Conclusions Drawn
On Vibrant Perspectives
Must Be Tempered
By Caution
Unfortunately, discovering one truth or fact – here to fore unknown – is not the end of the journey.
Truth never stands alone. One piece of truth, like digits on a hand, form only a part of the picture. A finger does not a person make, so it is difficult to draw conclusions based only on one truth or even two or three separate truths.
For example, if you found an unclaimed finger on the sidewalk and reported it to the authorities their first response would be to answer several questions, the most important one being, “who does it belong to?” You couldn’t know for sure without further investigation. It’s not an easy question to answer. More detail is needed.
Getting a finger print would help but only if the person’s print is in the system and in the case of mutilations the print might not be so clear.
If the person’s print isn’t in the system the DNA is probably missing also, so there may be no help there.
Even with a witness there is no guarantee. The value of the witness is determined by how well they knew the victim, if they knew them at all, and/or how accurately they remember what they saw. Assuming, of course, they are willing to come forward.
I think you get the point.
One truth is not an answer or a conclusion. It is nothing more than one truth. You can make up a “missing finger” story and use that to guide your search for other truths but until you have more detail you can’t draw conclusions. Your hypothesis remains unproven.
But that’s not all.
The real point is, you can’t draw too many conclusions even about the one truth you have in hand without further investigation. No pun intended.
Was the finger torn off or cut off, or did it maybe rot off? Is it old or young, diseased or healthy? Was it severed accidentally or by force? You may be tempted to draw quick conclusions for these questions but an immediate perspective, even a vibrant one, is limited and, like first impressions, often unreliable.
You can’t draw conclusions on one truth!
And that’s still not all. Personal perspective is also limited because what we think we see is often filtered through what we want to see or what we’ve been conditioned to see.
The reason I’m saying all this is because we can’t take one fact from the Bible and draw conclusions about science and vice versa. The church used to teach the earth was the center of the universe. We now know that isn’t true. Unbelievers used to claim Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch because they believed hand writing hadn’t been developed in his day. Archeology uncovered evidence to prove writing was around long before Moses was born.
There are many unanswered questions but there are also many bits of truth we haven’t yet discovered. No, we can’t prove the Bible is true. You must still accept it by faith, intelligent faith, informed faith but still faith.
It will also be a long time before anyone can prove the Bible untrue, if ever.
THINK!AboutIt
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