All of life is perpetual interpretation for everyone, all the time. Contemplate your own existence and consciousness. We are conscious, (or sentient) beings. Animals are also obviously sentient, but not in the same way as humans. Humans are NOT evolved animals. I am not an animal, so what I say about this is speculation on my part, so here goes: Animals have emotions. Animals have built in instincts, and muscle memory. (That is why they can be trained.) However, I personally think animals do not engage in contemplative thought as humans do. They do not have morality in the sense that humans do. We are moral beings. Morality matters.
We use varying words to express the same basic ideas, or thoughts. The human brain is mostly thinking all the time. The exceptions might be if you are sedated or unconscious for some reason. Being asleep is technically not being unconscious, because you have the possibility of dreaming, so your mind is still working. Try to sit for one minute without thinking anything. It is impossible (for me at least). Thoughts will invade your mind, and then you will have to think to yourself to stop thinking! Where do all the thoughts come from? Is it all your own mind processing things, or is it possible for your thoughts to be invaded by some outside force? I “think” it can be either, or both. I think the reason so many people seem to be mentally and emotionally unstable in this generation is because of the constant bombardment of information, and most of this is self-inflicted. (News flash: You do NOT have to look at media all the time! It is not against the law (yet) to simply turn your phone off and go outside for a nice long walk and let your brain relax.)
There is also the option of being under anesthesia for medical procedures. If what I have read about anesthesia is correct, the medical profession doesn’t really understand how anesthesia works because it appears that while a person is under anesthesia, the brain is not functioning at all. No brain waves can be measured, but the body continues to function as normal, but there is nothing happening that can be considered thought or a dream state. It is vastly different from being asleep. I don’t profess to know a lot about this. It is all very strange.
My personal thought on the brain is that the body is not controlled by the brain. We are spiritual beings. God breathed into man the breath of life. essentially, we are spiritual beings inhabiting bodies. The brain is the servant of the spirit of man. The spirit is the control center, not the brain. The brain is the tool the spirit uses to make the body function. I realize that sounds weird. I can’t prove this. It is speculation on my part, but to me it makes sense. There have been many documented cases of people whose brains have been so severely damaged they should not even function in the way we understand the brain to function as the control center of the body, and yet they do. That means that there is something else in play that we can’t measure with our instruments. I believe that to be the spirit. When a person dies, the spirit leaves. One second a person is alive, and then, in the blink of an eye, they are dead. Until the body begins to deteriorate, the physical part of the person is exactly as it was five seconds before they died. And not it is not. Something is gone, and we can’t bring it back.
Back to the issue of thought: Are all of your thoughts pure, even if you desire for them to be? Well, to that I can personally say “No”. I suspect that all of us should answer “no” to that question, but I only know my own thoughts, so I can only say definitively that my thoughts are not always pure. I think impure thoughts can be projected to us from evil spiritual forces. This can be seen in Jesus’s temptations from Satan during His time in the desert. Satan came and put tempting words to Him, whether this was thoughts or actual spoken words, the effect is the same. This is a repeat of what Satan did to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Satan lied. He misrepresented God. Having a sudden impure thought is not what condemns a person, it is what they do with that thought. Will they own it as their own, and act on it, or will they willingly turn away from it and reject it? Impure thoughts have the potential for making you lust. For normal men, the site of an attractive woman can gain our attention. But we should not allow that thought to camp within us. If we are already committed to a woman we have married, we gain our pleasure there, not in someone else. We reject the thought, or at least we should. Letting those kinds of thoughts camp within us is what got King David into trouble. Beautiful women have been the downfall of many men throughout the ages. David already had wives, but he saw Bathsheba bathing from the roof of his house, and he started to lust for her beauty. “Bath”sheba was taking a bath! He sent for her. She was already married, and her husband was in David’s army. He sent for her, and to put it bluntly, he had sex with her. Then he plotted to have her husband killed in battle and later took her to be his wife (one of many). That was evil. David later repented, but only after being confronted by the prophet of God, and ironically the Scripture refers to David as “a man after God’s own heart.” Control of our thoughts matters! It matters for our own well-being, and it matters to God. Only God knows a man’s heart. The only thing we can know about another person is what they present to us. We can’t see inside their heart and mind, but God can. We use the terms “mind control” and “thought control” in a negative way to refer to intentionally trying to control the thoughts of others for evil purposes, but thought control is something we all need to practice continuously for ourselves. We need to control our own thoughts. That is a positive thing. You could say that David saw Bathsheba and he “lost his mind”.
