23 appearance of age. That is, Adam was a mature man on the first day of his existence. By contemporary time tables, Adam and his world appeared to be much older than they were at the end of the first week of creation. Neither the atheist nor the evolutionist is thinking neutrally, objectively, or in a value-free manner. The atheist assumes a universal standard of goodness, justice, or love and insists that God must measure up to that standard. If God fails to do so, and the atheist insists that the problems of pain and suffering prove that He does not measure up, then God must not exist. In so reasoning, the atheist “brings God down to our size” in the sense that God is held accountable to a moral standard. At this point the moral standard is the ultimate measure of reliability, a type of god or idol, expressed in the form of a foundational presupposition. Then God Himself must bow to the ultimate standard of justice, goodness, or love in order to validate His existence. The atheist posits a “straw man god” that is not the God of the Bible. The words “accountability” and “responsibility” do not apply to the God of the Bible. God is not accountable to anyone or to anything. If He is accountable to something other than Himself, then that something is god. In any type of thinking, there is an ultimate standard or court of appeal for determining what is just, true, good, and significant. That final court of appeal is one’s ultimate measure of reality and what is determined to be true. Everyone has such an ultimate standard, and that standard is one’s starting point in thinking, one’s basic presupposition, or one’s god. It cannot be proven but must be taken for granted (by faith). That ultimate standard is the object of one’s faith, and everyone expresses faith in order to think and to maintain a viewpoint about what is real, what is true, and how humans should behave. Even the attempt to be “nonjudgmental” assumes a world in which moral judgments are relative and nonbinding upon other people. So is one “nonjudgmental” relatively or absolutely? Everyone is a person of faith, regardless of devout religious commitment or firm atheistic allegiance. The God of the Bible is beyond definition, which means that He defines everything else. The Bible does not attempt to define God, but it assumes His existence from the outset — “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). The Bible records the activity of God
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