By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible (Hebrews 11:3).

During the course of life most people develop some basic discerning tools in their intellectual arsenal that help them make sense of life. When people display these tools we normally say they have “common sense.” There are some things in life that just make sense when seen in a certain way. For instance, if you are walking in the woods and find a paper-clip lying on the ground, common sense will lead you to draw the conclusion that someone dropped it there by accident. No one would draw the conclusion that the paper clip just developed on its own in the woods. That scenario just does not make any sense. Common sense develops as a result of taking the time to observe the world around you. Simple observation leads one to understand that things like paper clips do not grow in the woods.

Having begun college a little latter than my peers, I spent time in the world developing my common sense before being introduced to idea’s that attempted to turn common sense upside down. I discovered that the longer I spent in the lecture hall the more I was encouraged to believe in idea’s as silly as believing that paper clips grow in nature. The longer I spent in school the more I began to see why our culture is in a crisis. As students we were constantly being bombarded with concepts that are absurd. Let me give you a couple jewels from just one book that was hailed as great thinking from the college I attended:

… social and political analysis which shows how such belief-systems have functioned to oppress and dehumanize will be very threatening, say, to philosophers intent on justifying the truth-claims that a good God can permit evil and suffering. But if, on the other hand, the aim of philosophy of religion is to enable becoming divine, becoming our sacred sexuate selves in relation to the earth and to one another, then mathematics and rigorous applications of theories of scientific epistemology are less likely to be helpful than are psychoanalytic theory, imaginative possibilities of human becoming drawn from literature and the arts, and careful and social political analysis.

’…naturally we ended up in Christianity by inventing a God such that it is he who comes’. But God isn’t the only one who comes. ‘It is the same for Saint Theresa – you only have to go and look at Bernini’s statue in Rome to understand immediately that she’s coming, there is no doubt about it. For that matter, the ‘mystical ejaculations’ are not restricted to the classics of the Christian tradition….

Slavery, conquest, and colonialization all appealed to God, the Great White Father.

That’s one book – and only a very small sampling from that very large book that I had to pay for. Let me say that again, I was required to buy this book. Your average college student must read many such books. Image reading this stuff for hundreds of pages! Spend several years reading this stuff and your mind begins to shrivel and morph from something that could make sense of the world into something that can’t think its way out of a paper bag. Unfortunately many people today can’t. Reading nonsense like this is akin to filling your mind with a toxic poison that inhibits true critical thinking. We send our young people off to be “educated” and this is what they are introduced to.

The absurdities are not limited to one or two areas, they can be found in every subject matter. And we wonder why many people today can’t make sense of the world. They have been introduced to ideas that have no correlation to reality. And those ideas have shaped the way they understand the world.

Some of the more salient ideas that are taught today:

• God is not necessary to understand the origins of life.

• God is not necessary for anything – unless you need an emotional crutch. If you do, have the good taste to keep Him to yourself. As Madeline O’Hare once quipped, “Keep the faith, but keep it to yourself.”

• We are the universe become itself – that’s actually a quote from a “scientist.”

• Science is all we need to make sense of life – While there is no empirical data and no true observational science concerning evolution, we can still be confident that God had nothing to do with it.

• There is no such thing as truth – that’s the one “truth” that is consistently taught.

• There is no right or wrong – except to say that it’s wrong to say something is wrong.

• Morality is a human construct – you can make it up as you go, or as you discover those things that make you happy. If something you want or like was once considered wrong, no worries, it’s just a man-made rule.

• Religion is bad – especially if it teaches that there are real things such as truth and virtue that are objectively true and for which all people will be accountable for in the presence of a holy God.

• Christianity is oppressive – never, ever be so insensitive as to use the name of Jesus in public. And what arrogance to believe that the only way to heaven is through Him!

• Sexual fulfillment is a cardinal virtue – This is seen as the chief end of man (no pun intended).

• Sexual studies should begin as young as kindergarten – Children are being told about homosexual practices and methods of arousal in elementary school. In some areas schools teach kids masturbation techniques and hand out condoms.

• Gender is a man-made construct – it is taught as an idea that was invented by people. Gone is the reality that gender is something you are born with. Some elementary schools are now telling kids that they can “choose” their gender.

• Marriage is a man-made construct – as a result men and women are encouraged to marry the same sex. Homosexuality has also been given civil rights status. A stand for “traditional” marriage is now seen as a stand for discrimination and hatred.

• Toleration demands acceptance – LGBTQ people are encouraged to flaunt their sexuality in every imaginable form. Transgendered men are encouraged to cross dress and use women’s bathrooms; and companies are expected to provide those bathrooms for their employees. And you are a bigot if that bothers you.

