Do We Really Have to Think About It?
Sometimes our culture thinks of those who have faith as simple minded people who have blind obedience to a notion that there is a God, even though there is supposedly overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Thinking about God is hard work, but it is important work for us to do as Christians. All spiritual searches focus on two important questions:
How did we get here?
Why are we here?
The world would have us believe that:
Reason is More Trustworthy than Faith, and
People of Faith are Ignorant
So many people have talked about the relationship between faith and reason:
Thomas Jefferson
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear
Anais Nin
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Francis Bacon
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
Sir Julian Huxley
Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place
Aristotle
Aristotle established a foundation for reason with his notion that nothing could be known until it first passed through an act of the mind, and could be:
Understood
Discovered
Or proved
Aristotle began a long line of thinkers who were determined to find answers for life’s two important questions. And in the last 150 years, many of these people have been atheists, determined to discover answers that had no connection or dependency on God. Many of your teachers will point to the large number of great thinkers who do not believe in God, as if their shear numbers testify to the ridiculous proposition that there could be a God at all. Don’t let their numbers fool you.
Charles Darwin
Perhaps the most important of these thinkers was Charles Darwin himself. Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Darwin was the British naturalist who became famous for his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like several scientists before him, Darwin believed all the life on earth evolved (developed gradually) over millions of years from a few common ancestors.
From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world. In South America Darwin found fossils of extinct animals that were similar to modern species. On the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean he noticed many variations among plants and animals of the same general type as those in South America. The expedition visited places around the world, and Darwin studied plants and animals everywhere he went, collecting specimens for further study. Upon his return to London, Darwin conducted thorough research of his notes and specimens. Out of this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called "specialization."
This form of genuine reason was largely adopted and encourage other thinkers to try to answer the questions that were previously answered from theology. We started to believe that we could understand all that copuld be understood and we began the journey of enlightenment. Man’s effort to understand and explain all that he could see.
Yuri Gagarin
Along the way, we started to wonder if God had anything to do with it at all. In 1961, when Yuri Gagarin first traveled around the earth in the first manned orbit of a Russian space ship, he looked outside the orbiter and said:
“I didn’t see any God out there”
Following Aristotelian logic will only bring so far. At best we may be able in some way to describe and investigate “what we see” but we need to understand the relationship between faith and reason if we ever hope to know more… The world will try to tell you the lie:
Reason is superior to faith and
Reason has no relationship to faith
But history has shown us that reason without faith is incapable of answering life’s big questions
Reason Has its Place
The God of the Bible does not call his children to obey blindly. The Bible itself serves as a piece of evidence, the testimony of eyewitnesses who are providing us with reasons to believe. That’s why the scriptures repeatedly call us to have a reasoned belief in Christ, and not to resort to the behavior of unreasoning animals:
Jude 4, 10
For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord… Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals-these are the very things that destroy them.
1 Thessalonians 5:19
Don't turn away God's Spirit or ignore prophecies. Put everything to the test. Accept what is good and don't have anything to do with evil. I pray that God, who gives peace, will make you completely holy. And may your spirit, soul, and body be kept healthy and faultless until our Lord Jesus Christ returns. The one who chose you can be trusted, and he will do this.
1 Peter 3:15
So stop being afraid and don't worry about what people might do. Honor Christ and let him be the Lord of your life. Always be ready to give an answer when someone asks you about your hope. Give a kind and respectful answer and keep your conscience clear. This way you will make people ashamed for saying bad things about your good conduct as a follower of Christ. You are better off to obey God and suffer for doing right than to suffer for doing wrong.
Great Christian Thinkers
While there may be 150 years worth of great atheist thinkers to be paraded in front of us to justify the possible truth of evolution and humanism, there are thousands of years worth of great Christian scientists and writers and thinkers. from Augustine to C.S. Lewis, from Louis Pasteur to Leonard Tolstoy, you do not need to feel out numbered or humbled by the secular world view proponents.
