Month: April 2017

Infighting: Young vs Old Earth

Subject Article: Why I Reject A Young Earth View: A Biblical Defense of an Old Earth. 

One of my favorite apologists is Frank Turek. I have really grown to love and respect him, and his methods. He is intelligent, articulate, and charismatic, and it is clear he loves the Lord, and does so with great courage. Frank has written a couple books that I have read and enjoyed, and would highly recommend.

Stealing from God, and Not Enough Faith to be an Atheist.

They are both thought provoking and amazing, and the concepts are very helpful.

Frank also runs www.crossexamined.org, a terrific apologist site. It seems as though everyone involved with this ministry is quite brilliant, and quite talented, and it is with trepidation that I butt heads with them on any issue, simply because I am quite outmatched, both intellectually, and regarding resources.

That being said, I have watched Frank’s responses to the young earth creation theory  very closely during his question and answer sessions, and have just recently read  Jonathan McLatchie’s article again from 2011, Why I Reject A Young Earth View: A Biblical Defense of an Old Earth.  Based on these, I continue to find myself at odds with their conclusions. I do however agree that though this issue should continue to be examined and explored, it should not cause division among Christians. 

I say this humbly, and from experience, because due to my passion for the subject, I have certainly allowed what I believe is the truth of God’s word to cause rifts, heated debate, and even anger between me and other christians. The intentions of my interactions are always out of love, and out of a desire to illustrate the amazing truths we can find in the word, thereby teaching how trustworthy the word of God is. How we are completely justified in our faith as Christians. But of course, the very human, and very fleshy part of me will often surface, and cause me to have less grace than I should, usually to the detriment of the conversation, and I am afraid, also to the detriment of people’s general view of me as a person and a christian. This is something I continue to try and work on in my own life.

I also acknowledge McLatchie’s conclusion in the subject article that the bible does indeed allow for a more literal interpretation for the Genesis days, though he does go on to say it doesn’t demand it. I have addressed this issue several times and in several ways. For more of what I have written, please click here:

“Why do we care?”

“Satan’s Fall”

“Total Opposite”

I have heard Frank state in his answer sessions that he does not believe in macro-evolution, based on evidence, and has therefore stipulated in his answer sessions that man was created in his present form (barring micro-evolutionary changes, or natural selection over time). I agree.

Yet, in another answer session, he will go on to stipulate that he believes based on the laws of physics and the Big Bang’s apparent reality (I disagree, but again, am not a scientist), the universe is/could-be very old.

If we examine the article in question, McLatchie further complicates matters by stating the myth that it could have been a local flood in Noah’s day, which is not only refuted by a simple reading of the biblical text, but also a simple surveying of the millions of drown fossils buried all over the earth among other obvious geological evidences. Genesis 7 assures us “all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” Being fans of science, I would challenge any apologist

2016-6-18-bill-j
pic from answersingenesis.org

 to explain how water rose 15 feet above all the highest hills, and somehow remained “local”. 2 Peter 3:5-6 continues to support the global event; “But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.” We can see from the many examples of great sea fossils buried upon the dry land of every continent that this was so. Andrew Snelling has done great work examining this.images (1).jpg

In regards to the days of Genesis 1, these have been addressed by YEC time and time again. But I would at least quickly point out that the day itself is literally defined in the verse as “there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.” Since it is the first one, God goes ahead and describes it for us, a daylight portion and a nighttime portion seem to make up a day. Literally defined. I would also ask, how many “first days” are there?

We are (or should be) familiar with day-age and gap theory, but specifically the gap theory seems to be the one Frank refers to in his answers, though he does so quite tactfully (and I don’t want to presume to speak for him), as he mentions the space potentially between verse one and two of Genesis. For reference, Thomas Chalmers invented the Gap Theory in 1814, saying that great time could exist in the beginning verses. He was a Scottish minister, professor of theology, political economist, and a leader of the Church of Scotland and of the Free Church of Scotland. He has been called “Scotland’s greatest nineteenth-century churchman”. Unfortunately, he was also reacting to the pressure of man’s idea of uniformitarian theory, and the “great chain of being” theory, which are the precursors of evolutionary thinking.

