Full-Proof Ministries

Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

We need to be very careful in how we respond to things like this, particularly as Christians.  One thing we must not do is make personal attacks on Stephen Hawking.  To do so is not logical and I believe is a sinful response also.

What we must do is allow all ideas to be tested and follow what survives the tests.  If the claims of Christianity pass the tests, then we should be Christians.  If ideas exclusive to Christianity pass the tests, such as what Hawking is claiming, then we should follow those.  We should always follow the truth and not be afraid to allow our ideas to be tested.

I read the following at http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=11542128 . . .

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” writes Hawking. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists why we exist.”

Let’s critique Hawking’s statement rather than critique Hawking, the man.  Assuming the quote is taken in context, Hawking claims “the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”  In order for something to be created, it must not exist.  In order to create, something must exist to do the creating.  Therefore, for the universe to create itself, the universe must both exist and not exist at the same time.  This is a violation of the law of non-contradiction, a basic foundational concept.  So it is safe to dismiss the idea from Hawking.

I recently read already gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it by Ken Ham & Britt Beemer.  One thing I think I need to do is either do these reviews right away (I read this the first week of April) or take more notes in order that I can go into more detail.

Let me point out at the beginning of this that I am not a fan of Ken Ham.  Being honest . . . he drives me nuts.  I just want you to know that upfront.

From the back of the book . . .

If you look around in your church today, two-thirds of the young people who are sitting among us have already left in their hearts; soon they will be gone for good.

The fact that the church is losing a ton of its youth is pretty well known.  Numbers vary from report to report, but they are high.  In this book Ken and Britt reveal (from the back again) . . .

The views of 1,000 twenty-somethings, solidly raised in the church but no longer attending – and their reasons why.

One interesting thing is the thousand aren’t random across a spectrum of twenty-somethings including atheists and/or agnostics and/or people raised in liberal churches.  These thousand came from conservative churches.

I appreciate Ken Ham’s concern for the youth.  Youth are who I have a burden for myself so I appreciate that focus of this book.  Another good point that Ken stresses is the need for apologetics.  On page 93, Ken quotes two passages that I think are the solution to the problem.  He quotes 1 Peter 3:15 as he stresses the need for apologetics and he also quotes 2 Timothy 4:2-4.  Paul tells Timothy in that passage to preach the word.  Ken stresses hard that there is a lack of teaching the Bible.  Ken writes on page 123, “. . . I firmly believe that one of the reasons people aren’t living by the word is that they aren’t being taught the word.”  I agree with him about this problem.  Many churches teach from the Bible, but they don’t teach the Bible.  What do I mean?  They preach topical series and use individual verses as launching pads instead of teaching through the text verse-by-verse in context, teaching through entire books so that Christians understand what a book teaches and how that book applies to their lives.  I risk really sidetracking on a soapbox of mine, so let’s stop there.

So Ken has some great emphases in this book.  He points out a serious problem.  He points out good solutions.  He makes one serious flaw in my viewpoint.  He absolutely mistakes the cause of so many youth departing.  Ken blames it on the church teaching “millions of years.”  This is Ken’s soapbox.  It’s a terrible one.  Why?  Because it’s not one of the B.A.S.I.C.S. (see my post on B.A.S.I.C.S.).

Ken writes on pp 73-74 . . .

The problem we are studying, of course, is that 60 percent of the students who grow up in the Church have lost that connection . . . What happened? How did we get here? I believe it all started when the Church gave us “millions of reasons” to doubt the Bible.  The book of Genesis gives us a clear account of the creation of the universe, of the world, and of everything that lives, including humanity.  A simple literal interpretation of these passages makes it clear that this creation took place in six days, with God resting on the seventh, just a few thousand years ago.

I listen to all of Ken’s podcasts.  He blames nearly everything that’s wrong in this world on this very point.

Ken hired Britt Beemer and his company to do a statistical study to get the information for this book.  Unfortunately, it appears Ken didn’t pay attention to the information.  We’re these kids taught “millions of years” in their youth at church?  Largely not.

Ken tells us about these 1,000 people on page 45 . . .

Of those  who attended Sunday school, over 9 in 10 said that their Sunday school classes taught them that the Bible was true and accurate.

Only 1 in 10 said their pastor/Sunday school teacher taught that Christians could believe in Darwinian evolution.

One in 4 said their pastors and Sunday school teachers taught that Christians could believe in an earth that is millions or billions of years old.

Over 4 in 5 said their pastor or Sunday school teacher taught that God created the earth in six 24-hour days.

Only 1 in 16 said their pastors or Sunday school teachers taught that the Book of Genesis was a myth or legend and not real history.

All 1,000 of these people are not “attending church” today.  But when you look at those stats, it appears most of them were not taught “millions of years.”  So how can the church teaching millions of years be the cause of their departure?  It can’t because most of them weren’t taught it in church!

You may not like what I say next, and I am not claiming to speak for Jeff and all of Full-proof when I say this.  This is just Joe Myzia talking.  I think the cause of their departure may not be “millions of years” but “thousands of years.”  Now that doesn’t speak for everyone because the stats do show some were taught an old earth/universe view.  However, it does speak for most of them as we look at those stats.  More than 4 of 5 were taught literal six 24-hour days.  The heaviest stat in Ken’s favor is that 1 of 4 pastors taught Christians could believe in millions/billions of years.  But even that only has 250 of 1,000 being taught old earth/universe.

