Tag Archives: worldview

Blindness to Worldviews

Dear hijas,

In picking back up in my review of Dr. John K. Reed’s book “Rocks Aren’t Clocks: A Critique of the Geologic Timescale”, I love these particular quotes from Chapter 6 titled ‘Unreliable Clocks’:

At its core, the geologic timescale is a weapon that secularism has used to good effect against Christianity.

Or this:

Furthermore, if the various clocks used by stratigraphers all worked as claimed, then they would all agree. It is clear that they do not. Different radiometric methods yield different ages. Dates of rocks of known ages are incorrect. Paleontologists discard radiometric dates that contradict fossil assemblages. And no one thinks that these disagreements pose serious problems, they just ‘know’ that the template is correct.

Or how about this one:

Most of the public thinks that radiometric dating is the one infallible clock. But scientists recognize that is not true and so they rely instead on combinations of fallible, malleable methods. Then they argue that the timescale is more certain because of independent overlapping lines of evidence. But do they overlap each other like shingles, forming an impenetrable seal, or like a house of cards? This need of many clocks tells us an important truth; there is not one single infallible chronometer. Would you rather have one watch that kept time or a dozen that didn’t?


…professional stratigraphers have known all along that the real ‘clock’ is biological evolution. Rocks are ordered by fossils and fossils by their evolutionary stage. This is why geologists share the panic of biologists when evolution is attacked. The credibility of the timescale is linked to that of evolution. If evolution falters, the timescale does too.

And then this classic from Chapter 4:

Christians can no longer remain blind to the worldview behind the timescale.

With love,

Dear ol’ Dad

Vaya con Dios mis hijas


We Have the fossils. We win!

We have the fossils. We win.

Dear hijas,

I was driving around town recently and saw this bumper sticker on the back of a car. It said, “We have the fossils. We win.”, with a fish symbol with legs and feet.

If we analyze this, what do you think this person was trying to say? It obviously has something to say about the creation-evolution debate, doesn’t it? It obviously implies that evolutionists think the fossils support their evolutionary position. It also implies that because evolutionists think the fossils support their position, they’ve won in some sort of contest, or duel, or battle; that fossils prove their side is correct. Do they own the fossils though? Or is it their interpretation of the fossils that the slogan is referring to?

fish fossil

So, what are fossils anyway, and what do they prove? Fossils are dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water scattered all over the earth. We’ve unearthed millions of them, from plants and flowers, to starfish, insects, and dinosaurs. We find them throughout the stratigraphic column. 95% of the fossils unearthed are marine invertebrates, <5% are plants, including trees and algae, with less than 1% vertebrates of all kinds. Is the claim that fossils document the evolutionary “descent from a common ancestor”, a “simple to complex” history,  true?

It depends upon your worldview interpretation, doesn’t it? We’re finding and unearthing once living things, now dead, in rock layers all over the earth. How they died, and how they were buried in these rock layers are all a matter of interpretation dependent upon one’s worldview. If you start with no God and with unregenerate man’s grand assumption that he can reach out and reason his way to truth by himself, then fossils fit within that paradigm, and are used as proof of his creation-myth: evolution. But to leave God out of the picture at one’s starting point is absurd. We’ve seen that every man has a sense of deity within him that he is held accountable to (Rom. 1:19).

However, if one starts with God and His revelation of Himself and His created universe, ourselves and our fallen condition, in Scripture, we come across a very different scenario, don’t we? We discover a real-time historical Fall into sin and a global and universal judgment of God in the Flood of Noah. It is this global Flood that gives primary explanation of the fossils we find buried in rock layers all over the earth. It is God’s revelation of what He did and His reasons for doing it that we must consider:

Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth (Gen. 6:13).

And all flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died (Gen. 7:21-22).


Noah's Ark

The fossils themselves don’t prove anything except that something once living is now dead. It’s how one interprets the fossils that is key. Even the supposed “transition fossils” that evolution requires are systematically missing.   The overwhelming message of the fossil record is one of stasis, not evolutionary change, as well as a great deal of violence at the time of their death and burial. The fossils are better evidence for a catastrophic and destructive globe covering Flood as recorded in Scripture than the “We have the fossils-We win” bumper sticker and slogan would imply.

For further reading and interest please see: http://www.icr.org/fossil-record/.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

The Moral Necessity: the Problem

Dear hijas,

We’ve been talking about the three main areas of philosophical and religious thought, or to say it another way, the three fundamental components of a worldview:

1) metaphysics (the nature of reality, of being and existence)

2) morals and ethics (how we live and conduct our lives)

3) epistemology (how we know what we know).

Remember in an earlier post we said that everyone is a philosopher because everyone has a worldview. For our purposes we’ll define a worldview as a network, a system and package of interconnected thinking governed by basic pre-commitments.  The idea is that each person, whether she realizes it or not, understands the issues of life in a framework context. In this sense each of us has a worldview and thus each of us is a philosopher.

We’ve covered the metaphysical question in earlier posts (although briefly), and I wish to move on to the second area; that of morals and ethics, of what we might call the moral necessity. This is the area of human conduct; the study of right and wrong actions and attitudes. It attempts to answer the question: How shall we live and conduct ourselves?

You see, man has a problem. When he looks at himself he soon understands that he is finite, yet personal. By finite, I mean that man looks at himself and realizes that he doesn’t have ‘all’ knowledge, can never attain to ‘all’ knowledge, and will never know everything there is to know about ‘everything’. Even if he is a specialist in some field, he understands that even in his specialty he doesn’t know all there is to know. Finite implies ‘limit‘, and man, by his very nature, is limited. He can’t love the way he wants to love, help others completely in the way he wishes to completely help them, can’t change others or the world for the better in the way that he wishes to change them. As Schaeffer says in He is There and He is not Silent, ‘because man is finite, he has no sufficient integration point in himself.’

Yet man is also personal; different than non-man in contrast to that which is impersonal. He loves, he cares, he creates, he aspires to beauty, he feels guilt, he is altruistic, he thinks in the abstract, he feels loss, he seeks and demands justice for wrongs, he communicates to others of his kind in complex languages, all the while understanding a significance outside of himself. He understands a spiritual nature to his constitution and to the constitution of others, and that this world and this life can’t be all that there is. He must work very hard to convince himself that ‘you live, you die, that’s it’. Most people intrinsically know that that’s not all there is. All these things and more make man personal.

Man also understands when he looks at himself and others a profound dichotomy. On the one hand he sees the goodness of people, their nobility, if you will, a profound kindness and caring for others of his kind and for the world around him, yet on the other hand he sees the utter cruelty and evil that man can do to his fellow-man. He is altogether perplexed at the history of man’s cruelty to man, and the utter evil that people can do to each other.

So man has a dilemma, a problem. The first dilemma is that man is finite and yet personal with no sufficient integration point in himself and the second dilemma is that man is both noble and cruel, good and evil. Or as Schaeffer likes to say, expressing it this way: ‘the alienation of man from himself and from all other men in the area of morals’.

How does one answer this dilemma, this problem? Following Schaeffer, this can be addressed again in two areas: A.) the impersonal, and B.) the personal.

We’ve already seen that evolution; modern man’s creation myth, starts with the impersonal, so we’ll take a look at this first and attempt to answer the question of moral necessity from an evolutionary impersonal standpoint. The question before us will be: How does evolution justify morality, or can it? How do morals arise, where do they come from in an impersonal beginning?

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad