Truth Really Matters

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178. 1/1/23 How did Christianity succeed in its first hundred years?
179. 2/1/23 The God Hypothesis
180. 3/1/23 Money, Greed, and God
181. 4/1/23 How Goes Your Quest?

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178. How did Christianity succeed in its first hundred years?
January 1, 2023

What factors contributed to the spread of the Gospel in the decades following the Resurrection?  Did God prepare political and economic factors to facilitate the multiplication of Christian churches?  How do conditions today compare with those of the 1^st century with regard to sharing the Gospel?

I recently read The First One Hundred Years of Christianity:  An Introduction to its History, Literature, and Development, by Udo Schnelle in 2019, translated into English in 2020 by James W. Thompson.  It’s a large tome, packed with details and analysis, but written mostly from the perspective of a secular historian sympathetic to the Christian faith, but discounting its supernatural character.  The author seems to treat the New Testament as equivalent to other historical documents . . . there is no apparent appreciation of its Holy Spirit-inspired character.

Nevertheless, I found some interesting nuggets, especially as summarized in Schnelle’s brief final chapter, “Fifteen Reasons for the Success of Early Christianity.”  I’ll paraphrase each one and make some comments.

1. The unity of the Roman Empire’s cultural and political control was crucial to Christianity’s early success.

In world-historic terms, the Roman Empire was only recently established when Jesus of Nazareth was born.  The early spread of the Gospel was enabled by the peace (Pax Romana) enforced across southern Europe and northern Africa, allowing safe and rapid travel via Rome’s system of roads and control of the Mediterranean Sea.  We should not take for granted Paul’s missionary journeys which established churches in nations that were once both independent and testy about foreign influence.

How much greater is our own opportunity to spread the Gospel in a world that is knit tightly together electronically, and travel is cheaper and faster than ever before?  If only Christians in the West would use their freedom and resources to do more than show up once per week for a ‘worship show’ and a winsome talk.

2. The widespread knowledge of the Greek language advanced the expansion of Christianity.

First and foremost, the New Testament in Greek could be read by most people across the Empire.  Doubtless, Christians would copy and distribute the Gospel accounts and the epistles from town to town from Egypt to Turkey to Greece to Rome and Gaul and Spain and, ultimately, beyond to Persia and India and Africa.

This is why there are tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament that have survived from all over Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.  Common use of Greek certainly enabled evangelists to show up in towns, even in Germany and Britain, and share the Gospel.  From Greek, the message would be translated into more far-flung local languages.

What is the universal language today?  Certainly English!  The modern missionary movement of the last two and a half centuries has been providentially sourced in the English speaking world, first from Britain and then America.  The best Gospel tracts ever created are available in English and almost every other language on Earth.  Yesterday there was a fellow at WalMart in the line ahead of me, apparently from Latin America.  He accepted the tracts I offered him (check them out at ThinkTracts.com), but his slight discomfort provoked me to reach for one of the Chick tracts in Spanish that I keep handy for just these occasions.  He responded positively to that offer – he knew how to read Spanish!  This is all so easy to do!

3. Hellenistic Judaism was widespread, giving Paul a place to start in the cities he visited.

The apostle Paul would start with the Jews, whose theology shared a Biblical foundation.  Paul’s witness to the pagan Gentiles would have to begin farther back, philosophically, explaining the God of creation.  Many Jews were readily converted (many, alas, were not), and became local Gospel evangelists.

Today we cross paths with many who have been raised in some branch of Christendom, and so share or at least are aware of some Biblical truths.  If they engage in conversation, it is at least easy for them to comprehend that they have missed something, namely salvation by grace through faith.  Most ‘religionists’ today, like most Jews and pagans of old, hope to be judged righteous enough for Paradise.  It’s not hard to quote and explain some basic Bible verses to show them their lost condition and need for forgiveness.

4. Existing religions were weak and local or regional. Pagan cults were in decline and not connected from region to region.

This enabled the Biblical Gospel to stand out in uniqueness and power.  The message of one Creator, whose Son was born into mankind, is something that seems ‘old hat’ now, but was unique then.  The message of forgiveness and the new birth offered an assured hope not found in any cult.  And Gospel truth was rooted in the history of the times and the prophecies of the Old Testament.  The Gospel was grounded in historical reality.

Today’s cults and religions and philosophies abound with thinly veiled false hopes.  The truth of the Gospel can still shake loose the weak foundations of worldly philosophies, and the Holy Spirit is still committed to the Great Commission so that we know that while we convey truth verbally (or by tract), the Holy Spirit draws the heart.

5. Monotheism enjoyed an appeal lacking in the polytheistic cults of the time. As the story spread about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, many sought and found a new understanding of God.

For someone yearning to find life’s meaning, polytheism simply does not have the ‘ring of truth.’  How can you wholly commit to just one or a few of the dishes on a large smorgasbord?  Ultimate truth demands one ultimate God who defines Truth, who has all the power, and in whom we can trust with all our being.

People are no different today.  Individuals choose a false religion or vacant philosophy because it’s comfortable, it justifies a sinful lifestyle.  But those who want to find TRUTH, will find the ‘ring of truth’ in the Gospel.  Our job is to convey the message compellingly and compassionately.

6. Christianity was new in that it was not just an additional religion added to the culture – the Gospel made an exclusive claim that required renunciation of other worldviews. It was all or nothing regarding salvation and the conduct of one’s life.

This was the feature that provoked such persecution.  Other religions coexisted, usually peacefully, within the Roman Empire, and were even willing to allow claims of godhood by the Roman emperor.  The Christian faith necessarily declared other faiths false.

The same tension and conflict persists today.  Accordingly, ‘tolerance’ seems to be available for all other perspectives except Biblical Christianity.  Since Christians and their faith are despised by false religionists, secularists, post-modernists, and everyone else under the sun, we may as well be bold and vocal about the TRUTH.  There is no point in compromise.

7. Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures valued dialogue, debate, and regularly entertained novel intellectual ideas. This opened the door for Christian missionaries to engage in the synagogues and marketplaces.

Open debate on serious issues wasn’t always friendly, but it wasn’t usually shocking.  (Although there are notable exceptions in the book of Acts.)  The culture valued listening to alternative points of view.  We see this throughout the book of Acts, when Paul visited the synagogues to challenge the Jews and on Mars Hill where he engaged with the pagan intellectuals.

Modern culture has shifted during my lifetime away from fair, intellectual debate.  Emotions drive political and religious positions, making it more difficult to engage peacefully.  Nevertheless, most of the world is still open to a Gospel witness, one-to-one, especially in America.  Whenever you can separate individuals from the mob, you are likely to get a hearing.  The response may be cold, but there are still souls open to truth, consciences still open to conviction.

8. A successfully communicative network of house churches included five pillars: letters, travel, coworkers, reciprocal material support, and a culture of hospitality.  The New Testament is rich with examples.

In this culture true discipleship thrived.  Every Christian had the opportunity and the obligation to evangelize the lost and to encourage the other believers, to develop gifts and to grow to spiritual maturity.  You will search the New Testament in vain to find the names of megachurch pastors . . . which, unfortunately, are the focus of modern Christianity.

The house church system (with its ‘pillars’) was designed by God to define church life until the Lord Jesus returns.  But modern Christendom has despised God’s design in favor of huge facilities with salaried clergy and scripted meetings.  And so the worldly culture disintegrates and wickedness abounds because the Christians have not “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6) in this generation.

