SHAKING THE FINGER AT THE DECATUR BOOK FESTIVAL--II

As he shook his finger at me, telling me of his study, I thought afterward about how argumentative and spoiling for a fight secularists, atheists, and agnostics are. Someone has pointed out that their pugnacious and argumentative spirit seems more like they're trying to convince themselves not to believe the truth they're suppressing.

Anyway, the vaunted conclusion of his study of all religions (that sounds like hyperbole) led him to announce that God is an invention of man, and in a clever, albeit unoriginal play on words, he turned Genesis 1 on its head, claiming that God is made in the image and likeness of man.

MORGAN FREEMAN PRIDE

He had a great deal of hubris because of the conclusion he'd reached, but others beat him to it, well, at least one did. First, we have Morgan Freeman who played God in a movie and its sequel and since he did, he was selected for a series of TV programs ("Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman") in which one episode is entitled, "Did We Invent God?"

He was asked about that episode concerning how he would answer that question. He was upfront about it, saying, "“So if I believe in God, and I do, it’s because I think I’m God." This is from a man whose education level is the 12th grade, graduating from Broad Street High School in Greenwood, Mississippi, after which he joined the Air Force.

THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHER

But one person who beat the secularist with the shaking finger for sure was an ancient Greek named Xenophanes who wrote, "But if cattle and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have."

The philosopher with the hard to pronounce name poked fun at other Greeks, even the revered blind poet Homer, when he wrote, ""Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of things that are matters of reproach and censure among men: theft, adultery, and mutual deception."

How right he was, the gods of the Greeks and Romans were such fallible sinners, hardly stronger than men, certainly just as much sinners as men.

THE DIFFERENCE

But how different is the God of the Bible--so awesomely holy and righteous that men can't stand in His presence, that men are to remove their shoes in front of a burning bush, so holy that a nation has to back off from a mountain, so holy that if they touch the Ark of the Covenant, they die, and so holy that He cannot countenance sin without eventually judging it. 

I don't know if Mr. Secularist knows that someone beat him to the punch thousands of years ago, but Xenophanes did, just as the same ancient pagans invented theories of evolution and natural selection way before Darwin did. (Didn't somebody say, "There's nothing new under the sun"? This is what's so annoying about historians-- we say, "This has never happened before," and they say, "Oh, yes, it has. I'll tell you when." Infuriating, isn't it?)

But, let's continue to examine the claim of man's invention of God in reference to Christianity and the Bible. How in the world could mostly unsophisticated men like the New Testament authors invent fulfilled prophecy? How fishermen invent the fulfillment of Isaiah 53's predictions of the Messiah and make them be fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth in such detail? How could they invent the fulfillment of prophecies of the details of the process of crucifixion a thousand years before the Romans even thought of it? How could they make Roman soldiers gamble for Jesus' clothes, just as the Psalmist predicted a thousand years before it occurred? We could go on and on and on.

On another front, WHY would they invent their fulfillment even if they could? They couldn't, but we're, as they say, "Just supposin'." They had zero to gain by it. They had no money to speak of and would never have any. They had no clout in the world psychically speaking and never would have. What they wrote and boldly declared got them scorned, hounded, ridiculed, beaten, lashed, imprisoned, and eventually martyred (all except one died a martyr). And, it bears repeating, if they invented all of this, it has been forever true that men don't die for what they know to be a lie. Men have died for a lie they believed, but men don't die for what they know to be a lie.

But in reference to the prophecies, if we do the math, there can be no invention of Christianity.

"Years ago, math professor Peter Stoner (Science Speaks [Moody Pres, 1963], pp. 99-112) calculated the odds for just a selected set  of just eight Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled by one man who has lived since the time of Christ. 

"Taking a conservative approach, he came up with the number, 1 in 1017. To visualize this, he said that 1017 silver dollars would cover the state of Texas two feet deep. Mark one, blindfold a man, and let him go wherever in the state he wished, but he had to pick the one marked silver dollar. That is the probability that Christ could have fulfilled just the eight prophecies that Professor Stoner used. 

"Then Professor Stoner doubled it to 16 prophecies and the number of silver dollars becomes a sphere extending from earth in all directions more than 30 times as far as from the earth to the sun! Picking the right silver dollar would be the odds that Jesus fulfilled just 16 Old Testament prophecies. But He fulfilled more than 300."

The man at the Decatur Book Festival was like way, way too many: way, way too proud of himself. At the Decatur Book Festival and in the trenches of life, that's the way it is. Pride of intellect is strong.

And what is it that pride goes before?