Truth Really Matters

190. 1/1/24 Christianity vs. Wokeness
191. 2/1/24 Love Thy Body
192. 3/1/24 Signals of Transcendence
193. 4/1/24 Politics is Personal: The Devil & Karl Marx
194. 5/1/24 The Fringes of Science

190. Christianity vs. Wokeness
January 1, 2024

“The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks.  Moreover, it speaks of everything.” – Cornelius Van Til

Van Til was right about that, at least in the sense that the Bible addresses all in life that is important.  I love everything about Van Til except his Calvinism.  In the Evangelism section of this site you’ll find my 3-part essay on Van Til’s presuppositional apologetics.

The quote is from Owen Strachan’s informative (and compact / readable) book, Christianity and Wokeness:  How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel – and the Way to Stop It.  He opens by citing a 2016 ‘anti-racism’ training video, which went viral, featuring a speaker named Ashleigh Shackelford, who told a group of white women that “all white people are racists,” and had no hope of changing.  “No, you’re always going to be racist, actually.  Even when you’re on  a path to be a better human being.”

Strachan explains that this reflects a core element of the “wokeness” system, in which there is no grace, no love, “only grievance, resentment, and condemnation.”  Therefore, it is clear that wokeness is not merely a non-Christian system.  It is an anti-Christian system.  It reveals its true father – Satan – who hates God’s image-bearers and devises means to foster misery and, ultimately, damnation.  Shackelford revealed her own heart when she commented, “I believe all white people are born into not being human.”  Later, she said that white people grow up “to be demons.”

The wokeness movement took off in the 1990s in academia, which should be no surprise.  Its goal was to convince many who had no racial prejudice that they actually did, and that they could not transcend differences in skin color.  Its chief enemy is Christianity, working to infiltrate churches with the idea that Christianity fosters “white privilege” and “white supremacy.”

Strachan summarizes how wokeness attacks a Christian spiritually.

• Wokeness divides us – oppressors versus oppressed.
• Wokeness tempts us to despise others based on some category or label.
• Wokeness tempts us to pride in condemning others.
• Wokeness robs us of peace and joy.
• Wokeness directs our attention away from the Gospel.  We lose sight of the most vital need of every individual – salvation.
• Wokeness tempts to bitterness.
• Wokeness makes forgiveness difficult.
• Wokeness diminishes faith – we lose sight of God’s prophetic vision of history.
• Wokeness makes man big and God small.  Man’s concerns dominate us.

Sadly, tragically, and ridiculously, many current evangelical leaders claim that wokeness is the way forward for the church.  I can only conclude that those who think like this have never been born again.  What else could explain such a disgusting lack of discernment?

Van Til’s comment above is grounded in 2 Peter 1:3, which assures us that God’s word is sufficient for all things that pertain to life and godliness.  With regard to race, there is only one.  Paul, in Acts 17:26, noted that God made us all of “one blood,” affirming our parentage from Genesis, Adam and Eve, in Eden.  What matters a little more or less of melanin in the skin cells?

“Woke,” of course, is derived from “awake,” clued in to the true nature of the world when so many are clueless, asleep.  I’ve observed that the woke mindset / posture works against postmodernism, which denies definite answers and objective truths.  When postmodernism seemed to hit its peak in the 1990s, the gravest sin seemed to be judgmentalism.  But the woke crowd is intensely and viciously judgmental, preaching a definitive, yet anti-biblical morality.

Strachan summarizes Critical Race Theory (CRT), the academic veneer of wokism, as the doctrine that “all of societal life is structured along racial power dynamics.  Race is a ‘social construct’ . . . it’s not biologically based and exists only in our imagination.”  But now they’ve mixed some postmodernism back in and yet . . . how can Shackelford call those women white and racist merely by looking at them?  Shouldn’t she ask them how they identify?

CRT goes on to assert that America is infested with racism, using terms like “structural racism” and “systemic racism.”  This ignores the tremendous progress America has seen, especially since the 1950s.  But history is ignored or revised to fit the political narrative, and to feed the grievance industry.  Martin Luther King’s goal of “color-blindness” has been reversed; no longer do the ‘anti-racists’ desire a society where children are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.  Rather, defeating “whiteness” is the goal.

The enemy is the ordinary man or woman who leads a quiet, normal American life.  Ibram X. Kendi, a widely published professor at Boston U., says that such people are the “most threatening racist movement” today.  Author Robin DeAngelo said that the “regular American” is worse than the cross-burning Klan member.

Apparently, the mom who posts photos of her kids on Instagram, bakes muffins, helps her neighbors, and volunteers at the homeless shelter is a “white supremacist” who must be defeated because her very existence oppresses others.  In CRT, Strachan notes, life is a zero-sum game.  Some win; most lose.

In the woke worldview, intersectionality is the principle that the victimhood of many groups overlaps, including blacks, the poor, the disabled, anyone not heterosexual, etc.  Also, for each of the oppressed, there must be an oppressor.  The rich oppress the poor, the “cisgender” oppress sexual minorities, and men oppress women because of “toxic masculinity.”  Such lists can be extended indefinitely.

Although wokists reject “binary” thinking in terms of the sexes, they are quintessentially binary in that you are either an oppressor or you are oppressed.  What a miserable way to look at the world and to avoid personal responsibility.  The mindset also avoids the humility required to own your own sins and repent.  Therefore, wokeness opposes the mind and heart conditions required to trust Christ for salvation.  It seems far more satisfying be righteously indignant and blame others; in fact, if you can find ways to cancel or punish the oppressors, that really feels good!

Where does CRT and its ilk come from?  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – for example, in The Communist Manifesto:  “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave . . . lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

Marx hated everything about God and sought to expunge Christian teaching from the face of the Earth.  In What Every Christian Needs to Know about Social Justice, Jeffrey Johnson notes that the institutions and historic principles of individualism, family, church, and state derive their authority from God; accordingly, Marxists must deconstruct them to eliminate God from society.  Furthermore, “for Marx, deliverance from the evils of capitalism cannot occur until all traces of God are removed from the world.”

Critical theorists go far beyond arguing that society is corrupted – they insist that reason is corrupted.  Thus, they ignore evidence and logic.  Only the woke can see the relevant structures of reality.  Voddie Baucham argues that this is simply gnosticism.  You can trust only the anointed woke priests and priestesses for enlightenment.

I resonate with Strachan’s take:  “The ultimate source of this ideology does not sound like the voice of God, but like the slithery hiss of a serpent.”

Strachan cites John McWhorter’s critique of what he calls the “Third Wave Antiracism,” particularly the type of traps the woke set for the rest of us.  For example, “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people.  But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.”  Another:  “Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them.  But seek to have black friends.  If you don’t have any, you’re a racist.  And if you claim any, they’d better be good friends.  Just know that you still aren’t allowed in their private spaces.”  What do you think?  Will this approach increase or decrease racism?

Apparently, the most influential book to promote wokeness in evangelicalism is Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, 2000.  They argue that whites, as the creators of our present society, “must repent of their personal, historical, and social sins.”  Otherwise, they are passed on to future generations.  This idea of generational sins is foreign to the New Testament, of course.  Such heresies only divide; they do not unite.  The Christian viewpoint is that the individual is responsible for his own sins, but can be restored through faith in Christ.  Thus, woke heresies distract from the need for 1-2-1 evangelism and the individual’s requirements for salvation.

In 2017 InterVarsity Press published White Awake, by Daniel Hill, a Chicago-area pastor.  He writes that all white people are racist, even if subconsciously.  (Whatever that actually means.)  Also, that racism is the chief sin of the Church today.  “The primary enemy of God’s kingdom in this realm is white supremacy.”

Strachan notes that actual white supremacy is truly hideous and includes segregation, lynchings, abused women slaves, and a societal order that dehumanizes people based on skin color.  Nothing like that exists in America today.  He observes that evangelicals today are demonstrably multi-ethnic.  Where there is a proper Christian unity, it comes from God’s grace, not skin color.  In fact, it is the CRT crowd that yearns to divide everyone by race, arbitrary though that may be.  Wokeness in the churches attacks unity, fostering distrust and resentment.  Of course it does, considering the source.

In short, wokeness is not a helpful paradigm to discover truths within the Christian framework.  Rather, wokeness is a different Gospel; indeed, it is anti-Gospel.  It is an evil, intentionally ‘racist’ doctrine.

In magnifying human diversity, wokeness creates attitudes that prevent any chance at unity.  Unity is only possible in Christ and, unfortunately, will not be universally realized until the Millennium.

In promoting  the CRT narrative, Marxists eagerly ignore or rewrite history.  For example, it wasn’t just ‘whites’ who sinned.  Black African traders facilitated the transatlantic slave trade in the 17^th century.  Black leaders supported 19^th century colonization.  America had numerous black slaveholders.  In the 20^th century black leaders have supported the disproportionately high abortion rate in the black community, and young black men are regularly victims of murder by young black men.

In Art Carden’s 2020 essay, “Slavery Did Not Enrich Americans,” he refutes the woke accusation that America and its prosperity was built on slavery.  Cotton crops would have been profitable without the expense of slavery; in fact, they would likely have been far more profitable.  People are more productive when paid wages that they can then use in freedom to lead their own lives.  Furthermore, cotton was not essential to industrialization.  Thus, slavery hampered the American economy.  This position is consistent with many descriptions of antebellum life, which featured (overall) a poor work ethic, a decadent culture, and immorality – all derived from the conscience-blighting effects of slavery throughout the culture.

Woke Marxists hate free markets.  Economist Walter Williams argues that free markets are naturally color-blind.  “Markets have a notorious lack of respect for privilege, race, and class structures.”  Strachan concludes that if the woke really wanted “fairness” and “equity,” they would be enthusiastic supporters of free markets, not their enemies.  He notes that Robin DeAngelo typically charges $15,000 per speaking event and has earned over $2M from her book White Fragility, all the while deriding capitalism as a racist system.

