Q&A 4: What does the Bible say about worldviews & political systems? Part I

All right, so I think what you should have is five pages of part one, and then six pages of part two. Part one for this week in the handout, and part two for next week. The question that we'll start today and continue next week, Q&A number four, is what does the Bible say about world views and political systems? Now let's just start off with the question, why would we ask a question like that? What does the Bible say about world views and political systems?

It says quite a bit. Pardon? It says quite a bit. Okay. It's all coming to an end. Yeah, the Bible does say quite a bit. What are some of the things, just to kind of introductorily look at things here, what are some of the things the Bible says about how people view the world? Does the Bible say anything direct that comes to mind? Pardon?

We're not of this world. Okay. All right. What else? A fool says in his heart, there is no God, right? There's another worldview, right? And so what does it say? That's a foolish worldview, right? We have had political systems that have also been married to maybe that's not the right word to use, but anyway, joined with atheism, the belief that there is no God. So there have been political systems that have combined that. Interestingly enough, in the last little less than a century, that worldview has been responsible for the deaths of approximately 100 million people. And just plain mass slaughter, as if people counted for nothing.

Was that Hitler's view? Was he an atheist? You know, it's interesting. Hitler was more of a non-theist. The only appeal that he had to theism was, for example, they appealed to Luther's rather negative reference to the Jews in support of what they were doing and how they were treating the Jews. But I'm referring in great part to the various expressions of communism. Various people come with different stories.

One fellow that years ago I knew fairly well, I'm not certain that he's still alive, but He was a missionary, his name was Dick Hillis, a missionary over in China when the Chinese came in and he told a story about a Chinese lieutenant holding a gun to his head to force Dick to give him the names and locations of the Christians that he knew.

And Dick would not. And so the lieutenant held the pistol to Dick's head and said, you know, I can blow your head off. And Dick says, that's all you can do. And so with that, the lieutenant figured he'd lost the battle and put his gun back. And so that's because that's why I got to know Dick, because that happened before I was born. But, at any rate, Dick's one who lived through it.

A great many did not. So, at any rate, worldviews can have a radical disconnect from biblical Christianity. And we'll be taking a look at some of those. Some of these are recognized by Christians fairly easily, and some are not. So we'll want to examine that. One of the things that we'll be looking at as we go through here is what are some of the ways that people are influenced about worldviews and political systems? How do people get influenced towards a worldview or political system?

College is often one of the places where these things are bought and sold, so to speak. And you can have professors that get intense. I've told the account of an Eastern religions professor that shortly after the class started, and I was wanting to objectively study Eastern religions, and the professor didn't like that. That's why he basically whacked me across the face, I mean hard. across the face, and about half the students said, do it again, and about the other half said, no, this is stupid. But there can be aggressive opposition. Aggressive opposition, students can be belittled. I know in my own case, my grades were impacted because I continued to express an objective view of the various world religions and was not willing to dabble in them as the professor was encouraging.

Doesn't sometimes the economic in times like in Hitler's time where there were problems and things and you could use that to tell people I can solve all your problems Yeah, what he's talking about, a lot of these worldviews sell themselves as, I can solve this problem or that problem. And so there is an appeal to people of some sort. In some cases, it's a carrot approach. And in other cases, it's a stick approach. There's an appeal to people with a lot of these worldviews as well. So anyway, let's look at this area down here towards the bottom.

Oh, I will mention one other thing. The material we'll be studying this week and next week has been written by Chester McAuley. I got permission to include it in here. There are a few things that I edited out just in order to bring more focus. And in some cases, I had a footnote or two. For example, in one case, he said, I'm not sure who said this. And I went and looked it up and gave the reference. So things like that. But pretty much, this is Jester McAuley's material. At the bottom of page one, it has the title of their worldview.

Though the Prophet Isaiah, through the Prophet Isaiah, God declares, my thoughts are not your thoughts. The Hebrew word for thoughts refers to inventions, values, devices, and here to a way of thinking. The contrast between divine thought and human thought is of enormous measure. Divine thought is communicated to us through scriptures, the Bible, the Word of God. Here is what creates a great divide between the Christian who views the Bible as God's intentional and inspired revelation.

