Truth Really Matters

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178. 1/1/23 How did Christianity succeed in its first hundred years?
179. 2/1/23 The God Hypothesis
180. 3/1/23 Money, Greed, and God
181. 4/1/23 How Goes Your Quest
182. 5/1/23 Progressive Christianity: Old-Fashioned Apostasy
183. 6/1/23 Scientism is not Science
184. 7/1/23 Against the Flow
185. 8/1/23 Why bother believing?
186. 9/1/23 Identity, History, Reality
187. 10/1/23 The Miraculous Cell
188. 11/1/23 The Air We Breathe
189. 12/1/23 Intellectuals

 

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178. How did Christianity succeed in its first hundred years?
January 1, 2023

What factors contributed to the spread of the Gospel in the decades following the Resurrection?  Did God prepare political and economic factors to facilitate the multiplication of Christian churches?  How do conditions today compare with those of the 1^st century with regard to sharing the Gospel?

I recently read The First One Hundred Years of Christianity:  An Introduction to its History, Literature, and Development, by Udo Schnelle in 2019, translated into English in 2020 by James W. Thompson.  It’s a large tome, packed with details and analysis, but written mostly from the perspective of a secular historian sympathetic to the Christian faith, but discounting its supernatural character.  The author seems to treat the New Testament as equivalent to other historical documents . . . there is no apparent appreciation of its Holy Spirit-inspired character.

Nevertheless, I found some interesting nuggets, especially as summarized in Schnelle’s brief final chapter, “Fifteen Reasons for the Success of Early Christianity.”  I’ll paraphrase each one and make some comments.

1. The unity of the Roman Empire’s cultural and political control was crucial to Christianity’s early success.

In world-historic terms, the Roman Empire was only recently established when Jesus of Nazareth was born.  The early spread of the Gospel was enabled by the peace (Pax Romana) enforced across southern Europe and northern Africa, allowing safe and rapid travel via Rome’s system of roads and control of the Mediterranean Sea.  We should not take for granted Paul’s missionary journeys which established churches in nations that were once both independent and testy about foreign influence.

How much greater is our own opportunity to spread the Gospel in a world that is knit tightly together electronically, and travel is cheaper and faster than ever before?  If only Christians in the West would use their freedom and resources to do more than show up once per week for a ‘worship show’ and a winsome talk.

2. The widespread knowledge of the Greek language advanced the expansion of Christianity.

First and foremost, the New Testament in Greek could be read by most people across the Empire.  Doubtless, Christians would copy and distribute the Gospel accounts and the epistles from town to town from Egypt to Turkey to Greece to Rome and Gaul and Spain and, ultimately, beyond to Persia and India and Africa.

This is why there are tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament that have survived from all over Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.  Common use of Greek certainly enabled evangelists to show up in towns, even in Germany and Britain, and share the Gospel.  From Greek, the message would be translated into more far-flung local languages.

What is the universal language today?  Certainly English!  The modern missionary movement of the last two and a half centuries has been providentially sourced in the English speaking world, first from Britain and then America.  The best Gospel tracts ever created are available in English and almost every other language on Earth.  Yesterday there was a fellow at WalMart in the line ahead of me, apparently from Latin America.  He accepted the tracts I offered him (check them out at ThinkTracts.com), but his slight discomfort provoked me to reach for one of the Chick tracts in Spanish that I keep handy for just these occasions.  He responded positively to that offer – he knew how to read Spanish!  This is all so easy to do!

3. Hellenistic Judaism was widespread, giving Paul a place to start in the cities he visited.

The apostle Paul would start with the Jews, whose theology shared a Biblical foundation.  Paul’s witness to the pagan Gentiles would have to begin farther back, philosophically, explaining the God of creation.  Many Jews were readily converted (many, alas, were not), and became local Gospel evangelists.

Today we cross paths with many who have been raised in some branch of Christendom, and so share or at least are aware of some Biblical truths.  If they engage in conversation, it is at least easy for them to comprehend that they have missed something, namely salvation by grace through faith.  Most ‘religionists’ today, like most Jews and pagans of old, hope to be judged righteous enough for Paradise.  It’s not hard to quote and explain some basic Bible verses to show them their lost condition and need for forgiveness.

4. Existing religions were weak and local or regional. Pagan cults were in decline and not connected from region to region.

This enabled the Biblical Gospel to stand out in uniqueness and power.  The message of one Creator, whose Son was born into mankind, is something that seems ‘old hat’ now, but was unique then.  The message of forgiveness and the new birth offered an assured hope not found in any cult.  And Gospel truth was rooted in the history of the times and the prophecies of the Old Testament.  The Gospel was grounded in historical reality.

Today’s cults and religions and philosophies abound with thinly veiled false hopes.  The truth of the Gospel can still shake loose the weak foundations of worldly philosophies, and the Holy Spirit is still committed to the Great Commission so that we know that while we convey truth verbally (or by tract), the Holy Spirit draws the heart.

5. Monotheism enjoyed an appeal lacking in the polytheistic cults of the time. As the story spread about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, many sought and found a new understanding of God.

For someone yearning to find life’s meaning, polytheism simply does not have the ‘ring of truth.’  How can you wholly commit to just one or a few of the dishes on a large smorgasbord?  Ultimate truth demands one ultimate God who defines Truth, who has all the power, and in whom we can trust with all our being.

People are no different today.  Individuals choose a false religion or vacant philosophy because it’s comfortable, it justifies a sinful lifestyle.  But those who want to find TRUTH, will find the ‘ring of truth’ in the Gospel.  Our job is to convey the message compellingly and compassionately.

6. Christianity was new in that it was not just an additional religion added to the culture – the Gospel made an exclusive claim that required renunciation of other worldviews. It was all or nothing regarding salvation and the conduct of one’s life.

This was the feature that provoked such persecution.  Other religions coexisted, usually peacefully, within the Roman Empire, and were even willing to allow claims of godhood by the Roman emperor.  The Christian faith necessarily declared other faiths false.

The same tension and conflict persists today.  Accordingly, ‘tolerance’ seems to be available for all other perspectives except Biblical Christianity.  Since Christians and their faith are despised by false religionists, secularists, post-modernists, and everyone else under the sun, we may as well be bold and vocal about the TRUTH.  There is no point in compromise.

7. Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures valued dialogue, debate, and regularly entertained novel intellectual ideas. This opened the door for Christian missionaries to engage in the synagogues and marketplaces.

