LEADER TIMES WEEKEND RELIGION COLUMN FOR
May 7, 2016 by William H. Scarle, Jr. 813-835-0129
George Lucas, in an interview with Bill Moyers in 1999, made the statement that, “The conclusion I’ve come to is that all religions are true.” This attitude was evident in a series of TV programs I just finished watching entitled “The young Indiana Jones.” The series of twenty episodes ran from March 4, 1992 to July 24, 1993. Each episode ran about two hours so you know there must have been some interest on my part to stick with it through the entire series.
The films were shot all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The cost must have been enormous. The stories covered world history from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century with “Indie” meeting some of the world’s movers and shakers in his various adventures. There was also considerable attention given to the religions of the world with brilliant filming of sacred sites.
This attitude toward religion is also evident in the “Star Wars” films. The main characters represent the two sides of the “force,” whatever that is. The problem however is critical. Lucas assigns moral value to one side and moral depravity to the other. This is not possible within a New Age Pan-everythingism in which there is no absolute truth and no personal God. The New Age thinking represented by Lucas has to cheat and borrow values from a biblical world view in order to make his stories palatable.
I was impressed in the “Young Indiana Jones” series with Lucas’s interest in and knowledge of the religions of the world. Knowledge however does not always translate to wisdom. He seems unaware of Aristotle’s first law of logic, the “law of non-contradiction.” It states two things cannot be the same and different at the same time and in the same way. Stated more simply, something cannot be both true and false at the same time. Buddhists are atheists. Hindus are pantheists. Muslims believe that the one god is non-accessible and beyond understanding. Christians believe that God not only reveals himself, but came among us in his appointed Messiah and paid the price for the world’s sins on a Roman cross and rose again in a defeat of death, sin’s penalty. It is obvious that these ideas all contradict each other.
It is logically possible that all religions are false. However, it is not logically possible that all religions are true. Two things cannot be both true and false at the same time.
The beginning premise of the biblical world view is the existence of a personal creator God who rationally structured the universe and made man in his own image, capable of knowing his Creator and learning the workings of the universe he created.
The story is told of a well-known atheist who paid a visit on Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and was confronted by a beautiful working model of the solar system. He expounded, “Who created such a wondrous thing?” Newton’s reply was, “No one.” The atheist’s response was an astounded, “How can that be?” Newton replied, “Isn’t it amazing. I tell you nobody made a simple toy like this and you don’t believe me; yet you gaze out into the solar system and you dare say that no one created it.” Newton was wise. He understood God’s word. He wrote commentaries on the book of Daniel which are available on the “web.” He also understood God’s world, and developed the law of gravity as a member of the scientific community. No contradiction here.
(Bill Scarle can be contacted at ravscarle@verizon.net) END-whs