This is what God is saying. And a key aspect of that is God has revealed in His Word something we could not know otherwise. How many here, if it wasn't for the Bible saying so, would have thought, you know, I need to be Restored in my relationship with the Lord and in order for that to happen God's got to send down His son and be born of the Virgin Mary in some obscure little town I Mean I don't know about you. I wouldn't cook that up. You know that wouldn't be my solution to things That wouldn't be even my assessment of the problem were it not for the fact that God revealed them that that perspective And it's interesting, in a logical debate with some atheists, they actually admitted that within the Christian system, the Christian system of revelation is actually logically consistent. They don't necessarily agree with it, but within the system it is logically consistent.

But it puts a Christian at a radically different viewpoint from those who reject and don't recognize that revelation. those who don't look upon, if there is a God, that he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ and his word. So that puts the Christian on an entirely different view of life and what is afterlife as well. So, as he puts it, failure to see this distinction between the Christian view And the world's view, lacking an understanding of God's revelation, lies at the root of all error and confusion. The moment he says that we assert scripture to be the word of God, we engage in deadly combat with all that surrounds. For the word of God does not supplement human thought, it rather denies it.

Yet the importance of truth dictates the direction we must take. Here we are walking around on ostensibly the same planet. Here we are, you know, breathing the same air, you know, and probably get our clothes in most of the same places and that sort of thing. And yet, we look at this world around us in a radically different way. because we see that God has intentionally revealed himself and revealed things about us that we would not have otherwise known. So the person who is not recognizing that is looking at the entire world, their life, relationships with people, the value of people, all differently.

So, the object of this writing is to identify some of the may know where the battle lies and how Satan has moved to capture the minds of men, making them suitable for his kingdom. The need for such a study is supported by the shrewd nature of Satan, our opponent. The system he initiates is subtle, and without mental alertness coupled with deep rooting in biblical knowledge, we who are to be more than conquerors will become his servants. I fear, however, that to say, will become is far too optimistic. have become.

Whichever may be true, let's start at the foundational truth, divine viewpoint versus human viewpoint. Here is the basic issue of life. Where shall we build? If we think highly of man's opinions, we will have little place for the Bible. We must see the chasm between divine viewpoint and human viewpoint. As we quoted before, Isaiah 55a displays the concept in short but clear expression.

My thoughts are not your thoughts. God's way of thinking is not the natural human way of thinking. In observing Isaiah's record, some will respond by denying its validity. Since, they will say, there is no God, there is therefore no revelation. Or some may say there is a God, but he has said nothing. The most these may hope for is the best of human opinion. Without divine viewpoint, the most we can do is turn to the most convincing philosophies of man and hope for the best.

You know, it certainly strikes me, going back there, my thoughts are not in your thoughts. And when you're a god, you just do. Yeah, yeah. So his thoughts make me think, what are his thoughts? He knows the future already, before the foundation of the earth. what his thoughts are. God has not revealed his thoughts and his way of thinking exhaustively, but he has revealed himself truthfully to the extent that he's revealed. And that's what we have in God's Word. God's intentional revelation of himself, and it is all truth.

Truth with a capital T. And that's where we, you know, as we step into the situations, you know, one of the environments where we get sold things is in school, and I would say a great part in colleges, but not exclusively. Randy was in junior high, probably about the latter part of junior high, when he had one of his teachers really challenging openly, you know, the basis for his Christianity. So I was junior high, public school. And so he came with sort of a dazed look, and he started asking me about some of these things that the teacher was saying. And I said, Randy, I spent quite a bit of time looking into this.

And I said, there are some very good answers to the questions that he's asking. And there are probably better answers than he's aware exist, because nobody's ever brought them to him. I said, you should have no problem responding with some good answers for this teacher. But not everybody is so equipped. A lot of people will go into that classroom and they just get steered away.

