Neutrality And A Five Speed

Three reasons neutrality is a myth ( neutrality and a five-speed)

When I was a young boy, my dad bought my first vehicle for me, and it was a five-speed stick shift. When I first started driving it, there were a few times that I could not get it to go in gear. I would let off the clutch, but the car would not go forward or backward.  I sat in place just revving the engine while going nowhere. This is the picture of neutrality. We are supposed to bring nothing into the data when we review a scientific study. Everyone should let the evidence speak for itself. Unlike my stick shift, no one can possibly be truly neutral because of the pre-beliefs that we all have.  No one is a blank slate, no matter what John Locke says. Here are three reasons that we are going to cover to expose the myth of neutrality.

1. We all have pre-beliefs, pre-commitments, and pre-suppositions through which we analyze all things and view life.

These pre-beliefs are the most fundamental part of our lives. The fall has corrupted every one of our pre-beliefs, just like the virus in a computer destroys the hard drive of the computer.  Before Christ, our pre-beliefs are bent toward rebellion, justification of life without God, and celebration of things that dishonor Him. This reality shows that there is a motive behind pre-beliefs, and it is to deny the one, true God or to worship a false god.  You can ask, “Where is your evidence for this claim?” Look at what unbelievers say about God. Science disproves God. Belief in God is like believing in a fairytale. They use their pre-beliefs as building blocks for their worldview.

Several atheistic non-neutral pre-beliefs:

• There is no god

• Material is all we have

• Morals are determined by societies

In short, to give up God is to give up knowledge. If you don’t start with God in your basic assumptions, then you forfeit knowledge. The unbeliever is forgetting that it was the one true living God who gave them science and the ability of uniformity in nature to ground the scientific method. This is so fundamental that we cannot leave this point without a word on how essential knowing God is to living. Whether someone does or doesn’t have a God-centered life leads to two foundations. The first is that the one true living God is worthy of worship and praise, and the second foundation is that we either don’t need god (Atheist) or that we are going to worship a god that we made (cults or false beliefs).

David Hume (1711-1776)-“Nothing can be more unphilosophical than to be positive or dogmatical on any subject.”

William Hazlitt (1778-1830)- “The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by the former theories”

Dear Christian, this is a war over foundations. We have to realize where the battle is located. 1 Corinthians 10:3-5 reads, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

There are three things we learn from the text.

1. The war and method of battle are not worldly.

2. Our key weapon is the word of God, and that is what they want us to give up. No wonder they are attacking it.

3. There are two huge foundations (fortresses) that have to be attacked with the word.

   1. Speculations

   2. Every lofty thought

We will cover this more in November’s article, but for now, let this begin to form the way you begin to think about the war. We have seen, in closing this section, that no one can be neutral because no one is unaffected by the fall of man; therefore, in order to have cogent pre-beliefs, you have to start with the one true living God. We will see how we use our pre-beliefs so instinctively.

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