Foundations

So, I am new to blogging and I want to start out by describing my worldview. Maybe it is not terribly important to do this, but I do what to have a post up that describes, in a little detail, what I believe. I hope that may give a context in which enything else I say may be understood.
My worldview, the set of ideas and concepts that I hold to be true which then determine how I interpret the world around me, is very important to me and I try to always remain conscience of what my worldview is. When discussing a topic with someone else, or reading material written by someone else, I also try to figure out what their worldview is, to see what kind of assumptions they are making and how that affects their conclusions. Because worldviews are so important to me, I want to begin by spelling mine out now, so that anyone who reads this may know where I am coming from.

First and foremost, I believe that the Bible is the true, inerrant Word of the living God, who is the great I AM, and the Creator of all things. I believe that God is the Trinity: three persons in one Being. These persons of the Godhead are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God the Son came to earth as a man. As a man, He was named Jesus, yet despite being fully man, He was also fully God. Jesus’ purpose on earth was to die for His people’s sins so that they may be reconciled to God. To accomplish this, Jesus lead a perfect, sinless life, died on the cross in place of His people, and rose again on the third day. Now He sits at the right hand of God (God the Father).

I guess I could sum up the previous paragraph simply by saying that I am a Christian. I wanted to go through some length to explain all that though because the term Christian can mean different things to different people. There are other tenants of my worldview that I want to explain, but from this point on, everything else flows out of the set of beliefs I explained in the previous paragraph.

I am Biblical creationist. This means that I accept the creation account in Genesis to be true. I believe that God created the world in six literal, 24 hour days, that time, space, and matter first came into being at the moment of creation and that immediately after that first moment, God began His six days of creation. I believe that the world is only about 6,000 years old. I reject the idea that any kind of biological evolution is possible. I believe that God created all organisms as kinds and that it is impossible for one kind of organisms to transform into a different kind. However, the gene pool of a kind is very large and it is possible for this gene pool to be restricted or shuffled about so that a population of organisms can change through processes such as natural selection, but how and to what extent they may change is restricted by the gene pool of the kind they belong to. I also accept as fact the occurrence of a worldwide deluge known as Noah’s Flood, and I believe that Noah’s Flood is responsible for much of the geology in the world today.

I believe that the Bible is the standard for all morality. God sets the standard in all matter of right, wrong, and justice. This means that right and wrong are not determined by whether someone gets hurt or not. Rather, right and wrong are standards set by God and God alone. Thus, theft is wrong not because one person has deprived another of personal property, rather, theft is wrong because it breaks rules set by God (the most familiar being the eight commandment). This does not mean that we can never speak of crimes like theft in terms of depriving another person of property: this is a legitimate way to discuss theft and how it affects civil societies. However, theft is ultimately wrong because God had declared it to be so, not because a society has come together and decided that it is good to make theft a crime.

I believe that rules for all human activities, including societies and civil governments, are determined by God and are put forth in the Bible. I believe that all governments, self government, family government, Church government, and civil government, are subject to God and as such, they all must comply with His will. Passages like Romans 13 show that civil governments are to be subject to God, passages like Ephesians 6 show that family governments are to be subject to God, books like I and II Timothy give instructions to Church governments, and rules for self government are evident throughout the Bible. Even though these four governments are all subject to God, they have different spheres of authority. This means that there is a kind of separation of church and state (the Church can judge men in matters of sin, the state can judge men in matters of crime), but since they are both subject to God, the Bible is the ultimate authority for both.

I believe that a model for all civil governments can be found in the laws given to the nation of Israel as described in the Old Testament. Some laws given to Israel are ceremonial, such as dietary laws and laws for sacrifices. These laws have no effect on Christians today since Christ is our mediator with God so that now we can commune with God directly. The civil laws found in the Old Testament, I believe, still have effect today. They not only tell us what things should be considered as crimes to be dealt with by civil governments (things like murder, theft, adultery, to name a few) and what the punishments should be. I do not believe that all of the civil laws given to Israel should be directly applied to countries today, but they should be a model on which we make our laws.

This is a summary of my worldview. This, then, is the bias I will use whenever I approach a topic. So I would have to admit that I am not an unbiased observer of the world. But then again, I would challenge anyone who claims to be an unbiased observer: are you truly bringing no ideas to a topic? Is your mind truly empty when you approach a new subject? I don’t believe that there is such a thing as an unbiased observer. I believe that the best we can get are observers who are aware of their biases.