Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.”

2 Peter, chapter 3, verse 4, New International Version

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re very glad to be with you today as we continue the series we started a few weeks ago on Anchored by Truth. We are calling this series “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know.” In the studio today we have RD Fierro. RD is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. So far we have covered 5 of the 10 facts and we have done that over 6 episodes. RD, let’s do a quick review of the first 5 facts and maybe take a quick look at where we are and where we’re going.

RD: Well, I would also like to say hello to all the listeners joining us here today. I do think it is a good idea for us to do a status check at this point because I think that this is one of the most important series that we’ve ever done on Anchored by Truth.

VK: Why is that?

RD: Well, to say our society is in a mess today probably a bit of an understatement. I don’t want to spend too much time listing the litany of social and cultural issues that are afflicting us because they are apparent and well known. But one of my observations has been for a long time is that while we normally talk about economic problems, social problems, health problems, political problems, etc. – all of those really stem from a spiritual problem. And the heart of that spiritual problem is people turning away from the only source of truth and light that can make a difference in the human heart – the Bible. Over the last 75 years or more there has been a steady decline in the United States and in just about all western cultures in Biblical literacy. Most surveys tell us that far less than 10% of Americans have any real depth of knowledge about the Bible.

VK: And you believe that one reason for that is that today in America and the west most people have come to regard the Bible as either being only partially true at best and outright myth and fairy tale at worst? And part of what has caused this profound doubt is the counter Biblical narratives that have arisen over the last 150 plus years. These counter Biblical narratives have become so deeply embedded in our society that the counter narratives hold much greater sway over our population than the transcendent truth of the Bible. And so far we have talked about an unholy trinity of those narratives: Deep Time, uniformitarianism, and evolution. Geological uniformitarianism played key role in convincing people like Charles Darwin that the earth was millions or billions of years old. This, in turn, allowed Darwin that to extend those uniformitarian ideas beyond geology to biology which turned into the General Theory of Evolution. So, those three ideas became instrumental in creating widespread doubt or indifference to the Scripture.

RD: We pointed out last time that the most prominent atheist of the last 3 or 4 decades is Richard Dawkins. Lest anyone think that this dark, despotic chain of decline …

VK: Uh, that’s easy for you to say … dark, despotic chain of decline …

RD: … not really. Just so that listeners don’t think I’m being unduly melodramatic even Richard Dawkins has connected Darwin and a lack of faith in God – what I am calling a dark, despotic chain of decline. Dawkins has written that “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In other words Dawkins admits that without Darwin, or at least his ideas, someone who wanted to be an atheist was continually confronted with some very troubling question that his belief system couldn’t answer. Without God where did everything come from? Without God who created life? Without God who made a creature so different from all of the other creatures we see about us on the earth?

VK: The Bible clearly tells us that “God created the heavens and earth.” The Bible tells us that God created man in His image. And the Bible describes God’s original creative activity as taking place thousands of years ago – not millions or billions. So, to replace God as being necessary to the world as we know it, these counter narratives had to be created, circulated, and adopted. And they were … so successfully, that if anyone dares suggest that the earth is only thousands of years old they are immediately attacked or ridiculed. And you think that this “10 Facts” series is important because it represents the launching point for knocking that unholy trinity of dark, despotic narratives off of their high, exalted perch.

RD: Exactly. Right now most of our attention gets focused on what I call secondary narratives. The narratives we notice, such as the prominent social and political narratives, are secondary ones - the acceptability of abortion or same sex marriage, the difference between "green" energy and fossil fuels, increased government control and regulation over our daily lives, etc. The secondary ones emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones. Primary narratives are the overarching paradigms so embedded in the culture that they are not even noticed any more. As we said last time, these primary narratives are like the framed art prints on your wall. Initially you see them and think about them, but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only notice them when a visitor comes in and makes a comment about them. Deep time, evolution, and uniformitarianism - among others - are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them.

VK: So – as we mentioned last time - briefly put Deep Time, along with its close cousin the Big Bang, does away with the need for God as Creator of the universe. The General Theory of Evolution does away with the need for God as the Author of life. Biological uniformitarianism provides the mechanism we need to explain the amazing biodiversity around us and does away with God as Sustainer and Multiplier. And geological uniformitarianism explains why the earth’s surface looks the way it does. And, in doing so, geological uniformitarianism does away with God as the Administrator of justice. The big lesson that came out of the Genesis flood is that if you practice evil continually God will wipe you off the face of the earth. That’s a pretty potent lesson in how seriously God takes sin. The sum of these parts is that we have now done away with any need to acknowledge God since we can explain the universe, life, and the surface of the earth without Him. And … since we've done away with God we now create our own standards for what constitutes "personhood," family, man's dominion over the earth, etc.

