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 1 (Part 1)

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

I am not a scientist.  But that’s okay, because evolution isn’t really science anyway.  When you think of science, you probably picture people in white coats looking at test tubes in a laboratory, searching for answers to the big questions in life, searching for truth, reality, unlocking all the mysteries of life.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

What tools does science have for its task, or what tools does it use to answer these questions?  Observations, measurements, repeatable experiments.    

With the scientific method, information about our world began increasing rapidly.

But then something happened.

At first science limited its inquiries to things it could see and observe and measure.  Gradually things that couldn’t be observed and measured were considered less real.  They were just beliefs, unworthy of people who were really in the know.  Then beliefs became irrelevant, even inimical to truth.

Science can’t observe God, measure Him, or subject Him to repeatable experiments.  So first it merely said that science is not concerned with God, only material things.  But then it began working with the assumption that material things were all there was.  They went from confining their area of expertise to what can be observed and measured to concluding that what can be observed and measured was for all practical purposes enough.  There was no need to accept anything beyond that.

Yes, I know this is a generalization and that there are many individual exceptions.  But they came to believe, not from empirical evidence but simply from their working presuppositions, that all reality can be explained entirely by natural processes.

Now if there is a God, at some point, somewhere, you would expect that He and the world would intersect, that He would actually do something in the world.  But science would not admit that.  It would never conclude that.  Whatever happened had to have had only material causes. 

If you could take a time machine back to the beginning of the world and you saw God actually call the world into existence by the words of His mouth, science would never accept that as truth.  What this means is that, while science is believed to be the source of all truth in the quest for understanding the world, it automatically precludes certain conclusions from its work. 

It is interested in truth as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with God.  It’s like trying to solve math problems and denying the existence of the number 3.

Whether or not God did indeed create the world, they will act under the presumption that He didn’t.  And all their theories, like evolution, are their best ideas of how all this could have happened on its own. 

If God really did create the world, anyone who seriously wants to know the truth about the world and life would want to know that.  If science really wanted to know the answers to life, it should be able to reach that conclusion.  But its methodology is limited (It can’t put God into a test tube or submit Him to a lie detector.), so it out of hand dismisses it as a possibility.

They say it is based on the best evidence, but I would like to show that it is rather based on a leap of faith far greater than that attributed to any religious believer.

First of all, evolution believes that life evolved through minute random mutations over millions of years.  After millions, even perhaps a billion years, every living thing on earth now should be in the middle of some evolutionary process.  Evolution would have no way of knowing or saying that it has reached perfection.  Things would have been constantly changing for better or worse, with the worse things gradually dying off. 

So every living thing, plant, animal, human, would/should be in some state of transition.  The evidence would suggest then that evolution all over the world has stopped for a few centuries at the same time with everything having reached a state of equilibrium.  And this is all supposed to be random, unguided?

Imagine that astronauts were to travel to Mars.  While exploring the planet, they find a computer on the ground.  Their first thought would be: “Someone has been here.”  Why?  They know that a computer could not be assembled without intelligence, someone designing it and then putting it together in a precise manner.  You could put all the required components next to each other for billions of years, and they would not make any progress toward making a computer.

If they found only a table and chair, they would conclude the same thing.  If they found the words ‘Mary loves John’ scrawled in the ground, they would conclude that some intelligent life preceded them. 

Nothing is more complicated in the world than a living thing, particularly human life.  The proteins that form our DNA are joined in ways that do not occur naturally and actually constitute a language considerably more complex than ‘Mary loves John.’

To say that humans evolved from apes can almost seem believable when said with a straight face by someone with a beard and glasses and wearing a suit.

It’s when you go back to the beginning of it all that the whole thing stretches all believability to the point of absurdity. 

How could life have started in the first place?   Let’s say it was caused by lightning striking the ground under the right atmospheric conditions.  Poof!  Living dirt.  A miracle. 

But we need some more miracles almost immediately.  This living dirt must have some way to create energy, otherwise it would die in short manner.  Another lightning strike would kill it, so maybe a lightning strike close by creates a system for this living dirt to metabolize other dirt for energy.  This living dirt can now exist for more than a few moments.

But now for all this to have any significance, it needs another miracle.  If this living dirt doesn’t reproduce itself, it will soon be gone forever.  So lightning strikes close by again, and now this living dirt is given the ability to reproduce itself. 

So now we have had three totally unlikely, impossible (?) miracles, and living dirt is starting to spread over the earth.  No, wait.  Locomotion.  We need another miracle for this thing to be able to move out of its location; otherwise, we will just have a mound of living dirt.  So lightning has to strike again, close by, and somehow this creates the ability of locomotion in this living dirt.

Now if all this had been what the religions had been teaching, scientists would have laughed them to scorn.  But it gets better. 

At this point, we need another miracle that makes all the previous ones seem run of the mill by comparison.

We have a world filling with living dirt.  This living dirt would be changing through random mutations, but now some of these need to be randomly developing complementary reproductive systems, strictly by chance, of course.  And amazingly enough, when at least two of these living dirt things have finally reached completed complementary reproductive systems, these two living dirt things need to be close enough to each other to actually reproduce together.

And science wants us to believe that all this happened by itself, with no intelligence guiding it, no outside power doing anything.  And they call faith blind?  You would think perhaps that the self-reproducing organisms would have been the one that prevailed through natural selection.

To say that the world and life was created by intelligence is or rather should be a logical conclusion of science.  When all natural explanations of the world and life rely on events totally contrary to experience and experimentation, then the God hypothesis is not only fair but logical. 

In my next article, we will consider why all this is so important.