Worldviews
Friday, November 12 2021
 Hello Sisters and Brothers,
Teach your children that behind all that we see and touch, is the personally intelligent universe of our God.
The primary axiom or postulate of the Christian Faith is that behind the all the physical and chemical mechanics of creation is a universe of intelligent persona. The opening verse of the Bible sets the stage for all else in our understanding of the setting we awaken to from birth through the rest of our lives.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and earth."
This belief that there is a spiritually intelligent personal world behind our sensible nonliving material world is opposed to the present materialist/secularist worldview that pervades our present era. It is the dogma that your children will be assailed with from their earliest day forward. The materialist view dogmatically asserts that there is nothing more fundamental to be found in our cosmos than the material world and claims to be "scientific" by excluding any "evidence" except that which can be measured in the court of our five senses. Yet, this view has not been the predominant one throughout 6000 years of recorded history and has only seen widespread acceptance in the last two hundred years. And it is not "scientific" to arrogantly ignore 6000 years of experience in mankind's history.
But like in math, the understanding that there is a Spiritual World behind the material world is like an axiom, a "a self - evident truth, one "to serve as a starting point for further reasoning", or postulate, taken to be true without needing proof" "as a basis for further reasoning". In mathematics, without these sorts of presuppositional "faith statements" in math and geometry there is no possible further reasoning. Yet, math and geometry work very well in our world. The limitations of our finite minds and our inability to gather all knowledge require a starting point based on faith in what we do know. And what we do know corresponds to reality and works in spite of all the other possible contrary scenarios, as if it was all made to work just that way. And this is true of the spiritual as well. Our a posteriori knowledge (our experience) leads us to an a priori (inner/innate) understanding in our hearts.
Or as George Washington once said,
"Religion is as necessary to reason as reason is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would lose his reason, in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature, had he not a Supreme Being to refer to; and well has it been said, that if there had been no God, mankind would have been obliged to imagine one."
Our experience leads to this conclusion.
King Solomon explained this,
"He (God) has set eternity into man's heart, yet so he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end" Eccl. 3:11.
We sense that there is an eternal spiritual realm, the entire worldwide history of mankind's religions and striving to reach the spiritual bear witness of this innate knowledge. Yet we cannot with our limited tools (five senses and reason) attain to it.
As David said in Psalm. 139,
"Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high; I cannot attain to it."
So, God must explain it to us. HE MUST COME TO US as we cannot go to Him. He must reveal to us what we are seeking to attain. And He reveals that behind the impersonal physical and chemical mechanics that He used to set the order of this universe in motion and that blocks our view of the spiritual, is the ultimate reality of a persona of intelligence. He and personally intelligent beings.
"Science" in the way it is being used and described is incapable of discovering this, it simply does not have the right tools. Like trying to describe color to someone blind from birth, it is simply not possible, we do not possess the faculties to apprehend it.
Because Jesus said it is only apprehended by Faith, that we must employ the lost sense, the faculty of Faith, we must trust in what we know in our hearts to be true. He said that like children who trust what their parents tell them, we also must trust Him when He tells us that it is real and reasonable. Faith in what He reveals to us from beyond our senses. The Personal loving Spirit, …God, is behind all the material things we see and He wants to take us into His Family as our Father. All we need do is trust Him.
"Now without faith it is impossible to please God, for the one who draws near to Him must believe that He exists and rewards those who seek Him." Heb.11:6
Teach this to your children. Because they too are "spiritual beings" made with/as eternal souls Gen.2:7. More on this in part 2 soon.
May God Bless,
Jonny
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