Remember when that used to happen with old broadcast television? Back when there were just 2 or 3 channels on TV, and peoples lives didn't revolve around it? Back when the whole family watched maybe an hour or two at the most, somewhere between 7 to 9 local time. The only thing you would see on a black and white screen after midnight was a test pattern or "snow."
So, maybe it's a good thing for me not to be so concerned right now about checking the site meter and worrying about how many hits I'm getting, especially since I'm just trying to get a new life put back together in a totally new place.
I'm starting another blog because it needs to have an appropriate title and all the other amenities that go with the subject matter. It's called Sons of Abraham. The name comes from Luke 19:9
"Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham."
The blog is not up yet, because I have been away for almost two years and I need to re-learn how to do all the technical stuff about customizing the look and uploading stuff and I'm working in someone else's place, with their computer, until I get enough money to replace things. I don't know how much more or less better off I am than Ann Barnhardt.
I've lost everything of material value, yet I have become rich beyond measure through the process. I'm wearing someone else's clothes. Eating someone else's food. Depending on other's generosity for all worldly things, yet, I get constantly reminded that The Father is providing it all.
I may retain this blog only to have someplace to vent about worldly things and politics (redundant?). But my passion has moved full bore into helping others find the One and Only Creator of the Universe.
Perhaps I shouldn't even try to compartmentalize through two blogs. Obeying the Father is a 24/7 way of life that reaches into every nook and cranny of existence, or at least that's how it's SUPPOSED to work. But I do figure that, for at least a few months, I'll have to maintain two blogs until people who have enjoyed my writing can transition to the other one and I have too much important stuff in the archives here.
Imagine having all, I mean ALL you possessions; computer, thumbdrives, hardcopy files, books, clothes, all legal documents, destroyed or disposed of for no good reason. As though your whole past life never existed from that point on.
So, I have a lot, I mean a LOT of work to do. Probably won't be able to post every day. But as I recover, I hope that I will come back better and stronger than before, and that what you get from me from now on will be of more benefit than you ever thought possible, because it won't be really coming from me, but from the God of Abraham.
Shalom.
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Monday, November 25, 2013
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Knowing God: Part 3
I knew when I started this essay, that one of the biggest problems would be avoiding all of the inherent rabbit trails that you can go down by taking on the question of whether or not it is possible to know God.
One commenter who passed by here did exactly what I expected, in light of the fact that the vast majority of people who occupy the churches on Sunday morning across this country don't really believe most of what the Bible says, and don't really have any interest in doing so. Let me quote my visitor:
It is interesting that this man cites the polonium halos, because that is the one case that proved to me that people will choose to believe what they WANT to believe in spite of the evidence. This visitor backs that up, in spades. Back in the late 80's, when I had just a couple of years of apologetics research under my belt, I was writing a paper for the class I was teaching on apologetics. I was distilling the very technical writing of Robert Gentry and his critics down to what could be understood by the average person with an eighth grade education. Most people don't understand chemistry and quantum mechanics, and I wanted people in my class to get the gist of it all. More importantly, I wanted them to see the silly ways that Gentry's critics tried to deal with explaining away his conclusions. God had a lesson for me in this exercise. So I will have to explain further.
There was a woman who for months had been coming to a Bible study at an Episcopal church that I was a member of at that time. She just showed up after about the second week it had begun. It was an evening, weekday class and we spent about an hour and a half on it. The class was memorable for two reasons. First, the woman seemed to be there for the express reason of playing the devil's advocate. She wanted to contest everything. She wanted to introduce every criticism she could come up with. There were just two of us who would take on her challenges, and often times that meant pointing out how ridiculous some of her challenges were, as they really didn't have anything to do with the particular text we were using. She was like a member of the Brady Campaign attending a Gun Owners of America meeting. We tried to be conciliatory and accommodating, but it was a struggle.
The other reason it was memorable was that a couple of months later, I was working on my apologetics class presentation, and I had gone to my college library to pull the source papers on Dr. Gentry's work on polonium halos. Guess who was the librarian on duty. She wanted to know what I was looking up and why. I went over it with her as succinctly as I could. She was not impressed. I highlighted the important points again and asked her if she understood the implications. She claimed she didn't. When I carefully explained that it meant that granite had to have been created nearly instantaneously, she said there must be some explanation. I showed her how I had already covered that.
