In addition to viewing our world through a reality lens and a biblical lens, we must also be viewing our world through a scientific lens to verify our perspective. 

Since I have previously documented this topic in my “Understanding the Anatomy of Evil” book in Chapter 10, I will just copy part of that chapter here. It starts out by addressing issues relating to accepting the truth and ends with an example that illustrates the profound concepts presented here.

Chapter 10         From cultural and political positions?

Now that we have established a biblical understanding of the significance of evil in our world, we are about ready to dive into the heart of the issue. However, first let’s cover what the bible says about the difficulty in receiving and accepting the truth.

Jesus tells the disciples why He speaks in parables in Matthew 13:13-15:

¹³ Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. ¹⁴ And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: ‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, And seeing you will see and not perceive; ¹⁵ For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, And their eyes they have closed, Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So that I should heal them.’

Obviously, God would have no trouble if He wanted to force us to understand and accept what we at times refuse to understand. However, that is not His plan. If we are willing to blind ourselves and not see His truth, He is willing to let us to continue in darkness. Romans 1:18 & 25 states:

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, . .

 ²⁵ who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

One requirement needed to understand the truth is to want to know the truth. Evil certainly cannot thrive with the light of truth shining on it and perhaps can’t even exist in the presence of light. Perhaps it is appropriate here to quote John 3:19-21 again. It states:

¹⁹ And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. ²¹ But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

Tools needed to see evil

In addition to the above texts explaining the blindness that allows evil to thrive, it also supports the concept expressed earlier that good and evil have a dual (diametric opposite) nature with no neutral ground between good and evil. However, just trying to see evil and how it appears in our world is not always sufficient for it to be readily identified. Sometimes we also need appropriate tools or instruments to be able to identify evil. I am sure that the reader is familiar with our inability to see the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the visible range and hear the audio spectrum beyond our hearing range. However, with appropriate instruments we can see and hear the complete spectrums. One tool that will help us see the evil in our world that is not normally perceived is simple probability science.

 Probability science

One way this tool can help us see evil is by recognizing that our cultural, political, economic and religious issues are basically only two sided. We believe in abortion or we don’t. We believe in homosexual marriage or we don’t. We believe in either socialism or capitalism. Consequently, if we can find two different philosophies, political parties, beliefs or specific religions etc. that are basically diametrically opposed to each other in every respect, we can draw some statistical conclusions that some rational cause is behind the diametric opposition rather than random chance. If one of those philosophies or religious beliefs could be viewed or considered a standard of some type like the bible that is fixed and doesn’t change, the conclusions could be quite profound since the standard would either have to be completely true or completely false and the same would be true for the other philosophy, political party or religion etc. We would only need to identify which was which!

Political positions  

A wonderful, scholarly source for this type of information is a 600 page book titled “Politics According to the Bible.” By Dr. Wayne Grudem. In Section 2 of the book he covered 62 specific political issues. It is my interpretation of his overall conclusion that the progressive, liberal or secular positions are all diametrically opposed to explicit or implicit biblical principles or violate factual knowledge. If these issues were “cherry picked” just to show the diametric opposition, any statistical analysis would be invalid. However, Grudem picked all popular current issues under the following categories: The Protection of Life, Marriage, The Family, Economics, The Environment, National Defense, Foreign Policy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion and Special Groups. From a biblical perspective that means that those progressive, liberal or secular positions are all wrong! However, we must also keep an open mind that the bible has it all wrong and that basically the Democrats have it all right. I used Democrats here in place of progressives, liberals and secularists because they are the same. However, I do not believe that Republicans are basically conservatives since Republican moderates are very similar to Democrats since they are for big government and everything that goes with that philosophy. Consequently, when we contrast opposite political positions on issues it should be against true conservatives not Republicans.

My interpretation of Dr. Grudem’s book is supported by the following quotes and conclusions that he draws. Quotes from his book are made with permission.

In his introduction he begins with laying a foundation of the Christian worldview to make sure that biblical texts are not out taken of context. He states:

Before turning to specific issues, I attempt . . . to lay a foundation concerning the main components of a Christian worldview: What does the bible say about God as Creator, about the earth He created, about us as men and women created in His image, about sin, and about God’s purpose for putting human beings on the earth in the first place? I lay this broad foundation so as to avoid a common mistake of using bible verses out of context to support nearly any position on current political disputes.[1]

He continues immediately to put this in perspective and explains where he is going in the rest of the book:

This foundation of a Christian worldview is necessary in order to “see the parts in light of the whole” and thus to understand individual verses correctly from within the overall framework of the Bible’s primary teachings. I put this material at the beginning of the book because basic worldview differences have profound implications for many matters of government policy. In fact, differences over worldview questions explain many of the disagreements between “liberals” and “conservatives” in politics today.