Open debate on serious issues wasn’t always friendly, but it wasn’t usually shocking.  (Although there are notable exceptions in the book of Acts.)  The culture valued listening to alternative points of view.  We see this throughout the book of Acts, when Paul visited the synagogues to challenge the Jews and on Mars Hill where he engaged with the pagan intellectuals.

Modern culture has shifted during my lifetime away from fair, intellectual debate.  Emotions drive political and religious positions, making it more difficult to engage peacefully.  Nevertheless, most of the world is still open to a Gospel witness, one-to-one, especially in America.  Whenever you can separate individuals from the mob, you are likely to get a hearing.  The response may be cold, but there are still souls open to truth, consciences still open to conviction.

8. A successfully communicative network of house churches included five pillars: letters, travel, coworkers, reciprocal material support, and a culture of hospitality.  The New Testament is rich with examples.

In this culture true discipleship thrived.  Every Christian had the opportunity and the obligation to evangelize the lost and to encourage the other believers, to develop gifts and to grow to spiritual maturity.  You will search the New Testament in vain to find the names of megachurch pastors . . . which, unfortunately, are the focus of modern Christianity.

The house church system (with its ‘pillars’) was designed by God to define church life until the Lord Jesus returns.  But modern Christendom has despised God’s design in favor of huge facilities with salaried clergy and scripted meetings.  And so the worldly culture disintegrates and wickedness abounds because the Christians have not “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6) in this generation.

9. Christians were both members in a local congregation, but also part of a worldwide fellowship of Christians. Regardless of station – slave or nobleman or tradesman – a traveling Christian would quickly find a group of believers to welcome him.

This is all the more remarkable considering the distances and time delays for communication between cities in ancient times.  Yet the New Testament record is clear that genuine believers would quickly recognize each other and help those in need no matter the level of sacrifice.

In doing street evangelism I have often encountered Christians and had sweet fellowship, if only for a few minutes.  I learned early on that it is not difficult to discern genuine believers from those who have a false religious hope.  But I’ve also been distressed to observe the isolation of church from church within a single community.  Even churches located across the street from each other see themselves as competitors, not at all as part of a local network.  This clearly hinders the Gospel and violates God’s New Testament plan.  The clergy in charge of megachurches or megachurch wannabes seem sadly motivated to acquire their own little empires and staffs and resources, even at the expense of ‘competitor’ churches.  Personally, I’ve found that Christians who are dedicated members of a given church have no interest in making friends of Christians who are not members of their church.

10. The Christian ethic of love for God and for others – even enemies – stood apart from pagan culture.  Startling was the acceptance of all classes into house church fellowships, and so multitudes from all classes became Christians and joined together.

The New Testament is clear and repetitive on this topic.  It makes sense – we’re all sinners who are saved the same way, by God’s grace, contingent on our humble repentance and faith.  All believers are born again as spiritual babes, including those rich and powerful in the world, and including those who are simple laborers or even impoverished.  Joined together in the same spiritual family by the grace of God, we are obligated to encourage, help, and build up one another, both spiritually and temporally.

Oh that Christians today would join together in the same spirit, facilitated by God’s intended design of city-wide house church networks, multiplying the Gospel block by block throughout a region, with member-evangelists who are part of every societal niche.

11. Baptism, the Lord’s supper, and house church culture created strong bonds within each fellowship, amplified in the early days by miracles and the Holy Spirit moving in power throughout a community to validate Gospel truth.  The bonds within and the openness to all those without made the Christian faith attractive to unbelievers.

And so the Gospel spread quickly throughout the Greco-Roman world and beyond to cover the globe.  It is clear from the Bible that God’s plan has not changed, even if market-oriented and culture-empathetic Western church leaders think they can do better.  It was far easier to distinguish the true from the false converts in ancient times under persecution;  similarly for professing Christians under duress in parts of the world today.  It is much harder to distinguish the wheat from the tares in the West today, yet the Bible is filled with warnings about this dichotomy, along with challenges to “examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Cor 13:5).

Persecution serves to purify and strengthen the bonds among believers.  Where persecution is absent or light, as in the West, the “glue” that serves is the Great Commission, a shared purpose that is worthy of our devotion and that provokes prayer, study, mutual encouragement, training, and rejoicing together.  If a church doesn’t use this “glue” it will be devoid of Holy Spirit power.

12. The Gospel accounts and the epistles introduced a new literature into the world, provoking discussion, study, and debate, along with a new perspective on the ancient Hebrew Scriptures – the Old Testament.

The themes included startling non-intuitive paradoxes . . . in death is life; the poor are rich; the oppressed will rule.  Given the claim that the Old and New Testaments were the very word of God, these apparent paradoxes made sense, engendering hope and purpose that transcended the harsh realities of life, and yet provided practical guidelines for daily life.

Throughout its history, the Christian faith has embraced study and open discussion, despite regular attempts to squash dissent from clergy-approved doctrines.  Modern emotionally-driven movements (Pentecostalism, the emergent church, entertainment-oriented evangelicalism) also work to diminish or destroy Biblical discipleship – the root word is ‘discipline’ regarding study, thought, and discussion, which Christians must still strive for, despite whatever local church culture they find themselves in.  See my ‘church’ essays in the Discipleship section of this site.

13. Jesus wrote nothing himself.  (The author cites similarity to Socrates and Pythagoras in this case, a trivializing note in my opinion.)   But the writings of the New Testament constrained the interpretation on Jesus’ life and teachings.

Indeed.  The Christian commits to the Bible as the Holy Spirit-inspired word of God, thereby constraining Christian doctrine to that delivered by God himself.  Despite this, varied interpretations abounded but, I believe, only because people deliberately misinterpreted or allegorized or mixed pagan ideas with Scriptural truths.  The New Testament is rich with warnings to hold fast to Scriptural doctrine.

Consider my essay “The 10 Most Deadly Heresies Affecting American Churches in These Last Days,” at http://truthreallymatters.com/wordpress/?page_id=84

I contend that the differences among “Christian” denominations and sects are easily resolved with a straightforward, but serious reading of the Bible.  It’s just not that hard to get the fundamentals right!

14. The split into different movements – the author identifies the Jerusalem church, a “Jesus movement” in Galilee, Antioch & Paul, and a Johannine school – was crucial to survival in a dangerous political / religious climate.  If one group were to be obliterated, Christianity would still survive.

I think the author has missed this one completely.  The emphasis was to evangelize and establish local churches everywhere.  “Movements” with divergent doctrines or interpretations were problems, not solutions.  The New Testament emphasis is to teach and to spread and to “earnestly contend for the faith once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).  Fragmentation into sects has consistently damaged the Gospel and turned multitudes into false converts.

