very theory, philosophical or otherwise," wrote Stewart Shapiro, "must take some notions for granted" (Philosophy of Mathematics).

He's right. We all start with presuppositions, with things too fundamental to be provable; otherwise, what you proved it with would be your starting point, and on and on ad infinitum. You have to stop somewhere because you have to start somewhere.

For me, that starting point is the Scriptures. It was apart from the Scriptures that God first showed me He was real, that He was close, and that He cared. Immediately afterward, He brought me to the Bible, His most complete, explanatory, and convincing revelation to us, at least until we see Him "face to face" (1 Cor. 13:12). Until then Scripture's my starting point, the foundation through which everything about God needs to be filtered, interpreted, judged.

Of course, unanswered questions about the Bible remain. So what? Anything you know or believe, secular or religious, is dogged by unanswered questions. How much more so, then, the Word of God--which pulls back the curtain on unseen physical and spiritual realities? If seen realities, known principles that can be expressed as mathematical equations, come heavy-laden with baffling black holes that swallow all attempted explanations, how banal and hubristic to think that spiritual truths about unseen cosmic realities would be any different, especially for fallen beings who in their empiric brilliance (with a few Hellenistic exceptions) needed thousands of years to finally discern that the earth moved around the sun, not vice versa.

Scripture is, for me, the bottom line. I refuse to try to get under it, behind it, and work at it from below, because whatever tools I use, they then become my first principles, the devices, the -isms, with which I judge Scripture. This is, basically, the historical critical project, and when I see where it has led, and the conclusions it has spawned, the quote from Alexander Pope, about fools rushing where angels fear to tread, does pirouettes through my head.

Everything from the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the Exodus, the covenant at Sinai, blood atonement, the resurrection, a six-day creation, predictive prophecy, you name it, and higher critics, using their man-made intellectual devices, have argued that it never happened or have spun it in a manner that denudes these truths of any salvific value. Nothing sacred is sacred; everything's up for grabs that doesn't fit with the latest method, the latest theory, that wipes out everything in its path until that theory is replaced by a new one, often based on different or even contradictory premises than the one just dumped into the intellectual trash heap. When all's said and done, what's left? Nothing.

Take the Jesus Seminar, which, using the latest and greatest critical tools, determined that Jesus wasn't resurrected but, instead, dogs ate His body. The sad thing is, people actually take these ideas, and others like them, seriously. Right now, for example, an Episcopal church in America is divided over whether Christ was really raised from the dead, or whether the resurrection was just a myth, a symbol of some grandiloquent spiritual truth. Ideas, even bad ones, do have consequences.

Of course, reason, logic, history, experience, linguistics, science all have their roles; they just need to be judged and filtered by Scripture, not vice versa. Because all these things, to one degree or another, are just human concoctions whose authority rests only on the human sources that codify them. Or, as my uncle (David Markson) expressed it in his experimental novel, Vanishing Point: "Thomas Hardy's anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn't certain it existed--and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage." Higher criticism works basically the same way. With higher criticism the method is the message. The higher critics tell us nothing about God, but a lot about ourselves.

I anticipate a barrage of attacks in response to this column from the usual suspects. One independent journal, for instance, recently lambasted me as a "fundamentalist" over my position on Creation.

Fine. But looking at the results of higher criticism, I'd rather be a "fundy" than a fool.

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.