7.
You think acceptance of evolution is the same as religious faith.
Another
one that you may have heard from our friend, Banana Ray. In his film
“EvG” (which is subtitled, “Shaking the Foundations of Faith”),
he underscores this supposed parallel by asking his victims — oh, I
mean, “interview subjects” — ridiculous questions like “Are
you a strong
believer
in evolution?” and “When did you first start believing in
evolution?” His point, as he goes on to explain, is that anyone who
accepts the truth of evolution based on the testimony of expert
scientists is relying on “blind faith” in the same way atheists
accuse religious people of doing.
There's
a little confusion about the difference between belief and faith.
Generally, people attach a religious connotation to the word faith
but I don't agree that's entirely appropriate. Let me give you an
analogy. In English, we have the words belief and believe.
One is a noun and one is a verb but we understand that they
basically carry the same root meaning. Are you with me so far? OK.
Now, in the New Testament, the Greek words faith and believe
are basically the same too!
The
noun, pistis
(πίστις,
Strong's
word 4102),
is generally translated as “faith” rather than “belief.” Its
cognate verb, pisteuo
(πιστεύω, Strong's
word 4100),
is generally translated as “believe” rather than “have faith.”
So, as we read the Bible, believing
and having
faith
is a distinction without a difference. Do
we believe in God? Do we believe Jesus is the Christ? Do we believe
the things in the Bible? If so, then we have faith.
The
most famous chapter on faith in the Bible is probably Hebrews 11.
Hebrews 11:7 says, “By
faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with
fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house.”
In other words, Noah believed God about something
that had not happened. He built the Ark and was saved as a result.
He was literally saved by his faith!
Christians
believe pretty much for the same reasons anyone believes anything –
they are convinced that what they believe is true. I believe Jesus
lived, died, and rose again. I believe when I repented and accepted
Him as my Lord, that He forgave my sins. I believe that He is seated
on the right hand of the Father, even now, making intercession for
me. This isn't wishful thinking. This isn't something that I hope
is true without having any good reason to believe that it is.
Romans 1:19-20 says, “[T]hat
which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it
unto them. For
the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:”
Everything I can see in the creation and everything that I've ever
learned about history convinces me that what I believe is true!
Though
Francke says that “blind faith” is frowned upon from a secular
perspective, he seems to endorse blind faith when it comes to
believing the Bible. Francke said, “'Blind
faith' does indeed have pejorative connotations in secular usage, but
RayCo lends credence to these undertones in a way that no True
Christian™ should.
That’s because the Bible talks about “blind” religious
faith,
and its description is anything but negative. In John 20:29, Jesus
declares that those who “believe without
seeing”
are
“blessed” (contrasting them with “doubting”
Thomas,
who asked for proof).”
Francke
is misrepresenting the Bible. What Francke doesn't seem to get is
that Thomas was refusing to believe the
testimony of the apostles! They had seen the
Savior alive but Thomas refused to believe until he saw Jesus for
himself. This is the same attitude many skeptics express today.
Jesus's ministry on earth only lasted a short time. The vast
majority of people in history were not alive during the few, short
years of His Incarnation. If the standard for believing in Christ is
that we see Him with our own eyes, then most of humanity is doomed.
However, that's not the standard. We have the written accounts of
His resurrection and we can believe the things written in the gospels
and be saved.
John
19:33-35 says, “But
when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake
not his legs: But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side,
and forthwith came there out blood and water. And he that saw it bare
record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true,
that ye might believe.”
John
is giving details about the death of Jesus. He is establishing his
credibility as an eyewitness to the event. Later, John saw Jesus
alive again. I don't believe in the Resurrection because some
wild-eyed preacher told me about a man I'd never heard of, who rose
from the dead 2,000 years ago. I believe because I have the
un-impeached testimony of someone who was there.
In
John 17:18-20, Jesus prayed, “As
thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into
the world. And
for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified
through the truth.
Neither
pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me
through their word;”
Jesus prayed specifically for the sake of the millions through
history who believed in Him because of testimonies of the apostles.
We should do what Jesus said and believe in Him because of what has
been handed down to us by those who knew Him!
The
irony is that, while Francke claims blind faith is necessary to
believe the Bible, he himself seems to only believe those parts of
the Bible which he feels has the doubting Thomas kind of proof. He doesn't believe in creation
on "blind faith," for example. Instead, he has adopted the secular
theories of proud atheists and has twisted the Scriptures to
accommodate their godless theories. How sad.
