Why Christianity and Darwinism can't mix - the end (for now).
Naturally commenters helped me write this last post. Of COURSE they want to help us find our way to the correct pathway of life. Jon Woolf said:
"It actually is quite an interesting, if disturbing, problem in binary theology: do you believe the words that other men say are the Word of God, or do you believe the record written into the very rocks of God's Creation? You can't believe both. One or the other is wrong. So, do you sacrifice your reason on the altar of your soul, or do you sell your soul for the sake of your reason? Or do you perhaps find a third way?
I have greater respect for men who seek a third path than for men who take either of the first two."
I have greater respect for men who seek a third path than for men who take either of the first two."
Well, now, this is quite a comment. "Binary Theology?" That is a term invented by men who disagree with Jesus Christ Himself and yet want to be considered Christians. Jesus said "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." All the original Christians knew that Christ came to be the Messiah, the Lamb of God, the fulfillment of scriptures. Historical Christianity has always been a matter of receiving Christ as Savior. Some have added works or extra prayers or religious ceremonies to this but normal Christianity is about depending upon Christ to forgive your sins and create within you a new creature who is forever linked to God.
First, if you are a Darwinist then you believe the words written by Charles Darwin rather than the Word of God. There are no "words" in the rock record. It is highly unlikely that Woolf believes the rock record is "God's Creation" since he argues against a Creator God on a regular basis.
What kind of other men believed the Bible is the Word of God?
Moses
Joshua
Elijah
Daniel
Isaiah
Jesus Christ
The apostles and the thousands of believers martyred for that belief in the first few decades of Anno Domini.
The hundreds of thousands martyred for their faith in Christ since then.
Those being martyred for their faith in Christ even in the 21st Century
John Newton, instrumental in ending the slave trade
John Newton, instrumental in ending the slave trade
Galileo
Sir Isaac Newton
Michael Faraday
Martin Luther
Benjamin Franklin
Lord Kelvin
Louis Pasteur
George Washington
Werner Von Braun and on and on and on...
"So, do you sacrifice your reason on the altar of your soul, or do you sell your soul for the sake of your reason? Or do you perhaps find a third way?"
Why does this sound a little like "Did God really say...?" The words sound like a lullaby designed to put your logic to sleep while you become comfortably numb in the pot that is prepared for you. The Big Lie again. If we made a list of the 20 greatest scientists of all time I bet you the majority would be or were Christians. Darwinists have had the audacity to steal the word, "science", and applied it to their religious belief so that it can become the state religion of a nation that supposedly cannot have one, the United States. The NCSE is a censorship agency designed to stamp out all non-Darwinist thought. If they had their way, there would be censorship of the media and that includes the internet, I am sure.
Scientists who are Christians are censured and shunned and fired and have now begun forming their own agencies and foundations. Creation.com, Answers in Genesis, Institute for Creation Research, Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, Creation Safaris and many, many others are groups of scientists, writers and researchers who are doing good science while ignoring the idiotic idea that life and time and matter made themselves.
Darwinism is an entirely nonsensical illogical flim-flam set of fairy tales. Listening to the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet is a lot like it must have been back in the 1950's and 60's listening to the radio and being fed a steady diet of communist propaganda. Christians attribute miracles to the only Person capable of producing them, the Supernatural Creator God. Darwinists give the natural world credit for doing its own miracles, including the most amazing one of all - creating itself!
"I have greater respect for men who seek a third path than for men who take either of the first two."
The men who are complete compromisers like the members of Biologos? We should have respect for the people who stick a foot in both boats before heading down the stream of life? Can you imagine putting a foot in two different canoes and trying to navigate down a class three river that way? You would fall out and it would not take long. No one can put Darwin and Christ together. They are diametrically opposed. Jesus promises life and a way to reverse the curse that causes all creation to run downhill while Darwin magically ignores the laws of both science and reason to paint a just-so picture of molecules working hard on their way up to man. But my next post will put the lie to that idea for good in the minds of normal people, hopefully.
