by Jim Pamplin
W
at Southern
California’s Long Beach Pike in a bygone era, the Crazie Maize was one
of those magical places on Earth where the inside of a room is larger than the
building that contains it! Mirrored hallways twisted away in all directions, but
only one of those paths could lead me back to the real world outside. And that
was the passage I could not find.
If “seeing is believing,” my belief system was shattered. Impossibly large rooms opened before me at every turn. But when I tried to step into them, a team of startled boys who looked just like me blocked my path. From time to time, I found spaces I could move into without being challenged by multiple reflections of my own image – only to bang into invisible walls of glass. Eventually I wandered to a place where I could see my parents standing outside, waving and shouting directions. They could see me and the elusive exit only a short distance away. But in my state of confusion, none of their hand waving or muffled shouts made any sense.
Finally, my mother paid the price of admission, transcended my perplexing space-time domain, and led me out into the sunshine. Little did we realize we had just mirrored the Human Paradox… and its solution.
Like children lost in a maze of mirrors, Mankind cannot make coherent sense of the world around him. For all their successes, science and philosophy cannot account for their own underpinnings – the preconditions for intelligible experience, science, logic, and morality. The uniformity of nature, natural laws, the laws of thought, moral boundaries, the ability of the mind to comprehend the world, cannot be explained in terms of observable data. By the conduct of our daily lives we all testify that such invariable abstract entities are essential. Yet the atheist’s worldview schizophrenically denies them.
Sometimes scientist, sometimes
showman, the late Dr. Carl Sagan wrote in his 1980 book Cosmos,
“The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”
Read here, “material universe.” Naturalism teaches that nature is the whole of reality – that all that exists are material objects and the forces they exert on one-another. Ultimately, objects and their forces resolve into wave-particles in motion. From quarks to galaxies, nothing exists but wave-particles in motion - according to Naturalism.
In our heart of hearts, we all know that God exists. We know God exists just as surely as we know the sun will come up in the morning. We know God exists with as much certainly as we know the circumference of any circle is pi times its diameter. We know these things because the tangible world around us lies embedded in an unseen universe whose abstract laws express the immutable genius and constancy of our Creator. Those laws are universal, invariant, and non-material. The equation for an ellipse is just as true on the backside of the moon is it is scrawled across a classroom chalkboard. Those universal, invariant, non-material truths are not inventions of the human mind. They are discoveries. They are objectively real- true whether we know them or not. They were true before we arrived. They will be true long after we leave. Neither our perception of abstract laws nor our denial of them has any effect on their existence. Though matter obeys them, they are not simply properties of matter – they reach far beyond what can be touched, seen, heard, smelled, tasted, weighed or measured.
Imagine daily life in Carl Sagan’s universe. Try reading the morning paper in a world devoid of such non-material realities as similarities and differences, dimension, symbols, categories, quantities and magnitudes. These abstract entities and many others are precursors to thought – the building blocks from which thoughts are constructed. Without them, you could not discover your way out of bed in the morning, much less find the kitchen or read a newspaper, tie your shoes, ride a bicycle, or drive a car.
The trouble with expelling GOD from reality is that all that is non-material goes with Him! All abstract truth departs. The laws of logic vanish! All information disappears. Knowledge cannot exist. Mind cannot process. Software ceases. These things have no mass or wavelength and do not extend themselves in space – therefore, by Naturalism, they cannot exist. In a naturalistic universe, thoughts are only a matter of chemistry and physics, mere ripples of matter and energy either predetermined by initial conditions at the instant of the Big Bang, or else coughed up from the quantum vacuum by random fluctuations. No person’s thoughts are un-coerced. One’s sense of being is an illusion and has no more significance than a portrait placed in front of a mirror, its lifeless eyes gazing at their own reflection. Decisions are illusion. Freedom is pretense. There is no meaning, no purpose. There are only wave-particles in motion, if God does not exist. Nothing is beautiful. Nothing is ugly. Nothing is good. Nothing is evil. Nothing is true – not even Naturalism.
Aaahh…now there’s the rub! If Naturalism is true, then nothing is true, and Naturalism cannot be true. The notion that Nature is the whole of reality implodes upon itself. It is self-refuting.
Herein lies proof of God’s existence – the impossibility of the contrary. Without GOD, nothing is true. Without GOD, one cannot prove anything.
Man-made religions and philosophies have no real choice but to pose arbitrary and self-contradictory notions. No worldview can, by its own bootstraps, justify its presuppositions. Like children lost in a maze of mirrors, Fallen Man cannot find his way. That’s the bad news.
Enter the Good News :
Just as my mother brought an outside perspective into the Crazie Maze those many years ago to rescue her befuddled son, so GOD has transcended Mankind’s morass with Good News. He has given us a lens through which to view the world, its history and its future. We call that extraterrestrial perspective the Holy Bible. Only the biblical worldview accounts for the underpinnings of thought, reason and knowledge. Describing itself as the Word of GOD - a message system from outside our domain of time and space, the Bible provides the preconditions for intelligible experience, science, logic, and morality. It is only through the lens of revealed Truth that the world around us resolves into focus.
In the beginning was the LOGOS (Word, Reason, Design).
And the LOGOS was with God. And the
LOGOS was God. The same was in the
beginning with God. All things were made by him. Nothing that was made was made
without him. In him was life, and
the life was the light of men. And the light shone in darkness, and the darkness
did not absorb it…That was the true light that lights every man who comes into
the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world did
not know him. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him. But to as
many as did receive him, to them he gave power to become the sons of God, even
to those that believe on his name. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the
will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the LOGOS became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory,
glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
- The
Gospel According to John, chapter 1, verses 1-5 and
9-14.
Bibliography:
Greg L. Bahnsen, A Biblical Introduction to Apologetics, Covenant Media Foundation 1-800-553-3938.
Does God Exist? A Formal Debate Between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein - (a free Real Audio recording of the world famous debate) (Also available in audiotape from Covenant Media Foundation, $15.00)
Chuck Missler, Cosmic Codes, Koinonia House, Couer d’Alene, ID http://www.khouse.org
Lecture entitled, Clear Thinking on Science and Religion by Dr. John Mark Reynolds, delivered October 8, 1996, Simon Greenleaf University.
Questions or comments? Please email jim@darwinisdead.com .
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