McLatchie says in his  article, that “… as a scientist, the arguments for an ancient earth seem to be very compelling (needless to say, when it comes to Darwinian evolution, it is a very different story).” So it would appear that both he and Frank are convinced the earth is quite old, yet are also both convinced that Darwin’s theory of evolution is “on its heels right now,” as Mr. Turek had stated. This would mean, unless I am misunderstanding, that both of these  men believe that it is possible, if not probable, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that the earth is potentially 4 billion years old, and that mankind was created less than 100,000  years ago (Frank’s date) in his present form.

This would mean that man, whom God made in His image, to subdue the earth, and rule it, has lived here 0.00073% of the time the universe has existed, and during only .0022% of the earth’s history. This would also mean that Jesus lied when He said God made them male and female in the beginning, being off by 99.9988%. So for reasons unknown, time would have been invented unnecessarily, for no one, to run on for ages upon ages without anyone but God to observe it’s passing, which would beg the question, why invent it?

It would further require a theory, since Darwinian molecules-to-man is not stipulated by either apologist, about when the rest of the animals were created. If it was long before man to account for an ancient fossil record, then we are now moving away from a Gap Theory, and trying to mold it in to a day-age theory, where each day is theoretically millions or billions of years. This throws day six into great confusion.

Confusion also arises when  the article addresses the “planting of the garden” taking longer than a day. If someone stipulates that God created light, and stars, and the sun from nothing, and then tries to convince me that planting a garden would take this person great time, it doesn’t sit right with me logically. In fact, Frank himself states; “The greatest miracle in the Bible is recorded in the first verse: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. If that miracle is true, then every miracle in the Bible is at least possible.” I would emphatically agree.

Another factor addressed by McLatchie is the death before sin problem. He states that the first few verses do not definitively say there was no death prior. However, our bible does say: “The wages of sin is death” – Rom 6:23

and

Rom 5: 12 ‘Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned…
14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses…
17 For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one…”

If one were to make the case that animals can’t sin, and therefore their deaths for millions of years are irrelevant, you still have to deal with the thorns, cancers, tumors, and various curse-caused issues of the fossil record, a written punishment of Genesis following the fall.

McLatchie tries to use some assumptions about carnivores causing animal deaths here, and goes so far as to mention the lion’s obvious “violence” – the very animal the bible uses to prove that when the curse is lifted, shall be so gentle, a child can lead them:

Isaiah 11:6 – “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

Since undoing the curse that took place is the theme and scope of the bible entire -Revelations 22:3, And there shall be no more curse –  I feel it is safe to assume the lion could easily be imagined as non-violent in the garden of Eden, since we have a promise it will be so again in the future.

So much internal evidence is thrown askew when the bible is forced to fit man’s theories (e.g. the theory of molecules to man evolution, or cosmic evolution). I would point out that in doing so, we are, like our christian brother Mr. Chalmers did, bending to the will of those who campaign furiously against God, and the redeeming power of Jesus Christ.

In the words of Luther, and despite my shortcomings, “I can do no other.” I will have to continue to support YEC, as I feel it is backed by scripture, and is quite readily corroborated by observable science. But I will also agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Turek that the Lord will not be caring about what we believe the age of the earth is when we arrive to meet him in heaven, but will instead be examining our hearts regarding Jesus instead. It is paramount. My fear though, is that with the bible’s foundation thrown into a confusing obscurity, will it damage the faith of others? I fear it already has.

