Category: The Biblical Narrative in the Modern World

Non-Racial Anti-Tribalism is at the Core of the New Testament

            Virtue from the biblical perspective has nothing to do with race, nationality, or place of origin.

            Ultra-conservatives would like to keep America racially white, to keep white people in the voting majority which implies that only white people can be virtuous citizens.

            Ultra-conservatives are welcome to their opinion, but this viewpoint is as unchristian as is imaginable.

            The Great Commission (Mt. 28:19-20) at the beginning of the new Christian church is race-neutral by divinely timeless foresight and intention (Gen. 12:3; Isa. 42:6; Jn. 3:16, 4:9-10, 8:5, 8:26-29, 10:34-35, 22:21: Rom. 3:29).

            The name given to the believers in the church at Antioch of being first called Christians is a name that is universally race-neutral and nationality-free (Acts 11:26).

            But the small nation of Israel in a rough and unwelcoming neighborhood must remain culturally intact for roughly 1,400 years until the arrival of Jesus Christ the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sins in the first-century, which on a practical level requires the Jews to not mix or intermarry with the people of the surrounding countries. 

            The Jews cannot allow their religious and cultural heritage to be diluted by mixing with the surrounding pagan cultures, or the positive context for the cultural explosion of the forerunner John the Baptist (Isa. 40:3-5; Mal. 3:1; Mt. 11:10-14; Lk. 1:17), the ministry of Jesus, the cross and resurrection, and the rapid growth of Christianity coming out of Jerusalem…would not be the extremely fine-tuned environment needed to inaugurate redemptive salvation as it actualizes for new covenant believers around the world to this present day.

            But this was not supposed to morph downward into the self-righteousness of parochial tribalism, of prejudicially looking down our nose at other people…which unfortunately was the social dichotomy between Jews and Gentiles at the start of the new Christian church (Acts 11:1-3, 17, 19-26, 22:21-23).  

“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.” (Rom. 3:10).

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:23).

            Saul/Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-1-6) is designed to remove the Judaic prejudicial tribalism against the pagan, idol-worshipping, polytheistic Greeks and Romans.  This event is a variation of the miracle that occurred on the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit is poured-out on the disciples, at the very time that peoples from all over the Mediterranean region were present, listed in Acts 2 as worshippers of God gathered together on that festival day (Acts 2:9-11).

            To successfully carry-out his evangelical mission to the first-century Greco-Roman world, Paul must be free of any self-righteous condescension towards the clearly mistaken Gentiles in worshipping dumb idols.

            Paul must painfully discover his own entirely wrong viewpoint regarding the person of Jesus of Nazareth, along with his mistaken colleagues back in Jerusalem in not only opposing the new Christian church, but in persecuting the church to the extent of arresting Christians and putting some to death.

            In order to be rid of his racial, religious, and cultural prejudice against the Gentiles which was a normal part of his Jewish upbringing and shared by every highly educated Pharisee in Jerusalem at the beginning of the Great Commission outreach to the larger world, the radically extreme turnaround needed for Paul was to discover that as a Pharisee his rejection of Jesus Christ as Messiah was far worse than the misguided idol-worship of false gods practiced by the Gentiles.

            To successfully fulfill his created destiny, the apostle Paul not only needed to broaden his horizon as to the divine nature of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and the Messiah of Israel, but also incredibly to include a new prejudicial and positive bias towards the Gentiles he will soon be called to evangelize.  

            Paul realized in his divine encounter at Damascus that he of all people should have known better…that of course the long-awaited coming Messiah could also be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin (Ps. 22; Isa. 53), and the unmerited yet instantaneous forgiveness of God towards him by grace through faith could then just as quickly be applied to the Gentiles through belief and acceptance of the gospel message of salvation through the cross and the resurrection of Christ.

            Improved virtue of character is obtainable by anyone regardless of race, nationality, or place of origin…through faith placed in Jesus Christ as Savior (Rom. 1:16-17, 2:10-11, 3:22, 4:16, 4:24, 8:1-4, 10:9-13).

            Racial prejudice in America is unchristian and unscriptural in the most injurious way to Christian evangelism.  It introduces a negative opinion of the worth and value of other people created in the image of God, that as Christians we of all people are not entitled to make.

            Whites, Blacks, Mexican-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and any other races are equally capable of virtuous citizenship in America because all human beings according to scripture are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).

            From an evangelical perspective, every person is capable of freely choosing to trust the God of the Bible, listen in the Spirit, and enter into a God-composed journey of faith life-script after the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith.

            Other peoples and cultures around the world can certainly engage in promoting and practicing the concept of extending value and worth to all people regardless of race, gender, nationality, and place of origin.

            But Spirit-born Christians have a divine mandate to throw-off racial prejudice and negative bias if we are to successfully fulfill our calling of the Great Commission in the end-times.  

The Broad Array of Moral Concepts

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”                                                (Jn. 1:14)

            If the Bible and Christians contend that Jesus Christ is the blemish-free, Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for mankind’s sins…that He was perfect and without sin during His life and ministry on earth, by what or by whose standard do we judge the existence of this alleged perfect moral character in any person?

            How would we determine that the life of Jesus was at the outer edge of moral perfection, at the peak and the pinnacle of absolute goodness and virtue having no additional room or space at the highest top-most point of the vertical, graduated spectrum-line of virtue and morality, of brilliant pure light and absolute goodness having no room for further improvement?

            What would explain the existence of the diverse categories of moral criteria defining virtue, of the numerous moral concepts broken down into individual words as abstract thoughts accessible to human contemplation that would enable and support a valid determination of the moral credentials of Jesus Christ?

            And finally, where would our highly-advanced capacity to comprehend, to divide, separate-out, and parse these varied conceptual virtues and vices consisting of finely differentiated realities that are true-to-life…come from? 

            Where would this uniquely human capacity originate from, seeing that it does not exist anywhere else in the animal world and therefore cannot plausibly be attributed to a common descent, naturalistic explanation for its origin extending seamlessly from animal instinct to human intellect?

            In short, is this current planet earth the perfect environment to conduct research explorations into the knowledge of good and evil, using the lens of a fallen moral nature that is crucified alongside Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary…redeemed fully so that believers in Christ can with impunity and without risk to our eternal salvation…enter into journeys of faith by picking-up our own cross to follow Jesus Christ into an adventure beyond our initial imagination?

God-composed journey of faith life-scripts are too deep for a naturalistic explanation for their origin

            Leaving aside the recent modern recognition in philosophy that the human mind…when reduced down to only a material “brain” made up of circuits and neurons…devolves into a nonsensical relativism that undermines confidence in the reliability of all human thought, and thereby destroys rationality, scientific investigation, and even philosophies such as atheism itself.

            Yet by simply asking the question and examining the evidence, this in and of itself declares at the outset that Jesus Christ the person we are investigating…is in fact within the zone of moral perfection and sinless virtue by reason of the question being seriously entertained at all. 

            We would not even open such an investigation into the life of any other exceptional person…past or present…because we already correctly acknowledge that only one person in all of history has made a credible, serious claim to have lived a perfect life, and that one person is Jesus Christ.  

            No sane person in all of recorded history has made a viable and well-substantiated claim to embody and demonstrate the moral attributes of brilliant pure light, absolute goodness, and perfect virtue…of being, speaking, and acting like a Deity…proactively anticipated for centuries in the biblical Old Testament messianic prophecies and documented and fulfilled later in the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus Christ recorded in the New Testament gospels.

            This raises the probing apologetics question into the divine origin of the composition of the Bible, Old Testament Judaism, and New Testament Christianity…of how…in the first place we would “come by” the capacity to accurately judge whether the life and ministry of Jesus Christ exhausts the extent of the possible outer-limits of moral perfection.

            How would we determine that our current tool-kit of known virtuous characteristics…of well-defined moral attributes…is absolutely exhaustive, adequate, and complete enough for the in-depth moral reasoning needed to evaluate the life of Jesus Christ? 

            How would we know whether there are not some additional, outstanding moral characteristics that we are unaware of…in this current earthly context…above and beyond those demonstrated and exemplified in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ that would raise the bar higher, that would call into question the impeccable qualifications of Jesus to be the blemish-free and sinless atoning sacrifice for our sins?

            The point here is not whether God has some additional, divine characteristics applicable in heaven that would not concern us presently…that are not relevant here on earth…but whether or not Jesus the Son of God in a human body (Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7) exhausts the limits of moral perfection as the God/man in order to qualify as the Passover Lamb of God, one-time atoning sacrifice for sin.

            The question is how this full and varied palette of morals had an origin and came into existence within the reality of human life…to be able to make this assessment.

            The important point in this discussion is the fantastic notion that we would have the moral reasoning tools in terms of human mental capacity, but also in the corresponding complement in the broad array of abstract moral concepts defined in discrete and distinctive words…to be able to make a valid decision for or against salvation faith in Jesus Christ…at this highly advanced level.

            The mere existence of this question removes the key component of naturalistic materialism utilizing the concept of incrementally gradualistic development…because of the easily recognizable wealth of complex and finely differentiated concepts defining moral characteristics within personal relationships…that are a fundamental and established part of the human reasoning capacity from the dawn of human history.

            The critical human invention of writing as one tell-tale indicator of human intellectual progress is dated to as recent a time as 3,200 B.C. in the wedge-shaped cuneiform lettering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the cuneiform alphabet in Syria around 2,000 B.C., and in the 22-sign Phoenician alphabet dated around 1,000 B.C.