Another thing to consider is that we mostly think in words, at least, I know I do. I assume others do as well, but I have never really had a deep conversation about that with others. That’s all talking to yourself is, just thinking out loud. I do it all the time, and I am not crazy! (Well, not much.)
We are taking in information all the time, whether we are intentionally doing it or not. If you sit down to read a book, magazine or newspaper, you are intentionally taking in information, and then you are processing and interpreting it to figure out, not only what is says literally, but also what it means. The meaning you ascribe to it is your interpretation. You do the same thing with electronic information, be it social media, television, your computer, etc. We are all influenced by things we encounter every day and the things we say and do influence other people. The media we consume is constantly trying to get us to buy into a particular narrative they have created. “News” is not simply reported anymore. It is “crafted”. It seeks to elicit a certain mental response from you. With the advance of computer algorithms and artificial intelligence most everything we see online is manipulation and/or propaganda. The algorithms study your behavior, (the things you search for in the search engines, the things you order online, the opinions you post on social media, etc.) Then the content you receive is mostly tailored to your preferences and opinions. The name for this is confirmation bias. You are told what you want to hear and shown what you want to see. The news you see in your internet feeds is crafted to suit you based on information that has been gathered about you from your comments on media, your online purchases, etc. The amount of data that is being gathered about all of us is staggering. Artificial Intelligence, and the vulgar emergence of data centers is Frankenstein’s monster. We have opened Pandora’s box and released a hellish beast that will destroy life as we know it, unless it is stopped. That is not hyperbole.
What you think about the things you see and read is your interpretation(s). Think about what we know about history, or all of what we think we know about the past. Not our own recent past, but past as it is recorded in history books, and electronic files, and whatever other media we use to record data. We were not there. We did not experience it firsthand. It was all recorded by flawed human beings with their own interpretations of what things mean, and colored by their preconceived ideas, notions, opinions and biases. We read it and assume it is all factual, accurate and non-biased. It most certainly is not. I am not advocating for everyone to read history as if none of it can be trusted or believed. That would leave everyone in a perpetual state of uncertainty and doubt, and that is certainly not a healthy place for a society to be in, but I am saying read it with a grain of salt, as the saying goes. Read it with a thinking mind, knowing that it is flawed to some degree. It has to be. There is no way for it not to be. The same principle applies to the so-called news we hear today. Much of the information of our current age is saved in digital format. It requires electricity to be accessible. It could all vanish very quickly if there were some catastrophe that knocked out the power grid. Our current information could be totally lost to future generations. It is preserved in silicone (which is just glorified sand.) What if this has happened before? We would know very little about our ancient past. Some artifacts remain, but many do not. They are perishable, so it is difficult to know how accurate what has been recorded is, unless it has been supernaturally preserved for us from a far greater source outside of ourselves. (Yes, I mean God, and yes, I mean the Scripture.) The earth has a long and sorted past with few artifacts preserved. Our interpretation of it, within our own limited frame of reference, apart from this outside source could be terribly flawed, and I think that it is.
The question we all need to ask ourselves is “What is the framework through which I interpret? How does that framework work, and what is it based on?” It is very much worth the time and effort to contemplate and confront this issue. This can be called our mindset, or our worldview. Where does it come from? Do we take the time to question it, or do we just take it for granted and ignore it and carry on? Our mindset (or worldview) influences how we interpret everything. Our mindset is our filter through which we interpret reality. We each have to determine for ourselves what that will be. Let me give you an example of what I mean:
Let’s look at the issue of the ideas of our origin. Where did we come from? Why are we even here at all? Why do we even exist? These are the most basic and fundamental questions we all ask at some point in our lives. Where does all this (our world and everything in it) come from? Why does it exist at all? Why do I exist at all? I think everyone to some extent wrestles with these questions at some point in their lives. There are “basically” two answers to that question we can choose from that have been postulated through the course of our age. Others can be postulated, but these are the basic too. Most, if not all of the other options to choose from are just variations of these two: Creation or Evolution.
Is there a reason and purpose for everything as proposed by Creationism, or is everything blind, purposeless chance, as proposed by Evolutionism? Your answer to that question is part of your worldview, and it affects how you interpret reality and how you interpret reality affects how you behave. The predominate worldview of academia for well over one hundred years now has been that of evolutionary atheism. This is the ideology that has been thrust on countless millions of children from a very young age.