15. Christians had direct access to God – there was no priestly class.  All believers are children of God, and see each other as brothers and sisters.  Scriptural promises destroyed the capriciousness of fate and the fear of death, with a promise of personal resurrection because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The boldness of believers in the first few centuries, even at risk of martyrdom, speaks to their assured hope of resurrection and eternal life in a restored Kingdom of God.  Martyrs around the world today prove the sincerity of their faith in God’s promises.  How much more should we in the West thank God for our liberties and resources by doing everything we can to share the Gospel.

A better analysis of what the 1^st century was all about, why Jesus was born when he was, and where he was, and what led up to that event and what shook out from it, is delightfully expounded in J. Warner Wallace’s 2021 book, Person of Interest:  Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible.

The book is outstanding and should be on every Christian’s bookshelf – after a careful read.  It’s one of the best apologetics books ever written, serving both to encourage believers and to convince skeptics.  I won’t review the book on this site, but I do heartily endorse it.  Wallace uses his career experience as a cold-case detective to weave the apologetics narrative in parallel with a cold case that he once solved.  Fascinating!

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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179. The God Hypothesis
February 1, 2023

The naturalistic worldview denies anything beyond what we can observe in nature itself, namely matter and energy within space and time.  Particles, quantum fields, and the “laws” of physics . . . that’s all there is, ever was, or ever will be, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.

Prior to Big Bang cosmology, the reigning “scientific” view was of an eternal and infinite universe.  Albert Einstein fudged his equations with a “cosmological constant” to support this idea and Fred Hoyle, with strictly ideological motivations, proposed a steady-state infinite universe.  Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he found the Big Bang idea “repugnant.”

And so the Big Bang idea was resisted for some time because it allowed for a cause.  There shouldn’t be anything or, God forbid, anyone outside the universe that could bring it into existence.  As Stephen Meyer points out in his 2021 book, Return of the GOD Hypothesis:  Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, since naturalism posits nothing outside the physical universe, therefore naturalism “does not qualify as a causally adequate explanation for . . . the beginning of the universe.”

Meyer would tell his students, “If you extrapolate back all the way to a singularity, you eventually reach a point where there is no matter left to do the causing.”

In this essay I’ll extract nuggets and comment (as usual).  I do highly recommend the book, but only if you’re already thoroughly grounded in young-earth creationism.  You can use my essays and book on creation vs. evolution on this site to help, and take advantage of the wealth of materials on creation.com and answersingenesis.org.  Meyer is firmly entrenched in the Intelligent Design camp and, accordingly, compromises on age of the earth and other historical issues within the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  But his book Return of the GOD Hypothesis is a wonderful exposition of the history and sorry speculations of the naturalistic foundations of atheism.

In particular, Meyer examines three major scientific discoveries that wreck any supposed rational faith in naturalism:  (1) the material universe had a beginning; (2) the universe is finely tuned for life; and (3) the biosphere has experienced huge and discontinuous increases in functionally specified information.

Let’s do a bit of history first.  Meyer quotes Oxford physicist / historian Peter E. Hodgson who wrote on “the material requirements for the growth of science.”  Specifically, there must be “a fairly well-developed society, so that some of its members can spend most of their time just thinking about the world,” without just scrabbling for the next meal.  Simple technology must be available to conduct simple experiments.  Mathematics are necessary for the systemization of experimental studies and a written language is required to communicate with other scientists to grow the collective knowledge base.

Several historians note that science developed in Western civilization alone, because of the intellectual presuppositions of Judeo-Christian theology.  In contrast, for example, Greek philosophers believed that order in nature derived from the logos, a self-existent logical principle, rather than from a divine mind.  This led to an ‘armchair’ philosophizer approach, neglectful of careful observations.

Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry, insisted that the job of the natural philosopher (scientist) was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.  Boyle advocated an empirical, observational approach, not merely a deductive one.  Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus, Meyer notes, believed themselves to be called to find evidences of God in the world.

Kepler wrote that God made it possible for us to discover God’s natural laws “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”

Scientists with a biblical worldview embraced human capability based on our image-of-God nature, and exercised caution about our fallibility due to the Fall and our tendencies to sin.  Thus, our experimental methods must be systematic and reviewed, even repeated by others.

Nobel laureate (chemist) Melvin Calvin argued that the monotheistic worldview of the ancient Hebrews suggested a single coherent order in creation with a single, universal set of laws.  Meyer notes in contrast that since animists, polytheists, and pantheists claim many spirits or gods interacting with nature in different ways, chaos and randomness would be more likely than uniformity and order.  Accordingly, Melvin Calvin identified the biblical concept of God as “the historical foundation for modern science.”

Isaac Newton viewed the order in creation as evidence of divine action.  For example, he argued that the uncanny match between the optical properties of light and the structure of the mammalian eye suggested design.  Newton also noted that the stability of the planetary orbits depended not only on the regularity of gravitational forces, but also upon the precise initial positioning of planets and comets with respect to the sun.

Extrapolating, consider the observed universe of stars, roughly 100 billion stars in each of a trillion galaxies . . . at least.  For galaxies to be stable and beautifully ordered, each star must have a suitable initial position and velocity.  Note that aerospace engineers don’t just fling artificial satellites up and hope for the best.  Those communications and GPS satellites must be carefully launched and positioned with precise velocity vectors, or else they will either fall back to Earth or escape completely.

Now, Meyer buys into Big Bang mythology completely, but hopes that people will believe that ‘God did that.’  He cites the famous conclusion to the book, God and the Astronomers, by astrophysicist Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Goddard Space Center, who wrote, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.  He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about the conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

I’ve written much else on this site regarding the Big Bang, so I’ll be concise here.  See also my two astronomy tracts at ThinkTracts.com for a brief summary of key issues.   The Big Bang idea derives from ‘winding the clock back’ from the currently observed expansion of the universe . . . which the Bible (perhaps) refers to at least 17 times as God ‘stretching out’ the heavens.  There simply must have been a beginning, which greatly tormented many atheistic scientists of the 20^th century who despised any fact that necessitated a Creator.  But the Big Bang is not biblical!  (See Genesis chapter 1.)  And ‘scientifically’ the Big Bang and naturalistic cosmology explain nothing, not the formation of galaxies and stars and planets, not dark energy nor dark matter, and not those beautiful orbits that we see in our telescopes everywhere.