And because this professor has a master's or a doctorate or three doctorates, I don't care, it would seem, oh, there must be some massive amount of evidence that puts the Bible aside. And I would say what I have discovered, it's not a massive amount of evidence at all. It's a massive amount of unverifiable assumption. That's really the distinction.

Yeah. And like I used to say, people who tell him, would tell him they're atheists or agnostics, things like Romans chapter 1, 16 and on, that tells you that you have no excuse. You're not an atheist, you just choose not to believe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and we'll talk about exactly that. There is a suppression of the truth that goes on.

Let's look at the part that says, what is the origin of the cosmos? Those who build on the Word of God affirm that the universe came into existence by the decree of God. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. You know, that one sentence has all sorts of major statements.

In the beginning says there was a beginning, right? And by the way, the Greek philosophers, you know, different ones, pretty much universally said that the physical universe was eternal, always existed. It was the gods, the Greek gods, that came later. So the physical universe, in their assumption, was eternal. But here is the Bible, the very first, in the beginning, God, who was there first, created the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth were brought into existence by God, and not the other way around. God is eternal, not matter.

And so you have an atheist now, the way I described an atheist a Sunday or two back here, was an atheist is someone who says they don't believe in God, and they're absolutely certain in their mind that absolutely nothing created absolutely everything. Boy, that's really spectacular. That is quite a conclusion. So, then it says, when we are told, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, we have a figure of speech called Merismas, which opposites stand for totality. Heaven and earth means the entire universe. This is kind of the two halves principle. in the Jewish figure of speech. The creative act of God was accomplished a relatively short time ago.

I started off majoring in theology and eventually decided against that to civil engineering. And one of the reasons was as I was going through the classes and I Took quite a few classes and went out into the field quite a few times. I ran into a great number of questions that were not being answered. And I went places and saw things that I wasn't being told about. And so eventually I came to the point, I said, you know, it's very interesting.

I enjoy studying it, but a lot of this is just a big waste of time. We went to the Grand Canyon and started at the top and went down to the bottom. The rocks at the bottom are supposedly before there was life. I was puzzled by a report by Dr. Clifford Burdick who said that he had found pine pollen in those bottom rocks that were supposedly from a time when there was no life. And that several other geologists from Loma Linda University had found the same thing. But they kept saying, well this must be contaminated. And they'd take another sample. They're all contaminated. This is terrible. Right? So I found that.

We went to a place near a town called Hagerman in southern Idaho. They call it Hagerman Horse Quarry because there are so many horses. And there are hundreds and hundreds of horse fossils all collected in one spot from some sort of a flood. And there are so many horse fossils, it's just a mass, a huge mass of these horses.

And I'm trying to figure out, when does that happen here on this planet the way things are now? It doesn't. And so I began seeing one thing after the next. You know, have you ever seen pictures of this horse sequence where you have this little dog-like creature and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger? And what I found was, you know, they show this nice little sequence, but that's not the way it is in the real world. In the real world, that little dog-like creature is very, very similar to an animal described in the Bible as a rock hyrax. That exists now.

And many of these different supposed horse species existed like it would be on one continent and not on another. And then the next thing that developed would show up on another continent, but not on the place where the supposed ancestors started from. And rather than being a nice little clean tree, the whole thing was a big pile of twigs, and the connections between them could not be made. The only way you make this horse evolution is by assumption. The facts do not point to it. That is almost going to be my point.

As we see each one of these progress, and today we still have that first creature, Yes. Why does one creature change so quickly, supposedly, and something else stays exactly the way it was hundreds of millions of years ago? Anybody hear of a ginkgo tree? That's a so-called ancient tree that's still around, still the same. A great many of the animals, the oldest fossil and plants, the oldest fossil we have is very much like the living thing today.

This is true of bats. The oldest fossil we have of a bat, guess what it looks like? A bat! And you know like these giraffes, they'll show these drawings of these giraffes getting longer and longer necks. Do you know how many fossils we have of giraffes with shorter necks? None.