In the rest of the book I examine about sixty specific current issues. I attempt to analyze them from the standpoint of that biblical understanding of civil government and that biblical worldview and also with reference to specific teachings of the bible that pertain to that issue.[2]

He goes on to explain his three-level basis for analysis:

On some issues I think the overall teaching of the bible is clear, direct and decisive, . . There is a second set of issues where I depend on arguments from broader principles. . . Then I have a third type of argument: an appeal to facts in the world.[3]

The 62 item list below is basically a list of the political issues that Dr. Grudem compared to biblical teaching in his book as part of the Table of Contents that he refers to as simply “Contents:”[4] This list is slightly different because all items were not really political issues and some were split into two separate political issues.

In Part 2, Specific Issues, the book explains why each progressive, liberal or secular position on these issues is opposed to the biblical position or relevant facts in the world today. Here we will not take the time to go into detail on how all the progressive positions are opposed to the biblical position; they are covered in Dr. Grudem’s book. However, we will cover some of these in a later chapter.

At this point we need to consider what possibilities can explain how progressive, liberal or secular positions and the bible can be in diametric opposition on all of a large number of independent two sided positions. If it came about by accident without a foundational reason like an authority and rebellion against the authority or good vs. evil or truth vs. falsehood etc., we can calculate the probability of that happening by random chance using probability science. It is the same probability as flipping a coin and getting heads each and every time with the number of flips equaling the number of issues. The formula is simple and it is 2ⁿ where “n” is the number of flips or issues. Don’t let the mathematics scare you. It simply means you multiply two times itself “n” times. For n=2 it is just 2 x 2 or 4. For n=3 it is 2 x 2 x 2 = 8. On your calculator it is y^x where “y” is 2 and “x” is “n.” For an “n” of 62 it is 4.6 x 10¹⁸ or 4,600,000,000,000,000,000 or 4.6 quintillion. Consequently, the chances of perfect opposition between 62 liberal progressive independent sequential or random positions (not “cherry picked”) and the biblical position is one in 4.6 quintillion unless some underling foundation or force is the cause. The fact that those chances are so slim means that some foundational reason or forces like those suggested above exists to explain that complete opposition. However, what remains to be explained is which is right and which is wrong. Building on what we just learned, we can establish that one of the following tables is correct and one is false and we need to decide which is which:

Proposed scenario:

Bible correct                                       Progressives wrong

Right                                                      Wrong

God as authority                               Satan and progressives as rebels

Good                                                     Evil

True                                                       False

Desirable effects                              Undesirable effects

Good fruit                                           Bad fruit

Alternate scenario:

Progressives correct                       Bible wrong

Right                                                      Wrong

Satan as authority                            God as the rebel

Good                                                     Evil

True                                                       False

Desirable effects                              undesirable effects

Good fruit                                           Bad fruit

I don’t believe that anyone has ever proposed the alternative scenario as the correct one. However, we need to either eliminate it as a possibility or accept it as a possibility. Lucifer or Satan has never claimed that he created God; only that he wanted to be like the Most-High. God never said that he liked to be like Satan or wanted to have Satan’s power and position. Also, if the alternative scenario is true all the biblical precepts, commandments etc. would be bad. I never have heard anybody claim that if people followed the commandments it would result in a bad and evil society. The complaints about the commandments include that they are too difficult to keep, they prevent us from fulfilling our desires and secondly when we do fulfill our desires, they make us feel guilty.

Let’s carry this one step further to help us understand the full implications of this diametric opposition. Another way of helping us understand this profound anomaly is to have you pretend that you are a school teacher. You give your students a 50-question true and false test. The answers to half of the test questions are true and half false. You randomize the order of the questions so the next question would have an equal chance of being true or false. Several of your students got all the questions right. The rest of the student’s test results were as expected except for one student. That student got all the answers wrong. The question is, what would you conclude about that student? Would you conclude he just didn’t know the material? Would that explain the result? Definitely not! If he knew nothing about the material he would get about half of the answers correct by random chance. So how would you explain getting all wrong answers? The only possible explanation is that either the student basically knew all the right answers and intentionally gave the wrong answers or someone trained the student in a 100% diametric opposite way to what was right. How else could you explain this test result? You can bet that no student ever got all the questions wrong on a 50-question true and false test because of ignorance or lack of knowledge; it is statistically impossible. The fact that in our culture and politics we get it all wrong based upon the bible is so profound that it should shake us to our core! It screams that some outside influence has affected our culture and our politics. We already rejected the possibility that perhaps our culture has it right and the bible has it all wrong. Consequently, as the bible teaches, it is Satan that knows what is right, yet does and teaches everything that is wrong. Rebellion against God, the bible and the good and truthful authority is the only reasonable explanation.