Today is Election day in the USA, and at stake are many Matt 24-relevant issues that came up in my recent reconnaissance at Evangelical Outpost Blog, which turned into a major worldviews engagement. During that period, I was able to see at close hand the underlying patterns of thought behind the progressivist secularist agenda that now seems to dominate the North, and to see the major gaps in its thought in action.
At the same time, I have been thinking about Daniel on Government under God, and have been re-reading Alistair Horne's magisterial reflections on the Fall of France in 1940, which was driven more by "what is false within" -- divided councils, selfish agendas, confusion, refusal to face the evident truth about Hitler's intentions, and self-deception --than by any superiority of German weapons or numbers. (Indeed, a measure of this was to see that AFTER the breakthrough at Sedan and decisive drive to the Channel, the French army belatedly released over 4,000 of its famous WW I era 75 mm field guns for use as antitank weapons. 500 of these -- resolutely manned and used as the main tank killers [similar to how the Germans used their famous 88 mm antiaircraft gun, indeed in the same 1940 campaign, that is how they were able to defeat the French Char B and the British Matilda [II] Infantry tank] -- would have made all the difference at Sedan, especially given that [1] the significantly inferior German 77 mm field gun had been used successfully as an antitank weapon in WW I, and [2] the very same guns were captured by the Germans, remounted and used as antitank weapons against T34s and KVs in Russia in 1942.)
I therefore think it appropriate to observe on the rise of the secularist-progressivist worldview and cultural agenda, and note on my findings as follows:
1] The worldview engine of the now dominant -- at least among the so-called educated elites -- secularist-progressivist agenda is evolutionary materialism, which is claimed to be the only viable "scientific" view of the world. However, this worldview is in fact fatally flawed because it is inescapably logically incoherent. As I long since noted, reflecting C S Lewis' "dangerous idea," it has to try to account for mind and morals on a-logical, a-rational grounds, and so decisively undercuts its own credibility. It is self-refuting, in short - strictly speaking, a non-starter. [This shows the power of spin tactics, rhetorical games and institutional dominance to win and hold undeserved credibility in this media-dominated age.]
2] Further to this, it fails to credibly account for the functionally specific, complex information [FSCI] at the heart of the molecules of life. Thus, it is also unable to account for the origin of life through so-called chemical evolution.
3] Similarly, it is at a loss to explain the Macro-level diversity of life, for the same reason. In short, as Loennig notes in the just linked, the Neo-Darwinian Theory fails to explain Macro-evolution, as it cannot account for the ORIGIN of the required level of complexity of genetic information required to support the creation of complex new body plans that are expressed early in embryological development. [It does not help matters that in educational, museum and mass media contexts, several infamous misleading icons of the theory are often presented as if they were conclusive evidence.]
4] It is also forced to recognise that the universe as we observe it has a beginning, which cries out for a "begin-ner." To get away from the obvious best explanation of such a beginning at a finite distance in time, of a universe that also shows FSCI - a powerful, highly intelligent purposeful -- thus, personal Agent, it has had to assert an effectively infinite chaos as a whole, in which our observed universe is just a bubble of apparent order, arrived at by an unknown chance process. Of course, this is immediately a resort to the unobservable [infinity!] and the speculatively metaphysical, but it is often presented to an unwary public as "science." We would be wise to insist instead, that it be subjected to comparative difficulties analysis, as one philosophical system among many.
5] Advocates of evolutionary materialism typically brush aside concerns about their imposition [often by judicial fiat] of a quasi-religious agenda as a de facto establishment, especially objections by Bible-believing Christians, as the objections of mindless fundamentalists. However, to do so, they are usually guilty of selective hyperskepticism, as well as prejudice based on the use of smear words. The associated attempts to disenfranchise and exclude Bible-believing Christians from high office or even simply exerting democratic influence on the course of public policy, are, together, a major warning sign.
6] I find it especially significant to note how the easily available and objectively strong evidence for the credibility of the New Testament, and the Morison Challenge on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, are hastily -- and often, irritably -- brushed aside.
7] Similarly, there is a questionable and common tendency to try to push Bible-believing Christians into the same boat as Islamist terrorists, as enemies of freedom. This of course rests on ignorance and/or rejection of the major contribution to modern liberty that grows out of Biblical soil, and the confusion of liberty with licence and libertinism, as well as even amorality.
8] In that light, the rising agenda to undermine marriage, by in effect "redefining" it away from the course of God's obvious creation order, and in the teeth of abundant evidence and plain common sense, stands starkly revealed as an illustration of what Paul spoke against in Eph 4:17 - 19: . . . I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.
9] Similarly, the now blatantly obvious, patent refusal to face facts on Islam and its links to islamist aggression, has been aptly remarked on by even former terrorists and islamists. For instance, Dr. Tawfik Hamid was just reported in the Canadian National Post, as observing, about: "The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe." He continues:
Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia's petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.
"We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys." . . . . "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."
Plainly, as France was in 1940, the West as a whole is today, and that is reflected in the falt-lines that are ever so visible in the issues headlined in today's election. So, I think the time has come for a serious reflection on the prophet Daniel's prophetic warning:
Dan 2:40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron--for iron breaks and smashes everything--and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. 41 Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. 42 As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
DA 2:44 "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands--a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces.
Where, then, do we put our trust: in the ultimately futile kingdoms of man, or in the Eternal Kingdom of God? END
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