            The Greeks adopt the Phoenician writing script around 800 B.C.   

            The invention of human writing, of widespread, functional written communication of complex and specified information that locks into time-and-place the human capacity for mature and fully developed moral reasoning…starts only 5,200 years ago.

            We do not have to be a professional anthropologist, sociologist, paleontologist, biologist, or historian to know that there exist no contemporary, eye-witness, written accounts by human authors of the retreat of the Ice-Age glaciers covering the northern continents of America and Europe starting around 12,000 to 10,000 B.C.

            There are no written, eye-witness accounts by the actual participants of humans battling wholly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers during the Pleistocene Ice-Age time-period, prior to the invention of writing, using the letters of an alphabet.

            Are we then to uncritically swallow whole the theoretical paradigm of incrementally gradualistic development as an explanation for the origin of sophisticated and discretely defined moral characteristics…the small step-by-step progressive gradualism proposed by the atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism in support of Darwinian macroevolution…still prevalent as a competing worldview narrative today?

            Mindless, undirected, gradualistic development of the capacity for moral reasoning would have left a clearly discernable trail in recorded human history going back for hundreds of thousands of years.

            The great advances in recent history that define the modern Scientific Revolution and the two major Industrial Revolutions are not the product of gradual improvements in the macro-evolution of human mental capacity…broken-up into small steps going back in a linear incline tens or hundreds of thousands of years. 

            These rapid advances of development in modern science and technology are the product of the progressing accumulations of information…an abstract, non-material entity produced by thinking minds and not a discernably progressive material development of the brain.

            Rapid, positive progression over recent time in human intelligence is not a factor as an explanation for the advancements of learning, technology, and the explosive expansion of knowledge over the last three to four decades…called the new Information Age…as this would be called a saltation…a miraculous leap forward as defined in biology.

            Like the sudden appearance of complex life-forms during the Cambrian Explosion 530 million years ago, without the sign of any transitional intermediate precursors found in the Precambrian rock strata, the sudden appearance of human intelligence and the capacity for advanced moral reasoning is extremely brief in relation to the 4.5-billion year age of the earth…and is too sudden in time to be explained by gradualism needing hundreds of thousands of years of development.

            Dr. John Lennox, Oxford mathematician and author suggests in some of his interviews and discussions online on the Internet that the sudden immergence of human intellectual and moral reasoning capacity might be considered another example of being a singularity in the same manner as the Big-Bang creation of the universe, and the sudden immergence of life on earth.

            The mental capacity to technologically problem-solve at the advanced level to take us to the moon in 1969…and the moral reasoning capacity to differentiate and comprehend complex moral concepts…are two realities that define the essence of human beings.

            The point here is that human beings possess a complete and exhaustive array of tools within the broad assortment of moral concepts from which to make an intelligent and reasoned judgment as to the divine quality of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

            Just as orderliness and intelligibility are indispensably coordinated with our human capacity to conduct successful scientific investigation of the natural world, it would be pointless to be presented with the decision-making imperative regarding the truth-claims of Jesus Christ regarding His qualifications as Savior, King, and eternal Ruler if humans did not possess the incredible capacity to make an informed decision.

            Is it therefore more plausible to recognize that the origin of the entire array and panoply of moral characteristics, appearing suddenly and fully defined in scope and range…that this recognition represents a sharp, near-instant vertical upward spike on any conceivable graph-line for the time-duration of the human race, and not anything like incrementally gradualistic development?

            In Galatians 5:22-23, Paul lists some of the positive fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”

            Earlier in Galatians 5:19-21, Paul lists some of the negative “works of the flesh”: “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.”

            To these two lists of moral attributes and characteristics we could add the concepts of truth, honesty, dignity, loyalty, friendliness, honor, humility, dedication, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, humor, flexibility, empathy, forbearance, consideration, self-sacrifice, gratitude, persistence, commitment, discernment, rationality, logical thinking, being organized, being a peace-maker, fairness, generosity, passion…and a number of other distinct and precise words that describe finely differentiated moral characteristics…and that could be expanded further by listing their negative counterparts.

            Why is this important in a book about the biblical narrative in the modern world?

            When anyone who is a born-again Christian, Bible college student, Christian theologian, atheist, skeptic, or curious truth-seeker begins an examination of the perfect and sinless life of Jesus Christ, they are acknowledging the existence of the very tools of the sophisticated and varied concepts available that precisely define moral characteristics that make such an examination possible.

            Such an investigation acknowledges the reality of the broad array of moral concepts that in and of itself argues as compelling evidence for their divine, advanced, and non-material origin (Gen. 1:26-27)…being inconceivable coming from a purely materialistic origin of a human “brain” consisting of circuits and neurons only…a brain manufactured over time according to the accidental, trial-and-error, chance-happenstance process of random and undirected naturalistic materialism.

            Without this complete and exhaustive tool-kit of concepts by which to judge moral characteristics, a personal decision for or against accepting Christ as Savior would fall short of being meaningful…would not have all of the richly differentiated criteria to support a valid decision…one way or the other.

            We could not accurately and realistically produce an oil-painting depiction of a rugged seascape shoreline with waves crashing against rocks…or of forest trees, blue skies, brilliant white clouds, and a peaceful lakeshore…using only three colors. 

            To create a masterpiece landscape painting, we need the full palate…the full array…of oil-paint colors. 

            For a god-less interpretation of reality to be valid…it would require some reasonable explanation for the creative origin of the extremely complex and nuanced definitions of the many words that describe the advanced moral concepts that human beings use and understand every day, that define the essence of what it means to be human, above and beyond the mere yet brilliant hunting skills exhibited through animal instinct.

            The complexity, specificity, and integrated coherence of the life-story of Jesus Christ in support of His being the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin, requiring moral perfection within the context of a human life not only requires a reasonable explanation for the origin of this remarkable concept, but also by necessity raises humans up into the elevated zone of being able to cast their informed votes…for or against…the placing of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior, King, and Tour Guide through this life. 

            The three complimentary categories: the existence of the broad array of moral concepts, our capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning, and the divinely composed life-script for Jesus Christ…must all be mature, fully developed, and functionally in-time for the appearance of Jesus Christ into this world…in the first-half of the first-century A.D.

            This discussion opens the door into a better and fuller understanding of the uniqueness of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ…validating the life of Jesus to be at the top-most point of moral perfection.

            As discussed in the previous essay and repeated here for emphasis…one area therefore where we can clearly and unambiguously authenticate the divine nature of Jesus Christ is in His perfect compliance with the biblical concept of God-sovereignty in His life-script and performance.

            On the cross Jesus is demonstrating God-sovereignty actualized to absolute perfection…in staying within His God-composed life-script calling to become the Savior of the world…in purely consistent, non-rebellious, sinless unity-of-purpose within the Godhead of the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

            The divinely brilliant, creative originality of the cross is that Jesus is experiencing the most acute outward display of worldly failure…while at the same time achieving the greatest single accomplishment for mankind in all of history as the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin.

            God combines on the cross two contrasting elements…extreme worldly failure and brilliantly divine success…on the broadest possible range of human experience because the cross at Calvary involves the divine Son of God in a human body (Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7) that no human literary writer could ever imagine or invent.

            Jesus Christ on the cross as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for mankind’s sins…in perfect demonstration of God-sovereignty…is such a brilliantly divisive yet subtle issue surgically separating truth from error that many modern Jews even today use this perceived failure of Jesus to be the expected Moses, Joshua, or King David type Messiah ushering-in world peace…as still serving as the main reason for why they reject Jesus Christ as Messiah, disqualifying Him on these grounds alone.

            Many Jews in the first-century and today would say that their Messiah would never suffer the indignity of being crucified by the Romans…of being a curse “hanged on a tree.” (Dt. 21:23; Gal. 3:13).

            As we ourselves stand at the cross looking up at Jesus…we either see the Passover Lamb of God performing His God-composed life-script in perfect God-sovereignty…or we see the worst failure of a person that can be imagined in life, the utter humiliation of first being scourged, then afterwards ending their lives through the shame and defeat of Roman crucifixion.

            As we look up at Jesus hanging on the cross, we either see a life-script that was perfectly written to match the unique capacity of the God/man Jesus Christ to take upon Himself the sins of the world, or we see a life-script that falls so far short of the positive aspects and aspirations of the American Dream ancient or modern…that our best option then is to choose to go our own way in a journey of self, according to the tenets of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…and reject Jesus Christ altogether.

            The insightfully piercing dichotomy between the perfect God-sovereignty of Jesus Christ…and the self-sovereignty of going our own way of the religious elites and political rulers in Jerusalem…at the cross…is exposed by God alone as no human literary genius could of being as wide apart as the Grand Canyon.

            God alone has the motivation and the ability to highlight on that day atop Calvary Hill…the huge contrast between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty…to perfection.

            This is a key element that separates-out for us…amidst the sea of multiple competing narratives…the singularly unique biblical narrative in a modern world.

The Perfect Savior

“For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”                                            (Heb. 4:15)

            In all of the accounts of the intense opposition from the religious and political leaders the Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and lawyers that Jesus responds to as recorded in the four New Testament gospels, in His miraculous healing of the blind and the lame, of preaching to hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, and in His personal interactions with His disciples and the common people, we see what we would expect to see in the moral attributes and traits of virtue in a person claiming to be the divine Son of God and long-awaited Messiah (Isa. 11:1-5, 35:1-8).

