Saturday, April 26, 2008

Some May Trust in Horses...

Some may trust in horses, some may trust in chariots but we will trust… in homeschooling. “Okay, so that’s not how the verse goes. It really ends with “but we will trust in our curriculums.” No? How about, “But we will trust in our formulas”? Hmmm. “Rules?”
What exactly do we trust in? If you are anything like me then you (or I) am always looking for the silver bullet. You know, that thing that will guarantee my desired outcome for my children, my marriage, my relationship with God, my job, my (put whatever you want here). I want the quick fix, the ‘this is how you do it’ formula that, if I carry it out to the letter, assures me of the result I want. We do it in almost everything, don’t we? If I can only find the right history curriculum (I think we’re on our third now, and looking for a fourth) then my children will have a biblical view of the world. If only there were a certain type of math, literature, science, or Bible curriculum. We just want something we know will give our children a biblical worldview. No, let me rephrase that. We all want something we know will make our children Christians.
This isn’t limited to just curriculum. It’s in everything we do. If I only keep them from this TV program or from watching certain kinds of movies, or playing video games or certain types of music. Maybe if we go to a certain kind of church or keep them from certain kinds of kids, then my kids will come out the way I want them to be.
You see, we are all legalists at heart. Just like the Israelites, we acquire a set of laws or rules and then think that we can do it ourselves. We think we can attain godliness or at least achieve it in our children through certain prescribed methods or practices. Israel thought the same way. Though the law was never given to them so that they could earn salvation, they took certain practices and Scriptures and turned them into the formula for “godliness” and salvation. But the law could not save then, nor can tradition or a particular lifestyle save our children today. The truth is that there is no Christian panacea. There is only One that can save our children and give them correct worldviews and morals and Christian virtues: Jesus Christ.
We must trust and depend on Him to do this. We must trust and depend on Him to open their eyes and give them understanding. We must trust and depend on Him because it is what we are supposed to do. Anything else is idolatry. The point of the law was for the Israelites to trust and depend on God, not themselves! The Christian life is all about this one thing: trusting and depending on God in Jesus Christ. We must trust Him for our salvation and our children’s. We must trust Him for our daily food and for our intellect and for the sun. When we disciple (school) our children both the goal and the means to the goal are the same, and that is to trust in God.
I write this because I know my own propensity to lock myself into trusting just about everything but God, especially as a homeschooler. I have to realize that just because something worked one day that it doesn’t mean that I then trust it instead of God. We should not homeschool because it’s “the proven method”, but because we trust in God. Homeschooling works not because it is homeschooling but because of the sheer grace and power of God. “Some may trust in horses, some may trust in chariots, but we will trust in the name of the LORD our God!”

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Why No One Really Believes in Evolution pt1

Have you heard of the madman that stood at the busy street corner announcing through his bull-horn, “I have discovered the truth that no one can know truth!”? Or the professor that proclaimed in his philosophy class, “I have logically proven that there is no logic.” Or the university lecturer that said, “All words are meaningless.” What do these three have in common? None of them really believed what they were professing to believe. The one who believed that words have no meaning was using “meaningful words” to attempt to communicate his belief. The madman believed that he knew the “truth” that he was teaching. And the professor was dependent upon the logic which he was trying to destroy. Each of these men might have thought that what they were saying was true, but they really didn’t believe it. Like so many others across the face of this vast planet, these men suffered from a sort of “intellectual schizophrenia”. Though they professed to believe one thing, their deeds acted contrary to their profession.

We are no strangers to this idea. One of the favorite mudslingers of our day is to call someone a “hypocrite”. When this charge is leveled, it is because people are seen acting contrary to their professed belief. We yearn for peoples actions to be consistent with their words. Now you may have noticed the usage of the term “words” and “professed beliefs”. This is intentional, because there is often a vast difference between a profession of belief and true belief. The profession is what someone thinks they believe, but true belief is in how they act. In others words, what you do is what you believe, not what you say. The professors words said, “There is no logic!” while his actions proclaimed “I believe in logic!” This disparity between profession and belief is also found in modern evolutionary thought, for though evolutionists proclaim one belief they deny that very belief in the way they think. Why??? See the next blog.