Let's be clear about the Bible. The genealogies of the Bible have been proven to be true by a survey of the world's genealogies. You find references to Noah and/or his three sons all over the world. Versions of the flood are found around the world. But the Bible was a record kept by God and His people that was meant to be authentic and authoritative. The history of the Bible concerning the peoples and events of the region of Israel have been confirmed by Archaelogists. The Bible is a remarkable book because it was preserved by an exhaustive and painstaking system by the Jewish scribes down through the centuries. Each portion of the Bible being copied was analyzed as if by a computer program as words were counted and index words were checked and recounted and proofread before a page was considered to be kept as part of scripture. Before there were computers and Kaizen and standard quality control methods there were Jewish Scribes and God.
The Semetic peoples are the first with a known written language according to secular sources but in fact the Children of Israel had a written Word of God since the days of Moses and surely the ability to both read and write was developed before the Flood changed the Earth. The descendants of Abraham were the descendants of Noah and had kept the oral history of mankind carefully enough that God could tell Moses to write that history and direct his words. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is written by men of God inspired by God to write the words. Jesus Christ used the Old Testament constantly in his teaching and underlined it as the Word of God. The entire New Testament was arguably all written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 so it was all written by men who either lived at the time of Christ or certainly the books were passed around as letters by people who were witnesses of Jesus and/or his apostles so that the history within them was verified by the very people who carried the epistles with them from church to church, risking their lives in the process. There is no book so ancient that has so much documentation for its historicity.
One could make an entire series of posts about ancient texts, why they are so rare and how and why that is true. But it frankly doesn't make any difference to people who are determined to follow Darwinism. But it should make a difference to Christians. There is no other book like the Bible and to compare the writings of Darwin and Hawking and Dawkins to the Bible is unfair to them. They cannot compare to the Word of God.
Al Mohler had this to say:
"The real question posed by Mooney’s USA Today column is whether Christians possess the discernment to recognize this postmodern mode of spirituality for what it is — unbelief wearing the language of a bland faith.
Chris Mooney might be on to something here. The American public just might be confused enough to fall for this spirituality ploy. Will Christians do the same?"
The article in question:
The War Between Spirituality and Science Is Over
The real question posed by Mooney’s USA Today column is whether Christians possess the discernment to recognize this postmodern mode of spirituality for what it is — unbelief wearing the language of a bland faith.
Monday, September 13, 2010
There are many arenas of cultural and intellectual conflict in the world today, but one of the most controversial of these arenas has disappeared. There is now no conflict between spirituality and science. The war is over, the combatants have gone home, and lilies of peace now decorate the landscape where conflict once raged. Science and spirituality are now at total unperturbed peace.
That paragraph is meaningless, of course, which is entirely the point. Monday’s edition of USA Today features an opinion column by Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Mooney sets out to argue that spirituality can serve as a bridge across the science-religion divide.
Mooney is alarmed by the pervasiveness of what he defines as scientific illiteracy among the American public. In his published writings, he associates this “illiteracy” with a “war on science” being fought by anti-evolutionists, those opposed to human embryonic stem cell research, critics of climate change, and assorted others identified as obstacles to scientific advance. Of course, the fact that a large majority of Americans reject evolution only adds fuel to his fire when he cries in his milk over what he can only describe as “illiteracy.”
But, if Mooney sees conservative Christians as a serious problem, he sees the so-called “New Atheists” as similarly vexing. It is not that those figures are characterized by scientific illiteracy, but rather that their strident atheism, once associated with science, becomes a further impediment to the public acceptance of evolution and other scientific claims.
In Unscientific America, Mooney castigates the New Atheists for their strident atheism — not because he would have them to believe in God, but because he knows that their stridency alienates the public. “The American scientific community gains nothing from the condescending rhetoric of the New Atheists,” he argues, “and neither does the stature of science in our culture.”