9. Christians were both members in a local congregation, but also part of a worldwide fellowship of Christians. Regardless of station – slave or nobleman or tradesman – a traveling Christian would quickly find a group of believers to welcome him.

This is all the more remarkable considering the distances and time delays for communication between cities in ancient times.  Yet the New Testament record is clear that genuine believers would quickly recognize each other and help those in need no matter the level of sacrifice.

In doing street evangelism I have often encountered Christians and had sweet fellowship, if only for a few minutes.  I learned early on that it is not difficult to discern genuine believers from those who have a false religious hope.  But I’ve also been distressed to observe the isolation of church from church within a single community.  Even churches located across the street from each other see themselves as competitors, not at all as part of a local network.  This clearly hinders the Gospel and violates God’s New Testament plan.  The clergy in charge of megachurches or megachurch wannabes seem sadly motivated to acquire their own little empires and staffs and resources, even at the expense of ‘competitor’ churches.  Personally, I’ve found that Christians who are dedicated members of a given church have no interest in making friends of Christians who are not members of their church.

10. The Christian ethic of love for God and for others – even enemies – stood apart from pagan culture.  Startling was the acceptance of all classes into house church fellowships, and so multitudes from all classes became Christians and joined together.

The New Testament is clear and repetitive on this topic.  It makes sense – we’re all sinners who are saved the same way, by God’s grace, contingent on our humble repentance and faith.  All believers are born again as spiritual babes, including those rich and powerful in the world, and including those who are simple laborers or even impoverished.  Joined together in the same spiritual family by the grace of God, we are obligated to encourage, help, and build up one another, both spiritually and temporally.

Oh that Christians today would join together in the same spirit, facilitated by God’s intended design of city-wide house church networks, multiplying the Gospel block by block throughout a region, with member-evangelists who are part of every societal niche.

11. Baptism, the Lord’s supper, and house church culture created strong bonds within each fellowship, amplified in the early days by miracles and the Holy Spirit moving in power throughout a community to validate Gospel truth.  The bonds within and the openness to all those without made the Christian faith attractive to unbelievers.

And so the Gospel spread quickly throughout the Greco-Roman world and beyond to cover the globe.  It is clear from the Bible that God’s plan has not changed, even if market-oriented and culture-empathetic Western church leaders think they can do better.  It was far easier to distinguish the true from the false converts in ancient times under persecution;  similarly for professing Christians under duress in parts of the world today.  It is much harder to distinguish the wheat from the tares in the West today, yet the Bible is filled with warnings about this dichotomy, along with challenges to “examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Cor 13:5).

Persecution serves to purify and strengthen the bonds among believers.  Where persecution is absent or light, as in the West, the “glue” that serves is the Great Commission, a shared purpose that is worthy of our devotion and that provokes prayer, study, mutual encouragement, training, and rejoicing together.  If a church doesn’t use this “glue” it will be devoid of Holy Spirit power.

12. The Gospel accounts and the epistles introduced a new literature into the world, provoking discussion, study, and debate, along with a new perspective on the ancient Hebrew Scriptures – the Old Testament.

The themes included startling non-intuitive paradoxes . . . in death is life; the poor are rich; the oppressed will rule.  Given the claim that the Old and New Testaments were the very word of God, these apparent paradoxes made sense, engendering hope and purpose that transcended the harsh realities of life, and yet provided practical guidelines for daily life.

Throughout its history, the Christian faith has embraced study and open discussion, despite regular attempts to squash dissent from clergy-approved doctrines.  Modern emotionally-driven movements (Pentecostalism, the emergent church, entertainment-oriented evangelicalism) also work to diminish or destroy Biblical discipleship – the root word is ‘discipline’ regarding study, thought, and discussion, which Christians must still strive for, despite whatever local church culture they find themselves in.  See my ‘church’ essays in the Discipleship section of this site.

13. Jesus wrote nothing himself.  (The author cites similarity to Socrates and Pythagoras in this case, a trivializing note in my opinion.)   But the writings of the New Testament constrained the interpretation on Jesus’ life and teachings.

Indeed.  The Christian commits to the Bible as the Holy Spirit-inspired word of God, thereby constraining Christian doctrine to that delivered by God himself.  Despite this, varied interpretations abounded but, I believe, only because people deliberately misinterpreted or allegorized or mixed pagan ideas with Scriptural truths.  The New Testament is rich with warnings to hold fast to Scriptural doctrine.

Consider my essay “The 10 Most Deadly Heresies Affecting American Churches in These Last Days,” at http://truthreallymatters.com/wordpress/?page_id=84

I contend that the differences among “Christian” denominations and sects are easily resolved with a straightforward, but serious reading of the Bible.  It’s just not that hard to get the fundamentals right!

14. The split into different movements – the author identifies the Jerusalem church, a “Jesus movement” in Galilee, Antioch & Paul, and a Johannine school – was crucial to survival in a dangerous political / religious climate.  If one group were to be obliterated, Christianity would still survive.

I think the author has missed this one completely.  The emphasis was to evangelize and establish local churches everywhere.  “Movements” with divergent doctrines or interpretations were problems, not solutions.  The New Testament emphasis is to teach and to spread and to “earnestly contend for the faith once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).  Fragmentation into sects has consistently damaged the Gospel and turned multitudes into false converts.

15. Christians had direct access to God – there was no priestly class.  All believers are children of God, and see each other as brothers and sisters.  Scriptural promises destroyed the capriciousness of fate and the fear of death, with a promise of personal resurrection because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The boldness of believers in the first few centuries, even at risk of martyrdom, speaks to their assured hope of resurrection and eternal life in a restored Kingdom of God.  Martyrs around the world today prove the sincerity of their faith in God’s promises.  How much more should we in the West thank God for our liberties and resources by doing everything we can to share the Gospel.

A better analysis of what the 1^st century was all about, why Jesus was born when he was, and where he was, and what led up to that event and what shook out from it, is delightfully expounded in J. Warner Wallace’s 2021 book, Person of Interest:  Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible.

The book is outstanding and should be on every Christian’s bookshelf – after a careful read.  It’s one of the best apologetics books ever written, serving both to encourage believers and to convince skeptics.  I won’t review the book on this site, but I do heartily endorse it.  Wallace uses his career experience as a cold-case detective to weave the apologetics narrative in parallel with a cold case that he once solved.  Fascinating!

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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179. The God Hypothesis
February 1, 2023

The naturalistic worldview denies anything beyond what we can observe in nature itself, namely matter and energy within space and time.  Particles, quantum fields, and the “laws” of physics . . . that’s all there is, ever was, or ever will be, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.

Prior to Big Bang cosmology, the reigning “scientific” view was of an eternal and infinite universe.  Albert Einstein fudged his equations with a “cosmological constant” to support this idea and Fred Hoyle, with strictly ideological motivations, proposed a steady-state infinite universe.  Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he found the Big Bang idea “repugnant.”

And so the Big Bang idea was resisted for some time because it allowed for a cause.  There shouldn’t be anything or, God forbid, anyone outside the universe that could bring it into existence.  As Stephen Meyer points out in his 2021 book, Return of the GOD Hypothesis:  Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, since naturalism posits nothing outside the physical universe, therefore naturalism “does not qualify as a causally adequate explanation for . . . the beginning of the universe.”

Meyer would tell his students, “If you extrapolate back all the way to a singularity, you eventually reach a point where there is no matter left to do the causing.”

