Introduction

I am not a reputed leader in the Church or a famous author.  I’m not a visible figure in government or a celebrity with a large online following.  I’m just a normal guy who works a normal job with a family to take care of.  So, when judged on the scale of cultural impact, it’s likely that this book that I have written will not have the influence of a work by John MacArthur or Malcom Gladwell.  This likely won’t be given the same attention that is given the words of the late Charlie Kirk (may God bless his memory), the thoughts of Barak Obama or even (sadly) the social media posts of Chrissy Teigen.

But I have still taken the time to research, prayerfully wrestle with, and write the content of this book.  I did this, not because I thought that the history books would record this work as a marker in time, where people’s perspectives about Christianity and Science shifted, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the issue of slavery or Galileo’s work did for man’s understanding of the Earth and the Sun; but rather I wrote these articles as an act of Intercession. 

Scripture teaches that there is an unseen realm comprised of rulers, powers and world forces (Ephesians 6:12) that affects the affairs of mankind.  These principalities can hinder what God can do in a region (Daniel 10:13).  They are servants of satan, who holds the whole world under his sway (1 John 5:19) and who works to blind people’s hearts to the Gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4).  God works in this realm as well, sending His angelic forces to counter the devil’s, the conflict of which is often described by the Church as spiritual warfare.

The Church is called to be an active participant in this spiritual struggle (Ephesians 6:12).  We do this through prayer (Ephesians 6:18) and through preaching (Ephesians 3:8-10).  Prayer and fasting have long been understood as means by which believers are to influence events and spiritual atmospheres.  A great book on this is Shaping History through Prayer and Fasting written by Derek Prince.

But one of the aspects of the Church’s participation in what God is doing in the spiritual realm that I have only recently become aware of is in the realm of the spoken and written word.  Paul describes in Ephesians 3:8-10 how when someone speaks to people about God that this is heard by the spiritual forces. There is a lot to unpack about this.  The first is that the Word of God is the most powerful thing in the universe.  All one needs to confirm this is to read Genesis 1, God speaks and things happen.  This is just as true in the Spiritual realm.  A word that is heard by a principality is a very consequential thing.  So, when Paul says that the end result of him preaching to people is so that the Word of God will be made known to spiritual principalities, we understand that he sees influencing spiritual beings as an important goal.  We also see in this that there is a mysterious touchpoint between people and spiritual power.  One aspect of this is in the realm of ideas.  This is seen in Paul’s explanation of what an intercessor does in 2 Corinthians 10:5. The spiritual warrior “destroys arguments” that are raised up against the knowledge of God, capturing thoughts like a soldier would take an enemy combatant prisoner in a physical war.

Bill Johnson, an incredible man of God from Bethel Church in Redding, California, says that “Belief in a Lie empowers the Liar.” Or, to put within the context of spiritual power, the faith of people strengthens either angels or demons.  False religions and ideologies are described as “fortresses” (2 Corinthians 10:4) that act as proverbial city walls that prevent the Gospel from getting to the people inside.  When a lot of people believe in a false religion, for example Islam in the Middle East, then the principalities behind Islam are empowered to bolster those beliefs in the region and as such the Muslim faith holds a greater sway there.

The False Religion of Materialism

The West has been bombarded with the false religion of Materialism.  Many would balk at the idea of Materialism being a religion.  In their minds it is the antithesis of religion, the very repudiation of it.  But atheism is to religion like zero is to numbers.  Zero denotes the absence of numerical value, yet it is still a number.  In the same way the philosophy which denies the existence of God still speaks to every issue and aspect of life that religion does.  Yet its adherents are adamant in denying that it is a religion.

They do this largely because it’s very important to their political philosophy that their worldview be permitted when it comes to discussing public policy, while the perspectives of their opponents be excluded because they are “religious ideas”.  This is useful to them as a line of argument on the issue of abortion, for example, which they can just label as people pushing “religion” on women’s bodies.  A quick and easy rebuttal is that they are pushing their atheism on unborn babies – in the form of cold unforgiving steel.  But in truth the argument that Pro-Lifers make is religious, but not in the way that the Left would be willing to admit.

The Pro-Life position is based on the belief that all people are innately valuable to God and that one person shouldn’t have the right to end another’s life.  The belief that people are of infinite worth to God is a Biblical one, there is no escaping that, but it is the belief that Human Rights are based upon.  The same rationale that was used to say that slavery is wrong, which is that people are made in the Image of God and that it is therefore wrong to own them like one would possess other material things, is the same line of thinking that says that abortion is wrong.  Both of these are manifestations of how a philosophy deeply embedded in the Christian faith should impact public policy.  Both of these are instances where one uses religion to tell someone (whether that be a slave-owner or a pregnant woman) that they should value the humanity of another.

