Attempts to answer these questions are seen from the earliest recorded history — the Chaldean Empire, and then the Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman Empires.  In modern courses of study, we find the wisdom of the Greek philosophers – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others – because they took the powers of human reason to a zenith in their efforts to answer these fundamental questions of life.  How can we “know that we know”? At the root of it, the quest for authority was a search for personal identity.  Is there a God out there who defines us, or are we alone in the universe with the burden of defining ourselves?  Is “right and wrong” absolute, or as fickle as personal opinion?  The philosophers concluded that there is a God (first cause), but they denied themselves the possibility of accurately knowing God by their determination to define Him.  The result was that their pursuit of truth could never rise higher than personal OPINION.  Human reason is not capable of defining God.  In order to define God, one would have to be God.  Only God is capable of defining Himself – hence, the necessity of REVELATION.  God must come to man and define Himself.  The necessity for this is found in the words of the apostle Paul to the Romans:

Paul was saying that we do not have the burden of ascending into the heavens to bring God down by the power of human reason or going beyond the grave and coming back in order to know what is there.  The Lord Jesus did both.  Truth is nigh.  Truth is as close as the Word preached!

Pilate was educated in Greek thought.  He was thoroughly familiar with the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans and Stoics.  The significance of Pilate’s question in the court trial of the Lord Jesus — “What is truth?” — reveals the utter failure of the philosophers to satisfy the desire to know without possibility of being wrong.  Christ satisfied this requirement by both inspiring truth through infallible revelation and by the promise of the preservation of what had been PURELY revealed.

There are solemn warnings against adding or taking away from God’s purely revealed Word all throughout scripture. One example is as follows:

The Lord also assumed the burden of backing up His claims with WORKS that proved his identity. If a man claims to be the truth, to be God incarnate, then He must provide evidence for the same. This is why the Lord said the following:

The most significant event in the course of human history is the record that God gave of his Son.  The events surrounding the life of the Lord Jesus Christ were of such a nature that the witnesses of those events were changed forever.  The impact of the events and witnesses profoundly affect us some 2000 years later.  Our calendar is like a tape measure with both ends having equal reality.  We may not be able to see the people and events of 2000 years ago, but we know that the year 2009 could not exist without the generation of 2000 years ago having equal reality.

If a man appears on the scene claiming to be God, then he must be able to back up his claims. The claims of Christ were backed “by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3).  The Lord performed literally thousands of miracles.  The apostle John said, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.” (John 21:25)

Note these verses:

The notion that Christianity is not based on real world evidence is a myth.  It is imperative that this generation understand the nature of the Christian faith.  Faith in any person or event that does not readily connect with the world of existing things and facts that we know and experience must be regarded with suspicion.  God does not treat us as gullible fools who believe any and everything we are told.  Infallible proofs undergirded His claims.  His miracles were not meant to impress people.  The miracles of Scripture were absolutely necessary to establish His claims of deity.  Only God could do what He did.  The author of time compelled the world to celebrate the fact by our current calendar, which provides eternity past and future with HIMSELF.

Secular humanism began, not in the modern era, but during the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance.  There are many who have contributed to this movement.  This view that emerged ignored the spiritual dimension since man doesn’t possess the wherewithal to investigate the invisible.  Man is capable of investigating the world of existing things, however, and to know, based on human experience by way of the senses.  With this shift away from the spiritual dimension, the focus now being upon the physical dimension, the roots of secular humanism today run deep.

Satan’s strategy seeks to divide what God has united, often introducing opposites to truth.  For instance, God never intended for the spiritual and physical dimensions to be divided into relationships exclusive from each other.  The Lord obviously intended for the two dimensions to be so infused that sense could not be made out of one without the other.  The biological evolutionist is “ever learning” how to explain origins, because he ignores or denies the possibility of an invisible dimension.  Evidence for evolution cannot be — and never has been — found.  God created!  It is a logical impossibility to find evidence for a lie.  Only truth has evidence.  The only way a person can explain the physical dimension is to see the harmony between the two dimensions.  Design cannot come from time and chance.  A “Big Bang” has never been observed to create anything other than disorder.  The world did not come about as a result of a “Big Bang,” but by the power of the all-wise, omniscient God.

It is perfectly logical that UNSEEN causes can have EVIDENCE that can be seen.  Our court system thrives on this very principle.  Neither the judge nor the jury in a courtroom arrive at conclusions based upon what they have seen.  The power of logic, as it relates to evidence that can be seen, is sufficient in many cases to sentence a person to death.  Courts rule by faith in causes not seen.  Such faith, however, has real world evidence inseparably linked to it.  Christianity is based upon this same logic, as found in Romans 1:20.

Any belief system that does not have a physical or manifest side cannot ultimately be known to be true.  For this reason, Christ must prove His claims of deity by works of deity, hence, the miracles.  If the world could not contain the books that could be written of all that Christ did, then that is a lot of evidence!