It is well known that so-called ‘racial’ differences (skin color, eye shape, etc.) account for only 0.012 percent of human biological variation.  Skin color derives from the presence of more or less melanin.  Ken Ham:  “No one really has red, or yellow, or black skin.  We all have the same basic color, just different shades of it.”  Such differences are trivial, but the woke want to deconstruct the entire world over nonsense.

In Ibram X. Kendi’s best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist, he offers a solution to racial prejudice:  “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”  How will that work out for future generations?  Perhaps the real motivation is to provoke race wars and destroy the West.  Strachan suggests that the Satanic goal is not a new order, but an anti-order, opposing everything that God ordained for His image-bearers to find peace with Him and with each other.

Under wokeness the law is divorced from retributive justice – rendering to each what they deserve – and becomes a tool of distributive justice – apportioning privilege to those without it.  Equality of opportunity is supposedly racist.  Equality of outcome is the new principle.  Romans chapter 13 makes clear the heresy.  God designed government to be a terror to evildoers and to reward good conduct, to execute justice with the power of the sword, if necessary, and that the people should be subject to the authorities.

The state promotes civil law and maintains order against evildoers.  The Church preaches the Gospel and disciples believers under the authority of the Bible, and the family raises children to know God, to love others, and to grow up productive members of the community.  The boundaries and responsibilities for these institutions are made clear within Scripture.  There is nothing complicated here.

The goals of Marxist ideology include the destruction of the family and the Church, and the perversion of the role of the State.  Society becomes a contest for power.  Individuals, cut off from family and church bonds, are easily controlled and intimidated by the overreaching State.  Diversity is achieved without unity.  Deconstruction of God’s institutions generates estrangement, fear, and hostility.  The world will be ripe for a powerful charismatic leader.  The antichrist will arrive just in time.

Strachan argues that wokeness is a new religion, a new worldview, which includes the following pillars:

• Neo-paganism – no Creator; we are our own gods
• Sexual libertinism – anything goes
• Marxist statism
• Postmodern Darwinism – evolution got us here and there is no absolute truth
• Mystic selfism – follow your heart
• Utopian eschatology – Earth-centric; make the Earth right via social justice

The author spends some time describing the Bible’s teaching on the nature of human beings.  Genesis chapter 1, for example:  We see one human race, with male and female, one couple, the foundation of marriage.  Period.

The Bible presents us as made in the image of God, conscious, sentient, knowing good and evil, exercising free will.  Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of what man (and woman) should be at its summit, without sin, loving, in perfect fellowship with God.  In our present state we are all guilty and condemned by our own willful sins, but obtain forgiveness and a new birth into God’s family by repentance and faith in Christ.

In contrast, under wokeness some are good and beautiful just as they are, and others are definitely not – those who are born into or exercise “whiteness.”  Strachan notes that when you miss that sin is always personal, you cannot see the problem.  “It is not that society is flawed and we are innocent.  It is that we are sinful, and so our world is polluted with our sin.”  Christ did not die for society.  We are not victims; we ourselves, individually, are criminals in God’s court, lawbreakers in desperate need of salvation.  The woke need to be saved, too, but they have embraced a philosophy and attitudes that work hard against it.

When we solve our vertical problem with God, we can line up with Him and His word and thereby line up with each other.  “Jesus is the only true hope of those who desire unity of any kind in the world.”  Of course, this will not happen on any significant scale until the 2^nd coming of Christ, when He rules the world from His throne in Jerusalem.  There is no other plan.  In this present age, the mission is the Great Commission – individual souls are at stake.  Ephesians chapter 2 gives a hopeful illustration of what unity can be achieved now (and in Paul’s day) in that the blood of Christ unifies Jew and Gentile, which at that time was quite a startling concept.

The cross is not God’s “best shot” at unification, so that we can improve the odds later with Marxism or psychotherapy or political compromise.  Jesus is the only way, because He is the source of life, He is the source of truth, and reality is wired for no other options.

Wokeness, Strachan observes, has no concept of God as Creator with us as image-bearers.  Rather, it starts with the dull, antagonistic stereotypes of Marxist collectivism and identity fictions.  There is no hope in any secular (Satanic) worldview, no afterlife, no Final Judgment, and . . . what should be incredibly frustrating to the Marxist woke . . . no justice.  Not to mention, no resolutions, no peace, and no happiness.  Have you noticed that the woke crowd is perpetually angry and miserable?

Yet with Jesus and the grace of forgiveness and salvation, people in allegedly antagonistic groups find themselves in the same spiritual family.  The most important things in life, they share in common.  In a group of truly born again Christians, who care about each others’ souls and the souls of the lost around them, there is neither Jew nor Greek, rich nor poor, white nor black nor brown.  A healthy church, even in this age, can show this kind of love if it wants to.

When God’s causes dominate our desires, the trials of this life seem small, petty.  And when life gets tough, Christian brothers and sisters are there to help.  At least, it can be that way if your church is organized around New Testament principles, instead of today’s seeker-sensitive megachurch mindlessness.

If wokeness is creeping into your church, say something.  Do something.  If you get thrown out, thank God and try to find some other Christians who haven’t gone mad.  The truly saved Christians won’t get fooled so easily.  As you share the Gospel with clearly lost woke individuals, recognize that they cannot consistently live their wacky worldview.  Share the distinctives of the Gospel message, that sin and lostness are individual, that humility and repentance are required to seek God, that Jesus paid the ultimate price, and that forgiveness, peace, joy, and the ability to love others who don’t look like you is a gift from God to those image-bearers who want it.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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191. Love Thy Body
February 1, 2024

Is there a dichotomy between you and your body, between body and person?  Or do “the two together form an integrated psycho-physical unity”?  The Christian (biblical) perspective is to honor our own bodies as a revelation of God’s purpose for our lives.

So argues Nancy Pearcey in her wonderful 2018 book, Love Thy Body:  Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.  She observes that the physical characteristics of our bodies reveal truths about our identities; further, that our bodies enable rational grounds for our personal moral decisions.  Accordingly, ethics depend on biology, especially on the topics of sexuality and abortion.

Pearcey quotes Sam Allberry, a Christian pastor with same-sex attraction who practices celibacy:  “Desires for things God has forbidden are a reflection of how sin has distorted me, not how God has made me.”

With comparable humility and courage to face difficult truths Tim Wilkins, who once lived as a homosexual man, but is now married with children suggests:  If God created some people gay, then “God has played a cruel joke on them.  He has engineered their minds and emotions for attraction to the same sex and yet created their physiology to be in direct opposition to that attraction.”  Pearcey notes that when your emotions war with your physiology, you cannot be a whole person.

We live in a fallen world, but God promises grace to live through brokenness.  When his disciples asked Jesus whose sin caused a man to be born blind, the Lord blamed neither the man nor his parents, but that God could manifest even through such tragedy.

Some Christians with same-sex attraction pray for years for God to change their desires.  Paul endured his “thorn in the flesh” (whatever it was) despite repeated prayers.  Paul ultimately decided to “glory in my infirmites, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”  Similarly, I’ve had a life-long tormenting malady, but have realized that I would rather depend on God’s grace with the affliction, than to be free of it without God’s presence in my life.

The body we are born with and grow up in does indeed limit our freedom, Pearcey notes.  Similarly, our biological (family) ties are not discretionary.  We don’t choose our parents, relatives, or the place of our birth.  But all these realities form our identity.  Gilbert Mailaender reminds us that we are not just “free spirits but embodied creatures.   Lines of kinship and descent locate and identify us.”

As Christians we are called to honor our parents and love our children, seeing them as gifts from God.  Learning to love and honor builds the character we need to live a fruitful life.

Marriage, differently, begins with consent but continues as a covenant as opposed to a contract.  In a contract there is quid-pro-quo consideration, but in marriage we pledge our very own selves, “for better or worse, until death do us part.”  Love is to be unconditional; after all, it may not always be reciprocated as we like, but God’s typology for marriage is an eternal relationship, not breakable.

Pearcey (dis)credits the loss of the positive view of the body to Charles Darwin.  Darwin, like Richard Dawkins today, could not deny the apparent design of life, but determinedly embraced a philosophy of materialism – matter is everything – the apparent purpose of life and its structures must be the result of blind, undirected forces.

Historian Jacques Barzun:  “This denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”  Dawkins:  “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered . . . has no purpose in mind.”

With no purpose there is no basis for moral truths.  We are merely machines, driven by physics, chemistry, and genetic predestination.  Obviously, without God humans may impose their own will.  Yet I would point out, as I have many times before, that in materialism you and I have no personhood.  If matter and physical laws are all there is, then what is love, hope, meaning, purpose, beauty, integrity, logic, and even rationality?  These are fundamental to human experience, foundational to what it means to be a person.  If our existence is just about physics, then where does your next thought originate?  How small a materialistic worldview is!

(Regarding whether Darwin and his modern acolytes have any clue at all, see my free ebook on the subject of creation vs. evolution.)

This conflict of worldviews is critical to the issues of identity and the body.  If an unborn child is just a ‘blob of tissue,’ then abortion seems plausible.  But then there are no immoral acts of any kind, anywhere and anywhen.

What about casual sex?  It’s “no big deal” according to Western culture.  Yet I’ve noticed that secular fiction (TV, movies, novels) often gets it right when they portray the tragic consequences of sexual sin:  jealousy, violence, divorce, STDs, addiction, etc.

Pearcey reports that a Washington Post book review opined that it is healthy when teenage girls “refuse to conflate” love and sex, reinforcing the “no big deal” mantra.  The Nation asked, “Why should sex have an everlasting warranty of love attached to it?”  Yep, if the body is just a lump of matter, why not just play with it?  A video by Children’s Television Workshop, used in sex education classes, defines sexual relations as merely “something done by two adults to give each other pleasure.”  There is no mention of marriage or family.

It is ironic, Pearcey notes, that some see sexual hedonism as too much emphasis on the purely physical.  Rather, she concludes, it places too low a value on the body, diminishing moral and personal significance.