Giraffes also have, because of their being so tall, when they go down, put their head down, drink water, which you see how they do this real awkward thing. When they put their head down, were it not for a special series of valves in their neck to keep the pressure down, their brains would just explode with hemorrhage. And then when they put their head up, were it not for the structure that they have in their neck, they would pass out. So I don't know how you get a giraffe surviving even for a day. What you find is, we neither find evidence of, nor can such a halfway evolved creature exist.

That's what we find. It's the whole thing. We could give numerous examples. It's one that I personally spent a fair amount of time checking into. Writing to professors. Writing to geologists. Going to sites myself to check things out. Taking pictures. A fair amount of checking things out. We'll get into that later perhaps.

Those who relate only to a human viewpoint foundation simply say that matter is just there. That's why I have the teasing, you know, they're absolutely certain that absolutely nothing created absolutely everything. Because what the atheist does is like the Greek philosophers commonly did, even if they believed in a god or gods. And that is that the physical universe is eternal and supreme, has always been in existence. The more we study science, the more we know that it can't be.

Okay. Let's take a look at page three. So the diagram there has the picture, the origin, which has a question mark. Let's all get here. See, the remarkable thing is that there is something rather than nothing, right? Why is there something? Why are we able to sit here or stand here and ask these questions, rather than there be nobody to ask any of the questions? But a questionable source or origin, over lots of time, has a developing process with chance events, with random events, to bring the level of detail and order that there is right now. That's the idea. So this is the perspective. that is taught in the universities. Okay? What you see right there. You know, how old is the earth? Oh, they usually say about 4.6 billion years is, you know, figure they come up with. Well, what was before that? What was before that? What was before that? And a lot of, not all, but a lot of them will come back to some sort of a big bang. Alright?

How did the material get there for that? Why was it configured in that way such that it would create a bang assuming that that's correct? Which is, by the way, just assumption. Okay? How did that get there? And why did it get there in such a position and condition that it would create this big bang in the first place? You're talking about energy. Where did the matter come from? Where did the energy come from to create that? And how come out of that primordial explosion we have order?

Yeah, just lucky. And when you come right down to it, It is unverifiable assumption. And this is what I finally arrived at. As Randy pointed out sometime back here when we had a class in apologetics, there was a mathematician, Kurt Gödel, from Austria, that some many decades ago laid out that actually even mathematics has to start with some unverifiable assumptions. I think he numbered about seven of them. Seven unverifiable assumptions. You have to start with something that mathematicians work with is unverifiable. You can't go back and check it.

And one of the things that I discovered is you start looking at this in various realms. of mathematics, physics, geology, different things, you end up with, you have to start with a set of assumptions. And the way I put it is this, human beings are made, this is consistent with the biblical view, human beings are made to be given their starting assumptions. That's why we have to start with unverifiable assumptions somewhere. To step outside of just being in absolute ignorance and being stuck in ourselves, we also have to exercise faith. Anybody ever hear of solipsism? Sometimes different emphasis on different syllables. You know, put an emphasis on a different syllable. Solipsism is the idea that only me and my ideas exist.

How do we philosophically get out of ourselves? How do I know that I'm not just extending out and there's this world out here all out of my imagination? We don't. We are beings that have I believe God has made clear, have been made such as to give us our assumptions and our worldview. If man by himself tries to arrive at that, it's empty. And what do you mean by that?

Well, in his case, in that case of one of the work he did, to rely upon that, to rely upon art, either it would be one dimension or it would be another dimension. Art would be another dimension. Though art is another dimension, that's not so. We would all have to have a different dimension in order for... But see, even a different dimension is an assumption.

In other words, if I start with just myself, I can't get out of myself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In other words, if I say only me and my ideas exist, how do I know you have any ideas? How do I know, from a purely human standpoint, how do I know that rather than you being an actual independent person, that you're just part of my ideas? That's right. And pretty soon we're all just non-personal islands. That's why it's like the I-1 dimension. Remember the dimension of the others and the other one? Yeah. Okay, let's look at the next question.