Next,
Francke said, Don’t
misunderstand me. I’m a big supporter of critical thought — and
of an engaged populace that rationally considers the information it
receives before accepting it.
In
his video, Evolution Vs God,
Ray Comfort isn't necessarily trying to convince these people that
their faith is just like Christian faith. He's trying to get these
young people, mostly college students, to see that they claim to
believe something and can't even cite a good reason why. Theirs is
truly a blind faith. Obviously, the
students in the video didn't rationally consider evolution. When
Comfort pressed them about their belief in evolution, they couldn't
name a single reason why they believed it.
Francke
continued, But
there are far worse people one could open one’s mind to than those
who are sharing their expertise within the fields they have risen to
the top of — especially when their conclusions are based on
mountains of hard evidence
that
are available to anyone who doesn’t willfully choose to ignore it.
Do I need
to remind Francke that the students in the video all claimed to be
atheists?! The people to whom they've opened their minds are people
like P.Z. Myers (also shown in the video). Myers, of course,
zealously preaches atheism and attacks Christianity – young earth
creationists in particular. You see, these young people have been
sold a bill of goods. They have been taught that atheism is the
default position of intellectual. The students in the video were
quick to admit their atheism. Some seemed very smug, even proud of
it. So I'm going to have to disagree and say, no, there is nothing
worse than rejecting the truth of Jesus. Romans 1 talks about people
who reject the truth of God and willingly believe a lie. Romans 1:22
says, “Professing themselves to be wise,
they became fools.”
I remember
myself at their age. I thought I knew everything. These students
were so smug and boldly touted their atheism as though they were
enlightened. When challenged by Ray Comfort on what they believed,
they began to soften their position and rethink what they had been
taught. If any of them came to Christ as a result, Francke should be
glad! Instead, he ridicules Comfort and defends rabid theophobes
like P.Z. Myers. This is why I cannot tolerate the false gospel of
theistic evolution. I see far too many evolutionists who claim to be
Christians, condemning brothers in Christ while praising unbelievers
like Myers. Incredible!
Matthew
7:15-16, “Beware
of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but
inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Ye
shall know them by their fruits.”
Related
posts:
4 comments:
Ray Comfort has compared faith in Christ, or in the truth of biblical literalism, to, e.g. one's belief that one's car will start when one gets in it in the morning. But I don't think it's quite like that: "faith" (in the Christian sense -- not merely belief, but commitment to that belief) would be if the car didn't start, but you insisted that despite appearances, it was functioning properly and you were cruising down the road on your way to work. Ordinary beliefs are tentative and open to modification or refutation.
And this conflation of two different sorts of "belief" or "faith" is what Francke is complaining about. I concede that many, many people who accept common ancestry of humans and other species do so merely because people they trust tell them this. Indeed, it seems that many of the people Ray interviewed in Evolution vs. God (at least, the ones he didn't cut off after a few seconds) don't even seem to much understand the theory of evolution they accept, or know basic claims about, e.g. tetrapod evolution. When you get right down to it, isn't that our basis for supposing, e.g. that the Wars of the Roses occurred in England (were you there?), that zebras live wild in Africa, or that the USA once had a President named "Millard Fillmore?"
But the further implication is that evolution is accepted "on faith" or on the basis of ancient anonymous testimony by actual scientists. Evolution makes testable claims. When the tests come back with results contrary to explanation, the theory is modified. What would you yourself think of a Christian who said that he would revise his belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ if contrary evidence turned up, or if he declared that his acceptance of the Last Judgment was merely provisional and subject to revision if new facts warranted it? Evolution does not merely seem, in some unspecified way, "true" to evolutionists; it predicts and is supported by evidence ranging from identically-disabled shared pseudogenes in humans and other old world anthropoids to fossil skulls that squat atop any dividing line you might wish to draw between "fully-formed humans" and "fully-formed apes."
A few side notes:
Ray Comfort, in Evolution vs. God, shows, e.g. P.Z. Myers unable to cite evidence for large-scale evolution. Given that Myers, on his blog, has many times cited facts that he considers to be such evidence, this must be the results of deceptive editing; he obviously could come up with some answer, whether or not Comfort accepted it. Comfort does this with all actual experts he shows in the film, while concentrating on, I suppose, English majors for longer interviews. His dishonesty (or, if one were generous, appalling incompetence) is a reason theistic evolutionists do not think well of him.
