I know I’m probably going to take a beating for writing this, but here goes, anyway.

I suppose you could say that I’m a pressuppositionalist – I tend to follow an apologetic approach that believes it is impossible to find meaning in anything where man himself is at the center of the pursuit for truth and understanding.  I carry with me a certain set of core beliefs and assumptions that guide and govern, not only those things that I do, but also the way I fit together all knowledge into a cohesive whole.

It’s interesting – when the evolutionist looks around him and witnesses nature, he sees millions of years of natural selection at work when I look around me, I can’t but believe that something had to have put all this in place.  This belief is based purely in logic and observation – I just find it impossible to think that chaos at the beginning of time could have somehow found its way into some sense of organization that just naturally progressed over billions and billions of years to what we have now.  That, to me, requires a much greater leap of faith than believing in an intelligent creator.  From everything I’ve seen and witnessed and studied, the natural state of the universe at large tends toward entropy.  Everything that currently exists is moving steadily toward a state of decay and decline, not the other way around.  This has ever been the way of things.  So I find it much easier to believe that everything started in a state of perfect order that somehow began a downward spiral toward chaos.

Both of these viewpoints are based on a set of presuppositions.  For the evolutionist, there is no God, no creator, no intelligent designer, merely a long process of natural selection, with new species adapting to their environments until we have the diversity that we see today.  And natural selection makes some amount of sense, since it is directly observable in the world around us – the strongest of the herd survive while the slowest, sickest, and least able to adapt die off, thus strengthening the species as a whole.  I just have trouble believing that natural selection could ever have, ultimately, brought humanity into existence from a single-celled bacterium – and I have yet to see compelling evidence that states such.  For the creationist (or the IDist), there must have been something intelligent and powerful to have set all this in place, that there is no way for something like this universe in which we live to have come about by chance or some evolutionary process.

Consider this – what if the all that scientific data that has been collected on the origins of the universe and the evolutions of the species can’t be trusted?  Secular scientists place a lot of faith in rationality.  They place man at the very center of rationality itself by presupposing that systematic, scientific study will eventually unlock all the secrets of the universe – or at least that’s the goal and hope – and this methodology does and has worked in a great many areas of study and research.  But what if scientific study as it relates to these two macroscopic issues has been placed in the wrong context?  What if, by placing man at the center, by assuming that if we only ask the right questions and study things in as unbiased a manner as possible, what if in doing science in this manner, we are getting it wrong?  What if this basic assumption in secular science has led to a great many misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the data we have?

I believe that faith and science can, indeed, complement each other.  When framed in the context of an intelligent designer, the scientific data that seems to lend itself so strongly for evolution yields a very different picture.  And contrary to popular belief, scientists who believe in intelligent design are still scientists who work within the constraints of their field.  The data I’ve seen on sites like Answers in Genesis is the same data I’ve seen shown on secular science sites, with the same explanations of what it means.  The difference is that Christian scientists provide alternative solutions for why some of that data might be misleading.  It is unfortunate, in a way, that many of these explanations can never be verified, as they are the result of unreproducible events.  Similarly, neither can secular scientists prove their claims about the origins of the universe for the exact same reason.  Despite objections from the secular community, Christian scientists are able to provide a complete, unified response for their conclusions based on their presuppositions.  And theirs is a response that makes much more logical, rational sense to me than the origins answers that secular science sometimes provides.

And this is where faith bonds with science.  We believe, based on a record given in the Bible, that the Earth looked a certain way during its beginning.  Framing scientific data into this context provides an explanation why, for instance, carbon dating may not be as accurate as is generally assumed by the secular scientific community.  Because none of these events that various groups believe in – Creation, Big Bang, Great Flood, evolution – can actually be reproduced and examined first-hand, certain things must, by necessity, be taken with a certain measure of faith.  This does not stop scientific study itself, nor should it.  Mankind is, by his very nature, curious and so there is a great deal of worth to be derived from such pursuits.  But the scientific community, no matter what camp, should bear in mind that personal presuppositions are going to greatly influence the way the collected data is interpreted.

So does secular rationality actually fail when faced with its own presuppositions?  We can only wait and see, but I would posit that, yes, it does.  Mankind is a limited, finite creature, and as such our abilities to know and understand will always be subject to that limitation.  If science, by itself, reveals anything to us with regard to the origins of everything that is, it will be that we can never know everything and that some ‘secrets’, like how the universe began or where mankind came from, will never be answered by science alone.

But don’t mind me – those’re just my presuppositions talking. 

There are many times during the course of my immersion into the realms of science fiction and fantasy, whether it be reading books, watching shows or movies, etc., when I wish that I could experience aspects of those cultures first-hand.  For instance, in the short-lived show Firefly, two cultures merged into one when humanity abandoned Earth.  The predominant world superpowers at that time were the United States and China.  So, when new worlds were terraformed and then populated by Earth’s refugees, it wasn’t long before most inhabitants of this new solar system were bi-lingual, speaking English primarily but switching over to Mandarin in moments of high emotion.

In Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon cycle, the culture of Britain in the early days after Jesu left his mark on the world was rich with history, symbolism, and faith.  The mere image of the cross was enough to spark strong emotional and behavioral reactions in the followers of the Great Light, of the one True God.  You can believe that nothing in their faith was taken for granted.

What it comes down to is this – I see in many Americans a shallowness that borders on being depressing.  I don’t believe it always used to be this way.  Early on in our nation’s history, national pride was treasured, cherished.  It was important to be known as an American, important enough to die for, as many did.  Today it seems that so many of our citizens are almost ashamed to be called Americans, thinking that to claim such is to be pretentious and arrogant in the eyes of the world.  We are becoming American in name only, with so many having no concept of the pride that goes with being called such.

