HOW DID YOU COME TO YOUR WORLDVIEW?

Our worldview informs our personal, social, and political lives. It helps us understand our purpose. Further, our worldview determines our ethics, our values, and our capacity for happiness. It helps us answer the big questions of life: How did I get here? How am I to live? Where do I find meaning in life? What is my ultimate destiny? It is more telling than any other aspect of our lives.

In forming our worldviews, Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. Armand Nicholi says, that we make one of two assumptions about life. The first is that we live in a godless universe; we are a product of nature that has evolved over time. This is a secular worldview that emphasizes scientific knowledge and its motto is “What do science and nature have to say?” The second assumption is that there is a supernatural intelligence who gives the universe order and life meaning. This is a spiritual worldview that is rooted in Biblical revelations. It places emphasis on spiritual truth and wisdom and its motto is: “What does God have to say about this?

It is reasonable to conclude that every person has an opinion on God and spiritual reality, even if it is a belief that He is non-existent. We all have a faith view of reality and it trickles down into our lives and influences the choices we make. One of the great flaws in our human character is we stubbornly hold on to our beliefs because they generally reflect how we want life to be rather than how life actually is.
For this reason, evidence does not seem to matter.

A great example of this is Dr. Francis Collins. He is most noted for having been chosen to chair the Human Genome Project, ENCODE where, in 2003, he led an international collaboration of two thousand scientists in sequencing the human genome. More recently, he was appointed by President Obama to be the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Clearly, he is a prominent scientist, but what is perhaps even more interesting is his spiritual journey.

He began this journey as an atheist. In his third year of medical school, while he was working in the hospital, he was attending a woman who had exhausted her options for treatment. She suffered from a heart condition and was going to die soon. Collins was moved by this kind and faithful woman. She had a
strong faith, and she shared it with him. She said, “You know, I’m ready to go. Don’t worry about me.”
And then she said, “Dr. Collins, you’ve been so kind to listen to me and care for me and listen to me share with you about my faith. Tell me about your faith. Tell me what you believe.”
Collins later wrote:
“Nobody had ever asked me that question before, not like that, not in such a simple, sincere way. I realized I didn’t know the answer. I felt uneasy. I could feel my face flushing. I wanted to get out of there. The ice was cracking under my feet. All of a sudden, by this simple question, everything was a muddle. Collin’s began to wonder if he was an atheist because he had chosen the position of reason or because it was the answer he wanted. Finally, it came to him: “As a scientist, I had always insisted on collecting rigorous data before drawing a conclusion. And yet, in matters of faith, I had never collected any data at all. I didn’t know what I had rejected. So, I decided that I should be a little better grounded in my atheism. I better find out what this is all about. So, I challenged a patient of mine who was a Methodist minister. And, after listening to my questions and realizing that I was not dealing with a very full deck of information, he suggested that I read the Gospel of John, which I did…I found the scripture to be interesting, puzzling, and not at all what I had thought faith was about… then I began to read C.S. Lewis and realized there was a great depth of thinking and reasoning that could be applied to the question
of God.” Lewis convinced him that reason and faith go hand in hand, though faith has the added component of revelation—the Bible. Collins had previously believed that Jesus and the stories of the
Bible were nothing more than mere myths. Again, as he studied the historical evidence, he was stunned at how well documented and how historically accurate the Bible is. He also saw a surprising fidelity of the transmission of the manuscripts that were passed down over the centuries. And, over time, Francis Collins,
based on the accumulation of the evidence that he observed, concluded that God exists, and that Jesus is the Son of God. He also concluded that most of the religious skeptics that he knew and that he meets today are just like he was. That is to say, they didn’t want to think about these things and never looked at any evidence, never drawing conclusions from the real evidence that was available. This is what Dr. Dallas Willard, former professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, believed was a major problem with individuals who considered themselves to be agnostic or atheist. Willard found that so many of the students and scholars he encountered on campus and in the world were guilty of what he called “irresponsible disbelief.” These bright men and women would often choose to disbelieve in something without any significant commitment to an investigation of that disbelief by way of sound reasoning and careful examination of the evidence.

Do you believe the Bible is inerrant? The revealed word of God. If you do then you need to reject evolution and its billions of years and hold to to the Biblical history and the worldwide flood of Noah’s day. It produced the billions of fossils and fossil fuels, oil and gas that evolutionists tell us took billions of years to form. The Bible tells us that to initiate the flood God broke the mantle of the earth “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.” The whole topography of the Earth was changed when God poured out His wrath upon the Earth the first time when He judged the wicked Nephilim (hybrid angel/humans) and mankind. The subsequent Ice Age was a single, rapid event triggered by post-Flood conditions. These included massive volcanic activity releasing aerosols that cooled the continents, combined with warm oceans from Flood-related heating, leading to heavy snowfall and glacier formation. The duration is typically estimated as several hundred years, with glaciers building up over the first few centuries and melting during the latter half as volcanic activity waned. This fits within the post-Flood timeline, allowing for human and animal dispersal (e.g., via land bridges from lower sea levels) before the rise of early civilizations like those in Mesopotamia around 4,000 years ago. The Tower of Babel event that formed the nations with new God given languages occurred just 200 to 300 years after the Flood and was the reason people dispersed across the world.

God has been active in His world with these dramatic events. The apostle Peter told us 2000 years ago that in the last days before Jesus returns that the world would reject God and His account of creation and Noah’s Flood as myths and suffer God’s judgement just as the ungodly did before the worldwide flood. The many fulfilled Biblical prophecies are proof God exists and His Word is truth.

Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” 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. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.2Peter 3: 3-7

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