Evolution has no answer for the question of human morality. Everyone who exists has some standard of morality that they judge themselves and others by. That can’t be denied. That is just a fancy way of saying everyone thinks that there are things people should and should not do, right and wrong in other words. If there is no objective standard of morality that originates outside of man, then everyone is subject to their own personal opinions about what is right and wrong. That leads to absolute chaos, and that is what we see happening in the world all throughout the course of time. If there is no absolute standard of morality that governs mankind, then we have no right to call what another person does right or wrong. If you think it is wrong for me to steal your property and murder your family, and if I think it is perfectly fine for me to do that because I want what you have, then there is no basis for any morality at all. It is all subjective. Common sense tells anyone that will not work. God has built morality into our DNA. That can’t be ignored or denied. If you deny that, you are contradicting your own behavior. You are denying reality, because you do not live that way. If you say you do, you are lying. You expect justice for those who have wronged you. That means you have some sort of moral compass.
No one likes the idea that life is meaningless. Nihilism leads only to a life of despair and hopelessness, chasing one distraction after another to subdue the feelings of hopelessness. If everything originated from some random, unexplainable explosion, and is just matter constantly rearranging itself, and we are the current end product of that, nothing means anything. There is no reason or purpose for anything. That is a ridiculous idea that has long been promoted as science that makes absolutely no sense. There is no cause. People like the idea of believing that human beings evolved from primates because it relieves us of moral responsibility for ourselves. We want and expect morality from everyone else, but not ourselves. This is the height of intellectual laziness if you think about it. It does not answer the question of origin. If we evolved from lower primates, where did they come from? You still get back to the idea of a beginning that makes no sense. We need for things to make sense. It is built into us as rational beings. How many times have you caught yourself saying, “this just doesn’t make sense” when you are trying to figure something out? Usually, when this happens, we are not seeing the full picture. But what if there is a grand picture that we are supposed to see first, before we can make sense of the individual parts? When you buy a jigsaw puzzle, or a Legos set, you see a picture of what the finished product is supposed to look like first before you start putting it together. You know what you are aiming for. If you didn’t look at the picture, then follow the instructions, and instead just dumped all the parts or pieces out in a big pile on the table and then commenced to try to piece it all together, it would make no sense, and you would just have a big mess. We need a picture of what life is supposed to look like when it is done right. God gives us that picture in His Word, but so many people willingly choose to ignore it to their own peril.
Meaninglessness does not line up with the reality that we live. Everyone has the ability to believe whatever they want to, but the thing we need to ask ourselves, which many people do not is, “Does what I believe line up with reality?” We do not live our lives in the practical sense as if nothing has any meaning. We do everything we do as if it had meaning. To think otherwise is nonsense. Do you, or did you raise your children as if nothing mattered? I certainly hope not. If you did, and you still say you believe in evolution (monkeys to man evolution) you are contradicting yourself. You can say you believe it, but you do not live that way. If nothing has any meaning ultimately, except the meaning we make up for ourselves, then it is not based in reality, it is based on our whimsical fantasy. It is meaningless. If you do not raise your kids as if their lives have no meaning, why would you say you believe that? That makes no sense.
The other option, Creationism, aligns thoroughly with reality. Creationism starts with the Creator, not the elements of the material world as Evolutionism does. It has been rightly said that God is the uncaused Cause. Look at the complexity of the physical world around you. Does it appear as something that came about as a result of random chance? It certainly does not to me. The complexity is staggering. It all very much appears designed. Design is what we see. It aligns with reality. It is reality. Charles Darwin didn’t know anything about DNA at the time. No one did. Basically, he noticed that the skeletons of primates, and the skeletons of human have basic similarities, and he noticed the beaks on some birds landing on a tree whose beaks seem to change shape over a period of time and wrote a whole system of monkeys to man evolution theory based primarily on that. (Granted, that is an oversimplification, but not much.) The thing is, now we have so much intricate information about DNA and its staggering complexity, and the complexity of the known universe, that no one can come to the conclusion today that reality is not designed and created by One outside of our space and time. The Creator has to be outside of, and not dependent on His creation. It can’t be otherwise. The inventor of the first automobile can’t be part of the automobile. That doesn’t make sense. For a person in our day and time to continue to believe in blind chance evolution is inexcusable willful ignorance.