It says, where did evil originate? The Christian viewpoint asserts that evil is not part of original creation, for God pronounced it good. And when he made man male and female, he even said, very good, okay? Evil entered our world by man's failure to fulfill his responsibility to God. Adam, in Genesis 3, rebelled against the ordered plan of obedience established by God as creator. Thus, evil entered. The secular reply, which does not consider biblical revelation, again tells us that evil is just there. Its origin is unknown.

Ultimately, part of the difficulty with materialism, the idea that the material realm is really all that exists, is that concepts like personality and evil end up having no real significance. And this is why in the communist system, which denies God's existence, You know, hey, if I want something to be some certain way, it doesn't matter how many million people I slaughter, because after all, they're just stuff. They're just stuff. There's no particular value to people. Whereas the biblical view is man has created an image of God. And therefore, people do have a value based on God's value and worth and character. But in the material system, it is very difficult to establish anything other than just, I don't care much about anything, except what I want to, if I want to, when I want to. And it could change tomorrow, or this afternoon.

One of the difficulties that a materialist has is establishing anything as being evil. Not only does he have a hard time saying how evil originates, he may have difficulty saying anything is evil. My brother was teasing his next door neighbor, atheist friend.

He had been having some long discussions with them, and my brother had been saying, well really, if what you're saying is true, that we're all just matter, nothing really matters. Nothing, I mean, you know, if your life ends, you know, or anybody that you care about ends, well it's really just matter, and the feelings of this is important, or this person makes a difference, that's all it is, but even the feelings are just material, because nothing is spiritual. we're just a bunch of atoms and physics. We're just chemistry and physics, that's all we are. And the feeling of personality, the feeling of the value of a person is purely arbitrary.

So when this atheist neighbor had a baby daughter, my brother said, may I see your daughter? And then he held the baby daughter in his arms, and he said, according to the viewpoint that you hold, this little precious baby daughter of yours could just as well be eaten for dinner, and it really doesn't matter. Well, the guy just was in shock. He practically went out of his mind at that thought.

But that's a part of the problem, is they have no consistent basis for saying that this little baby daughter is a precious being created in the image of God. Instead, this little baby daughter is just simply the result of random chemical and physical processes. That a hundred years from now will have no significance whatsoever and maybe less.

So is the history of the cosmos uniform in development? One of the things I kept trying to drum into our heads as I was going through the geology classes is the present is the key to the past. Whatever processes you observe, whatever natural laws you observe, everything on into the past must be explained in view of the presently observable laws and processes. Everything.

Therefore, the evolution was not a result of examining lots of evidence and having incontrovertible evidence that evolution was true. Not at all. It was faith in the assumption. Faith in the assumption. As a matter of fact, in a great many cases it was faith in the assumption, even if it was contrary to the facts, or there were no facts to support it.

2 Peter 3, 6 and 7 and on into verse 13 is quoted there. through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But the present heaven and earth, heavens and earth, by his word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. But according to his promise, we are looking for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." So there was a world that was the world before the time of Noah, destroyed by flood, but of an earth of this present existence. But there will come a time when the earth of this present existence will go away. Could be as close as 1,007 years from now. Could be as close as that. This world will be gone. It will disappear. It will cease to exist.

There are different figures of speech. As a matter of fact, some of you had questions about them. And we'll address those. Peter describes it as the elements melting. Other descriptions from the Apostle John are heaven and earth fled away. Things like that. So we'll be addressing that question. So there is a, but at each one there is a divine intervention. How did the flood take place? A divine intervention. How will this present heavens and earth end? Divine intervention.

If you ask someone who has a completely materialist, scientific point of view, they will say, well, the sun's going to end up growing cold and everything on earth will die because there's no energy source. But that's a billion years out. God says, no, not that long. He's got something a whole lot sooner that will end everything. And it's not just a heat death. It's not just that everything will turn cold and dark and dead. Of course. The plan isn't working, is it? Well, not so much.