RD: Right. So, these primary so-called scientific narratives give rise to another primary moral or ethical narrative that I want to spend some time on today – a narrative that is sometimes phrased homo mensura.

VK: According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary homo mensura [MEN-SUR-AH] is a doctrine first propounded by the Greek philosopher Protagoras which holds that humankind is the measure of all things. It is sometimes simply stated “as man is the measure.” This means that everything is relative to human apprehension and evaluation, and that there is no objective truth. We’ve talked before on Anchored by Truth that we live in a post-modernistic world that not only denies that we can know absolute truth but also that it even exists.

RD: Right. Nature abhors a vacuum. Once we did away with God we had to have something to fill the void so man stepped up and stepped in. So, as you’ve already noted this freed man up to begin to redefine any of the transcendent standards that God had established for man. Man felt free to do away with the Ten Commandments because supposedly science had done away with the Being who sent the commandments down the mountain.

VK: The problem is, of course, we didn't do away with God or His truth. And the house built on intellectual sand falls when the river of reality hits it. And we are seeing all around us the reality of what happens with man starts to see himself as, in fact, being the only measure by which all standards should be established or moral or ethical judgments be made.

RD: There’s an old saying that “ideas have consequences.” We can now see the consequences these primary narratives have on communities and societies and I think many people are waking up to the fact that they don’t like these consequences. But … and this a big but … these primary narratives are so deeply embedded within our culture we have moved past the point where we can simply dismiss them out of hand. It’s no longer enough just to say, as the old bumper sticker used to read, “The Bible says it. I believe it. End of discussion.” That may be true for many people. They do believe the Bible and that’s great. But when you simply proclaim but fail to “explain” you have given the other person no reason they should accept your proclamation.

VK: And even Jesus modeled this approach in providing a witness to the watching world. In the Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 11 Jesus said, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. If not, believe because of the things I do.” That’s from the Good News Translation.

RD: Right. The predominant result of the primary narratives supposedly coming from science – Deep Time, evolution, uniformitarianism - was to get rid of a perceived need for God. This gave rise to a primary narrative that man was now the highest and only judge for how life was to be lived, how the universe was to be explained, and how the affairs of man were to be governed. So, if we are going to get back to a world in which God’s transcendent truth supplants homo mensura we can’t just dispute the child we must begin to engage the false parent.

VK: So in this “10 Facts” series we are challenging the so-called truth of those primary narratives that we supposedly get from science? And we’ve gone through 5 of the 10 facts so far?

RD: Right. But rather than moving on to fact 6 today I want to take a little time and give a broader overview of what we are trying to accomplish. With the first 5 of our “10 facts” we have challenged the prevailing view of what might be termed natural history. With the next 5 facts I want to shift from talking just about natural history to talking about human history. I specifically want to talk about how what we know about human history is not only consistent with the Bible but how certain events within human history actually help confirm the Bible’s supernatural origin.

VK: We have often said on Anchored by Truth that any book that claims to be the word of God must possess at least attributes. First, the book must be consistent with what we know from making observations about the world around us. And I’ll add that we’re not just talking about observations of the physical universe but also what we know about the history that has preceded us – both natural history and human history. Second, that book would have to give evidence of a supernatural point of origin. These criteria are important. You obviously wouldn’t want to trust a book claiming to come from God that is manifestly inconsistent with observations you can easily make. Why trust a book’s depiction of heaven if you can easily verify it can’t even accurately tell you about earth? Why trust a prophecy about the future if what that book tells you about the past is inaccurate?

RD: Yes. So, with our first 5 facts we demonstrated that the natural history related by the Bible is reliable. In saying this we are not trying to turn the Bible into a history or a science textbook. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, the principle purpose of the Bible is “primarily teach what we are to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of us.” In other words, the purpose of the Bible is to tell us about God and to transmit God’s expectations for us to us. But as the Bible accomplished its purpose it has to necessarily relate observations about the world and the people upon whom it reports. If those observations weren’t accurate we would have valid reasons for not accepting the reliability of the Bible.

VK: And, notwithstanding man’s attempts to dispute with the Bible, the observations the Bible reports about natural history are accurate when we are honest with the science and honest with the Bible’s literary constructs. The Bible does contain poetry, allegory, and even romantic poetry. No responsible Bible interpreter tries to construe non-historical sections literally. But one section of the Bible that does contain history is very often maligned. That is the opening chapters of Genesis. The opening chapters of Genesis contain a significant amount of material about natural history. And the point of our first 5 facts was to demonstrate that contrary to current attempt to defame that history, the natural history in the opening chapters of Genesis remains stubbornly accurate.

