Defense of the Faith - Secular Worldviews

So last week we had a discussion where we talked about logical fallacies as a good portion of the class. We're going to actually look at applying that for this class, hopefully, so that not only does it seem like something you heard last week, but it feels like something you have some opportunity to observe and maybe even kind of solidifying our minds by participating in thinking through some of the things we'll go over today. As usual, I like to make sure that we cover any definitions of things that we're going to be talking about that are at the core of the lesson. Because, well, one of the logical fallacies is ambiguity, where you use words different ways. So we want to avoid that. But also, it's important that we all have a Same page kind of understanding to what we're saying and thinking about here. Not because I'm wanting to brainwash you so that you all think the same way, but so that we can communicate clearly.

So let's talk about the first one. We want to talk about the word faith. And here I say faith is a noun. It is the substance of what we believe. How many of you have heard people say faith and they just talk about believing in things in a mystical sort of a way? There are things that we might say we take by faith.

For example, I personally haven't touched Christ's wounds like Thomas did. But did Thomas touch Christ's wounds? Well, according to the records that we have, Jesus showed up to multiple people having been resurrected, and Thomas touched his wounds, and we have recordings of those things. So my faith isn't in the mystical idea of a resurrected Christ that no one saw, but one guy told another guy about, maybe, kind of, sort of.

So faith is in the substance of what we believe. The other Sunday School class that Mike Doyle and cohorts are teaching is about faith, and I am behind on listening to it, but I actually am going to be trying to listen to it this week. It sounds like it's going to be very interesting. I looked at some of the handouts or the slides from the way Hal taught it a while back and that was very good. So faith though, we want to talk about it being something of substance and not something of mysticism, or spiritual woo-woo stuff. I don't know if woo-woo is a really good word to have in a definition, but we'll go with it.

The next one we have on here is humanism. It's an outlook that attaches prime importance to humans instead of religion, the supernatural, or deity. So if you hear of somebody being a humanist, they're focused on the perspective that humans get to interpret all of the data and declare what is true. We'll just put it that way bluntly.

There's probably some good questions as to why that's a logical perspective, but we'll get into that a little bit later on. Is it possible to have religious humanism? There's definitely religious humanists who try to blend humanism with various religious views, including Christianity. It's not a consistent perspective, but it's definitely something that does exist. Christian science is actually even different from that. Unless you're talking about Mary Baker Eddy Christian science, or you're talking about Christians doing science.

The next word we've got here is skepticism. The idea that unless something can be proven out empirically, then it is not true and should be either investigated further or ignored for absolute knowledge. Okay, maybe missing a comma there. But the idea is that with skepticism, until it's been proven out, it's surely false, and it needs to be proven out empirically.

I didn't have the word empiricism or empirically in the handout. Is everybody comfortable with the word empirical? Or is that one I should define? Okay. Empirical evidence or the idea of empiricism is that you have to have a physical reproducible concept for whether or not something is true. They will usually concede that history is not something you can be empirical about and they'll kind of grimacingly concede that you can't be empirical with history. But they want empiricism when it comes to science or our understanding about anything in life in the universe that needs to be proven out physically. Well evolutionists are, well the irony of that is that I think that there is no empirical evidence for macroevolution, but they would like to say that they're empiricists or that they are skeptics.

So we're going to take a look at the difference between agnosticism and atheism here in just a second, which I think we'll kind of articulate that a little bit more. Agnosticism is a name for the philosophical position that is only certain of their uncertainty, and I try to be a little bit of play on words there, but holding a position of empirical skepticism without the commitment to there being no God. And agnostic says, I can't know that there's no God, but I certainly don't put my faith in God, or a God, or faith in atheism, because that's an absolute position. They can't prove that there is or is not a god from their perspective, so they're agnostic. They're without knowledge of whether there is truth on those things. And atheism is a name for the philosophical position that is certain that there is no god or gods. Okay, so A being the negative prefix, and gnosis, for agnosticism, gnosis is knowledge, and atheism is a theist, so without god.