As I draft this in August 2022, the preliminary results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have shocked the cosmological establishment.  The JWST is designed to see deeper into the infrared than other telescopes in order to find those ‘proto-galaxies’ that supposedly were forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.  But what they’re finding is what creationists (including me) have predicted they would find . . . fully formed galaxies at the greatest distances.  Big Bang doctrine is dogmatic against fully formed galaxies at the greatest observed distances!  Furthermore, the spectra displays elements (other than hydrogen and helium) that shouldn’t have been in the first generation of stars.  And yet the ID camp remains in lockstep with the atheists in embrace of the Big Bang.

Let’s move on.  Meyer reviews the history and variations of thought within the Big Bang community, and that’s all interesting.  The next key area to review, however, is fine tuning, “the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life . . . to exist.”  The term “anthropic fine tuning”  is also used to emphasize that we wouldn’t be here to marvel at these ‘coincidences’ if they hadn’t worked out just right.  Atheistic scientists sometimes call it “the fine-tuning problem.”

In our “Goldilocks universe” the forces of physics have just the right strengths, the particles have just the right mass, and the initial distribution of matter and energy was organized just right.  Stellar and planetary orbits, for example, although Big Bangers like Meyer believe that the initial sub-microscopic ball of mass and energy that expanded into our universe had to be arranged ‘just right.’

One very particular example of fine-tuning is found in the wonderful properties and abundance of carbon, without which life as we know it would be impossible.  Complex organic chemistry with its infinite variety of long, chain-like molecules enables storing and processing genetic information and the execution of all other cellular processes.  No other element comes close as a potential substitute for carbon.  Carbon’s properties depend critically on its mass, the stability of its nucleus, the strength of the forces of physics at the atomic level, and its abundance in the earth’s crust.

Physicist Paul Davies on fine-tuning:  “The impression of design is overwhelming.”  Astrophysicist Luke Barnes:  “Fine tuning suggests that, at the deepest level that physics has reached, the Universe is well put-together . . . The whole system seems well thought out, something that someone planned and created.”

The biblical creationist loves the fine-tuning arguments, but not exactly the same package.  God created the universe fully-functioning, according to His brief outline in Genesis chapter 1.  He did not create it via a fantastical fine-tuning of the mass/energy in a Big Bang singularity.  Roger Penrose calculated the odds against our well-balanced universe of solar systems and galaxies, whereas the by-far-most-likely result from a Big Bang would have been just one giant ball of mass which would collapse into one giant black hole, or at best a number of big black holes.  The odds he calculated are 1 in 10 raised to the 10¹²³ power.  Yes, the exponent is 10 raised to the power of 123.  The number is inconceivable.  There are “only” about 10⁸⁰ particles in the entire universe.

The secularists call this a fine-tuning problem.  No, I call it ridiculous . . . the Big Bang is a ridiculously bad theory.  No, God created the planets, stars, and galaxies in a functioning initial state.

Meyer devotes a large section of his book to intelligent design issues in biology.  He’s solid on all this, but I’ve written much on this site, including essays on his two previous books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt.  For a brief look at the issues, see my tracts on DNA, Genetic Entropy, and the Fossil Record.

Meyer appropriately comments that late 19^th century scientists assumed that the universe’s fundamental entitities are matter and energy.  What has been discovered since then is that information is foundational to life, particularly the genetic code and all the brilliantly designed nanomachines that enable you and me and the hundred billion cells in our bodies to operate successfully 24-7-365.

Of course, information comes only from a mind, with purpose and intent.

As an ID but anti-creationist, Meyer tells a story of “information explosions” throughout history that produced today’s panoply of life.  But of course those “information explosions” all occurred within the week described in Genesis 1.  So we’ll move on again.

Regarding the question of what caused the Big Bang, naturalists / atheists have suggested such ideas as eternal, chaotic inflation, supposing that our universe arose out of an already eternally existing multiverse or, somehow, an eternally preexistent set of conditions that allowed for a Big Bang beginning to ours.  There are no evidences, of course, for a multiverse and there are foundational philosophical reasons to deny an infinitely eternal past, as elucidated by Christian philosophers J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig.

The eternal past impossibility is defeated by biblical doctrine – God as described in the Bible is beyond space and time, since He created all that, and as a free agent with free will could “initiate a new chain of cause and effect without being compelled by any prior material conditions.”  Therefore, there is no “infinite regress of prior material states.”

A God with free will makes sense to most people, who live as if by their own free will.  If you deny you have free will, as any serious materialist must, then to whom am I talking?  Is it just brain chemistry making noise?  Is there a you in there?  Reason and rationality require free will.  Meyer also notes that in pantheism, god is part of the universe and so cannot have caused it.

Meyer critiques some assertions of naturalists, for example that everything we see simply derives, necessarily, from the laws of physics.  But that cannot be true.  The values of the physical constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, charge of the electron, Planck’s constant) could have different values under the same set of laws (Maxwellian or quantum electrodynamics, Einsteinian gravity).  Additionally, the initial conditions (number of stars and their orbits) are completely independent of the physical laws, as any freshman physics student comes to understand.

Meyer also critiques theistic evolution, espoused by those who believe that evolution is true, but somehow in an undetectable way, God used evolution to generate life and guide it to the present day.  This position is trivially refuted by a Bible-believing Christian, and is scientifically refuted by checking that mutations and natural selection are woefully inadequate for the generation of even miniscule amounts of the information content of life.  (See my DNA tract and several of my essays in this area.)

Some suggest a “front-loaded” version of theistic evolution which posits that the Big Bang’s initial conditions were so finely tuned that not only do we get all the stars and their orbits just right, but also the apparently random molecular conditions that resulted in the first cell and all of life after that.  Wow!  What faith might that entail!  No, the 2^nd law of thermodynamics and all of its implications (plus quantum indeterminacy) have been with us from the beginning and are evident in both laboratories and in life’s experiences.  To suggest a secret thread of molecular lottery winnings that are undetectable – in principle! – begs the question of why don’t you just believe that God did it the way He said He did?

Specifically, Meyer explains:  “The second law of thermodynamics implies that any biologically relevant information-rich configurations of mass and energy present at the beginning of the universe would dissipate over time.”  He also mentions that Claude Shannon’s tenth theorem indicates that only an external source of information or control could prevent that tendency . . . so God would have to be involved all along, once again.

Meyer points out the obvious truth that there is no materialistic explanation to  close the causal gap between a preexisting nothing and the existence of the universe.  Physicists Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have suggested that the laws of physics can explain how everything came to be, but this is false on its face.  The laws of physics are descriptive of what is observed in an already existing universe.  These descriptors have no power to create or cause existence.