Extolling the idea of “friends with benefits,” the New York Times explains, “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”  In other words, avoid actual friendship to avoid emotional connections.  Pearcey relates the story of a teenager who was depressed because her hookup partner had just broken up with her.  Despite the euphemisms (“friends with benefits,” “hookup culture”), God has wired our human body & soul systems to take sex seriously, within the boundaries of marriage.  Troubles multiply outside the boundaries.

Researcher Donna Freitas interviewed hundreds of students and concluded that hookup culture “creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy,” teaching young people not to “reckon with someone’s personhood.”  The hookup culture inhibits dissent.  If you want more than sex, like friendship, relationship, or commitment, you will be labeled needy, clingy, and dependent.  One student said, “It’s a contest to see who cares less.”  This is a denial of the reality of our human nature designed by God.  We were designed for marriage, not hookups.

Miriam Grossman, a UCLA psychiatrist, wrote the book Unprotected:  A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, after experiencing the consequences of university policies that prevented her from using concepts of “right” and “wrong” when counseling students.

Christian teachings shocked the 1^st century world by commanding husbands to love their wives, to be sexually exclusive and faithful within the marriage, and not to seek sexual pleasure with slaves or prostitutes.  At the time it was not considered possible that a man could commit adultery, because women were property.  Adultery was not a property crime.  The Christian view was radical.

Pearcey:  “Biblical morality is teleological:  The purpose of sex is to express the one-flesh covenant bond of marriage.”

When a mother nurses her baby, her body releases oxytocin, called “the attachment hormone,” because it promotes the desire to care and nurture.  Surprisingly to scientists who discovered this, oxytocin is also generated during sex, especially in women, but also in men.  There is a biochemical / emotional bond built between a man and a woman . . . intended for marriage.  In hookup culture, you build and break such bonds continually and trouble is inevitable.  There is biochemistry connected to Paul’s admonition is 1 Cor 6:18 to avoid fornication because you sin against your own body.  Grossman notes, “You might say we are designed to bond.”  Studies consistently report that the people who are happiest sexually are married, middle-aged, conservative Christians.  Shocking.

The biblical view of the body is wholistic, Pearcey observes.  When you eat, you don’t say, “My mouth is eating;” rather, “I am eating.”  You know that you don’t just own your body – your body is part of you.  Someday the body of the Christian will be redeemed, transformed, resurrected, made immortal, because we are “embodied beings.”

In the 1^st century these ideas were counter-cultural.  The philosophies of the day, like Gnosticism, typically disparaged the material world as corrupt, inferior to the spiritual.  Salvation was about escaping the corrupt physical and ascending to a higher realm.  (Note the reinvention of this idea in sci-fi, Stargate SG-1, for example.)

Now, biblically, we live in a presently fallen world, but God created it originally as “very good.”  After the 2^nd Coming of Christ, all the “good” will be restored.  God created a lot of stuff.  Stuff is not inherently evil.  What we do with the stuff can be righteous or sinful.  And God will ultimately redeem all the consequences of the Fall.

Pearcey comments that what really set Christianity apart in the 1^st century was the incarnation – that almighty God took on a physical body!  Scripture teaches that the Lord Jesus will remain incarnate throughout the rest of eternity.  The apostle John offered a test for genuine faith and legitimate preachers in his Gnostic world:  “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God:  Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.” (1 John 4:2 and surrounding context)

The resurrection of Jesus is a declaration that God will fix this broken world and regenerate our broken bodies.  We won’t float on clouds in some ghostly state, but will have physical feet planted on physical streets and buildings and parks and tennis courts in a physical New Earth and New Heaven, headquartered in a physical New Jerusalem.

One horrific consequence of the view that the body is mere biology, sub-personal, is abortion.  Virtually everyone believes that “life” begins at conception, but in the Roe v. Wade ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun bluntly declared that an unborn baby is not a person.  He admitted that if the baby were a person, then abortion would necessarily be illegal.  Judge Blackmun will be judged himself for that wicked judgment.

A famous source for mind/body dualism is Rene Descartes:  “I think, therefore I am.”  Descartes saw only the mind as the authentic self.  Pearcey evaluates this perspective as illogical.  “How can a free mind influence a body that functions as automatically as a machine or a robot?  How can a mind control a body whose behavior is determined by mindless mechanical laws?”

The issue is intertwined with materialism.  How can a non-material mind / soul even exist within a matter-only universe?  If there is no spiritual, no soul, then Blackmun is no more a person than the unborn baby he is content to discard.

Bioethicist Joseph Fletcher proposes fifteen qualities to define when human life is worthy of respect and protection, including intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, concern for others, and communication.  A problem is that such qualities are not binary (you have it or you don’t).  They emerge gradually as you grow, in a continuum from conception until death.  Differences between persons are quantitative.  Pearcey:  “What we do not find is a clear qualitative transition point for the momentous transformation from a non-person to a person.”

So equal rights under the law for all persons critically depends on your worldview.  Does God exist and, therefore, do you as a person exist?  What about the unborn baby?  What about the old woman in a years-long coma?  Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the dedicated atheist, admitted that the “Christian concept . . . of the ‘equality of souls before God’ . . . furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

Ultimately, it’s not within our moral rights to decide that someone else has no right to life or liberty.  As a being made in the image of God, my rights and your rights are unalienable, bestowed by our Creator, who loves us and provided for our salvation, if we humble ourselves, repent, and trust in Him.  Our world’s cultural and legal and moral disasters arise from those who reject such obvious truths.

Ernst Haeckel was Darwin’s foremost apologist in the late 19^th century.  Perfectly consistent with his evolutionary dogma, Haeckel saw caring for the disabled as interfering with the survival of the fittest.  He urged society to follow “the example of the Spartans and Redskins” who killed disabled infants immediately after birth.  Haeckel also advocated euthanasia for disabled adults, Pearcey notes.

Today there is still a strong correlation between those who embrace evolution and advocacy for euthanasia, abortion, and even the murder of newborn infants who survive an abortion procedure.  Worldview matters.

Pearcey explains how “the Harvard criteria” proposed in 1968 at the medical school switched the debate on euthanasia from biology to philosophy.  No longer would death be defined as when the heart cannot be restarted or a certain number of cells die, but rather when you suffer a ‘loss of personhood.’  It is so ironic that materialists depart from scientific (measurable) criteria to a standard – personhood – that has no meaning whatsoever in an atheistic worldview!  And so death becomes a “social construct.”  Pull the plug when it is convenient to whomever has the power or the money.  Pearcey observes, “Essentially a patient is no longer a person when the attending physician says so.”

One of Nancy’s students works for a suicide hotline.  She said, “I spend hours every week persuading people not to end their lives, telling them that their lives still have value.  It breaks my heart that people think they must be able to function in a certain way to be considered significant.”

The answer to the suicide crisis is, of course, the Gospel.  I wonder how many suicide hotlines offer the assured hope that the Lord Jesus offers, not just for eternal life, but to live with meaning, purpose, and the promise that Jesus will walk with you through the travails of this life.

Right-do-die advocates portray euthanasia as compassionate.  Yet compassion means to “suffer with” (com = with, passion = suffer).  True compassion obligates you to help the suffering bear their burdens, to sacrifice your time and effort and resources – love in action.

When the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” that includes a disabled person.  The body is part of the person, “the place where we come to know a person.”  Thinking biblically makes it easy to evaluate the morality not only of abortion and euthanasia, but also organ harvesting, surrogacy, and the sale of tissue from abortion products or frozen embryos.

Let’s try thinking biblically about same-sex desire.  Geneticist Francis Collins writes that “sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations.”  Not disagreeing, gay advocate John Corvino writes, “It doesn’t matter whether we’re born this way.  The fact is that there are plenty of genetically influenced traits that are nevertheless undesirable.”

There is plenty of evidence that both maladies and temptations to sin may be genetic (run in families), including depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and heart disease.  In fact, most people find themselves predisposed toward anger, lust, greed, worry, impatience, etc.  The underlying factors go far beyond the genetic, of course.  The mix of genetic, environmental, experiential, and even free will factors are incredibly complex, beyond quantitative analysis.  God actually knows this, yet commands us to choose righteousness and calls sin out for what it is.  When we sin it’s because we want to and don’t care what God says and, frankly, usually don’t care whether we hurt someone else.  Even when tempted, we can choose to resist, and build patterns into our lives that are constructive.  God helps, if we seek Him.  Christians can help by offering sincere friendships.  We don’t have to follow Freud who saw every relationship as sexual.

We live in a fallen world, and we can do right even if it’s not easy.

Doug Mainwaring ended his marriage to engage in multiple sexual relationships with men, and became an advocate for same-sex marriage.  After ten years he became a Christian, remarried his wife, and they finished raising their children together.  He writes, “Along the way, I learned that marriage is more than just a tradition or a religious or social construct.  Monogamous, complementary, conjugal marriage is a pearl of great price worth investing one’s entire life in.”

Pearcey:  “Our feelings do not define us.  Our moral commitments do.”

Pearcey cites a New York Times article that reports that the part of the brain associated with navigation is enlarged in London taxi drivers, as is the region that controls the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.  So brains can be ‘rewired’ by diligent practice.  Other brain studies show MRI patterns that shift after trauma or significant events.  Biblically, we understand that the brain is a physical tool subject to the immaterial mind / soul.  Scripture teaches that we can grow in knowledge, wisdom, and even righteousness.

Pearcey discusses how Queer Theory produces a very low view of the body, presuming that one’s psychological state, one’s feelings, define the authentic self, disregarding the biological sex you are born with.  But why should mere desires and feelings define identity?  How much of reality are you willing to deny or reimagine because you have strong feelings today, which may change tomorrow?

Pearcey notes that Christianity is often accused of being anti-sex and anti-body.  Clearly, it is the secular post-modern ethic that is anti-body by denying biological reality (given by God’s design) and anti-sex, by relegating sex to mere transient pleasure while despising the God-given institution of marriage.