And just because I think it's interesting, deism is the position that there is a higher being, a God, but not any of the commonly held positions of religion. You may believe in God, but you don't believe in the God of the Bible, or at least not as the Bible portrays him. You think there's just a deity. A lot of the AA movement, as they've moved further and further away from what used to be kind of a biblical position on maybe they would show God sort of in a biblical light in the earlier days, but it's moved now to this idea of a higher being. Unless you're atheist, and I don't know how they handle that, because I guess atheists go to AA2 sometimes.

And then the last item on our definition is moral relativism, and this is the idea that all morals are relative, subjective, and are not objective, true, or universally consistent. Moral relativity is an interesting problem because what you end up getting is this situation of that's true for you, but it's not true for me.

And that can get very interesting because what it ends up is being more and more permissive for moral behavior because there is no absolute. The interesting thing is that it rarely gets less and less permissive. It has a tendency to become more and more permissive.

And one last logical tidbit that I had Jeremy Doan listen to the lesson last week and mention something to me and he articulated something I thought I should articulate back to you and that is it is possible for something to be logical or logically true but false.

If you start with a false assumption but reason outward from it with using inductive reasoning, you can conclude a logical conclusion that is by its roots false. Is everybody following with what that says? It's important to understand that someone could say something is true, but if they start from a bad place, it's true based on the bad starting point. Examples of that would be if you start with a worldview that is based on a set of assumptions, you can derive all kinds of things based on those sets of assumptions.

And it will be consistent and true within the worldview, but that doesn't make it actually true, it just makes it self-consistent. Was it one of the things that you heard last week, didn't start off, didn't start off with a fallacy? Yeah. I don't remember what it's called. Well, we're going to go over the list of fallacies in just a minute, but Jeremy articulated that and I thought it was worth reiterating just in case it was vague last week.

Alright, so we're going to talk about the most prevalent secular worldviews with agnosticism or atheism being the predominant representation of that in the universities today and growing in the media and presented as Truth in education. When you go into the school system, when you go to the science class, and they talk about where did the universe come from, cosmology, you might possibly find some teachers talking about, well, some people don't agree with this, but I am required to tell you that evolution is true and is the case. and that is in part because of this growing movement of humanism and the agnostic or atheistic perspective of the universe.

The authority of the secular worldview is man. Man is at the center. Man decides all things. Now, there's lots of different ways that I find that to be peculiar. One of the ideas is that why does man get to be the decider and get to be the center of the universe, so to speak? That seems semi-arbitrary. I'm sorry, did you say something? Yeah, we get to call the shots, we get to make the rules. For a while.

So the funny thing is that if Assuming, going through some of the thinking of secular humanism and the evolutionary perspective, which we'll get to a little bit more later, it is possible that humans are actually this really low-level species in the grand scheme of time, and there are other more either evolved or capable species in the future, and so making it about humans is a little naive or optimistic. You know, what if there are Vulcans who are much more logical than us out in the universe, right? But we don't know. We only have what we have right now that we know about.

But making man kind of the measure of all things is an interesting decision to make. And part of the empiricism there is the next statement, because man is the measure of all things, everything must be measured by mankind to be known. What can we not know? Well, as Rumsfeld said, there's the known knowns, the known unknowns, but what concerned him the most was the unknown unknowns. But the thing that's important to ask is, what can we not know in science and history? at least based on our current understanding of this time-space continuum.

Can we get in Dr. Who's TARDIS box and go back in time to the beginning of the universe or the end of the universe? I guess Dr. Who can, but we can't, right? I don't normally expect to bring up Dr. Who, by the way, as a normal point of reference in this class.

