Is There a Universally Recognized Human Right to Homosexual Immorality and Same Sex Marriage?

It is quite frustrating to see Evangelical theologians missing the whole point in their comments about homosexuality, transgenderism, and same sex marriage.  The vast majority of them are trying to find common ground with secular humanists who have invented their own facade which they call "human rights."  [See:  Is Same Sex Marriage a "Human Right"?]  The real question is who decides what these human rights are and how is the deduction made?  Is there an objective standard for determining morality?

This where I am strongly an advocate of the late Dr. Gordon H. Clark's presuppositionalism.  According to Dr. Clark's apologetics, everyone starts with undemonstrable and unprovable axioms or starting points.  This is clearly true of empirical science as well since empiricism is really based on logical positivism of one degree or another.  In fact, Dr. Clark went so far  as to say that empirical science is based on the fallacy of affirming the consequent.  Basically, a theory is a presupposition and the scientist finds every inductive evidence he or she can to affirm the theory.  So why is it that two scientists can examine the same inductive evidence with two different theories and come up with affirming conclusions for two different presupposed theories from the same evidence?  Even scientists are fideists.  [See:  Science and Truth].

The answer, of course, is that they have affirmed the conclusion beforehand.  If it is raining, the streets are wet.  The streets are wet, therefore it is raining.   If A, then B.  B, therefore A.  Of course there could many other factors involved that could cause the streets to be wet.

Logical positivism is self refuting because it says that only what can be learned from the five senses is legimately knowledge.  But the beginning premise is itself not capable of observation since it is an abstract proposition that can only be thought with the mind.  Do animals understand the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4?

To cut the argument short I would ask the question that if everyone--including scientists--begins with presupposed axioms, why would the world at large fault the Christian for beginning with the axiom of Scripture?  All knowledge for the Christian worldview begins with Scripture as the axiom.  Scripture is the God-breathed Word of God.  Every single word is fully inspired by God.  (2 Timothy 3:16; Matthew 4:4; 2 Peter 1:19-21; Psalm 119:89).

I keep repeating this point but it is worth repeating again.  Is the human mind just a product of chemistry in a body, a brain of grey matter?  Or is the human mind really a soul created by God through providence and natural generation?  Philosophers of science have yet to solve the mind/body problem.  Exactly how does the brain produce a thinking and sentient soul in the first place?  Yet we have psychologists and psychiatrists pronouncing yet another fallacy of affirming the consequent.  If there are genetic and biological predetermining factors that could cause homosexuality and transgender dysphoria, then there will be homosexuals and persons with transgender dysphoria.  There are actually homosexuals and transgender confused persons, therefore homosexuality and transgender dysphoria must be caused by genetic and biological predispositions of the human body.  But presupposing this is again affirming the consequent.  If A, then B.  B, therefore A.

The fact that no empirical scientist can demonstrate how a brain can manifest a thinking and sentient soul should raise questions about the logical fallacy of presupposing a confused individual was born with a man's body and a woman's mind or vice versa.  Just because a person has same sex attractions, does that prove that the person was biologically or genetically predetermined to that lifestyle or attraction?  The cause could be psychological disorders rather than genetics or biology.  Presupposing that the streets are wet because it is raining ignores the fact that the street could be wet because a water line broke some other place and flooded the area.   The same is true of presupposing the consequent and finding causes to support the consequent.  There could be any number of other causes underlying homosexuality and transgenderism.

Finally, do we know that there is some set of human rights that everyone universally is entitled to?  According to secular humanism these rights are "universally recognized."  But is that statement itself true?  Obviously not since every culture has different customs.  In ancient Greek and Roman societies sexual promiscuity and homosexuality and even pedophilia were commonly accepted practices.  In Christian societies these are taboos.  In short, presupposing a set of human rights based on popular opinion is a contradiction because there is no universally recognizable authority for developing a set of human rights.  Popular vote does not determine morality per se because morality is maleable and relative to each society.  Unless there is a deontological basis for morality there can be only a totalitarian determination of morality by the state.  For Christianity there is a higher authority than human opinions.  That authority is the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures.  We ought to obey the governing authorities and the civil authority.  (Romans 13:1-14).  But when the government commands Christians to accept homosexual marriage, transgenderism, and the murder of unborn babies, the Christian has a higher obligation to obey God rather than man.  (Acts 4:19, 5:29).  In recent comments President Obama said that Christians must accept the dogma of secular humanism and change the teaching of the Scriptures.  [See:  Christian Churches 'Must be Made to Affirm Homosexuality'].  The dogma of homosexual marriage and transgenderism is soon to be a legally enforced doctrine of the socialist state.  The same thing has been said by Hillary Clinton in regards to abortion.  Christians must accept the dehumanization of human babies or face legal sanctions, according to Clinton.  [See: Hillary Clinton: Force Christians to Change Their Religious Views to Support Abortion].