RD: The first fact that we discussed was that every Christian needs to know is that science confirms that the universe and earth are thousands of years old, not millions or billions of years old. This confirms the age of the earth we can calculate from the genealogies in Genesis. The second fact we covered was that the complexity of life makes it impossible for life to have arisen as a result of the random collision of atoms and molecules – even if you could explain the existence of the atoms and molecules to begin with. This confirms the Bible’s record of God creating all life beginning on day 3 of the creation week. Fact number 3 is that there is solid scientific evidence that the tallest mountains on earth were underwater at one time. This confirms the account of a worldwide flood in chapters 6 through 8 of Genesis.

VK: The 4th fact we discussed is that the fossil record does not support any kind of gradual development of the many different types of plants and animals we see on earth. Instead, life on earth is fundamentally discontinuous at both a biochemical level as well as at the level of visible morphology. The first fossils we see in the rocks show plants and animals fully formed and functional and even those phyla that are supposedly hundreds of millions of years old so closely resemble their modern counterparts they are easily recognized. The 5th fact we talked about is that the dating methods that are used to assign dates to rocks or fossils all depend on assumptions that are unproved and unprovable. Moreover, those methods have been shown to dramatically misdate certain specimens when we know when a particular sample of rock was formed by volcanic eruption.

RD: Right. So, in our first 5 facts we have concentrated on showing that the natural history related by the Bible is entirely reasonable when compared with empirical observations of the world we live on. We now want to turn out attention to showing that Bible is equally reliable when it comes to the facts that it chooses to relate about human history.

VK: Can you give us a preview of what we will be talking about?

RD: Well, I don’t want to give away too much right now but let me just touch on one subject that will be relevant - geography. Just about every good study Bible has one or more maps as a part of it.

VK: I think most people know that.

RD: I think they do too. I think they take them for granted. But in taking them for granted what they are unconsciously doing is acknowledging the reliability of the underlying historical text. Remember, that those maps are being produced by modern users of the Bible. None of the Bible writers created maps and inserted them into their scroll, clay tablet, or codex. It’s not that they couldn’t have. Maps have been around for thousands of years. But that wasn’t their purpose. They were simply preparing records or accounts initially for the Jewish nation. But in the course of making their record they described names, dates, and places. Now calendar systems have changed down through history. So, we have to “translate” their dates into the Gregorian calendar that we use today. And names have a certain amount of variation. The same man might be called Richard, Rick, or Dick and no one in our society would think anything about it. The same thing was true in ancient times. King Uzziah was also known as King Azariah.

VK: But geographic places don’t change. That doesn’t mean that the boundaries of a particular kingdom or nation won’t vary over time. The United States started out as 13 colonies but today is 50 different states. But it is distinctly the same nation. But even while the nation is changing New York City is still in the same place today as it was when the Dutch first bartered for the right to the property. But New York City was originally called New Amsterdam. The name was changed in honor of the Duke of York following the British acquisition of it from the Dutch. And that is a phenomenon that we also see in the Bible. Name of places will change although the place is obviously still in the same geographic location.

RD: Right. And the fact that we can know with a high degree of confidence what places those ancient names applied to means that modern scholars can construct accurate maps. But they couldn’t do that if the ancient Bible texts were unreliable. This reliability and accuracy distinguished the Bible from many other books that claim to be the word of God.

VK: I see what you’re saying. Biblical scholars often have discussions about the exact route that the Israelites took when they left Egypt. There are often 3 possible routes that are discussed: the Northern Coastal route, the Bitter Lakes route, or the Suez route. But the fact that they can discuss various possibilities at all means that the description of the route in the book of Exodus is accurate enough that it corresponds to the known geography of that region. It corresponds well enough that there are multiple possibilities that could satisfy the described path. I suppose people might say that since we can’t identify the exact route that casts doubt on the accuracy of the text.

RD: But that makes as much sense as a friend asking how you went from Macon, Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee and wondering whether you went straight through Atlanta or took the beltway around it. You reply you don’t know because you were asleep and someone else was driving. Your friend wouldn’t say that you couldn’t have made the trip because you weren’t sure which route you took. The Bible record is proven to be true and accurate regardless of which of those 3 possibilities, or another one, is true. The point is that the Bible texts are accurate enough to permit scholars to identify the location of Bible events on modern maps. This, then, is a testimony to the accuracy of the text that we have received.