But the idea is that there's a lot of stuff that we don't know, history being only what is recorded, right? What about all the things that are unrecorded? What about all the things that are hypothesized? Yeah? Sure, there's things that get edited out. And so the problem is that there is much of what is in history that has to, at some point in time, be assumed. Let's talk about, for example, the Big Bang Theory. Everybody's heard of the Big Bang Theory at one point in time or the other.

I went to a special lecture by a NASA... No, no. He's from Boulder. He worked with NASA. He was not from NASA. But the University at Boulder, there was a professor, and he really, really, really wanted this $300 billion project to be pushed through Congress so that they could build radio satellites on the moon, on the dark side of the moon, and then String more wiring to have satellites that would then send that data back to us here on the earth because he was really hopeful that if we spent 300 billion dollars, we might be able to get some bounce backs of the Big Bang So that we could know more about it Now on the financial side of that will ignore will pretend 300 billion dollars is a great investment.

It's awesome. I Tend to be more fiscally conservative than that, but that's a personal subjective thing, right? but if your assumption is that there is a Big Bang, then you will want to read data on the Big Bang. If your assumption, which I'm going to say from a biblical worldview, my assumption is that there is not a Big Bang, then I really don't want to spend all that man-time and energy and financial resources trying to get rockets and ships up to the moon and back and set things up and have all the solar power stations built up and then run the the network so that you can take that data and bring it back down to the earth and then send it to IBM's big blue or whatever computer is powerful enough to then start trying to take the massive amounts of data and then maybe hopefully turn it into something.

But you get this concept where we have to measure it. We got to measure it and this is a thing we could measure. So humanism could be very expensive. But this is at the root of skepticism, this idea that you would be constantly asking, you know, until I test it, it's not true.

So we continue to bring back this idea of, I don't believe in God because I can't touch him and prod him and poke him and feel a certain way. And in fact, some people who are outspoken atheists or agnostics will talk about God as though he is just a powerful man in the sky. They really want God to be a human too. As Mark Twain said at one point in time, God made man in His image and man returned the favor.

So, the following other set of statements here about philosophy, theology, ethics, and science here are generalizations and should be taken as a starting point, but as I said last week, we want to make sure that that you engage somebody and talk with them about their actual position because they may have variances on these things. But the first one is that their center of philosophy is naturalism or empiricism.

They believe what they can prove. And that sounds good on the surface. I'm not against being able to prove things, okay? So I think it's important that we articulate that there's nothing wrong with being interested in the way things work, we would do it from a Christian perspective and say the things work because God set them in order, that God maintains them, that God sustains them, like Colossians tells us. So their philosophical focus is on what mankind can do and what mankind can know.

Now I'm gonna briefly rabbit trail on this and say how much of the universe is it possible for us to know about? in a reasonable amount of time. Okay, let's pretend we have a million years. That seems like a reasonable amount of time. How much of an infinite universe can be known? It's still, as far as we know, massive, and so it becomes problematic when you start to think about how much we can't know, that eventually, if you're holding judgment as an agnostic, I want to make sure we've explored all the universe to know that God isn't just off in that corner and we never went there. That becomes a real problem because the agnostic, even in a million years, is still going to run short of time to chase down this ideal of just making sure. Isn't the universe constantly expanding, even at this point? As far as we can tell, yeah. Even if you had ultimate knowledge, you would never be able to know that because it's always getting bigger. Well, and that's the biggest problem, is that I've read either that it's expanding and will continue to do so infinitely, or is infinite already, but changing its shape infinitely. Or, and the other thing that's funny is I've actually read some scientists have been asked, how big is the universe? And they've come up with a number.

And that's fascinating, that you'd be like, we're going to start over at this end of the universe, because it has an end. It's like a flat world mentality to me, but that's OK. Because the problem with the idea of an end is that it's over here, and then it goes over here.

