Patrick Reany
8 August 2023
Term for the day: Kirlian photography. According to Wikipedia,
Kirlian photography is a collection of photographic techniques usedThis short essay is a reply to AronRa's YouTube post called, "Believers
to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges.
AronRa's video message is over 17 minutes long, so I don't think I will
reply to all of it. But I do want to reply to the main charge he made against
Christians, which is that when he asked them to give a factual basis for
their belief in Jesus, he never got a cogent answer from them. I wonder
if this is also by implication supposed to include books and pamphlets and
videos made by Christians (particularly Christian apologists, of which I
am not one), or lectures he may have sat in on by them. So, by implication,
in all of that he has never once heard a believer give a rational reason to
believe in Jesus and the Gospel. Well, I aim here to give exactly that, and
much more for belief in Jesus.
The Bible declares, 'others save with fear' (Jude 1:23). It's a pretty
poor basis to believe on Jesus only on the facts of this world, or because
hearing of the coming Judgment has put fear in you. Being a Christian
is a fulltime occupation that demands a lot of study and contemplation
with your rational mind (thus, we are told to worship God with all our
minds). And one of the big problems with believing based only on the
'facts' is that God made the world of facts to be misleading to the
nonbelievers (and also to believers). God has never intended all the
'facts' of the Natural world to support His Gospel. This is by His design.
God could have made Adam on Creation Day One so that he could have
watched the entire Creation Week unfold, day by day, and thereby know
what the truth of its creation is. But God instead made Adam on Day Six,
thus forcing him to believe God on how old the earth was. But if Adam or
his descendants preferred to use their own natural wisdom and the 'facts'
of Nature, they will get it wrong. (After all, on the day Adam was made,
the Garden of Eden in which he lived was a fully functional eco-system
to support him, not a collection of slow-growing seedlings.) Thus, the
Garden of Eden on Day Six looked 'old'. This is just one of many examples
of God having set up delusion-traps for we humans who are stiff-necked
and rebellious to fall into.
To those apologists out there who claim that certain creationist models of
the universe cannot be true because God would not do anything that would
appear to contradict facts or the ordering of 'reasonable' cosmological
events, I say, beware. God made the universe primarily to give light on
the earth for measuring of time and for glorifying Himself. All other
considerations are secondary and mutable. If we believe that God
created the universe by His wisdom for His specific purposes, we don't
have to invent our own cosmological time tables to satisfy secular
models. If that starlight was not visible prior to the Flood, it must
have been after it for it to fulfill its purpose. And God would do anything
He deemed right and necessary to do to accomplish that purpose.
On the other hand, not all the facts are on the side of the atheist or the
secularist. Therefore, by God's careful doing, both the just and the unjust
must live their lives based on faith (at least partly). I'll explain all that.
But first the motivating basics for us all:
There are basically three kinds of people in the Western World:
1. Those that have heard the Gospel of Jesus and say, "Oh my. I am in trouble!
I better do something to appease this Holy God while I still have breath and
agency to do it!
2. There may be a God -- somewhere -- but He's probably a very tolerant dude,
and since I live a fairly OK life, I'll have no problem in the Judgment.
3. There can't be a God of the Bible, because if there is, I'm in a lot of trouble,
and since I don't want to change my ways (or my public image), I'll convince
myself that there is no god nor gods with whom I will be judged. Amen!
For over 45 years I've seen videos and read books by Christian apologists
who have specialized in creationism, Bible history, and Bible prophecy,
which are fact-based. Now, AronRa can ignore those facts or contest them,
or rather contest their implications, but the facts are just as much on the
side of the Young-Earth creationist as the Old-Universe atheist.
If AronRa can look at the horizontal layers (arranged vertically) throughout
the Grand Canyon, which are claimed to have been set down over multiple
hundreds of millions of years, and say to himself, "Well, it looks pretty consistent
with Uniformitarianism and Plate Tectonics to me," then that's on him. You
see, it's not just the facts that decide the issue, it's also how we choose to
interpret them. How they fit in with or disrupt our basic assumptions. It's a
fact, folks, that the Grand Canyon has had earthquakes even in historic times,
so why wouldn't it also have had hundreds of earthquakes throughout the very
long time of its supposed formation? The point being that strong earthquakes
can tilt the surface ground. I don't see evidence of that in the layers of the
Grand Canyon. Did I miss something?