VK: So, one of the points that we will be making in the next 5 facts that we will be covering is that we can have confidence in the reliability and accuracy of the Bible’s text. And that is true of both the Old and the New Testaments. The book of Exodus which is in the Old Testament is accurate when it relates information pertaining to the geography of modern day Israel and Egypt. The book of Acts is equally accurate when it relates information pertaining to the Roman Empire of the 1st century AD. The books of Exodus and Acts are separated by approximately 1,500 years in terms of their time of preparation. But both books display the concern of the inspired Bible writers for accuracy and fidelity.

RD: Right. So, this example helps reinforce the fact that the Bible is accurate when it relates human history as well as natural history. And that’s a point we want to reinforce in the next 5 facts. But in our next 5 facts we are also going to introduce a couple of facts that demonstrate that the Bible also has a supernatural point of origin.

VK: Many, many writers would be competent at relating history. There is an abundance of ancient historians and while their reliability varies there are still many of them who prepared very accurate accounts of certain historical events or people. But the Bible contains evidence that its writers weren’t just working with their human gifts as impressive as some might have been. The Bible contains evidence that there was a supernatural Presence superintending and inspiring the records they were preparing. When God directed the individual writers to pick up their pen or stylus He provided them information that would have been impossible for them to discern unless He was choosing to give them supernatural insights.

RD: The point of this series and today’s discussion is to help Christians guard against as the Apostle Paul put it “Satan’s wiles.” Ever since the Garden of Eden Satan has used the same strategy. First Satan casts doubt on God’s goodness. Then He denies God’s truth. The next he elevates the self-importance of man. Finally, he establishes a replacement for God’s truth in the mind and heart of men. That’s what we see with these primary narratives we’ve been talking about. The Bible tells us the earth is thousands of years old. But then someone got the idea that the topographic features of the earth needed millions of years to form. Then that idea was extended beyond geology to biology. Then we invented dating mechanisms based on unprovable assumptions but asserted that anyone who doubted them must be doubting science. Then after God was deemed no longer necessary all that was left was to decide that man was the measure of all things.

VK: As you said it’s a dark, despotic chain of decline and it’s been going on for a long time. But in the 150 years since uniformitarian ideas began to seize popular culture the decline has accelerated and one of those primary narratives has become that science has proven that our world and universe can exist just fine without God. But when we start taking a hard look at the available evidence our brains confirm what our hearts already know – there is no coherent explanation for the universe that doesn’t include God. This sounds like a great time to go to the Lord in prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer that we and our friends and neighbors would set aside all of the narratives that our culture pushes and instead return to the inerrant, infallible, and inspired worship of the One True God.

---- PRAYER FOR RESTORATION OF THE WORSHIP OF THE ONE TRUE GOD

VK: Before we close we’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes in this series or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”

(Opening Bible Quote from the New International Version)

2 Peter, chapter 3, verse 4, New International Version

Immeasurable Age - creation.com

Radio-dating in Rubble - creation.com

Dinosaur footprint treasure trove found in Britain - creation.com

The Bright Angel Trail trackways - creation.com

Flat gaps - creation.com

Dinosaur and mammal tracks found together - creation.com

Genesis in clay - creation.com

New archaeological find affirms Old Testament historicity - creation.com

Debunking the Documentary Hypothesis - creation.com

Noahs Flood - creation.com

Satan’s Strategy

• Cast doubt on God’s goodness

• Deny God’s truth

• Elevate self-importance

• Establish a replacement in the mind and heart for God’s truth

Cultural Narratives

One way to look at narratives is that there are primary and secondary narratives that circulate in our culture. The primary narratives are so embedded in our culture that they are not even noticed any more. They are like the framed prints on your wall. Initially you see them but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only know they are there when a visitor comes in and remarks about them.

Deep time, evolution, uniformitarianism, and the equality of all religious viewpoints are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them. The narratives we notice (such as the prominent social and political narratives) are secondary ones - the acceptability of abortion, same sex marriage, the difference between "green" energy and fossil fuels, "public" education, increased government control and regulation, etc. The secondary ones emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones.

• The Big Bang/deep time does away with the need for God as Creator.

• Evolution does away with the need for God as the Author of life.

• Uniformitarianism does away God as the Administrator of justice (become evil continually and God will wipe you off the face of the earth).

Since we've done away with God we now create our own standards for what constitutes "personhood," family, man's dominion over the earth, etc.

The problem is, of course, we didn't do away with God or His truth.

And the house built on intellectual sand falls when the river of reality hits it.

So, we will proclaim the truth to try to save some and maybe by God's grace many or most. People who doubt the inerrancy of scripture never think about any of this but they should.

The line from that which they doubt the Word to a life they don't want to live is very straight. The line grows even more straight as it uncoils - just like the hangman's rope.