Hawking:  “The universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.”  Go ahead, Stephen, explain that . . . or are you just blustering for a popular readership?  Hawking’s dereliction in reasoning was motivated by his depressing atheism:  “I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking . . . When we die, we return to dust.”

Additionally, the laws of physics are woefully incomplete, requiring enormous extrinsic information about initial and boundary conditions, amounts and kinds of matter, etc.  Furthermore, the initial or current conditions (orbits) are finely tuned with respect to the laws of physics.  The whole system is finely tuned without any part of the system ‘causing’ any other part of the system.

Atheists threaten us that a belief in God stops the advance of science.  Historian Stephen Snobelen reports that Newton’s belief in God and God’s interaction with His creation informed rather than hindered Newton’s work.  Newton saw God as (1) the source and sustainer of the universe’s mathematical order, and (2) the intelligent designer of the solar system.  These ideas inspired Newton’s science.  Newton’s treatise, Principia, was intended to bring glory to God and His genius.  Sir Isaac Newton was arguably the greatest scientist in man’s history.

When Meyer began his teaching career he created a course called “Reasons for Faith,” in response to challenges from a frustrated agnostic student who couldn’t get satisfactory answers from his Christian classmates.  The student was shocked to hear that Meyer thought that such evidences exist.  Meyer cites a poll that two-thirds of atheists believe “the findings of science make the existence of God less probable.”  The evolution scam is the core underlying reason for such unbelief.  That’s why I have created so many Gospel tracts that target the evolution scam.

As a junior in college Meyer ran into a thought from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre:  “No finite point has any meaning unless it has an infinite reference point.”  Without God there is no meaning in human life – our mortality means that anything we achieve will be forgotten.  But with God as He reveals Himself in the Bible, there is an eternal and self-existent Creator, the “I AM,” who is both holy and loving and provides THE way for an eternal relationship with Him.  Everything we do then matters.

Lawrence Krauss seems to have an idea that we can fake meaning . . . “We make our own purpose.  We make our own joy.  We are here by a cosmic accident, as I’ve tried to show, but it’s a remarkable accident that’s allowed you and I to be here to talk, to think and appreciate the beauty and splendor of the universe.”

Sartre would have considered this inauthentic.  He faced up to the consequences of the alleged “cosmic accident” and professed that without a transcendent God people are left in a state of “anguish, forlornness, and despair.”

However . . . when we authentically recognize that we are made in God’s image, but our sins have condemned us, condemned us even in our own God-given conscience, and we see that we need forgiveness, it is supremely rational to repent, trust Christ for salvation, and live a life in touch with reality, mindful of eternity.

Meyer concludes his book, encouragingly, “But since meaning can only be recognized and conferred by persons, and is arguably found best in relationship between persons, the return of the God hypothesis also revives a hopeful possibility – that our search for ultimate meaning need not end in vain.”

Where Meyer falls disastrously short, though, is his neglect of an affirmation and exhortation that meaning is found only through salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.  It’s not enough to be a theist – even Satan is a theist.  You must be born again, via repentance and faith.  How tragic for Meyer and any of his readers if they stop short of salvation, and spend an eternity of regret in the Lake of Fire.  How tragic to suffer, possibly, ridicule from demons likewise condemned, who knew of God, but never knew God, never willing to humble themselves and enjoy the richness of both this creation and the renewed creation of the ages to come.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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180. Money, Greed, and God
March 1, 2023

The heart of free enterprise is that we are individually made in the image of God.  “Our creative freedom reflects that divine image,” writes Jay W. Richards in his 2019 edition of Money, Greed, and God:  The Christian Case for Free Enterprise.  Market economies feature competition, private property, and rational self-interest.  But the heart  of free enterprise is our God-given capacity to create wealth, to defy zero-sum thinking whereby someone wins only if someone else loses.  Poverty can only be overcome by the creation of wealth.

So what is the source of material wealth?  Richards argues that the source is spiritual.  Free societies produce inventors, producers, problem solvers, and creators who use their imaginations to transform material resources into new and useful products and services.  “Man, not matter, is the ultimate resource.”  The more people in the free society, the more creators, the more the economy grows.  Labor-saving devices are invented to increase individual productivity, which was described by philosopher Luis de Molina as “the fruit of our ingenuity.”

It was more difficult for me than usual to pull out a few choice nuggets from Richards’ book because there are just so many!  But let’s try.  Do pick up this book and have your children read it, too, before they finish high school.

“Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.”  — American novelist John Dos Passos

Karl Marx had predicted that contradictions in capitalism would produce a workers’ revolt, but that this would be a necessary step in social evolution.  Then private property would be abolished and a just socialist state would be created, on the way to a communist utopia in which the state would “wither away” and we all would live in prosperity, peace, and freedom.

Reality clashed with Marx’s 19^th century prophecies, even during his lifetime when workers’ wages were rising.  When the socialist / communist revolution finally did succeed in Russia in 1917, it was led by power-lusting intellectuals in an agrarian culture that had no association with either democracy or capitalism.

Harvard historian Richard Pipes:  “Communism did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising; it was imposed on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans.”

I see striking parallels in America and the rest of the West today.  Today’s political and corporate elites work hard to impose a socialist tyranny on the middle class whose hundreds of millions of people simply want to be left alone to live their lives in freedom.  The socialists of today work to emulate Lenin who set up a one-party state that “filled every nook and cranny of Russian society.”  He politicized everything.  Sound familiar?

Lenin centralized most of the Russian economy, “from industry and trade to education and transportation.  This required secret police, a massive bureaucracy, and the widespread use of terror.”

Productivity tanked.  Industrial production in 1920 was 18% of the level in 1913, there were half as many workers employed, and living standards fell to one-third of their pre-war level.  I won’t go on regarding the economic disasters, slaughters, and famines of the Stalin period, but if you’re not familiar with that history, you should shore up your education.  Richards’ overall conclusion in this historical section is that, against Marx’s expectations, revolutions do not spring up in advanced industrial societies with a strong rule of law, but rather are enabled in poor agrarian cultures where despots can flourish.

A group of scholars led by Stephane Courtois documented the communist death toll in a tome called The Black Book of Communism, published in 1999.  As many as 100 million human beings died due to communist policies and atrocities during the 20^th century.  Richards:  “Never has an idea had such catastrophic consequences . . . Extreme moral passion minus reality equals mass death.”  Beware of such political leaders.

