Facts vs. Truth, The Flawed ArgumentOn the one side you have people, usually atheists, arguing against things stated in the Bible. Their approach is usually that there are no facts to support these statements, or that said facts are contradictory in nature. On the other side you have Christians who, although well meaning, argue that what they have is Truth which cannot be explained by facts along, there must be faith. As a Christian I understand what they are saying and to an extent they are correct, but to pit facts against truth is totally illogical. They are different, yes, but they do have connections to one another that makes it impossible for one to exist apart from the other.
Let us consider the cosmos, that is the entirety of the universe. What facts do we have to support the existence of this universe? Well, we have big-brained people looking through high powered telescopes, or viewing images taken from satellites. We have mathematicians calculating the distance from us to planets, stars and galaxies. We have a host of scientists telling us about many things that are either facts or believed to be facts. What we do not have, even taking all of them together, is a clear picture, understanding or grasp of our universe. We have enough to "get our heads around it", but in the end result we must have faith that the cosmos does in fact exist. Am I saying these facts are incorrect? Of course not. What I am saying is that they are only tiny pieces of a very large picture, a picture so large, in fact, that it cannot be completely seen or understood. That it does exist is truth. Truth is all the facts compiled together, and the millions of facts that have been overlooked, all summed up in the single existence of the cosmos itself. It cannot be fully seen, nor explained, but that doesn't negate the fact that it is there.
Likewise scientists have made observations about our earth, about the life on this planet, about the different species and made certain speculations based on those facts to give us an idea of where we came from. Are all these facts false? No, of course not. When they begin to disregard certain facts because it doesn't line up with their beliefs, well then that is neither true science nor is it revealing any true facts. The Truth is that God created everything there is out of nothing. He did it by the power of His spoken Word. For many this Truth is so great, so vast that it's just plain impossible to believe. Yet if we follow the facts, as we did with the cosmos, we would see that these facts are all part of a larger picture, a Truth so big that it takes faith to contain it. And the Truth is that there is a God. He is the One who is bigger than even the sum total of all the facts. The facts themselves are not incorrect, but I guess it is like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle. The truth is the picture you see on the cover, the facts are all the pieces in the box. But if someone were to disregard some of those pieces because they didn't fit with their understanding, well then that puzzle would never be solved. God gives us plenty of facts, but we cannot possibly comprehend the enormity of the picture these facts come together to make if we even had all the facts, which we do not. So we are left with doing one of two things, disregarding the existence of God, because our understanding is so limited that we cannot possibly perceive of some Divine being that is so vast, or we can allow God to give us just enough faith so that we know that He exists. If we do the latter these facts start to come together. They start to make sense. We still don't see the full picture, but by faith we can possess the fullness of God. That is why this argument is so badly flawed. It pits one against the other when there is a decided difference between facts and Truth. Yet one thing will remain, no matter where you stand on this issue, Truth cannot be altered. Truth remains truth. To alter it means only to turn it into a lie.
Now people who disbelieve the existence of God really do overlook a lot of facts. The overlook the fact that everything is slightly different, even if it looks the same. They overlook the tremendous complexity of even some of the minutest of life forms. Take grass, for instance. A simple blade of grass is actually part of a unit, a community of sorts. It has roots that shoot down into the earth and the blade reaches up to the sky. If we let it grow long enough the community will also send up a shoot that will carry seeds that will plant new grass. Let's go back to the blade of grass. This blade will always angle itself to get the most exposure to the sun. Because it is mostly water in nature, as are all living things, it needs to draw moisture up from the ground in order to stay alive. As it does so the chlorophyll that gives grass its green color reacts with the sun and the water, taking in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and converting it to oxygen. This is just grass, but if it weren't for grass, green algae in the waters around the world, and other plant life, we would soon run out of air to breathe. It is interesting that while humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide that these little green plants live off of this gas. Furthermore, while they exhale oxygen we live off of that. This fragile balance could not possibly have happened by accident. I mean even if some great alien being were trying to create life on this planet they would have to go through many, many trials and errors to get the balance stable enough to work out so both plant and human and animal life could exist. Each time they got the balance wrong the whole experiment would shut down and they'd have to start from scratch again. The real kicker is that they would have to get this balance correct at precisely the same time or neither could exist.
In the Genesis account of creation you have God moving on the waters, which is made up of hydrogen and oxygen as I'm sure you all know. He separates the waters so that there is dry ground. This makes perfect sense because many of the plants are going to need ground to live in, and algae may be a long way in coming about. Also the animals and people are going to need ground to walk and live on. After God makes this separation he does something else. He creates lights in the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars. This effectively gives us a way to calculate the passage of time, something that did not exist either before the world was created. You need to think outside the box here to think of timelessness, so I apologize for the reference. Yet there is something else that the creation of these lights does. It gives a balanced exposure of light and warmth to the earth that made it conducive for both plant and human and animal life. Follow this God created the plants. There was enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the waters as evaporation took place under the sun. Then God created the animals, giving the plants a good firm foothold so they wouldn't die. Finally, when the balance was nearly complete, God made man in His image, which does not refer to the physical features at all, but the fact that, like God, we are triune, having within our bodies both a center for intelligence and an eternal part of us which can most closely be described as our character or personality. This is our spiritual nature. Yet for it to survive on this planet the body must survive, and as I've just shown, God prepared the way for this shell we call the flesh or the body, to live so that the real us might have a place to live.
There is much more, but these are just some of the facts that go overlooked by people who refuse to allow God into their observations. People like this started some of the most bizarre religions on this planet, and others took their fears and limitations to twist the Truth and turn the relationship we were supposed to have with God into a religion. Having only part of the picture can be dangerous, especially if you insist on convincing yourself that you have all the pieces.
