<quote from Real Faith & Reason>
Now we’ve realized that knowledge is only possible in Christ. And yet we’re also aware that unbelievers seem to know a lot, depending on how we define “knowledge.” And the scientific method has led to knowledge, the knowledge that resulted in working products, even among those who refuse to acknowledge Christ. At first glance, if we don’t think about it too deeply, we might deceive ourselves into thinking there’s a conflict between the productive science we observe and the inability of the human mind to self-generate knowledge.
But as we look to God about this question, He shows us that there’s zero conflict because all knowledge comes from God even when ungodly thinkers refuse to thank Him for it. God sends His rain to believers and unbelievers alike as we’ve previously realized. He is the Light Who lights every person whether the person acknowledges Him or not. And in the same way, He blesses unbelievers and believers with knowledge so they can survive to seek Him and find Him. (Acts 17:24-28) Truly, He blesses humanity with knowledge through the scientific method, and He revealed everything we now know about the true scientific method. However, the brute-beast mind God gave us for survival can receive God’s revelation without thanking God or glorifying God.
Refusing to acknowledge God or thank Him is like putting on a blindfold. This brute-beast mind also reacts to the five senses as we’ve discussed. Perceiving the world around us and reacting to that world around us isn’t a fallacy. But this brute-beast mind can’t reason beyond those senses to determine reality, truth, right, wrong, the origin of the universe, whether the Genesis Flood occurred, or which of two interpretations of Scripture is correct. When it tries, it makes up stuff and calls the made-up stuff “true.” The human mind simply has no mechanism to self-generate knowledge. It has no mechanism to self-generate truth, so it must stick with what God reveals through Scripture, observation, or some other means. That’s why the brute-beast, human mind can’t interpret observations or anything else.
Those who refuse to acknowledge Christ are willingly blindfolding themselves. They’re willingly ignorant. They can’t see reality as it is. They see reality as they imagine it.
We make a distinction between brute-beast, unreasoning awareness and knowledge. We don’t make this distinction according to the standard worldview. We’re using the word “knowledge” differently. We mean absolute and unquestionable knowledge of reality, and reality is truth.
Any ungodly scientist who understands science will tell you that science isn’t about knowledge. It’s not about truth. They’ll tell you that all findings are tentative and any new information, any discovery could overturn these findings tomorrow. And yet a great gulf exists between science that we can observe and “science” that tries to extend observation by telling a fanciful story. The further the brute-beast mind gets from observation, the less dependable the conclusions. When the brute-beast mind watches something happen, it’s fairly reliable. However, it’s much more reliable when two or three people watch something happen and agree about what happened.
The brute-beast mind becomes less reliable when it tries to figure out what happened ten minutes ago. Allow a week to pass, and it becomes even less reliable. When years have passed, reliability decreases further. When centuries pass, only the most prominent facts remain as they were written down by eye-witnesses of the time. Without eyewitness accounts, the brute-beast mind has only made-up stories. Archeologists may find an artifact such as a tool or fossil, but the brute-beast mind makes up a story about the artifact, and stories aren’t a reliable way of knowing. Every time we extend the time, the reliability shrinks. Ungodly thinkers who feel that they can reconstruct events from more than a thousand years ago without divine revelation or written eyewitness accounts have lost their minds. They’ve become proud in their thinking and unrealistic in their expectations.
So this brute-beast, unreasoning awareness can’t make ungodly thinkers rational, that is, capable of sound deductive or inductive reasoning. God reveals truth to ungodly thinkers, but ungodly thinkers can’t know this truth for certain without a true premise. Since ungodly thinkers refuse to acknowledge divine revelation, they have no source for a true premise, so they can’t know. Though God revealed reality to them, they can’t know this knowledge in the sense of being certain. They think they know it based on what they feel is an assumption, but they don’t know that this “assumption” is really revelation. And since they make no distinction between revelation and assumption, they don’t know the difference between good and evil, truth and error, or reality and make-believe. So they don’t have knowledge because they reject knowledge and are willingly ignorant of the truth. They know nothing.
Whatever God reveals is knowledge. However, Ungodly thinkers can’t tell the difference between make-believe and divine revelation. When they try to reason beyond their senses, they can’t tell the difference between observation and make-believe. Since they can’t tell the difference, they defend the theory of evolution and the law of gravity with the same zeal. They see no difference.
</end quote>
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http://RealReality.org/Real_Faith_and_Reason_Vol_1_-_Scientia.pdf
