Acts 1:3  “Jesus presented Himself alive after His suffering by many unmistakable proofs.”  

“I just don’t understand this sort of macho thing about, ‘I’m not gonna get the vaccine. I have a right as an American, my freedom to not do it.’ Well, why don’t you be a patriot? Protect other people.” This was President Joe Biden in March 2021, calling Americans who have not taken former President Trump’s COVID vaccine unpatriotic (it was Trump’s leadership that deserves the credit for bringing us the vaccine).

Flash back just 6 months to Sept. 2020: “I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump. At this moment, the American people can’t either.” This was Presidential candidate Joe Biden telling America to not take the COVID 19 vaccine because it was developed under Trump’s administration.

During the vice-presidential debate, Kamala Harris said “I will not get a vaccine pushed by Trump” because “any effort to get vaccines to the American public by President Trump can’t be trusted.” Vice President Mike Pence’s response: “Stop playing politics with people’s lives. The fact that you continue to undermine public confidence in a vaccine, if the vaccine emerges during the Trump administration, is unconscionable.”

In May 2020, when COVID-19 was at its worse, all of us including President Biden were regularly praising our frontline health workers – EMTs, our hospitals, emergency centers, our nursing homes – who bravely continued treating patients although they were in direct exposure to COVID. But today is a different story.

Due to President Biden’s mandates for government employees to be vaccinated or lose their jobs, many woke corporations have followed suit. These same heroes just over a year ago are now being fired for refusing to take the vaccine, a vaccine Biden and company was against when Trump was President.

Someone is not telling the truth. The vaccine can’t go from untrustworthy to trustworthy in 6 months unless there is evidence. Without evidence, we are a nation of people “taking sides”, regardless of the truth about the vaccine’s effectiveness. There are philosophical worldviews at play here. Many of us subconsciously hold to one or more of these. They are affecting our ability to figure out the truth. Let’s look at 7 of these.

We start with Relativism, where truth is defined by the group I associate with or the culture in which I grew up (“I believe that because my friends think this way”). Then there’s Subjectivism, where truth is defined based on my personal preferences (“That’s just my opinion”). There’s also Pragmaticism, where truth is defined for me based on what works for me (“My beliefs are based on what makes me happy”).

The problem with these very common worldviews is they often have very little to do with truth. And when they eventually fail, as we are seeing with the misinformation over vaccines, they can lead to the worldviews of Skepticism (“why should I believe that what you are telling me is true?”) and Agnosticism (“I cannot know what is really true”). So, how do we get out of such destructive worldview thinking?

In his book ‘When Skeptics Ask’, Dr. Norman Geisler explains how to find truth: “Lying is impossible without some correspondence to reality. If our words don’t need to correspond to the facts, then they can never be factually incorrect. Without a correspondence view of truth, there can be no true or false. There must be a real difference between our thoughts about things and the things themselves for us to say whether something is true or false.” Geisler says truth must always correspond to reality and the evidence – facts.

2 of these 7 philosophical worldviews do uphold Dr. Geisler’s point: 1) Objectivism (truth is based on what conforms to reality, regardless of my opinion), and 2) Absolutism (truth is based on what conforms to reality, regardless of my circumstance). A good example of this is the law of gravity. It doesn’t really matter what my opinion is, or what circumstance I find myself in, if I decide to step off a cliff. I truth is, I will fall.

These worldviews of objectivism and absolutism are what make Christianity compelling. The very Person behind Christianity, Jesus Christ, urges us to examine its claims if you are seeking truth rather than what works for you (pragmaticism) or what your friends believe (relativism) or what you prefer (subjectivism).

In our verse this week, the author of Acts, Dr. Luke, starts off by saying he is giving us an account of the life of Jesus Christ with “many unmistakable proofs” that show He rose from the dead. Have you studied the life of Jesus Christ? You will discover objective truths that, unlike the vaccination rhetoric, make a clear case for what is the truth – that Christ is in fact the God’s only Son who is Savior of the world.

The Evidence of Faith’s Substance _ Article #477