"Then there must be some other explanation."
"Do you know of some other physical laws of the universe that the best minds in geophysics are not aware of?" I asked her.
"Well, no, but there must be some other explanation."
"Look, I've made the point that Dr. Gentry has come at this problem from every angle, and that the physicists who don't like his conclusions have postulated theories but with no experimental or empirical evidence. I've shown you the quote where the head of the geophysical association simply tells his colleagues it would be best to drop the subject because they have no good answers."
"They just haven't found it yet, they just need more time."
And so it hit me. It didn't matter how much more time. It didn't matter how much more evidence. That dialog would prove to be very valuable to me just a couple of weeks later in my sociology class. The visiting instructor there was an assistant from University of South Florida, where I would attend later. He was a former Catholic who had a real hate on for the church of his ancestry, and he enjoyed taking shots at Christianity and the Bible at every turn. But he hadn't bargained for having somebody like me in his class. I challenged him all the time.
"You make fun of things you claim are "Christian" beliefs and then I show clearly why you are wrong - that those aren't Judeo-Christian beliefs at all - why do you do that?"
"Because it's all just a bunch of mythology. Mankind has gotten past that, or needs to."
"But you don't give any good evidence. You cite stuff that I've shown has been debunked. You make statements, but you don't back them up with anything solid."
"I don't need to."
"Then let me ask you this: If I could show you a mountain of incontrovertible evidence that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Bible is a supernatural book that had to be written by an omnipotent, omniscient creator, would you be willing to change your mind?"
"Hell no."
There it was. The same thing I saw in the librarian. However, here, I had gotten him to admit it in a classroom full of 28 students. A guy who was supposed to be teaching truth to young minds about a field that was supposed to be about scientific endeavor. It was like the scene in "A Few Good Men" where Lt. Caffey gets Col. Jessup to forget about the implications of what he might say, and instead, just blurt out the truth. [BTW - I love the Col. Jessup soliloquy and agree with it.]
It cemented a lesson in my mind that I would never forget. It brought a more complete understanding to me of what Yeshua meant when He said that we shouldn't throw pearls before swine. It proved to me that people will not only seek out the answers they want and ignore the ones they don't, but even in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence, they will choose what they want over what is real.
Now, let me back up to what commenter Paul said above:
Admittedly, I don't know what all gets sent to Paul, but his statement smacks of what I've encountered over the many years. It is the a priori method of dismissing anything one doesn't agree with from the moment something seems to present evidence of the supernatural or contradicts long held assumptions. Paul is invited to share with me examples of what he deemed unworthy to even consider, but I doubt he'll take me up on it.
When I was teaching apologetics regularly and came across such bad information, I always used it as a teaching opportunity to show my students what not to do. Also notice that Paul is as much admitting that he doesn't go looking for information that challenges his beliefs, he is waiting for someone to send it to him. There's another lesson there.
I'm a great fan of marine biology. Of material things I miss a lot, my 75 gallon saltwater aquarium is in the top ten. I used to do a lot of snorkeling, and when I lived in Tampa, I was ten minutes from one of the world's largest marine estuaries. What does that have to do with the previous paragraph? There would be no small amount of times when I would see Yankees who had come to Florida, thinking that every piece of shore that was licked by salt water would be a bounty of marine wonders. I can't count the number of times I'd hear "kids" of all ages say, "What's the big deal, there's nothing here."
I'd be out in the turtle grass and mangroves, enjoying the wonders of all the different species of crabs, anemones, a few coral, sea horses, etc. It was different every day. It could suddenly change with the tide. The dolphins aren't on the payroll of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, so they don't show up on cue, but they eventually show up. There are many wonders to behold, but if you are expecting someone to lead you by the hand, you will miss out on a lot. Of course, you can go to the Florida Aquarium, or Sea World, and it's all designed to be spoon fed to you as easy as pie, but the people who go to the trouble and expense of making it so easy and entertaining are making big bucks to do it.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard a believer in evolution make a statement about what creationists believe or teach, only to find out when challenged that they not only cannot cite the source, but that it's what they heard some other evolutionist say they thought creationists believed. Most of the time, it would turn out to be false. For this reason, creationists are forced to be extremely careful about quoting and citing source material. Fortunately for us creationists, there are evolutionists who, from time to time, let down their guard and admit things out of some devotion to the scientific method, or truth, as it were.