But many on the Left don’t seem to engage in the self-critical analysis that would lead them to recognize that Human Rights, from both a philosophical and historical perspective, are grounded upon the Christian Faith.

I say many, because some have.  Tom Holland, the writer of Dominion, a self-described son of the Enlightenment and renowned historian, decided to investigate what the historical roots of his beliefs in things like Science and Human Rights were based on and found that both were rooted upon the ideas expounded upon in the Holy Bible.

Holland writes that the language used to explain Human Rights, came as a compromise out of the inter-Christian, civilizational clash in Europe, between the Protestant and Catholic Churches, where explanations of the universal worth of human beings being founded upon God, that didn’t side with either Luther or Rome, were accepted by both sides as a way forward after much conflict and war¹.

The Enlightenment then came along, led by the French Revolution and the language in American founding documents like the Declaration of Independence, and acted as if they had come up with idea itself.  The idea succeeded in America because it was still founded upon God – an external, Transcendent, unchanging standard for morality – but failed in France because it was based on the State (which is really to say that it was based on people in power, who would ever be changing like reeds blowing in the winds of time).

But ever since there has been a growing ignorance, like a snowball rolling down the philosophical hill, of the indisputable fact that the things most precious and exceptional about the Western world – one of which is that we believe that all people are valuable – are based in the Bible.

This lack of gratitude for the contributions of Christianity to the West’s moral outlook has resulted in the strange idea that “religion is bad for society” and that it shouldn’t be used as a rationale for public policy.  This becomes more odd when such ideas are spoken in the same sentence as a commendation for Human Rights, which again without God lack foundation.

In short, the Left wants to have it both ways.  They like Human Rights, but they don’t want God.  But to separate the two is like cutting a flower from its root system.  It might be beautiful and smell good for a couple of days as it sits in the vase on your dinner table, but sooner or later it will wither because it has become disconnected from the thing which brought it into existence.

It Could be Worse

While I’m frustrated by the hypocrisy and lack of self-criticism that it takes to both trash God and honor Human Rights in the same sentence, I’ll admit that it’s better than the alternative.  The history of the 20^th century proves that worldly ideologies can take Materialism to its logical conclusion, resulting in large-scale, massive bloodshed.  This was seen in the many incarnations of Communism throughout the world; which when historians total up the number of bodies from the Holodomor starvations (Holodomor means “Terror Famine”) in Soviet Russia, the forced labor camps in the Gulag, the famines brought about by the “Great Leap Forward” in China (which independent estimates say accounts for the death of 32 million to 46 million people) and the genocide of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to name a few; brings the number of deaths that Communism is responsible for to be around 100 million people.

Nazism, in its deranged race-based Darwinist eugenic philosophy that found favor in Germany because of its sense of desperation due to the humiliating defeat and harsh terms of surrender in World War 1, was responsible for the death camps of the Holocaust that murdered 12 million people and a second world war that claimed the lives of 75 million.

The Communists and the Nazis were on opposite ends of the political spectrum (and were thus sworn enemies) but one thing they had in common was a belief in Darwinian Evolution.  Hitler applied the both the logic and racism of Darwin to a social policy called Eugenics.  One of the things they won’t tell you in science class is that Darwin used his racial bigotry as an “explanation” of why his theory was correct in his book titled Descent of Man.  They also won’t tell you how there is a clear link between Darwin and his disciple Ernst Haeckle, who was the most influential scientist in Germany in the period that preceded the rise of the Nazis, and that the racism present in Nazi Germany found its rationale in the mainstream beliefs of the scientific community of that day.

No, instead you’re more likely to hear about the Scopes Monkey trial in America, which 100 years ago was a trial that resulted in evolution being taught in schools, and how it was a “victory for rationalism over religious dogma” or something like that; but you likely haven’t heard of the contents of the textbook, A Civic Biology, that was being argued over.  Spoiler alert – the textbook has a portion where it “divided humanity into five races and ranked them in terms of superiority”.