[Cf. Leviticus 18:22-23; Romans 1:27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Genesis 19:5; Judges 19:22; Deuteronomy 22:5; Leviticus 19:28; 1 Kings 18:28]

I will ask this question again.  Which god is it that gives human beings the right to murder infants and practice perversions like homosexuality and mutilate their bodies to look like the opposite biological sex?  (2 Corinthians 4:3-6).  

Is Donald Trump any better?  No.  Trump is for using tax dollars to fund Planned Parenthood, which exists solely for women's health issues.   Of course, the term "women's health" in liberal jargon means the right to murder an infant in the womb at any stage of development from conception up to just prior to a normal birth at nine months.  Viability is not the determining factor but sheer dehumanization of a human person.  Even Hillary Clinton acknowledged that an unborn child is a person in a rare slip of the tongue:   [Hillary Clinton Admits That Abortion Kills a ‘Person’].   Donald Trump is a relativist in regards to morality as his affirmation of the LGBTQ lobby clearly shows.  Trump is no friend of Evangelical Christianity and to affirm his candidacy is the same as attacking Christianity since he would uphold totalitarian laws restricting religious freedom and theological dissent from the dogmas of the secular humanism state.

For the Christian the final authority in all matters of morality, faith, and practice is not the secularist state or socialism.  Instead the Christian is obligated to obey God when there is a conflict between state dogma and biblical deontological morality.  The Christian cannot in good conscience obey laws that command him or her to recognize a perversion as "marriage" or obey laws that command them to recognize a woman's right to murder her unborn baby at any stage after conception up to and including just prior to a normal birth.  The sixth commandment says, "Thou shalt not murder."   (Exodus 20:13).  The Bible is a book that is logical and propositional in nature and it is perfectly legitimate to logically deduce civil and judicial laws based on the morality revealed in the general principles of the Decalogue and the other moral laws revealed in Holy Scripture.  [See Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1:6].

 6.      The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men. (2 Tim. 3:15–17, Gal. 1:8–9, 2 Thess. 2:2) Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word: (John 6:45, 1 Cor 2:9–12) and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed. (1 Cor. 11:13–14, 1 Cor. 14:26, 40).   WCF 1:6.

In short, true Christians are at this time a small minority or remnant in the United States of America and around the world.  Most of the western countries are now openly socialist, materialistic, and hostile to biblical Christianity.  Persecution is just around the corner.  How much longer will the liberal media and the totalitarian state be content with religious freedom?  They are already willing to take away the second amendment right to bear arms.  The freedom of speech and freedom of religion is also on their hit list as relative to the socialist and secular humanist agenda to stamp out the archaic religions of the past and replace them with theological relativism and secular atheism.  Those who are supporting Trump are not offering a legitimate alternate but simply affirming the same result but with a different leader.  Trump is willing to equivocate and dissimulate to win the Evangelical vote.  But in the end Trump's agenda is no different from the agenda of the far left.  His only points of difference with them is on the issue of open borders and free trade or the Transpacific Partnership.  Other than that Trump is still a socially progressive liberal.  But the question is how is it progress when America is regressing to atheism and paganism rather than staying true to the Christian values deduced from the Bible?  It is the rule of law that is deduced logically from the Scriptures that has made our nation great and that has caused western civilization to advance peace around the world.  Instead the secularists want to exalt an intolerant pluralism that does not include the right to believe the Bible literally as it is logically and propositionally revealed from God himself.  The best summary of the system of propositional truth in the Holy Scriptures is the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Humans alone are created in the image of God.  Since God is a spiritual being with no body, it logically follows that the image of God cannot be a material body.   (John 4:24).  It is man's soul which is spiritual and immaterial and it is this spiritual and immaterial soul that is the image of God.  God, being Logic (John 1:1), enlightens every man with the ability to think.  (John 1:9).  Man is not a tabula rasa at birth but is innately endowed with the ability to reason, think logically, keep time, remember the past, and examine contingencies to predict various outcomes for future events.   [See:  The Image of God in Man, by Dr. Gordon H. Clark].  If morality is relative to culture, then morality changes with culture.  The basic premise of secular humanism is that deontological ethics deduced from the archaic Scriptures of Christianity is subject to revision.   Tomorrow it might be perfectly fine to eliminate subhuman homeless persons who have nothing to contribute to society.  Unborn babies are merely a source of human body parts used to enhance the lives of those better able to pay for this service and who have something more significant to contribute to a socialist utopia.  Any political or theological dissent based on an objective standard of morality is intolerable to the secularists.  Although they pretend to be tolerant the one thing they cannot tolerate is legislating morality.  Instead they prefer to legislate immorality and outlaw religious dissent based on the proposition that the Bible is the plenary and verbally inspired words of God and without error in every proposition recorded therein.

