Astronomy and Politics Through the Lens of Epistemology
How do We Know What We Know?
What is Our Method of Evaluating Truth?

For example, my background is unique in that I was exposed to apologetics as a child.  Later, it was a direct result of my own personal discoveries as a late teen-ager, that I became inspired to the Christian faith as the result of my encounter with astronomical discoveries via the scientific work of obscure follower of Christ.  That would eventually generate a tremendous focus on Christian apologetics in my life and reading many classic works like The Evidence That Demands a Verdict series by Josh McDowell.  The study of Christian apologetics is not related to any type of apology but more analogous to the role of a defense attorney who defends the reliability of the Biblical writings and their authority as being from God.  Likewise, apologetics is also the defense of the Christian faith.  But the defense of the Christian faith is obviously intertwined with the defense of the Church where many elements of these defenses of the faith and Church are shared in common, yet so often missed.

Now the nuts and bolts of the defense of the Church in the U.S. is also linked to the secular values of the Constitution.  That should in no way suggest that the Constitution is divinely inspired like the Bible, I am absolutely opposed to that view.  Rather, it is the Constitution that forms the nuts and bolts of a secular and legal defense of our faith in the advance of a government increasingly hostile to the faith and which seeks to impose its secular values on all of U.S. Christendom.  Therefore, we Christians have a self-interest in insuring the survival of the constitution which requires our participation in our political system to defend both its secular survival and therefore to protect our divine mandate in the great commission (Mathew 28:16-20).

Now right away, there are many who read this will insist that depending on a man-made law of this nature violates the admonition that, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses (2 Cor 10:4).  But that view of earthly law not being our calling is based on tunnel vision on a single verse and rejects a vision of the entire Word of God carried out by the example of the Bereans of Acts 17:11: “who searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so”.  The people who insist that “actively using our legal system is not the weapon of our warfare” omit, for whatever reason, extensive use of the Roman legal system to appeal the false charges against Paul of Acts 22:25-28:31.There, Paul, even appeals to Caesar as a Roman citizen to defend his “rights” while simultaneously advancing the Gospel in the process.  SO WHY CAN WE NOT DO THE SAME THING TODAY?  It just is not good enough to connect the dots of this story in Acts with the people of the day to determine God’s will.  We must also connect the dots of all of Scripture with the people and government of our time for the Gospel to have any relevancy in our lives today.

This is the connection at this site between apologetics, astronomy and politics. I have become convinced over the years that the popular Christian apologetics defenses to the challenges of astronomy and politics to the church has been either non-existent or, in my case, either confusing or destructive to my faith early on.  I have witnessed the same confusion with others, which I will recount in my subsequent blogs.

In the case of politics, as the reader can glean from what I have just described above, the failure of popular Evangelical treatments of that subject have broken down in the area of Biblical precepts versus modern pre-suppositions.  Yet, both precepts and pre-suppositions are integral parts of the study of Christian epistemology.  You will eventually notice that I will be utilizing mostly precepts and pre-suppositions in my analysis of Christians and modern day politics, whereas I will be directly implementing the study of Christian epistemology in the area of astronomy.  This study will NOT be any of a series of liberal epistemological approaches to “higher criticism”.  Instead, I will be deriving these epistemological principles directly from a detailed study of the scriptures themselves.