Knowing God: Part 2

This is part 2.  Click here to read Part One.

It was the following day that I took time after class to go to the biggest Christian book store in Tampa.  This place had been in business a long time.  A free standing building about a third of the size of your average Barnes and Nobles, maybe a little smaller.  It wasn't just some little shop in a strip mall.  I figured if any place has some books with the answers to help me with all of the doubts and questions, surely this was the place.

My assumption was totally wrong.  There was a big section that had lots of different translations of the Bible.  At that time, I didn't understand why that was necessary.  Of the most popular translations, you even had different variations: red-letter, chain reference, topical, etc.Nobody to explain why all that was necessary, but it was all there.  Then there's all the different binding, and, oh-my-goodness!,  the selection of very fancy covers or carriers to tote them around in. A whole corner of the book area was devoted to such paraphernalia. Then there was a huge section that had to do with "Spirituality." Then an area about "self-improvement." Biographies took up another section.  There was a section with Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias and other large reference works. Of course there were books about end time prophecy.  Everybody wants to know what's going to happen and when. Smaller sections covered evangelism and church organization, and of course there were lots of books about current events and culture and what was wrong with the world. There were books on single topics or areas that I don't even remember.There was a large section of the store devoted to popular or contemporary gospel music, both recorded and sheet music.  Then there's the clothing.  Tee shirts, jewelry, choir robes.  Sunday school supplies, lesson books, felt boards, posters.  Artwork, paintings, candlesticks, knick-knacks, whatever.

I think I'd spent over two hours browsing the titles and reading the jackets to find something that dealt with just the basic questions I had.  In the reference section there was some fat volume about Bible criticism.  Perhaps it was Gleason Archer's When Critics Ask or some such, but that's the kind of stuff for second and third year seminary students and dealt with internal textual minutia that didn't have anything to do with answering any of my deeply held belief in evolution.  It seemed like I was wasting my time and I was coming to the conclusion that I wasn't going to find anything because there was nothing to find.

Let me back up a bit here.  As I was being made fun of for my new faith, I was asking questions of the priest and the other people I went to church with.  A lot of those people had gone to church all their lives and seemed to have great faith, and for heaven's sake, what's the point of getting a seminary degree and becoming ordained if you aren't going to learn how to answer people's questions about why we should believe in this stuff.  But when I would ask my questions, pointing out the glaring contradictions in what we accepted as fact from science versus what the Bible said, the only responses I got were pretty much one of three kinds:  "What's important is just having faith." "The accounts in the Bible are just parables or allegories, they're not to be taken as literal history."  "Evolution is just God's way of doing things."

The problem is, all of those answers mean that you couldn't trust what the Bible said about anything.  My logical mind wouldn't let me come to any other conclusion.  Especially since the Bible itself claims over and over again that it is the truth. I was not about to buy into any solipsistic nonsense about it.  And if you are one of those idiots who believes in solipsism, you might as well stop reading and go someplace else, because I got no use for you, unless you want to be disabused of that garbage.

Some people can somehow find a way to shut down that part of their mind that demands to know; "How did we get here, and why are we here?"  I really don't understand how someone of even average intelligence can do that, but that's a whole new post.  Those fundamental questions are why we spend trillions of dollars all over the planet,  building superconducting super colliders  and engaging in quantum physics research.  It's why we keep peering farther and farther out into space and launched Voyager and have radio telescopes listening for aliens.  I have a strong suspicion that even the people who claim not to care about the basic issue of human origins really do care when faced with their own mortality or deep personal crisis.

It would also be another thing if the Bible didn't deal with the issue of our origins, but it does.  It doesn't simply tell us, "God just created everything you see, and He really doesn't want to be bothered with telling you how He did it."  Quite the contrary.  It not only tells us the order that certain things were made, but defines what a day is and how long it lasts, and the order in which things were created made no sense according to everything I'd been taught in school.  And that was just scratching the surface of all the problems I had with the stories in the Bible.  I walked out of that store feeling pretty let down.

As I went to pull out of the parking lot the radio was playing something I found very irritating at that moment and so I hit another preset, to land on a station that carried Dr. D. James Kennedy's Truths That Transform just in time to hear that the program was about a book that was full of evidence that countered evolution.  It  seemed to have basic rebuttals to some things that I'd always just accepted as fact: Carbon dating, how primitive early man was, billions of years of geological evidence, etc.

Wow, why hadn't I ever heard anything like that before?  Even so, it sounded like stuff that should be pretty easy to falsify if it was just typical Christian propaganda.  I ordered it.  The book itself was pretty simple and seemed to be written for a general audience, but with lots of references.  I no longer have it in my library, having loaned it out many years ago and never gotten it back, but its footnotes and bibliography got me started on research, and within a couple of months I was spending a lot of money buying books from other sources, and finding out some really amazing things.