Why No One Really Believes in Evolution pt2

First, a brief definition will be helpful to understand who and what we are talking about when we talk about evolution and evolutionists. There are a myriad of definitions for evolution, but what I am specifically addressing here is the belief of evolution “as a comprehensive model of origins”. In other words evolution is the belief that everything generally, and man specifically, have arisen by purely natural processes through millions or billions of years to become what we are today. As Carl Sagan says, “It is the universe that made us. We are creatures of the cosmos.” This is the evolution of which millions profess and yet none truly believe.

What evolutionists are claiming by “purely natural processes” is that there was no supernatural intervention in the creation of man. This means that there is no design to the human being, no purpose to any of his organs, and no intent behind his existence. Christians often claim that what evolutionists are saying is that we, the human race, are a mistake. This is not true, for “mistake” assumes original intent. There is no intent, no purpose, or thought, or meaning or plan. According to evolutionary theory you are just a random conglomeration of time, chance, matter, energy and chemical combustion. You do not exist to survive, to thrive, to think or to do anything else. There is no “meaning” or purpose behind you, your senses, or your brain. It is at this very point that the problem arises for evolutionists. Let me explain.

On the one hand the evolutionists are asserting that their minds are the product of random, meaningless, non-logical, purposeless forces and yet, on the other hand, are trying to reason, think and use logic. Therein lays the contradiction. If you believe that your mind is the product of random, purposeless forces, that it was not meant to think or to reason, that intelligence and logic are mere concoctions of this hodgepodge of chemicals, and that your senses are not designed to sense, then why would you attempt to use reason, to understand data, and to use the laws of logic? How could any evolutionists think that they can think coherently and that their minds can rationally understand reality?

Lets picture this another way. According to evolution our minds are just the random happenstance of time plus energy plus matter. They were not designed to think or to reason, to know or to interpret data. In fact they came about for no reason whatsoever. This being the case there is no difference between a brain and a rock in their design to reason. Or for that matter milk bubbles, Franks Hot Sauce (that’s good stuff!!), intestinal gas or grass. Each of these was designed to think in the same way, it wasn’t. They are all just random non-intelligent chemicals that happened to have come together through time.

to be continued...

Why No One Really Believes in Evolution pt3

Now we all trust our minds and the thoughts that arise from them because we believe our minds to be logical, reasonable, rational, intelligent and coherent. Each of these traits is central to knowing anything, to positing any truth, to making any kind of a rational decision, to science, to math, and more specifically to thought itself. And yet if, as evolution maintains, the brain is the accumulation of millions of years of unguided, unintended chemical processes, if it is merely the composition of matter plus energy, then where does reason, logic, rationality and intelligence arise from?

Just the other day I was conversing with an evolutionist about his beliefs. I asked him why he believed in evolution, to which he responded, “Logic.” I found the answer quite interesting. I then asked him, “Is matter intelligent?”
He answered, “No.”
“Is energy intelligent?”
Again, “No.”
“Hmmm...” I continued. “Did you ever take math in school?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me then, what is 0+0?”
“Zero.”, he replied.
“All the time?”
“Yes, all the time”.
I then queried, “So if I take zero intelligence and add zero intelligence to it, how much intelligence do we get?”
“Ummm, zero.”
“And if we add zero plus zero for a thousand years? A million? A billion? How much intelligence do we get by adding another factor without intelligence?”
Silence.
I then pressed the dialogue, “The same is true of logic, of reason, of rationality, of knowledge. If you add a zillion non-logical chemicals together how much logic do you get? Zero. Where then did intelligence, logic and reason come from?”

Zero intelligence plus zero intelligence equals zero intelligence. Zero logic plus zero logic equals zero logic. Where, then, does intelligence arise from (in the human brain or anywhere else for that matter) when there is no intelligent source or origin? Is “intelligence” just a combination of certain chemicals? Is logic a different chemical combination? And reason a third? And if so, how does any combination of non-intelligent chemicals make intelligence? And Logic? And Reason? The answer, of course, is that they don’t. Zero plus zero still equals zero.