            We see truth, honesty, kindness, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, and uncompromising courage, to name a few positive attributes that give Jesus a grade of A-plus, of perfect 100-percent test scores across-the-board within the broad array of moral concepts we can use as standards for judgment.

            We can agree with Pilate the Roman governor in Jerusalem after examining Jesus: “I find in him no fault at all.” (Jn. 18:38).

            But what we do not clearly see in hindsight in first-century Jerusalem during the time of the ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth…is why the Passover had no connection with the Old Testament Judaic conception of the coming Messiah.

            How is it that nearly everyone in and around A.D. 27 in Israel were looking hopefully and expectantly for a Joshua or King David type warrior/priest as Messiah who would expel the loathsome Romans out of their country as had occurred with numerous other enemy invaders in their past national history, and fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy of 9:6-7 of God setting-up His eternal kingdom in Jerusalem?  

            No one expected the coming Messiah to also be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sins, according to the obscure and little understood scriptural passages of Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.

            This is where God’s ways and our ways sharply divide, differentiating the life-script for Jesus Christ as being above and beyond human literary invention…lifting the biblical narrative above other contemporary worldview narratives in today’s modern marketplace of ideas.

            But the one area where we can with solid confidence through the benefit of hindsight today conclude that Jesus Christ is operating at the cutting-edge of divine perfection, above anything that any other human being has ever been able to achieve, is that Jesus Christ is living-out His God-composed life-script to be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin to the outer limits of absolute perfection…unbeknownst to the popular expectation of a soon-coming military and political deliverer/messiah in conformity with past Jewish history.

            The life-script mission of Jesus Christ as the Passover Lamb of God would require perfect adherence without any gaps of inconsistency to the uniquely biblical, moral concept of God-sovereignty, Himself being the Second Person of the Trinity, which would be humanly impossible for anyone other than the messianic God/man Jesus Christ to actualize.

            Every positive person of faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, other than Jesus Christ, have God-composed life-scripts that take into account built-in allowances for human error (Rom. 4:6-8).

            All of these positive people of faith are nonetheless morally imperfect and are not perfectly virtuous…are morally imperfect like the rest of us in the many categories of the broad array of moral concepts, but also in their inability to perfectly follow-through within their God-composed life-scripts without stumbling and bumbling at certain points along the way…in pursuit of their divinely created callings and destinies.

            If the biblical narrative stories of faith can be described as God’s attempt to give us something of Himself, to enable us to experience first-hand the expression in-and-through-us of some portion of His divine character as actualized through the events of God-composed life-script storylines…we can also see that this extraordinary program entails our imperfect performance.

            Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Esther and Mordecai, Ruth, Hannah, Daniel, Peter, and Paul…none of these people are morally perfect and sinless. 

            Their life-scripts are based upon Holy Spirit empowered grace-through-faith, and proceed according to their individually exceptional gifts and abilities, plus the creative imagination of God their Creator as life-script Writer.

            These biblical life-scripts are not based upon the self-realization of autonomous individualism built upon the attempt to save ourselves through the self-performance of good-works…that as entirely human-driven and human-directedwould and must fall far short of moral perfection and sinless virtue.

            But the God-composed life-script for Jesus Christ the Son of God intentionally exploits and utilizes to the fullest His uniquely divine nature to the maximum extent to be able to perfectly succeed in the one area wherein God knows we will have the most difficulty.

            This is the area that is the definition of sin and that the cross on Calvary Hill focuses upon…the area of God-sovereignty versus self-sovereignty…of following God’s leading in our lives compared instead to going our own way in shortsighted self-rulership (Isa. 53:6).

            God singles-out and highlights this key element within the broad array of moral concepts, honestly and candidly revealed in the difficulty that Jesus has in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion.

            Matthew 26:36-46 and Luke 22:39-46 record that in the Garden of Gethsemane the night of His arrest and preliminary trial, that Jesus asked His disciples to “watch and pray”…that His soul was “exceedingly sorrowful”…that He received the assistance from an angel from heaven to strengthen Him…that He went back a second time to “pray more earnestly”…and that He sweat “great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

            The remarkable words of Jesus spoken that night: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk. 22:42), tells us that God has brilliantly written a life-script for Himself, for the second Person of the Trinity living in a human body that manages to challenge Himself in the one humanly unreachable zone of moral perfection and sinless virtue, of making perfect choices and doing the right thing every time.

            Yet this humanly unreachable zone is still comprehensible within our capacity for moral reasoning…in the above-this-world, unconventionally divine test-case scenario in the Garden of Gethsemane of God-sovereignty consistent, unified, and indivisible within God Himself…within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

            If Jesus does not say in perfect faith without skipping a beat: “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done”…but instead decides to go in another direction other than the cross the next day, at that precise moment in time God-sovereignty would have been split in two…introducing autonomous individual rebellion into the God-head of the Trinity…Jesus the Son of God going His own way apart from the Father and away from His ancient destiny as the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Rev. 13:8).

            This unprecedented development of the testing of divinely sinless unity-of-purpose consistent between God the Father, Jesus the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit, of unerring fidelity to the one right course of action no matter how difficult it is or how high the cost in the Garden of Gethsemane and Calvary the next day…separates-out God-sovereignty as the most important and the highest of issues in all of reality…the top-shelf “queen” of the virtues.

            All of the other moral concepts and virtues are secondarily derivative to the primary concept of God-sovereignty…of following God’s leading in our lives rather than going our own way as autonomous independent agents (Isa. 53:5-6).

            The blood that Jesus Christ shed on the cross is not just to improve our moral performance in the areas of honesty, integrity, tolerance, and the capacity for unselfish love…because the ancient goal, the prime target, the foremost primary reason for the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice is to focus and home-in on the remedy and removal of sin. 

            When I became a Spirit-born Christian at age 18 in 1970, I was not instantly transformed into a morally perfect person, possessing sinless virtue incapable of making any mistakes from that time forward.

            After the resurrection of Jesus Christ and after the Day of Pentecost the early church Christians went out into the Greco-Roman world with the Great Commission gospel message that eventually conquered the world…yet they do so while inhabiting imperfect virtue and fallen yet redeemed natures.

            I have never heard anyone ask the question why this is so…why salvation through Christ does not instantly produce inner perfect virtue and flawless character.

            Why would it be the case throughout the Old and New Testament journeys of faith life-scripts of Abraham (not discounting Enoch and Noah) through Paul…that God works His “magic” of blessing mankind through people having imperfect characters?

            The answer is that God uses His divinely timeless foresight matched with the creative insight of being an ingenious master strategist…to be able to turn mankind’s fall in the Garden of Eden into a positive.

            This is a profoundly unexpected validation of the brilliance of God in keeping with the fine-tuning of the physics in the universe and the nanotechnology of the molecular machinery we now discover in living cells.

            We were simply outwitted in the Garden of Eden…ill-equipped to divide and parse genuine truth from cleverly disguised misinformation (Gen. 3:1-6). 

            I was outwitted by the strong pull of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…in choosing to go the culturally acceptable wrong way of humanistic self-sovereignty…of trying to self-validate my worth and value through personal achievements, until I was saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.      

            The God of the Bible is so brilliant He can take the imperfection of human beings and in an instant of time flip this into a positive asset…into the high-quality of the perfect vehicle of a fallen nature that can take us through an in-depth research program into the knowledge of good and evil…without which we would not only be unable to decipher and understand the subtle nuances of the broad array of moral concepts involved, but which also places believers in the sweet-spot of humility regarding the flawed nature of this human vehicle that precludes self-inflated and pride-filled self-righteousness, the very character trait that kills the ability to take the salvation message of the gospel out to the world-at-large in the spirit of love (Jn. 15:13).

            The blood that Jesus shed on the cross at Calvary covers my sins past, present, and future.

            This enables me to step-into a risk-filled adventure of faith following the God of the Bible…in which I am certain I will make many mistakes along the way, but absent the threat that I can jeopardize my eternal salvation as a result of my imperfect performance.

            The God of the Bible is so brilliant that He has proactively crafted the redemption through the cross and resurrection of Christ so as to provide impunity from the condemnation that should accrue through my blunders and mistakes…for the precise purpose of guaranteeing a safe passage and a safe-conduct through the God-composed journey of faith life-script He has written for me…so that I can experience a first-person exploration of the knowledge of good and evil, within the God-sanctioned and approved vehicle of an imperfect moral nature (Rom. 7:15-8:4).

            Atheists criticize Christians for not being perfect…but we are not supposed to be perfect…just better than we were.

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”                                                                                            (2 Cor. 4:7)

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”                                                                 (Jn. 8:36)           

            The only way we could discover and understand the knowledge of good and evil is for us to take it out for a sanctioned and authorized test-drive…within the vehicle of a redeemed yet fallen imperfect nature.

            The hypothesis that the God of the Bible is trustworthy, truthful, loving, has own best interests at heart, and that we can know Him on a personal basis…is something that can be tested and found to be either true or false.

            A God-composed journey of faith life-script having the upfront impunity of redemptive salvation leads to factual findings that are as empirical as it gets…being in importance far above the findings of modern science into the workings of the natural world.

