FOUNDATIONS

1. FOUNDATIONS Humanity & The Flood

2. Review • Kalam Cosmological Argument • Genesis 1 • Created Time and Space • Rational Communication • Standard of Good and Bad • Intrinsic Worth in God’s Image • Relationship within Unity • Continuity between the Creation and the Creator • Questions about traditional Big Bang Theory

3. Humanity There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is man. C.S. Lewis

4. Humanity • Consciousness or Rational Thought • Morality

5. Consciousness • We have the ability to think rationally because a Supreme Being gave us that ability. • We have the ability to think rationally because rational thought evolved in nature. • We do not have the ability to think rationally. Each thought is just the result of a long chain of chemical reactions that are beyond our control.

6. Perspective #2:Evolving Thought • Thinking, or any act of the will, is an act on or against nature • Thinking coming out of nature means nature produces something that transcends itself

7. Perspective #3:Illusory Thought “All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of our reasoning…if certainty is merely a feeling in our minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them – if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work – then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.”

8. Perspective #3:Illusory Thought “Anything which professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known, is really a theory that there is not reasoning. But this, as it seems to me, is what Naturalism is bound to do. It offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior; but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.” C.S. Lewis

9. Humanity • Consciousness or Rational Thought • Morality

10. Morality “We have come to this place in our Western culture because man sees himself as beginning from the impersonal, from the energy particle and nothing else. We are left with only statistical ethics, and in that setting, there is simply no such thing as morals.” Francis Schaeffer

11. Morality “Nobody has ever discovered a way of having real ‘morals’ without a moral absolute. If there is no moral absolute, we are left with hedonism (doing what I like) or some form of social contract theory (what is best for society as a whole is right). However, neither of these alternatives corresponds to the moral notions that men have. Talk to people long enough and deeply enough, and you will find that they consider some things are really right and some things are really wrong.” Francis Schaeffer

12. Morality “Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.” C.S. Lewis

13. Objections • Euthyphro Dilemma: Is something good because God says it is good, or does God say it is good because it is good? • Morality is possible without belief in God • Morality as a social contract theory

14. Genesis 2-3 • Mythical elements? • We are abnormal now • The origination of death

15. Evolution • The lack of an adequate mechanism for evolution • The need for multiple parts of complex features to develop simultaneously • The lack of confirmation in the fossil record • The degradation of the human genome

16. Review • First Cause • Thought • Morality

17. A World that Requires Him Romans 1:18-25 18For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

18. A World that Requires Him 21For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

19. The Nature of God “…that a personal Creator of the universe exists, who is uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginably powerful. This, as Thomas Aquina was wont to remark, is what everybody means by ‘God.’” William Lane Craig

20. Genesis 6-8 • God grieves • Man’s inclination towards evil • God’s justice and judgment

21. Flood Evidence • Alternative dating methods • Salt in the ocean • Helium in the atmosphere • Carbon-14 in coal • Fossil Record • Marine life everywhere • Rapid fossilization • Flood stories everywhere