Where the Nazis were obsessed with race, the Soviets were focused on class.  For all their faults they don’t seem to have fallen into the “scientific” racism that defined Nazi ideology.  Their use of Darwin was focused on “scientific atheism” and was used as a polemic against religion and religious people.  The logic of Marx’s disciples viewed the world in terms of a class struggle.  The Proletariat, or working class, were the enemies of the Bourgeoisie (the middle class) and the supposed liberation of the workers of the world could only be accomplished by emerging victorious from a bloody, revolutionary struggle. Thus people, according to Communist Ideology, were divided into either friends or enemies, based on how they were perceived as being on the side of the Proletariat or not.  Christianity was viewed as being adjacent to the Bourgeoise and as such was treated as a force that must be eradicated without the slightest remorse.  This rationale was used as a justification for the systematic dehumanization of Christians on a scale never seen before in the history of the world.  This is where their use of “scientific atheism” comes in.  The “enemies of the people”, to borrow a phrase from Mao, must have their ideas refuted, enter Darwin as the scientific justification for why religion was wrong.  Millions were murdered under this rubric and those that weren’t were put in insane asylums simply because they believed in God.  The scale of these atrocities is so large that they leave one numb.  One way to feel the extent of the horror is to get specific.  For example, in just 1937 alone, 106,300 religious leaders were murdered by the Soviets².

This was the madness of the Materialistic Ideologies of the prior century.

So as I said before, while I think its hypocritical of the modern Left to both embrace Human Rights, which are founded upon the belief that God values human beings, and criticize the use of religious arguments in public life; I’ll take that over the purer versions of Materialistic Ideology that were present in the 20^th century.

Refuting Materialism

In any case, Materialism holds a deep sway in the minds of many.  And it is against that idea that I have written this book. 

I have divided this book into 3 sections.  The first section starts with how God led me into the study of how Christianity and Science can be reconciled with one another in a post called The Limits of Empiricism.  I then talk about how the idea that Einstein discovered, that time is relative to the physical location of an observer, causes us to wonder where God was when He was creating the Universe and observing the effects brought about by His Spoken Word.  I also muse how Scripture seems to state that time for God is different than it may be for us in Moses Knew about the Theory of Relativity.  From there I speak about how there is a purposeful vagueness in Genesis 1 regarding the process that brought about plants and animals.  This leads me to have an open mind about whether God could have used an intermediary material process to bring about plants and animals.  I discuss this in Let the Earth Bring Forth Animals.  I am open to the idea that God created the Universe in 6 God-days, which could have been experienced differently by people, had we been present on the earth and had we used the earth’s relation to the sun (which God instills on Day 4 as a gift to mankind) for our understanding of a day.  Perhaps the 6 God-days of Creation took 13.2 billion earth-years.  But I remain skeptical of science’s ability to know for sure how much time it took God (in earth time) to ready the Universe for mankind.  I discuss this in the post I’m a “Who Knows” Earther.

In the post Let the Earth Bring Forth Animals I explain how I am open to Theistic Evolution, which is the idea that God established the conditions and circumstances for the Earth to bring forth the different types of plants and animals that came into being.  But while I am open to it from a theological perspective, I also think its very possible that “Let the Earth Bring Forth” could be a use of language to convey that the animals that came from God’s Words are the result of special creation and that letting the earth bring them forth is a way of saying that they are brought about mysteriously and beyond the view of the observer, as if they were walking up on the distant horizon in a movie.  I also speculate in The Lost Glory of the Earth that if God’s Words enacted an intermediary material process, that it doesn’t have to be evolution.  It’s very possible that the Earth had some kind of creative property to it that has been lost since the curse of the Fall and is now undiscoverable.

I said above that I am open to Theistic Evolution from a theological perspective.  But after a brief period of time where I thought I might adopt this way of thinking I found myself rejecting it on logical grounds.  The first problem with Evolution is that before it can even take place there have to be living organisms that can reproduce.  So, then what happened to make it so that non-living substances came together in just the right way and at just the right time for the first living cell to come into being?  Scientists have no idea how this could have happened.  They have a name for it – Abiogenesis – but they have no working theory as to how it happened.  That’s a problem.  I go into this in my post Abiogenesis – or more appropriately – its time to Stop Pretending.

In the second section of the book, I introduce how newer discoveries in science are pointing to the idea that the existence of life seems to be an anomaly and that evidence is mounting that the Universe has been perfectly Fined Tuned for life to exist on Earth.  I start this off in the post There are No Blind Forces in Nature by talking about how Fred Hoyle, a famous atheist scientist, discovered how improbable it was that carbon (which all life is based on) is produced within stars.  My next post, What a Wonderful World, is a devotional musing on how science has discovered invisible fundamental forces that God created to govern the material world.  I follow that up with Finely Tuned Universe, which discusses how the unique aspects of our galaxy, the Earth, water and other things have to be exactly the way they are for life to have been possible.