            God has set-up a program within the context of this life wherein we can for ourselves…with His help…verify the truths and falsehoods contained within a tried and tested knowledge of good and evil, with the additional ingenious feature that we are the ones who are the mouthpieces used to spread these findings about God to other people, rather than this coming from God directly in the form of authoritatively writing this across the sky in fiery red letters.

            This reality could never come from a purely naturalistic universe of matter and energy alone, and it is beyond the literary creative imagination of human invented mythology.

            The idea that God could and would flip our imperfect moral natures into the microscopic and telescopic lens needed to see into the mysteries of the knowledge of good and evil…while engaged within a God-guided journey of faith that also infuses more virtue and goodness into our characters through the indwelling Holy Spirit (Jn. 16:13) through mission-plans designed to help other people entailing some measure of cost and sacrifice to ourselves…answers in large part the fundamental question of the purpose of this life and why we are here.

            Only the real living God could set this all up.

            In The Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 5:6, Jesus does not say blessed are the morally perfect, but “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” (bold and italics mine).

            By becoming born-again (Jn. 3:5-6, 10), the people of faith in the Old and New Testaments are given new spiritual hearts and minds that can comprehend the knowledge of good and evil, while still inhabiting imperfect characters, through the deliberate preplanning and foreknowledge of God (Prov. 3:5-6; Isa. 55:8-9; Jer. 29:11; Eph. 1:7, 2:8-10; 5:8).

            This is one of the many reasons why the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are the most important events in all of history…far above Jesus as Messiah expelling the Romans from Israel in the first-century.

            If God Himself is not internally consistent in this fundamental moral concept of freely choosing God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty…in Gethsemane and at Calvary…within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit…then justifiably God could not ask us to make the difficult, Holy Spirit assisted transition from self-sovereignty toGod-sovereignty in the course of our lives (Jn. 3:14-21).

            This is the fundamental issue under consideration for all human beings, and the God of the Bible is telling us through the life-script of Jesus Christ that He was willing and able to get out in front of us in this regard of the bond of unity…tested within a human life incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth the Son of God…within the personal interrelationships of the Trinity.

            This is why Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life…and why there is no other way to come to the Father except through Him (paraphrased from John 14:6)…because Jesus is the perfect bridge of God-sovereignty that connects us in the right way within a personal walk with God in our own lives.  

            Without freely allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 46:9-10; Jn. 12:24)…to achieve in some measure in our lives this same divine unity-of-purpose (Jn. 17:21), after the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith, then God cannot flip our imperfect natures into the fully redeemed, 4-wheel drive vehicles to venture-out into empirical research programs of lessons-learned traversing through the rough terrain of the knowledge of good and evil in a fallen world.

            God identifies for us in the Garden of Gethsemane that Jesus Christ is operating at the apex, at the highest pinnacle of morality and virtue, when God reveals with incredible honesty and candor His own difficulty at the far outer-edge of virtuosity…the unique and singular challenge in all of time past, present, and going forward into eternity of offering Himself as the loving sacrifice for our sins.

            This unbroken fidelity to God-sovereignty restores our severed relationship with Him on the highest terms of true and right justice yet at the greatest cost to Himself…the cost of the unprecedented death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection three days later.

            Because this entire scenario of truth, challenge, and drama soars far above the capacity of human literary fictional invention, in my opinion this answers the question of how we would know today with certainty that Jesus Christ is the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sins, being morally perfect and having sinless virtue…and qualify as the Messiah in the first-century and now.

            A popular defense of the Bible and Christianity should start at some point with the biblical uniqueness of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, paramount in importance and at the very zenith within the broad array of moral concepts.

            Other than being an embarrassment to Jews worldwide today, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the Passover Lamb of God atonement for sin as a Jew in the first-century…as the Messianic Savior by grace through faith for Jews and Gentiles alike…should be a source of the deepest and most heartfelt commendable pride.

            A book written on the biblical narrative in competition with rival worldviews in the modern marketplace of ideas, can at the outset identify a categorical difference of enormous importance between the traditional Christian doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ…and the entirely contrary view of the other world religions of salvation achieved through the self-performance of good-works, of achieving a “good life” on our own and then putting our faith and trust in a god who will judge this self-effort satisfactory enough to approve our admittance into the after-life.

            This concept of our redeemed fallen nature as the God-sanctioned and authorized vehicle in which to conduct a first-hand exploration of the knowledge of good and evil in a likewise fallen and broken world, is in my opinion, not a new biblical doctrine or interpretation.

            This concept is staring us in the face in the biblical narrative stories of faith, and is integral within the idea of actualized faith placed in the real and living God in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (Rom. 4:1-8).

            Entering into a God-composed journey of faith life-script within the redeemed vehicle of imperfect moral character adds another key piece to the puzzle of the fundamental questions of why we are here and who is the real God?

            I became a Spirit-born Christian at age 18…but then so what…what comes next?  What is so earth-shattering about that?

            The point is that the vehicle of a fallen nature as the perfect lens to be able to explore a fallen world opens up the entire panoply of the meaning and purpose of human life…no matter what are my individual talents, abilities, or faults…no matter where is my “port of entry” into a journey of faith.

            We see this in the biblical narrative stories of faith having exceptional purpose and directional trajectory…in direct opposition to the competing worldviews of the other world religions to find our own salvation through self-realization, but also in direct opposition to the atheistic worldview of naturalistic materialism that asserts that purpose and meaning do not exist at all in our universe.

            The grandest irony of ironies is that we can only inhabit this God-sanctioned and authorized vehicle of a fully redeemed and forgiven fallen nature, in order to venture-out into the individual destinies of our research programs to discover the real meaning and purposes within the knowledge of good and evil…we can only do this by first admitting that we are in fact fallen and that we are imperfect moral beings.

            In the words of Jesus: “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt. 4:17), shouts-out this message to the world having the highest of intentions imaginable…coming from the one Person capable of making this reality possible.  

            When confronted by the Pharisees who asked the disciples: “Why eateth your Master with tax collectors and sinners?” (Mt. 9:11)…Jesus answers in Matthew 9:12-13:

12 They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

13 But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

            The massive gulf between “going about to establish their own righteousness” (Rom. 10:3) and the redemptive salvation of grace through faith (Eph. 2:8-9) through the repentance of admitting that we are fallen and in need of saving, is spoken by Jesus Christ in no uncertain terms to the Pharisees: “I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.” (Jn. 8:24).   

            Christianity is the one place in all of human existence where it is okay to be not okay.

            A broken life is the reality to be honestly acknowledged and faced foursquare…not something to whitewash (Mt. 23:27) or sugar-coat.

            The God of the Bible is the only person in the universe who honestly knows about sin and does not sweep it under the table, but does something remarkable about it.

            God is telling us that He has life-scripts for us that actually and counterintuitively factor-in our fallen nature.

            If we currently have broken and ruined lives this is no problem for God to cleanup, redeem, and insert a course-correction that sets us going in the right way.

            This is why Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, because they can readily admit that they are fallen and need God.

            Arrogant pride and self-inflated self-importance will not accept or admit a fallen and imperfect nature, and thereby closes off entrance into the God-sanctioned and authorized vehicle of a redeemed fallen nature to really learn about the knowledge of good and evil…through a similar quality of the unity-of-purpose Jesus exhibited in His own life-script…likewise actualized for us in our God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

            One caveat here is that Paul and Peter warn believers not to use this freedom as an excuse or license to willfully sin (Rom. 6:1; Gal. 5:13; 1 Pet. 2:16).

The biblical narrative has purpose, meaning, and hope fueled by God’s divine participation

            God-composed life-scripts for the people of faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible…eventually over time lift these people up into the victorious positions of becoming overcomers (1 Pet. 5:10), but not in the worldly conventional sense of self-validation and worldly pride that is centered upon oneself.

            God’s elevation of people into high positions…Abraham the “father of faith,” Joseph the governor of Egypt, Moses the great prophet and deliverer, Joshua the military leader, the Israelites conquering their homeland, Peter the leader of the early Christian church, and Paul the missionary evangelist to the first-century Greco-Roman world, to name a few, are for unselfish service to other people and not for self-validation and personal achievement.

            God-composed life-scripts in the biblical narrative stories of faith are designed to fix things to the most radical extent required, at all costs, at the micro-level in the moment…and at the macro-level over the long-range duration of human redemptive history extending into eternity.

            The biblical narrative stories of faith are about enabling God to set-up and manage a program throughout human redemptive history that allows God to actualize events and circumstances into reality…to fix our world and our lives…from the viewpoint of eternity (1 Jn. 2:17).

            This is an elevated program that will run above and often contrary to the culturally accepted direction of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 5:3-12, 6:25-34).

            This element of elevated unconventionality explains Abraham waiting in faith for the birth of Isaac, Joseph’s unusual MBA preparation in the house of Potiphar and the prison of Pharaoh, the Israelites in bondage in Egypt, and the advance preparation of Moses as a shepherd of sheep in Midian.

            It explains David being pursued for his life by the jealous King Saul, Peter utterly failing in the courtyard of Caiaphas during the night trial of Jesus, and the incredible conversion of Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus creating the radical humility needed for a highly educated Pharisee to take the gospel message that Jesus is the Messiah to the larger Greco-Roman world…without looking down his nose in disdain at the polytheistic, idol-worshipping, pagan Greeks and Romans of his day. 

