According to a Washington Post story available online by Rick Noack, the number of young people in Iceland who believe that God created the world is zero (which is also a temperature the country is familiar with). In light of the availability of Christian evidences and the failure of evolution to offer any substantial proof in favor of it, this report is astounding. According to this survey, 0% of those in Iceland (young or old) believe the very first verse of the Bible. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
One Icelander responded by saying such a figure presents the wrong picture. He argued that plenty of people still believe in God in Iceland. Really? How many people who read the first line of a book and believe it to be false would keep reading? If a history book began, “The earth is flat,” who would continue to consider anything else that appeared afterward? Why would it have any credibility elsewhere within its pages when it was so fundamentally incorrect to begin with?
Now here is a frightening thought: Only twenty years ago (about one generation) 90% of all Icelanders were religious believers; today that number has dwindled to 50%. Not much is offered in the way of a lengthy analysis; the following paragraph is the best that the article offers.
“Secularization [in Iceland] has occurred very quickly, especially among younger people,” said Bjarni Jonsson, the managing director of the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, an athiest non-governmental organization. “With increased education and broad-mindedness, change can occur quickly.”
The first statement above implies that young people are being taught differently than they once were. Has God been thrown out of their schools? In what form has this “increased secularization” taken place? And to what does increased education refer? Are the students going to school an extra day a week or two more hours per day? Or are they being constantly bombarded with propaganda?
One can only speculate on what is meant by broad-mindedness in this context. Isn’t it supposed to be associated with being tolerant? If belief in God creating the world has fallen to 0% in the space of twenty years, one thing can be relied upon-it had nothing to do with being broad-minded. Few evolutionists can be characterized by tolerance. They are known for ridiculing creationists and labeling anyone who deigns to disagree with them as “unscientific.” Was it this kind of broad-minded approach that reduced the number of those who believe in Genesis 1:1 to zero? How much classroom time was granted to an opposing view?
According to the article, just 20 years ago, nearly 90% of all Icelanders were believers in God; today that amount has sunk to less than 50%. The explanation offered makes little sense.
Solveig Anna Boasdottir, a professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Iceland, agreed that scientific progress had changed religious attitudes in the country.
Scientific progress in the last twenty years? What scientific progress would that be-the advent of Facebook and the various social media? All of us who have been on earth the past 20 years might well ask the question, “What scientific progress?” More particularly, what “scientific progress” came about as the result of not believing that God created the heavens and the earth? Precisely how has man been benefited by evolutionary theory in the past twenty years?
Only two pseudo-scientific things comes to mind-Lucy, which was not all she was cracked up to be and “global warming,” which has yet to have an adequate scientific basis for it. But even if both were true, how has either one helped modern man? Even if something were actually discovered that lent the theory of evolution credibility, what scientific progress would it generate? Would it cause automobiles to run more efficiently-or draw us any closer to “beaming” from one locale to another? Evolutionists have been frantically searching for proof for more than 150 years, and they have come up empty. But even if they had iron-clad evidence, who would mankind be improved?
“Global Warming” may motivate some to be hysterical, but how much taxpayer money was lost on Solindra? If the theory motivates some to develop better forms of energy, fine; motivation to do better and be better is helpful, but taxpayers should not be forced to fund fly-by-night schemes as though the planet would fade into oblivion in the next five years. However, whether creation or evolution is true will not change “global warming.” So, again, what scientific progress in the last 20 years has convinced those in Iceland that religion has no value?
The theory of evolution lacks any clear support; evolutionists cannot explain left-handed amino acids, no do they have a convincing explanation for polystrate fossils. Their dating techniques have proved to be invalid beyond a certain range, and they are constantly changing the age of the universe (from 2 to 10 billion years, to about 20, and now back to 15). Mathematics students would love to have that much leeway on problems they solve. “Your test answer is only off by 5,000,000,000. Close enough.”
The same professor previously cited commented further on the current beliefs of Icelanders. She opined
that about 40 percent of the country’s younger generation still consider themselves Christian-but none of them believe that God created the Earth. “Theories of science are broadly accepted among both the young and old. That does not necessarily affect people’s faith in God.”