If you want to interpret life correctly, in a manner that lines up with the reality that human beings actually experience, you must start off with what the actual Creator of life says about it, not human theory, most of which can’t be proven anyway. You need to see the picture of the puzzle before you start attempting to put it together. You need to follow the instructions of the person who created the puzzle or Lego set.
Let’s think about information for a few moments. We have often heard it said that we live in the information age. The internet is called the information superhighway, but what is information anyway? How can you verify any information that you receive is even real? You must experience it first-hand. Anything otherwise has been communicated to you from some other source, be it something someone else has told you, something you read, something you have seen on television, social media and news on your phone, the radio, whatever. Something is being communicated to you. What do we know about space? We haven’t been there. We have been told our astronauts have been there, but we did not witness it first-hand. We saw the video images. We were not there. Some of us may have actually gone to Florida and watched the rockets blast off towards the sky. That was real. Did we see the rockets leave the atmosphere? No, we can’t. What do you know about our past? Only what you have been told and what has been written down for us. We did not witness our grandparent’s childhood. We only know what we heard about it (if anything.) What do we know about anything? Really, only our own experience. All else is second-hand information from outside sources. I am NOT saying we should doubt everything, but we should take it all with a grain of salt. We can be misled and lied to. We can be manipulated. Information can be communicated to us that is not accurate, and in some cases, intentionally orchestrated lies. All information is interpreted by someone. Books written about things that happened in the 1800s are a writer’s interpretation of what happened. Yes, there can be a degree of archeological and historical data to substantiate some of what they are saying, but even then, it is interpreted by someone, and that person has a worldview through which they interpret. Worldview matters. I have recently been reading “The Outline of History”, written by H.G. Wells. I picked up the two-volume set in a used bookstore out of curiosity many years ago. It is blatantly obvious to me that this so-called account of history makes a lot of assumptions from a very biased, evolutionary perspective. That is the problem with our current educational system. Unless it is a Christian (Creationist) based school, the evolutionary worldview is dogmatically taught as if were established fact. No other options are presented, so we have generations of students that have been taught what to think (believe), not how to think. The ugly word for this is indoctrination.
Another term that may be more familiar to readers who are unfamiliar with the term worldview is Point of View (or P.O.V. in our acronymically inclined society). Point of View is more like Mindset than World View. Many people can express their points of view on lots of things without ever giving much thought to their Worldview, but they have a Worldview regardless of whether they realize it or not. Your Worldview can inform your point of view(s) but your point of view is not your Worldview. Your Worldview is much larger. Your Worldview informs your starting point in understanding your life. The reason I mentioned Creationism and Evolution is because your Worldview starts with a belief in either on or the other of those two. You might say you believe in reincarnation, but that does not address the issue of beginnings at all, so that really doesn’t count. It doesn’t explain the reason for anything. I have heard it said that every time an evolutionist’s theory fails, be it biological evolution or cosmological evolution, the answer is to simply put more zeros on the end of the timeframe in which it is supposed to have occurred.
Many people in our society will totally identify as secularists, stating they have no beliefs or faith in anything, but this is not true. They have bought into a totally materialistic view of life. They believe there is nothing beyond what we experience in this material world which they have been taught originated out of nothing for no apparent reason, and when you die, you simply cease to exist and that is all there is to it. But this can’t be proven, and it does not line up with reality as we know and live. So consequently, they “believe” it. They have faith in the worldview that they have been taught and accepted as fact, but it can’t be proven. It seems odd and ironic that people who profess to be atheists will say things like, “rest in peace” when someone dies. If they are true to what they profess, saying “rest in peace” makes no sense. According to the atheist’s worldview there is no rest from anything after death, you simply cease to exist, and there is a corpse that needs to be disposed of. We go to elaborate, and expensive measures to bury our dead in a respectful and honorable manner. Why? If they are simply dead, end of story, what difference does it make what we do with them? Just one less mouth to feed and take up space. Thank God there IS more to life than that! That gets back to the point I have been trying to make about the contradiction between what people say they believe, and what they actually do.