In evolution thought is simply the gaseous excretions of the chemical combustions of the goo in your head. These excretions are no different from any other excretions from any other part of your body, or any other “living” thing. They are all just chemicals interacting and combusting. So what makes the gaseous excretions in a skull intelligent or meaningful while the random gaseous excretions from intestines are not? So what in the world would cause an evolutionist to think that his mind is a reliable guide that gives meaningful insights and has accurate interpretations of laws of logic and physical phenomena? If he really believed evolution how could he possibly believe that this mass of random chemical goo called his “brain” is intelligent or rational? How is his conglomeration of random chemicals (brain), or anyone else’s, any different from any other conglomeration of random chemicals such as Alka-Seltzer, soda-pop or dirt?

To be continued...

Why No One Really Believes in Evolution pt4

In evolution thought is simply the gaseous excretions of the chemical combustions of the goo in your head. These excretions are no different from any other excretions from any other part of your body, or any other “living” thing. They are all just chemicals interacting and combusting. So what makes the gaseous excretions in a skull intelligent or meaningful while the random gaseous excretions from intestines are not? So what in the world would cause an evolutionist to think that his mind is a reliable guide that gives meaningful insights and has accurate interpretations of laws of logic and physical phenomena? If he really believed evolution how could he possibly believe that this mass of random chemical goo called his “brain” is intelligent or rational? How is his conglomeration of random chemicals (brain), or anyone else’s, any different from any other conglomeration of random chemicals such as Alka-Seltzer, soda-pop or dirt?

To this problem a friend of mine answered, “Some day they may find the difference between thought and non-thought and give us an answer, it’s just not known yet.” To which I responded, “Don’t you see that their “answers” are just the gaseous excretions of the goo in their heads?” In other words, we can postulate an “answer”, but the “answer” is just the unorganized haphazard excretions of yet another unorganized haphazard mass of chemicals that we call a human being. How then can we trust their “answer”? We may postulate all we want that someday someone might find some quantitative difference between cognition, flatulation, and what rocks dream about, but the point is that they are all still non-rational matter. It is just nature taking its course. Any combination of any number of non-rational chemicals does not and cannot create rationality or intelligence. No matter how many chemicals we add or what combinations we use, they are still non-intelligent non-rational chemicals, and nothing plus nothing equals…

There is, therefore, no reason to believe that our minds and thoughts correspond to reality, or, for that matter, our senses. (In fact, we can’t even know if we have senses, for though the random chemicals in our skulls are “telling” us this through their random combustions, how can we truly trust that those random combustions are in any way reflecting reality?) How can an unordered chaotic mass of goo create or find order in an unordered chaotic universe? We must remember that our minds are not trying to decide truth or discern truth, they are not attempting to make sense out of the world, they are not endeavoring to gather data, but our minds are merely chemicals purposelessly doing what they do. It’s simply nature doing what nature does.

Have you ever been asked the question, “What were you thinking??” Well, in an evolutionary world the basic answer is, “I wasn’t. It was just nature taking its course in my head!” There is no thinking “intelligently”, “logically” or “rationally” but only naturally, and that kind of thought we have no control over . The evolutionist often fails to realize this truth. There is therefore no distinction between rationality and irrationality in an evolutionary world, because it is just nature taking its course. There is neither logical thinking nor illogical thinking, for all thinking is not thinking at all but nature simply doing what it does. Therefore any reference to “being logical” or “being intelligent” is nonsense.

We therefore see that the evolutionary worldview, by its very definition, destroys all possibility of objective knowledge, logic, reason and intelligence. It undermines all academic study and subverts the possibility of coherent thought. Yet I have yet to meet or ever hear of any evolutionist who rejects his own reason or the laws of logic. They all continue to uphold their intelligence though they know that evolution cannot explain or produce it.

to be continued...