But what about up there, and down there, and the three dimensions? If it goes infinitely in all directions, that's massive. And I actually did see a really cool, somebody made a cool visualization on the internet that showed what we know about the universe, and it went out linearly to the sides, and then it shrunk down to the smallest particulate matter that we could get into in a microscope, and yet they know there's smaller than that. but they can't get anything powerful enough to get that small. And they only have things that are literally on a horizon, but they're not holistic once you get out of a small amount, given the size of the universe, a small amount of distance.

So it's pretty fascinating. So empiricism has a real shortcoming when it comes to infinity. I can prove that out every day in a computer. Computers really don't handle infinity well. You can specify that this is the idea of infinity, but you can't actually calculate infinity in computer technology.

Pardon? It's a divide by zero error. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so coming back to the list here, the next one you have is theology. And I've got atheism on here because not because everyone who is an agnostic is secretly an atheist necessarily, but they seek to address all ideas of the universe without God. They want God not in the equation. They want a naturalistic or empirical evidence or proof of things and they must not have God in the equation because that breaks the formula. it breaks the assumption of the worldview. Ethics, their stance on ethics is moral relativism.

We talked about that briefly. There's a great book, if you like to do quick reading but you enjoy this kind of subject, there's a book called Relativism Feet Planted Firmly Midair. and uh... it's it's very approachable from like sixth grade up reading level so you don't have to feel like you have to have a major philosophy degree to understand it but the author's done a great job of articulating multiple problems with moral relativism but also it addresses the fact a lot of the arguments that relativists bring up end up being strawman type of arguments uh... so it it's an important uh... And I think we're going to go over that a little bit more later in the series, if I recall the sequence. So we'll talk about more moral relativism later on. And lastly on this list here, we have science.

Neo-Darwinian evolution. And Marilyn, you've asked about that. All things can be explained naturally, and what we don't know we will learn eventually, given enough time. So what's Neo-Darwinian evolution? Why do we say Neo-Darwinian? Who is Charles Darwin?

Anybody got Stan? Well, he was one of the species. OK, so he showed that, you know, all species are constantly changing and becoming more adaptable to the environment. The problem is that there's no. They call it Between the two species there's never been anything found. Yeah. Missing link or intermediate. Yeah. Missing link. So you have to have neo-Darwinism because Darwinism doesn't really fit what science knows. Yeah. You put a neo in front of it, then we're okay. Yeah, we say it's the new, improved version. I don't know what comes after neo-Darwinism, but it'll be interesting.

But everything needs to be explained naturally, and the idea is that things evolve from nothing to something, and of course, I'm skeptical of that. The idea that material came from nowhere is really truly a major problem. Just like they would accuse Christianity of saying, well, where did God come from? God came from nowhere. That's ridiculous. I would say, so matter came from nowhere. That's ridiculous. And the Big Bang Theory still doesn't actually answer how non-matter exploded into matter. It doesn't address that problem. At least to date, I've never heard someone really articulate a good answer for that. It does create a beginning. There we go.

We can't explain it, but as long as we're not explaining God, we feel good about it. So let's ask, you know, the question I've got written there in the handout is what are the assumptions of this position? What is it assuming? Okay, the supernatural doesn't exist, that everything can be explained naturally, that... what else? They need more time. That's always a good thing. So everything is knowable over time. Except for the idea that the universe is expanding infinitely becomes very problematic Because then then you do run out of everything So the next section I've got on here are what are the attacks on Christianity from this view and this is a quick Bullet point list that I've heard people attack it on a bunch of levels either in personal conversations or books I've read or videos I've watched and But these are key areas that I've noticed that they attack Christianity on.

The idea of God as unempirical and immoral. So God is unempirical, we can't touch him or see him. He's the man in the sky. So he must not be real, because I can't empirically touch God. Now, let's ask a real quick question. How does the Bible describe God? God is spirit. which means by his very nature he can't be touched. So they're asking for a definition of God that we would disagree with and that is the only way they will accept him as an entity or a being in the universe. What that worldview asks for is this physical world is what's real and Therefore, we want God to be in this physical world, where the biblical viewpoint is that God is spirit, and he created the physical world, and he'll take it away. almost this evolutionary idea of God as well. That God is just more evolved or something and we need to contact him as the more evolved being.

