The test of salvation is faith. You are required to believe through faith and not through science. But what are you required to have faith in? There are tens of thousands of choices out there to put your faith in, but what if you pick the wrong one? Will you go to Hell if you pick the wrong one? Most definitely you will.
One Sunday afternoon as you are sitting on your porch, a Jehovah's Witness and a member of the Assembly of God walk up to you at the same time to convert you to their religion. Both of them claim to be Bible believing Christians who are out to save your soul so that you might enter the Kingdom of Heaven, to live forever in eternal paradise. However, it is soon apparent that these religions are mutually exclusive, each claiming the other is the road to hell. Perhaps there are 10 different religions represented as other Christians start gathering. Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Messianic Jews, Baptists, Moonies, and throw in a Muslim, all of them claiming that all the others are false beliefs and that unless you make the correct choice, your soul is forever lost. But the one thing they have in common is that you must believe through faith.
So - how do you choose? How do you decide which one is right?
Obviously you can't start out by using reason because if you use science and logic then you will surely pick the wrong one. If the belief is scientifically provable, then you won't be able to believe in it through faith. Since faith is required, then scientific proof would be prohibited. Suppose there were one true religion, the religion that got it all right (or at least really close). And suppose that it had the salvation by faith clause. Then suppose that science proved that this religion were real. What would that mean?
If the one true religion required faith-based salvation and it were proven to be true scientifically, then that would undermine faith because faith is belief without proof and if you have proo, then faith is excluded. So if science proved the one true religion then everyone who believed in the true religion would all go to hell, because their faith was undermined by scientific verification. This would create a paradox for God - so the only solution must be that God would make sure that the one true religion must never be scientifically provable.
There is some evidence of this because it would explain why God remains hidden from science and totally scientifically undetectable. And it explains why so much of the Bible can't be proved with science because if it could be, it would undermine the faith requirement preventing the believers in the true religion from obtaining salvation through faith. Thus the Bible has to be unscientific so that it can never be scientifically proven and have Bible believers lose faith because of proof and evidence.
So - based on the salvation through faith assumption, we can come to some interesting conclusions.
- Science can never prove that God exists.
- Science will never prove that the Bible is true.
- The true religion can never be proven by science.
So - if this is what we know about the true religion, how then can we find it? Perhaps we can start with a process of elimination? Instead of trying to figure out what it is, let's start with what it isn't. If we know that God cannot be proven through science, all religions that claim the belief in God are scientific and must all be false. The same is true of people who claim to use science to prove the Bible. If they could prove the Bible through science, then they are going to Hell because where there's proof there's no faith. So - that eliminates a huge number of false religions that claim an affiliation with science.
Keeping in mind that, if any element of the one true religion was provable, then that element would lose it's ability to contribute to salvation. It raises the possibility that perhaps the one true religion has no basis in science whatsoever, and the more impossible it is to believe in the more likely it is to be true. What religion would fit that classification?
The Church of Scientology might fit that criteria. They make no scientific claims that God exists, that the Bible is based on science, and the idea that 75 million years ago that Xenu slaughtered the Thetans and that we are possessed by their entrapped souls is so scientifically ridiculous that it fits all the qualifications of salvation through faith. So I suppose if I was forced to choose, I'd have to go with Scientology and hope for the best.
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