All this aside, I agree with Mr. Frank Turek and his team of apologists on nearly everything else, and will continue to look to them as a wonderful resource for me, my family, and my church, and recommend them to anyone who finds this article. Since I am so small, and he is out there crushing it, it is unlikely that he or Mr. McLatchie will ever come across this small little blog page. But if that ever happens, I look forward to getting absolutely toasted by a scientist and a doctor. But in closing I will say that it is a blessing to have the education, and the printed bible in my language at all, that would even allow Mr. Turek and I to form opposite opinions on some theology points. There was a time when the word was kept from being studied by all but the clergy,  and someone like me would not have had the privilege to ever read it in my own language, much less the freedom to disagree with my superiors. For this I am grateful. As Tyndale said, “…if God spare my life, I will make a boy that driveth the plough know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” With that purpose having been achieved, we all now have the blessing of studying these mysteries for ourselves, and determining our own salvation… as well we should… with fear and trembling.

 

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Don’t need God, Just Add Time…

One of the arguments apologists make is called the teleological argument, or simply stated, the argument from design. The old adage goes, if I were to come upon a pocket watch laying on a  beach,  I would quickly observe the dials, the polished metal, the small bits of assembly required to make it run. It would be clear to me that it had a designer. In much the same way, we can observe the infinitely more complex information, and organization of nature and confidently say it has a designer as well. DNA language, irreducible complexity, biodiversity. These are things we instinctively realize are not accidental, though some may hope them to be. As Romans 1:20 says,

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.

rustic_wood_look_planks_large_clock-r7e0ef10db0d34208b51758b252490b09_fup13_8byvr_324But since Sir Charles Lyell’s book, the Principles of Geology, where he imagined the geologic column, and perpetuated the idea that the world was much older than the bible chronology reported, we have been adding great amounts of time to the theory of molecules-to-man evolution. Sir Charles Lyell who wished to “save the sciences from Moses”, and was a contemporary and major influence on Darwin,  proposed that the world was at least 35,000 years old after his trip to Niagara Falls in 1841.

The story goes that upon his visit, with the firm desire to “prove” the world was older than the bible said, he visited the falls to test the erosion rate. Rather than wait and measure, he asked the locals their opinion on how quickly the falls eroded per year. A collection of reports from locals that had lived near the falls for years stated that the erosion rate was probably about 3 feet per year. Measuring back to Lake Ontario at this rate only gave him a date of around 12,000-15,000 years. Lyell, needing the dates to be much older, assumed this was an exaggeration, and when he ended up back in England to write down his “research”, he felt the more likely rate of erosion was 1 foot per year. The seven miles from its beginning therefore allowed him to assume it had taken the falls 35,000 years to reach its present position.

As it turns out, the actual median erosion rate of the falls is 5 feet per year, which by that measure would have brought the date to only about 9000 years old, or even younger when you figure the beginnings of that erosion were caused by the fast moving drainage of Noah’s flood. But Lyell had a uniformitarian view to prop up, and it was his hatred of the bible that motivated it. Incidentally, by the end of his career, Lyell presumed the beginning of life was 200 million years.

This idea of long time didn’t start with Lyell, though he was the one that popularized it. James Hutton, who was died the year Lyell was born, suggested a long time frame and wrote that the present was the key to the past, which of course led to uniformitarian viewpoints. Before him was Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788, who first proposed broad scale mutability of species. In Epoques de la Nature, he suggested the Earth was torn from the sun 75,000 years ago.

As we know now, the assumed time for the age of the earth is around 4.5 billion years. The more fossils that were found, and the slower it seemed evolution took place, so slow in fact that evidence for it was non-existent, the dates of life’s beginning moved from Lyell’s 35,000 years to 2.1 billion years. This is the time frame that evolutionists believe is necessary to evolve humans from a one celled organism. So slow in fact, that evidence for it is completely un-observable. Sounds a lot like faith, doesn’t it?

Dr. George Wald, a Professor of Biology at Harvard University, and Nobel Laureate wrote “The origin of life”, and article in Scientific American, August 1954. In it he states, “However improbable we regard this event [origin of life], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.” He goes on to say, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”

Sound like faith?

You see, time itself is the miracle worker in evolutionary theory, not God. Time can do the impossible. Time fixes all the issues, the lack of evidence, the problem of entropy. Time, with no purpose, intelligence, or reason, has somehow created all we see, and done so opposite of the laws we observe today. If you add enough of it, that shouldn’t matter, as long as we have replaced faith in God with faith in something else.

