But I’m afraid I don’t share your epistemological scepticism here. You speak much more like a postmodernist than a Christian. Sure, because we are finite and fallen, we will never know everything perfectly, nor are we expected to. And yes Christians will have disagreements in many areas. That is also expected.

But that does not mean we can never come to a knowledge of the truth. The Bible says hundreds of times that followers of Jesus can have a real grasp of truth, and can have strong certainty of what they believe. To deny this is both to reject the clear teaching of Scripture, as well as to condemn us all to relativism and perpetual doubt.

I am not ready to abandon such strong assertions as the following:

John 8:32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.
2 Tim 1:12 I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.
Heb 11:1 Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
1 John 2:20 But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.
1 John 5:20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.

There are many more such biblical texts. Humility is admitting we will not know everything. Arrogance is telling God that he is wrong and that we cannot know anything. While we can never have exhaustive truth in this life, we can have sufficient truth, because God has promised us this.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

This attitude precludes learning anything else: what would be the motivation, since we already know everything. This is arrogant and inhibits growth.

The Bible is many books in several genres: poetry, history, allegories, etc. To interpret poetry as history is to misinterpret, To use, for example, the Parable of the Seed as a horticultural model is to misinterpret-and scattering seed on rocky soil because Jesus spoke of doing so is like insisting on the literal interpretation of everything else in the Bible.

We all need to admit we don’t know everything, and considering the scope of our subject (God) we aren’t going to know everything any time soon.

Je’ Czaja

One important reason for rejecting the “God used evolution” nonsense is what it entails about God’s nature. The antitheist Jacques Monod was not impressed:

The more cruel because it is a process of elimination, of destruction. The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethics revolts. An ideal society is a non-selective society, is one where the weak is protected; which is exactly the reverse of the so-called natural law. I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution (emphasis added).

The Bible teaches clearly that death is the “wages of sin” and the “last enemy”, the result of the sin of a literal first man, Adam. Conversely, evolution is a theory that death was an important part of the creative process. I explain further in Church of England apologises to Darwin: Anglican Church’s neo-Chamberlainite appeasement of secularism.

Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane

I’ve never been a Darwinist or a Creationist.

I had the benefit when I was a young adult of having good rambling discussions with a Priest over these sorts of issues.

The message that was stressed to me, and which I have retained, is that it wasn’t the method that God used that was important but the fact that nothing could have occurred without God’s direct intervention.

Its comforting to know that God is so awesome and all powerful that He could create an entire universe including man in 6 days or even less, or that God is so patient and eternal that He could create the entire universe including man over a period of billions of years.

I personally prefer to believe that God took billions of years to create the universe.This keeps reminding me that whilst Man appears to be such an insignificant aspect of a several billion year creation process, the reality is that Man is absolutely central to the creation story so much so that God sent his Son to become Man to redeem us.

There is a genuine sense of awe and wonder in looking at what science has discovered and revealed to us about the make up of our universe and the make up of the human being. However, it is easy to be seduced by science and unfortunately too many are seduced.

Christian creationists and Christian evolutionists need to join together on the 2 central issues that unite them -firstly the fact nothing could have been created or evolved without God’s direct intervention and secondly that neither creationsism or evolution has any value without the God’s second intervention of sending His Son into the world.

This will never stop atheistic scientism but for those who are often in leadership positions in our communities (and who are often vacillating value free persons) the combination of Christian creationists and Christian evolutionists may be enough to show that there can and should be constant discussion over both creationism and evolutionism in all areas of society including schools and universities.

John Ryan

1. Why do most geologists date coal and diamonds as being millions of years old – yet all coal and diamonds tested show a carbon dating age of labout 100,000 years old?

2. How come wood carbon dated at less than 100,000 years has been found in lava dated at millions of years old?

3. How can lava known to be only decades old, be dated by a reputable laboratory to be millions of years old?

4. I know of no satisfactory explanation for these actual discrepancies. Do you?

Peter Newland

On logic: if one asserts that truth is utterly relative, including contradictory statements, one cannot then claim that post-modernism is true. First, one would then be smuggling back into the scheme a notion of truth which has ostensibly been rejected. Second, I challenge a post-modernist to state his theory without invoking the Law of Non-contradiction. He has to say that the opposite of his theory, viz. that absolutes are essential, is false. The moment he does so he has abandoned his position.

One other thing: when the post-modernist insists that truth is not only relative, but individual, i.e. that something can be “true for me, but not necessarily true for you”, he is confusing both himself and others. What he means is that the something (whatever it is) is CONVENIENT OR HELPFUL – but being personally convenient has nothing to do with whether or not it is true. I can claim that snakes are venomous creatures: that is not merely an objectively true statement, it is also a personally INconvenient one!

Murray Adamthwaite

For what it is worth, here is a top twenty list of books on Islam: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2006/07/31/top-twenty-recent-books-on-islam-terrorism-and-jihad/

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

I am dealing with an entierly different area, and that is Islam. Living in central melbourne, and having muslim friends, we have quite spirited discussions about faith, and revelation.

We certainly don’t worship the same God. It’s pretty hard, and testing, but God willing I’ll stick to it.

Presuppositional apologetics is the area that I’ll move into next once I have the tools to battle islam , well, hopefully anyway…

Dale Bates

I have to agree that we are often the only ones caring about the truth.

Our difficulty is that humanists in their various guises have redefined the truth (as Schaeffer explained).

Thus we hold to absolutes, but the prevailing “philosophical atmosphere” holds to no absolutes, and “the truth” is a meaningless idea. There are as many truths as there are people, they say.

This makes it difficult to argue philosophically with a humanist/relativist, because we have to confront them with the impossibility of their position, and then they accuse us of not respecting them (and thus their position). They drag us into an argument from within their worldview, where we always “lose.”

I am still grappling with Van Til’s presuppositional apologetics (Schaeffer studied under him) as a means of avoiding that problem. It’s slow work though

John Angelico