How can anyone refuse to believe what one part of the Bible teaches while repudiating a different part of it? It is either true, as it claims to be, or false. If God did not create the heavens and the earth, then how do we know that He is all-powerful? And what’s the next thing to be case aside? How about the miracles? We don’t see those in operation today; so why should we believe they ever occurred? Perhaps they were just fanciful explanations for events that we cannot explain. We cannot duplicate them scientifically; so if we are going to be people of science, then the miracles cannot be taken seriously. If not, why not?
Well, say, how do we know anything in the Bible is accurate? If we have already rejected the creation of Genesis 1, then how do we know that Adam and Eve is not some sort of allegory? Maybe man invented marriage instead of God doing so, and it doesn’t really have to be between one man and one woman for life. If man actually came up with that arrangement, then the other arrangements he designed are equally valid, such as polygamy and homosexual unions. If man is the originator of the marriage concept, then no one has the right to challenge what any consenting adults want to do.
Unfortunately, no basis exists for denying any practice, period, whether the participants are adult or consenting. When Boco Haram kidnaps teenage girls to sell for sex slaves, why is that wrong? Who says we need marriage at all? Man thought it up, but man has also desired to live in fornication; so why should anyone regard marriage as superior? In fact, why is anything man decides to do right or wrong? What’s wrong with forcing women to comply? Aren’t we talking about the wonderful evolutionary idea of “the survival of the fittest”?
Now that we have destroyed Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, surely we must see how antiquated the concept of sin is in Genesis 3. The idea of sin was just created to make people feel guilty for acting out their desires. All that sin amounts to is simply a disease or an inborn propensity to do certain things. No one can seriously call homosexuality a sin, since people are born that way. Asexuals must be, also, as well as fornicators and adulterers. Thieves probably can’t help themselves, either. If God didn’t create the world, then man cannot be created in His image. Evolution cannot account for a soul or a spirit; mankind just evolved. No room for spirituality exists; it’s just sentimentality.
In Psalm 11:3, David asked the question: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” It’s an excellent question. One of the foundations of the Bible is Genesis 1:1. Remove that and the rest of the Bible collapses-whether Icelanders realize that or not. To say that a person can still be a Christian without believing the first verse in the Bible is not only wrong-it is dangerous! It is the equivalent of saying, “I have no basis for believing in Christianity, but ‘I’m a believer anyway.’ ” A believer in what-fables?
If the Creation foundation is removed and marriage, the foundation of a stable society, is removed, we are already well down the road to an absence of any standards whatsoever. The next point of attack is to do what the Jesus Seminar did in trying to determine what Jesus actually said because, once the validity of miracles is removed, what Jesus taught becomes the next target. If the miracles cannot be considered valid because they are unscientific, then all of the evidence for Jesus being the Son of God (and thus our Savior) is gone. John included them as evidence for the reader (John 20:30-31).
John cannot be regarded as honest if he wrote of unscientific occurrences; neither can Matthew, Mark, or Luke. So if the Bible is to have any value at all, a subjective determination will have to be made as what in it might be valuable and what is irrelevant. Reaching agreement on these teachings is largely unlikely. How many are willing to accept Jesus’ condemnation of adultery and fornication (which includes homosexuality) (Matt. 15:18-20)? How many are willing to accept that these are deeds of darkness (John 3:19-21; Eph. 5:3-13)? How many are willing to acknowledge that such things are shameful? Right! Didn’t think so.
Eventually the entire Bible will be reduced to, “Love one another,” and “Don’t judge me”-although these will be entirely removed from their Biblical context. The number of believers in Iceland has fallen from 90% to 50% in just twenty years. Wait until those remaining figure out that they have no basis for their beliefs-that foundations have been destroyed. Some may continue to believe anyway, but the next generation will not be so blind. They will observe that “faith” is not based on facts and will wonder, “Why fool with it at all?” Eventually, they will notice that no foundation for mortality exists anywhere. Moral and ethics were invented by mankind and are subject to change upon the merest whim of society. That’s the reason abortion can be right in one culture and wrong in another-or why it can be legal in one century and illegal the next.
Without God as Creator, no objective standards exist. Their foundation has been destroyed. It may take another twenty years before Icelanders reap the results of what has occurred during the last two decades. But it will come to pass if people actually live their atheistic philosophy. Moral restraints fall by the wayside. Iceland’s bitterly cold rejection of the Bible will result in an extremely hot future (not a reference to global warming).