• Toleration demands silence – People who disagree with men and women marrying the same sex, or with any of the ideas on this list, should be silenced as they are only practicing discrimination against others.

• Traditional marriage is antiquated – it is in need of revision to include same sex unions, multiple partners – and some groups want to include man-boy relationships and parent child relationships

• Traditional marriage is oppressive – it is nothing more than institutionalized slavery that prevents women from reaching their full potential, and teaches children violence and inequality.

• Men are evil – feminist studies teach that male leadership in the home is the root cause of most evils in the world.

• White men are the source of all evil in the world – in one class at the college I attended a black professor had the white students pretend to be slaves as the black students were encouraged to beat and whip the white students. The purpose was to teach the white students what it feels like to be a slave.

• Indigenous cultures (read non-white) are morally superior – i.e. non-Christian cultures that allow sexual libertinism.

• Capitalism is evil – (read hard work and free enterprise) has only led to the rape of indigenous peoples and has led to their subsequent suffering – i.e. capitalism must be replaced by dialectical materialism and Marxist ideology (never mind that Marxism alone is responsible for 100 million deaths in the 20^th century).

• The life of unborn children have no real value – in-utero murder is encouraged and publicly funded for “mothers” who “choose” not to bear the responsibility of their sexual activity and find the pregnancy inconvenient.

• Human life has no more value than a chicken – groups like PETA have lamented the great chicken holocaust – seriously.

• Humans are destroying the planet – so called man-made global warning/climate change is the biggest threat to life on earth.

• We must decrease the population – the best thing for our mother, plant earth, is that humans become extinct (I always wonder why those who promote this view don’t begin with themselves).

• Humans are a disease

I could go on. These are just a sampling of ideas that are being taught every day in schools and colleges across our country. Can you imagine someone with a degree in, let’s say Queer Studies, applying to be your child’s elementary teacher? And, by the way, what is Queer Studies? It’s offered as a degree in many colleges today. Your average college grad today, while most likely not having the skills to write a coherent sentence, and certainly not being able to teach others to do so, will be able to expound in great detail upon any of the topics listed above as they teach the next generation. Scary.

Of course, not all college classes are bad, and not every book is filled with this nonsense, and there are plenty young people that can write a sentence. But, there is a comprehensive worldview that is taught in our education system beginning at a very young age. Imparting that worldview is the principle goal of the educational establishment today. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, which were once the core components of education, are now only a means used to teach an anti-God worldview.

At its foundational level this worldview teaches its adherents to believe that life is a product of forces that are not guided by anything other than random chance.  Everything on the above list stems from that one idea. Life is nothing more than an accident. Life has evolved from nothingness, with the result that we are the universe become conscience of itself. Therefore we believe life and the order we see around us can be randomly created from nothingness and chaos. As a result we think we can now help that process along by guiding how we evolve. As Morgan Freeman said as a character in the recent movie Lucy, “It is up to us to push from evolution to revolution.” So, we have become the creator with the ability to guide our own destiny.

But, chance is not an ontological reality. It is a noun that describes probability. “Chance” cannot create anything. It is only a word that describes something. And consider the order we see within life. It is multifaceted and mind-boggling in its complexity. What is the “chance” that simple proteins that have the specificity of 10 to the 40,000th power accidentally got together and “created” something (which by the way require many other components to survive) within a universe that is, at its possible oldest, 10 to the 18th power seconds old? The probability of that happening is 0. And, all complex order has a specific characteristic – it’s all information. Information does not come from nothing. It is not produced by accident. Information needs an intelligent source.

So, the reality is that order does not self-produce from chaos, and life (read complex information) does not evolve from nothingness. Order is the result of complex information being organized in a very specific way by an intelligent source. Chaos is the disorder of that complex order that is already imposed upon the universe and life. We experience that order on a daily basis. However, when we pretend we are the creator, believing we have the ability to define the boundaries of life, instead of reaching into the chaos and creating a beautiful reality, we reach into the well-ordered beauty of life and create chaos.

But the real motivation for teaching that there is no God,  if that is true, then everything is permissible. And that’s what people want. They want to live life without boundaries. However, the consequence of that desire is that life becomes incoherent. By that I do not mean that life stops functioning or that we can no longer go on. Rather, since those ideas do not correspond to what is real, as defined by God, when they are employed as a philosophy of life they lead to real failure. Because these ideas are false, a person who seeks to live by them will fail to integrate into life as it really is. Because they are looking for something that does not exist, they will fail to see what does exist on the one hand, or have a collision with what does exist on the other hand. That failure will result in an inability to understand real experiences, like suffering, and real consequences, like the post-mortem depression women experience once they have an abortion. But it will also result in an inability to understand life. As falsehood is pursued and as life unravels as a result, those who experience this unraveling will not know the real source of their suffering. They will experience failure and frustration, and will be trapped in an endless cycle where resolution and peace eludes them. And ultimately, they will experience the greatest failure when they discover the realty that the knowledge of God and His ways were meant to be a first priority in life. In failing to know God, they have failed to understand the real purpose of life.