Or he's immoral. That God had a bunch of people die or God let sin happen and that was an immoral act. There will be those kinds of arguments that they'll try to bring up. It is probably beyond the scope of this class to really fully address all of those things, but in the Old Testament when God told Israel, for example, to go wipe out a nation, was that something that he did willy-nilly? When God actually tells Israel to go wipe out a nation, what's the situation that's going on?

Well, previous to that he said that your cup of sin was not full, so I have to assume that the cup was full. There was lots of wickedness and he was wiping out the wickedness. It was justice. It wasn't immorality, it was justice. It was morality that stirred that move. The Canaanites were considered by their pagan neighbors to be way over the top wicked. So the moral problem was what God was addressing. God wasn't being immoral, he was being just.

Is that something that will satisfy the skeptic? Probably not. They'll just move to something else, right? But it's important that we have an answer for that. The other thing they'll say is that why would God, why would a loving God let evil happen on the earth and things like that? And that is because God created us in his image to have a will. and it would have violated our will and not let us reflect that image if he came in and stopped all things from happening at all times. That's not the way that he set up the universe. Morgan? I don't believe in evil, but that's evil. It is inconsistent for sure. All right, so we have the idea that the Bible is unreliable, they'll attack the Bible. Their presumption when they say the Bible is unreliable is that the biblical version of history is wrong. Adam and Eve weren't the first people, there's lots of people before that, and they pass down this mythical idea by word of mouth, and we know how terrible that is.

They talk about the telephone game and instantly negate other things. Now I mentioned memorization briefly last week and the guy had Alzheimer's so I finished the book this week about memorization and what's fascinating is that our brains are actually capable of storing a lot more information and when we're consistently diligent about passing that on it doesn't get screwed up as badly and when we take those pieces and we combine that with the biblical doctrine that the Holy Spirit is preserving His word, it doesn't become this long, long, long, hundreds of thousands of years old myth that got converted into Adam and Eve because they couldn't remember their names. It actually becomes a believable story of history with a timeline that is within the reason of, hey, Adam lived for 600 years and then talked to people within a short amount of time from Noah. who lived within a short amount of time from Abraham, so those stories could be communicated and written down in a reasonable amount of time, and it's not, uh, I can't remember what he said, we'll call him Adam. Okay, it becomes a plausible sequence of events, but their attack on oral history, for example, is one that assumes that their position is true. So you're not talking apples to apples, if you will.

And we don't know what was on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I've heard the kind of opposite argument. Yeah. using other cultures oral history and biblical history. Well these people have a flood account, these people have a flood account. And using that, well that means the biblical history is false. But this same person puts himself in the past in other people's heads.

Assumptions. Basically making assumptions. They're assumptions that fit into their worldview. And that's important. It will be consistent with the worldview, but it is not the only interpretation of the data, so to speak. Stan? I think it's also the fact that The history that we have today is inaccurate because man has changed it, as they were saying earlier, and certain things have been deleted. And we change it to adjust for the particular worldview that the person writing, even though it may be not fiction, but it's supposed to be a true story or true fact. But it's not because it's been changed.

So when you look at that, you say, well, how can something like the Bible that is so old, actually be valid all the way through. Because we're starting with an incorrect assumption that all history is invalid. And all history has been edited to the positive position of the author.

That's what I love about the Bible, is there are some really unflattering things told about David, for example. Or Saul, here's the first king of Israel after they've revolted and he goes and he starts offering the sacrifice and Samuel comes and tears the back of his cloak and says obedience is better than sacrifice because Saul disobeyed well here's the first king of this nation that's God's people and here's a recording of how terrible he was and disobedient and it only went downhill from there So that's definitely the case. We'll keep going down the list here.