Here is a good example:
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is a renowned champion of neo-Darwinism, and certainly one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology. He wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
One commenter who passed by here did exactly what I expected, in light of the fact that the vast majority of people who occupy the churches on Sunday morning across this country don't really believe most of what the Bible says, and don't really have any interest in doing so. Let me quote my visitor:
I have spent about 15 years now happily looking at evidence that was sent to me by creationists. I'm a Christian, a teacher in my church, and even a part-time missionary! I rarely find evidence sent to me that even takes looking at. [sic] On rare occasions I do, but even that has not stood up to scrutiny.
Gentry's polonium halos is a good argument, though there are refutations [he means criticisms, nobody has refuted any of Dr. Gentry's work. - Moshe] of it written. The question has to do with whether there was any travel of gas through the granite. Gentry says there's no evidence; his opponents say there's clear evidence. I can't resolve a question like that, but I haven't found anything else that withstood scrutiny.
It is interesting that this man cites the polonium halos, because that is the one case that proved to me that people will choose to believe what they WANT to believe in spite of the evidence. This visitor backs that up, in spades. Back in the late 80's, when I had just a couple of years of apologetics research under my belt, I was writing a paper for the class I was teaching on apologetics. I was distilling the very technical writing of Robert Gentry and his critics down to what could be understood by the average person with an eighth grade education. Most people don't understand chemistry and quantum mechanics, and I wanted people in my class to get the gist of it all. More importantly, I wanted them to see the silly ways that Gentry's critics tried to deal with explaining away his conclusions. God had a lesson for me in this exercise. So I will have to explain further.
There was a woman who for months had been coming to a Bible study at an Episcopal church that I was a member of at that time. She just showed up after about the second week it had begun. It was an evening, weekday class and we spent about an hour and a half on it. The class was memorable for two reasons. First, the woman seemed to be there for the express reason of playing the devil's advocate. She wanted to contest everything. She wanted to introduce every criticism she could come up with. There were just two of us who would take on her challenges, and often times that meant pointing out how ridiculous some of her challenges were, as they really didn't have anything to do with the particular text we were using. She was like a member of the Brady Campaign attending a Gun Owners of America meeting. We tried to be conciliatory and accommodating, but it was a struggle.
The other reason it was memorable was that a couple of months later, I was working on my apologetics class presentation, and I had gone to my college library to pull the source papers on Dr. Gentry's work on polonium halos. Guess who was the librarian on duty. She wanted to know what I was looking up and why. I went over it with her as succinctly as I could. She was not impressed. I highlighted the important points again and asked her if she understood the implications. She claimed she didn't. When I carefully explained that it meant that granite had to have been created nearly instantaneously, she said there must be some explanation. I showed her how I had already covered that.
"Then there must be some other explanation."
"Do you know of some other physical laws of the universe that the best minds in geophysics are not aware of?" I asked her.
"Well, no, but there must be some other explanation."
"Look, I've made the point that Dr. Gentry has come at this problem from every angle, and that the physicists who don't like his conclusions have postulated theories but with no experimental or empirical evidence. I've shown you the quote where the head of the geophysical association simply tells his colleagues it would be best to drop the subject because they have no good answers."
"They just haven't found it yet, they just need more time."
And so it hit me. It didn't matter how much more time. It didn't matter how much more evidence. That dialog would prove to be very valuable to me just a couple of weeks later in my sociology class. The visiting instructor there was an assistant from University of South Florida, where I would attend later. He was a former Catholic who had a real hate on for the church of his ancestry, and he enjoyed taking shots at Christianity and the Bible at every turn. But he hadn't bargained for having somebody like me in his class. I challenged him all the time.
"You make fun of things you claim are "Christian" beliefs and then I show clearly why you are wrong - that those aren't Judeo-Christian beliefs at all - why do you do that?"
"Because it's all just a bunch of mythology. Mankind has gotten past that, or needs to."
"But you don't give any good evidence. You cite stuff that I've shown has been debunked. You make statements, but you don't back them up with anything solid."
"I don't need to."
"Then let me ask you this: If I could show you a mountain of incontrovertible evidence that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Bible is a supernatural book that had to be written by an omnipotent, omniscient creator, would you be willing to change your mind?"