In this essay I’ll extract nuggets and comment (as usual).  I do highly recommend the book, but only if you’re already thoroughly grounded in young-earth creationism.  You can use my essays and book on creation vs. evolution on this site to help, and take advantage of the wealth of materials on creation.com and answersingenesis.org.  Meyer is firmly entrenched in the Intelligent Design camp and, accordingly, compromises on age of the earth and other historical issues within the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  But his book Return of the GOD Hypothesis is a wonderful exposition of the history and sorry speculations of the naturalistic foundations of atheism.

In particular, Meyer examines three major scientific discoveries that wreck any supposed rational faith in naturalism:  (1) the material universe had a beginning; (2) the universe is finely tuned for life; and (3) the biosphere has experienced huge and discontinuous increases in functionally specified information.

Let’s do a bit of history first.  Meyer quotes Oxford physicist / historian Peter E. Hodgson who wrote on “the material requirements for the growth of science.”  Specifically, there must be “a fairly well-developed society, so that some of its members can spend most of their time just thinking about the world,” without just scrabbling for the next meal.  Simple technology must be available to conduct simple experiments.  Mathematics are necessary for the systemization of experimental studies and a written language is required to communicate with other scientists to grow the collective knowledge base.

Several historians note that science developed in Western civilization alone, because of the intellectual presuppositions of Judeo-Christian theology.  In contrast, for example, Greek philosophers believed that order in nature derived from the logos, a self-existent logical principle, rather than from a divine mind.  This led to an ‘armchair’ philosophizer approach, neglectful of careful observations.

Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry, insisted that the job of the natural philosopher (scientist) was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.  Boyle advocated an empirical, observational approach, not merely a deductive one.  Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus, Meyer notes, believed themselves to be called to find evidences of God in the world.

Kepler wrote that God made it possible for us to discover God’s natural laws “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”

Scientists with a biblical worldview embraced human capability based on our image-of-God nature, and exercised caution about our fallibility due to the Fall and our tendencies to sin.  Thus, our experimental methods must be systematic and reviewed, even repeated by others.

Nobel laureate (chemist) Melvin Calvin argued that the monotheistic worldview of the ancient Hebrews suggested a single coherent order in creation with a single, universal set of laws.  Meyer notes in contrast that since animists, polytheists, and pantheists claim many spirits or gods interacting with nature in different ways, chaos and randomness would be more likely than uniformity and order.  Accordingly, Melvin Calvin identified the biblical concept of God as “the historical foundation for modern science.”

Isaac Newton viewed the order in creation as evidence of divine action.  For example, he argued that the uncanny match between the optical properties of light and the structure of the mammalian eye suggested design.  Newton also noted that the stability of the planetary orbits depended not only on the regularity of gravitational forces, but also upon the precise initial positioning of planets and comets with respect to the sun.

Extrapolating, consider the observed universe of stars, roughly 100 billion stars in each of a trillion galaxies . . . at least.  For galaxies to be stable and beautifully ordered, each star must have a suitable initial position and velocity.  Note that aerospace engineers don’t just fling artificial satellites up and hope for the best.  Those communications and GPS satellites must be carefully launched and positioned with precise velocity vectors, or else they will either fall back to Earth or escape completely.

Now, Meyer buys into Big Bang mythology completely, but hopes that people will believe that ‘God did that.’  He cites the famous conclusion to the book, God and the Astronomers, by astrophysicist Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Goddard Space Center, who wrote, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.  He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about the conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

I’ve written much else on this site regarding the Big Bang, so I’ll be concise here.  See also my two astronomy tracts at ThinkTracts.com for a brief summary of key issues.   The Big Bang idea derives from ‘winding the clock back’ from the currently observed expansion of the universe . . . which the Bible (perhaps) refers to at least 17 times as God ‘stretching out’ the heavens.  There simply must have been a beginning, which greatly tormented many atheistic scientists of the 20^th century who despised any fact that necessitated a Creator.  But the Big Bang is not biblical!  (See Genesis chapter 1.)  And ‘scientifically’ the Big Bang and naturalistic cosmology explain nothing, not the formation of galaxies and stars and planets, not dark energy nor dark matter, and not those beautiful orbits that we see in our telescopes everywhere.

As I draft this in August 2022, the preliminary results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have shocked the cosmological establishment.  The JWST is designed to see deeper into the infrared than other telescopes in order to find those ‘proto-galaxies’ that supposedly were forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.  But what they’re finding is what creationists (including me) have predicted they would find . . . fully formed galaxies at the greatest distances.  Big Bang doctrine is dogmatic against fully formed galaxies at the greatest observed distances!  Furthermore, the spectra displays elements (other than hydrogen and helium) that shouldn’t have been in the first generation of stars.  And yet the ID camp remains in lockstep with the atheists in embrace of the Big Bang.

Let’s move on.  Meyer reviews the history and variations of thought within the Big Bang community, and that’s all interesting.  The next key area to review, however, is fine tuning, “the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life . . . to exist.”  The term “anthropic fine tuning”  is also used to emphasize that we wouldn’t be here to marvel at these ‘coincidences’ if they hadn’t worked out just right.  Atheistic scientists sometimes call it “the fine-tuning problem.”

In our “Goldilocks universe” the forces of physics have just the right strengths, the particles have just the right mass, and the initial distribution of matter and energy was organized just right.  Stellar and planetary orbits, for example, although Big Bangers like Meyer believe that the initial sub-microscopic ball of mass and energy that expanded into our universe had to be arranged ‘just right.’

One very particular example of fine-tuning is found in the wonderful properties and abundance of carbon, without which life as we know it would be impossible.  Complex organic chemistry with its infinite variety of long, chain-like molecules enables storing and processing genetic information and the execution of all other cellular processes.  No other element comes close as a potential substitute for carbon.  Carbon’s properties depend critically on its mass, the stability of its nucleus, the strength of the forces of physics at the atomic level, and its abundance in the earth’s crust.

Physicist Paul Davies on fine-tuning:  “The impression of design is overwhelming.”  Astrophysicist Luke Barnes:  “Fine tuning suggests that, at the deepest level that physics has reached, the Universe is well put-together . . . The whole system seems well thought out, something that someone planned and created.”

The biblical creationist loves the fine-tuning arguments, but not exactly the same package.  God created the universe fully-functioning, according to His brief outline in Genesis chapter 1.  He did not create it via a fantastical fine-tuning of the mass/energy in a Big Bang singularity.  Roger Penrose calculated the odds against our well-balanced universe of solar systems and galaxies, whereas the by-far-most-likely result from a Big Bang would have been just one giant ball of mass which would collapse into one giant black hole, or at best a number of big black holes.  The odds he calculated are 1 in 10 raised to the 10¹²³ power.  Yes, the exponent is 10 raised to the power of 123.  The number is inconceivable.  There are “only” about 10⁸⁰ particles in the entire universe.

The secularists call this a fine-tuning problem.  No, I call it ridiculous . . . the Big Bang is a ridiculously bad theory.  No, God created the planets, stars, and galaxies in a functioning initial state.

Meyer devotes a large section of his book to intelligent design issues in biology.  He’s solid on all this, but I’ve written much on this site, including essays on his two previous books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt.  For a brief look at the issues, see my tracts on DNA, Genetic Entropy, and the Fossil Record.

Meyer appropriately comments that late 19^th century scientists assumed that the universe’s fundamental entitities are matter and energy.  What has been discovered since then is that information is foundational to life, particularly the genetic code and all the brilliantly designed nanomachines that enable you and me and the hundred billion cells in our bodies to operate successfully 24-7-365.