The idea that morality is not universal. Universal morality is definitely irritating to the agnostic or atheist. The idea that something is an absolute truth morally, that, for example, the most offensive piece to them would be the idea of sin. Here's the funny thing.

Sin implies that something is wrong. They don't want things to be wrong. So they tell you you're wrong for saying there's sin. It loops back around. It's like, wait a minute, you're saying I'm wrong when you say that things can't be morally wrong. So it becomes problematic. My English teacher when I was in college said that my right to swing my arm ended where his face began. And he went from there to all kinds of other things about morality. I don't know how that tied to English, but he liked to pontificate on that regularly.

The next and last item on the bullet point here is the idea that the Bible doesn't know what to do with science. This is one of my favorite ones that come out. The Bible doesn't talk about dinosaurs, which is not true. And there are things that the Bible doesn't address regarding dinosaurs, like the Ark.

It just says that God took care of things. I cannot articulate to you, because the scripture doesn't record it, how that was dealt with. But that doesn't mean it wasn't dealt with. And the fact that something isn't articulated doesn't, like we talked about last week and we'll go over again briefly, the argument from silence is not an argument.

If the scriptures are silent about dinosaurs, it doesn't mean that there is no dealings with dinosaurs in the Old Testament times, it means that we don't have any recordings of dealings with dinosaurs in the Old Testament times, except for the few that we do have. Like the Leviathan with Job is a great example of that. If you start picking animals that the Old Testament doesn't deal with. It just says the beast of the field. I don't believe in the creation account because it doesn't talk about bears specifically. I want bears in my creation account. Why articulate and pick one thing? The argument from silence is not an argument.

We'll keep moving from that. So this next section I want to do after we've briefly reviewed the fallacies again. This next section is actually quotes from skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. And I want to take a look at the assumptions and or fallacies, although I have fallacy written here in the paper. If you don't have a pen, I apologize. I have one. But let's take a look at these things. We'll quickly scan through the fallacies and then we'll talk about the fallacies that are in each one of these.

Given the amount of time that we have left, we'll probably hit one or two of each one of them and then keep moving because otherwise we'll be out of time. That would be highly unfortunate. So let's take a quick review of the fallacies. from last week, the slippery slope fallacy, the idea that if A is true and B is true, then Z is true, and therefore we should not do A. This is problematic again because some slippery slopes are proven, but not all slippery slopes are proven. So as soon as you make a jump in your conclusions that's outside of the proven sequence of things, it's a logical fallacy.

The straw man. Setting up a false argument about things. Like when the atheist... George Carlin was a comedian, but he was very antagonistic towards God, and he always called God the man in the sky. That's a straw man representation of God. False causality.

Linking things that correlate, and actually there's this awesome website, researcher put together a website, you can write computer algorithms that will find things that correlate that have nothing to do with one another. Things having to do with like cheese production and divorce rates. Like Wisconsin cheese production, the chart shows how that correlates with divorce rates. There's no way you could show causality for cheese production and divorce rates, but false causality is one of those things. Okay, so the appeal to emotion.

You don't want to be one of those people that walks by mystical, mythical faith, do you? You know, that's terrible. Ad hominem attacks. When you start attacking people, like, well, all your pastors are a bunch of closet druggies and perverts. Here's this news article and this news article. It doesn't make Christianity false, it just means that they're attacking people who are in leadership.

Appeal to authority. Well, Richard Dawkins is a scientist, and so therefore, if you're going to follow science and thinking rational people, you're going to follow Richard Dawkins. The argument from silence, we talked about that several times last week and this week. It's important that when we understand the argument of silence, if there is no information, you don't get to build an argument from no information. Loaded questions.

Presuming something and then building things on that. Richard Dawkins, in his book God Delusion, did a phenomenal job of that where he said, we know that religion is child abuse when we teach that to our children. and then went on to build on top of that foundation. Well, that loads the question. Why is religion child abuse? He knows it. We won't actually delve into that. It's not empirical, that's for sure.