Pearcey:  “It is Christianity that honors the body as male and female, instead of subordinating biological sex to psychological feelings.”

Pearcey has a lot to say in her chapter, “Transgender, Transreality,” which I won’t summarize here.  Please do buy her book.  It’s a wonderful reference.  One interesting factoid is that the 80 to 90 percent of children who experience some gender confusion, lose those feelings before adulthood.  Yet all the power centers of our culture are pressuring children into mutilating and sterilizing treatments and surgeries . . . God’s judgment will be fearsome upon those who destroy children.

There is a nice historical review of social contract theory toward the end of the book.  The notable proponents were Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  They imagined what human nature would be like if we could strip away all accumulated marks of civilization:  morals, laws, customs, traditions, institutions, and religions.  Especially religions.  Rejecting biblical history and the Christian worldview, humans were once, supposedly, in a primeval, pre-social state, the “state of nature.”  Individuals were disconnected and autonomous with no natural obligations.  Therefore all social relations are constructed by choice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most famous work, The Social Contract, opens famously with, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  Accordingly, we have liberty to throw off whatever chains of cultural or social duties we dislike, and invent our own morality, our own rules . . . or none at all.

Social contract theory was primarily applied, at first, to politics and economics.  But now, it intrudes everywhere.  Rejecting the Bible, we reject Scriptural principles for the God-given institutions of the family, the church, and government.  Let’s create our own visions for alternative forms of marriage and the family, for example.

Pearcey points out that, contrary to Hobbes, “we do not pop up overnight like mushrooms after a rain.”  Starting as a helpless baby, we are born into a pre-existing family, clan, church, town, and nation.  We mature into adulthood only if others, especially parents, commit to us sacrificially.  God designed this pattern; God designed the family, including the strong natural bonds that inspire and ground us.

She cites the Charles Bronson character in the (terrific) movie The Magnificent Seven, who tells a group of boys in a poor village, “You think I’m brave because I carry a gun.  Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility:  for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers.  . . . They do it because they love you, and they want to.  I have never had this kind of courage.”

I’ve noticed that God’s system works, even when practiced by non-believers.  Years ago I got to know the families that lived in my cul-de-sac, none of which were Christians.  They were all middle-aged or older, had avoided divorce, had raised their children to be productive adults, and were ‘responsible citizens.’  Only one had enjoyed a ‘professional / executive’ level job.  Another had been a ‘garbageman,’ one had been a postal worker, one worked in an auto factory, and another had a modest job in construction.  But they all prospered – nice houses, nice cars, and apparently happy in their lives, as far as I could tell.  Namely, they all worked largely within God’s framework for family, work, and civic life, and enjoyed the benefits.

My neighbors lived reasonably in sync with reality.  Unfortunately, much of America does not, anymore.  Trouble results and disaster looms.  The way to optimally live in sync with reality is to repent, trust Christ, become a born-again Christian, and live in accordance with God’s Scriptural principles for life.  Anyone can do that, but it first requires humility – that we are not autonomous, independent creatures, that we are not little gods who can shape our own version of reality.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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192. Signals of Transcendence
March 1, 2024

Why am I here?  What is life all about?  What’s the point of it all, anyway?  Many ask these questions.  Many dismiss them quickly, repeatedly.  Some begin a quest to find THE answers, but end up in the wrong place.  Some find TRUTH and it changes everything.

Os Guinness has written an intriguing book, Signals of Transcendence (2023), each chapter a case study of some notable figure who, at a key point in his or her life, cried out, “There must be something more.”  Guinness credits his mentor, Peter Berger, for coining the term ‘signals of transcendence’ to describe the experiences that provoke the soul to yearn for more than can be seen.

Is life merely “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare says in Macbeth, or is it just a “trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind,” as Joseph Heller wrote?  Guinness asks, “Will it be chance, necessity, determinism, karma, or our stars?”  Or is there something . . . someone . . . ultimate, God as revealed in the Bible, who draws all to him, as in John 12:32 and John 6:44, 55?

I can think of three especially poignant ‘signal’ experiences in my life.  The first I’ve written on elsewhere on this site, regarding the crisis of pointlessness I had as a teenage atheist that led to my conversion.  Guinness advises us that “signals only signal.”  They don’t come with the full story.  It’s up to us to take the steps that lead to answers.  In my case I had no idea where to look, since I had rejected all religion when I rejected my Roman Catholic heritage, and since it was the evolutionary worldview, that suffused all of my formal education, that had provoked the ‘life-has-no-purpose’ crisis in the first place.

If we are just ‘naked apes,’ or selfish genes, or as Plato put it, “featherless bipeds,” there would be no hope, no point.  (Diogenes responded to Plato by plucking a chicken, throwing it into the assembly, and declaring, “Here is your Platonic man.”)

God was gracious to me.  With perfect timing he crossed my path with a Christian family, offering me the chance to respond when I heard some truths I’d never considered before.  It took several months for me to work through this new landscape, but when I realized that Jesus is exactly who He claims to be in Scripture, I believed.  Life changed completely, forever.

Guinness’ first chapter describes the signal event in the life of Malcolm Muggeridge, the prolific and famous writer and journalist.  In WW2 Muggeridge was an intelligence officer monitoring German shipping in Mozambique, what seemed to him to be an utterly pointless role in a life altogether too pointless thus far.  He was drunk, alone, depressed, and decided to commit suicide.  He swam out into the ocean, planning to go too far to possibly return.  But he glanced back at one point, saw the lights along the coast and thought of his wife, Kitty, back in England.

“They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged.  I must reach them.  There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy.”  He swam back.  He had hope again.  Was he converted?  No, not at all.  But he began a quest for meaning.

Guinness reports that Muggeridge eventually became a Christian, which is the consensus view.  His ‘Christianity’ however, was at first Anglican, then later Roman Catholic.  Muggeridge brought Mother Theresa to the attention of the world in his TV documentary, Something Beautiful for God.  In short, Malcolm properly started the quest, but landed in the wrong destination in the end.  It is significant, I believe, that Guinness provides no details of an actual born again conversion experience or testimony on the part of Muggeridge.

I love Os Guinness, but he has a serious lack of discernment about what is wheat and what is tare within Christendom.  Not that it’s easy!  And there is no way to validate any specific case of true vs. false conversion while we reside under this blue sky.  But in this case there are definite clues that, while Malcolm Muggeridge became a theist, and even embraced Christendom, he never understood the Gospel.  If he had, he would not have fallen into the grasp of Rome.

W. H. Auden was one of the 20^th century’s foremost poets, according to Guinness and many others. WW2 was underway, but the U.S. had not yet entered the war. He visited a local cinema in Manhattan in a largely German-speaking community.  The film was a documentary of the Nazi conquest of Poland; it was graphic and violent.  Auden, an Englishman, was horrified to hear the audience cry out in support of the Germans – “Kill the Poles!  Kill them!”

Auden’s convictions until this point had included a belief in the natural goodness of mankind, and that the solutions to the world’s problems could be found in politics, education, and psychology.  The cinema experience convinced him he was wrong.  The Nazis’ actions were absolute evil and must be judged and condemned.  Auden had been in sync with the late 19^th century book by Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, which asserted “evil perpetually tends to disappear. . . . Progress, therefore, is not an accident but a necessity.  Evil and immorality must surely disappear; man must surely become perfect.”

Spencer was simply expressing the optimism of the 18^th century Enlightenment but, as Guinness states, “after the Great War it was ludicrous and after World War II and the Nazi death camps, it was unthinkable.”

Auden’s elite education had assured him that there were no absolutes in his universe.  Judging anything absolutely was done only by “the great unwashed.”  God was dead (Nietzsche) and truth was dead and all that was left was relativism (your truth / my truth) and emotivism (what I feel is good is good, etc.).  How could anyone judge the Nazis if there were no absolute standards?  Yet they must be judged!

Berger wrote, “Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell.”  Many proclaimed that “hanging is not enough” for Eichmann.  The soul demands damnation in the full biblical sense.  Only God can deliver that.

Winston Churchill once growled that a powerful argument for God “was the existence of Lenin and Trotsky, for whom a hell was needed.”

Auden entered the theatre an atheist and left it a seeker after an unconditional absolute.  Eventually, he began attending church and became a Christian.  Once again, Guinness reports no clarity – no testimony from Auden and no distinctive change of life in accord with New Testament principles.  Wikipedia mentions that Auden was an Anglican and that he had a serious homosexual relationship in the 1940s.  So, was W. H. Auden a ‘born again’ type of Christian?  Guinness offers nothing.  Did Auden have a ‘signal’ experience that changed his perspective?  I don’t doubt Guinness on this.  But that’s a long way from repentance and saving faith.

G. K. Chesterton, author of 80 books, 200 short stories, hundreds of poems, and thousands of essays, is a favorite of Guinness. Chesterton’s ‘signal’ arose from wrestling with the dichotomies of beauty and brokenness, optimism and pessimism. In his book Orthodoxy he writes that Christianity was accused of being too optimistic about the universe, and of being too pessimistic about the world.  He realized that this made sense, however, in the Bible’s account of creation and the Fall.

What Guinness (and Chesterton) should have realized is that prophecy’s end, the 2^nd Coming, and the New Heaven / New Earth as restoration of the creation, completes the arc and is the foundation for the ultimate hope of every believer, whether healthy and prosperous, or tortured and dying in a dungeon for his faith.

But Chesterton landed on potentially fruitful ground, realizing that the Christian worldview allowed him to be both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously.  It explained “why I could feel homesick at home.”

Chesterton finished his autobiography just weeks before he died, ending with a chapter entitled “The God with the Golden Key,” describing his faith as “the overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors.”

He famously argued, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he is genuinely thankful, but has nobody to thank.”  And, “If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have somebody to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet into mine?”

