Month: December 2014

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

One of the arguments used to attempt to discredit biblical Christianity by its increasingly strident secular critics in the West today revolves around the idea that the Bible is inaccurate in its description of the world and its origins. The “New Atheists” of the 21st century are aggressive in their assertions that Scripture is not compatible with the scientific discoveries of the modern age.

Much has been written about this controversy on the Christian side, many by believers far more scientifically literate than I, and this piece will not primarily be an attempt to harmonize biblical accounts of nature and its beginnings with contemporary scientific theory. The bigger question for me is how we have come to a point in human history in which science, with its intrinsically changeable understanding of reality, has come to trump religious understanding of our existence in the popular mind. Today a majority of people in the “First World” seem to have accepted, almost unconsciously, the idea of looking primarily to science as the arbiter of ultimate truth. It strikes me as ironic that this continues to be the “default position” of the average non-religious or nominally religious person when we consider how many questions once considered permanently settled by science have turned out to be anything but.

Any scientist, at least any without a Secularist axe to grind, will admit that there have been necessary changes in thinking in various scientific disciplines ranging from Cosmology to Physics in recent decades, in some cases seismic changes. This is the inevitable result of new discoveries that have sometimes unexpectedly created questions about accepted thinking. Even something as revered as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has not gone unchallenged by a new generation of Physicists. In fact in some scientific circles debate has become more than a little heated in recent years (including the area of Evolutionary Biology where assumptions accepted as “gospel” not long ago are increasingly under attack by contrarian Biologists who are anything but Intelligent Design advocates.) Yet, despite the discomforting fact that things thought settled in the canons of science can no longer be considered settled, scientific laypersons in the wider culture continue to rely on science as the only reliable arbiter of reality.

This begs the question of why at least those who do not have an agenda to reject religion wholesale aren’t re-evaluating their unthinking acceptance of the shakier dogmas of science. The answer, I think, can be found in the power that Secularists now wield in two places, academia and the media.

Educational indoctrination into the Naturalist worldview now begins in the earliest years of public education in the Western world and continues unabated through the college and post-graduate period in secular universities. The promotion of this worldview, most obviously seen in the canonization of Darwinian thought in the Biological Sciences, is now so ingrained as to be accepted almost without question by the vast majority of educated people. Meanwhile mass media continues to be suffused with messages that take the absolute reliability of “scientific laws” as a matter of course. This is particularly true in broadcast and print media which are more monolithically controlled, as far as content, than that which comes to us through the internet.

Many of us spend at least 12 years in school. Most of us spend our entire lives watching countless hours of television. It then becomes apparent why the prevailing Secularism, with its attendant near-worship of science, has control of the popular mind. Through academia and the media we are simply steeped in a pro-science, and often anti-biblical, way of thinking. The human mind is like a sponge, so why would this state of affairs come as any surprise?

When we add to this the tendency of a self-centered race to avoid the possibility that it is morally responsible to a higher power; it becomes all too clear why human beings have a vested interest in trusting in science over theology. Science generally does not call us to account for our individual moral lapses; both the Bible, and the God who inspired it, does. Science is, of course, not evil in and of itself nor is it usually inaccurate. It has much to tell us about the natural world that is useful, particularly when we apply that knowledge in useful forms of technology, but because of its malleable nature it is not a reliable guide for our existence. The fact that it continues to be used as such a guide in the modern world says less about science than it does about the wishful thinking of the fallen human heart.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Even during this yuletide season I’m not sure that we who call ourselves followers of Christ often give much thought to the supreme miracle that we are about to celebrate, the miracle that exists at the very center of our faith. The advent on earth of the universal God in human form is a mystery both unfathomable and blessed. We are all far the less if we do not take time at this season, or at any time of the year for that matter, to ponder the sublime reality of God becoming a man.

No other religion in the world puts forth the idea of a Supreme Being so willing to identify with His deeply fallen human creation as to literally become one of them. That He would do so out of love, because only such an “incarnation” would make possible our rescue from spiritual death, can become for us an incredibly sweet and compelling truth if we but ponder it for a while. It is mind-boggling, yes, but even though we cannot completely comprehend the full glory of our Lord becoming incarnate we can apprehend it in such a way as to open a door to one of the greatest and most transcendent blessings that we can know in our Christian walk.

Just think about it. We belong to a God who so loved us as to become one of us to make that “belonging” possible. What indescribable condescension must that have entailed for One who is infinite, eternal and uncaused Being? I once wrote that it is somewhat akin to a man becoming a flea to save a world of fleas, but that barely begins to cover the magnitude of the descent we now consider. It is truly the miracle of all ages.

But do not just use your intellect in your endeavor to experience the truth of the earthly advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, use your heart as well for this is also nothing if not an affair of the heart. How can our hearts not love Immanuel, “God with us”? Christmas testifies to the beginning of a new and profound opportunity for human intimacy with God, an intimacy with God as man. How can we remain unmoved by a Holy God, One “Wholly Other” as one German theologian once described his innate separation from us, becoming us? The mere fact of the Son of God becoming also the Son of Man is enough, in my opinion, to make Christianity the most compelling belief system on the planet. No one has a God like ours, no one, and it is Jesus, the God-Man who makes this so.

Perhaps the only thing more compelling than the Advent itself is the reality that the God who arrived on earth as one fully human over two-thousand years ago then proceeded to go to the cross and defeat death for what were now His fellow human beings as well as His creation. Contemplate that. He made us but, because of Christmas, he also died for us, as one of us.

But then that is a story for another Holy Day, a few months from now.

Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved

There has probably never been a time or place in human history when and where it has been so easy to ignore questions of eternal existence as it is now in the West. Today we have so many temporal diversions offering every kind of false transcendence that literally millions have spent little or no time pondering the ramifications of what happens a moment after they die. We are diverted from such thoughts by the busyness of our Post-Modern lives, by obsessions with sex, money and power, by a mass-media that vies for our constant attention and by beguiling technology that eats up the leisure time we might otherwise spend on deep thought and meditation.

It was not always so.

For the majority of history most human beings knew lives that were tenuous at best and most often short by our standards. Mortality and want went hand in hand and death was not something easily pushed out of the mind by convenient distractions. It is really only during the past century that material and technological progress has created a so-called “First-World” in which so many live to an advanced age in comfort unknown to their ancestors. The very nature of life in past era’s put the stark fact of death before everyone’s eyes and people faced with death on a day to day basis have a much stronger tendency to wonder if their might be a better world coming or, for that matter, a worse one.

Of course religion had a far greater hold on people’s attention throughout those centuries, perhaps another result of their being more aware during those times of the temporary nature of life in this world. Beyond that the Judeo-Christian tradition dominant in the West taught that the God of the Universe had created humankind in His image and that part of that image included perpetual existence. This tradition also taught the concept that our actions and affiliations here on Earth during the time we were here would determine the kind of existence that would be.

Most theologically conservative Judeo-Christians, of course, still teach this concept today, but it seems that the popular mind isn’t too terribly interested in it. We are far too busy being entertained, pleasured and otherwise distracted and the idea that there might be a place called Heaven and a place called Hell, and that we might end up in one or the other forever, is just too much to think about.

(Of course we may not feel that way the day we get the bad report from the doctor or, worse, the moment the sudden fatal heart attack eliminates our ability to consider and perhaps change our final destiny.)

So no one likes to think about death and, today, fewer and fewer people in our part of the world consciously do. But now, as always, the wise still learn to number their limited days on this planet and they also do well in seeking the One who holds the potentially endless days beyond this life in the palm of His hands.