Is God able to create all and to tell us the truth about it?
Hi Harvest,
The following is from Al Mohler's blog site (click
HERE to read the original).
I found it well worth the read as so many professing Christians have abandoned the clear teaching of Scripture that God created the heavens and the earth by speaking it into existence. The reason they are abandoning what Scripture is clear on is that they feel insulted and mocked by so many secularists that say if you believe that God created everything you are a fool and idiot!
Listen folks - do not be intimidated and do not believe the lies that are being put forth as truth. No one can prove either 'theory' of evolution or creation. Both are based on assumptions and presuppositions. The foundation of both is some sort of 'faith'.
But more importantly we as Christians must stop trying to fight the wrong fight. Creation is a miracle! And no one can prove how a miracle happened! No matter how you try you cannot prove creation true. I do believe that using evidence and science you can show the major holes in evolution and why it is such a blind belief being passed off as fact. The Bible teaches creationism clearly, just as it teaches other miracles like Jesus raising a dead man, healing a blind man, rising Himself from the dead. Miracles are based on the character, power and truthfulness of God and by their very definition cannot be proved. So stop wasting time fighting the wrong fight and simply believe and proclaim the truth of God's Word.
Do you believe God? The God of the Bible? Do you believe His Word? In this article Dr. Mohler does a good job of showing how Professor Giberson is a typical professing believer who has abandoned the clear revelation of the Word of God and bought into a lie and yet cannot see how profoundly he has walked away from the truth of God. Be warned dear Christian not to throw out God's inspired revelation, not to deny God's ability and power to create or re-create (salvation), or to rule sovereignly over all that was, is and will be.
I choose to believe God and His Word - what do you choose to believe?
Norm
Science Trumps the Bible? — An Amazingly Candid (and Disastrous) Argument
Professor Giberson asserts that to
believe in the truthfulness and historicity of the entire Bible is to
paddle in an “intellectual backwater.” Christians committed to biblical
authority should ponder that statement deeply, even as they keep
paddling.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The
folks at BioLogos continue with a fierce intensity to press their case
for theistic evolution. In so doing, they are making the arguments that
are essential to their case that Christianity and evolutionary theory
are compatible. The arguments they are now making are integral to their
cause, and they are amazingly, even breathtakingly candid.
In a recent article series responding to atheistic scientist Jerry
Coyne, Professor Karl Giberson of Eastern Nazarene College rejects
Coyne’s insistence that evolution precludes theism. Coyne, one of
Darwin’s most ardent defenders, seems to operate under the quaint idea
that Christians are marked by belief in an interventionist God and a
confidence that the Bible is true.
Coyne also seems to believe that Christian theologians are not
deists, and he is profoundly right. He wrote of “some theologians with a
deistic bent,” who insist that evolution and Christianity are
compatible, but who are in no way representative of true Christianity.
Sometimes it takes an atheist to see the truth in a theological
argument. Coyne strikes gold when he writes: “The reason that many
liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that
they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to
most Americans.”
Coyne is one of the most recognized authorities on evolution in
the world today. He sees those who argue for an accommodation of
evolutionary science and religious belief as either dishonest or
delusional. He is increasingly frustrated with scientists who make what
he sees as a fallacious argument — that Christianity and evolution can
be reconciled. “Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off
the intellectual assembly line,” he laments. “It never stops, because
the reconciliation never works.”
In a five-part series at BioLogos, Professor Giberson seeks to refute
Coyne’s argument. Now, Professor Giberson does land a few well-placed
intellectual punches on Coyne’s absolute naturalism, but he does great
damage to the Christian faith in so doing. At the same time, he ends up
proving Coyne’s central point.
Coyne argues that religious ideas are ancient and resistant to
correction, and he identifies science as the only qualified correction.
Giberson rejects Coyne’s argument that religious beliefs are a
fossilized set of ideas that reluctantly give way to scientific advance.
Giberson retorts that religious beliefs change from within religious
communities and that scientific advances often refute previously held
scientific opinion.
At this point, Giberson’s argument gets really interesting — and
really dangerous. “I am happy to concede that science does indeed trump
religious truth about the natural world,” Giberson writes. “Galileo and
Darwin showed this only too clearly, even if it is completely lost on
Ken Ham and Al Mohler.”
Well count me in as being lost to the assertion that science trumps
the Bible “about the natural world” or about anything else. In his
original response to Jerry Coyne, Giberson made the argument in more
striking words: “Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth
about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly.” That
statement, with its reference to “revealed truth,” is even more shocking
than the first.
In the economy of a few words, Giberson throws the Bible under the
scientific bus. We should be thankful that his argument is so clear, for
it puts the case for theistic evolution in its proper light — as a
direct attack upon biblical authority.
There is more to Professor Giberson’s argument. ‘Theology and
biblical studies move forward as well in dramatic and revolutionary ways
but New Atheist critics dismiss this progress because it is not
acknowledged by lay people on Main Street or in intellectual backwaters
like those where Al Mohler and Ken Ham paddle about.”
And what does this theological “progress” look like? Consider this paragraph:
In ‘The God Delusion’ [Richard] Dawkins
eloquently skewers the tyrannical anthropomorphic deity of the Old
Testament—the God that supposedly commanded the Jews to go on genocidal
rampages and who occasionally went on his own rampages, flooding the
planet or raining fire and brimstone on wicked cities. But who believes
in this deity any more, besides those same fundamentalists who think the
earth is 10,000 years old? Modern theology has moved past this view of
God.
Giberson’s theological “progress” is to deny the Bible’s truthfulness
concerning crucial Old Testament texts. Modern theology rejects any
notion that God would flood the planet or rain judgment upon cities, he
insists. His summary: “Modern theology has moved past this view of God.”
In Giberson’s view, anyone who holds to the truthfulness and
historical character of these biblical texts is simply intellectually
backwards and unsophisticated. I can only wonder if the parents who send
their offspring to Eastern Nazarene College have any understanding of
what is taught there — and with such boldness and audacity.
In the last article in his series, Giberson makes the argument that
the Christian faith “is rooted in unique historical events that were
recorded by the early church as they tried to make sense of their
encounters with the risen Christ.” Is that the sum and substance of
Professor Giberson’s view of biblical inspiration — that the Bible is
the record of the early church’s attempt to “make sense” of Christ and
“unique historical events”?
We do know this: Professor Giberson asserts that to believe in the
truthfulness and historicity of the entire Bible is to paddle in an
“intellectual backwater.” Christians committed to biblical authority
should ponder that statement deeply, even as they keep paddling.
Karl Giberson, “Exposing the Straw Men of New Atheism,” BioLogos.org, Part 1 (September 16, 2010), Part 2 (October 2, 2010), Part 3 (October 8, 2010), Part 4 (October 22, 2010), Part 5 (October 25, 2010).
Jerry Coyne and others, “Does the Empirical Nature of Science Contradict the Revelatory Nature of Faith?,” Edge, January 21, 2009. Professor Giberson’s original response to Coyne is found in this forum.