            These are the scenarios composed by God to fix our world and the problem of sin in our lives from an eternal perspective.

            The brilliantly creative capacity of God to get His arms around the vast stretch of human experience…of Jesus maintaining consistent fidelity to God-sovereignty in the midst of the lowest failure and the highest success… allows every person of faith that accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, King, and Tour Guide through this life…to get to know God personally from the least to the greatest.

            This reality for human life was prophesied roughly 2,600 years ago by the prophet Jeremiah in anticipation of new covenant believers (Jer. 31:31-34) not offended by Jesus on the cross, all energized by God-sovereignty rather than being fueled by the pursuit of individual achievement according to the tenets of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The cross and the resurrection of Jesus were in service to mankind at the peak and pinnacle of moral perfection, the purest essence of virtue.

            The cross and the resurrection of Jesus were and are radical measures in the extreme designed by God to fix the human problem of sin, fundamentally defined as going our own way in autonomous individualism.

            God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts as patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith, creating similar unity-of-purpose partnerships between God and people, is the antidote to the individual autonomous rebellion of going our own way.

            When this uniquely biblical reality is separated-out and highlighted from amongst the broad array of existing moral concepts, this provides a compelling basis for accepting Jesus Christ into our lives, for accepting a God-composed journey of faith applied and interwoven into the course of events in our lives.

            This humanly inconceivable, acid-test of the consistency of God-sovereignty within the Trinity, faithfully and seamlessly exhibited by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary Hill…also actualizes within the biblical narrative stories of faith and actualizes within the God-composed life-scripts for Spirit-born Christians today.

            This validates the Christian argument that the Bible cannot be the creative invention of human literary imagination.

            This also provides us with a huge revelation…a unique and innovative insight…of The Biblical Narrative in a Modern World.

By Accident or Design?

A fundamental axiom of Darwinism…that the brilliance of functional organization and the originality of creativity we see in the biological world…is an accident without purpose or meaning…is in part motivated simply to be able to include the scientific field of biology within the strict, paradigm boundaries of naturalistic explanations…like the other fields of scientific investigation.

Because the living world appears to be many times more complicated than the non-living world…to the casual observer the living world therefore appears more obviously to be the product of design…to be the product of intelligent foresight, skilled guidance, engineering acumen, and artistic good sense.

To the casual observer…trying to fit the natural living world into the philosophical worldview of naturalistic materialism…is like trying to put a large square peg into a small round hole.

Darwinism fails to attract more than a small percentage of the general population because of the fundamental disconnect between the incredible marvels of the natural world that we observe with our own eyes…and the absurdly simplistic and counter-intuitive notion that this is all an accident…having no ultimate purpose or meaning beyond the present.

The extension…the extrapolation…from the commendable scientific study of natural phenomenon…that shouts-out for design…to atheism…is as nonsensical as the unsupported leap from micro to macro evolution.

Neither macroevolution…nor atheism…follows logically or “naturally” from the evidentiary facts of natural phenomenon.

What is missing from the modern scientific database is precisely how God created…how He manufactured our living and non-living world.

We do not have an Owner’s Manual to our planet, our solar system, or to the cosmos.

God has not provided us with a technical manual on how He designed and assembled the living and non-living world…no more than Mercedes Benz, Ferrari, or Lamborghini would tell us in precise details how they manufactured their cars.

Scientists who are atheists…who are naturalistic materialists…incorrectly assume that by admitting an intelligent designer God into the overall equation…that this somehow will limit the extent of the investigative reach of scientific research…by accepting an undefinable and indeterminable limit at some natural/supernatural demarcation line.

But the limits to our investigative reach using the methods of scientific research may have natural limits imposed by the nature of the phenomenon itself.

We have certainly…by general accounts…hit a snag in the origin-of-life research program…recognizing that the complexity of going from non-living matter to the “simplest” form of single-cell organisms such as primitive bacteria starting in the Precambrian Period at around 3.8 billion years ago…is a bridge too far to cross…without an explanation for the input of the massive quantity and quality of information that has to be arranged in a coordinated package…for life to begin.

Should God be accused of hoarding critical information…of setting reasonable limits and boundaries around the access to His means-and-methods of creation…to exercise His fiduciary responsibility to protect the proprietary copyright and patent rights to His inventive creations?

When the book of Genesis in the Bible records: “And God said…let there be…this or that”…bringing into existence something by His word alone…without further explanation or details…does the inquisitive nature of human scientific investigation require that God give to us the methodology of His creative techniques…in addition to the already expansive and extensive parameters He has provided for our investigation into the living and non-living world?

Even if we could understand the creation of the universe in terms of absolute mathematics, physics, and chemistry…do we really expect God to tell us the techniques and technology of creation…when we have already discovered, built, and used the atomic bomb that can wipe-out all human life on earth in a few moments of time?

Do we really want to know the secrets to creating life…in which mankind could then create a host of disastrous living monsters…or manufacture living semi-human soldiers that tyrants could use to control the world…like the clones created for battle in the Star Wars movies?

Are there justifiably rational limits to what God could responsibly hold back…in terms of absolute knowledge…that if revealed would clearly make the irrefutable case for His existence…but on the flip-side would expand our capacity to allow for greater evil to exist than is already possible?

One of the subtle arguments for design in the living and non-living world…that does not get as much recognition and discussion as it should…yet is presented several times in this book…is the incredible match between the orderliness and intelligibility of natural phenomenon…and our intellectual capacity to investigate, understand, and organize into distinct categories of knowledge…the complexities of the natural world…as covered in an earlier essay.

To the casual observer…this does not seem like something that would simply fall into place on its own.

The natural world…orderly and intelligible to humans alone…places the search for truth on the highest plane of intended purpose and premeditated forethought.

Mountain of Evidence is Theoretically Driven 2

An analogy to an Olympics track meet might be helpful.

In the Olympics track meet competition, one event…the historical length…mile-relay…has four runners per team each running one lap around the track…receiving the baton from the previous runner and passing the baton to the succeeding runner…to complete a continuous and unbroken four-lap circuit around the track.

But this relay baton is not passed off to the other distinct and unconnected events outside of the mile-relay.  The baton is not passed to the high-jumpers, pole-vaulters, high-hurdlers, 100-meter sprinters, or the competitors in the shot-put or javelin throw…thereby creating an unnatural, artificial, and unwanted connection between these disparate events.

These other events are discontinuous and unconnected to each other and to the mile-relay, even though they are all a common part of the Olympics track meet.

A network schedule of logic-lines connecting the start-times for each track and field event…simplified into printed program schedules for the spectators…would have to be created ahead of time to organize the track meet.

But these organizational lines connecting the start and the finish times between the individual events…head-to-tail…would never be confused with the fundamental differences between pole-vaulting, high-jumping, the long-jump, the triple-jump, and the 5,000-meter (the historical length 3-mile) run.

The essential characteristic of each distinct event creates a discontinuous gap between each event that is unbridgeable in terms of mixing and blending…other than their logical sequencing for start-times and spacing within the overall management of the track-meet competition.

The passing of the baton between all of the track and field events to create an artificial connection…a connection that does not logically exist…simply because at a general level all these events belong to the same track-meet…would be nonsensical.

To attempt to blend and mix all of these disparate track and field events together into a connected whole through small, incremental, transitional phases using the relay baton as the connecting link…would be a forced arrangement falling so far outside of the intentionally designed, fundamentally discontinuous gaps between each of the individual events of an athletic track meet…as to render the entire competition gradualistically intermixed…hopelessly indecipherable…and thus incomprehensible.

If all of the track meet events were blended together in infinitesimally small incremental steps…it would be difficult to determine when and where one event finished and another started.

Each track and field event also has a predetermined goal…an outcome…that entails a different “lifestyle habit” program of training and technique.

Even though running hurdles, the pure sprints, and the long-distance running events share similarities, they are vastly different in their “lifestyle habits” of length of distance, agility requirements, pure speed, endurance, time-span, and the physical characteristics of the competitors.  Specified function…running fast, leaping high, jumping far…are inseparably connected to the lifestyle habits unique to each athletic event.

Darwinian common descent must, by definition, have the relay batons at each branching node of the ever-expanding tree of life…passed safely from one species to the next without falling to the ground (becoming extinct).

But fitness in “lifestyle habits” in each track-meet event does not carry over into fitness in lifestyle habits in another event.  The Olympic gold medalist in the high-jump cannot pass along gold metal technical proficiency to the pole-vaulter simply by handing off a relay baton.

The relay baton in this instance would be a nonsensical addition…inapplicable to both high-jumper and pole-vaulter.

The gold metal “lifestyle habit” proficiencies in each event are too different and discontinuous to be connected by the unrelated, unhelpful element of a relay baton.

The tautological statement that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring…the fittest organism being defined by circular reasoning as being the one that produces the most offspring…stays entirely within the boundary-lines of a single, track- meet event like high-jumping.

It describes the proficiency level attained through the microevolution of that single track meet event of high-jumping.

Macroevolution…hypothetically producing diversity (in our track-meet analogy) has absolutely nothing to do with the gold metal high-jumper passing the relay baton to the pole-vaulter.

How the high-jumper reaches gold metal proficiency…fitness in lifestyle habits…has no correlation to reaching an equivalent level of technical proficiency in the entirely different track meet event of pole-vaulting…although they each share the similar goal of going as vertically high as they can.