Of course, information comes only from a mind, with purpose and intent.

As an ID but anti-creationist, Meyer tells a story of “information explosions” throughout history that produced today’s panoply of life.  But of course those “information explosions” all occurred within the week described in Genesis 1.  So we’ll move on again.

Regarding the question of what caused the Big Bang, naturalists / atheists have suggested such ideas as eternal, chaotic inflation, supposing that our universe arose out of an already eternally existing multiverse or, somehow, an eternally preexistent set of conditions that allowed for a Big Bang beginning to ours.  There are no evidences, of course, for a multiverse and there are foundational philosophical reasons to deny an infinitely eternal past, as elucidated by Christian philosophers J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig.

The eternal past impossibility is defeated by biblical doctrine – God as described in the Bible is beyond space and time, since He created all that, and as a free agent with free will could “initiate a new chain of cause and effect without being compelled by any prior material conditions.”  Therefore, there is no “infinite regress of prior material states.”

A God with free will makes sense to most people, who live as if by their own free will.  If you deny you have free will, as any serious materialist must, then to whom am I talking?  Is it just brain chemistry making noise?  Is there a you in there?  Reason and rationality require free will.  Meyer also notes that in pantheism, god is part of the universe and so cannot have caused it.

Meyer critiques some assertions of naturalists, for example that everything we see simply derives, necessarily, from the laws of physics.  But that cannot be true.  The values of the physical constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, charge of the electron, Planck’s constant) could have different values under the same set of laws (Maxwellian or quantum electrodynamics, Einsteinian gravity).  Additionally, the initial conditions (number of stars and their orbits) are completely independent of the physical laws, as any freshman physics student comes to understand.

Meyer also critiques theistic evolution, espoused by those who believe that evolution is true, but somehow in an undetectable way, God used evolution to generate life and guide it to the present day.  This position is trivially refuted by a Bible-believing Christian, and is scientifically refuted by checking that mutations and natural selection are woefully inadequate for the generation of even miniscule amounts of the information content of life.  (See my DNA tract and several of my essays in this area.)

Some suggest a “front-loaded” version of theistic evolution which posits that the Big Bang’s initial conditions were so finely tuned that not only do we get all the stars and their orbits just right, but also the apparently random molecular conditions that resulted in the first cell and all of life after that.  Wow!  What faith might that entail!  No, the 2^nd law of thermodynamics and all of its implications (plus quantum indeterminacy) have been with us from the beginning and are evident in both laboratories and in life’s experiences.  To suggest a secret thread of molecular lottery winnings that are undetectable – in principle! – begs the question of why don’t you just believe that God did it the way He said He did?

Specifically, Meyer explains:  “The second law of thermodynamics implies that any biologically relevant information-rich configurations of mass and energy present at the beginning of the universe would dissipate over time.”  He also mentions that Claude Shannon’s tenth theorem indicates that only an external source of information or control could prevent that tendency . . . so God would have to be involved all along, once again.

Meyer points out the obvious truth that there is no materialistic explanation to  close the causal gap between a preexisting nothing and the existence of the universe.  Physicists Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have suggested that the laws of physics can explain how everything came to be, but this is false on its face.  The laws of physics are descriptive of what is observed in an already existing universe.  These descriptors have no power to create or cause existence.

Hawking:  “The universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.”  Go ahead, Stephen, explain that . . . or are you just blustering for a popular readership?  Hawking’s dereliction in reasoning was motivated by his depressing atheism:  “I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking . . . When we die, we return to dust.”

Additionally, the laws of physics are woefully incomplete, requiring enormous extrinsic information about initial and boundary conditions, amounts and kinds of matter, etc.  Furthermore, the initial or current conditions (orbits) are finely tuned with respect to the laws of physics.  The whole system is finely tuned without any part of the system ‘causing’ any other part of the system.

Atheists threaten us that a belief in God stops the advance of science.  Historian Stephen Snobelen reports that Newton’s belief in God and God’s interaction with His creation informed rather than hindered Newton’s work.  Newton saw God as (1) the source and sustainer of the universe’s mathematical order, and (2) the intelligent designer of the solar system.  These ideas inspired Newton’s science.  Newton’s treatise, Principia, was intended to bring glory to God and His genius.  Sir Isaac Newton was arguably the greatest scientist in man’s history.

When Meyer began his teaching career he created a course called “Reasons for Faith,” in response to challenges from a frustrated agnostic student who couldn’t get satisfactory answers from his Christian classmates.  The student was shocked to hear that Meyer thought that such evidences exist.  Meyer cites a poll that two-thirds of atheists believe “the findings of science make the existence of God less probable.”  The evolution scam is the core underlying reason for such unbelief.  That’s why I have created so many Gospel tracts that target the evolution scam.

As a junior in college Meyer ran into a thought from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre:  “No finite point has any meaning unless it has an infinite reference point.”  Without God there is no meaning in human life – our mortality means that anything we achieve will be forgotten.  But with God as He reveals Himself in the Bible, there is an eternal and self-existent Creator, the “I AM,” who is both holy and loving and provides THE way for an eternal relationship with Him.  Everything we do then matters.

Lawrence Krauss seems to have an idea that we can fake meaning . . . “We make our own purpose.  We make our own joy.  We are here by a cosmic accident, as I’ve tried to show, but it’s a remarkable accident that’s allowed you and I to be here to talk, to think and appreciate the beauty and splendor of the universe.”

Sartre would have considered this inauthentic.  He faced up to the consequences of the alleged “cosmic accident” and professed that without a transcendent God people are left in a state of “anguish, forlornness, and despair.”

However . . . when we authentically recognize that we are made in God’s image, but our sins have condemned us, condemned us even in our own God-given conscience, and we see that we need forgiveness, it is supremely rational to repent, trust Christ for salvation, and live a life in touch with reality, mindful of eternity.

Meyer concludes his book, encouragingly, “But since meaning can only be recognized and conferred by persons, and is arguably found best in relationship between persons, the return of the God hypothesis also revives a hopeful possibility – that our search for ultimate meaning need not end in vain.”

Where Meyer falls disastrously short, though, is his neglect of an affirmation and exhortation that meaning is found only through salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.  It’s not enough to be a theist – even Satan is a theist.  You must be born again, via repentance and faith.  How tragic for Meyer and any of his readers if they stop short of salvation, and spend an eternity of regret in the Lake of Fire.  How tragic to suffer, possibly, ridicule from demons likewise condemned, who knew of God, but never knew God, never willing to humble themselves and enjoy the richness of both this creation and the renewed creation of the ages to come.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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180. Money, Greed, and God
March 1, 2023

The heart of free enterprise is that we are individually made in the image of God.  “Our creative freedom reflects that divine image,” writes Jay W. Richards in his 2019 edition of Money, Greed, and God:  The Christian Case for Free Enterprise.  Market economies feature competition, private property, and rational self-interest.  But the heart  of free enterprise is our God-given capacity to create wealth, to defy zero-sum thinking whereby someone wins only if someone else loses.  Poverty can only be overcome by the creation of wealth.

So what is the source of material wealth?  Richards argues that the source is spiritual.  Free societies produce inventors, producers, problem solvers, and creators who use their imaginations to transform material resources into new and useful products and services.  “Man, not matter, is the ultimate resource.”  The more people in the free society, the more creators, the more the economy grows.  Labor-saving devices are invented to increase individual productivity, which was described by philosopher Luis de Molina as “the fruit of our ingenuity.”