Thomas Sowell:  “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Richards mentions the experience of the early church in Jerusalem in Acts chapter 4, which is sometimes described as a communist experiment.  It was no such thing, of course.  The sharing was entirely voluntary and the state was nowhere in sight.  (Other than in persecuting the new Christians who then responded with charitable sharing in order to survive.)

When Ananias gets judged in Acts 5 it is clear that his sin was lying.   His property and its proceeds were his to keep or to give, in part or in whole.  But he lied and the Holy Spirit needed an example to insure that His church started out on the right track.  Furthermore, this early church experience was not normative for future church life.  The circumstances (persecution) were special.

Ronald Reagan:  “Socialism only works in heaven, where they don’t need it, and in hell where they already have it.”

Mao was the worst of the worst socialists in history.  See my essays on both Mao and Stalin.  Richards suggests Mao’s communist dystopia “tried to draw heaven down to earth.  They brought up hell instead.”  In socialism, he points out, it’s not that no one controls the property.  Rather, it means the state must confiscate or control whatever property is held privately.  This is what the Great Reset is about in today’s world, illustrated by the efforts to squash the Canadian truckers and the Dutch farmers, and the generations-long American leftist efforts to monopolize education under the state, making war against Christian, private, and home schools.

Richards describes the Nirvana Myth promoted by Marxists:  “It’s the delusion that we can build utopia if we try hard enough, and that every real society is intolerably wicked because it doesn’t measure up to our ideal.”  And in the Marxist version, thou shalt never mention God, sin, Jesus, or an afterlife.  Everything is here and now and politics is the only religion.

And then there’s “The Piety Myth” which involves “focusing on our good intentions rather than on the real consequences of our actions.”  Richards applies this to foreign aid, citing Bob Geldof:  “Something must be done, even if it doesn’t work.”  (This anti-principle has broad applications, of course, from gun control laws to stimulus packages to racial hiring and school admission quotas, etc., etc.)

In the foreign aid application, rich countries give all kinds of things to poor countries.  For example, the US overproduces cotton because of subsidies that inflate the price.  We have to dump the excess cotton somewhere, so we dump it on poor countries as “aid,” but that drives cotton farmers in those countries out of business.

Considerable “aid” goes to prop up dictators who waste the money on projects that maximize their power.  In one case refugees who had to flee from an “aided” dictator were also awarded “aid,” just to be fair.  Analysis has shown no correlation between the “aid” a country receives and its economic growth.

The myth creates havoc inside our country as well.  Peter Drucker once stated that by the 1960s “it had become accepted doctrine in all Western countries that government is the appropriate agent for all social problems and all social tasks.”  Well, of course.  Once you deny God’s existence and the way He wired reality, government fills the moral vacuum.

George Gilder wrote in Wealth and Poverty, “It is extremely difficult to transfer value to people in a way that actually helps them.  Excessive welfare hurts its recipients, demoralizing them or reducing them to an addictive dependency that can ruin their lives.” Taking the property or money from one group to prop up another is a lose-lose game.  You coerce one and degrade the other.  Urban America has been a disaster since the 1960s, when the welfare state began to destroy black communities.

In the Old Testament, God instructed the Jews to leave the leftover “gleanings” in the field at the end of the harvest to allow the poor or the sojourners to gather what they needed.  Such charity is practical, gracious, and limited.  You cannot grow widespread wealth in this manner.  To grow wealth across a society you need property rights, the rule of law, trade, enterprise and personal virtues like diligence, thrift, and ingenuity.  The culture must foster trust, delayed gratification, and a hopeful vision of the future.

Most of these factors are moral and derive from biblical principles.  The legal issues are for government to get out of the way and let people build their own businesses and their own lives.

Richards cautions Christian ministries to treat people in impoverished lands as “fully spiritual beings rather than mere mouths to feed.”  Instilling Christian values will transform the culture and reduce poverty far better than cool celebrity-led campaigns.

It should also be obvious to Christians in ministry that when people are truly converted, the indwelling Holy Spirit will provide wisdom, courage, and strength and the new believer can get prayers answered!

The Zero-Sum Game Myth . . . believing that trade requires a winner and a loser.

Richards does some short case studies to illustrate that free markets create new and bigger “pies.”  (Life is not just about political fights that divvy up a constant pie.)

In 1958 Leonard Read wrote an essay, “I, Pencil.”  A pencil is not as simple as it might seem.  Read explained (speaking as a pencil), “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”  What goes into a pencil includes cedar trees in California, with saws and trucks and ropes and other equipment built all over the country.  There are trains to transport the wood, electricity from a dam to power the manufacturing plant, graphite from Sri Lanka, clay from Mississippi, other chemicals from who knows where, wax from Mexico, brass from copper mines to hold the eraser, factice from Indonesia and pumice from Italy to make the eraser.  Nobody on earth has all the skills and knowledge to go out and make a pencil from scratch.

The iPhone is the quintessential modern example.  I won’t go through the analogous description of its complexity and parts, not to mention the internet which facilitates a smartphone’s function, and the associated computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, satellites, etc., etc.  Millions of people are involved in the creation and production of smartphones.

Smartphones wouldn’t exist without free markets.  “We hear a lot about the brutish, competitive nature of capitalism, about the one percent and ninety-nine percent, winners and losers, survival of the fittest, and all that.  Some of us may even have downloaded a podcast on the subject right onto our iPhones.  We hear far too little about the miracles of free cooperation and interdependence that free markets have made possible . . . We should take no critic seriously who does not first recognize this virtue.”

Richards argues that the best way to get ahead for everyone is not by theft, fraud, and slavery, but by working to meet the needs and wants of customers.  “And everyone is a customer.  The logic of competition . . . is about serving customers better than your competitors.”  No other scheme comes close in producing wealth and well-being for multitudes of people.

The Materialist Myth . . . believing that wealth isn’t created, it’s simply transferred.

Winston Churchill:  “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”  Indeed, socialist cures are worse than the disease.  America’s tyrannical responses to COVID, for example, produced far more misery and death than did the virus.

A nation’s wealth is not a physical object to be divided up, Richards notes.  Wealth can and does grow, if simple conditions are met.  Compare what people have today with 100 or even 200 years ago.  In 2011 a study was done concerning what 30 million “poor” Americans (poor as classified by the U.S. Census Bureau) possessed:

• A car, air conditioning, two color TVs, cable or satellite TV access, and a DVD player.
• They were not hungry and had access to medical care when needed.
• They had more living space in their homes than the average (non-poor) European.

