The Long War for Truth

“A CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW IN A SECULARIZED WORLD– Part 1”

I. A WORLDVIEW IS ONE’S COMPREHENSIVE UNDERSTANDING AND EXPLANATION OF THE WORLD IN WHICH HE LIVES
  It answers the biggest questions of his existence
   1. What is the authority for my life?
   2. Who am I?
   3. How did I (we) get here?
   4. Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life?
   5. What went wrong or why is there evil and suffering?
   6. How can this be changed?
   7. Where am I going? What is the end of it all?
   8. How should I live?

II. THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW VERSUS THE CURRENT WORLDVIEW
  A. The Christian worldview explains existence in terms of Creation,the Fall and Redemption
  B. The current worldview, scientific materialism, secular materialism or naturalism, denies the first two and therefore sees no need for the last one.
   1. No creation by a personal or impersonal God; just a cosmic, evolutionary “accident”; consequently no creator or judge to answer to; no absolute truth to block the way to do as one pleases. Life happens in a naturalistic and mechanistic way
   2. Since there is no creator or creation there can be no sin or fall. Man is a machine, a complexity of firing or misfiring neurons and his interaction with his environment. Such concepts as freedom, liberty, love, sin, self, consciousness, free will and redemption are “useful fictions” and do not exist factually. Man is neither good nor bad at heart since these terms are only “social constructs” to discriminate against others. There is no truth to be known, only the “truth” you are
currently experiencing.
   3. The arts and humanities suffer greatly under this system since they have no factual value. They are tools of the imagination of those who cannot handle the “truth” of factual materialism. The artists and the lover of the humanities will either make his system be that which is consistent with the machine or he will be out and on his own.
   4. Therefore, those who cannot accept this mechanistic system rebel against it with irrationality, mysticism and fantasy. Those holding another view than the naturalistic view are relegated to the realm of the superstitious and the useless.
   5. Those who have rebelled against the “machine” existence create another competing worldview with that of the Christian. This worldview is inconsistent, often irrational and is willful and quite often mean-spirited.
   6. Those in the realm of liberal theology go one of two ways: they surrender to the mechanistic worldview on the natural level and then jump to the irrational level to explain the rest of existence or they jump into postmodernism
or mysticism.

III. THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW DETAILED
  A. Explains existence in terms of Creation, Fall and Redemption
  B. Creation
   1. God created time, space and matter out of nothing (no preexisting
material - ex nihilo) and immediately (without assistance, without processes)
   2. God is personal, unseen spirit, pure, holy, love, omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent and immanent
   3. All things have their origin from Him
   4. Man is the final created thing in His creative work
   5. Man, male and female, is made in the image of God
   6. He is the Sustainer and Provider for all that is and all things depend upon Him for their lives
   7. In Him, all things live and move and have their being
   8. By extension, all things including man must answer to Him and give an account of themselves to Him
   9. God tasked man with the stewardship responsibility of the planet and all its living things - the common mandate
   10. God made all things to be fruitful and to therefore reproduce
   11. God created all things with the appearance of age or created them in their adult form without the required time for them to reach that maturity
   12. Work (labor) was to be a large part of man’s existence
   13. God created other spiritual beings besides man