Follow me
DyerThoughts
  • Home
  • About
  • Resources
    • Study Materials >
      • Baptism
      • Essential Beliefs
      • The New Birth
      • 25 Questions about Baptism
      • Q&A about Salvation
      • Salvation is Free
      • How the Church Began
  • Contact
  • Seminar Topics

Implications of Being Made in the Image of God

12/14/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Being made in the image of God has grave consequences for how we work out our worldview. How should we view ourselves? Are we purely physical beings? Are we simply animals? How do we know we are more than just evolved creatures? The naturalist has cut off the hand that feeds him when he denies that man is more than a physical creature. 

In order to restrict man to a purely physical existence the naturalist equates the mind with the brain. This is their botched attempt to solve the supposed mystery within naturalistic philosophy of the immaterial soul. For if the two, mind and brain, are distinct then the naturalist has an unexplainable anomaly in their worldview. Thomas Nagel, a naturalist philosopher, reluctantly admits this conundrum, “So long as the mental is irreducible to the physical, the appearance of conscious physical organisms is left unexplained by a naturalistic account of the familiar type. On a purely materialists understanding of biology, consciousness would have to be regarded as a tremendous and inexplicable extra brute fact about the world.” But they have only dug their own grave. For any attempt to form a construct of thoughts only proves what they are trying to deny. That is, you cannot consciously choose to deny consciousness. Like Wile E. Coyote they have run off the cliff, looked down, noticed they have no ground to stand on, and are simply blinking in the camera as if nothing is wrong. 

According to the Biblical worldview man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:27). There are many implications for this but here are three:
  • We are endowed with personhood.
  • We are separate from the animal kingdom.
  • We have a higher intrinsic value than animals.

Hence God’s covenant statement to Noah in Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.” This follows God’s provisions for mankind to kill animals for food (Gen 9:2-3). Knowing that this fact is unescapable the liberals chose to redefine the unborn from a person to a thing. If the unborn is simply a fetus, that is a glob of tissue, then he (it?) has no more value than a bad organ that needs to be disposed. This somersault of logic (or lack thereof) kicked the latch open on Pandora’s Box. For if the authority to define personhood resides with man then the scope of personhood will be mounted on the guns of those with the most firepower. Soon we will follow in the footsteps of the Nazis who justified genocide by dehumanizing whole groups of people who they deemed a parasite to the Aryan race. Scholar Andreas Musolff said, “The source imagery of Hitler’s political worldview consisted in the conceptualization of the German (but, in principle, every) nation as a human body that had to be shielded from disease…Jewish people…viewed as an illness-spreading parasite, represented the danger of the disease. Deliverance from this threat to the nation’s life would come from Hitler and his party as the only competent healers who were willing to fight the illness.” As we clearly see our understanding of the nature of man has grave consequences for the type of world we produce.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Apologetics
    Apostles
    Archaeology
    Atheism
    Bible
    Christianity
    Dawkins
    Free Will
    God's Sovereignty
    Hermeneutics
    Inspiration
    Morality
    Moral Relativism
    Philosophy
    Psychoanalysis
    Reading
    Romans 7
    Science
    Scientism

    Picture

    Author

    I’m Billy Dyer a Teacher and Preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is my blog page. It is focused on “coffee table apologetics”..... continue reading >>


    Follow Me:

    Tweets by @dyerthoughts84

    Archives

    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    RSS Feed


© 2015 dyerthoughts
Picture