Jesus Himself
And the greatest of these thinkers was, of course, Jesus Himself. We don’t tend to think of him as the smartest man who ever lived, but that is exactly what he is. Understand that God wants us to use our minds because he understands the relationship between reason and faith. He knows that all great thinkers want to understand and discover and prove and he knows that we will all try the journey for ourselves. He encourages that, because he knows two things. Our journey of reason and science will NEVER reveal him to be a lie, and in fact, our journey will take us to and end that we cannot explain. We will come to a point in which we will realize that reason cannot give us the answers we are looking for. We will come to the feet of God. Reason will lead us to faith. Let’s take a look at what I mean:
Darwin’s Notion of Simplicity
Darwin operated under the assumption of “simplicity of transformation”. He believed that the simple single cell creature could one day, if given enough time and environmental pressure, transform through small generational changes into a different form altogether. That sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? What he failed to realize is that life is not about simplicity, but rather about the complexity of information. Darwin didn’t realize that the smallest microbe, the smallest single cell creature contains an incredible amount of genetic information, roughly equivalent to a 500 page book. But the human species is far more complex than that. It would take 5000 such books to represent the amount of information required to create us as human beings. That’s a huge difference, and it is the downfall of evolution altogether. You see, all transformation that we see in nature within a species is the result of either rearrangement of DNA information or the loss of DNA information
Darwin’s Notion of the Fossil Record
Darwin believed that there were intermediate forms of life, transitional forms that bridged the gap from one species to another, and if this were true, he believed we would eventually find them in the fossil record. In fact, he said that if we did not find these fossil, his theory would fall completely. Well guess what. We still can’t find them. Evolutionists have tried for years to find such fossil evidence and the trilobites are the best they can come up with. Separated by thousands of years, they display some significant differences in form as we track the trilobite’s progress across the ages. But these are not intermediate transitional species. In the end, we still have the trilobite, although he may look a little different
Do you understand that the BIBLE actually supports this kind of evolution? It is called MICRO-EVOLUTION as opposed to Darwin’s notion of MACRO-EVOLUTION. Biblical micro-evolution accounts for the changes we see in the same geno-type as it is influenced by environmental forces. After all, the Bible tells us that all of us are descended from the three sons of Noah, yet there are all kinds of variations in us as humans, based on where we come from environmentally. This type of micro-evolution is purely Biblical, and guess what… it’s true.
The Limits of Change
See for years, teachers and evolutionists have been pointing to small observable changes within species to promote the idea that one species could actually evolve into another. Don’t buy it. You still need additional information in the genetic map to change forms, and that just doesn’t happen in any example given by an evolutionist.
You want to stump your teachers who promote evolution? Ask them for an example of one genetic mutation or evolutionary process in which there is an addition seen in the informational material. They will be speechless, because no such example exists. Because information cannot be added to the mutation process, one species can never evolve into another. (For more information about macro-evolution, visit our Plausibility of Evolution page HERE!)
God’s Notion of Reason
God has his own understanding of reason. He wants you to understand and discover, but he also knows that without his help in revealing the truth to you, you will always come up short of the answer. he adds both revelation and experience to the equation, and with those two pieces of the puzzle, we are able to move beyond understanding what we see, toward understand what it all means. We can answer both questions. How did we get here? Why are we here? These answers are available to us as Christians because we understand that faith and reason are partners, and our search for truth through reason will eventually lead us to a position of faith:
Romans 1:18-24
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
Where Faithless Reason Can Lead You
Imagine where a faithless life of pure reason will lead you. There was a man once who studied to become an artist. He loved to paint and draw and think about a perfect world. But he had no faith whatsoever, and all of his thinking progressed from an atheist world view in which God does not exist, does not create with purpose, does not care for his creation. In his effort to create a perfect Godless world, this man came to power and built a kingdom. And in this kingdom, he and his followers began to postulate that, with the help of artificial selection, they might be able to engineer a perfect society, removing all the weakest of the species and preserving the best. His name was Adolph Hitler. Reason and science, when detached from faith, can lead you down a path in which YOU become God. Thinking that you can answer all of life’s most important questions all by yourself.
So if we, as Christians, know that we hold the truest idea of the relationship between faith and reason, why won’t we stand up to our teachers, our culture and our friends on this issue? Is it a matter of not having enough information? Or is it a matter of courage. Let’s pray about these things and ask God to give us the knowledge and strength to accomplish the mission.
Live Above the Lies
Now go out and live with the confidence that you are not the product of random chance. You were designed with a purpose. And God wants you to use the mind that he gave you to examine the facts. He is calling us to know more about evolution than the teachers who are now teaching you. Why? So you can show them the fallacy and change your world.