None of the gospels claims to be written by an eyewitness. John clearly distinguishes between "the disciple whom Jesus loved" whose testimony is the basis of the gospel, and the "I" who actually wrote it, and Luke claims to have interviewed eyewitnesses but not to be one. As Ray Comfort shows, even eyewitnesses can get it badly wrong, and second-hand testimony can add further confusions.
David Hume would approve of Thomas not simply accepting the testimony of his fellow apostles. Thomas presumably had much experience both of dead people staying dead, and of people going insane or lying, and very little of people actually rising from the grave after three days. He's simply weighing alternative explanations for the testimony he's received -- and the gospel account says that this is not so good as blindly accepting one particular explanation regardless of how unlikely it seems.
Steven J,
I admit that when people talk about religious faith, there is often this subtle undertone that we're talking about things we can't really know to be true. I'm not sure if Christians are the victims of a very successful smear campaign or if we've perpetuated this misunderstanding ourselves. I've included on my blog before this quote from Richard Dawkins: “Faith is belief without and against evidence and reason; coincidentally, that's also the definition of delusion.” That certainly isn't the definition of faith found in most dictionaries. This haggling over the meaning of the word faith is a straw man skeptics use to ridicule believers.
Belief implies a certain amount of commitment. Suppose I built a rocket and asked you to fly in it. If you believed it was safe, maybe you'd fly in it. If you weren't sure it's safe, maybe you wouldn't. That's how belief always works. We act on what we believe is true and move cautiously on things we're unsure of.
Beliefs have consequences. We use what we already believe to be true to make sense of things we donb't understand. Richard Dawkins once said that evolution made it possible for him to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. It seems he had already made up his mind to reject God but was still nagged with lingering doubt because he lacked a satisfactory explanation of our origins. Perhaps this led him to accept evolution too quickly. Perhaps the same thing is true of the young people in the video. Regardless, a belief in secular origins is akin to a belief in creation. We hold one or the other to be true and live our lives accordingly.
God bless!!
RKBentley
Yes, evolution must be accepted by faith, and I think Steven J demonstrates this when he says that evolution makes testable claims, but then inadvertently admits that it can't be falsified. Instead of evolution being falsified when the testable claims are returned with contrary results, the theory is "modified". Yet evolutionists like to say that if a theory can't be falsified, then it's not science (which is one of their arguments against Biblical creation).
On the one hand, falsification is not as simple a matter as rudimentary explanations make it appear. The Quine-Duhem thesis points out that it is impossible to test one hypothesis in isolation; you always test multiple hypotheses at once (from "this test tube contains the reagent I think it does" to "there are no important factors at work in this process beyond the ones I've identified so far"). You can always save a hypothesis from falsification by discarding one of these auxiliary hypotheses instead.
On the other hand, evolutionary theory is actually a whole set of theories on different aspects of biology. Showing that one idea about how evolution occurs is false does not show that other ideas are false, or, especially, that the offensive ideas, that the Earth is billions of years old and that some of your ancestors were monkeys, are false.
This is a general feature of all science. Democritus and John Dalton -- or even the authors of my father's high school physics textbook (which mentioned protons and electrons, but said nothing of neutrons) -- would be surprised at modern ideas about subatomic particles, or that even protons and neutrons are made up of even more basic particles. Yet the basic idea of "atoms" remains unfalsified (and no, the Bible says nothing about atoms -- at least, that was the opinion of early Christians who rejected atomism as part of a package deal with rejecting Epicureanism).
The basic ideas of evolution have been abundantly confirmed, as noted above, from fossils of Anchiornis and Homo naledi, to the discovery of identically-disabled GULO pseudogenes in humans and other old-world simiiforme primates, etc. Meanwhile, the basic ideas of young-earth creationism look as though they ought to be falsifiable: radiometric dating ought to show nothing on Earth older than ca. ten thousand years and we really wouldn't expect to find, e.g. shared endogenous retroviruses in humans and monkeys. But in point of fact YECs just come up with novel reasons why, e.g. God couldn't make radiometric dating support a literal reading of Genesis.
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