Insane Reasoning from a Religious Intellectual.
Someone of high stature in religious circles actually said this. This man is considered a great defender of Christian principles. He’s considered an intellectual. At first, what he said sounded very deep. You almost need a dictionary to decipher it. What’s he really saying? An axiom is something you make up and pretend it’s true. You treat it as if it were proven, but it’s not proven. A presupposition is like an axiom. It’s something you suppose ahead of time. To suppose is to think something is true with no proof that it is true. So, to say and axiom is a presupposition is to say made-up stuff is made-up stuff. Now, he goes on to say this made-up stuff is assumed true. To assume is to suppose. He’s redundant, but he messes with your mind by using big words. So far, he said, “I made-up some stuff and pretended that it’s true.
From this made-up stuff, he deduced theorems. What is he saying? He deduced theorems. Deduction is a type of logic that comes to absolute conclusions. It must have certain elements. The premises must be true. Nothing can be added to the premises or diminished from the premises on the way to the conclusion. The premises must prove the conclusion. A theorem is a statement that is proved. He didn’t tell us how he used deductive reasoning to get his theorem, but he did tell us his premises consist of made-up stuff rather than truth. In logic talk, that means his logic isn’t sound. His thinking is insane. He needs to check himself. That means his theorem isn’t proved, but he’s pretending it’s proved in a stuffed-shirt kind of way.
Next, he says, “It makes sense to use the propositions of Scripture as axioms.” If it makes sense, it’s sane. Propositions are just statements that are put out there. They aren’t necessarily true. The problem is that the statements in Scripture are absolute and true. And then, he goes back to the word, “axiom,” which is made-up stuff he treats as if it were true. He has said, “It is sane to use the tentative statements of Scripture as made-up stuff.”
How did such an intelligent man come up with such a ridiculous statement? There is no atheist who is stupid enough that he or she couldn’t dismantle this statement. The statement makes no sense. When an intelligent person drifts into poor reasoning, there is usually a strongly held belief behind the problem. In this case, this man was defending cessationism.
Cessationism is a kind of deism. It’s a kind of naturalism. An online site, GotQuestions, says this: “Cessationism is the view that the “miracle gifts” of tongues and healing have ceased—that the end of the apostolic age brought about a cessation of the miracles associated with that age.” Of course, there is no such age mentioned in the Bible as the “apostolic age.” The Bible says we will have apostles UNTIL we ALL come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So that’s cessationism. Under cessationism, the Holy Spirit can’t reveal anything to you. There’s a huge problem with that.
The problem with the idea that the Holy Spirit can’t reveal anything to you is that then you can’t know anything. You can only have opinions, but you can’t know. The human mind can’t reason to truth. It can’t do it. It can fool itself and use deceptive statements like this intellectual used. It can’t know that the Bible is God’s word without error. The Holy Spirit reveals that the Bible is God’s word without error, but the fallen human mind has to either receive the revelation that comes from God or bounce around in irrational thinking. That irrational thinking is just as irrational whether the person is defending the Bible or attacking the Bible.
God is real. All who seek Him find Him. Seek Him. Find Him. Get to know Him well. Listen to His voice. Allow Him to lead you. Yield to His Spirit so He says His words and does His acts through you. Keep on keeping on. The best is yet to come.