"Hell no."
There it was. The same thing I saw in the librarian. However, here, I had gotten him to admit it in a classroom full of 28 students. A guy who was supposed to be teaching truth to young minds about a field that was supposed to be about scientific endeavor. It was like the scene in "A Few Good Men" where Lt. Caffey gets Col. Jessup to forget about the implications of what he might say, and instead, just blurt out the truth. [BTW - I love the Col. Jessup soliloquy and agree with it.]
It cemented a lesson in my mind that I would never forget. It brought a more complete understanding to me of what Yeshua meant when He said that we shouldn't throw pearls before swine. It proved to me that people will not only seek out the answers they want and ignore the ones they don't, but even in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence, they will choose what they want over what is real.
Now, let me back up to what commenter Paul said above:
"I rarely find evidence sent to me that even takes looking at.[sic] On rare occasions I do, but even that has not stood up to scrutiny."
Admittedly, I don't know what all gets sent to Paul, but his statement smacks of what I've encountered over the many years. It is the a priori method of dismissing anything one doesn't agree with from the moment something seems to present evidence of the supernatural or contradicts long held assumptions. Paul is invited to share with me examples of what he deemed unworthy to even consider, but I doubt he'll take me up on it.
When I was teaching apologetics regularly and came across such bad information, I always used it as a teaching opportunity to show my students what not to do. Also notice that Paul is as much admitting that he doesn't go looking for information that challenges his beliefs, he is waiting for someone to send it to him. There's another lesson there.
I'm a great fan of marine biology. Of material things I miss a lot, my 75 gallon saltwater aquarium is in the top ten. I used to do a lot of snorkeling, and when I lived in Tampa, I was ten minutes from one of the world's largest marine estuaries. What does that have to do with the previous paragraph? There would be no small amount of times when I would see Yankees who had come to Florida, thinking that every piece of shore that was licked by salt water would be a bounty of marine wonders. I can't count the number of times I'd hear "kids" of all ages say, "What's the big deal, there's nothing here."
I'd be out in the turtle grass and mangroves, enjoying the wonders of all the different species of crabs, anemones, a few coral, sea horses, etc. It was different every day. It could suddenly change with the tide. The dolphins aren't on the payroll of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, so they don't show up on cue, but they eventually show up. There are many wonders to behold, but if you are expecting someone to lead you by the hand, you will miss out on a lot. Of course, you can go to the Florida Aquarium, or Sea World, and it's all designed to be spoon fed to you as easy as pie, but the people who go to the trouble and expense of making it so easy and entertaining are making big bucks to do it.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard a believer in evolution make a statement about what creationists believe or teach, only to find out when challenged that they not only cannot cite the source, but that it's what they heard some other evolutionist say they thought creationists believed. Most of the time, it would turn out to be false. For this reason, creationists are forced to be extremely careful about quoting and citing source material. Fortunately for us creationists, there are evolutionists who, from time to time, let down their guard and admit things out of some devotion to the scientific method, or truth, as it were.
Here is a good example:
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is a renowned champion of neo-Darwinism, and certainly one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology. He wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
‘We take the side of science in spite of thepatent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.
You see, it's an open conspiracy, or a cattle conspiracy. The vast majority of the population outside of academe, don't read the literature and are unfamiliar with all of the internal debate that goes on among scientists. Guys like Paul aren't going to dig and discover gems like the one above. It's just generally accepted that "all" scientists believe evolution is fact, based on the evidence, not in spite of it. The assumption is that if someone has an advanced degree in science, then there was some magic fairy dust that was sprinkled on them that makes them follow the truth regardless of the implications or the consequences.
And let's not forget that the reason Ben Stein made the movie EXPELLED: is because the vast majority of the populace is unaware of the systematic and purposeful efforts that go on in academe to stifle any discussion, let alone evidence that is heretical to the religion of evolution.
I want to thank Paul for stopping by and making me realize that I needed to go down this little side track in order to emphasize that if my readers are going to benefit from what I have to share, they are going to actually have to do some thinking for themselves. And if I need to stop and answer questions and objections, that's fine, even if it means it will take a bit longer to get to the conclusion. My main point for this entire essay is whether or not it is logical and reasonable to believe that we can know God. If we have to broaden the knowledge base to get there, so be it.