It was more difficult for me than usual to pull out a few choice nuggets from Richards’ book because there are just so many!  But let’s try.  Do pick up this book and have your children read it, too, before they finish high school.

“Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.”  — American novelist John Dos Passos

Karl Marx had predicted that contradictions in capitalism would produce a workers’ revolt, but that this would be a necessary step in social evolution.  Then private property would be abolished and a just socialist state would be created, on the way to a communist utopia in which the state would “wither away” and we all would live in prosperity, peace, and freedom.

Reality clashed with Marx’s 19^th century prophecies, even during his lifetime when workers’ wages were rising.  When the socialist / communist revolution finally did succeed in Russia in 1917, it was led by power-lusting intellectuals in an agrarian culture that had no association with either democracy or capitalism.

Harvard historian Richard Pipes:  “Communism did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising; it was imposed on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans.”

I see striking parallels in America and the rest of the West today.  Today’s political and corporate elites work hard to impose a socialist tyranny on the middle class whose hundreds of millions of people simply want to be left alone to live their lives in freedom.  The socialists of today work to emulate Lenin who set up a one-party state that “filled every nook and cranny of Russian society.”  He politicized everything.  Sound familiar?

Lenin centralized most of the Russian economy, “from industry and trade to education and transportation.  This required secret police, a massive bureaucracy, and the widespread use of terror.”

Productivity tanked.  Industrial production in 1920 was 18% of the level in 1913, there were half as many workers employed, and living standards fell to one-third of their pre-war level.  I won’t go on regarding the economic disasters, slaughters, and famines of the Stalin period, but if you’re not familiar with that history, you should shore up your education.  Richards’ overall conclusion in this historical section is that, against Marx’s expectations, revolutions do not spring up in advanced industrial societies with a strong rule of law, but rather are enabled in poor agrarian cultures where despots can flourish.

A group of scholars led by Stephane Courtois documented the communist death toll in a tome called The Black Book of Communism, published in 1999.  As many as 100 million human beings died due to communist policies and atrocities during the 20^th century.  Richards:  “Never has an idea had such catastrophic consequences . . . Extreme moral passion minus reality equals mass death.”  Beware of such political leaders.

Thomas Sowell:  “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Richards mentions the experience of the early church in Jerusalem in Acts chapter 4, which is sometimes described as a communist experiment.  It was no such thing, of course.  The sharing was entirely voluntary and the state was nowhere in sight.  (Other than in persecuting the new Christians who then responded with charitable sharing in order to survive.)

When Ananias gets judged in Acts 5 it is clear that his sin was lying.   His property and its proceeds were his to keep or to give, in part or in whole.  But he lied and the Holy Spirit needed an example to insure that His church started out on the right track.  Furthermore, this early church experience was not normative for future church life.  The circumstances (persecution) were special.

Ronald Reagan:  “Socialism only works in heaven, where they don’t need it, and in hell where they already have it.”

Mao was the worst of the worst socialists in history.  See my essays on both Mao and Stalin.  Richards suggests Mao’s communist dystopia “tried to draw heaven down to earth.  They brought up hell instead.”  In socialism, he points out, it’s not that no one controls the property.  Rather, it means the state must confiscate or control whatever property is held privately.  This is what the Great Reset is about in today’s world, illustrated by the efforts to squash the Canadian truckers and the Dutch farmers, and the generations-long American leftist efforts to monopolize education under the state, making war against Christian, private, and home schools.

Richards describes the Nirvana Myth promoted by Marxists:  “It’s the delusion that we can build utopia if we try hard enough, and that every real society is intolerably wicked because it doesn’t measure up to our ideal.”  And in the Marxist version, thou shalt never mention God, sin, Jesus, or an afterlife.  Everything is here and now and politics is the only religion.

And then there’s “The Piety Myth” which involves “focusing on our good intentions rather than on the real consequences of our actions.”  Richards applies this to foreign aid, citing Bob Geldof:  “Something must be done, even if it doesn’t work.”  (This anti-principle has broad applications, of course, from gun control laws to stimulus packages to racial hiring and school admission quotas, etc., etc.)

In the foreign aid application, rich countries give all kinds of things to poor countries.  For example, the US overproduces cotton because of subsidies that inflate the price.  We have to dump the excess cotton somewhere, so we dump it on poor countries as “aid,” but that drives cotton farmers in those countries out of business.

Considerable “aid” goes to prop up dictators who waste the money on projects that maximize their power.  In one case refugees who had to flee from an “aided” dictator were also awarded “aid,” just to be fair.  Analysis has shown no correlation between the “aid” a country receives and its economic growth.

The myth creates havoc inside our country as well.  Peter Drucker once stated that by the 1960s “it had become accepted doctrine in all Western countries that government is the appropriate agent for all social problems and all social tasks.”  Well, of course.  Once you deny God’s existence and the way He wired reality, government fills the moral vacuum.

George Gilder wrote in Wealth and Poverty, “It is extremely difficult to transfer value to people in a way that actually helps them.  Excessive welfare hurts its recipients, demoralizing them or reducing them to an addictive dependency that can ruin their lives.” Taking the property or money from one group to prop up another is a lose-lose game.  You coerce one and degrade the other.  Urban America has been a disaster since the 1960s, when the welfare state began to destroy black communities.

In the Old Testament, God instructed the Jews to leave the leftover “gleanings” in the field at the end of the harvest to allow the poor or the sojourners to gather what they needed.  Such charity is practical, gracious, and limited.  You cannot grow widespread wealth in this manner.  To grow wealth across a society you need property rights, the rule of law, trade, enterprise and personal virtues like diligence, thrift, and ingenuity.  The culture must foster trust, delayed gratification, and a hopeful vision of the future.

Most of these factors are moral and derive from biblical principles.  The legal issues are for government to get out of the way and let people build their own businesses and their own lives.

Richards cautions Christian ministries to treat people in impoverished lands as “fully spiritual beings rather than mere mouths to feed.”  Instilling Christian values will transform the culture and reduce poverty far better than cool celebrity-led campaigns.

It should also be obvious to Christians in ministry that when people are truly converted, the indwelling Holy Spirit will provide wisdom, courage, and strength and the new believer can get prayers answered!

The Zero-Sum Game Myth . . . believing that trade requires a winner and a loser.

Richards does some short case studies to illustrate that free markets create new and bigger “pies.”  (Life is not just about political fights that divvy up a constant pie.)

In 1958 Leonard Read wrote an essay, “I, Pencil.”  A pencil is not as simple as it might seem.  Read explained (speaking as a pencil), “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”  What goes into a pencil includes cedar trees in California, with saws and trucks and ropes and other equipment built all over the country.  There are trains to transport the wood, electricity from a dam to power the manufacturing plant, graphite from Sri Lanka, clay from Mississippi, other chemicals from who knows where, wax from Mexico, brass from copper mines to hold the eraser, factice from Indonesia and pumice from Italy to make the eraser.  Nobody on earth has all the skills and knowledge to go out and make a pencil from scratch.

The iPhone is the quintessential modern example.  I won’t go through the analogous description of its complexity and parts, not to mention the internet which facilitates a smartphone’s function, and the associated computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, satellites, etc., etc.  Millions of people are involved in the creation and production of smartphones.