Why No One Really Believes in Evolution pt5

I remember the time that my essay “Of Evolution and Alka-Seltzer” got posted on an atheist/evolutionist website, which prompted dozens of responses. Not surprisingly every one of these responses made appeal to laws of logic and reason and evidence, only further validating the argument presented in the essay. What these fellows failed to realize was that their attempt to make a distinction between what was logical and illogical, their attempt to make a distinction between right and wrong ideas and reasonable and unreasonable thoughts completely destroyed the foundation of their evolutionism. The more they appealed to such concepts the more they denied the reality of their belief. They cannot appeal to any standard of logic, reason, rationality or truth because evolution undermines the possibility of logic, reason, rationality and truth. If they really believed evolution they would realize there is no distinction between what is logical and what is not, but that their mind just does what it does because it is natural for it to do so.

And yet they continue to believe that they are capable of making choices. They continue to believe that there are objective standards of logic and rationality. They continue to believe that they have meaningful thoughts, that their ideas correspond to reality, that they are capable of intelligence and are themselves intelligent beings. They believe that they do have senses, and that what those senses intake correspond to reality, and that the transfer of the data from those senses to their brains is an accurate transmission, and that the brains interpretation of the data is accurate, and that they make reasonable choices in accordance with all of that data. In so doing they fail treat their minds as products of evolution.

And so, just like the madmen mentioned at the beginning, there stands the evolutionist declaring, “With my reason, logic, intellect, knowledge and rationality I believe in evolution.” In other words, “Logically, there is no logic! With my rational mind I have determined that there are no rational minds! With my reason I have ascertained that there is no reason! From all of the knowledge that I have obtained I have determined that there is no knowledge! From the depths of my intelligence I have concluded that there is no intelligence in the universe!” Why? Because they really believe that they are far more than just random, impersonal, unintelligent, non-rational, non-logical combinations of matter and energy. In the end, they do not really believe in evolution. They might shout it from the rooftops and write it in their books and live it in their moral choices, but they flatly deny it in the way they think.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Why No One Really Believes in Evolution (the whole thing and its long, believe me!)

Have you heard of the madman that stood at the busy street corner announcing through his bull-horn, “I have discovered the truth that no one can know truth!”? Or the professor that proclaimed in his philosophy class, “I have logically proven that there is no logic.” Or the university lecturer that said, “All words are meaningless.” What do these three have in common? None of them really believed what they were professing to believe. The one who believed that words have no meaning was using “meaningful words” to attempt to communicate his belief. The madman believed that he knew the “truth” that he was teaching. And the professor was dependent upon the logic which he was trying to destroy. Each of these men might have thought that what they were saying was true, but they really didn’t believe it. Like so many others across the face of this vast planet, these men suffered from a sort of “intellectual schizophrenia”. Though they professed to believe one thing, their deeds acted contrary to their profession.

We are no strangers to this idea. One of the favorite mudslingers of our day is to call someone a “hypocrite”. When this charge is leveled, it is because people are seen acting contrary to their professed belief. We yearn for peoples actions to be consistent with their words. Now you may have noticed the usage of the term “words” and “professed beliefs”. This is intentional, because there is often a vast difference between a profession of belief and true belief. The profession is what someone thinks they believe, but true belief is in how they act. In others words, what you do is what you believe, not what you say. The professors words said, “There is no logic!” while his actions proclaimed “I believe in logic!” This disparity between profession and belief is also found in modern evolutionary thought, for though evolutionists proclaim one belief they deny that very belief in the way they think. Here is why…

First, a brief definition will be helpful to understand who and what we are talking about when we talk about evolution and evolutionists. There are a myriad of definitions for evolution, but what I am specifically addressing here is the belief of evolution “as a comprehensive model of origins”. In other words evolution is the belief that everything generally, and man specifically, have arisen by purely natural processes through millions or billions of years to become what we are today. As Carl Sagan says, “It is the universe that made us. We are creatures of the cosmos.” This is the evolution of which millions profess and yet none truly believe.