You can move on to Knowing God: Part 4 by clicking here.
And let's not forget that the reason Ben Stein made the movie EXPELLED: is because the vast majority of the populace is unaware of the systematic and purposeful efforts that go on in academe to stifle any discussion, let alone evidence that is heretical to the religion of evolution.
I want to thank Paul for stopping by and making me realize that I needed to go down this little side track in order to emphasize that if my readers are going to benefit from what I have to share, they are going to actually have to do some thinking for themselves. And if I need to stop and answer questions and objections, that's fine, even if it means it will take a bit longer to get to the conclusion. My main point for this entire essay is whether or not it is logical and reasonable to believe that we can know God. If we have to broaden the knowledge base to get there, so be it.
You can move on to Knowing God: Part 4 by clicking here.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
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
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
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Knowing God: Part 1
Talk about a tough subject to tackle. Why even try?
I will try, to a very, very limited degree, because of something that I've heard or read from people over and over, both on one extreme or on the other. On the one hand, I've heard from people who have said the most outlandish, crackpot stuff while invoking the name or authority of God, at the other extreme are those who, while being correct about human inability to comprehend God fully, seem to believe that we can't know anything about God, so, why even try? Which leaves them open to create a god in their own image, according to their own likes and dislikes.
This is a subject that actually requires a tremendous amount of background. Like having a discussion on the fine points of flying an F-18 Superhornet and carrying out a mission involving multiple combat scenarios, you wouldn't attempt to include people who have never flown in a plane, let alone don't know anything about aerodynamics or avionics. Therefore, I understand that I'm about to talk about stuff that will leave a lot of people in a fog if they happen to stumble on to this blog. In the religious realm, this is like lecturing on eschatology when some of your audience has never even heard the terms; amillennial, pre-trib, or harpazo.
But this is what I feel led to do, so here goes.
I came to my knowledge of God, not based on some experience. Thank you, Father. I don't mean for that to disparage those who have, after all, look at Rabbi (apostle) Paul. I came to my faith kicking and screaming, battling with my intellect the whole way. By the time I was 25, I hated all forms of organized religion. But I couldn't shake the gut feeling that there was some kind of "higher power." That brings up the issue of being "spiritual, but not religious," but that will be another post.
Here is where you have to pay attention carefully. I came to God out of desperation and in spite of my mind, while having a crisis of purpose. He answered me and gave me some personal miraculous confirmation. But I was a long way from any real knowledge of God and I had lot's and lot's and lot's of misconceptions and doubts. I spent the first few years of my new life with God getting spanked and corrected in my thinking. Actually that still goes on, but not quite as dramatically as it did in the first year.
I had a friend who led his family life as though God existed, but admitted to me in private his serious doubts about God's existence. His main problem was that he felt God should make His existence obvious to the point that no one could have any doubts about it. I finally discovered his "bottom line" after giving him lots of evidence from several years of studying apologetics. What I also discovered about my friend is that he really just wanted a consensus of worldly "experts" to simply render a judgment and tell him it was true so he wouldn't have to wrestle with the hard thinking. He couldn't understand why so many people he knew believed in God, while so much of the world of academe that he put his faith in, didn't. I've lost touch with him, and don't know if he ever did come to an understanding of what faith really is.
Over time, I've discovered a consistent thread among those who wish to avoid any mental heavy lifting when it comes to theology. The name for such people is agnostic. They don't think of themselves as mentally lazy. Instead they will declare that questions about God or knowing anything about Him or His existence is just too difficult for even the most brilliant intellects, therefore, it is unknowable. They have decided to take their chance in the hereafter by pleading ignorance. What's funny to me is the amount of mental gymnastics they employ to avoid the difficult choice. And while such people in the realm of religion are called agnostic, in the realm of politics, I call them moderates. Same thinking process, or lack thereof. Atheists are a completely different animal and are so illogical as to be silly. The rules of logic make that clear, and when you confront them with it, it nearly makes their heads explode or they shut down or switch position to agnostic, at least in front of me.
Which reminds me: this is where someone is going to think I'm horribly arrogant. Showing any confidence at all in an argument is enough to reduce most moderates or agnostics into simply using the "arrogant" epithet and concluding that they don't need to engage the debate any longer.
