On Friday I came across an article at Breakpoint about a movie called The Master Designer—the Song, and I, my wife, and son watched it in dumbfounded awe. It’s so refreshing to watch a documentary about the wonders of the natural world and not be told over and over that “nature” or “evolution” (unguided, random, material processes) is responsible for it all. Such a notion that random chance can produce anything, let alone the Bison that has four, count ’em four, stomachs to digest its food, is ridiculous. Just plain old stupid nonsense. Yet if you are in academia or among our cultural elite and question evolution, you are hounded as “anti-science!” I challenge anyone to watch this documentary, look me in the face with a straight face, and say, nah, there’s no God. You want to inoculate your kids from atheism and agnosticism? Watch this documentary with them.
It’s much more challenging, though, to inoculate them from practical atheism. It’s important to realize that there are very few (under 5%) philosophical atheists, or those who actually believe the universe is God-less. It’s just too obvious that there is a Master Designer, as you’ll see when you watch the movie. In fact, if someone could watch the movie and still walk away an atheist, I would question their mental health, though we know it’s not that at all. It’s not an intellectual issue. Paul tells us what it is in 2 Corinthians 4:
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
So if people can’t help believing there is a God, and believe in Christ as the perfect manifestation of his glory, why does God fall so far down on their priority list? In a word, secularism. Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age, argues that we live in a “disenchanted” age, where the spiritual and transcendent just doesn’t seem real to people. It’s not so much what people believe, but what is to them believable. I’ve written much about plausibility structures, those institutions in a culture that determine meaning, and the seeming realness of things. It is the, almost, all powerful plausibility structure of the ubiquitous secularism of American culture that turns people, even many Christians, into practical atheists. Simply, they live their daily lives as if this world was more important than the next. It’s not! This world, this life, is nanoseconds compared to forever. And if you’re in your 40s and beyond you know that “blink of an eye” is the perfect metaphor for how quickly our mortal lives pass.
So how do we extricate ourselves from practical atheism, and the secularism that pushes us there? We allow the ridiculous amazingness of general revelation (creation) to drive us to special revelation (the Bible). If this being, this God, has the power and knowledge and wisdom and creativity and skill to create the universe and everything in it, then by golly, we ought to want to find out more about him! And just our luck, he’s revealed that to us in words! Paul tells us that creation reveals “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature,” and that these qualities are obvious (watch the movie!), but we need more, much more. So in God’s gracious providence he’s given us a strange collection of 66 books written by 40 authors over 1,500(!) years, and we can read!
Let us take our Savior’s words to heart, God who became a man and died a horrible death for us. In response to Satan’s temptation in the desert, Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” These words, every word, in Scripture, in our Bibles, should become as necessary to our daily lives as food! Are they for you? In due course as you become more familiar with it, get lost in it’s never ending profundity, it will blow you away every bit as much as creation.
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