Like the fact that some of the best and brightest scientists with advanced degrees, all over the world, not only believed that the Bible was true, but that the earth was very young.  I'm not talking about crackpot, or fringe scientists, but guys with Ph.D.s from major universities and who were well respected and even taught at such places or were doing cutting edge research.  Like Dr. Richard Damadian who invented the MRI., Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith a holder of three separate doctorates in the medical field; Dr. Russell Humphreys who was once the lead scientist in high energy plasma physics.

Those are just modern scientists.  I'm sure nobody cares that Isaac Newton, or Michael Faraday, or Louis Pasteur or most of the scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries were devout believers in the Bible and believed that the pursuit of science was, as Faraday put it, "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

All of this information really shook me up.  I read volumes and volumes of material.  I read the criticisms of these men and their research and conclusions and found myself having to agree with them.  I discovered Dr. Robert Gentry's work on polonium radio halos in granite and how none of the evolutionary scientists could find a flaw in his logic of what the implications were.  It actually made me angry for weeks.  I'd been misled for a long time.  I'd been lied to.  I thought "all" scientists were in agreement that evolution was a fact and that there was no mitigating evidence to the contrary. You see, it's one thing to present both sides of an argument fairly and let the audience decide, but that's not what goes on out there.  I would get to experience it first hand for myself, long before Ben Stein would come out with his documentary, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.  I have been in college classrooms and in churches and parties where, once I began laying out evidence that made evolution easily falsifiable, my opponents would say I was nuts, but couldn't produce or cite a single piece of evidence to refute me.

This post, and even this entire blog is not for the purpose of laying out over 24 years of my experience and research into the debate and the evidence.  I've been a subscriber to Creation and now Answers magazine, as well as the scientific, peer reviewed journals of the Creation Research Society, and Answers In Genesis' Technical Journal.  I've listened and read, over, and over, and over to the evolutionists talk about how creationism isn't science, but then they never deal with the science.  Their argument always gets reduced to being about religious people trying to impose their beliefs on everybody else.  This has become so routine, that I have never been afraid to engage in debate with any doctor of any discipline anywhere at anytime regarding creation versus evolution. I'll try to keep to the topic of how the decay theorem proves that radiometric dating is always just a guess, or really a SWAG, and they'll just tell me it's "settled" science, without dealing with the mathematical equation.  They have nothing, and they prove it every single time.  Maybe I should share some of those encounters in other posts, but that's not the purpose of this particular post.  Here, I am just wanting to deal with the idea of knowing God. The background is important, however, because we are not talking about God as just anybody wants to understand Him.  The God that you understand on your terms is no god at all.

Once again, my logical, science loving mind was very concerned with the question of: Which God?  Is there just God and all roads lead to him?  Is the god of the Hindus and Buddhists and the Muslims and even the Mormons all the same entity?  Is religion just this big, complex salad bar that we all slide our tray along and get to pick and choose what we like, but we all end up eating in the same dining room?  All of these religions contradict each other on so many points and so many levels.  They can't all be right.  The universal language of the Universe is mathematics.  All the laws that govern this Universe are very exact and precise.  It stood to reason in my mind that a God who created all of this must have some very well defined rules.  It also made sense to me that any entity or religion that claimed to know God would not reflect any characteristics of a God that were inconsistent with nature.

Being logical, I asked myself: "What if I were God?"  Would I create a universe with very precise and logical mathematical laws, incredible beauty, mind-boggling diversity, then create sentient beings capable of tremendous abstract thought and deep emotional capability, and then leave them to their own devices and not provide a way for them to find out about me?  Maybe it's just me, but I find that line of thinking stupid beyond words.  So, now a big part of my journey was going to be about discovering whether or not I could know if I had the right God.  This would prove to be my journey on the road called epistemology.

I had already had enough experience from as far back as I can remember of experiencing the most asinine and moronic behavior in churches.  It still goes on to this day.  One need only turn on the TV and experience the clownish antics of the prosperity hucksters and simple-minded "evangelists."  Way too much of what the world encounters under the label of "Christianity" on television looks like a combination of Ringling Brothers and Saturday Night Live.  I would have to find out, apart from the "church" that God is not afraid of the toughest questions I can put to Him.  I would also have to learn that the vast majority of stuff done in His name had nothing to do with Him.

The next post on this theme is going to deal with,  "How do we find  the real God?"

You can move to the next post by clicking on Knowing God: Part 3