Chesterton’s most famous fictional character was Father Brown, the small town priest who solved crimes the police always seemed to get wrong.  The moral themes in the story were right in Chesterton’s wheelhouse because, yes, G. K. was a staunch Roman Catholic.  He was even considered for RCC sainthood.  Accordingly, I can find no clear testimony from Chesterton to indicate he knew he was lost in his sins, humbled himself, repented, and was born again.  If he had been truly born again, understanding the Gospel and his own accountability and responsibility, surely he would not have dwelt contentedly within Roman Catholicism, with its sacramental grace, priestly intercessions, and works-based uncertainties regarding eternal life.

C. S. Lewis decided that he was an atheist at the age of 14. For me, it was at 13. His parents were religious, but nominal, members of the Church of Ireland.  My family was Roman Catholic – my mother and her relatives were fairly serious RCs, while my dad turned out to be an agnostic.  Lewis’ atheism was triggered by his mother’s death when he was nine, his father’s coldness, and his own horrific experiences in the trenches of WW1.  He was also rebellious, despising authority, and loved the autonomy of atheism.  For me it was both the moral autonomy and the constant drumbeat of evolution that I experienced in my public Junior High, the Chicago Museum of Natural History, the subscription to Scientific American my parents were so generous to provide me, and a host of books on my dad’s shelves that supported an evolutionary worldview.

In Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he admitted to “an inconsolable longing” for something beyond human experience.  He longed for Joy – with a capital “J” – as distinguished from both pleasure and happiness, which depend on transitory experiences . . . a beautiful landscape, the smell of perfume, etc.  Yet Joy could be triggered by beauty, music, poetry, and human love.

On a summer day he had a memory of his brother, Warnie, with a toy garden, the memory overwhelming him with a sensation of blissful joy.  But then it was gone; the world was ordinary again.  Eventually, he realized that these ‘whiffs’ of something transcendental, these ‘signals’ pointed to something beyond all human objects.  The ‘whiff’ simply was triggered by something terrestrial.  He knew that it was foolish to make idols out of objects or experiences associated with them.  So he began his search.

A fellow don at Oxford – a skeptic – remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was “surprisingly good.”   This shook up Lewis:   “If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not ‘safe,’ where could I turn?  Was there then no escape?”  Lewis began to study the Gospel accounts and became convinced of their truth.

He described his crisis point as feeling “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I desired so earnestly not to meet.  That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.  In the Trinity Term of 1930 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed:  perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Now, I’ve written about C. S. Lewis before, and presented evidence that he never understood the Gospel at a personal level, that he knew he was a sinner under just condemnation, needing forgiveness, and expressing a sincere repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus.  Consider the testimony above.  As far as I know, he never recanted that miserable profession, never explained that he was ‘kidding,’ that he was in fact extraordinarily grateful that he found forgiveness and embraced a desire to follow Jesus.  In his book God in the Dock, a collection of writings, he recounts many events where circumstances cried out for him to challenge or plead with lost sinners to repent and believe the Gospel, but failed to do so without any hint of conscience.  In his most famous book, Mere Christianity, he shows zero discernment regarding the heresies that abound within Christendom.  Doctrine seems to matter not at all, even the vital doctrines tied to the salvation of souls.

Indeed, Lewis turned from atheism to become a strong advocate for theism, and even Christendom.  But a born again Christian?  I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t expect to see him in Heaven.  And I am fully aware that I am in a tiny minority on this.

In discussing his grandfather, Whitfield Guinness, Os argues that human love is a poignant signal that God provides to help sinners find Him.  He quotes a line from a Michael Martin Murphy song: “If love never lasts forever, tell me what’s forever for?”

Love is a loud signal “because it is a rare moment when we are simultaneously most ourselves and least ourselves.”  “Love reaches out, love risks, love offers, love affirms, love gives.”  (See also 1 Corinthians chapter 13.)  Love fuses two people into one, culminating in marriage, at least what marriage should be.

Yet human love crashes against mortality.  The cherry blossom is gorgeous in full bloom, but then it dies so soon.  The grip of love on the human soul cries out for eternity.  Shouldn’t love last forever?  Only God’s love satifies this yearning, because God is love, God is the author of love, God is the source of love and offers His love for eternity . . . purchased by His blood on a cruel cross.  We must come via the cross.

Whatever the signal, whether love or joy or beauty or an epiphany of understanding, Os Guinness challenges the reader to pay attention.  “Be ready, then, for the call that will come to you in your life.  Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”  What Guinness fails to make clear, throughout his book, is the destination, the Gospel, what everyone must understand about salvation, and what to do about it.  How do you write a book like this and leave that out?

He’s right in his concluding remarks that “the perspiration that follows the signal is as important to the search as the inspiration.”  He’s right in describing the materialist / secularist worldview as “poor, narrow, and constricting.”  He’s right in that for anyone and everyone, “the time is ripe for a great escape, a grand spiritual awakening.”  He agrees with Tolstoy that someone needs to “tear asunder the enchanted circle in which people are now shackled.”

Well, that’s the job of the evangelist, the Christian – any Christian who cares about souls.  Based on many other writings and interviews, I’m confident that Os Guinness is a born again Christian.  If this were the only book of his I had available, though, I would really wonder.  Is this a sign of the times, a delusion of Satan that beclouds the minds of God’s people so they don’t make clear the pressing need for the salvation of souls all around them?  I don’t know, but it is distressing.

The theme of Signals of Transcendence is vital.  The execution of the theme within this book is lacking.  But it is still worth reading.  It will provoke the Christian who cares about souls to be sensitive to the signals – the drawing of the Holy Spirit – in the lives of lost sinners all around us.  And even if you aren’t aware of the signals touching those around you, just take a shot anyway.  Hand out some tracts this week.  Start a conversation with someone who lingers and explain the Gospel.  Make it personal.  Don’t let someone go to Hell without a clear warning.  Love them enough to give them a chance!

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

 

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193. Politics is Personal: The Devil & Karl Marx
April 1, 2024

In 1862 Karl Marx wrote a letter to his friend and partner, Friedrich Engels, noting that his wife’s misery was so poignant and persistent that she said every day that she wished to die.  Marx commented, “Blessed is he who has no family.”

Aristotle once wrote, “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.”  Marx was followed by a long line of communist revolutionaries, from Lenin to Mao to Castro to Che, etc., whose personal lives also were dysfunctional, corrupt, and utterly self-centered.  Their apparent coping strategy was to build tyrannies to visit their misery on the multitudes they sought to control.  Paul Kengor:  “No other political ideology has produced as much wretched poverty, rank repression, and sheer violence.”

This is the theme of the 2020 book, The Devil and Karl Marx:  Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration, by Paul Kengor, which focuses on the (truly) Satanic influences in the life of Karl Marx, and how these influences have brought misery to the world ever since . . . even and especially in present-day America, in which the culture and every institution is infested and afflicted by Marxist ideology and tactics.  Militant atheism and a rabid anti-Christianity were at the core of Marx’s beliefs and have been central to communism ever since.  In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared, “Communism begins where atheism begins.  Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.”

Consider its success today.  Regarding the LGBTQIA+ takeover of law and culture, the strange proliferation of drag queen story hours, the sexualization of children including pornography in school libraries . . . where are the moral boundaries?  No one asks the cultural Marxists, “What would be immoral?  Where’s the line?”  Of course there are no boundaries for the Marxist, the dedicated follower of Satan.  The goal is deconstruction, obliteration of morality and the Christian foundations that enable a peaceful civilization.  Nikolai Bukharin, Pravda’s founding editor and a lieutenant to Lenin and Stalin asserted, “A fight to the death must be declared upon religion . . . (we must) take on religion at the tip of the bayonet.”

Well, then, “Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war!”, as Marc Antony (and General Chang) said.  Hey, Christian, wake up!  The war is approaching a crescendo whether you’re on the field or not.  Your part is spiritual – particularly, the Great Commission – so grab some tracts and head out to a neighborhood or a store and launch some Gospel missiles into the fray.

OK, well, back to our story . . .

From Marx’s Communist Manifesto, along with other writings, Kengor summarizes a few key principles:

• Communism seeks “to abolish the present state of things.”
• Communist goals can be achieved “only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
• Communists will support all kinds of revolutionary movements as long as they work against the existing social and political order.
• A fruitful communist tactic is the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”
• Marx loves the quote from Goethe’s Faust: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
• In Marx’s essay declaring that religion is “the opium of the people,” he asserted that “the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.”

You might observe that these sentiments are perfectly in sync with Satan’s desire to overthrow God, destroy His imagebearers, and tear down everything good in creation.  Robert Payne’s biography of Marx includes this analysis:  “And after he has abolished property, family, and nations, and all existing societies, Marx shows little interest in creating a new society on the ruins of the old.”  In one of Marx’s poems he imagines throwing a gauntlet at the world (the Communist Manifesto, perhaps), watching the world crumble, and wandering through the ruins, his words glowing, with a heart like the heart of God.  Perfectly Satanic.

Kengor points out that a lot of people don’t recognize Marxism’s war against all of us today, because they think of it in the 19^th century terms in which Karl Marx developed it – economic war between the working class and the property-holding elites.  By the mid-20^th century communist ‘intellectuals’ recognized that the economics of communism had failed completely, and so they shifted to the cultural and the sexual.  But the vision never changed – destroy Chrisitianity, destroy morality, persecute Christians, and corrupt the society so severely that it cannot recover.  From Satan’s point of view in the spiritual realm, harden the culture so thoroughly that the Gospel will be despised and no one would consider becoming a Christian.  The Devil wants to populate Hell with as many image-bearers as possible.

Kengor notes that as he drafted his last chapter, the lead article at CPUSA’s website was entitled, “The Capitalist Culture of Male Supremacy and Misogyny.”  Such is the intellectual fare of modern communists.

In the book’s Foreward, Michael Knowles observes that socialism has succeeded everywhere it has been tried, “at least for a time.”  He points out that the problem with socialism isn’t the inefficiency, but rather the evil.  Karl Marx, like modern Marxists, “sought to radically transform society by changing human nature.”  This is Satan’s war against God, featuring persistent denials of the reality created and sustained by God.