To functionally train for both the pole-vault and high-jump events…to obtain dual proficiencies…a program of transitional “crossover” conditioning and training techniques would be an obvious regime in preparation for competing in these two events…at the same track meet.

We should expect to see the same obvious crossover transition at both the bottom portion entering into each branching node in the tree-of-life …and coming out the top portion of each node…according to common descent.

Identifying fictional nodes in Darwin’s tree of life…in the physical characteristics side of the equation alone…using creative imagination, would not explain the diversity of lifestyle habits for the tens of millions of living species on earth.

This would only get us half-way there.

Simply identifying where and when during the track-meet the high-jumper passed the relay baton to the pole-vaulter…would not explain the vast differences in gold metal “lifestyle habit” techniques between these two events.

The architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits…observable in the “track meet” in-the-wild…are widely different for lions, leopards, and cheetahs.

Did lions, leopards, and cheetahs evolve from a common ancestor?  The philosophical leap to common ancestry…due to the similarities between these three “big cats” is irresistible.

Yet did it actually happen this way?  Do we know this for sure?

The body-plans, lifestyles, and performance dissimilarities between lions, leopards, and cheetahs are so different and discontinuous…that the mere introduction of a relay-race baton connecting them at a hypothetical ancestral node in the long-ago past…does not explain the brilliant creative imagination that defines the unique essence of each of these big cats.

These unique dissimilarities must be in-place at their original inception near the first branching event from lion to leopard to cheetah…close to the ancestral node…or conversely…we can chalk their brilliantly unique existence to blind, mindless, unguided, accidental trial-and-error…falling into place according to random-chance luck.

But then we must consistently apply this concept to all living organisms.  Do finches, ducks, and eagles share a common ancestor?

Again, the philosophical pull toward common ancestry is irresistible.

But where is the line drawn?  When we get to the large classification groupings…the discontinuous gaps between the phyla divisions are as wide apart as the Grand Canyon.

Darwinian macroevolution…based upon naturalistic materialism…would have us believe that all living things today came from a single ancient ancestor.

But this requires an unimaginable quantity and quality of creative brilliance in crafting the unique lifestyle habits that accompany every distinct architectural body-plan.

This requires us to imagine Mother Nature sitting at the designer’s drafting table with an overhead magnifying lamp, tee-squares and triangles, sharpened pencils and erasers…yet being blind and mindless…scribbling endlessly in a probabilistically hopeless random-chance search strategy…for the most complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information that comprise every living organism on earth…and the varied ecological systems to support them.

This is a part of the illogic of the tree-of-life of Darwinian common descent.  The empirical relay baton of explanatory mechanism must connect each discontinuity gap between-the-dots being birds, fish, mammals, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants, trees, bacteria, and fungi…which are analogous to discontinuous track and field events like pole-vaulting, discus throwing, high-jumping, and the mile-relay.

These connections between hundreds of billions of distinct (and thus classifiable by human taxonomists) life-forms must account for both physical and lifestyle characteristics.

The discontinuous lifestyle habits of the multitudes of living creatures renders the hypothetical “relay baton” connection through common descent to be implausibly forced, stretched, and logically unbridgeable.

            Naturalistic materialism is the philosophy that superimposes an unnatural “relay baton” to connect all of the track meet events. 

Naturalism creates the evidence that supports naturalism.  This is circular.  Take away the common descent interpretational framework and we are back in time to the neutral facts of pre-1859…the “standard Olympics track meet” of typological and discontinuous life-forms…which did not point toward macroevolution at all, prior to Darwin’s book The Origin of Species.

Mountain of Evidence is Theoretically Driven 1

What is critical to understand is that the contention by Darwinists that macroevolution has a “mountain of supporting evidence”…thereby establishing the “fact of evolution”…proceeds not from the facts themselves but only materializes (no pun intended) after applying the philosophical framework of naturalistic materialism over the biological facts in nature. 

The common descent viewpoint when stretched to fit over all living things can produce a tentative, provisional mountain of evidence in support of macroevolution…but only if common descent is first assumed to be true.  Common descent will explain the fossil progression from the simple to the more complex over time, the homology (similarities) in design between creatures, and the biological distribution of similar creatures split apart by continents.

But intelligent design, based upon the empirical evidence of highly specified information and integrated complexity…explains this natural phenomenon better.  Intelligent design is a more persuasive and plausible interpretation of the evidence…than is common descent.

Without the hard empirical evidence for the methodology and mechanism of how macroevolution changes a fish into a land reptile into a bird over time…having wings, feathers, and a totally unique breathing capacity to enable sustained flight…the philosophical overlay of Darwinian naturalism does not produce “overwhelming, mutually supportive evidence.”

The Darwinian model produces nothing more than the hypothetically connected structure of common descent…supported by circumstantial arguments alone…whose artificially connected structure falls apart when the concept of the discontinuities between the varied body-plan architectures and lifestyle habits of hundreds of billions of life-forms on the planet…is introduced.

The theoretically unimaginable jump across the gap of running and leaping along the ground or in the branches of trees, then “evolving” into winged flight through small, incremental, progressive steps, without any detailed supporting explanation as to the massive anatomical and lifestyle-habit changes that would have to occur…is alleged by Darwinists to have happened simply because this is what is required to have happened…according to the philosophical paradigm of naturalism.

The theoretically unimaginable jump from the functioning respiratory system of the gills of fish extracting oxygen from water under the surface of oceans, lakes, and rivers, to the fully functioning system of lungs in amphibians, reptiles, and mammals breathing air above the water, must take place in a matter of seconds or immediate death follows.

This is an enormous gap of discontinuity.  Small incremental change here is unimaginable…is unbridgeable…in terms of function…in terms of survival and reproduction.

Yet for macroevolution to be valid, this bridge across discontinuity must be plausibly explainable within the unifying theory of common descent taken from Darwin’s hypothetical “tree of life”…connecting all living things.

Darwinists allege that this type of jump in development and diversity from living underwater to living above water…had to have occurred in small, incremental, progressive steps because it simply had to happen this way according to the paradigm narrative of naturalism.

This type of secularly skewed argumentation is then stretched to apply to the enumerable discontinuities large and small of the tens of millions of different species on the planet, mixing together the dissimilar ingredients of diversity and likeness into the theory of common descent…based in large part upon its appeal to scientists of being a unifying theory of biology, and at the same time offering a non-theistic explanation for the origin and diversity of life.

But from the start Darwinian macroevolution could not explain the Cambrian Explosion…the sudden appearance of a diversity of complex life-forms in an instant of geological time…which should also have had an accompanying and complimentary backstory of transitional intermediate life-forms appearing in the Precambrian rock strata.

Darwinists have also been unable to explain the sudden appearance during the geological era known as the Cretaceous…of the angiosperms…the flowering plants having their seeds enclosed in an ovary…without transitional precursors in the rock strata leading up to this time-period.

Over time, the many difficulties with the theory of macroevolution should have resolved themselves.

Instead, the idea of common descent has not bridged the enormous gaps of discontinuity in the living world between the major groups like amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, insects, or mammals, or the discontinuities in the subdivided lower levels of each of the major groups…like the large African mammals separated by the unbridgeable lifestyle gaps between elephants, giraffes, water buffalo, rhinoceros, zebras, lions, leopards, cheetahs, and Thompson’s gazelles.

One major factual problem for Darwinism is that there is no evidence for the actual existence of the transitional “nodes” at the apex junctures of Darwin’s branching “tree of life” between the major groups and their subdivisions, which must be there for common descent to occur.

These nodes do not exist now and they do not exist in the fossil record…unless artificially created through a fictional, philosophical overlay of common descent crafted through human imagination.

Darwinian evolution is a classic example of being a half-truth.  It explains microevolution which occurs within a species.  It explains variation over time within a species.  But the extrapolation from microevolution to macroevolution…the origination of new species using genetic variation and natural selection…is an over-reach…an extension of philosophy rather than an empirical product of science.

This is why Darwinian macroevolution is subtly persuasive but vacuous.  The “mountain of evidence” is artificially produced through circular reasoning…the philosophy must first be superimposed on the evidence to rescue the philosophy…rather than the evidence itself independently standing on its own to formulate the philosophy.

It is the theory of common descent that connects the dots into the forced linear arrangement of an ascending “tree of life”…the dots do not logically align themselves to connect that way on their own.  The connections between dots are by philosophy…not by explanatory, scientific fact-based evidence.

The Appearance of Stasis

Some evolutionists in their books comment that Christianity held-up the revelation and acceptance of a changing, evolving earth during the 1800’s…leading up to and following Darwin’s groundbreaking The Origin of Species published in 1859…as a result of the biblical concept of a static, unchanging natural world.

This is a classic example of a half-truth.

There are no verses in the Bible that state that the earth is static and unchanging.  The Bible is silent on this subject.

The Bible does say that God is eternal, timeless, and unchanging…but says nothing definitive about the change-status of His creations over time…living or non-living in the natural world.

There was a consensus of opinion prior to 1859 amongst scientists, Christians, and the general public…that the universe and our earth are static and unchanging…because that is how the natural world phenomenally appears to people then and now today…change that is nonexistent when viewed within the span of our lifetimes.

