religion die — be it Atheism, Spiritualism, or some
denominational creed. Follow the biblical injunction to “work out your
own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians
2:12) and know
there is a God through the things He has made (Romans
1:19 – 22).
“Choose you this day whom [you] will serve; … but as for me and my
house, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua
24:15). In the twenty-first
century that choice is still there — make it personally and
intelligently.
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Does God Exist?, SepOct10.