The argument from ambiguity, using false definitions or defining words several different ways and then using them the specifically convenient way, All right, so those are some of the fallacies that we have here. So let's read some of these quotes and then kind of talk about what fallacies are there. And I don't know the answers, so we'll have to figure them out together. So this first one is from Rene Descartes.

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt as far as possible of all things. So what's a logical fallacy of doubting all things? to seek truth. That still requires faith, but it places all the faith in typically logic and or empirical, that is, faith in the sense or sense by extension of your senses. You still have to have faith somewhere. You have to put faith in your senses and faith in your thinking. And, if you doubt all things, why would you also not doubt your own thinking?

You basically say, let's assume zero, and then work our way out from zero, but you have nothing to build on top of with that. The reason why it says, as far as possible, is because you realize that you get back far enough and you start to assume. Also, in order to seek truth, it's saying that this is the only way that you can seek truth. Which goes back to science, or being able to see, touch, and feel something. And that, as Ernst said, faith is not a means of determining a truth. He starts off by saying, in order to seek truth, no, that's not correct. This isn't the only way to seek truth.

It's an appeal to the authority of mankind. It's the appeal. And we are the measure of all things. And that statement assumes truth. Yes. So we should go back and ask if there's truth first before we try to seek it, right? Okay, so we'll keep moving. These things sound philosophical or quasi-intellectual, but often if you start to think about what they're assuming or putting forth, there's actually quite a bit of self-authority involved with some of these statements. Here's one from John Dewey, skepticism, the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. So if you are not a skeptic, you are not Educated. If you want to be educated, you must be a skeptic. Otherwise, you're dismissed.

When I was teaching at one church, I taught about the literal interpretation of the Bible, and one of the elders at the church came up to me afterwards and said that that was wrong, and any seminary worth its salt would teach that we can't trust the Bible. And since I went to a seminary that taught that we could trust the Bible, I was going to a bad seminary period.

And so it was like, wow, okay. didn't have to justify it, it was just his position. They weren't skeptics in the humanistic standpoint of skeptics. They were diligent students of God's word and they believed fundamentally that God was consistent. And so they would do comparison to make sure that things were consistent with scripture.

Not the same kind of... Humanistic skeptic, or a skeptic. Yeah. The definition of that is... That we define what is true and we get to call the shots. There's no arriving to truth ever because... That's basically the position. We only know the best guess about what we know now. It's probably the safest that an honest skeptic will ever get. Let's go down to agnosticism.

This one I thought was a great quote, and I didn't cherry pick these. I actually did a lot of reading and had to cut out a bunch of them. I had to find ones that were short. That was my criteria is that we didn't have to read paragraphs because there's some awesome long quotes.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic. Charles Darwin. So, Darwin wasn't an atheist, he was an agnostic. I think that's kind of ironic, since a lot of the atheists lean heavily on him. But he says it's insoluble. He's already what? What's his authority? Insoluble by us. By us, yeah.

So, mankind can't figure it out. There may be some higher being that can, but mankind can't. So we have this appeal to the unknown, this argument from silence basically, the unknown beginning. And so he says we have this argument from silence because we didn't have videotapes and historians recording it. And so then therefore his philosophical position is based on the unknown. So basically then, you're saying that without the absolute knowledge of scripture, you don't have order, you've got chaos. Because man cannot determine anything. really, except for science, and science can be twisted and maneuvered. So, there really is no truth.

Well, science is very contextual and we've actually learned a lot about that as in the last 50 years when we've done space research. There's a lot of things we assumed about history and about the way that matter worked that was based on the fact that we lived on this planet inside of this ecosystem And then we got to the moon and discovered all kinds of things that were new and cool and exciting because we made a very small journey to the moon.