Compared with America’s upper class, they might be considered poor . . . relatively speaking.  But really poor people suffer around the world today, living on a few dollars per day, many going hungry.  About 11 million children die before they are five years old.  The reasons include tyranny, tribal conflicts, corruption, no property rights, and no hope to change any of the above.

Most of the complaining about the economy in America derives from envy about the really wealthy in their country.

In America opportunities abound to increase personal or family wealth.  Most people change their income class dramatically as they age.  One legal factor mentioned before is property rights, that enable you to establish a home or a business.  These rights are purely conceptual, represented by a title that establishes in the minds of others that you have exclusive rights over an asset.  This gives you the freedom to invest and build without fear of arbitrary confiscation.  “In general, the more a country protects private property, the more prosperous the citizens of that country will be.”  Property taxes work against this principle.  If the taxes grow too onerous to pay, the government will foreclose, effectively making the government your landlord.  With property taxes, no one really owns their own property.

How fast can markets create wealth?  Consider the inventions, innovations, and development around telephones, lightbulbs, jet aircraft, rockets, computers, MRIs, and antibiotics over the last century.  The growth is exponential.

The Greed Myth . . . believing that the essence of free enterprise is greed.

Free markets derive from the Golden Rule, Matthew 7:12.  Our decisions must include care for others, but we are most responsible for our own family, our own neighbors, and our own community.  We’re not omniscient and so cannot agonize over everything, from a kitten thirsty for milk in Mumbai to an old lady needing help to cross the street in Buenos Aires.  So we cannot predict the consequences of all our actions everywhere.  The complexity of free markets might invoke the butterfly effect as much as weather forecasting does.

Accordingly, we necessarily pursue “self-interests” due to limited knowledge.  The success of free markets involves multitudes making rational and fair choices about value and prices.  The ‘analog computer’ consisting of networks of billions of consumers and producers works best at generating wealth for the multitudes when most people do what seems right and just to them personally.

Richards:  “Any system that requires everyone always to act selflessly is doomed to failure because it’s utopian.  People aren’t like that.”  Socialism does not fit the human condition.  It defies reality.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand is illustrated by the idea that even if the butcher is selfish, and that he would love to sell you spoiled meat in exchange for everything you own, he cannot make you buy his meat in a free economy.  In his own self-interest he has to satisfy your desires if he wants to stay in business.  Win-win.

In contrast, when a government controls all health care, it is extremely expensive, you have no choice but to buy it (you pay the taxes), and the resulting monopoly inevitably provides poor service.  Real people suffer and die unnecessarily.  Dictating lockdowns and vaccine mandates have demonstrably caused economic suffering, health disasters, and increased death rates far beyond what would have ensued if people had been allowed to make their own informed choices.

In free markets, entrepreneurs create in competition with other entrepreneurs to see who can best satisfy the needs and wants of real people in the market.  They do it to make money, of course, but they only make money if they are in touch with what people want.  This is simple stuff!  And yet the elite in politics, industry, and academia strive for socialism, as long as they get to be in charge.

Are people selfish in a free market?  Richards cites statistics that free economies correlate with the most charitable giving and that the higher the taxes, the less people give.  I’ve always believed that if welfare programs were zeroed out and taxes were reduced accordingly, that charitable giving would more than make up for whatever safety net is needed.  Furthermore, with more people working because they can and must, tax revenues would increase even as rates decline.  This was demonstrated dramatically in the 1980s in the Reagan presidency, in the 1920s under Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and in the 1960s under JFK.

The Bible has a lot to say about private property and treating our neighbors honestly in business.  The 10 commandments tell us not to lie, steal, or even covet what does not belong to us.  Instructions in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the parables of Jesus speak to the virtues of honest and fair business dealings with others.  If we obey God’s commandments at the micro-scale, person-to-person, it is evident that He has designed human reality to work effectively at the macro-scale.  At the macroscale, governments and nation-to-nation, God also has much to say, of course; for example in 2 Samuel 23:3, “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.”

In summary, free markets built atop a just system of laws that assure private property ownership and punishment of theft and corruption, are the natural outcome of a biblical worldview.  Richards’ book concludes with, “Seen in its proper light, the market order is as awe inspiring as a sunset or a perfect eclipse.  It might not be enough to convince the skeptic that God exists, but surely the believer should see in it God’s glory.  At the very least, it should settle the question we started with:  Can a Christian support free enterprise?  The answer is surely yes.”

This is a book I believe should be in every Christian’s library.  Read it with your children and discuss it in light of the news of the day.  It will help equip the young against the relentless and pervasive leftist indoctrination they will experience when they enter the fray.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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181. How Goes Your Quest?
April 1, 2023

Actor Marlon Brando reached the pinnacle of Hollywood fame and success, but near the end of his life said, “Life is a mystery and an unsolvable one.  You just simply live it through, and as you draw your last breath you say, “What was that all about?’”

How pitiful, yet how reflective of a life without God, without hope, without meaning.  The Brando quote is cited by Os Guinness in his 2022 book, The Great Quest:  Invitation to an Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning.  Guinness calls the reader to this great quest, a search for meaning as the key to make the most of life and find “fulfillment in all you do.”  If you are not consciously on this quest, “you will always to some degree be sleepwalking through your existence.”

The stakes are infinite because each life extends into eternity and eternity’s destination depends, of course, on discovering the essence of reality, God’s reality, and truth in the person of the Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Miss that . . . miss Jesus . . . and you’ve missed everything.  There is no greater tragedy.  “The quest is existential because you are staking your very existence on the outcome of what you discover.”

Some try to avoid the quest, but “man cannot live on cynicism alone,” Guinness observes.  I’ve run into some who pretend to, especially among college students.  They love to criticize, to mock, to take shots at the Christian worldview, for example.  They act as if they do not embrace a worldview of their own, that must be defended rationally if they would claim the intellectual high ground.  Typically materialists, they fail to realize that rationality itself is excluded by materialism – if matter is everything then the next thing they say is derived from random brain chemistry.

Some are cocky, living as if they were “godless self-gods” who think they’ve got it all figured out.  After our global pandemic, though, who can really believe we control our own destiny?  I’ve met some of these, too.  I ask them if they can, with their godlike powers, forego sleep and bowel movements for the next week.

Many just don’t think much at all about ultimate questions.  Most unbelievers, when I ask them if they ever think about what will become of them when they die, they reply, “All the time.”  What they mean is that thoughts of their mortality intrude on them frequently, but they refuse to dwell on it, which is so easy to do in this generation which holds the internet literally in the palm of its hand.