Smartphones wouldn’t exist without free markets.  “We hear a lot about the brutish, competitive nature of capitalism, about the one percent and ninety-nine percent, winners and losers, survival of the fittest, and all that.  Some of us may even have downloaded a podcast on the subject right onto our iPhones.  We hear far too little about the miracles of free cooperation and interdependence that free markets have made possible . . . We should take no critic seriously who does not first recognize this virtue.”

Richards argues that the best way to get ahead for everyone is not by theft, fraud, and slavery, but by working to meet the needs and wants of customers.  “And everyone is a customer.  The logic of competition . . . is about serving customers better than your competitors.”  No other scheme comes close in producing wealth and well-being for multitudes of people.

The Materialist Myth . . . believing that wealth isn’t created, it’s simply transferred.

Winston Churchill:  “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”  Indeed, socialist cures are worse than the disease.  America’s tyrannical responses to COVID, for example, produced far more misery and death than did the virus.

A nation’s wealth is not a physical object to be divided up, Richards notes.  Wealth can and does grow, if simple conditions are met.  Compare what people have today with 100 or even 200 years ago.  In 2011 a study was done concerning what 30 million “poor” Americans (poor as classified by the U.S. Census Bureau) possessed:

• A car, air conditioning, two color TVs, cable or satellite TV access, and a DVD player.
• They were not hungry and had access to medical care when needed.
• They had more living space in their homes than the average (non-poor) European.

Compared with America’s upper class, they might be considered poor . . . relatively speaking.  But really poor people suffer around the world today, living on a few dollars per day, many going hungry.  About 11 million children die before they are five years old.  The reasons include tyranny, tribal conflicts, corruption, no property rights, and no hope to change any of the above.

Most of the complaining about the economy in America derives from envy about the really wealthy in their country.

In America opportunities abound to increase personal or family wealth.  Most people change their income class dramatically as they age.  One legal factor mentioned before is property rights, that enable you to establish a home or a business.  These rights are purely conceptual, represented by a title that establishes in the minds of others that you have exclusive rights over an asset.  This gives you the freedom to invest and build without fear of arbitrary confiscation.  “In general, the more a country protects private property, the more prosperous the citizens of that country will be.”  Property taxes work against this principle.  If the taxes grow too onerous to pay, the government will foreclose, effectively making the government your landlord.  With property taxes, no one really owns their own property.

How fast can markets create wealth?  Consider the inventions, innovations, and development around telephones, lightbulbs, jet aircraft, rockets, computers, MRIs, and antibiotics over the last century.  The growth is exponential.

The Greed Myth . . . believing that the essence of free enterprise is greed.

Free markets derive from the Golden Rule, Matthew 7:12.  Our decisions must include care for others, but we are most responsible for our own family, our own neighbors, and our own community.  We’re not omniscient and so cannot agonize over everything, from a kitten thirsty for milk in Mumbai to an old lady needing help to cross the street in Buenos Aires.  So we cannot predict the consequences of all our actions everywhere.  The complexity of free markets might invoke the butterfly effect as much as weather forecasting does.

Accordingly, we necessarily pursue “self-interests” due to limited knowledge.  The success of free markets involves multitudes making rational and fair choices about value and prices.  The ‘analog computer’ consisting of networks of billions of consumers and producers works best at generating wealth for the multitudes when most people do what seems right and just to them personally.

Richards:  “Any system that requires everyone always to act selflessly is doomed to failure because it’s utopian.  People aren’t like that.”  Socialism does not fit the human condition.  It defies reality.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand is illustrated by the idea that even if the butcher is selfish, and that he would love to sell you spoiled meat in exchange for everything you own, he cannot make you buy his meat in a free economy.  In his own self-interest he has to satisfy your desires if he wants to stay in business.  Win-win.

In contrast, when a government controls all health care, it is extremely expensive, you have no choice but to buy it (you pay the taxes), and the resulting monopoly inevitably provides poor service.  Real people suffer and die unnecessarily.  Dictating lockdowns and vaccine mandates have demonstrably caused economic suffering, health disasters, and increased death rates far beyond what would have ensued if people had been allowed to make their own informed choices.

In free markets, entrepreneurs create in competition with other entrepreneurs to see who can best satisfy the needs and wants of real people in the market.  They do it to make money, of course, but they only make money if they are in touch with what people want.  This is simple stuff!  And yet the elite in politics, industry, and academia strive for socialism, as long as they get to be in charge.

Are people selfish in a free market?  Richards cites statistics that free economies correlate with the most charitable giving and that the higher the taxes, the less people give.  I’ve always believed that if welfare programs were zeroed out and taxes were reduced accordingly, that charitable giving would more than make up for whatever safety net is needed.  Furthermore, with more people working because they can and must, tax revenues would increase even as rates decline.  This was demonstrated dramatically in the 1980s in the Reagan presidency, in the 1920s under Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and in the 1960s under JFK.

The Bible has a lot to say about private property and treating our neighbors honestly in business.  The 10 commandments tell us not to lie, steal, or even covet what does not belong to us.  Instructions in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the parables of Jesus speak to the virtues of honest and fair business dealings with others.  If we obey God’s commandments at the micro-scale, person-to-person, it is evident that He has designed human reality to work effectively at the macro-scale.  At the macroscale, governments and nation-to-nation, God also has much to say, of course; for example in 2 Samuel 23:3, “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.”

In summary, free markets built atop a just system of laws that assure private property ownership and punishment of theft and corruption, are the natural outcome of a biblical worldview.  Richards’ book concludes with, “Seen in its proper light, the market order is as awe inspiring as a sunset or a perfect eclipse.  It might not be enough to convince the skeptic that God exists, but surely the believer should see in it God’s glory.  At the very least, it should settle the question we started with:  Can a Christian support free enterprise?  The answer is surely yes.”

This is a book I believe should be in every Christian’s library.  Read it with your children and discuss it in light of the news of the day.  It will help equip the young against the relentless and pervasive leftist indoctrination they will experience when they enter the fray.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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181. How Goes Your Quest?
April 1, 2023

Actor Marlon Brando reached the pinnacle of Hollywood fame and success, but near the end of his life said, “Life is a mystery and an unsolvable one.  You just simply live it through, and as you draw your last breath you say, “What was that all about?’”

How pitiful, yet how reflective of a life without God, without hope, without meaning.  The Brando quote is cited by Os Guinness in his 2022 book, The Great Quest:  Invitation to an Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning.  Guinness calls the reader to this great quest, a search for meaning as the key to make the most of life and find “fulfillment in all you do.”  If you are not consciously on this quest, “you will always to some degree be sleepwalking through your existence.”

The stakes are infinite because each life extends into eternity and eternity’s destination depends, of course, on discovering the essence of reality, God’s reality, and truth in the person of the Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Miss that . . . miss Jesus . . . and you’ve missed everything.  There is no greater tragedy.  “The quest is existential because you are staking your very existence on the outcome of what you discover.”

Some try to avoid the quest, but “man cannot live on cynicism alone,” Guinness observes.  I’ve run into some who pretend to, especially among college students.  They love to criticize, to mock, to take shots at the Christian worldview, for example.  They act as if they do not embrace a worldview of their own, that must be defended rationally if they would claim the intellectual high ground.  Typically materialists, they fail to realize that rationality itself is excluded by materialism – if matter is everything then the next thing they say is derived from random brain chemistry.