I would go further than Knowles.  It’s not that socialism succeeds, only apparently, for just  a while when it takes over.  It succeeds thoroughly by corrupting and destroying souls for a generation at least, once it takes hold within a nation.  It is designed to corrupt and to destroy.  As of 2023 the Russian and Chinese tyrannies have persisted for a century.  How many souls have perished in that century, particularly those who were prevented from hearing or considering (freely) the Gospel?

Kengor:  “Marxism from the outset was a seriously perverse ideology that brooded in misery, wallowed in misery, advanced itself in the name of misery, and ultimately produced misery.”

Under communism there are no individual unalienable rights, no rights endowed by the Creator.  I have lived long enough to see, amazingly, free speech disappear on college campuses and in other aspects of American life.  I recently saw a news report that Harvard University was ranked worst among all American colleges and universities for free speech.  Students profess that it is impossible to have friendly and open discussions on a large list of topics wherein the Marxist narratives have already been settled.

Ronald Reagan wondered whether mankind can survive Communism.  He called it a “vicious disease.”  Also, “Communism is neither an economic or a political system – it is a form of insanity.”

Insanity:  a denial of God’s ordained reality.  Marx’s biographer, Robert Payne, concluded that Marx “had the devil’s view of the world, and the devil’s malignity.  Sometimes he knew that he was accomplishing works of evil.”  Payne further speculated that Marx, although not a Satanist – after all, Marx was a determined atheist – was, in fact, possessed by a demonic spirit.

A caveat on Paul Kengor’s perspective – he views spiritual warfare from a Roman Catholic perspective.  Accordingly, he is happy to quote RC authors, Pope Benedict XVI, for example, who noted that the fatal flaw of communists is that their anthropology is wrong:  they don’t understand man, especially man’s spiritual need to find God.  A consequence of this denial of reality is the original emphasis of Marxism, that economics is the alpha and omega of human existence.

Jesus, however, reminded Satan that man does not live by bread alone.  Satan, rather, historically inspired communists to obsess on money and material things.  Currently, the emphasis has shifted to identity or denial of one’s God-given identity.  Whatever works.  Whatever serves to deny God’s order and distract men and women and children from recognizing their need of forgiveness and salvation.

Marx wrote that human nature had to be changed.  In the Soviet Union, the idealized ‘Soviet man’ would learn, drill, and memorize the text of the Communist Manifesto, while shunning any counter-revolutionary literature, especially the Bible.  Religion was considered to be a powerful enemy, not to be taken lightly.

Communists have therefore persecuted Christians diligently.  Richard Wurmbrand, in his autobiography Tortured for Christ, states, “All the biblical descriptions of hell and the pains of Dante’s Inferno are nothing in comparison with the tortures in Communist prisons.”  Some torturers would declare, “I am the devil.”  Another told him:  “I thank God in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.”  Wurmbrand experienced first-hand how Communism deals with its enemies.

In their Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels advocated the abolition of private property and right of inheritance, centralization and state control of communication, transportation, industry, and agriculture, and a free public school education to conform the thinking of future generations.  Strikingly, they proclaimed, “Abolition of the family!”  They desired “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.”

They admitted their program required despotism, and that “their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”  Revolution, even violence would be necessary.  Lenin followed this path in Russia:  “The truth is that no revolution can be successful unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed.”  We should recall these sentiments when we observe the antics of the Left in the West.  Regardless of the topic, there is no interest in analysis or debate; the tactics are intimidation, defamation, even violence.

The young Karl Marx was a determined poet.  Poetry was his refuge.  But his poetry was dark and troubled.  For example . . . “the hellish vapors rise and fill the brain, Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.  See this sword?  The Prince of Darkness sold it to me.  For me he beats the time and gives the signs.  Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.”

The poem is entitled, “The Player,” whose identity is clearly Lucifer, and the music he plays frenetically is meant to accompany the end of the world.  The Player, a violinist, destroys the world to spite God, while deriding and mocking the Creator.

In another poem, the love of his life drinks poison and dies and goes to the flames.  Robert Payne comments, “for a man does not write such things unless he is on the verge of madness or despair.”  Tragically, the evil in Marx’s life was visited upon those around him.  Two of Marx’s daughters killed themselves with poison in suicide pacts.

A notable aspect of Kengor’s book is that most biographies of Marx neglect the spiritual issues, discounting the Satanic, and relegating the early poems of Marx to the folly of youth.  Namely, most biographers take a secular perspective on his life, a perspective that Marx, himself, might well be content with.

Marx also wrote a poetic play entitled Oulanem, an anagram for “Manuelo,” or “Emmanuel” – God.  In the play violence is turned against all of mankind; the characters are learned in the arts of destruction and are consumed with a rage for vengeance.  This was Marx’s attempt to match Goethe’s Faust.  Marx loved Goethe’s line, “Everything that exists deserves to perish,” and used it in multiple writings.  In Oulanem every character is aware of his own corruption and yet flaunts it and celebrates it.  Such celebration of evil is certainly prevalent in our current culture, more than in any previous generation, perhaps since the days of Noah.

Karl was born Jewish, but his parents converted and raised him to be Lutheran.  Karl became an atheist in his college years.  In his thesis at age 23 in 1841 he quoted the Roman philosopher Lucretius, condemning the “burden of oppressive religion,” and “Religion lies at our feet, completely defeated.”

As a teen and young adult, Marx refused to work for a living, parasitically drawing income from his parents.  When his parents finally cut him off, it enraged him.  Karl’s mother wished that “Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.”  His wife complained along the same lines, bitterly.  Karl’s wife and children were regularly short of money, food, a steady roof over their heads, and even medical care.  After the financial cutoff, Karl didn’t visit his mother for twenty years, and only then to pressure her for cash.

Karl was a serial moocher, trying to hustle relatives, friends, fellow travelers in the Communist cause, and anyone he might con into supporting him.  Marx envied Engels’ wealth and begged money from him continually; eventually Engels cut off the money flow, too.  Marx’s personal habits were disgusting:  drinking, smoking, lack of exercise, warts and boils from lack of washing, the stink of not washing his clothes.  The apartment was always a mess, with broken furniture, broken dishes, and broken toys strewn about.

The point is that when Satan takes over a life, it affects every aspect.

The family ‘employed’ a nanny, Lenchen, but Karl didn’t pay her.  Kengor:  The “champion of the proletariat, protestor against wage exploitation, never paid Lenchen a penny.” She was a virtual bondslave, and was sexually abused by Karl, which was a grief to his wife, Jenny.  Lenchen eventually got pregnant.  Karl refused to admit his responsibility and never paid any child support.

Karl and Jenny had three daughters, but he denied them an adequate education, hindered them from pursuing careers, and was hostile to suitors.  Four of Marx’s six children died before he did, and the two daughters who survived him later committed suicide.

Karl was also an outspoken racist against blacks and Jews, despite his Jewish heritage.  Kengor has much to say about Karl’s specific racist comments, but I won’t mention them here.

Friedrich Engels was also morally degenerate.  A year after Marx’s death in 1883, Engels published his book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.  It included considerable material contributed by Marx.  Some of the ideas . . . a mother’s housework should be co-opted by the State, so mothers can return to more ‘meaningful’ work in the fields and factories.  Childcare would be a communal task.  Education, of course, would be State-run.  Engels hoped, “The single family ceases to be the economic unit of society.”  One useful result, he anticipated, would be “the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse.”

Lenin followed Marx in hating God and God’s works:  “Any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most inexpressible foulness . . . the most shameful ‘infection.’”  Lenin likened religious belief to venereal disease.

On Christmas day in 1919, Comrade Lenin ordered his secret police to be alert to anyone who failed to show up for work . . . they should be shot.  In the summer of 1918 in the Yekaterinburg diocese, forty-seven clergymen were shot, drowned, or axed to death.  This was just one incident in a long campaign directed by Lenin.

Leon Trotsky rejoiced in Darwinism.  “The idea of evolution and determinism took possession of me completely . . . I was intoxicated with his (Darwin’s) thought.”

We can trace a direct line of ideology from Marx through Lenin through other Marxists right up to the present day.  Hatred of God and God’s word is core to Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and every wokist perversion under the sun.

The Soviet Union was officially atheist.  “It was not neutral,” Kengor notes.  This hostility continues today in China, North Korea, and Cuba.  Leftists in the West are working hard in the same direction.

Marx designed a philosophical system and a ruthless mindset to enable the overthrow of the existing order, but did not explain how to rule after the success of the revolution.  Marx figured, “all contradictions would be resolved, man and the world would finally sort themselves out.  Then everything would be able to proceed by itself along the right path.”  In effect, utopia would follow the revolution ‘naturally.’

Marxist revolutions have certainly had their opportunities.  Communists were successful in the revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and other places.  Tragedies followed in every case . . . inevitably.  The ongoing revolutions in the West show the same trademarks.  In CRT, once the white supremacists (all of the white people) are demonized and oppressed and the reparations are forcibly extracted, what then?  Does utopia break out?  There are no answers from the communists who surround us.

Kengor has much to say about liberal or progressive ‘Christians,’ and their sympathy with Communist causes, sharing sentiments about workers’ rights, wealth redistribution, and other areas generally lumped into ‘social justice.’  An expert ex-communist, Herbert Romerstein, concluded that communists found progressive pastors to be “the biggest suckers of them all.”

As an example, Kengor recounts how communists infiltrated men’s groups within the RCC in the 1930s.  Catholic men’s groups were quite active in anti-communist initiatives back then.  But communists were even able to infiltrate the editorial board of Wisdom, a Catholic anti-communist publication.

In the 1930s political realm, communists within the Roosevelt administration convinced FDR to establish formal diplomatic relations with Stalin’s totalitarian USSR, after previous US presidents had rejected Stalin’s attempts.

