It’s amazing to me how many Christians in the 21st century live in a state of insecurity about their faith and the nature of reality. I’m not myself immune to the secular temptation that wafts unseen through the secular culture pushing material reality as the only reality. Mind you, I and very few other people believe that the universe and everything in it is somehow a product of mere matter and chance. Just ask anyone you come across if they believe that there is no God, and that the universe is a product of mere matter and chance, and 95 plus percent will say, no way! Yet most of them live as if God is absolutely irrelevant to their lives, practical atheists if you will. Yet we, if we’re honest, are tempted to live the same way. I know I am, which I why one of the verses most on my mind and lips and prayers is Paul’s declaration in Romans 1:20, that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Meditate on that, clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . . We just need to open our eyes! And we will know, God is.
Yet, we are not left with mere creation, if you will, as awesome and undeniable as that is, but also our minds and logic. Part of this clearly seeing into the nature of creation has to do with reason and logic, phenomena pointing us beyond the merely material. In other words, if reason and logic exist, there is more to reality than matter (i.e., minds are not just brains). There has to be. This may take a little bit of work to wrap our mind around, but it’s worth the effort. Remember the challenge of our secular age. We are indoctrinated from birth by our secular culture to believe, as I’ve said, that the material world is the only world, and that any spiritual reality beyond the material either doesn’t exist or is irrelevant to our existence (Epicureanism). We can get along just fine without it. Although, we can’t, and not just in a heaven and hell sense, as obviously as important as that is, but right here in the good old material world. Materialism, where it is believed, reeks destruction wherever it is practiced (e.g., communism).
This brings me to a piece I came across about an overly confident materialist (there is no other kind), a “leading astronomer,” who proclaims:
we are all made of elementary particles with no additional constituents. As such composite systems, we do not possess freedom at a fundamental level, because all particles and their interactions follow the laws of physics.
“No additional constituents”? Really? How does he know this? Obviously he doesn’t. He can’t. He can only assume and assert it. Based on what? Absolutely nothing! That’s all the materialist has, assertions based on nothing but wishful thinking. They really, really don’t want God to exist (read Genesis 3, they want to “be like God”), and they don’t have logic or reason or evidence, so they assert. They assert, assert, assert! The more they assert, the more they believe their own . . . . Well, this is a family blog, but it is two words that begin with B and S. This kind of non-reasoning is why Christians do not have to be insecure about their faith, and the biblical conviction that there is a spiritual reality, and that we are spiritual as well as material beings, and that this life is not all there is. It’s worse than non-reasoning, however. The author critiquing the astronomer points out not only the vacuousness of the man’s reasoning, but that is it invalid contradictory garbage:
It follows that, if Loeb is right, there’s no reason to pay attention to what he says, any more than one would pay attention to the noise made by the wind or the sea. Loeb’s metaphysics is self-refuting nonsense. Logic and reason aren’t laws of physics and therefore they transcend physical properties.
Exactly! If logic and reason exist, and they self-evidently do, than materialism is false. If materialism is false, then there is more to reality than the merely material. On the other hand, if logic and reason only exist because of stuff (if matter is all there is), then they have no more meaning or value than stuff. It is an inescapable conclusion which means the materialists “logic” and “reason” are as valuable as dirt, worthless. Yet they strut across the stage as if their words are oracles from on high, and the secular culture applauds them as if their oracles mean anything.
The conclusion of this exercise in reason and logic? As Christians not only do we not need to be insecure about our understanding about the nature of reality, but we can be supremely confident that it is the most reasonable, logical, and plausible understanding of the nature of things. There is no space to go into the superiority of the theistic interpretation of things versus other spiritual conceptions of ultimate reality, but there are very few options. They are atheism, theism, and pantheism, and that’s it. Pantheism is only slightly more plausible than atheism, but it has no explanation for persons or morality or evil, or really anything. Only theism is reasonable and logical, and only Christianity proclaims a risen Savior who conquered death. We can proclaim it with a bold confidence, and live and die with hope.
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