It’s the best place to start, right?

If you’re building something, you start from the very very bottom and go up – the foundation comes first. What’s your foundation?

What is the one thing on which you base your worldview, the lens through which you view and interpret everything around you? How do you determine what’s real, what’s important, what’s fiction, what’s superfluous? What determines your doctrines, your convictions, and your preferences – are where you draw the lines between those categories?

I can tell you what mine is – the Word of God.

 

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished until all good works. (II Timothy 3:16-17)

So, next question – what is the foundation for the Word of God? What does it start with? Where are we initially told what kind of world we live in, what kind of people we are, and what kind of God we have?

Genesis.

Specifically chapters 1-3.

And I think it’s important that anyone who claims to believe in the Bible and the God who wrote it understands the depth and strength and significance of this foundation.

There’s an interesting psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, where inconsistencies in our patterns of thought and behavior cause us physical discomfort, necessitating one of three responses: 1. Changing our thoughts or behavior, 2. Adding new cognitions to override one or the other of the conflicting thoughts or behaviors, or 3. Reducing the perceived magnitude or relevance of the conflict by ignoring, denying, or justifying our beliefs or actions.

Christians do this sometimes with Genesis and Darwinian evolution. Maybe they truly believe in the “science” behind evolution, maybe they just want to “fit in” and not be criticized for their faith, but they create cognitive dissonance by believing in the Bible (including Genesis) while also believing in evolution. The response is 1. ceasing to believe the Bible or ceasing to believe evolution; 2. adding thoughts like, “God could have used evolution to create the world,” “Genesis can be interpreted in different ways, it doesn’t necessarily have to be literal,” “we know better now than when Moses wrote Genesis,” etc.; or 3. rationalizing the inconsistency by saying that it’s okay to throw out Genesis and still believe the rest of the Bible or that in the grand scheme of things, one’s beliefs about the origins of life don’t really matter.

Note that the second and third responses don’t exactly eliminate the cognitive dissonance, they just make it easier to ignore. The fact of the matter is that if you believe the Bible, you have to believe the entire Bible, because everything is interconnected. Creation isn’t just talked about in Genesis, it’s talked about Exodus, Deuteronomy, Nehemiah, Job, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Matthew, Mark, John, Acts, Romans, I Corinthians, Colossians, Hebrews, James, and Revelation. Then you have the issue of the entire point of the Bible being salvation through Jesus Christ, and if you don’t believe Genesis 1-3, the entire plan of salvation as laid out in Scripture is either irrelevant (we’re not inherently sinful or sin doesn’t separate us from God) or insufficient (sin and death have existed for all of history and there’s no relationship between the two, so Christ’s Blood couldn’t atone for sin).

So what about science?

Oh, I love science so much.

I’m not technically a scientist…yet. But love studying and researching and learning and hypothesizing and experimenting and figuring things out…

Yes, there’s science. And it says things. It says very exciting things. But that’s another post for another time.

And God saw every thing He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.