A huge point to be made here regarding the various fields of scientific exploration…is that the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…intelligible to humans alone…has been in-place and fully functional on earth for 4.8 billion years since its beginning…waiting for the technological inventions of new types of equipment…and the populating of the earth of intellectually and morally capable beings self-motivated to conduct honest investigations into the explanations of the phenomenon in the natural world…which spawned the Scientific Revolution starting four or five hundred years ago.

One basic acknowledgement about the advancements of the modern Scientific Revolution…that can reasonably be made…is that the interaction of the two Industrial Revolutions and the Scientific Revolution propelled the creation of new fields of science…that were not possible hundreds and thousands of years earlier…due to the lack of equipment not invented yet to conduct in-depth scientific investigations.

The invention of eyeglasses, the telescope, the microscope, calculus in mathematics, the chemistry periodic table of elements…along with enumerable other technological innovations leap-frogging ahead of and then catching-up with each advancement in the sciences…explains more accurately the modern revisions in outlooks and biased prejudices that were shared equally by scientists, theists, and the general public.

One interesting example of this is the difficulty that Albert Einstein struggled with in his field equations regarding general relativity in 1916…that produced either an expanding or a contracting universe…a non-static universe that is not eternal and unchanging…a concept so disturbing to Einstein’s prejudicial bias favoring an unchanging and eternal universe…that he added a cosmological constant of repulsion to his equations to counteract the attraction of gravity…a decision influenced by his prejudicial bias for a static and unchanging universe…that overpowered his confidence in the accuracy of his own mathematical equations…a decision he later called “the greatest mistake of my life.”

If the static and unchanging appearance of the natural world was and is a universal observation…which rendered the acceptance of the revolutionary new concept of the expansion or the contraction of the universe…of being this strongly abhorrent observationally to one of the greatest scientists and thinkers in human history…what does this have to say about the Darwinist’s claims today that the natural world observationally exhibits enough obvious change to support macroevolution…exhibits enough change to assert that macroevolution is an obvious fact.

As I look out at the natural world today…I do not see radical change that would argue for macroevolution as scientific fact.

Without Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Hubble’s observation of an expanding universe, and the discovery of the uniform background radiation by Penzias and Wilson…the only thing that would tell me the universe had a beginning in time…is Genesis 1:1 in the Bible:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

I certainly could not deduce a beginning of the universe through phenomenal eyes-only observation alone…but like Edwin Hubble being able to look through the 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory…I would also need a background in astrophysics to be able to understand what I was looking at…to be able to draw the correct conclusions from the data I was observing.

Without the key contribution of the three-volume book-set published in 1830-33 by Charles Lyell entitled: Principles of Geology…having the full subtitle of: “Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by reference to causes now in operation”…we would have absolutely no reason to take a harder look at the incorrect interpretation of Bible scriptures that…in my opinion…erroneously combines the seven days of creation into a single earth week…producing an apologetically indefensible young-age earth that undermines Christian evangelism across the world.

My point here is that the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…intelligible to human beings alone…in existence and in full-operation for the entire duration of the 4.8 billion years of the life of our planet Earth…when applied through the methodology of scientific investigation coupled with technological inventions…to create the new immerging fields of scientific inquiry…produced new discoveries that in most if not all cases took everyone by surprise…even scientists like Albert Einstein who appear to “stumble” upon discoveries like an expanding universe…that they themselves did not see coming.

If we want to indict and criticize Christians for “slow-walking” the concept of a changing earth that inhibited acceptance of macroevolution according to some Darwinists…then we can also include the whole of scientific investigation that sometimes takes decades or longer to confirm a particular new theory…and include the general public that even up to our present-day observe no radical change in the natural living and non-living worlds.

Einstein back-tracking on his own field equations…in 1916 pointing toward an expanding or contracting universe that leads to a beginning creation point in time…gives us a remarkable insight into the accepted wisdom that permeated modern societies through the first decades of the twentieth-century…that our natural world appears static and unchanging…even if it is not.

This undermines and refutes the notion that macroevolutionary change is so profuse and prolific that it is visually obvious…and excuses Christians, many scientists, and the general public at that time following 1859…for not immediately going along with the concept of biological macroevolution…and that still to this day is one of the observational, commonsense reasons why microevolution is accepted by the general public…but the theoretical extrapolation to macroevolution is still highly controversial and unproven.

The Unified Theory of Everything Regarding the Purpose and Meaning of Human Life 2

If Darwinists can look the other way…can marginalize this phenomenon while at the same time using it as the pillars of their scientific enterprise…this demonstrates the power of worldview and confirmation bias to look straight at the evidence for design in this uncanny match between orderliness and intelligibility in nature…and the complementary human capacity to comprehend phenomenon in the natural world…and yet still attempt to explain it away through the impersonal forces of mindless, indifferent, random-chance, trial-and-error processes…that must blindly fall into place by accident…this is to me an inconsistent and nonsensical view of reality.

Naturalistic materialism could never get the two tunnels to meet in the center of the mountain…without enumerable Swiss-cheese holes in the mountain that would be obvious to all intelligent observers today…scientists and laymen alike.

The natural world today reveals a living and non-living world that is the diametric opposite of a mountain having a myriad of crisscrossing drilled holes attempting to reach center through random trial-and-error…never producing the connection between human scientific investigation…and nature…that is clearly and irrefutably the reality we see and experience today…that forms the basis for scientific investigation.

The materialistic worldview of a universe consisting of only particles and energy…that could after 13.7 billion years following the start of the physical universe in the massive explosion of the Big Bang…self-assemble into a reality that could bring orderliness and intelligibility into association with human intellectual capacity…in the remarkable way that it has developed…is a materialistic viewpoint far too simplistic to explain this reality.

That orderliness and intelligibility would be so fine-tuned and have such a well-defined bandwidth…to match the equally narrow definition of the human intellectual capacity, innate curiosity, and the incredible independence and transcendence above and outside of nature to craft “why” expeditions in search of the explanations of the causations of the phenomenon in the natural world…is an overwhelming piece of evidence that resides at the most fundamental level in all of science.

Whether scientists like the God of the Bible or not…is not the point.  Science itself points toward design.

The Designer of this universe is an architect, engineer, and artist of mind-stretching command of a quantity of information that taken as a whole is complex, specified, and coherently integrated at a level and to an extent that goes well beyond mere words to describe.

To chalk this up to random-chance, trial-and-error is as blindly unscientific as is imaginable.

It would be one thing if the natural world was orderly and intelligible…and none of its living inhabitants could ponder and appreciate this fact.

It would be quite another thing if humans had the intellectual capacity to scientifically investigate the natural world…but the natural world was not orderly or intelligible.

The same orderliness and intelligibility that dovetails with our capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning…the universe and the natural world ordered in such as way as to be open and amenable to scientific exploration…is the same orderliness and intelligibility that makes a God-composed journey of faith life-script possible.

Our ancient or modern cultural environment shapes our worldview on politics, economics, and survival.

            God-composed journey of faith life-scripts create the context of events to revolutionize our outlook on everything…in a timeless fashion relevant to human life today.

What is the political and socio-economic outlook of Abraham?  It was displaced by a new God-composed journey of faith life-script that transcends above worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…when Abraham received his calling to leave the city of Haran in the north…and to walk south to Canaan the Land of Promise.

This book is written for Christians.

The biblical narrative stories of faith are radically different from the appeals to the deities to help with the agricultural crops and trees, sheep and cattle herds, large families of healthy children…that formulate and motivate the invention of the ancient fertility religions.

The God-composed journey of faith life-scripts in the Bible aim for another motivation outside and above worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…that change the context and environment to an elevated theme that transcends above the American Dream concerns…ancient and modern…regarding survival, prosperity, and security (Lk. 12:21, 30).

The connection between the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…intelligible to humans alone…applies equally to the capacity to follow a God-composed journey of faith life-script…that is the rough equivalent to the uniform theory of everything…sought in modern physics today.

The Unified Theory of Everything Regarding the Purpose and Meaning of Human Life 1

The current search in modern physics for the unified theory of everything…falls just short of being comprehensive and exhaustive in being able to explain how every particle in the universe interacts with every other particle…because in the central equation within the Standard Model of Particle Physics…up to this point in time…all of the twelve known elementary particles in nature are included…except the force of gravity.

For some unknown reason gravity is the outlier that messes-up the otherwise beautifully functioning equation that describes how atomic particles interact…the force of gravity being the one exception that does not fit within the central equation.

The search for a unified theory of everything in the scientific field of physics…demonstrates how incredibly far the human aptitude for investigation into the workings of the natural world has taken us.

In my opinion…this incredible human aptitude for probative investigation is not confined to the scientific search for truth involving the causations underlying the phenomenon we observe in the natural world…but can also be applied equally well to a unified theory of everything regarding the ultimate purpose and meaning of human life itself.

This search for a unified theory of everything in the field of theological truth-seeking…begins at the starting-point of the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…orderly and intelligible to humans.

The dual pillars of orderliness and intelligibility…basic and foundational for the practice of scientific investigation…are not intelligible to lions, giraffes, wildebeests, elephants, whales, dolphins, eagles, or horses.

The natural world is orderly and intelligible to humans alone.

This is like tunneling for miles from the opposite sides of a large mountain…hoping the two tunnels will meet in the center.

Humans possess the transcendent capacity for intellectual curiosity, moral reasoning, self-awareness, and the independence to craft pursuits in search of answers to the amazing question of “why” to a myriad of topics in the natural world…plus the fundamental question regarding the purpose and meaning of our existence.

