The Importance of a Journey of Faith 1

“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”                                                                            (Dan. 12:4)

The supernatural participation of God in our adventure of faith is precisely what separates and elevates the Bible above mere human inventive imagination in the world of religion.  What differentiates a biblical journey of faith following Jesus Christ is that it falls outside of comparisons to conventional experience.

The whole point of the modern Christian’s journey of faith in space and time is for the supernatural God to noticeably participate and intervene in the course of our lives in ways that are beyond our creative imaginations, thereby revealing His true nature to us.

In a game of catch with a baseball with the God of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, God not only catches the ball and throws it back, but He creatively invents a unique game of “pickle” or “over-the-line,” or throws us “grounders” or “fly-balls” to match our individual talents but also to pinpoint aspects of the game we need more work on.

By definition, a biblical, supernaturally guided adventure of faith is not analogous to a worldly conventional, self-directed, God-less life.

Radically liberal biblical critics today cannot accurately determine the probabilities of the reliability and truthfulness of the occurrences of biblical events using analogy to conventional human experience, because there is no correlation between everyday life and the supernatural participation of God in the lives of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Elijah, Esther, Daniel, or Peter, for example.

When conventional-life humanistic and social science comparisons are used as the only “empirically” valid tool to interpret the Bible, this misses the point on a fundamental level.

When the Bible is included in comparative religious studies, without exception the uniquely biblical experience of a journey of faith is absent from the discussion, because there is no equivalent comparison found in other religions or in commonplace everyday life.

The central theme in the Bible is the re-connection of people, by means of a supernatural, unconventional relationship through the four dimensions of space and time, with God.

This was the original intention for mankind before our fall into sin. Attempting to compare the uniquely biblical adventure of faith, saturated with the supernatural participation of the living God, to contemporary social science research based upon common everyday conventional life, and to other world religions falsely invented out of the imagination of man, will never lead to seeing and understanding the true nature and character of a supernatural God.

The “modern,” radically skeptical approach of unbelief applied to the interpretation of the Bible produces a Bible that is just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill religious book.

Radically liberal, skeptical unbelief pulls the Bible down into a flattened, non-supernatural, leveled playing-field where it can then be more conveniently but erroneously compared to other contemporary religions in both ancient and modern times.

This is one of the most clever and subtle deceptions of all time, and it carries with it the “authority” of university trained scholarship.  Whatever good qualities are contained within a modern social science critique of the Bible, removing the supernatural element out of the Bible as a working hypothesis changes the biblical literary document into something it is not.

A humanistic, naturalistic, modern “scientific” approach to biblical interpretation homogenizes out the vital supernatural element that makes God and the Bible unique and full of life.

This discussion on science, the philosophy of naturalism, and intelligent design is leading toward an important point.

The mission of science to discover natural explanations for phenomenon in our physical world…does not mean that science itself must therefore be allied with the philosophy of naturalism.  A scientific methodology designed to discover natural causes for phenomenon is not the same thing as the philosophy of naturalism that claims our natural world is a closed-system…not allowing active participation by a supernatural God.

Pure science cannot say anything conclusive about whether or not our natural world is open or closed to unique, one-time, non-repeating supernatural events, because this question is not testable by repetitive experimental investigation.

The empiricism of scientific evidence and the philosophy of naturalism do not touch tangentially, much less overlap in terms of common, supportive hard data.  Nonetheless, naturalism has deceptively attached itself to science, thereby claiming a prestige and authority through a faulty connection to the empirical nature of science…that the purely speculative philosophy of naturalism does not merit.

From the Christian perspective, the unwarranted attachment of the philosophy of naturalism to the credibility and purity of science is one of Lucifer’s greatest triumphs of deception in our modern times.

The subtlety of this deception is amazingly clever.  Dividing and separating out the philosophy of naturalism from pure science is not easy.  The malevolent agenda of Lucifer is to combat faith and trust in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and to cast doubt on the credibility of the Bible, by coupling the atheistic philosophy of naturalism to the neutral empiricism of scientific investigation.

Combined with the commendable optimism of the historical Enlightenment era “doctrine of progress,” and the accelerating positive momentum of the Scientific Revolution, the tag-along philosophy of naturalism is a free-rider that is difficult to disconnect from this fast moving train.

What better scheme than to promote a philosophy that unjustifiably claims the prestige and credibility of science, yet unscientifically works to remove the existence of God out of our natural world altogether…a philosophical tenet that goes way beyond the scope and limitations of the scientific investigative method itself.

Equally important, the philosophy of naturalism performs double-duty service as one of the key components of the radically liberal, skeptical social science interpretation of the Bible.

A naturalistic social science research approach begins with a non-supernatural presupposition in analyzing the Bible.  But what happens if empirical, secular science itself discovers strong circumstantial evidence for intelligent design and thus a supernatural Creator, similar to the creative capacity we possess, but vastly superior?

What if world-class modern scientists discover blueprint designs behind the workings of physical phenomenon everywhere we look in our natural world, revealing a creative mind exactly like our own, yet with unsurpassed creative imagination using an ordered arrangement of complex information that is sublimely brilliant?

The growing body of scientific evidence in the emerging field of intelligent design pulls the rug out from under the false connection between naturalistic philosophy and the pursuit of science.  If the hard facts of science begin to confirm and point toward a supernatural God, then naturalism must look elsewhere for its credibility boost.

 

What might have passed for scientifically validated conclusions drawn from the philosophical approach of naturalism applied to the Bible, are now reduced to the more honest level of mere human speculation, conjecture, and biased opinion, with no basis whatsoever in pure science.