Why? I will let Dr. Richard Charles Lewontin, from Columbia University, an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, academic and social commentator answer that question:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Or perhaps Nagel, Thomas could give you extra insight as to why:

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.” – The Last Word, pp. 130–131, Oxford University Press, 1997. Dr Nagel (1937– ) is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.

So the premise maintained by the goo-to-you believers is that given enough time, disorder, without any intelligence guiding it, will become order, opposite the Laws of Thermodynamics, Motion, etc. The opposite of entropy.

To conclude, I will give you the example Dr. Ron Carlson gave during one of his lectures. He says, go up in a plane to 5000 ft above the Space Center Complex, take some neatly stacked index cards and toss them out. You must do this over and over until they land in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex parking lot so that they spell out “Welcome to the Kennedy Space Center”. (This simple phrase of only 30 letters should be easy, as compared with the perfectly ordered 3 billion letters of our genetic code).

We observe at 5000 ft that these cards are not organizing, but instead ending up all over the place. So in order to produce more of a chance to organize in a way that makes sense, we will now follow the theory of evolution’s assertion and give these cards MORE TIME.

We will now take the plane up to 25,000 ft, so they have more time to fall, take our neatly stacked cards, and toss them out.  With all this extra time to fall, we must conclude that eventually they will organize into a proper sentence, or word, or even one letter. We have added the magic of time like evolutionists!

But wait –  the cards are now spreading out in an even more disorganized radius of chaos, some landing even 10’s of miles from where the plane dropped them!

How then, my friends, do we explain the beauty and exactitude of nature with this process? The answer is, we cannot. It is impossible.

I submit to you that this scientific experiment will provide us with more truth about our reality than any of the postulating, question-begging, circular reasoning, and assumption of our evolutionist friends, who like Dr. Nagel, hopes there is no God.

 

 

 

Why do we care: Young Earth vs Old Earth inconsistencies (abstract)

We have explored the fact that Jesus Christ believed mankind was created at the beginning of time. We have discussed the references from Paul, John, David, Peter, indicating that they firmly supported the testimony of early patriarchs, and the Genesis account, specifically the actuality of a global deluge. For example:

2 Peter 2:5:

“if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly”

Matthew 24:37–39

“For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

Hebrews 11:7

“By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.”

2 Peter 3:5–6

“For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.”

I was teaching the other day at church, and someone asked (believers in molecules-to-man evolution have asked several times as well) why does it matter how old the Earth is? In other words, why must this be a node that our faith hinges on? Or maybe more to the point, why am I so passionate about exploring it?

I will repeat this point to start, that being saved by the propitiation of Christ does NOT hinge upon origin beliefs. You can absolutely be saved by faith in Christ and still believe the Big Bang theory created everything from nothing, and that spontaneous matter flew through the empty vacuum of space evolving into massive stars, which then exploded into more stars creating heavier elements, which eventually coalesced into orderly solar systems upon which billions of years affected its habitability so that abiogenesis could take place, which led to the slow development of continually more complex organisms despite observable entropy, until eventually man sprouted from the animal kingdom evolved enough to begin understanding a God that set it all in motion. Yes, you can believe this (despite the lack of evidence, and the fact that it was invented to escape the reality of God 200 years ago), and be saved. But at what point will a logical student, who is learning this as a world view in college, start to realize that if this is true, then the bible must not be?

What do I mean? Consider the amount of death that took place in order to bring about mankind within the evolutionary model. Billions of dead animals, and man-like creatures eventually rising to an evolved enough state to proclaim that there is a God. Not only death, but  thorns, cancer, disease, arthritis, abscesses, tumors, rickets, syphilis, all before man and the fall in fossil record.
Then we read,

“Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:

“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.””

And later, a messiah who shall lift this curse:

Colossians 1:20  – and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross
Revelations 21:4  – And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away
Revelations 22:3 – And there shall be no more curse.