American communist leader Earl Browder was proud of their successes in achieving ‘united fronts’ with various church groups to promote social justice issues.  He admitted, of course, that as a communist he despised all religions, but he was happy to accept their help on specific causes; he saw the united fronts as a way to bring anti-religious ideas to their unwitting partners.

Kengor:  “As communists in the West assured Christians that they wanted to shake hands with them, communists in the East and elsewhere handcuffed them and blew up their churches.”  Kengor goes on to develop a fairly detailed history of communist efforts in America during the 20^th century, including the infiltration of seminaries, both Protestant and Catholic.  An example:  In the 1930s communists were told by the Party to rejoin the churches they had left in order to establish cells for both influence and takeover.

Bella Dodd admitted in the 1950s that the Communist Party subsidized hundreds of young men to go into the ministry, especially into the more liberal churches.

The Communist pattern of deceit, infiltration, and corruption has persisted since its beginnings in the 19^th century.  A Romanian spy chief who defected to the West in the 1970s admitted that Liberation Theology was created by the KGB.  These ideas were critical motivations for several Latin American revolutions in the late 20^th century.

Harry Hay (1912 – 2002) is credited as the founder of the modern gay movement.  Hay used a combination of Marxism, Native American revivalism, and New Age spirituality to advance gay and transgender causes.  His shrewdest tactical move was to portray homosexuals as a ‘minority’ class, evoking sympathy from the Left.  Author Will Roscoe asserts, “Without the idea of Gays as a cultural minority, there would be no Gay identity and no Lesbian/Gay movement today.”

The Communist Party in America has embraced all forms of sexual libertinism, ruthlessly criticizing every traditional moral value.  Destroying morality has become a favored means to destroy Christian influence, the family, and other pillars of peaceful civilization.

Kengor concludes his book with a detailed discussion that ties all that is woke with Marxism, but I’ll trust you to acquire his book, which I highly recommend.  Analysis of ‘woke’ issues is trivially easy, as I see it, from a Christian point of view.  If it’s woke, it’s anti-Christian and it’s evil.  Simple, huh.  Sin is blatant now; subtlety is gone.

If you embrace a Christian worldview at all, why would you embrace any idea that originates in the demon-possessed life of Karl Marx?  It does matter where the idea originates.  What might seem plausible on the surface may connect to a deeper, sinister agenda.  Christian principles, on the other hand, originate in the character of the Lord Jesus Christ.  The key elements of His life and His teachings are recorded in Scripture for all to see, and for all to decide to accept or to reject.

But there is a more dangerous trap for Christians in this age of unrestrained wickedness.  Too many Christians respond to the political and cultural threats of this day without recognizing their spiritual core.  Their energy goes primarily into politics and complaining about the culture.  I have visited adult Sunday School classes that feature considerable discussion on the woes of today’s culture.  I have interrupted such discussions with the question, “Well, what are you all doing about it?”

The Christian’s response should be and must be what has always been the mission – the Great Commission.  Share the Gospel.  That’s the solution, the only solution.  Don’t just pray for political change.  Pray for power to share the Gospel effectually.  God might just bless that.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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194. The Fringes of Science
May 1, 2024

Rupert Sheldrake has come to know many scientists, some ruthlessly ambitious, others kind and generous, some narrow-minded, cowardly, others brave, visionary.  In short, scientists are people.  That’s my experience, too.  The practice of science includes competition for resources and for prestige, is constrained by peer-group pressures, often involves politics, and unfortunately is rife with temptations, just like any other high-stakes enterprise.

In science, as in other fields, the facts do not speak for themselves.  Prevailing scientific narratives depend on rhetorical skills, power structures, and alliances, in addition to experimental and theoretical competence.

Such realities form the background of Sheldrake’s exploration of scientific dogmas that he believes should be questioned and, perhaps, discarded, in his 2012 book Science Set Free:  10 Paths to New Discovery.  The book is a gutsy challenge to materialistic dogmas from a secular point of view . . . Sheldrake is not a Christian, and certainly not a creationist.

Some of his calls to open up new lines of research are intensely practical.  For example, studies of East African women show they can carry up to 20 percent of their body weight on the head – “for free” – without burning more energy compared with walking.  Also, they can carry 70 percent of their body weight using 50 percent less energy than a U.S. Army infantryman with a backpack.  It involves a special type of gait, but Sheldrake questions whether there might be more to it.  He also asks why this skill isn’t taught in every Western phys-ed class.  He suggests that since the skill is found in low-status 3^rd world cultures, it is disrespected in ours.

Sheldrake’s vital point is that a spirit of inquiry has been choked off by the delusions that science has answered all the vital questions short of particle and cosmological physics.  And that we cannot learn from those less educated in mainstream science.

Rupert Sheldrake is a cell biologist with a successful career at Cambridge University and as a research fellow of the Royal Society.  He’s been attracted to puzzles far beyond his own field, however, discovering problems that defy the materialist dogma that all reality is merely physical.  The dogmas that he challenges in his book include the following:  people and animals are just machines; human consciousness is an illusion of merely material activities within brains; nature is purposeless; telepathy does not exist; and memories are just material traces destroyed at death.

He  points out that materialism is a philosophical assumption.  It is not, indeed it cannot be demonstated by the scientific method.  (My synopsis of the scientific method:  Science employs techniques of counting, weighing, and measuring, observing results, creating hypotheses to organize and to explain phenomena, and designing experiments to validate some hypotheses at the expense of others.  Human creativity, decision-making, and judgment are always in play.)  Since human scientists must employ logic, mathematics, and judgment calls on experimental design, “goodness” of data, and validity of conclusions – which are all non-material – consciousness, personhood, and nonmaterial qualities permeate the existence of science.  Thus, ‘science,’ which is an immaterial concept using immaterial methods, clearly cannot ‘prove’ materialism.

Sheldrake cites the philosopher David Chalmers, who calls the very existence of subjective experience the “hard problem,” hard because it defies explanation via mechanisms.  An elementary example:  Even if we understand the physics and biochemistry of how eyes respond to red light, “the experience of redness is not accounted for.”  I’m partially color blind and it is quite evident to me and to my wife that I don’t see the Fall colors the same way she does.  How do I explain the difference in redness that I experience?  How can she explain to me what she sees so that I fully comprehend?  Such experiences are entirely internal.

Sheldrake notes that within the life sciences, molecular biologists have the preeminent status.  The molecules of life (DNA, proteins) are foundational to making life work.  Indeed, scientists cannot explain how life works unless they can understand it at that nanotechnological level.  Then they can “hand the baton to chemists and physicists, who will reduce the properties of molecules to those of atoms and subatomic particles.”  This is the way of materialistic reduction and the framework of evolutionary thinking.  How did it all get started?  Start with the Big Bang and elementary particles, and develop a story bottom-up to generate planets, life, and ecosystems.

Yet it is clear that life had to be designed top-down.  Living systems are the most complicated of all systems, far exceeding the human-designed systems of buildings, automobilies, supercomputers, and cities.  None of those systems make any sense if they must be explained by bottom-up processes.  (As I’ve written much about in the Creation vs. Evolution section of this web site.)

Sheldrake suggests that trying to explain organisms in terms of their chemical parts “is rather like trying to understand a computer by grinding it up and analyzing its component elements, such as copper, germanium, and silicon.”  Such a process will never reveal the circuit diagrams, nor its programs, and especially nothing of the purposes for which it was built.

Yet Sheldrake is an evolutionist, perhaps something of a pantheist.  He suggests that the Gaia hypothesis is a recognition of the earth as a living organism, as is perhaps the solar system and the rest of the universe.  But when he gets mystical in his writing, he seems to avoid specifics.

Rupert dabbles in cosmology in the chapter, “Is the total amount of matter and energy the same?”  He observes that in cosmological models, the density of dark energy in the expanding universe is assumed to be constant.  But since the universe is expanding, the total amount of energy would be increasing.  Such questions do not seem to be testable at present, though.

More down to earth, he cites Paul Webb’s studies in the late 1970s on energy balance in humans, measuring caloric intake, exercise, metabolism, etc.  Despite extraordinarily careful efforts, he could not account for an excess 27% in energy expenditure.  Did life have access to unmeasurable energy reserves?  Most would conclude that the measurements were simply not thorough enough.  But Sheldrake considers the question open enough to warrant more research.

He cites historical examples of religious mystics who lived for extended periods with no food, even years.  Much controversy surrounds such cases, but Sheldrake asks, “Are there new forms of energy that are not at present recognized by science?”  “If such a form of energy exists, how is it related to the principles of physics, including the zero-point field?”

In the chapter, “Are the laws of nature fixed?”, Sheldrake recounts the recent history of the variation in the determination of the gravitational constant, G.  Between 1973 and 2010 the experimentally determined values fluctuated by 1.1 percent.  This is a huge variation, considering the supposed precision of the measurements, which are typically registered to three, four, or even five decimal places.  Does G vary in time?  A group at MIT discovered a daily rhythm; if more research is done, perhaps other variations might be discovered.  “The variation of fundamental constants is now a matter of serious debate among physicists.”

Sheldrake controversially (perhaps wildly) proposes his own “hypothesis” for variations, patterns within cosmology, physics, and even biology and behavior.  He calls it “morphic resonance,” without ever explaining exactly what that means. The root word of “morphic” means form or structure, as “morphological” is used in biology.  Sheldrake explains, “Similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space” to affect what we see now.  There is a ‘memory’ in a morphic field that links past effects to the present.  This applies to “all self-organizing systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals, and animal societies.”  (He’s quite bold to call all of those ‘self-organizing systems.’)

As an example, he mentions that a growing crystal of copper sulfate is in resonance with countless previous crystals, to facilitate the same growth pattern and lattice structure.  Similarly for a growing oak seed or the spinning of a web by an orb-weaving spider.  “It follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating with them directly across space and time.”  Morphic resonance also applies to human learning, he suggests, for example in that the more people that learn how to snowboard, the easier it will be for others to pick up the skill.

