2 Peter 2:12a and Jude 1:10 & 19 speak of those who are like brute beasts, unable to process rational thought and only able to respond to their five senses because they don’t listen to the Holy Spirit.
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Abductive Reasoning: In the absence of a true premise, both deductive and inductive reasoning default to abductive reasoning, which some people say is guessing. However, abduction isn’t always guessing. It’s intuitive. Abduction is a source of information in the same way that observation is a source of information. God can speak through the intuition, but so can demons, and so can our fallen fleshly minds. God tells the truth, demons lie, and the fleshly mind makes up stuff. We pray for God to make the difference plain to us, and He promises to answer that prayer.
Someone may say that the Holy Spirit’s work isn’t personal and that we can’t know Christ in any real way through His Spirit. They may point out that one person’s claim of “Spirit-given intuition” may totally contradict another person’s claim. From this, they imply that we can’t depend on the Holy Spirit. They see dependence on the Holy Spirit as subjective. Another person may say that we should be skeptical about any experience with the Holy Spirit. They may try to equate any such experience with human emotions or teachings that conflict with Scripture. For instance, they may claim that all people who experience the leading of the Holy Spirit are teaching that the Holy Spirit isn’t a person but that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force. Some people even say that the leading of the Holy Spirit isn’t in Scripture. They may say that Christians need not seek leading or revelation from the Holy Spirit. They imply that God never promised to have the Holy Spirit lead us. Then they say that, given the many possible choices, Christians are free to use “their God-given wisdom” to choose from among those choices as long as they don’t choose something that God forbids in Scripture. These are only a few of the arguments people use against following the leading of the Holy Spirit. We’ll go over many more of them in the book Real Faith & Reason Volume Three.
We can acknowledge some points. It’s true that Christians have conflicting doctrines, but we can’t blame the Holy Spirit for that. The human mind has no way to determine doctrine without divine revelation, so the human mind without divine revelation is going to create conflicts in doctrine. It’s true that some Christians disregard the Bible or parts of the Bible. The Holy Spirit draws us to read the Bible, and He’s right there to bring light to the Scripture if we don’t block Him out with our preconceived ideas. Christians need to remember that the emotions they may feel when they come in contact with the Holy Spirit are just the flesh’s reaction to the Holy Spirit. Those emotions aren’t the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit can move without emotional feeling. Some Christians do interpret the Scripture in a subjective way, but they become subjective by ignoring the Holy Spirit. Since Star Wars introduced The Force, many Christians have been deceived, but that movie series was based on Buddhism rather than the Holy Spirit.
All these push-backs against the Holy Spirit have problems. Most notably, the only alternative to divine revelation is made-up stuff. All reasoning without the Holy Spirit is subjective. Without the Holy Spirit, all attempts to interpret Scripture are subjective. Someone may have a rationalized interpretation of Scripture and try to defend that rationalization by saying, “God showed me.” However, it’s more common for them to say, “The Scripture showed me” or “Common sense showed me.” Contradictions among Christians are a function of refusing to follow the orders that God lays out in Scripture for receiving revelation. Contradictions aren’t caused by asking the Holy Spirit to reveal reality as it really is. God does promise to lead us. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth. It’s true that God gives us the freedom to ignore His leading. He never forces anyone to follow Him. If we think we can have some sort of “God-given wisdom” without the God Who gives the wisdom, we are mistaken. Jesus Christ is our wisdom. When we disconnect ourselves from Him, we are truly on our own with our own made-up stuff as the basis for our reasoning. That’s what the brute-beast mind, devoid of the Spirit, is all about.
We know Christ is real because we know Him. He reveals Himself to every person, so no one will have an excuse. We know that the Bible is God’s word (utterance—He speaks through it) without error because He reveals this fact to us. Only by divine revelation can anything be known. Ungodly thinkers base every conclusion on made-up stuff. Ungodly thinkers base every interpretation of the Bible, observation, or anything else on made-up stuff. They just make it up and declare it “true.”
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