In his book, The Nature of Historical Explanation, Patrick Gardiner asked a worthwhile question:
“In what sense can I be said to know an event which is in principle unobservable, having vanished behind the mysterious frontier which divides the present from the past? And how can we be sure that anything really happened in the past at all, that the whole story is not an elaborate fabrication, as untrustworthy as a dream or a work of fiction?”
There are two types of people who struggle with the big bang cosmology:
Those who embrace materialism and exclude God from the equation, and
Those whose religious teachings present the universe as eternal.
The bodily resurrection of Jesus lies at the heart of Christian theology. If the body of Christ did not rise from the dead, the Christian faith means nothing. Since belief in the resurrection relies on the evidence, it’s worth our time as either believers or skeptics to evaluate the quality of the evidence.
Are you familiar with the idea of religious pluralism? Pluralists believe that all religions are essentially teaching the same things and directing their practitioners to the same goal. You may have seen the “Coexist” bumper stickers where the word is spelled with the various symbols of major religions. That’s a pluralist message. Pluralism is best illustrated by the parable of the elephant.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I’ve heard this stated several times over the past few weeks. A lot of people who choose to not believe in God make such demands of believers.
In Jeremiah 18, God sends the prophet to a potter’s house. When Jeremiah arrived, the potter was at his wheel refashioning a ruined piece of clay into a useful vessel.
Solomon began his reign well. When God granted him any request, Solomon asked for wisdom and was given riches, peace, and length of days to boot. He realized his father’s vision by building God’s house in Jerusalem. He expanded Israel’s territory to its farthest extent and accumulated great wealth for God’s people. However, the many wives and concubines he collected for both political and pleasurable ends influenced Solomon’s apostasy. Ecclesiastes briefly chronicles his life apart from God. Solomon states his purpose in 1:3, “What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?” Profit or gain is generally a business term that describes what is left over when all the expenses are paid. In Ecclesiastes, it expresses Solomon’s search for meaning, value, or purpose in human existence. “Under the sun” tells us that Solomon searched for these things without involving God. Solomon puts his earlier faith as well as his father’s faith to the test. Is life worth living without God? Can man find happiness or contentment in the world apart from a God worldview?
In recent weeks, I’ve enjoyed reading “The God Who is There” and “Escape from Reason” by Francis Schaeffer. A good brother in Christ recommended the books to me and I am grateful for the recommendation. Schaeffer had a lot of good things to say about the devolution of Western thought that began in the early Renaissance and gained steam in late 18th/early 19th century philosophy.