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How Naturalism Rejection of God Holds Humanity Captive

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How Naturalism Rejection of God Holds Humanity Captive

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Dr. Phillip Johnson, retired emeritus professor at Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an insightful book, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education (1995).

His book helps us understand how easily influenced we are by agnostics and atheists, who write many of our school textbooks and dominate many of our classrooms and school curricula. A Christian society can be badly corrupted by educating its young people in Darwinian evolution.

Dr. Johnson describes how an entire societal culture is shaped by Darwinists: "Darwinian evolution is not primarily important as a scientific theory but as a culturally dominant creation story. Every culture must have a creation story as a basis for things like philosophy, education and law. If we want to know how we ought to lead our lives and relate to our fellow creatures, the place to begin is with knowledge about how and why we came into existence.

"Where there is radical disagreement in a commonwealth about the creation story, the stage is set for intense conflict, the kind of conflict that is known as a 'culture war.'"

Dr. Johnson shows that naturalism has corrupted Western societies: "In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a very different creation story replaced the traditional one, first among the most highly educated elites and gradually in the society as a whole.

"The new creation story said it is not true that God created us; on the contrary, our ancestors created God out of their prescientific imagination. According to the new story, all living creatures evolved by an unguided, purposeless material process of random genetic change and natural selection" (pp. 12-13).

Thus, the logic goes, God doesn't exist and there is no need to allow for or consider Him in our thinking.

Satan the devil would have us believe that we came into being by random chance from primordial slime and that there is no all-powerful Creator or laws to live by—so that we conclude we can do whatever we feel like doing without moral restriction.

Naturalism—disbelief in anything beyond the natural world around us—is a subtle way to reeducate people, freeing them from feeling guilty over sin by substituting immorality or amorality for godly morality. With no real standards of right and wrong, we truly are in a position of survival of the fittest and everyone for himself.

The Holy Bible rebukes naturalism: "Let God be true but every man a liar" (Romans 3:4). That has never stopped Satan, who cunningly has taken humanity hostage through "philosophy and empty deceit" (Colossians 2:8). GN