But the point that scripture makes and what is revealed is that there are times where God explicitly intervenes in the physical universe to bring it into existence, to bring it to an end, and at certain particular times in between those extremes, the beginning and the end. Now, in order to explain our present on the basis of the way the humanist, the materialist looks, he posits enormous dates for the age of the Earth. The human body, for example, is the end product of development from single cells and it must have taken billions of years. Development from a single cell to the complex human body in a few thousand years is too much for anyone to buy.

I was reading this last week about a fellow who was a geochemist at Sandia National Laboratories. And another fellow was talking to him and saying, do you know that if you take the various minerals that are in the ocean and you measure the rate at which those minerals are being added to in the ocean, you, depending on the mineral, end up with different ages, maximum ages possible for the ocean.

Assuming the ocean was created, oh no, not that word. Assuming the ocean was initially completely free of any of those minerals. As you go through the various ones, what you find is that The answer varies depending on the mineral. Making those assumptions, and by the way, you can't verify them, right?

But making those assumptions about the current rate of those minerals coming off of the continents and taking the current concentration of each of those minerals in the ocean, you end up with ages of the Earth's oceans of something like, you know, five to 20,000 years and ranges in between for the maximum age for the ocean. Well, when this geochemist was asked, you know, why, why isn't there a calculation, you know, of the minerals and the way they're going into the ocean, the amount that we have. I mean, those are all measurable things. Why don't we get some age of billions of years?

And so he said, well, I don't know. There must be some means where we're losing the salt in the oceans, but we haven't discovered it yet. But then he was asked, well, so what confidence do you have that the Earth is actually that old? And he says, oh, there's a whole bunch of evolutionists out there, and I believe I trust them. But he really had no answer, and here he is a geochemist. He's supposed to be the guy with the answers. He had no answer whatsoever. None scientific. What he didn't have was what?

Faith. Faith. Now, what we see on top of page four, the big title there, is Relationship with God Possible. Scripture, which of course we look upon as a revelation from God, informs us that God made a verbal agreement with Abraham to provide a savior and restorer of the universe. A relationship to God is based on the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, His cross, death, and resurrection. Humanism would tell us relationship to God is not possible since His existence is endowed anyway, and He is certainly not a personal God.

Social phenomenon, therefore, is a result of impersonal forces. Personal interactions from a purely materialistic standpoint is simply according to natural laws and you have no more significance than the grain of sand. Except, unless you invent one. Unless you invent a significance or invent a purpose.

So now, we get into the question that we started with. How is society to be governed and perpetuated under the presence of evil? What do you assume about evil, okay, and then how do we govern society based on that evil? What are some answers that people have had about how do we govern society considering the problems we have? What are some solutions or The systems that people would come up with.

They just need more education. Oh yes, that's right. Educate them more. There we go. That'll fix it. More education. Yep. Alright. Good. What other solutions would people come up with? Laws. Pardon? Laws. More laws. That's right. And if things aren't quite right, even more laws on top of that must be necessary, right? Yeah. Okay, good. What are some other thoughts? It's all dependent on the environment the child was raised in. Okay, yeah.

Let's come up with a blame game. It's, you know, what was the environment the child was raised in? So we've got to tweak the environment, right? The Robin Hood idea of take away from the people who have and give to the have nots, so everybody's all the same. So the Robin Hood approach for the government is Robin Hood. Okay, alright. How about, let's not make any laws. Or go ahead and make whatever laws you want, I'm going to ignore them anyway.

Everything is relative. Yeah, everything is relative. Even my relatives are relative. If I have a system in which natural laws are in place, and it's been put this way by even those of the secular realm, to put it as a question or even a statement, how can you determine what ought to be from what is? How can you determine what ought to be from what is? Anybody got any ideas? The Bible. Pardon? The Bible. Oh, but no, no, no. They're not allowing that. No, we can't have that. So how do we determine what ought to be just from what is? Any ideas there?

People's best guesses. People's best guesses, right? And how do we determine what guess is the best? And which people are the best at guessing? Trial and error. And matter of fact, you can call it trial, but maybe there isn't any such thing as calling something error. How do you say it didn't turn out good? So maybe it's just trial.

