Faith

Posted by Worldview Warriors On Thursday, May 15, 2014 0 comments

by Steve Risner

“…it’s time for who do you trust? Hubba hubba hubba. Money money money. Who do you trust?” — the Joker

Do you have faith in me? If I told you I rolled the dice and rolled 2 sixes, you could believe that, right? You could have faith I was telling you the truth. If I told you I did this exact thing 10 times in a row, you may begin to doubt me, correct? Your faith, which is not based on anything other than your trust in me, would be tapped out. You would believe I was lying or I fixed the dice so I could only roll 2 sixes. How much more exceptional is it to believe in a theory that states everything came about by enormous amounts of chance and through a series of untraceable mistakes?

Faith is trust in something or someone who is faithful. That means that your faith is placed in something trustworthy, reliable, and/or dependable. Evolution does not qualify, as it is not faithful at all. It is ever changing. “Blind faith” is what the evolutionist has since his/her faith is not based on anything faithful or trustworthy. It is based on a hope that what they believe is correct. Some believe that, “As settled science, evolution is not a matter of opinion, or something one chooses to believe in or not, like a religious proposition.” — Tom Krattenmaker, USA Today

The unfortunate thing for Tom here is there is no such thing as “settled science.” To paraphrase Albert Mohler, by its very nature, the goal of science is to test and test and test again to either confirm or toss out a belief. In so doing, hosts of new discoveries are made. No one was given a Nobel Prize for “settled science.” An interesting thing to note on the trustworthiness or faithfulness of science is that many of these prizes were given to men and women whose discoveries were later rejected. Science is not faithful and it is far from settled. The God of the Bible, however, is completely trustworthy, dependable, reliable—He is faithful.

Some would try to marry their faith in God to their faith in man (evolution). However, to do so means one must disregard fundamental characteristics of both. Basic tenets of the theory of evolution and of Christianity must be suspended in order for one to hold onto both simultaneously. This is because their faith in their God and His Word is rivaled by their faith in man and his word. They are forced to meld the two because they give them equal footing. The error is catastrophic and while it, in and of itself, is not a salvation issue, I personally have seen its corrosive effects on the life of a believer to the point where such a person has little to no faith in Jesus Christ because His Word is no longer trustworthy to him.

“But there is a mountain of evidence from many different disciplines that confirm evolution,” is the canned response we get from so many evolutionists. This seems strange since “evidence” doesn’t do anything—it can’t. It’s mute, so it can’t say anything. It’s inanimate, so it can’t show us anything. Based on our worldview, we put the evidence together in such a way that it tells a story. There is no such thing as “evidence for evolution” just like there is no such thing as “evidence for creation.” There is simply evidence. How one interprets that evidence is based on presuppositions—our preconceived notions that we observe the world through. Everyone does this. Every theologian, every scientist, every politician, etc; every person must take in information, interpret it based on a set of improvable presuppositions, and then use it to tell a story. The same evidence can be interpreted multiple ways. A very simple way to demonstrate this is using the president. Some would see the outcomes of his presidency and think he’s doing a great job. They would believe he’s seeking what’s right and just and is working hard for our nation’s prosperity. Others may see the exact same outcomes of his presidency and may believe he’s doing a terrible job. They may see him as trampling the Constitution and he may rank as one of the worst presidents to hold office. Both of these viewpoints are based on the same information—evidence that doesn't say anything on its own—but the information is filtered through different lenses to arrive at very different results.

This is because facts don’t speak. The observer makes them say something. What the observer believes the evidence is saying will be based on their worldview. There is really no way around this. So often we’ll hear it said that science is based in facts (and comically, evolution will be equated with science in general) while religion or creation is based on blind faith—it’s just a belief. But is this what we observe? Hardly. There have been claims that science (and therefore evolution since they want us to believe they are the same thing) happily changes with the evidence. This is just not true. If the evidence modifies a current fringe belief in terms of evolution, it may be accepted or at the least scrutinized further. But if some evidence seems to completely contradict a major principle of the theory, accusations of fraud or contamination are the response with little to no justification and the credibility of the scientist (rather than their work) is questioned. To further confirm that evolutionism is a religion, we see creation scientists are mocked and ridiculed and the world is told no true scientist can deny Darwinian evolution. In fact, Dawkins said to deny evolution means you’re either stupid or lying. You can read about that here.

So we, as followers of Christ, have faith in the One who is faithful. And we have faith that the Word of God is true. This faith is bolstered by evidence—historical, scientific, experiential, and logical as well as a variety of other sources. An evolutionist (which means one holding the belief that life on planet earth came about spontaneously through natural processes and diversified from some unknown “simple” biological prototype through a series of copy mistakes to give us the total number of species we see alive today and in the fossil record) has faith in something completely different. They trust their belief that the universe and everything in it is a product of accidents, chance, and natural processes both known and unknown. But it all boils down to faith of some sort. Creationists have faith in God and in His Word and this faith (which is far from blind) is supported by the world around us—the evidence as we see it. Evolutionists have a faith that is based in ever changing “truths” that they rest on today and reject tomorrow. Their faith is foundationless apart from humanism and naturalism—which are ideologies rather than evidence. Where do you put your faith? Is it in the God of the Bible who has proven He is faithful or in man and his claims to be the pinnacle of a pyramid of errors?

Hebrews 11:1-3: “Faith means being sure of the things we hope for and knowing that something is real even if we do not see it. Faith is the reason we remember great people who lived in the past. It is by faith we understand that the whole world was made by God’s command so what we see was made by something that cannot be seen.”

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