I then write about how scientists discovered that the Universe is expanding in Let There Be an Expanse.  In Day 2 we see God actually putting something called “The Expanse” within the material substance of the universe (Genesis 1:6-7).  The Expanding Universe is a problem for people who purposefully exclude God from the equation because if there is a constant rate of expansion (which scientists have found that there is), then that means that a naturalistic explanation (which again must exclude God) has to come to the conclusion that if the expansion is traced backwards in time that it will lead to a primordial atom.  If one assumes that this happened (which if you don’t give credit to God then you have to), then you have a perfectly calibrated explosion, that people have called the Big Bang, that had to have happened in exactly the right way for life to have been able to exist.  I go into this in the post called It Had to Be Perfect.

The weight of the evidence of both how the Universe is Expanding and how it is Finely Tuned turns the entire naturalistic explanation of the origin of the Universe on its head.  Like I said above, I take issue with many aspects of the Naturalistic Script that starts with the Big Bang and ends in Evolution, but even if one accepts it in its entirety, then you still haven’t removed God from the picture.  And, in fact, if the universe and life was brought about by the inevitable falling dominos that originated in a perfectly calibrated explosion of mysterious origin, then we have something more incredible than if God created the universe in a process.  We admire the sculpture of King David by Michelangelo because we recognize that it must have taken incredible planning and skill for the artist to carve this out of stone, but if it was discovered that the medieval artist used one perfectly calibrated explosion to do this instead of a process that took many days, then that would be even more incredible.  So, it is now with those who believe in the Big Bang and Evolution.  You haven’t taken God out of the picture, you just made what He did even more incredible.  I go into this in the post The Script Has Been Flipped.

I follow this up by throwing a little bit of cold water of the assumptions of Naturalism in my post The Boomerang Effect.  Even though if its true it still points to God, I still find myself questioning our ability to know everything about the distant past.  The Universe is expanding, yes, but God doesn’t have to have made it expand at its current rate for all time, it could have expanded at a different rate in the distant past, and it would be hard for us to know that.  This could be true either because a physical law could have been at work in the past that for some reason isn’t active now, or God could have supernaturally caused expansion to happen quicker than it happens now.  Even though it’s remarkable that a theory that was designed to exclude God has ultimately betrayed those who postulated it, I still reject the assumptions that undergird it and say that we need to be content living with mystery and recognize that there is a lot that we don’t know about the distant past.

My final post in this section is called The Mystery of God Revealed.  It is an invitation to let go of our desire to know the distant past and to recognize that our existence is a gift from God, who not only gave us life but made a way for us to be forgiven of our sins and have a relationship with Him forever in Heaven.

The 3^rd section is an Appendix where I tackle one-off issues in separate articles.  I write about how Christianity Gave Birth to Science, how scientists sometimes make irresponsible and deceptive statements in Why I don’t Believe Something Just Because a Scientist Says It and how the current mood of the scientific community has some pretty stark hypocrisies that are ideologically motivated in Straining Out a Gnat While Swallowing a Camel.

I pray that this blesses you.  I wrote this because I was both irritated by how thoughtless atheistic denunciations of Christianity are and how amazing this world that we live in truly is.  It is both a work of skepticism and wonder - skeptical of our ability to know everything about the distant past and yet filled with wonder about how what we do know points to Transcendence.  I pray this roots your faith in the God who has revealed Himself from the cloud of Mystery by coming to earth in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity – Jesus Christ – and has given us a trustworthy record of these events and His other encounters with mankind in the pages of Holy Scripture.

Amen.

 

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¹ This is discussed in the excellent book by Tom Holland called Dominion in chapter 17.  I recommend caution with this book.  It should be noted that Holland is not a believer and that he picks up many lines of attack against the faith, that could be challenging to one who hasn’t been exposed to them.  I spent much of my college years wrestling with the questions he brings up so they were ho-hum to me.  Yet the book is an extraordinary exposition of the way in way Christianity has shaped the modern world.  Nearly everything the West holds dear comes from the faith.  A fact that is largely not known in our time.

² This is taken by Eric Metaxas’ incredible Book Is Atheism Dead? in Chapter 20.