You Believe the Bible? Hilarious!
by Terry Wane Benton
They looked at me as if I was some odd, foolish, and gullible person who got conned into believing a fairytale. Because of my studies, I look back at them with pity and sadness, and they don’t realize that they were the ones conned into believing the fairytale that everything got here by accidents of a “nature” that itself formed from nothing by accident. Their “book” of nature is pure fiction. In contrast, my book is history of how the Creator created the universe, the world, and life and interacted with man to reveal and confirm with eyewitness testimony the historical interactions.
Actual people and places, confirmed by archaeology, with the genealogy and essential details of prophecy, types, and shadows of the larger plan, come together in the records of the Bible to present a credible historic case for God and the plan to bring Jesus into the world for our deeper internal needs. Failure to read the testimony leaves people listening only to the doubters and critics and forming opinions without studying the evidence presented. The critics assume their position regarding the Bible is reasonable without actually studying its testimony as testimony. Those who laugh it off are like those who laugh off the truth that threatens their intellectual smugness. They trust men who told them that doubt in the Bible is reasonable while belief in it is unreasonable. They swallowed the prejudice and laughed at the ignorance of Bible believers. All the while, they are ignorant, without knowing how ignorant they really are. (See Ephesians 4:17-21).
If you start by assuming that nature developed itself naturally without supernatural involvement, then you tend to build on that assumption for the rest of your assumptions. The starting domino in your outlook set up the rest of your philosophical dominoes, and now you have become smug in thinking it is the only legitimate outlook. But there are certain scientific facts you conveniently forgot. Facts like order does not form itself from disorder and chaos, an explosion, and the material that exploded had to come from something eternal since the material is not itself eternal in nature. Life can only come from life and cannot form itself from lifeless matter. Therefore, something was eternally living for life to be.
Naturalism is a philosophy, not a scientific fact. To assume that nature is all there is or ever was is an unprovable and unscientific assumption that it is a pure fairytale. It is like a prince coming from a frog, a frog turning into a prince by a kiss. It says that we may assume that matter does not need an explanation as to its origin, and life does not need explanation as to its origin, and we can start with it already in place and assume the already formed “nature” is all there is. From that quite laughable assumption, men have ruled out even giving God a fair hearing when God is the only reasonable starting point. Hearing His testimony in the Bible is quite reasonable and the only reasonable beginning point. This is why the Proverb writer declares, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). If you don’t start there, you will not know the truth, and you will not be truly wise. You will actually be basing your whole outlook on the most foolish fairytale of all, that nothing can start something, give it life, give it mind, give it conscience, and all without an eternal supernatural source.
The philosophy of naturalism is passed around as knowledge, but it cannot hold any validity. It builds human pride and plants intellectual snobbery, but the laughs that look scornfully at the very idea of God is foolishness (Psalms 14:1) that is without excuse (Romans 1:20; Psalms 19). Scholars and Bible archaeologists know that the Bible is a very reliable source of testimony. Humble students of the Bible are amazed at how credible and powerful that testimony is, and they live seriously by it.
In the words of one of Jesus’ many eyewitnesses, Paul, who had been unbelieving Saul, said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16) and “faith comes by hearing the word of God” (Romans 10:17). How real and powerful is that amazing testimony!
