poligion: Evolution: Why it’s wrong and why it matters 1a (Part 1a)

where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Evolution: Why it’s wrong and why it matters 1a (Part 1a)

Evolution: Why it’s wrong and why it matters 1a (Part 1a)

Last time I wrote about why evolution is wrong, and I was planning here to show why this matters. Some readers, however, were kind enough to take the time to write lengthy comments to my article, so I thought it important here to respond to their comments. Perhaps the fact that I said evolution was wrong without qualifying that statement with such mitigating phrases as, “why I believe evolution is wrong,” or, “in my opinion, ….” had something to do with the content of their comments.

One reader was thoughtful enough to include a scientific flowchart to show how science works. My article simply mentioned such things as observing, measuring, and repeatable experiments.

Science is certainly very good at what it is made to do; but after reading all the comments, I still believe it is safe to say that evolution does not fit with the scientific method.

What kind of repeatable experiment would we conduct? Fill a Petri dish half full with amino acids, top it off with water, place it on the ground where it can get adequate sunlight, and then check it in a million years or so for signs of life?

I think it is safe to say that evolution does not meet the requirement of repeatable experiment. Nor that of observation. Science can’t give an experiment of evolution. By this I mean, either the origin of life or the transition from one species to another. And even if it could, that wouldn’t prove anything, because the whole point of evolution is that all this was supposed to have happened by itself, without any intelligent help. If a scientist did think that he proved evolution by his experiment, it would actually be more of a support for the existence of God, because it would show that these things needed intelligence to put it all together, not blindless, random mutations.

And since no intelligence is involved in the process, evolution should have been going on continuously ever since it started. It wouldn’t have noted that now that we have human beings, its work is done. There is nobody to do the thinking.

And the fact that we still have all these intermediate species, like birds and fishes and reptiles, would suggest that this evolutionary process is still at work. Yet all these species appear to be finished products. If evolution were true, as I said before, every living thing now would be in some transitional state, a work in progress. Now it looks like everything is complete in its own kind.

One reader had a question about the origin of the earth. Did God create it or did it come about through entirely natural means? Neither alternative is easy. Either would require an act of faith. However, I have read too much about the wonders of the world to think that everything just came about by chance. Why would water expand when it freezes, unlike everything else that contracts, thus permitting life below the water’s surface to survive in winter?

I read that the earth possesses something like 27 properties that are essential to life. It has been described like the earth was made specifically to support life. It’s not so much a question of whether there is life on other planets, but why is there any life at all?

It was suggested that life is simply the mixing of the right ingredients. I understand that the molecules that form our DNA are constructed in ways that do not occur naturally. That is, you can get these atoms and amino acids to combine in a laboratory or elsewhere, but they won’t combine in the way that DNA is built.

Several readers use the words ‘scientific fact’ to describe the results that science purports to have. That’s not quite accurate. Science can establish facts, and it has done so quite well. But evolution is entirely out of that realm. There are no observations, no measuring, no repeatable experiments. And it precludes the possibility of God having done anything right from the start. That’s not only not fair; it’s unscientific, in the better sense of the term. Science, as I would like to think of the term, would be the search for the truth, wherever it leads, not just to naturalistic explanations for everything.

The pursuit for truth should take someone wherever the evidence leads, not make up some story to avoid the obvious conclusions. The world, everything in it, and especially human beings, is a truly wonderful place. I use the word ‘wonderful’ here in its etymological sense, full of wonder. Nothing in our experience would even suggest that order, intelligence, complexity, and design can originate apart from previous intelligence.

We use the word God for that intelligence. If you have problems with the understanding of God that you were taught when you were younger, that still should not dissuade anyone that such a thing as a God put all this together. To ascribe all this to chance is more than a typical leap of faith. A religious person feels there is evidence to push him in a certain direction. The non-religious scientist has to leap to something that is contrary to human experience and known laws of nature.

One last reader speaks of “libraries of empirical testing.” Our point here is with evolution, which cannot be tested. Human involvement would contaminate the experiment, it is unobservable, and there is no evidence that it has actually occurred.

Fact and truth are held up as the epitome of human existence. The fact is that there is much of life and existence that science cannot talk about. The meaning of life, its purpose, and, of course, whether there is a God.

There are no questions bigger than these, but science has nothing to say about them. It reduces life down to a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fats brought together by chance. And someday it will all separate.

Is that all what life is about? Life is short. I think our first duty as human beings is to find out if there is a God. If there is, we need to find out anything and everything we can about Him. If not, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and try to make the most of what little time we have.