Thinking Christians need to stand for the truth and make it known that relativism and progressivism is not an option and that they are willing to suffer persecution if necessary.   Those so-called Evangelical  churches that are more concerned with not losing their tax exempt status--read state licensed or state controlled churches--are not faithful to the Scriptures but to the state.  This distinction will become even more evident as time goes on.

Some so-called Scripturalists are libertarians or libertines.  They believe the axiom that nothing is wrong except what harms another person.  But the Decalogue and the Scriptures disagree.  Leaving out the first table of the Ten Commandments is unconscionable.  Belief in the God of the Bible is the very bedrock of a democratic and constitutional Republic.  Without the Bible the rule of law means nothing.  I end with the question,  "How do you deduce a libertarian political philosophy from the logical and propositional system revealed in the Bible by good and necessary consequence?"

Charlie J. Ray, M.Div.

Dr. Gordon H. Clark: Everyone Begins with Assumptions

All arguments seem doubtful. And what is worse, as the student makes his way through the mazes of speculation, he begins to see that even though some sequences of thought are logically valid, they all depend on original assumptions.  --  Dr. Gordon H. Clark

Of course, the proofs of God’s existence are not the only arguments that upon examination disclose suspicious intricacies. All philosophy is intricate. Behaviorism in psychology, utilitarianism in ethics, the Newtonian law of gravitation, and the Marxian interpretation of history are all defended by elaborate and plausible arguments. When first read, they seem unanswerable. But minds as keen as Hume’s have attacked these positions very effectively. Theism is not the only philosophy that faces difficulties. All arguments seem doubtful. And what is worse, as the student makes his way through the mazes of speculation, he begins to see that even though some sequences of thought are logically valid, they all depend on original assumptions. Just as the theorems of geometry are deduced from the axioms, so the conclusions of behaviorism are deduced from the assumption that mind is a physiological process, utilitarianism from the assumption that pleasure is the good, and gravitation from a theory of space and time. But what about these assumptions or axioms? Can they be proved? It would seem that they cannot, for they are the starting points of an argument, and if the argument starts with them, there is no preceding argumentation. Accordingly, after the humanist or theist has worked out a consistent system by arranging all his propositions as theorems in a series of valid demonstrations, how is either of them to persuade the other to accept his unproved axioms? And the question is all the more perplexing when it is suspected that the axioms were chosen for the express purpose of deducing precisely these conclusions.

Gordon H. Clark (2014-06-05T04:00:00+00:00). A Christian View of Men and Things (Kindle Locations 336-347). The Trinity Foundation. Kindle Edition.

See also:  A Christian View of Men and Things.

William Lane Craig, R. C. Sproul, Sr., and Evidentialism

Someone messaged me in FaceBook with the following question.  You can read my response below.

       B.: Hey man, what do you think about William Lane Craig. He argues that objective moralism can not exist without the existence of God.