What evolutionists are claiming by “purely natural processes” is that there was no supernatural intervention in the creation of man. This means that there is no design to the human being, no purpose to any of his organs, and no intent behind his existence. Christians often claim that what evolutionists are saying is that we, the human race, are a mistake. This is not true, for “mistake” assumes original intent. There is no intent, no purpose, or thought, or meaning or plan. According to evolutionary theory you are just a random conglomeration of time, chance, matter, energy and chemical combustion. You do not exist to survive, to thrive, to think or to do anything else. There is no “meaning” or purpose behind you, your senses, or your brain. It is at this very point that the problem arises for evolutionists. Let me explain.

On the one hand the evolutionists are asserting that their minds are the product of random, meaningless, non-logical, purposeless forces and yet, on the other hand, are trying to reason, think and use logic. Therein lays the contradiction. If you believe that your mind is the product of random, purposeless forces, that it was not meant to think or to reason, that intelligence and logic are mere concoctions of this hodgepodge of chemicals, and that your senses are not designed to sense, then why would you attempt to use reason, to understand data, and to use the laws of logic? How could any evolutionists think that they can think coherently and that their minds can rationally understand reality?

Lets picture this another way. According to evolution our minds are just the random happenstance of time plus energy plus matter. They were not designed to think or to reason, to know or to interpret data. In fact they came about for no reason whatsoever. This being the case there is no difference between a brain and a rock in their design to reason. Or for that matter milk bubbles, Franks Hot Sauce (that’s good stuff!!), intestinal gas or grass. Each of these was designed to think in the same way, it wasn’t. They are all just random non-intelligent chemicals that happened to have come together through time.

Now we all trust our minds and the thoughts that arise from them because we believe our minds to be logical, reasonable, rational, intelligent and coherent. Each of these traits is central to knowing anything, to positing any truth, to making any kind of a rational decision, to science, to math, and more specifically to thought itself. And yet if, as evolution maintains, the brain is the accumulation of millions of years of unguided, unintended chemical processes, if it is merely the composition of matter plus energy, then where does reason, logic, rationality and intelligence arise from?

Just the other day I was conversing with an evolutionist about his beliefs. I asked him why he believed in evolution, to which he responded, “Logic.” I found the answer quite interesting. I then asked him, “Is matter intelligent?”
He answered, “No.”
“Is energy intelligent?”
Again, “No.”
“Hmmm...” I continued. “Did you ever take math in school?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me then, what is 0+0?”
“Zero.”, he replied.
“All the time?”
“Yes, all the time”.
I then queried, “So if I take zero intelligence and add zero intelligence to it, how much intelligence do we get?”
“Ummm, zero.”
“And if we add zero plus zero for a thousand years? A million? A billion? How much intelligence do we get by adding another factor without intelligence?”
Silence.
I then pressed the dialogue, “The same is true of logic, of reason, of rationality, of knowledge. If you add a zillion non-logical chemicals together how much logic do you get? Zero. Where then did intelligence, logic and reason come from?”

Zero intelligence plus zero intelligence equals zero intelligence. Zero logic plus zero logic equals zero logic. Where, then, does intelligence arise from (in the human brain or anywhere else for that matter) when there is no intelligent source or origin? Is “intelligence” just a combination of certain chemicals? Is logic a different chemical combination? And reason a third? And if so, how does any combination of non-intelligent chemicals make intelligence? And Logic? And Reason? The answer, of course, is that they don’t. Zero plus zero still equals zero.

In evolution thought is simply the gaseous excretions of the chemical combustions of the goo in your head. These excretions are no different from any other excretions from any other part of your body, or any other “living” thing. They are all just chemicals interacting and combusting. So what makes the gaseous excretions in a skull intelligent or meaningful while the random gaseous excretions from intestines are not? So what in the world would cause an evolutionist to think that his mind is a reliable guide that gives meaningful insights and has accurate interpretations of laws of logic and physical phenomena? If he really believed evolution how could he possibly believe that this mass of random chemical goo called his “brain” is intelligent or rational? How is his conglomeration of random chemicals (brain), or anyone else’s, any different from any other conglomeration of random chemicals such as Alka-Seltzer, soda-pop or dirt?