Let’s examine the implications of a Creator God. A Creator creates. It can’t be otherwise. You would not call a person who has never learned to sing or play a musical instrument a musician. You would never call a person who has never created any sort of art whatsoever an artist. To do so would make no sense. Because of Creation, there is purpose. There is meaning. This is what we desire out of our own lives: purpose and meaning. No one wants a meaningless existence. But does the simple idea that we desire for our lives to have meaning and purpose actually mean that it does, or is that just wishful thinking that has no place in reality? I do not think it is just wishful thinking. I think the Creator God intentionally wrote that into our DNA. To think that it doesn’t is not reality, because that is not how we live our lives. We do everything we do for a reason. We don’t just randomly go around doing stuff for no reason.
God’s creation is ordered. That is why what we call natural laws, such as gravity, water consistently freezing at 32 degrees, etc., exist. They didn’t just happen randomly as matter scattered through space. That makes no sense. “Natural laws” do not exist in and of themselves. They are created by a lawmaker. The laws that govern our societies did not just spring into existence out of nothing. They did not just exist eternally in some vacuum. They were crafted by lawmakers at some specific point in time for some specific purpose. The scriptures show us that God’s law is written on our hearts. We don’t need to be told that is wrong to murder and rob. We instinctively know it. It is there for a reason: order. God is a God or order and creativity. Creativity does not just happen, it is planned, worked out and performed.
From the very first chapters of Scripture, we read of God creating. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That is the starting point. That should rightly be the beginning of our worldview. God created us, we did not evolve. That also implies something else we have to get right: God owns us. He made us. We belong to Him, not ourselves. That completely rules out self-autonomy. This goes absolutely against how this world’s system operates. When I Googled Self Autonomy, this is what our dear friend ChatGPT (sarcasm warning) came up with:
Self-autonomy refers to the ability to make choices and decisions that align with one’s own values and interests. It emphasizes personal freedom and self-determination in various aspects of life.
Key Aspects of Self-Autonomy
- Choice and Control: Self-autonomy involves acting by choice, allowing individuals to govern their own lives.
- Alignment with Values: Actions taken under self-autonomy should reflect personal beliefs and interests, enhancing individual fulfillment.
- Independence vs. Autonomy: While independence is often associated with self-sufficiency, autonomy is broader, focusing on the motivations behind actions.
Notice the things I have underlined. Christ calls us to die to self to follow Him. We are not free, in God’s order to pick and choose our own values. The mindset of self-determination (self autonomy) grows from the root of evolution. It is the original lie: “Has God really said…?” “You will not surely die, but you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” If you choose to be your own boss and not submit to God’s authority, you will die in your sins and go to eternal damnation and destruction.
Do you want to drive on a highway where people are free to just make up their own traffic rules on the spot as they go? (Well, not that they don’t already, but that is beside the point!) Do you want to live in a world where there are no moral absolutes? I certainly do not. That is chaos. The moral absolutes originate with God, and they have been communicated to us. We are not free, in our self-autonomy, to determine which ones we will, or will not obey. If we choose to disobey them, we do so at our own peril. That is the way reality works.
Additionally, we see a common pattern repeated throughout Scripture: God brings order out of chaos. This often refers to water. The raging sea is represented in Scripture as choas out of which God brings order:
Genesis 1:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
Trying to figure out how everything started in the scientific sense, such as the big bang theory, how stars formed planets, how primates evolved, etc., serves no practical purpose whatsoever. It does not improve anything. It does not make us better. If evolution is correct, if all we are is advanced cellular structures without souls that eventually die, what difference does it make if we figure it out or not? It serves no purpose, other than to generate a worldview of total nihilism. If life has no ultimate meaning, what is the point in figuring out anything? It all comes to nothing anyway. Interpretation matters.
If, on the other hand, we begin our interpretation acknowledging God as the first cause, the uncaused Cause, we have a reasonable starting point. We have a foundation upon which we can build. That is how we live out our reality in the real world. In order to do, or build anything, you must have a starting point. Secular evolution gives us nothing to build on, other than pointless, unprovable speculation. What is the alternative to starting with God, the uncaused Cause? There isn’t any! There is nothing to build your worldview on. There is nothing to build your life on. Anything that exists can’t start with nothing. That is illogical and does not line up with reality. You can’t build a house with absolutely no material to build from.
How do you interpret the life you are living? Where do you start? What does it mean? Have you taken the time to ask these questions, or are you just caught up in the hysteria and distraction of living for the moment? Everyone really needs to come to terms with this within themselves. There is much more, once this has been established, but it needs to start here.
Danny's Stump 