    Charlie J. Ray

        That's the moral argument for God's existence, B. My own apologetics is not evidentialist. That's William Lane Craig's approach. Craig is an Arminian [Molinist], which presents problems in and of itself. A Reformed man who is an evidentialist is R.C. Sproul, Sr.  Sproul follows the classical arguments for the existence of God: 1) The ontological argument. We can conceive of no higher being than God so we could not even conceive such a being unless He actually exists. 2) The cosmological argument. Everything has a cause. Tracing the chain of cause and effect back to the beginning of time God is the first cause of the universe and all that exists. 3) The teleological argument. The universe and all the creatures in it are so complex that they must have been designed by an intelligent designer. That designer is God.  (See Classical Apologetics,).

        The moral argument is a variation on the ontological argument since it insists that there is a higher being who is the very highest moral being we could conceive. Therefore if we can conceive of these high moral standards, God must exist.

        The other major approach in apologetics is the distinction between presuppositionalism and evidentialism. Cornelius Van Til was the most prominent Reformed theologian who advocated presuppositional apologetics. The problem with Van Til is that he begins with reason, as do the evidentialists, rather than Scripture. Van Til also makes the Creator/creature distinction so absolute that Scripture itself is not God's actual words but rather an analogy of God's thoughts. This comes dangerously close to the neo-orthodox view that the Bible is not God's Word but only "contains" God's Word. R. C. Sproul, Sr., would take the same evidentialist approach as Craig. They use reason to try to persuade people to believe in God and go from there to Christian doctrine like Scripture.

        I am a presuppositionalist. I reject both Van Til's presuppositionalism and Sproul's evidentialism. I follow the apologetics of Gordon H. Clark. Clark's most famous student was Carl F. H. Henry, one of the leading Evangelical theologians of the 20th century. Henry was also a Calvinist. Anyway, Clark called his presuppositionalism Scripturalism. Clark said the only way we can know God is through Holy Scripture, which is God's divine revelation from God to man. The Bible is presupposed to be God's revelation. There is no amount of reason or evidence that could prove this to an unbeliever. The Christian can and does believe the evidences and the reasons for faith. But this is not the beginning point. Anselm said, "Faith seeks understanding." In other words a person has to believe before he or she will accept the evidences for God's existence. The three classical arguments for God's existence (Aquinas) cannot win anyone over who has not already come to a position of faith. The same can be said of Van Til's presuppositional view that begins with God's existence and the trinity and then proceeds to Scripture.

        Clark realized that Scripture is the beginning point because the Scriptures tell us everything we need to know to be saved (2 Timothy 3:15). If they will not believe Moses and the prophets they will not believe even if someone were raised from the dead (Luke 16:28-31). It is through the preaching of the moral law that the elect are convicted of their depravity and their position before God as miserable sinners (Romans 3:20; 7:7; Galatians 3:23-26). It is only through the preaching of the Gospel that elect persons are converted and irresistibly drawn to saving faith (Romans 10:8-11, 14-17; John 6:37-39, 44, 65). Regeneration or the new birth is an act of God on the unbelieving and unconverted elect person. Only after regeneration will they have faith since faith itself is a gift of God (John 3:3-8; Ephesians 2:8-9). Election precedes the creation of the world and election is particular, not general (Ephesians 1:4, 11; Romans 9:11-13, 17-18).

        Also, for Clark and his student, Carl Henry, Scripture is not merely an analogy of God's Word. Scripture is the very words and thoughts of God given to us on a human level. For example for both God and man 2 + 2 = 4. God understands this on our level just as we understand God's same thoughts on this mathematical truth claim. When we read Scripture we are thinking God's words and thoughts after Him. Scripture is given in logical form which can be understood by even unbelievers even if they refuse to believe it. Scripture makes propositional truth claims that must be assented to and believed for salvation. Christ died for the sins of His elect is a truth claim. It is either true or it is false. It's called the law of non-contradiction. A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time. So if the Bible proclaims that God is one God and three persons (Deuteronomy 6:4; 2 Corinthians 13:14; Matthew 28:19), [we are obligated to believe that truth claim].

        Van Til's error was in confusing the incomprehensibility of God with God's divine revelation to man in Scripture. The two are not the same at all. The verbal plenary view of inspiration presupposes that every word of God in Scripture is fully and completely inspired, not just the parts or concepts with which we agree. There are no contradictions or paradoxes in God's Word. If Scripture were contradictory it would undermine our faith in a God who is absolutely perfect and non-contradictory.

        Sola Scriptura!

        Charlie

(See also:  The Trinity Foundation and the God's Hammer blog).

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