Now, that may sound like a strange thing for a Christian to admit to, but that's
God's doing. God, throughout the Bible, has revealed to us the Truth of our
existence and the universe around us. If we choose to reject that revelation,
God has left a lot of factual 'evidence' in the natural realm to support that
rejection. God claimed that He would ultimately claim responsibilty for your
delusions. What I am saying is that God has left behind Him mental traps and
rabbit holes for those who turn their backs on Him. The solution is obvious:
Repent and turn to Jesus.
Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my
footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the
place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those
things have been, saith the Lord: but to this man will I look, even to him
that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. He that
killeth an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as if he cut
off a dog's neck; he that offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine's blood;
he that burneth incense, as if he blessed an idol. Yea, they have chosen
their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations. I also
will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because
when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear: but they
did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not.
-- Isaiah 66:1-4
6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time.
For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will
let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed,
whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy
with the brightness of his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working
of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness
of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of
the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them
strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: -- 2 Thessalonians 2:6-11
But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest anySo, on the one hand, God does not want to have His existence merely
of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. -- Hebrews 3:13
There are two profound fallacies that AronRa has made that can be summed
up in this dictum: The best beliefs for truly rational people are both founded
on the facts and must be decided on the facts only.
Oh really? Where does the role of personal preference fit in. What about
intuition? In the first place, facts are not infallible. Today's so-called
fact, may be tomorrows falsehood. In the second place, in practice, the
smartest people on earth by Western secular standards -- the theoretical
physicists -- are not capable of resolving important matters merely 'by
the facts'. In their group there are two strongly divergent factions on
the prominence of string theory. Those who are adamantly for it, cannot
prove it. Those who are adamantly against it, cannot disprove it. Then
why is it a controversy at all in the halls of science? Because people
decide their allegiances based on their hunches, their intuitions. Thus,
the allegiance to this theory on both sides is not founded merely on the
facts and rational thought.
Rational people do not live their live according to such a narrow basis for
belief. So I ask you, dear reader, to answer this question: As of this moment,
has the last novel musical tune already been created by mankind? If you say no,
you defy common sense. If you say yes, you have no facts to base it upon. People
daily rest a lot of their reasonable beliefs by intuition. I wish to make clear
that this question is designed to be answerable by everyone, not just by special
people with special knowledge. So, if God were to communicate to me by special
revelation that the last novel tune has (or has not) been invented by humans,
I would have a reasonable basis to believe it based on revelation (Of course,
I would have had to use this knowedge channel enough to know that it's
trustworthy.) That knowedge would be based on revealed truth, but it's still
not fact, for a fact is a supposed 'truth' vetted by standard secular means.
But there is a much more profound error that AronRa has made: He seems not
to have understood the four channels of worship and communication that
the true believer has to the Godhead, and Jesus named them:
And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, OThus, the four channels are: heart, mind, soul, strength. I won't repeat here
Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with
all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like,
namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other
commandment greater than these. -- Mark 12:29-31
Finally, I have some personal reasons to believe in Jesus: Jesus has healed my
body. He has delivered my soul from righteous punishment (that's called mercy).
He has provided me abundant physical gifts by coincidence that are too improbable
to be mere chance alone. And He has delivered me now these 15 years from a
life-long addiction to sex. Praise the Lord! These things are real to me and they
can be real to you. There is no 'hiddenness of God' to the true follower of Jesus.
If you refuse to find the meaning of every coincidence in your life, you will miss
those attempts that God has tried to get through to you with a manifestation of His
existence and mercy.
Jesus promised to manifest Himself to His true believers:
He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth
me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love
him, and will manifest myself to him. -- John 14:21
There is no absence of evidence of God in my life! All the historical and physical
evidence of God -- which is great -- is wasted on a person who is deadset on not
believing in God. It's almost as if those God skeptics and atheists who espouse
the 'hiddenenss of God' paradox are daring God to appear before them to resolve
the paradox and to make their journey into belief easy for them. Well, Jesus has
told us in the Gospels that God doesn't typically operate that way. God has given
mankind personal agency of choice. Use your mind and soul and heart to find God
in your life, and make that All-In choice for disciplehood in Jesus, while you still
have time to do so. It is the logical thing to do.