Morphic fields, he asserts, shape the development of plants and animals, instincts and behavior, social group behavior, and are akin to quantum fields, probabilistically imposing patterns on what might seem to be random events.  Certainly evolutionary events would fall under the morphic resonance umbrella.

This seems to be simply mysticism, if not mumbo-jumbo, to avoid both the materialistic worldview and that of biblical creation and top-down design for the universe, planets, and life itself.

To his credit, Sheldrake attempts some specific examples of the effect.  Turanose, a sugar, known for decades as a liquid, was first crystallized in the 1920s after much difficulty.  Thereafter, it was synthesized readily all over the world.  The idea is that, under morphic resonance, once the process succeeded, a ‘memory’  resonated to other labs where the process succeeded much more easily.

A polymorph is an alternate form of a crystallized compound.  In the pharmaceutical industry polymorphs can be big problems.  For example, ampicillin was first crystallized as a monohydrate (one water molecule per ampicillin molecule).  But in the 1960s it began to crystallize in laboratories as a trihydrate, with a different form, and henceforth the monohydrate could not be made again.  This type of effect has happened on multiple occasions for different drugs.

Sheldrake concludes:  “The emergence of new polymorphs makes it clear that chemistry is not timeless.  It is historical and evolutionary, like biology.”

He tackles the materialist / dualist debates next.  Materialism is bankrupt because it denies consciousness.  Dualism (reality is both material and spiritual) doesn’t explain how one’s spirit interacts with matter.  As a Christian I can live without having to explain how my soul / spirit interacts with my brain, because it is obvious that it does.  All scientific instruments that measure voltage, current, force, weight, etc., clearly do not have the capacity to measure spiritual entities, but that simply speaks to the limits on science.  So be it.

After reviewing some of the debate’s history, Sheldrake figures only one way out – panpsychism – the idea that even atoms and molecules have a primitive kind of mentality / experience / consciousness.  The Greek word pan means everywhere, and psyche means soul or mind.  The more complex the object, the more sophisticated the consciousness.  This is an ancient idea, which shows up in pagan beliefs about souls infesting all aspects of the natural world, including Gaia for the Earth.

Sheldrake:  “Maybe all organisms, physical and biological, have experiences and feelings, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, plants, animals, societies of organisms, ecosystems, planets, solar systems, and galaxies.”

He does not seem to propose any specific research to explore these issues, but it serves as a pillar of his worldview, so he can dance apart from both materialists and theists, creating his own perspectives and agendas.  It is amazing to what lengths intelligent people will go to avoid God.

Sheldrake then goes on to challenge materialism’s view that nature is purposeless.  Why not God and design, Rupert?  Anything but that!  He spins off the ideas of a mid-20^th century biologist, Conrad Waddington, who suggested that the incredibly complex processes of embryonic development might be explained by what amounts to form-shaping morphogenetic fields.  After all, how can you get from a fertilized egg to the spectacularly complex human form without some guiding magic?  He offers metaphors about attractors and gravity wells that objects fall into, and then topological models that might inform how biological structure is guided.  But it’s all hocus-pocus.  Mysterious “morphogenetic fields,” if they existed, would need their own explanation, indeed their own brilliant Creator to do the job of constructing full-grown creatures.  They would have to be both incredibly brilliant and incredibly complex themselves.

Sheldrake marvels at the protein folding problem – it takes about two minutes for a newly constructed protein molecule to fold inside the factory of the cell.  If the molecule had to experiment to find just the right folded pattern, it would take trillions of trillions of years.  In fact, researchers once predicted that knowing the amino acid sequence would enable them to predict the 3-D folded shape.  This has proven to be impossible.  So how does folding work?  Either there are mysterious morphogenetic guiding fields, or else the cell’s internal structures must be so brilliantly designed that you would require an Almighty God as the cell’s Engineer.  Guess which Sheldrake chooses?

Sheldrake does a wonderful job in dismantling atheistic materialism with his analysis, but he can’t seem to conceive the very possibility of God as Author of the creation.

Sheldrake’s mystical fields, I believe, find a kinship with Plato’s forms, which Sheldrake admits.  Real trees aspire to the tree form, real tables to the table form.  He does not believe in a conscious purpose for non-sentient objects and creatures.  But . . . “Both evolution and progress can be interpreted in terms of attractors, with influences working backward in time from future goals.”  Apparently, cause and effect often work backwards!

Sheldrake discusses the hubris associated with the first published draft of the human genome in the year 2000.   A Nature editor gushed, “Genomics will allow us to alter entire organisms to suit our needs and tastes . . . We will have extra limbs, if we want them, and maybe even wings to fly.”  But optimism waned quickly with the realization of the awesome gap between gene sequences and actual human beings.  I’ve discussed this in other essays, including those on Stephen Meyer’s books, on discoveries of the multi-dimensionality of the genome, plus epigenetic complexity that matches or exceeds that of the genome.

Interestingly, Sheldrake insists that the existence of morphic fields is testable, even with regard to behavioral effects.  If squirrels learn a new trick in one location, then squirrels elsewhere on Earth should be able to learn it more easily.  He cites his books A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past, where he discusses such cases.

Sheldrake applies his morphic fields idea to memory.  Does the brain store specific memories in specific neurons?  Research on the physical basis of memory has miserably failed to find just where memories reside.  Experiments on rats, monkeys, and chimpanzees has shown, astonishingly, that learned memories can persist even after large amounts of brain tissue have been removed.  A conclusion has been voiced that “memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular.”  This is all consistent with the Christian’s dualist view, though, that soul (mind) and brain are distinct, yet interact in ways beyond our ability to measure at present.

He cites the extraordinary case of a young man with an IQ of 126 and a college degree in mathematics who was afflicted since infancy with hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”).  His skull was lined with just a thin layer of brain cells about a millimeter thick; the rest was filled with fluid.  With about 5% of a normal brain mass, he functioned quite normally – above normal, in fact, since the average fellow does not possess a B.S. in math.

Sheldrake asks whether minds are confined to brains.  Since other fields (electric, magnetic) can extend far beyond their physical source, might not our consciousness?  Can we affect others just by looking at them?  In fact, this is testable.  Extensive surveys have found that many people have the experience of causing people to turn around by looking at them.  In Oriental martial arts, students have been trained to increase their sensitivity to someone looking at them from behind.  (“Feel the force, Luke!”)

Professionals (police, soldiers, surveillance specialists) report that people they are watching regularly react to covert surveillance.  A Marine Corps sniper discovered that some targets seemed to suddenly realize that he was watching them, even through telescopic sights at a great distance.

Carefully posed experimental tests have found the effect to be real with a high statistical significance.  The effect does not occur frequently, necessarily, but it does occur far more than chance would suggest.  It occurs when subjects and starers are separated by windows or one-way mirrors, and even when cameras are used with CCTV.

Sheldrake offers some wonderful stories on animal telepathy.  For example, his neighbor in Newark-on-Trent owned a cat who was very attached to her son, who was away on duty in the Merchant Navy.  One day he was able to get away on leave, but did not tell his mother, just deciding to surprise her.  Mom figured it out, though, when the cat sat on the front-door mat meowing for an hour before he arrived.  Mom was able to prepare dinner for him ahead of his arrival.  Sheldrake has a database with over a thousand accounts of dogs and over six hundred of cats who anticipated their owners’ returns.  He also cites data on animals anticipating natural disasters, including earthquakes and tsunamis.  Dogs in London during WW2 anticipated the explosions from V-2 rockets, even though they could not have heard the approach.  V-2s were supersonic.

Do dogs and cats have souls?  Yes.  Spirits to connect with God?  No.  But perhaps our souls can extend their influence through another dimension at times.  This is not inconsistent with a biblical view of reality.  (We don’t need morphic fields to explain it.)

Sheldrake also includes accounts of human telepathy.  With help from a midwife, he personally conducted a study of nine nursing mothers in London over a two-month period.  When separated from their babies, they often knew when their babies needed them, experiencing a breast-feeding response mediated by the hormone oxytocin.  This normally is initiated by hearing the baby cry, but some mothers respond ‘mysteriously,’ even when miles away.  Eliminating normal feeding rhythms and recording data on both mother and child, there were apparently telepathic connections that occurred, defying chance by odds of a billion to one.  The effect is real.

Sheldrake offers some evolutionary and morphic field mumbo-jumbo, but the effect is plausible enough from a soul / body duality designed by God.  Perhaps the effect is not as consistent as it might be because of the Fall.  Perhaps we were originally designed to make useful spiritual connections with each other, but sin and de-volution intervened.  Perhaps our restored resurrection bodies will have abilities we can only imagine.

I recommend Sheldrake’s book to you, but you should read it from within a biblical worldview.  In his conclusion, he notes:  “This naïve, old-fashioned reductionist faith bears no relation to the reality of the sciences.  Physiologists do not explain blood pressure in terms of subatomic particles but through the pumping activity of the heart . . . Linguists do not analyze languages in terms of the movements of . . . molecules in the air; . . . they study the patterns of words, grammars, and meanings . . .”, etc.

He goes on to cite physicist John Ziman who argues that at higher levels of complexity, all the way through human cultural institutions, “we find systems obeying entirely novel principles.  The behavior of such systems is not predictable from the properties of their constituents.”  Similarly, the majesty of the Taj Mahal cannot be gleaned from the properties of a block of marble.

The startling conclusion he misses in this analysis is that creation only makes sense in light of top-down design.  Ultimately, God designed the subatomic particles so that they could form atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, not to mention stars and planets.  But we don’t live in a random sea of subatomic particles, nor a black hole swallowing all of them.  Clearly the structures of creation, from galactic clusters to ribosomes are purpose-built, tied to functions that ultimately serve consciousness, the consciousness of beings made in the image of God, namely us.  I pray that Rupert eventually figures that out.

He does a great job dismantling atheistic reductionistic materialism, but he misses the point of it all.  I do hope that he has success in exploring some of the mysteries he unfolds in the book.  I guarantee that as we learn more, that will only cause us to marvel at God’s creative genius.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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