At what point will the student realize school is teaching him or her that

a) this was all by accident instead

b) death is not the unnatural enemy and curse of mankind, but a means of creation via mutation

c) if it took millions of years of evolution, at what point did God impart souls to people? or are there no souls in reality?

d) if what we see in geology is not the result of an obvious flood, but instead of millions of years of erosion, then Christ, Moses, David, Peter, Paul, John and others were all lying or just story telling (Nearly every book in the bible refers to Genesis (over 200 times in NT alone))

e) if my parents asked me to believe all this in Genesis, and it isn’t true, and they also asked me to believe in a virgin birth, miracles, the death and resurrection of Christ, them why should I believe it?

f) religion must be man made…

This is perhaps the reason that 75% of church going students who go off to college drop away from the church, and from their faith in the Good News of Christ. As with the parable of Christ, the world is not fertile ground, but is instead hard ground and thorns which will not allow faith to grow.

But, when Paul relays the gospel to us, what phrase is repeated in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-4:

“that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures”

According to the scriptures! This means we should expect them to be accurate! If we consider the scriptures, the hundreds of fulfilled prophecies (uncanny proof of their veracity), if we consider the geography presented – even skeptic archaeologists use the exactitude of the bible to uncover ancient discoveries in the Middle East, places like Ur and Nineveh, which date back to before Abraham – if we consider the eye-witness testimony, we should very easily be able to apply it to our world view with no problem. And we can!  Abraham is in Genesis, and from Abraham on, we have abundant evidence that things happened just as was stated by eye-witnesses, and recorded by Moses. It was then verified by prophets and historians for centuries, and backed with prophecy, and miracles, not the least of which involves an empty tomb, also verified by history.

This is played out similarly in the word, when it says in 1 Corinthians 1:23:

“but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles”

Why foolishness to the Gentiles? Because they have no frame of reference with which to believe such a story. They do not accept the concept of sin, or God, of God’s law, or the fall of man, and therefore do not even acknowledge their need for salvation. This was addressed also in Acts by Paul, who had to explain who God was when he preached to non-Jews. He was not preaching to people who were waiting for a messiah. He was preaching to a people who had no idea they needed one!

This is the secular environment of the world today. Christianity seems like foolishness to the world, to America, to students on college campus. It doesn’t matter that the anti-god world view of those they look up to, learn from, and revere, has no evidence to support it. It is what they prefer, for in that world view, they need not ever humble themselves, and the world before them is a justified buffet of consequence-free pleasure, and power, for anyone strong enough to get it.

Often, an atheist will contemplate the meaning of life, as we all do, yet they do so with the naturalistic world view. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson stated, we are nothing but stardust.  Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said,  “I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe… I was just thinking… that here we are, all of us, eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence and there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.” If we are truly an accident, a blip, then the cold truth is, life has no meaning. It is a fleeting thing, and we are as worthless as the ant, the leaf, and the rock. Your feelings are happenstance, and your moral compass is random programming.

It is with this understanding that I consider the bible, and must logically conclude it must either teach truth, or all be a deranged hoax. This is a serious consideration, and if it is true, which I think it clearly is, then how could I not be passionate about the hope we have in Jesus Christ! How could I not also push for others to understand  that when the bible is taken as truth, the world very much makes sense within its framework. As well it should, for God created it! In it we have answers from archaeology, genetics, paleontology, geology, biology, and cosmology, just to name a few.

At what point could someone see all this, believe all this, verify all this, a God who wrote you a love letter, and a history of the world, over a 1400 year period, which has withheld critics for centuries and stood strong under the most extreme scrutiny, and then choose to believe all but the beginning, the very reason a messiah is needed, and the very reason that screams to us all how special a creation we are, thereby causing everyone in the rest of the book to be lying, or foolish. Not only that, but would instead chose to believe a team of men who set out specifically to concoct a theory that would disparage God’s word (and succeeded), the consequences of which cost 100’s of millions of lives.

And all this damage, this godless, twisted result, all of it so that a person can impose their will for a time before a meaningless death consumes them. Whether the life of an atheist is perceived as good or bad, it could not matter one iota, as the end must be the hopelessness of nothing, tantamount to never having been at all.