Some are cocky, living as if they were “godless self-gods” who think they’ve got it all figured out.  After our global pandemic, though, who can really believe we control our own destiny?  I’ve met some of these, too.  I ask them if they can, with their godlike powers, forego sleep and bowel movements for the next week.

Many just don’t think much at all about ultimate questions.  Most unbelievers, when I ask them if they ever think about what will become of them when they die, they reply, “All the time.”  What they mean is that thoughts of their mortality intrude on them frequently, but they refuse to dwell on it, which is so easy to do in this generation which holds the internet literally in the palm of its hand.

Life is filled with duties and chores and relationships, and whenever a moment of free time invades our consciousness, an entire world of news, entertainment, and endless distraction is a click away.  Who wants to think deep thoughts, troubling thoughts?  Blaise Pascal, the 17^th century mathematician, concluded that most prefer not to think about death and so surround themselves with distractions.  Guinness suggests that we moderns are not just surrounded by diversions; rather, “we are mesmerized by them, and we rarely lift our minds to think beyond them.”

Guinness notes that “we lose the curiosity we had as children.”  Life is astonishing, from dewdrops, dandelions, and dogs, to the sun, moon, stars, and galaxies.  So how did everything get here?  Why am I here?  To whom am I responsible?  What’s right, what’s wrong, and how do I judge the difference?  And then what?  What happens when my life is snuffed out?

There’s a legend that a London cabbie asked the famous mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell what he thought was the meaning of life.  Russell was flummoxed.  He griped, “Only precise questions deserve precise answers.”  Finally, the best he had to offer was, “The universe is just there, and that’s all.”  Pitiful.  It’s just giving up.  He should have resigned his claim to be a philosopher, which implies a love of truth, a desire to understand.  Socrates’ challenge still stands:  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”  — Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung

“The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more biological needs.”  — Anthropologist Clifford Geertz

This has certainly been true for me.  As a young atheist I yearned for meaning, desperately, and this opened me up to the Gospel.  (You can find my testimony on this site if you want the gory details.)  Guinness is amazed that so many people are careless about pursuing and finding answers to the ultimate questions.  I am, too.  I don’t identify at all with the careless metaphysical drifter, no matter how well educated, successful, and driven in worldly ways.  Faced with the existential crisis of how to live day by day and how to face death and eternity, how is it possible to not care enough to find answers!?!

Some engage in bargaining.  We’ll deal with the question later, we promise ourselves, after we’ve graduated, or once we get a better job, or when we’ve got more time, or, worst . . . after we’ve retired.  Jesus dealt with this issue, in part, in the parable we find in Luke 12:13-21, which includes the warning, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee:  then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?”

Guinness contrasts two modes of thinking that have shaped the West – the Greek and the Jewish.  The Greeks tended to think that reason alone can be employed to investigate both the natural and supernatural realms.  The Jews believed that truth about God and His creation must be found through narratives and experience.  Both Jews and Christians saw God as personal and known through relationship.  Knowing about God and knowing God are very different things.  Both aspects are possible only if and as God reveals Himself to us.  Thus, we have the Bible and the born again experience, followed by living life led by the Spirit of God, insofar as we allow Him to lead us.

Now, Guinness is a Christian and so his thesis is that the only quest in touch with reality is the one that leads to knowing Jesus as Lord and Saviour.  The Gospel is both motivation and solution in that, realizing we are sinners, we seek the one and only Saviour, who shed His blood on a cruel cross and raised Himself from the dead . . . a demonstration and a promise that we can share.  We need forgiveness and we crave life, eternal life, and only Jesus has the technology to give us bodies that live in good health forever – resurrection bodies.

Guinness contrasts conceptual truths where you can “take it or leave it,” with existential truths on which you stake your life and your eternity.  There are useful and useless methods to find truth.  Bertrand Russell claimed that “what science cannot discover, man cannot know.”  This is scientism, and is both preposterous and self-refuting.  1^st, self refuting:  You cannot use the scientific method, for example (observing, counting, weighing, measuring, hypothesizing, testing), to prove that “what science cannot discover, man cannot know.”

2^nd, preposterous:  Try to prove your love for your wife with math, logic, and scientific instruments.  Faith, meaning, purpose, hope, love, integrity and all that is important to human life cannot be verified in test tubes or reduced to mathematical formulae.

Guinness encourages us that to embark on the examined life, we cannot outsource the work and we cannot make a lackadaisical effort.  We must do the work and the thinking and the emotional struggling.  When I was confronted with the Gospel as a teenager, it took me a few months to figure out that it was true.  Once I realized that Jesus is who He said He was, it took me less than a minute to decide to act on that truth.

The author challenges us to use our reason, to be aware of our conscience, and to engage a living sense of wonder.  No matter what is true about creation, human life, and our individual life and destiny, what is true will certainly be amazing.  If we decide materialism is true and we derive from stardust, that would be amazing.  If we realize we are made in the image of God and that God loves us and offers us redemption and eternal life, that is amazing.  There is no neutral, mundane worldview that grapples with the wonder of what we see and experience.

He cautions the young who are immersed in social media.  Do not be content with the opinions of others.  Don’t go with the flow.  Don’t do a quick internet search . . . unless you find a truly insightful website, like truthreallymatters.com.

Phase 1 of the search that Os outlines is a time for questions.  Questions are vital for the quest.  Few people, he claims, keep asking questions.  I’ve experienced this in that over the many years I have engaged in 1-2-1 evangelism, oh-so-rarely do I encounter a new question.  Most of the time people don’t have any questions that are forefront in their minds.  No questions means they are content to drift along as they are.  A good question, however, presents a challenge that cannot be ducked.  When I was searching, I had to find answers.  And answers were there to be found.  God makes sure of that.

To settle on a particular answer, you must be convinced it is objectively true, not just true for you, but true whether anyone else believes it or not.  We live in a skeptical age, but also a “spiritually and intellectually stunted” age, cut off from not only the rich conversations and debates of previous generations, but also from a healthy culture that encourages or even allows open debates.  Question the orthodoxy of the woke meme of the day at your own peril!

How is it other than insane that the latest outrageous woke assertion cannot even be questioned?  Can’t I even ask someone to explain an idea that overturns thousands of years of wisdom and experience?

Immanuel Kant suggested four big questions:  “What can we know?”  “What must we do?”  “What can we hope for?”  “What is man?”  French artist Paul Gauguin summed it up in three:  “Where do we come from?”  “What are we?”  “Where are we going?”

Everyone has some answers to these questions, ergo, everyone has a faith, a personal philosophy, a worldview.  I discovered this by experience when I started knocking doors for my Sunday School bus route in the 1970s.  From the most to the least educated, from the richest to the poorest, everyone had figured out, they thought, what it was all about, whether they spent anytime thinking about it or not.  They bet their lives and eternities on faith, some faith, whether they had any good reasons or not.  On such faiths, blind or sighted, people decide on identities and morality, and whether they have any hope for the future.

Os tells the story of Charles Handy, an eminent British management guru, who was astonished as he attended his father’s funeral.  His apparently mundane, modest father had touched the lives of hundreds in profound ways.  “I had put my faith until that moment, in success, money, and family, probably in that order.  I still think these things are important, but I hanker after a bigger frame in which to put them.”  He suddenly saw the difference, as David Brooks puts it, between the “resume self” and the “eulogy self.”