The stridency of their atheism — a hallmark of the New Atheism — alarms the public. “Abrasive atheism can only exacerbate this anxiety and reinforce the misimpression that scientific inquiry leads inevitably to the erosion of religion and values,” he writes.
Mooney knows and documents that scientists are far more secular than the general public, and he is well aware that this poses a huge challenge to the public acceptance of their ideas and theories. The New Atheists, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, just add fuel to the fire. “If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the combativeness of the New Atheists is strongly counterproductive,” he laments.
Why? “America is a very religious nation,” he explains, “and if forced to choose between faith and science, vast numbers of Americans will choose the former.” He is undoubtedly correct on that score.
But all this brings us to today’s column in USA Today. Give the strident atheism a rest, he demands, and adopt the language of spirituality. As he tells the atheists, the language of spirituality is utterly compatible with atheism, but it will not scare the public.
In his words:
Across the Western world — including the United States — traditional religion is in decline, even as there has been a surge of interest in “spirituality.” What’s more, the latter concept is increasingly being redefined in our culture so that it refers to something very much separable from, and potentially broader than, religious faith.
Spirituality can have little or even nothing to do with belief in God, Mooney affirms. “Spirituality is something everyone can have — even atheists.” He explains: “In its most expansive sense, it could simply be taken to refer to any individual’s particular quest to discover that which is held sacred.”
Spirituality is completely compatible with atheism, he asserts. It requires no belief in God or the supernatural in any form. As a matter of fact, spirituality requires no beliefs at all. Mooney quotes the French sociologist Emile Durkheim: “By sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called Gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred.”
Thus, he argues that spirituality “might be the route to finally healing one of the most divisive rifts in Western society — over the relationship between science and religion.”
In its own way, Mooney’s column serves to illustrate the vacuity that marks modern spirituality. There is nothing to it — no beliefs, no God, no morality, no doctrine, no discipleship.
Spirituality in this sense is what is left when Christianity disappears and dissipates. It is the perfect religious mode for the postmodern mind. It requires nothing and promises nothing, but it serves as a substitute for authentic beliefs.
Clearly, Chris Mooney sees spirituality as a potential public relations strategy for the advancement of secular science and the naturalistic worldview. He needs prominent scientists like Dawkins and Dennett, along with others like Stephen Hawking, to shut up about atheism and just use the language of spirituality. They can retain their atheism, but they should not sound like atheists to the public.
My guess is that Dawkins, Dennett, and Hawking will ignore Mooney’s advice. After all, they have made atheism into a cottage industry, and their books are bestsellers. They are likely to see Mooney’s advice as quaint and unnecessary, because they feel that they own the future anyway.
The real question posed by Mooney’s USA Today column is whether Christians possess the discernment to recognize this postmodern mode of spirituality for what it is — unbelief wearing the language of a bland faith.
Chris Mooney might be on to something here. The American public just might be confused enough to fall for this spirituality ploy. Will Christians do the same?
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.
Chris Mooney, “Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide,” USA Today, Monday, September 13, 2010.Chris Mooney, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (Basic Books, 2009).
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Yes, the third way is the way that leaves men open to viewing spirituality in this way: “By sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called Gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred.”
Not me. I consider the Word of God as a sacred thing. The Creator of the Universe has given it to man to help understand himself and the world around him, the meaning of life and how to appreciate and have fellowship with God. I consider the Word of God to be far more authoritative than the words of Hawking or Dawkins. Hawking has simply substituted gravity for a mythological character and given it the power to create the Universe with absolutely not one shred of evidence that such a thing could ever happen.
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
I repeat the quote: “Evolution is an unproven theory. If what its fundamentalist supporters believe is true, fishes decided to grow lungs and legs and walk up the beach. The idea is so comically daft that only one thing explains its survival—that lonely, frightened people wanted to expel God from the Universe because they found the idea that He exists profoundly uncomfortable.”—Peter Hitchens