How is it possible that little-old me has the chutzpah to think that I can really know something or anything about God? Believe it or not, it is precisely because of my love of science that I came to believe in God. It is because I like and appreciate logic and reason that I embrace the existence of God and the pursuit of knowing Him more and more.
I didn't start out that way, as I said. I had accepted, without reservation, everything that the average secular person believes about evolution, that the Bible was merely written by men who used religion as a way to control others, that miracles were myths, and that science had explained almost everything, and whatever it hadn't yet explained, it was just a matter of time until it would. In the Spring of my 25th year, had you told me that I would one day reject all of that and eventually be teaching creation apologetics and that the Bible was true, I would have said, "Screw you and the horse you rode in on." But I would have done it in less polite language and with much gusto.
At first, I just wanted this warm fuzzy idea that I could be forgiven for all my shortcomings and that I didn't have to worry about some cosmic justice or judgment at the end of life. I liked the "idea" of Jesus, but I didn't want anything to do with that Bible stuff. And I could have gone along like that indefinitely had I only hung around the "Christians," because the vast majority of them were just like me in that regard. (A very sad statement about Christendom) The problem came because I was challenged by the secular world about being simple minded for believing in such a fairy tale as Jesus and the Bible. That just didn't work for me. I can't pretend that it's possible to compartmentalize what should be, what is, the most ultimate question of the Universe from everything else I believe. My logical mind was not going to let me get away with that.
I was forced into engaging in linear logic, Aristotelian thought, if you will. Either Jesus is real, or he's not. And it isn't just enough that he was a real historical figure. If he simply lived and died, and all the information about him in the Bible is just a bunch of made up stories or embellishments, then it's foolish and self-delusional to think that he can somehow save me or make my life better. If there is no certainty that there's a life after this earthly one, then I might as well get whatever pleasure I can while I'm here. What's the sense of playing by a set of rules if the outcome is a guaranteed loss? The flip side of that scenario is what happens if this Jesus guy is for real and all that stuff in the Bible about him is true? That would mean that what I stand to lose goes up exponentially.
So, I made up my mind, with a tenacity like I'd never known before. If I could come up with enough evidence to put to rest this idea that Jesus was anything more than a really charismatic teacher, then I could go on living my life the way I wanted and not have to worry about stories no more valuable than those of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. All I had to do was prove that the Bible couldn't be trusted.
I said out loud, "Hey God, or Jesus, or whoever you are; if you are real and if this book is really your word, you're gonna have to prove it to me." No feigned reverence. No pleading as if I was worried about losing anything. I was my typical bull-headed, in-your-face punk.
The following day is when things got interesting.
To move on to the next part click on Knowing God: Part 2
I will try, to a very, very limited degree, because of something that I've heard or read from people over and over, both on one extreme or on the other. On the one hand, I've heard from people who have said the most outlandish, crackpot stuff while invoking the name or authority of God, at the other extreme are those who, while being correct about human inability to comprehend God fully, seem to believe that we can't know anything about God, so, why even try? Which leaves them open to create a god in their own image, according to their own likes and dislikes.
This is a subject that actually requires a tremendous amount of background. Like having a discussion on the fine points of flying an F-18 Superhornet and carrying out a mission involving multiple combat scenarios, you wouldn't attempt to include people who have never flown in a plane, let alone don't know anything about aerodynamics or avionics. Therefore, I understand that I'm about to talk about stuff that will leave a lot of people in a fog if they happen to stumble on to this blog. In the religious realm, this is like lecturing on eschatology when some of your audience has never even heard the terms; amillennial, pre-trib, or harpazo.
But this is what I feel led to do, so here goes.
I came to my knowledge of God, not based on some experience. Thank you, Father. I don't mean for that to disparage those who have, after all, look at Rabbi (apostle) Paul. I came to my faith kicking and screaming, battling with my intellect the whole way. By the time I was 25, I hated all forms of organized religion. But I couldn't shake the gut feeling that there was some kind of "higher power." That brings up the issue of being "spiritual, but not religious," but that will be another post.
Here is where you have to pay attention carefully. I came to God out of desperation and in spite of my mind, while having a crisis of purpose. He answered me and gave me some personal miraculous confirmation. But I was a long way from any real knowledge of God and I had lot's and lot's and lot's of misconceptions and doubts. I spent the first few years of my new life with God getting spanked and corrected in my thinking. Actually that still goes on, but not quite as dramatically as it did in the first year.