The crucial years, Os states, are from eighteen to twenty-five, the Big Seven, in which people think through their biggest decisions – who they are, which career, who to marry, which worldview.  Accordingly, I find the most interesting and rewarding 121s are on or near college campuses.  Just walk up to a college student, offer him a tract, and ask him if he has figured out what the purpose of life is.  Generally, he’ll talk to you.  But a few years later he might well brush you off after his heart and mind have ossified on some false worldly philosophy.

Some people have signals that puncture their complacency or awareness.  Fyodor Dostoevsky was ecstatic after a last-minute reprieve from execution.  He reexamined his life, all the wasted time, laziness, errors, etc., and set out on a new path.  For Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti it was the death of a friend, “a hole torn in life.”  For me it was a divine encounter with a Christian when I was at the absolute nadir of my atheistic lifepath.  Even without a dramatic signal, though, everyone’s life has elements of transcendence, if they are open to them.

I had a moment about fifteen years ago that gave me a glimpse of Heaven.  Families had gathered at our house at Christmastime.  I was sitting on the living room floor with our daughter, Elizabeth, and our infant grandson Eli and . . . the moment was perfect.  Everything was just right, just as it ought to be, a glimpse of justrightness that I’m sure we’ll experience in the ages to come.

The second phase is a time for answers.  There are countless answers, but only one will be “illuminating and truly adequate.”  Now, this book by Os Guinness is not an apologetic discourse on why the Christian faith is the unique and soul-saving answer.  He admits that.  I’ve written much and reviewed many books on this site that serve that purpose.  What Os is attempting is to stir up the desire for the quest in the heart of the reader.  He (and I) are confident that God has wired every one of His image-bearers to recognize the truth if they sincerely seek it.

C.S. Lewis offers the heart of presuppositional apologetics when he writes, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” What I do not like about evidential apologetics is that is focuses on detailed evidences, and entrusts the rebel (unbeliever) to sit in the Judge’s seat to decide whether the evidence is good enough.  Alternatively, presuppositional apologetics starts with the presupposition that the Bible is true, and suggests that now you can see / understand everything important about life and creation.  You can then toss in those detailed evidences.  They will fit nicely.  But you’re confronted with the entire life-changing Gospel-centered worldview.

 “For with thee is the fountain of life:  in thy light shall we see light.”  Psalm 36:9

Using this approach we can evaluate other religions, too.  In Hinduism the universe is grounded in Atman, unchanging and impersonal.  There is no supreme worth for individuals, resulting in a Dalit or “untouchable,” for example.  Pantheism and monism exclude individual worth and dignity.  Our apparent individuality is illusion.  You aspire for “‘release’” – freedom from individuality, not freedom to be an individual.”  Does your conscience resonate with this?

Similarly, atheism is adamant against the transcendent and everything else beyond the senses and the narrowly drawn scientific method – counting, weighing, measuring.  Are you content to see your identity as merely a clump of molecules in motion?  Do you deny your own personhood?  Is morality just some odd brain chemistry?  Is murder just molecules in collision or is it wrong? How about rape or torturing babies for fun?  Do you actually live with no conscience?

Apparently, Charles Darwin, late in life, admitted that he was less able to appreciate the music of Handel’s Messiah that he had once loved.

Guinness observes that the Christian view of the world gave rise to modern science.  The Hindu did not and could not.

What about other societal impacts?  Human rights and dignity do not derive from either Eastern religions or atheism / secularism.  The huge and shocking (for the better) societal changes due to the entry of Jesus into history are well documented in a book I plan to review a few months from now, The Air We Breathe:  How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, by Glen Scrivener.  What we take for granted in “Western values,” including individual rights, compassion, freedom, science, and progress was determinedly not characteristic of ancient cultures.

Phase three is a time for evidences.  Truth, real truth whether it feels good or not,  is despised in our postmodern culture . . . so get over it.  Truth really matters!

When someone says, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” take them at their word and don’t believe them.  Guinness:  “Truth is all about solid facts and reality.”  The opposites of truth include lies, deceptions, delusions, mistrust, fake news, misinformation, and suspicion.  The world is filled with attacks on truth.  Your life depends on persevering against the “father of lies,” as Jesus described Satan.

“The Christian faith claims to be true in the sense that it fully aligns with reality.  It is true in the sense that, if it is true, it would still be true even if no one believed it; and if it is false, it would still be false even if everyone believed it.”  All questions are open.  When Nathanael scoffed to Philip whether or not Jesus was worth checking out, Philip replied, “Come and see.”

Biblical Christianity is tied to reality.  Real reality simply cannot go out of fashion.  Reality and trust in reality are essential for countless human endeavors such as business, science, journalism, politics, and personal relationships.  Christianity is tied to history and to human experience.  It welcomes examination.  Christians themselves may, and are, found wanting quite often, but the Bible is clear that that will be the case, too.

The big questions on which to examine the veracity of biblical truth include what we see in creation, the nanotechnology of living creatures, flood geology, fulfilled prophecy, the behavior of man (sin / virtue / morality), the logic and experiences of redemption and the new birth, and the resonance of hope in the human soul.  A Christian life philosophy welds together realism and hope, optimism and pessimism.

C.S. Lewis at first tried to read the Gospel accounts as a literary critic and was shaken to his core. “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” he asked, including how to reconcile two aspects of His life – the “depth and sanity of His moral teaching” and “the quite appalling nature of this man’s theological remarks.”

In short, no great moral teacher ever claimed to be God and that was what Jesus claimed repeatedly, even to the point of crucifixion.

Lewis:  “Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great moral teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

The fourth and final phase of the quest is “a time for commitment.”  This is a step of faith, not a leap of faith, a step fully rational and grounded on the conviction that what we see in the Bible is true.  It is a warranted belief.  If true, you must respond, all in or all out.  This is a matter of heart, will, and mind.  It’s personal.

In deciding for Christ, you necessarily repent from all other worldviews, which are demonstrably irrational, in accord with the type of examples mentioned before.

Your warranted belief naturally includes conviction, which leads to trust.  Your entire person commits to a Person, the Lord Jesus.  Now, I wish that Os was more complete in his discussion here, because the conviction and trust that produces a born again conversion necessitates a humility and an admission of sins that need forgiveness, which is why the Cross and the Resurrection occurred.  Repentance from your actual personal sins and trust in the Person of Jesus Christ are the elements that complete the quest . . . the new birth into the family of God.

Which starts a new quest.  The Christian life extends from this point, “a new creature” (2 Cor 5:17), through eternity.

Jesus had a quest, too, to search for us, pictured in Luke 15 as a shepherd searching for a lost sheep, a woman searching for a lost coin, and a father waiting for a lost son to come home.

Once we come home, once we are born again into God’s family, our new quest is to follow in Jesus’ work – to seek and to save that which was lost.  At this point in my life – I’m 70 now, easily fatigued, and have several health issues – I don’t have much ambition or the capacity to fulfill new ambitions, but it is still clear to me that as long as I can walk and talk I can share the Gospel with lost people, both verbally and by tract.  We hand out about 400 tracts per week, I knock doors with my grandsons, and I find interesting ways to reach out to people I would not normally cross paths with.

I don’t do as much as I used to, but I am very grateful that the Lord still has some service for me to perform.

I highly recommend Os Guinness’ book.  He concludes with some beautiful thoughts:  “. . . for a seeker to find Jesus is not the end of all searching, but the beginning of the greatest quest of all . . . to know God better and better, which is the climax and soul of human existence . . . It never ends, not because of the infinity of options and the impossibility of choosing, but because of the infinity and inexhaustibility of the One in whom we have found our answer.”

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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