To this problem a friend of mine answered, “Some day they may find the difference between thought and non-thought and give us an answer, it’s just not known yet.” To which I responded, “Don’t you see that their “answers” are just the gaseous excretions of the goo in their heads?” In other words, we can postulate an “answer”, but the “answer” is just the unorganized haphazard excretions of yet another unorganized haphazard mass of chemicals that we call a human being. How then can we trust their “answer”? We may postulate all we want that someday someone might find some quantitative difference between cognition, flatulation, and what rocks dream about, but the point is that they are all still non-rational matter. It is just nature taking its course. Any combination of any number of non-rational chemicals does not and cannot create rationality or intelligence. No matter how many chemicals we add or what combinations we use, they are still non-intelligent non-rational chemicals, and nothing plus nothing equals…

There is, therefore, no reason to believe that our minds and thoughts correspond to reality, or, for that matter, our senses. (In fact, we can’t even know if we have senses, for though the random chemicals in our skulls are “telling” us this through their random combustions, how can we truly trust that those random combustions are in any way reflecting reality?) How can an unordered chaotic mass of goo create or find order in an unordered chaotic universe? We must remember that our minds are not trying to decide truth or discern truth, they are not attempting to make sense out of the world, they are not endeavoring to gather data, but our minds are merely chemicals purposelessly doing what they do. It’s simply nature doing what nature does.

Have you ever been asked the question, “What were you thinking??” Well, in an evolutionary world the basic answer is, “I wasn’t. It was just nature taking its course in my head!” There is no thinking “intelligently”, “logically” or “rationally” but only naturally, and that kind of thought we have no control over . The evolutionist often fails to realize this truth. There is therefore no distinction between rationality and irrationality in an evolutionary world, because it is just nature taking its course. There is neither logical thinking nor illogical thinking, for all thinking is not thinking at all but nature simply doing what it does. Therefore any reference to “being logical” or “being intelligent” is nonsense.

We therefore see that the evolutionary worldview, by its very definition, destroys all possibility of objective knowledge, logic, reason and intelligence. It undermines all academic study and subverts the possibility of coherent thought. Yet I have yet to meet or ever hear of any evolutionist who rejects his own reason or the laws of logic. They all continue to uphold their intelligence though they know that evolution cannot explain or produce it.

I remember the time that my essay “Of Evolution and Alka-Seltzer” got posted on an atheist/evolutionist website, which prompted dozens of responses. Not surprisingly every one of these responses made appeal to laws of logic and reason and evidence, only further validating the argument presented in the essay. What these fellows failed to realize was that their attempt to make a distinction between what was logical and illogical, their attempt to make a distinction between right and wrong ideas and reasonable and unreasonable thoughts completely destroyed the foundation of their evolutionism. The more they appealed to such concepts the more they denied the reality of their belief. They cannot appeal to any standard of logic, reason, rationality or truth because evolution undermines the possibility of logic, reason, rationality and truth. If they really believed evolution they would realize there is no distinction between what is logical and what is not, but that their mind just does what it does because it is natural for it to do so.

And yet they continue to believe that they are capable of making choices. They continue to believe that there are objective standards of logic and rationality. They continue to believe that they have meaningful thoughts, that their ideas correspond to reality, that they are capable of intelligence and are themselves intelligent beings. They believe that they do have senses, and that what those senses intake correspond to reality, and that the transfer of the data from those senses to their brains is an accurate transmission, and that the brains interpretation of the data is accurate, and that they make reasonable choices in accordance with all of that data. In so doing they fail treat their minds as products of evolution.

And so, just like the madmen mentioned at the beginning, there stands the evolutionist declaring, “With my reason, logic, intellect, knowledge and rationality I believe in evolution.” In other words, “Logically, there is no logic! With my rational mind I have determined that there are no rational minds! With my reason I have ascertained that there is no reason! From all of the knowledge that I have obtained I have determined that there is no knowledge! From the depths of my intelligence I have concluded that there is no intelligence in the universe!” Why? Because they really believe that they are far more than just random, impersonal, unintelligent, non-rational, non-logical combinations of matter and energy. In the end, they do not really believe in evolution. They might shout it from the rooftops and write it in their books and live it in their moral choices, but they flatly deny it in the way they think.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008