Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

In the beginning God …

• Genesis 1:1 (at least the first four words)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

• John 1:1-5

On the night before I wrote this, really writing it in my mind when I heard the conversation, I had been watching my favorite panel discussion, four pastors and a moderator taking on Hard Questions that had been sent in from viewers.  I was getting ready for bed, the usual taking of medicine, turning off the ice maker, turning off the lights, but I had not turned off the television.

The television show that followed is heart-warming, enlightening and depressing at the same time.  A young man goes on a road trip for Truth.  The name of the show is part of that statement. It is heart-warming in that he dispels the modern secular view, which also makes the show enlightening, but he goes on to college campuses and interviews the person on the street, so to speak.  Most deny that there is any truth at all.  But some who claim to be Christians cannot distinguish between Genesis and Revelation.  They cannot define any word used to describe the Christianity that they say they follow.  Thus, intensely depressing.

In this latest episode, he interviewed a California university theology professor, part of the imparting knowledge before interviewing those on the street who will soon have college degrees with no “knowledge” at all.  This theologian was asked whether it was irrational to believe in God, in a higher being that created the universe.  The theologian dismissed that question by stating something different, before getting around to his answer.  He said that it is irrational to believe in a Big Bang, an effect that has no cause.  It is irrational to believe that all this universe came into being by mere chance.  It is irrational to believe that life just happened.  It is irrational to believe that intelligence just developed on its own.  But with a tiny rational step, with all this evidence that there is something greater than us out there, we can believe that a God outside time and space created all things in this universe, including life itself.  It is rational to believe in the “Uncaused Cause.”

I was tired.  I had seen enough episodes to know that the young man was about to leave the theologian’s office and ask dumb students what they thought of what the theologian told him.  The young man would be treated with venom, hatred, and ignorance.  I had heard the good part and the “uncaused cause” had my motors running.

God is the only thing who has no cause.  He is eternity within Himself and Jesus was and is a person within Him.  With the Holy Spirit, three persons in one being.  Notice that John says that within the “Word” was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.  That is the source of our intelligence and indeed life itself.  When Genesis says that God breathed life into man, think about it.  God is a spirit, but Jesus is in a form like man.  Jesus could easily breathe life into man.  Jesus could walk with Adam in the garden.

Yet, if we negate any thought of God, why is the secular worldview introducing unanswerable questions?  The Big Bang had no cause.  Because if there was a cause, no one has an answer other than God or some being from another universe who “lit the pilot light’ or so to speak.  But then, who created that being?  As the theologian said, this leads to an endless regression of who created the pilot light lighter, and who created that other being, etc.  That, in itself, is logical fallacy.

We can say the same about creating life.  If you only have a soup of basic chemicals – please, creating a soup of basic chemicals requires the soup to be created, thus a creator, but let’s play along with this insanity – then there must be a cause to create the creation of life.  A lightning bolt?  Really?  Something that for all time only destroys, changed its nature millions of years ago?  Then we have the endless regression fallacy of how the lightning bolt changed its nature… 

But then, how do we gain intelligence?  Million years of making mistakes?  Rationally thinking, we would make enough mistakes, having no intelligence to begin with, none, that we would destroy mankind in the process of learning what not to do.  We kill enough people by accident today to draw that conclusion.  We just have enough intelligence within some folks to keep those mistakes as a minimum.

All these secular concepts in our modern world are either obviously fallacious, illogical fallacies, or they question the sanity of who dreamed them up.  The reason for them is to ignore the existence of God.  Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both had agendas to rid the world of the Christian worldview.  Other than Satan wanting to deceive whomever he can, who is behind this latest attack on the Truth?

When I was in school, we followed the philosophy of Aristotle, that every effect in this world had to have a cause.  I learned what Rene Descartes said that if something exists, there must be a cause for it to exist, at least within time and space.

Sir Isaac Newton, who was a strong believer in Jesus, wanted to explain God’s design.  For every object in motion, it tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.  An object at rest tends to stay at rest unless and outside force acts upon it.  No inanimate object simply starts to move on its own.  That would be a miracle, outside explanation from this world’s physical laws.  Yet the “science” of today is fraught with such miracles and they refuse to accept a higher power as a reason for their inconsistencies.

But an uncaused cause, God, would be such a miracle worker.  God always was.  There never was a time in which God did not exist.  He was not created.  He is the I AM.  Thus, God extends beyond time and space.  God extends beyond the physical laws to the supernatural.  In being the uncaused cause, God is by very nature all the miracles that we see in the world.  God is the only rational answer when there is an inconsistency in the explanation of these wild theories of today.  But why not, since God is the only answer, accept God’s answers that are provided in the Bible?  Once God becomes the only way to explain this universe, the Bible makes a lot more sense.

God, outside time and space, is the uncaused cause of everything else.  In the beginning God …  That alone, without finishing the sentence, states volumes.  God, who is outside time and space, created the heavens and the earth, and incidentally, time and space themselves.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.