Posted by Yong TM (202.172.43.132) on February 19, 2003 at 13:42:25:
In Reply to: Objective Truth posted by Yew Weng on February 18, 2003 at 01:50:44:
Good observation.
I can accept that all faith-statements are not completely scientifically verifiable.
What I am pointing out however, are the more black and white situations, and claims that can be, and should be verified but are not. There is a large difference between saying that you can be healed if you have faith, and I am the anointed servant of God gifted with healing. In the former, one can escape by saying that the patient has no faith. In the latter, the number of actual healings and the success rate does determine whether one truly is an anointed servant. If the number of successful healings are NOT statistically significant over that of the utterances of a little child, then the claims are not significant. This aspect of objective truth, I believe, cannot be discounted.
When I was in college, one of the things the newspaper like to do was to publish the prediction of various sportscasters about upcoming football games. One season, there was a sportscaster X whose prediction was more accurate than all the other sportscasters. At the end of the season, it was revealed that X was a chimpanzee picking out random numbers! This example clearly shows that the sportscasters were all useless in predictions!
The alarming thing in church today is that we have thrown all caution to the wind lest we anger God by questioning His servants. So churches today specialise in telling half-truths rather than the whole truth. Citing a secular example, the many cases of major financial scandals with companies like Enron came about because they often use half-truths to represent the truth. For example, when they say that dozens of companies bought their new products (therefore driving up stock prices), they are telling the factual truth. What they did not say was that those companies happen to be formed by the mother-company in the first place, so there is really no net gain in profit. This is classic half-truth. If you observe the church scene carefully in Singapore, you will see the same type of smoke and mirrors being used extensively in order to achieve church goals.
I observe churches and pastors doing this all the time. There is very little respect for God being the Truth and nothing but the Truth; just do or say anything in order to get whatever done. I have participated my share in gospel campaigns that employed marketing tricks and deception to lure people into the church, and I deeply regret those today. But even today, I am still faced with the challenge of telling over-zealous Christians that we should not tell half-truths in order to teach others about the Truth.
The church is in the business of Truth; when that goes, the church will ultimately go as well.