Doesn’t the scientific enterprise boil-down to the search for answers to the fundamental reality of why we are here?

That the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…and the human intellectual capacity to utilize these two pillars of reality to investigate this natural world…should coalesce at a point in time 13.7 billion years after the Big-Bang creation of the universe…in search of answers to the fundamental questions of the purpose and meaning of existence…is not evidence for a blind, mindless, unguided, indifferent, random-chance, trial-and-error mechanism to be the causal-agent explanation for this amazing development…according to the worldview of naturalistic materialism.

On the most fundamental level this amazing development refutes Darwinian macroevolution…because of the utter impossibility for random-chance of any kind to be able to arrange a perfect one-to-one correlation…to meet as opposite tunnels at the center of the mountain…to arrange the intellectual marriage between a natural world that is inexplicably orderly and intelligible…and at this moment in time…intelligible exclusively to human beings alone.

Human beings possess the capacity to be able to benefit from and to take advantage of the innate curiosity and intellectual capacity to unravel the deepest mysteries of nature from the microscopic world of atomic particle physics to the formation of stars and galaxies in the vast universe.

The physical laws governing these phenomenon can often be written in mathematical equation-form to fit on a single piece of paper…eclipsed in simplistic magnificence by the most famous equation having the briefest yet possibly the most profound information regarding energy in the universe: e = mc².

One proposition asserted in this book…is that if this human intellectual capacity could be reduced to a mathematical equation in likeness to e = mc²…it would start by saying: “given that mankind has the mental capacity to engage in a scientific investigation of the natural world…then mankind also has the equivalent mental capacity to comprehend the deepest and most profound moral issues regarding absolute truth…existing in universal and eternal reality.”

My contention here…argued in my other Christian books…is that the intellectual and moral reasoning capacity of humans to correlate one-to-one on an equal engagement with the orderliness and intelligibility in a scientific investigation of the natural world…also applies beautifully and elegantly to the God-composed journey of faith life-scripts elucidated in the Old and New Testaments in the Bible.

This is a contention that transcends above the often misguided and destructive episodes in history when man-invented religions and man-made interpretations of the Bible…descend into the authoritarian tyranny of institutionalized religious establishments…a human fault that has also similarly plagued the advance of progress over the history of the recent centuries comprising the modern Scientific Revolution.

The correlation and integration between the natural world that is orderly and intelligible to humans…coupled with our intellectual and moral-reasoning capacity to fit into this reality perfectly like two matched jigsaw puzzle pieces…places the worldview of naturalistic materialism into the untenable position of having to explain this incredible development using only the tools of a blind, mindless, and accidental mechanism to produce a correlation and integration between two entirely different realities in two unrelated categories…that in actuality is mind-boggling in its precision.

The fact that the one and only group of living things blessed with the capacity to connect with the orderliness and intelligibility components of the natural world…is human beings…comprising the analogy of two shafts tunneled through opposite ends of a massive-sized mountain that near miraculously meets in the middle of the mountain…has its significance and evidentiary value as an irrefutable argument for the most sublime intellectual design imaginable in all of human scientific investigation.

This is scientific fact-based evidence that is out-there in the plainest sight…being coopted and utilized by every scientific field of discovery starting with the centuries-old Scientific Revolution…all the way through the modern science of microscopic, atomic particle physics…to the genetics of DNA…to the search in the reachable cosmos for the signs of other habitable planets and extraterrestrial life-forms.

All of this is based on this extraordinary connection between the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world matched precisely and solely with the one group of living beings capable of making and taking the opportunity of benefitting from this relationship.

If this isn’t compelling, fact-based scientific evidence for an intelligent designer having a targeted aim so precise, accurate, and premeditated over the eons of time in its original scheme and its eventually successful outcome…then I do not know what is.

This is scientific fact-based evidence of such fundamental quality…that it cannot be detoured around without exposing the most blatant, disqualifying bias for naturalistic materialism…that undermines the decision-making credibility of the scientists and philosophers asserting this worldview.

The Delicate Balance between Belief and Unbelief 3

The premeditated, planned-in-advance, moderated appearances of the resurrected Jesus do not overflow beyond this well-defined boundary-line of faith and trust in another person…in this case faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God…expanded into a universally larger appearance to everyone in Jerusalem…which would then have turned His resurrection into the entirely different zone of being objectively observed empirical fact…of being an impersonal acknowledgment of an otherwise obvious, ordinary fact…like the daily appearance of the noonday sun…conferring no positive spiritual and moral status to professing faith in Jesus Christ…and not being the starting point for entering into a journey of faith following God’s lead.

The grand purpose of this universe and our existence in it…is to discover the character of God through the experience of a personal relationship.

This is part of the elevated capacity that humans possess…of the natural world being orderly and intelligible to us…and equally amazing and privileged to also be able to comprehend God as revealed to us through God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…as patterned in the biblical narrative stories of faith…starting with the life of Abraham…that can be actualized in our lives as well.

The personal, relational aspects of faith and trust in another person…cannot be reduced to material constituents.

Relational faith in another person cannot be placed in a test-tube and heated-up to observe its characteristics.  Personal, relational faith in another person cannot be cooled-down to the temperature it freezes…to determine when it becomes a solid.

After 160 years of intensive scientific research into the creation/evolution debate…the present conclusion is that this incredibly brilliant and insightful investigation conducted by human beings…revealing our highest qualities for intellectual pursuit of truth and our inner moral guidance for honesty in our evaluation of the evidence that we have discovered…reaches a divinely intended philosophical impasse in the study of biological life…and an impasse in the search for answers to the questions of the source of origin of the fundamental reality of who or what is behind it all…as God knew in-advance this would happen in 1859 when macroevolution was first introduced…in a convincing way into the marketplace of ideas.

This leads us to the point of recognizing and acknowledging the surprising presence of this elevated part of the fundamental reality…the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…taking its place alongside the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world to human beings…both of which are in actuality part of the answers to the questions we seek.

Only the Creator God could and would initiate the fundamental reality of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…producing the fine-tuned, philosophical stalemate between the two opposing worldviews of creation or evolution…the worldview of creationism based upon giving God the benefit-of-the-doubt to pick-up our cross and follow Him by faith into our created destinies…or the worldview of evolution that limits this worldly experience to autonomous individualism…the hallmark of the philosophy of humanism…relying entirely upon ourselves as junior gods sitting upon the thrones of our lives…according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This is one of the starting premises of Christians as we view the fields of human scientific research…which in and of itself makes a compelling argument for a reality that transcends above anything that could be produced through the blind and mindless mechanism of materialism.

The natural world belongs equally to everyone…and the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…to humans…invites Christians who are scientists, philosophers, and laymen to accept the open invitation to investigate the natural world…God being confident…as its Creator…of our finding ample evidence of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…that reveal an Intelligent Designer of incredible engineering skills and unsurpassed artistic judgment…in fashioning this environment for life on earth.

On the other side of the coin of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…macroevolution hits the wall of not being able to progress beyond this delicate balance…because it cannot achieve a completely decisive, empirically objective victory…because it is an untruth…a false narrative…that cannot cross the finish-line of scientific fact-based evidence…unlike other proven fields of scientific research.

The few simple arguments I present at the beginning of this essay…are not like the arguments against the notion that the earth revolves around the sun…debated controversially from Copernicus to Newton…based on two incorrect ideas that wind should be blowing at around 1,000 miles per hour (the 25,000 mile circumference of the earth spinning at one full revolution per a 24-hour day)…and that people should fall-off the surface of the earth at the upside-down, bottom-end of the earth’s rotation.

The hundreds of trillions of unique cell types in a fully grown African elephant is a scientific fact.  The question at the fundamental reality level is what is the source-of-origin of the complex, specified, and coherently integrated information that locates each of these cells in their correct location…and tells them their unique function?

The contention of naturalistic materialism that Mother Nature is capable of performing this…merely creates another man-invented god…materialistic in nature…that could not…nor ever would invade the sacrosanct self-sovereignty of our autonomous individualism.

The obvious fact that all of the unique cell types in our bodies grow together as a coordinated whole-unit…from human adolescence to mature adulthood…does not need the confirmation from science to establish this as scientific fact-based evidence.

Again, the question at the level of the fundament reality…is who or what is the source-of-origin that is capable of coordinating this inconceivably complex communication network…operating flawlessly and free of assembly-line “bugs.”

These and tens, hundreds, or thousands of similar exceptions …to the notion that the blind and mindless naturalism of Mother Nature could step-up into the shoes of being the creative cause behind the vast diversity of life…stops cold the otherwise brilliantly hypothetical extrapolation of Charles Darwin from microevolution extended into macroevolution…at the hard demarcation-line of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…the zone in which Darwinian evolution can proceed no farther in terms of empirical evidence or worldview philosophy.

 

Finally, if God is perfect…if He is incapable of bias, error, or bad judgment…and we were created in His image…then we have intrinsic worth and value that is not the case at all in the program of naturalistic materialism.

We cannot have value to an entity that is blind, mindless, indifferent, and uncaring.

If the purpose of our existence in the universe is to experience a journey of faith in order to discover the true character of God (Gen. 3:1-5) through a personal relationship…it is because of a starting-point of our intrinsic value and worth to God.

This is one of the key through-lines running in all of the biblical narrative stories of faith.

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