It’s been a hectic week so far. It hasn’t been made any better by a new item thrown in the mix. Sunday I am preaching on faith and reason, religion and science, etc…. To make sure I was authentic I decided to enter into the noisy rainforest of Amazon’s discussion boards. It didn’t take long to find a site discussing faith and science. The thread was “Who made God?,” but the thousands of posts following ventured well into the dense debates of religion, physics, biblical integrity, and a general discussion of how we know what we know. Of course there was a lot of name calling and slander, kinda of like chimps throwing stuff from the canopy, but there was also a lot of good thoughtful exchange of ideas.
Here’s the question and dilemna I keep running into, however. How do I know the person claiming they know knows anything? Sure, after a dozen posts back and forth I’ve got an idea. Likewise, if they are discussing the New Testament manuscripts, since that’s my home field, I know pretty quick. But, what about the guy discussing Quantum Physics? He could be Stephen Hawking’s gradaute assistance or his intellectual prowess may have topped out at the local New Age bookstore… I just don’t know. It is a dilemna. Everytime I see a new person entering the discussion I have running in the back of my head Brad Paisley’s great hit declaring, “I get so much cooler online.”
Wrestling through all this has made me reflect on revelation. Why did God give the miraculous signs? Hebrews 2:2 says they were given to verify the credentials of the speaker. And what about the incarnation of Jesus? Why did He come to reveal God (Heb. 1:1-3)? Could He not have just wrote another letter and explained it? Maybe He could have, but we would still have nagging questions about who was on the other end of this communication. We would know what He posted, but we couldn’t really know Him. Taking on flesh and becoming one of us, among us, lets us know who He really is. Just a thought.
**The picture doesn’t add much, except to remind us that we all have this innate ability to think, at least for a critical moment, that really bad ideas make sense.