 

Law of Non-Contradiction

The law of non-contradiction states that contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time, e.g. the two propositions “A is B” and “A is not B” are mutually exclusive. The principle was stated as a theorem of propositional logic by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. This is an important part of apologetics, as many people will state, “that is true for you, but not true for me”.
If there is an absolute truth, it behooves us to seek it, and to know it. As an example, in Christianity, we state that Christ died according to the scriptures, and was raised from the dead on the third day according to the scriptures. In Islam, they state that Christ never died on the cross.
(Similarly we have a huge contradiction regarding the deity of Christ (God vs god)).
One can plainly see that these two statements cannot both be true simultaneously. Yet, from a great many who are offended by the gospel message, in a New Age world of anything goes, they will state that Islam is true for them, Buddhism is true for them, and Christianity is true for you, and who are you to say otherwise? But in this case, it is impossible for truth to be relative. Either one is true or the other is. Ignoring that will not make it go away.
In a similar instance a couple years ago, Oprah indicated that there are many names that one might give to that which she calls “God”, including “energy,” “consciousness” and “life”; at the same time she famously stated that Jesus Christ was merely a symbol, and that clinging to the “Old Rugged Cross” was a “mistake”. These beliefs  are in stark contrast to the statements of God’s word,  and have very different consequences than those referred to in scripture, if one applies them to a world view. Therefore the two worldviews are incompatible. Either the bible is lying to you, or Oprah is wrong. There is no logical third option.
In this attempt to be accepting to others, we deny that all these ideas have very contrasting beliefs. One simply cannot believe that every viewpoint is possible and remain honest. But it can become much easier to base belief on feelings as opposed to truth, because of the consequence (social pressure, fear of losing friends). What we must ask is this: is it truly loving to not seek truth in order to protect feelings? If salvation is a reality, and there is one way to attain it, is it kind to not share it for fear of retribution?
C.S Lewis says, “…it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
He offers this advise:
“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I continue to work on discipling others and spreading the good news of Christ as best I can, and in love as I am able, but with full knowledge that a) I am utterly imperfect, and b) that God and His truth are utterly perfect. We should all be grateful the morality and truth of God’s word are not malleable. What a terrible thought! But the consequence of a perfect and immovable God is that He is inexorably a God of order, and reason, not a God of confusion, and His nature and the truth of His ways and plans are fixed, all above our wishes and ways.
Again, C.S. Lewis states: “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.”
The law of non-contradiction is an ugly truth to wrestle with. It shouldn’t be, as it is a plainly obvious law. I am all for debating which perceived truth is correct, and making a decision based the data at hand. But when someone emphatically states there are many truths, that all truth is subjective, and relative, what progress can be made? This is an emotional standing, upon which one feels that he or she is safe. Safe from offending friends, offending God, and incurring consequence. It is interesting to note that the most heated contestations with someone who thinks all world views are acceptable is when you assert that truth is not subjective, but absolute. “That is your truth, not my truth!” It is deemed an imposing of one’s will upon another, rather than a stating of natural, created order. We are at that point asking a person to accept a reality based on objective truth, and objective morality, contrary to what they wish to perceive. This can be a scary and emotional transition.
Boiled down, we are talking about introducing the reality of Law into the worldview of society. This is anathema to naturalism, atheism, and New Ageism. We know we are not saved by the law, but by grace. However, Romans 7:7 says, “What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.””
This is compounded by, James 2:10  “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”
This is the introduction of consequence to a worldview, which convicts the heart, and forces one to try and reject the reality of God, or instead to humble themselves before Him.
In relative truth’s simplest form of defeat –  saying truth is not absolute is itself an absolute statement. It is self-defeating.
In conclusion, based on the bible, Christians are admittedly narrow-minded in this truth – Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” –  John 14:6
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This is the case with Creation vs evolution debate as well, two contradictory world views which once logically considered, cannot be simultaneously believed (for more on that click here).
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