In like manner, Nietzsche’s belief that there is no God must beg for evidence to support the idea of design without a personal maker.  Darwin seemed to provide the evidence with his evolutionary theory that a “Big Bang,” coupled with time and chance, stretched out over millions of years, could explain the complex design observed in the world.  The only problem with the theory is the total absence of evidence.  The known laws of science fly in the face of evolutionary claims.  Biogenesis, the law of non contradiction, the First and Second laws of Thermodynamics, and the Law of Irreducible Complexity preclude the possibility of evolution.  In addition to the known laws of science, there is the problem of scientific research itself.  There is nothing to be found in geological or archeological research that supports the theory of evolution.  Observation points toward the creation model of explanation.  Evolution is not science.  Evolution is a faith about man, and the world is struggling to find one scintilla of evidence for the position.  Many of the evolutionists’ discoveries of evidence have proven to be fraudulent, often connected to the need to continue the flow of grant monies to support the research. Success in “proving” a theory and the flow of grant monies go hand in hand.  If evidence cannot be found, then there is motivation to manufacture it.  Darwin, nevertheless, has been embraced by many in certain intellectual circles.

A person’s behavior is determined by what he believes to be true.  This is a tremendously important point to understand.  If a person believes there is no God, then morality can only be determined by the self, the democratic majority, or a dictator.  The problem with the self being the determiner of morality is that people do not agree concerning right and wrong.  Some believe that sex outside marriage is fine as long as it is consensual.  Others obviously believe that rape is right for them.  Others believe that robbery is in their best interest.  Hitler believed that Jews should be destroyed.  When there is no God, then you have a situation like the one that existed in Israel in the days of the Judges.

The 60’s generation followed the logic of Nietzsche, and, later, Sartre’s existentialist philosophy that the only reality is existence itself.  There is no God, they said.  Man is the measure of all things.  There are no absolutes.  Morality is fluid and changes with an ever-evolving universe and man.  The positive side of this world view was only temporary in that the individual was free to be his own god.  The ‘60s existentialist philosophy gave rise to a generation of “free spirits” that had no idea of the bondage they were creating for themselves and society.  As a Russian scientist once said concerning the prospect of there not being a God (paraphrase), by rejecting God, we find ourselves hurtling through space on a little speck called planet earth, at some 66,000 miles per hour, with no one in charge.  The Russian philosopher Dostoyevsky concluded the same fear as he embraced the atheistic view in his book The Brothers Karamazov.  In a universe where there is no God, “everything is permitted, even cannibalism.”

In time, many would discover that this new-found freedom was, in reality, a philosophy of despair.  Life had no real point beyond the present.  Identity became a huge problem, and for many, still is.  To this very day, young people mark themselves with tattoos and piercings in a desperate attempt to attract attention to themselves.  There is a competition over conspicuousness as empty souls attempt to obtain some recognition, some personal significance, some meaning, some purpose in life.

Darwinian biological evolutionism is a philosophy of despair.  It is a philosophy that provides no hope beyond the gratification of a moment’s pleasure, as we await an inevitable death.  In a short while, we will all be a memory — and eventually remembered by no one forever.  The personal self ceases to exist, and all that our lives may have involved serves no real point.  According to the second law of Thermodynamics, which is a law of entropy or decay, the universe is running down.  All systems are gradually tending toward disorder and eventually stagnation.  All life as we know it will eventually end.  Beyond planet earth, personality cannot be found to exist.

When a person is educated into this view of life, a kind of schizophrenia begins to take hold and nothing really makes sense.  Right and wrong no longer have meaning to those who are honest enough to follow the logic.  Those who still cling to some form of morality are only holding on to morality stolen from Christianity, because they cannot handle the emptiness and meaninglessness of evolutionism, where the only ethic is “survival of the fittest.”

The ‘60s created a generation of monsters capable of doing anything, while considering it moral.  Morality became so unbridled and obscured that violence for many became a way of life.  The Columbine shootings (1999), by the two youths, Klebold and Harris, were not merely the actions of two deranged kids who had lost their minds.  These boys were educated into this madness by an educational system that literally ripped the basis for a moral conscience out of them.  They did not believe life had a point.  They had been taught Darwinian evolutionism as truth by their school system.  They followed the logic and moral implications of Darwin’s view more honestly than most professing Christians follow their own beliefs.

When they came to the end of this “matured faith,” they were angry with the ugliness they discovered in their own existence.  They exploded with revenge at the world and welcomed suicide as the only escape.  One of the boys was found wearing a T-shirt with the words “Natural Selection” written on it.  What an appropriate epitaph!  As the willingly ignorant among evolutionary educators looked on, suppression and outright denial of the dangers of this world-view became their only refuge from personal responsibility for what had taken place.  Currently, one out of every four women who attend a NC State University will be sexually assaulted before she graduates (State statistics).  A woman is raped, in NC, every 6 minutes.  We have created a violent society via the educational system of America, which has outlawed the God of the Bible.  Darwin has been chosen as the moral guide, and when the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the ditch.