Small being a relative statement here given an infinite universe. I understand it's quite a drive. But yeah, it's the idea that we can use science to know everything also implies a constancy that is an assumption. rather than a constancy that is revealed by the God of the universe who sustains it and puts it together. The bigger things, not the smaller things. You can't define all these smaller things, but things like purpose and philosophy and order and those things, no. There were a lot of quotes that I read as I was researching and putting this stuff together where they basically said, it looks like order, it looks like design, but it isn't.

That's Charles Darwin. Let's skip down to atheism as we are running out of time there. And that's a good Richard Dawkins quote there. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. What is that an example of in our fallacies?

It's at least one good thing. It's a straw man. I would also say it's a loaded gun. It's the loaded question, not a loaded gun, that's different. Religion teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding. If you answer that and say, yes, but, then you've already assumed that religion teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding, which I think is a fallacy amongst the people that I have known as a Christian, which is a very tiny subset of all of Christianity.

My dad is formerly many things, but one of them is an engineer. And in engineering, there's constantly this research and digging into the way that in physical science and how things work with water, how things work with building structures, and how strong is this, and how does that work? That sounds like wanting to know how things work. There are Christians who are in science that are researching things from a perspective that isn't evolutionary biology.

They're not commonly accepted because they have faith. They're treated like they're nut jobs. But that is character assassination, ad hominem attack kind of things because of their faith position. It has nothing to do with the quality of their science.

But Richard Dawkins is notorious for making these broad sweeping statements. I will read this Ernest Hemingway quote and then we'll keep going. This is similar to one of the earlier quotes. All thinking men are atheists. Ernest Hemingway. John Dewey says that all educated minds are skeptics, and Ernest Hemingway says that all thinking men are atheists. So, now that we have those broad, universal truths, we have a problem because that's not very relativistic.

Alright, let's briefly... Yes, an absolute statement. And they can know it, empirically, apparently. Or not. So, secular empiricism on the surface sounds like it is rational, self-consistent worldview. It also comes with assumptions that are believed, i.e. faith. If you ask why enough times, you get to the assumptions.

Why did the universe come from a Big Bang? Because they can't prove the universe came from a Big Bang. Why did the universe come from a Big Bang? Because we don't believe in God, we have to come up with an answer. So this is our answer. This is a guess. And then, in my lifetime, the number of years that the universe is old has changed to most recently, the thing I've read, is that there's been a series of Big Bangs, where matter expands and collapses and expands and collapses and expands and collapses, so that we don't know how old the universe is. It's not 4 or 5 or 15 billion years old. It's infinitely old. And matter keeps coming into and out of existence.

Why? Let's ask why some more. Why? I want to be a three-year-old and be obnoxious to the scientists. Why? It gets bigger than I don't believe in God. I don't want to. And that's the suppression from Romans 18. Stan? I was going to say, if you look at what Hemingway said and what Dawkins said, then you have to assume from what they said that they believe in an order of things, where there would be no purpose to thinking men and to evaluate evidence. Because if there's no order, then there would be no purpose for that.

But you can go back to the, what is it, the clock in the forest. They walk and walk and they find a clock and they say, oh, there must have been a clockmaker, right? In a sense, they're saying the same thing here because they're able to evaluate the facts. they're going to come to basically the same conclusion that you have with faith. That there's order, and that there was a beginning, and somebody did it, or something did it. Yeah.

At some point in time you run into the situation of faith, and that is the offensive word that they don't want to hear. They don't want to hear that there's faith, but it is fundamental to all human philosophy. Alright, we better close in prayer. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would just continue to show us, through the truth of your word, through the historical relevance and the linguistic relevance and the cultural relevance of what's there, that we would grow. And Lord, something you put on my heart this week that we need to be reminded of daily, and that is that If we run into these people that are atheists or agnostics or skeptics, that we're still called to love them, that we're still called to preach the gospel to them, and that we're called to be a representative of you in their lives. And we pray for those opportunities. In Jesus' name, amen.