When Worlds Collide

I just posted a comment on a thread discussing The Very Persistent Illusion: Absurd and Amusing Rationalizations About Free Will over at the evangelical outpost.

I must confess that I'm endlessly fascinated by the manner in which "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;" as explained in 1 Corinthians 1:27

Below is my comment for your consideration:

Coram Deo writes:
I'm unclear about the correlation being drawn here between intellect and "believing dumb things".

There's probably some fine data out there but I've not seen the statistics. Furthermore I wonder how one goes about quantifying or defining "dumb things".

Perhaps at the root of the issue is the two conflicting worldviews at play in any given meeting between the Christian Biblical worldview and the Secular-Humanist worldview. The worldview one holds colors absolutely every perception and establishes every presupposition through which data from our environment is processed. While our noetic equipment is the same, our spiritual conditions couldn't be more different.

In fact the two aforementioned worldviews are diametrically opposed in every way. These worlds collide because the Christian views the world and processes his experiences with the mind of Christ, in the light of scripture, and with the discernment of the Holy Spirit who resides inside of him. On the other hand the non-Christian views the world through his darkened, utterly depraved and desperately sinful heart.

The "highly intelligent" non-Christian - by the world's standards - is in fact suppressing the knowledge of God in unrighteousness and is unable to develop a sustainable worldview of his own apart from "borrowing" from the Christian worldview. Since in his world there are no moral absolutes the unbeliever has no basis for good or evil nor can he even explain simple causation or why he should expect the world tomorrow to behave like it did today. Even worse the secular-humanist / atheistic philosophy is completely unable to explain universal laws such as the laws of logic. Clearly the laws of logic are non-conventional and immaterial, so the unbeliever finds himself on the horns of logic and begging the question when asked to explain how his world accounts for such things.

The Bible throws down the gauntlet and asks in 1 Corinthians 1:20 "Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" The simple answer of course is there is none to be found.

This bold challenge still stands unanswered and unanswerable today since it is impossible to successfully dispute the manifold wisdom of God.

In every social encounter the Christian is either witnessing to the lost or fellowshipping with a believer and it's important to quickly determine which situation you're in and tailor your message accordingly.

The Christian ought never to abandon his presupposition of the absolute unassailable truth of the Bible in order to gain "common ground" or "relevance" with his audience. The believer must present the whole counsel of God and allow the Holy Spirit to (prayerfully) move upon the heart of the unredeemed and open his eyes to the truth of the ages which is Christ crucified.

posted on 01.06.2007 9:35 PM