You see, here's part of the difficulty. that without God, without God revealing truth to us, the person without that revelation is in a spot. They're in a tough spot, because it's this question, how do you determine the ought from the is? How do you determine what ought to be, just from what is? Is it eliminating confusion? Pardon? Is it eliminating confusion, so to speak? Okay, if you say that the ought is to eliminate confusion, okay, why?

See, that's the part of the problem is that you can't come up with any whys that aren't just purely arbitrary. Whatever is, is. Right? You ever heard somebody say, well I like things that are natural? You know, whatever happens is natural. Right? If we were in here and right out front we heard a crash, we'd have some concerns and people would probably be opening windows and running out the front door and seeing you know, what just happened. And we would have this sense, well that ought not to be, or we ought to do something. Somebody call 9-1-1. Why? Somebody go help those people, see if anybody's hurt. Why?

The world simply has no way to determine the ought from the is. They don't. It ends up being arbitrary things like feelings. Well, that's because of what I want, or this is what I don't want. I like this, I don't like that. It's not my problem. It's not my problem. And then you also run into another problem. And that is, some people want this, and other people want that. And that may be at odds. Well, they're wrong. Yeah, and how do you determine what's wrong? See?

The difficulty that we have as human beings is determining the ought from what is, is a very difficult thing to do by ourselves. And that's a part of the difficulty. What they end up, because of the assumptions, and that's all it is, because of the assumptions, it forces us into the idea that in the direction that things ought to go.

After all, if the assumptions dictate that that's how we got here, then we ought to say, what would evolution have us do? Not what would Jesus do, but what would evolution have us do? The difficulty even with that, however, is, what was Adolf Hitler's answer to evolution? Evolution, he said, created, this is a superior race to that one.

And these people need to be eliminated. And he called it the final solution. Yeah. Survival of the fittest. That's right. And then you also have that communism and Nazism both dealt with might makes right. Survival of the fittest is ultimately the principle. OK. We're running out of time here, but there's still just one more page. What I would like to do is to move on down here where Chester McAuley looks there at the inadequacy of the human viewpoint.

And it says there at the bottom of page 4, there's a heading, Man's Exalted Beginning. They Knew God. They Knew God. But why didn't it turn out good from there? You see that as a heading on page 5. Man's dual failure. They did not honor him as God or give thanks. They became futile in their speculations. Professing to be wise, they became fools. They pressed down, they suppressed the knowledge of God and pushed it away. That's Paul's analysis of the human condition. They pushed and pressed the knowledge of God away.

See, an atheist does not have a big mass of facts standing behind what he believes. He doesn't. What he has are assumptions based on pushing down and pressing away the knowledge of God. and therefore he builds a worldview based on that. But it is a worldview that is based on denying the truth. In another less antagonistic philosophy class, The professor had an oral final. Each student got a different question.

And the question that Professor Engel asked of me, he says, Mr. Peterman, you've got four minutes. Since it's clear from your papers that you believe in God, you have four minutes to tell us all what difference that makes in your life. Quite an opportunity. By the way, Professor Engel was a retired pastor.

So that helped. At any rate, it's a little different reception from the Eastern Religions class. But what was interesting is here's this classroom full of people and one of the guys comes up afterwards and identifies himself as an atheist. Well, he didn't stay that way, but I think the thing is everybody in that room, everybody in that room had this innate knowledge of God and it was only a matter of varying degrees to which they pushed that away or come to recognize it. Okay, then next week Because after what he's done here, he's kind of walked through the Romans 1 passage here.

And next week, we'll start delving into some of these different systems of thought. And we've just kind of touched on some of them now. It's worldviews and even political systems. And examine those in view of what Scripture says. OK? Questions? Oh, does anybody have more of those questions to turn in? A list of questions? If you happen to have those, I'll be happy to take those. And let's take a minute to pray, okay?

Lord, we thank you for what you have revealed. We thank you that you have intentionally revealed yourself and what you plan for this universe and what you plan for even after this universe is gone. And we thank you for your marvelous grace and love that you have intentionally and deliberately