So, too, in our churches and in our faith.  We are becoming Christian in name only, and that often only barely.  Cultural shallowness has begun to penetrate our minds, our hearts, our churches so that our ministries become less effective, less robust.  As both Americans and as Christians, we are losing our culture, those elements that root us in what we are and in what we believe.  The cross of Christ has become less of an integral, necessary part of our belief system and more of a digitized placeholder of faith whereupon we look and remark in a distracted manner about how important it is to our faith.

A recent email conversation among some friends has addressed this topic from the perspective of the church’s affluence.  The problem posed at the outset of the discussion is that of the presence of “fancy buildings… sound systems, and the musical instruments, and the hundreds of different colors of papers, and the power point programs, and twenty children’s programs and all associated materials.” These are all things that most of our churches today seem to think they require in order to function and minister effectively.  We seem to require that our auditoriums be air conditioned and that crying children be removed from the service, that the drums not be played too loudly (or at all) and that the pastor have the appropriate level of pious humility if we are to be expected to worship at all.¹

There are several things that I believe have contributed to the current state of affairs in our churches.  The first is that the increased development of technology has pushed the pace of culture into hypersonic speeds.  Information and data travel at a breakneck rate nowadays, and most of us have noticed that life has moved into not just the fast lane but into the ultra-fast lane.  We have less time now than we ever did, and what free time we have we fill with activities that are, essentially, needless.  We are constantly inundated with more and more information that we must sort through and process, and as a result we have become detached from those things that are truly important, things like God, faith, and family.  This is contributor number one to the shallowness of culture.

The second contributor is the shift toward post-modern philosophy.  Truth is no longer what it once was.  It has become an ethereal entity that cannot be grasped.  Indeed, truth has become little more than a vapor, a thing that is seen – and then only just barely – before it is caught up by the wind and blown away.  We try to clasp it in our hands so that we may know it, yet it slips through our fingers and goes on its merry way, leaving us wondering if it was ever real to begin with.  This is the way popular culture sees truth today, as an insubstantial, ever-changing entity that is unique to each individual.  Truth has many faces, so that it may look different to each individual who views it, even changing in form to a single person depending on the circumstances surrounding its pursuit.  We are continually losing the notion that truth is, in fact, static and stable, never-changing, steady throughout the ages.  The Enemy attacks the idea of absolute truth because those who do not believe in it are merely sheep to be led to the slaughter.  The disappearance of absolute truth has contributed to the shallowness of culture and the loss of those things which are most important.  Now what is most important is determined by each person privately and may look vastly different from what is most important to the next person.

The third contributor has already been mentioned – the affluence of culture.  As another contributor to the conversation stated, it seems that “the more STUFF we have around us, the more FAITH we need.” I do not believe that this is just limited to material possessions, either.  I have watched as men fill their heads with more and more knowledge and ‘facts’, information that they learn and catalogue.  In so doing they see less and less of God’s presence in the world and in creation and less need for something outside of themselves to provide truth and to make sense of those things that happen that we simply cannot explain.  We are an affluent culture, both in the things we own and in the things we know.  The more things we have, the more we become distracted by them and the less we see a need for God.  It is the things that then become important because we must maintain them, maintain a certain way of life, maintain traditions that we have become comfortable with and that continue to make us comfortable.  The things take a place of higher precedence, usurping God and pushing faith into the background.  We continue to believe that we have faith, but all we are really left with is a dependency upon things that, when taken from us, cause us to come crashing down because, in pushing faith aside, we have struck our own foundation out from under ourselves.  The acquisition and collection of things contributes to a shallow culture and a faith that is sorely taken for granted.  Things are temporal; faith is not, yet we seem to have gotten the two in reverse.

I find myself yearning after some of the things I read in my fiction, not as a substitute for my faith but as a return to a simpler way of doing things, a way that eliminates so many of our distractions and restores a richness to culture and to faith that has been lost in today’s hustle and bustle of activity.  I think perhaps what most appeals to me about Chinese culture, in some ways, is the richness of it, the legacy of history that inspires millions to both national pride and devotion (though even that is being lost as Western culture invades the Chinese borders).  There is a power within a national legacy that the cultures of both America and American Christianity seem to lack.  We have become shallow people, abhoring and rejecting that which is most important in favor of pursuing those things that are most important to us, our selfish and narcissistic ideals.  That is what our culture has told us is important, to what and to seek out that which we want, rather than what our Creator God deems important.

A return to simplicity is needed, I think, in order to return us to our roots, so that we may find again the awe of our faith and the power of God in our lives.  I believe that the icons of our faith can once again become powerful, no longer taken for granted as just another pretty picture on a wall or a decorative item to be viewed and then dismissed.  I also think that simplicity can be communicable, a contagion that can spread through the Church and returning it to a place where the important things are remembered and the unimportant set aside and forgotten. 

Yet, I think in order for that to happen, simplicity must first take place within each one of us separately, as we extract those things in our lives that prevent us making the most of the time we have here in this life – the possessions that demand our interest, the activities that require our time, the pursuit of more knowledge and facts that only serve to distract from serving our Lord.  It is in the doing and living that makes the most impact on others, that demonstrates that we do not, in actuality, require most of the things we cling to with such ferocity, that we can really be happy and content with less.  It is not, and will not, be an easy process, no.  But I think more and more that it is a necessary one if we as a Church in America wish to again be salt and light in our culture.  We do not yet see that we need less because we are blinded by our own affluence, but there are Christians in many other countries who pray that Christians in America will face the persecution that strips away all the unnecessary things so that we will once again remember Who it is we serve and remember again what business it is we are to be about.

Less is more.  Jesus knew this.  It is why he taught time and again that for any man to follow Him, he must first give up all he had and then follow Him.  Would that we should remember that.

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