Reality Check 101

How is it that we have been so effectively mesmerized by only half of the universe?  Is it really so difficult to understand what happens when one of humanity’s deepest inclinations, the drive to find the unknown, to know the unseen half of our universe (and its Master), is suppressed and even ridiculed?

The fundamental result is our hunger for peace and security. Ours is an ingrained internal struggle with the responsibilities and moral consequences of shunning the full experience for which we were made. This is not a stretch of logic or imagination.  Francis Schaeffer framed it as a separation from ourselves.  Could this be behind the contemporary obsession with all things community and inclusivity?  Is it possible to deny our natural bent for the spiritual without sacrificing wholeness and fulfillment?

Moderns have the misguided idea that there is no other choice than to choose between an allegiance to the superiority of science in all of life or an allegiance to “prescientific” religion with a flawed god made in the image of ancient man and his ignorances.  In its quest to shun the prejudices of “pre-enlightened” science, modernity has become the same deformed animal that it so disdains.  Instead of genuine science as it is practiced in the formal and applied sciences or in disciplines such as physics and chemistry, most of the remaining branches have become callous if not hostile toward possibilities outside of their secular ideology.  They have become scientism instead of science.  Scientism is blindly idealized in education, applied to public policy and even distorted in some corners of theology.

What sophisticates shun is a recognition that scientific objectivity means analyzing and describing, as Norman Geisler wrote, without pretext, in context, with integrity. But in order to do that and still justify secularist prejudices, they must eliminate spiritual non-secular possibilities.  They must disprove the existence of a separate spiritual realm and God Himself.   Scientism, if it is truly objective and honest, can never win that fight.  It therefore stands completely on an irrational faith in a material existence that leads to nothing but worms and dirt.  It has no right to pre-legislate (Geisler) possible explanations.

The same principles of natural and supernatural halves in one creation apply in Christianity as well.  The choice is simple.  We can worship and serve man’s wisdom first and let God, His unseen kingdom, and His Bible serve our scientism, psychology, history and culture.  Francis Schaeffer again:  “Remove the supernatural from the universe… we are merely shut up to anthropology, psychology and sociology and all we say about religion. … falls to the ground.”

Or we can worship and serve the Creator first, and demand that creation and our knowledge of it include all that exists instead of half of it.  From the Biblical point of view, if it is taken at face value, the supernatural is God’s other half of creation and is as normal as the natural.  It is as close as the angelic armies of God exposed to Elijah’s servant in 2 Kings 6 or of the other 102 Old Testament angelic appearances.  It is as immediate as Moses and Elijah with Jesus at the transfiguration or 93 angelic appearances in the New Testament.

The American people and our culture do not need to continue down the road of cynicism in our intellectual disciplines or in our spiritual lives, despite destructive forces to the contrary.  As the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have moved away from their spiritual roots to be absorbed into progressive “creatureliness”, others have risen to take their place.  Trail Life for boys has grown exponentially and, since BSA’s latest capitulation to homosexual activism, it can hardly keep up.  When the GSA began its transition into secularism and liberal feminism, American Heritage Girls was born and now has chapters across the mid-west.

It has already been said but bears repeating.  Unless prideful prejudiced scientism can disprove the God of the Bible in all the Scripture’s detail, He and every jot and tittle of those Scriptures are both necessary and undeniable.  That means that our need for Him as individuals and as a nation are also necessary and undeniable.