Unfortunately it is believed that adopting an anti-supernatural worldview, where belief in God (and all that that entails) is only a matter of preference, will lead to liberation and happiness. But happiness is never experienced at the expense of reality. There is always a price to pay when one rejects what is real. Living by a philosophy that prevents one from understanding life is a tragedy. Someone said that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I would amend that to read, “The life trapped by a vicious falsehood is not worth living.” It is a tragedy of the first order.

To escape that tragedy one need only observe what is around them for a few minutes and observe that there is, in fact, a coherency to life. The motions of the sun and moon do not move at random. The tides of the oceans follow a set pattern. Birds migrate every year following the same route, being guided by built in internal mechanisms that are consistent year to year. The seasons appear when expected. Babies take nine months to gestate. Child development follows predictable patterns. The laws of nature, like gravity, are uniform no matter what part of the globe you are on.  Even when one peers to the smallest parts of creation and studies quantum physics, we see strange theories like the Indeterminacy Principle where a set pattern of behavior can be labeled Indeterminacy. A bit of irony. I am now old enough to have lived several dog lifespans. It is not hard to notice that, despite a few personality quarks, a dog is a dog is a dog. If you know one dog, you pretty much know them all.

Life is like that. In fact, we count on it. But, intellectually, we take for granted the reality that life has real built in coherency. We try hard to convince ourselves it is not coherent, and then believe that we have the ability and moral obligation to make it so, based on the way we think things should be and based on our desires and wants. All that is needed is for us to redefine what is right and true to fit our ambitions. We will be complete when I can get what I want and when you get what you want. Unfortunately, when we embark on that journey we fail to make the connection between our ignoring reality and the suffering that ensues as a result.

The problem is not a lack of coherency, the problem is that we try to live as though the coherency did not exist. Then we are puzzled when we see conflict and chaos result in our lives when we attempt to make life coherent through artificial means. But, the chaos can be expected, and is proof of the coherency inherent within life. We can predict when chaos will result!

Living life contrary to what is real is madness. Yet, every day we are encouraged to live as though there were no such things as truth or morality. We are encouraged to believe that there are no real boundaries in life, only worn-out rules of generations gone by that were afraid to get out of the box. We have come to believe that because there are no boundaries we can achieve freedom from anything that we feel constrains us and hinders our desires.

Unfortunately many people fail to make the connection that many, if not most, of the problems that ensnare us can be traced back to the idea that we can liberate ourselves from the things we don’t like about life.

• People who believe traditional marriage is an antiquated concept, and who want to include same sex marriage in its definition, and who teach that traditional marriage is an oppressive man-made construct that is prejudicial against “other” forms of sexual expression and “love” fail to see the connection between families that are disintegrating and why society begins to unravel. God created the family through the marriage of one man and one woman for life as the most basic social foundation. Destroy the family and watch civilization fall apart.

• People who believe marriage is nothing more than a contractual agreement between two parties, and who advocate no fault divorce fail to see the correlation between easy divorce and a society that no longer understands or practices things like sacrifice, self-evaluation, forgiveness, hard work, humility, dedication, and respect for others.

• People who want to redefine the family in any way fail to see the correlation between a very real lack of stability in social agreements – i.e. people no longer trust each other. If the family is where children learn respect for others, hard work, unselfish-giving, sacrifice, dedication, honesty, hard work, or things we call “traditional values,” then as the culture moves away from those things, the culture has to ensure those things through burdensome laws and bureaucratic means that force people to act in a way that was simply expected a generation ago, and which were learned at home. Hence, the less values a society possesses the more government and laws, and lack of real freedom that society can expect.

• People who promote abortion believe that it’s not fair for a woman to be constrained by the reality that sex leads to procreation. They want sex to be about pleasure and entertainment, not procreation and family. But when society no longer protects the sacredness of the marriage bed, and substitutes that for pleasure they fail to see the correlation between that and the societies loss of respect for life. The death toll for abortion today is well over fifty-million babies! That is the greatest holocaust in the history of the world – and few people seem to object.

• People who do not see the sacredness of sex and who promote pornography amplify the falsehood that sexual pleasure is a form of entertainment and/or liberation. But these same people fail to see the correlation between sexual perversion and the dehumanization of others as they are seen as a means to an end.

• People who advocate for euthanasia think life owes us convenience and freedom from hardships. It isn’t fair that we might suffer, or might have to care for those who are a burden. And if we do suffer, we have a right to end it. But those who want this fail to see the correlation between promoting death for convenience and a growing lack of empathy and compassion towards the infirm. Killing others in the name of empathy is not compassion.