I had a friend who led his family life as though God existed, but admitted to me in private his serious doubts about God's existence. His main problem was that he felt God should make His existence obvious to the point that no one could have any doubts about it. I finally discovered his "bottom line" after giving him lots of evidence from several years of studying apologetics. What I also discovered about my friend is that he really just wanted a consensus of worldly "experts" to simply render a judgment and tell him it was true so he wouldn't have to wrestle with the hard thinking. He couldn't understand why so many people he knew believed in God, while so much of the world of academe that he put his faith in, didn't. I've lost touch with him, and don't know if he ever did come to an understanding of what faith really is.
Over time, I've discovered a consistent thread among those who wish to avoid any mental heavy lifting when it comes to theology. The name for such people is agnostic. They don't think of themselves as mentally lazy. Instead they will declare that questions about God or knowing anything about Him or His existence is just too difficult for even the most brilliant intellects, therefore, it is unknowable. They have decided to take their chance in the hereafter by pleading ignorance. What's funny to me is the amount of mental gymnastics they employ to avoid the difficult choice. And while such people in the realm of religion are called agnostic, in the realm of politics, I call them moderates. Same thinking process, or lack thereof. Atheists are a completely different animal and are so illogical as to be silly. The rules of logic make that clear, and when you confront them with it, it nearly makes their heads explode or they shut down or switch position to agnostic, at least in front of me.
Which reminds me: this is where someone is going to think I'm horribly arrogant. Showing any confidence at all in an argument is enough to reduce most moderates or agnostics into simply using the "arrogant" epithet and concluding that they don't need to engage the debate any longer.
How is it possible that little-old me has the chutzpah to think that I can really know something or anything about God? Believe it or not, it is precisely because of my love of science that I came to believe in God. It is because I like and appreciate logic and reason that I embrace the existence of God and the pursuit of knowing Him more and more.
I didn't start out that way, as I said. I had accepted, without reservation, everything that the average secular person believes about evolution, that the Bible was merely written by men who used religion as a way to control others, that miracles were myths, and that science had explained almost everything, and whatever it hadn't yet explained, it was just a matter of time until it would. In the Spring of my 25th year, had you told me that I would one day reject all of that and eventually be teaching creation apologetics and that the Bible was true, I would have said, "Screw you and the horse you rode in on." But I would have done it in less polite language and with much gusto.
At first, I just wanted this warm fuzzy idea that I could be forgiven for all my shortcomings and that I didn't have to worry about some cosmic justice or judgment at the end of life. I liked the "idea" of Jesus, but I didn't want anything to do with that Bible stuff. And I could have gone along like that indefinitely had I only hung around the "Christians," because the vast majority of them were just like me in that regard. (A very sad statement about Christendom) The problem came because I was challenged by the secular world about being simple minded for believing in such a fairy tale as Jesus and the Bible. That just didn't work for me. I can't pretend that it's possible to compartmentalize what should be, what is, the most ultimate question of the Universe from everything else I believe. My logical mind was not going to let me get away with that.
I was forced into engaging in linear logic, Aristotelian thought, if you will. Either Jesus is real, or he's not. And it isn't just enough that he was a real historical figure. If he simply lived and died, and all the information about him in the Bible is just a bunch of made up stories or embellishments, then it's foolish and self-delusional to think that he can somehow save me or make my life better. If there is no certainty that there's a life after this earthly one, then I might as well get whatever pleasure I can while I'm here. What's the sense of playing by a set of rules if the outcome is a guaranteed loss? The flip side of that scenario is what happens if this Jesus guy is for real and all that stuff in the Bible about him is true? That would mean that what I stand to lose goes up exponentially.
So, I made up my mind, with a tenacity like I'd never known before. If I could come up with enough evidence to put to rest this idea that Jesus was anything more than a really charismatic teacher, then I could go on living my life the way I wanted and not have to worry about stories no more valuable than those of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. All I had to do was prove that the Bible couldn't be trusted.
I said out loud, "Hey God, or Jesus, or whoever you are; if you are real and if this book is really your word, you're gonna have to prove it to me." No feigned reverence. No pleading as if I was worried about losing anything. I was my typical bull-headed, in-your-face punk.
The following day is when things got interesting.
To move on to the next part click on Knowing God: Part 2
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