As Christians, we should be well-informed in as many ways as possible.  My personal opinion is that the view of a young-earth/universe has been brutally assaulted by a gang of facts.  However, while that has happened, the evidence for Darwinian and/or neo-Darwinian evolution has been also brutally assaulted.  Old-earth/universe does not automatically make macro-evolution true (macro-evolution is the idea that one species becomes another).  I think this is where Ken makes mistakes.  Ken regular makes category mistakes by automatically throwing macro-evolution in with an old earth/universe.  This can, and often does, result in “straw man” representations of old-earth Christians.

So how do I propose that kids taught young-earth creationism are in danger of falling away?  First of all, if students aren’t taught firmly that this is an area of debate in Christianity, but rather are taught with hardcore dogmatism that the earth is young, and if the scientific evidence becomes too convincing for them against the young-earth view, then they may have the misunderstanding that they have no other Christian camp to go to.  Thus, they may jettison the whole Christian worldview.  Secondly, teach a proper understanding that the Bible is sixty-six books, not one book. If a young adult sees the Bible as one book and struggles for a period in understanding one book, they can’t throw out the other sixty-five automatically.  Remember, we couldn’t always purchase a leather-bound codex with all sixty-six books in it.  They were all individual documents created at individual times. Thirdly, teach proper apologetics and good linear thinking in how we come to conclusions.  I can’t find the page, but Ken states somewhere in the book (and often in podcasts and public speaking events) that we believe in the resurrection because the Bible is the word of God and the Bible claims Jesus was resurrected.  He’ll do it in a question and answer type format.  He’ll ask, “Why do we believe in the resurrection?  Because the Bible says so.”  I do not think that is the proper way to teach resurrection and creation apologetics.  Oh, I absolutely believe the Bible is the word of God, but we don’t have to posit that to prove the resurrection.  The only place we must get to is proving that the gospel accounts and/or Paul’s epistles are historically reliable.  If Matthew states that Jesus said X, then Jesus said X.  If Mark says Jesus did Y, the Jesus did Y.  Proving the divine authorship and inerrancy of these books is further down the line in our argumentation in good apologetics.

By teaching teens in a way that they take the whole Bible as one book and getting them into a mindset that we believe X because the Bible says X, once they begin to have a doubt about one point they begin to doubt the entire Bible.  Once they don’t believe one doctrine, they toss the whole worldview.

By teaching teens:

• the difference between essential Christianity and non-essential Christianity (and we can’t give this lip service . . . we can’t say something is not an essential and treat it as essential after that, and this is what Ken does)
• about ways in which Christians disagree and why different Christians hold those views and respecting Christians who hold a differing viewpoint than we do
• how the Bible came to be book-by-book, how it was inspired and written down and then how it was transmitted through the centuries to today

we can equip them so that they don’t fall away from the faith if a non-B.A.S.I.C.S. point is challenged.  The age of the earth/universe is a debatable point inside the pale of orthodox Christianity.  Let’s not confuse this issue with an issue such as who God is or how one is saved or any other B.A.S.I.C.S. doctrine.

So what’s the deal with people asking others to choose a side – Religion or Science? I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and am officially fed up with people pretending that to side with science is to side with the “known.”

Science is supposedly a self-correcting apparatus, right? Hasn’t anyone ever wondered how much is left to be corrected? After all, we only know what was wrong when we find out what is right – and then we only “know” that we were wrong before, but still aren’t completely positive that we’re “right” now – maybe just closer to it. Is it really that “intellectual” to pursue a scientific path at the cost of knowing you only believe something until some lab coat tells you to think differently.

I’m all for science…really. I have benefited from the technological advances, medical discoveries and electronic innovation as much as the next guy, and I’m glad for it. I’m just not ready to “thrown in” with a system that admits it’s faulty from the get-go, but is unsure just how faulty and for just how long. It is especially difficult for me to embrace a movement that asks me to place my faith and trust in the knowledge of man over and against the knowledge God has relayed to us through His Word. One system changes almost daily…the other system is still using the same textbook, with no revisions pending. Like I said, I like science and have reaped its many benefits, but let’s get real.

Let’s review some of the things we KNOW:

1. Milk does a body good…until we find out all the potentially terrible things it can do to the adult body.

2. The earth is hundreds of thousands of years old…actually its several million years old…okay, this just in, it’s 4.5 Billion years old…this time we’re SURE, trust us!

3. The planet is slowly, but surely cooling. Though the measurement seems small in our lifetime, it will have a catastrophic impact on future generations. Whoops…it must be opposite day – we meant to say that the planet is heating up at such an alarming rate…

You get my point. There are some helpful elements of science and we can all appreciate most of them. Just don’t go abandoning your faith because someone in a lab coat demands more answers from the faithful laymen than he or his buddies can answer in their own fields of expertise. When you’re tired of changing your mind (or having it changed) every few years, find a Bible and get a hold of some unchanging truths. God will be waiting for you when you make the move.