• People who want to advocate that gender is an idea and not a biological reality want the “freedom” to be someone else. It’s not fair we don’t have a say in what sex we are born with. But when we teach our children that they can change their gender, we are teaching them that nothing in life should interfere with their passions and wants – not even biology. While the jury is out on this one, I predict we will see a whole new level of narcissism as children who are taught this grow into adults.

• People who advocate and teach that all paths to truth are the same, and that tolerance is a cardinal virtue that must be practiced by all, end up missing the correlation between their desire to make people see the world as they want them to see it, and the abuses that come from the intolerance that view actually creates.

• Those who advocate for these and the many other “liberties” our society seeks to promote today fail to see the correlation between their quest for greater freedom and the reality of the slavery they will endure in the end.

Those are just a sampling from our culture today. But behind every idea where someone thinks they are breaking a boundary and creating a new universal liberty, they are in fact saying that “It’s not fair that life is not the way I want it to be.” The word “I” needs much emphasis. At the heart of all incoherency in life is that little letter, “I.”

Let me introduce to you my three best friends: me, myself, and I: “We do what we feel is best for us. And, because we don’t like how some things in life are defined, we will move the boundaries to fit our liking. And if you don’t like it, we will vilify you and remove you too! Because all that really matters is that we are satisfied, fulfilled, and happy. We will re-make life the way we think it should be made.”

However, by way of simple analogy, what if every driver on the road applied that theory to their daily commute? People would be enraged! When one driver does not obey the traffic rules, he puts other people at risk. We do not like having our lives jeopardized because someone does not obey the traffic laws. What if the majority of drivers believed drinking and driving and texting should all be done at the same time? Mass chaos and death would result. In the same way, when we seek to rearrange and redefine the built in laws of life as defined by God, we jeopardize the lives of everyone around us – including our own. And that reality can be observed by looking at the lives of people and societies that seek to ignore and/or redefine what God has declared to be true about life. Ignoring God’s design for life leads to chaos.

Thankfully, we need not obsess about reality. God has created stability in life. All we need do is learn the boundaries. The first step in understanding the boundaries is to learn that design is an important aspect of life. God designed every area of life. There is no part of life that is incomplete. We are not evolving, and God’s design certainly does not need our help. We, however, need to learn God’s design for life if we are to be successful and happy.

The best place to begin in understanding God’s design is to learn about creation as recorded in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis. While these chapters do not inform us about the moral laws that are a part of life’s design, they teach us something very important about the designer.

• First, He is the source of all life. Life is not an accident. Life originated in God; and life as we experience it is God’s idea.

• Second, He has the power to make life become a reality for us. When God created the universe and all of the various forms of life on our planet, He began His creation by speaking the world into existence. He said, “Let there be…” and it was done. He is not deficient in His ability to provide for our needs.

• Third, God has the desire to create good things. After every day of creation God noted that what He had made was good. There were no flaws in what He had done. Nothing was lacking or needing to be improved.

• Fourth, God created according to a specific design. Every day of creation God was focusing on one necessary aspect of the total. Each part fit into the next and was necessary for the creation to be complete. In other words, nothing was left to chance.

• Fifth, God created everything with purpose. He created everything in way that benefits those for whom it was created. God did not create the universe for the sake of having a universe. He created a universe for the sake of providing a home for those who inhabit His creation.

• Sixth, God created us for Himself. It was not until He created the man and woman that He said it was “Very good.” The entire purpose of the creation was to create a home where we could dwell in communion with God. The creation was incomplete without the man and the woman.

These points are foundational in gaining a coherent view of life. As a result we can draw some important conclusion about life:

• Life has an author.
• Creation is not in the process of becoming, it is complete.
• Life is by design.
• Design, not disorder, is the hallmark of the stability we experience and expect in life.
• Life has inherent value.
• Life has purpose and meaning.
• Life is good when understood and experienced according to the design.
• The designer cares about His creation. He takes specific delight in people as they are the crown-jewel of creation.

These truths lead us to see the world in a very specific and hopeful way. Far from being a world that is in turmoil and chaos where we need to guide the “evolution” of life by imposing ridiculous and absurd ideas that will “improve” life, we need instead to recognize and submit to this reality. Instead of attempting to change the creation by adding ideas that do not correspond to reality, we need to see reality for what it is. When we begin to do that, we will begin to see the chaos of life diminish. And we will understand that the disorder and chaos we experience is directly related to our ignoring the fundamental nature of life as designed by God.

The enemy of our souls desperately wants us to ignore this reality. Because, if we ignore God’s design for life, not only will we experience chaos and disorder in our life here on earth, but we will experience disorder and chaos eternally in hell.