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Gary comments on some popular examples of internet wisdom in the forms of memes.
The Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century rejected special revelation (the Bible) as the ultimate standard of authority and declared reason to be supreme. Reason was elevated to god-like status. Reason, not revelation, ruled. While these philosophers were not atheists, even so, they reasoned as if God did not exist. Their worldview was deistic. A deist believes that God created the universe “and instilled within it natural laws to ensure its orderly operation.” Consequently, “the world runs according to God’s precise initial design without any need for His intrusion. . . . Because deism rejects divine intervention in the affairs of the created world, the only means available for man to know God is through what has been made—the creation itself. Verbal revelation in the Bible, the deity of Christ, and miracles are all discarded as possibilities.”[1] For the deist, reason is
a law unto itself, as though man’s mind were self-sufficient, not in need of divine revelation. This attitude commonly leads people to think that they are in a position to think independently, to govern their own lives, and to judge the credibility of God’s word based on their own insight and authority.[2]
In time, theistic rationalism, which rejected even the possibility of special revelation, turned into atheistic rationalism with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). The doctrine of evolution destroyed belief in God because its starting point is self-consciously atheistic. In 1862, Charles Hodge concluded that Darwinism “is Atheism.” Hodge went on to write, “This does not mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of design from nature is . . . tantamount to atheism.”[3]
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy NowGary comments on some popular examples of internet wisdom in the forms of memes. Some of the most illogical and ridiculous ideas are presented by people in the form of memes and Gary can’t resist pointing out the nonsense being displayed. He has also decided that this will become a semi-regular segment on the podcast so be on the lookout for more to come.
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[1] W. Gary Phillips and William E. Brown, Making Sense of Your World from a Biblical Viewpoint (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1991), 79.
[2] Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), 113.
[3] Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1995), 156–57. For a contemporary discussion of the design issue in the discussion of origins, see William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (Downers, Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999).