Scripture says:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Rom 1:20).
Physics reveals the universe was created with such precision that the slightest change in any one of its fundamental properties would preclude our existence. God could, of course, have created the universe without leaving any evidence of intelligent design. Instead, He placed evidence where you could find it, so that you might hear His call.
The Holy Spirit begins by calling your soul; you may choose to ignore the phone and let it ring. But until He senses a response in your heart He will go no further. If you eventually answer the call, He will try to awaken you to the idea that there is something wrong with your soul. As weeks and months go by while you ponder this thought, He is gradually drawing you closer to Himself. Then comes the hard part! You must confess your own sin nature and sinful behavior. You must confess that your heart, intellect and will are corrupt beyond measure. Only by acknowledging the poverty of your own soul can you enter the kingdom of God; those who are baptized with the Holy Spirit have a sense of absolute unworthiness. You must be convicted of your own sin nature and behavior. Without conviction, it is not possible to have true remorse in your heart. Without remorse, it is not possible to repent. Without repentance, there is no faith; belief must be preceded by repentance and followed by obedience to qualify as faith. Without belief morphing into faith, obedience cannot flourish. Conviction of sin is an unpleasant experience, particularly when you realize that, although God will forgive your sin, the consequences stand!
He hopes that, someday, the words from your lips might be:
You asked me how I gave my heart to Christ,
I do not know;
There came a yearning for Him in my soul,
So long ago;
I found earth’s flowers would fade and die,
I wept for something to satisfy;
And then, and then, somehow I seemed to dare,
To lift my broken heart in prayer;
I do not know, I can’t say how,
I only know my Savior now.
All this is religious blabber and Christian claptrap to most real scientists of the past 300 years. The task of creation in the cosmos is relegated, by real science, to an immanent impersonal force relentlessly driving change -- the life force of Jedi Yoda. While Christians assign broad attributes to God such as being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth, real science assigns only being and power; it includes only those things that can be observed, measured and mathematically quantified by man.
David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher recommended that library shelves be purged of any book dealing with religion or any other subject that cannot be reduced to empirical facts. C. S. Lewis warned that the rise of scientific naturalism would lead to the abolition of man, for it denies the reality of those things central to our humanity: our sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God. Daniel Dennett, for example, has argued that traditional moral and religious beliefs are dissolved away by the universal acid of Darwinism. If human beings have evolved by material, purposeless causes, then there is no basis for believing in a God who loves or who is holy. (Colson and Pearcey, p 419-422)
But wait, isn’t this scientific naturalism incoherent and self-contradictory? Aren’t scientists exempting themselves from the very framework they prescribe for everyone else? All humans are reduced to mechanisms operating by natural causes except the scientists themselves. To carry out their experiments, they must assume that they alone are capable of transcending the network of material causes to engage in rational thought and free deliberation. Only the scientists can formulate theories and recognize objective truth. They themselves must form the single glaring exception to their own theory. From another perspective, the naturalist assumes everything that exists can be explained in terms of natural forces. But that assumption itself cannot be the result of natural forces or it would not qualify as a genuine truth claim. If an idea is simply the product of particles bumping around in our brains, then it is neither true nor false; it is merely a natural phenomenon. For scientific naturalism to work, scientists must elevate themselves above the human rabble and become, at least, demigods themselves.
But remember the words of Oswald Chambers:
“The disposition of sin is not immorality and wrong-doing, but the disposition of self-realization – I am my own god. This disposition may work out in decorous morality or in indecorous immorality, but it has one basis, my claim to my right to myself.” (Chambers, October 5th)
