How Can I Make Sense of It All?
By Stephen M. Golden
Copyright © 23 March 2012
You’ve been told
contradictory information. You've been
given incomplete answers and answers that just don't make sense. You've probably been told Science refutes the
Bible and that believing in God is irrational.
How can you trust what the Bible says?
How can you know the entire
Bible is true? How can you make sense of it all?
The first thing to
understand is that your whole outlook on everything will be directed by your primary premise.[1] That
will determine your worldview. No one is
bias free. Your primary premise is that
ultimate concept you believe to be true. It is a premise that does not rely on
any other premise in order to be true.
In other words, if you take
statement ‘D’ and say, "I believe 'D' because of 'C'; I believe 'C'
because of 'B'; I believe 'B' because of 'A'", and so on, eventually you
would come to a logical statement that is the source of all your other
reasoning. Very few people ever actually do this, but whether you do it or not,
and whether you realize it or not, you still view everything through your
worldview which is based on your primary premise. This primary premise must be accepted
on faith.
For most people, virtually
everyone, whether they know it or not, this premise is their belief about
whether the Creator God exists. There
are two possible positions: He exists, or He does not exist.
You may have assumed or
even adopted a worldview without realizing it.
Nevertheless, every belief or conclusion based on facts and evidence
will be interpreted according to your worldview.
You've probably heard the
phrase, "The facts speak for themselves." That is simply false. The facts never
speak for themselves.[2] All
facts must be interpreted. All facts
will be interpreted according to your worldview.
Regarding the ultimate
premise, whether God exists, without going too deeply into the logic of it in
this article, from a strict logical
perspective, only the belief in God of the Bible is rational—that is, having a
reason to believe it. The belief that
God of the Bible does not exist is
logically irrational because you are reduced to a premise that has no rational
basis.
A rational worldview must
account for the
• Reliability of Memory - How do you know your memory is reliable?
•
Reliability of the Senses – How do you know what you perceive is correct?
•
Laws of Logic – How do you know there are laws of logic? You would first have
to assume them in order to prove them
The rationality of the
existence of the God of the Bible comes down to this: "The Bible must be the Word
of God because it says it is, AND if you reject this claim, you have no basis
for the Laws of Logic or knowledge itself." If
you want all the details on this, I suggest you read The Ultimate Proof of Creation by Dr. Jason Lisle.
So, coming from the
perspective that God exists, God gave His testimony to reliable men, and they
wrote it down for us. For more information on this, I recommend The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
Regarding Genesis and
origins, you have likely been inundated with the idea of millions of years most
your life. It simply isn't true. The entire universe, from the perspective of
the Earth, is a little more than six thousand years old.
A reality that has been
kept from you is that most methods used to determine the age of the earth, the
moon, and even the planets reveal a young age. The only dating methods that
consistently yield really old ages are
"radiometric dating methods."
But radiometric dating has serious issues. There are a minimum of three assumptions made
when estimating the age of something using a radiometric dating method:
1. The quantities of the initial materials,
2. That the decay rates
were constant, and
3. That there was no
contamination of the sample.
At least these three
assumptions must be made; none of these assumptions can be proven.
Even given those
assumptions, the problem is, radiometric dating methods yield dates of millions
and billions of years for rocks that are known to be less than 100 years
old. If the methods aren't accurate for
rocks of known age, why would one presume them to be accurate for rocks of
unknown age?
Regarding the Earth,
geology, fossils, and such, I highly recommend Dr. Walter Brown's Web site www.creationscience.com, which presents his book, "In the Beginning…." You can read the entire book online.
I have several Videos and
PowerPoint presentations regarding much of this information on my own Web site,
https://www.smgolden.com/videos and regarding humans,
https://www.smgolden.com/where-are-all-the-people.php These, and more, are found
in the Creation section under the “Videos” menu.
I also have some documents
under the Theology menu that relate to making sense of it all: "Red Sea
Crossing", "Science is a Game", and "Searching for
Moses".
There are other articles
you might find interesting and useful as well.
I hope this gives you a
starting point in your search for truth.
May God direct your path.
(Proverbs 3:5-6)
[1] The Ultimate Proof of Creation by Dr. Jason Lisle, “Ultimate Standard,” Master Books, Copyright © 2009, First Printing May 2009, pp.142-145, https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Ultimate+Proof+of+Creation&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AUltimate+Proof+of+Creation
[2] Ken Ham