Life is filled with duties and chores and relationships, and whenever a moment of free time invades our consciousness, an entire world of news, entertainment, and endless distraction is a click away.  Who wants to think deep thoughts, troubling thoughts?  Blaise Pascal, the 17^th century mathematician, concluded that most prefer not to think about death and so surround themselves with distractions.  Guinness suggests that we moderns are not just surrounded by diversions; rather, “we are mesmerized by them, and we rarely lift our minds to think beyond them.”

Guinness notes that “we lose the curiosity we had as children.”  Life is astonishing, from dewdrops, dandelions, and dogs, to the sun, moon, stars, and galaxies.  So how did everything get here?  Why am I here?  To whom am I responsible?  What’s right, what’s wrong, and how do I judge the difference?  And then what?  What happens when my life is snuffed out?

There’s a legend that a London cabbie asked the famous mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell what he thought was the meaning of life.  Russell was flummoxed.  He griped, “Only precise questions deserve precise answers.”  Finally, the best he had to offer was, “The universe is just there, and that’s all.”  Pitiful.  It’s just giving up.  He should have resigned his claim to be a philosopher, which implies a love of truth, a desire to understand.  Socrates’ challenge still stands:  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”  — Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung

“The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more biological needs.”  — Anthropologist Clifford Geertz

This has certainly been true for me.  As a young atheist I yearned for meaning, desperately, and this opened me up to the Gospel.  (You can find my testimony on this site if you want the gory details.)  Guinness is amazed that so many people are careless about pursuing and finding answers to the ultimate questions.  I am, too.  I don’t identify at all with the careless metaphysical drifter, no matter how well educated, successful, and driven in worldly ways.  Faced with the existential crisis of how to live day by day and how to face death and eternity, how is it possible to not care enough to find answers!?!

Some engage in bargaining.  We’ll deal with the question later, we promise ourselves, after we’ve graduated, or once we get a better job, or when we’ve got more time, or, worst . . . after we’ve retired.  Jesus dealt with this issue, in part, in the parable we find in Luke 12:13-21, which includes the warning, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee:  then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?”

Guinness contrasts two modes of thinking that have shaped the West – the Greek and the Jewish.  The Greeks tended to think that reason alone can be employed to investigate both the natural and supernatural realms.  The Jews believed that truth about God and His creation must be found through narratives and experience.  Both Jews and Christians saw God as personal and known through relationship.  Knowing about God and knowing God are very different things.  Both aspects are possible only if and as God reveals Himself to us.  Thus, we have the Bible and the born again experience, followed by living life led by the Spirit of God, insofar as we allow Him to lead us.

Now, Guinness is a Christian and so his thesis is that the only quest in touch with reality is the one that leads to knowing Jesus as Lord and Saviour.  The Gospel is both motivation and solution in that, realizing we are sinners, we seek the one and only Saviour, who shed His blood on a cruel cross and raised Himself from the dead . . . a demonstration and a promise that we can share.  We need forgiveness and we crave life, eternal life, and only Jesus has the technology to give us bodies that live in good health forever – resurrection bodies.

Guinness contrasts conceptual truths where you can “take it or leave it,” with existential truths on which you stake your life and your eternity.  There are useful and useless methods to find truth.  Bertrand Russell claimed that “what science cannot discover, man cannot know.”  This is scientism, and is both preposterous and self-refuting.  1^st, self refuting:  You cannot use the scientific method, for example (observing, counting, weighing, measuring, hypothesizing, testing), to prove that “what science cannot discover, man cannot know.”

2^nd, preposterous:  Try to prove your love for your wife with math, logic, and scientific instruments.  Faith, meaning, purpose, hope, love, integrity and all that is important to human life cannot be verified in test tubes or reduced to mathematical formulae.

Guinness encourages us that to embark on the examined life, we cannot outsource the work and we cannot make a lackadaisical effort.  We must do the work and the thinking and the emotional struggling.  When I was confronted with the Gospel as a teenager, it took me a few months to figure out that it was true.  Once I realized that Jesus is who He said He was, it took me less than a minute to decide to act on that truth.

The author challenges us to use our reason, to be aware of our conscience, and to engage a living sense of wonder.  No matter what is true about creation, human life, and our individual life and destiny, what is true will certainly be amazing.  If we decide materialism is true and we derive from stardust, that would be amazing.  If we realize we are made in the image of God and that God loves us and offers us redemption and eternal life, that is amazing.  There is no neutral, mundane worldview that grapples with the wonder of what we see and experience.

He cautions the young who are immersed in social media.  Do not be content with the opinions of others.  Don’t go with the flow.  Don’t do a quick internet search . . . unless you find a truly insightful website, like truthreallymatters.com.

Phase 1 of the search that Os outlines is a time for questions.  Questions are vital for the quest.  Few people, he claims, keep asking questions.  I’ve experienced this in that over the many years I have engaged in 1-2-1 evangelism, oh-so-rarely do I encounter a new question.  Most of the time people don’t have any questions that are forefront in their minds.  No questions means they are content to drift along as they are.  A good question, however, presents a challenge that cannot be ducked.  When I was searching, I had to find answers.  And answers were there to be found.  God makes sure of that.

To settle on a particular answer, you must be convinced it is objectively true, not just true for you, but true whether anyone else believes it or not.  We live in a skeptical age, but also a “spiritually and intellectually stunted” age, cut off from not only the rich conversations and debates of previous generations, but also from a healthy culture that encourages or even allows open debates.  Question the orthodoxy of the woke meme of the day at your own peril!

How is it other than insane that the latest outrageous woke assertion cannot even be questioned?  Can’t I even ask someone to explain an idea that overturns thousands of years of wisdom and experience?

Immanuel Kant suggested four big questions:  “What can we know?”  “What must we do?”  “What can we hope for?”  “What is man?”  French artist Paul Gauguin summed it up in three:  “Where do we come from?”  “What are we?”  “Where are we going?”

Everyone has some answers to these questions, ergo, everyone has a faith, a personal philosophy, a worldview.  I discovered this by experience when I started knocking doors for my Sunday School bus route in the 1970s.  From the most to the least educated, from the richest to the poorest, everyone had figured out, they thought, what it was all about, whether they spent anytime thinking about it or not.  They bet their lives and eternities on faith, some faith, whether they had any good reasons or not.  On such faiths, blind or sighted, people decide on identities and morality, and whether they have any hope for the future.

Os tells the story of Charles Handy, an eminent British management guru, who was astonished as he attended his father’s funeral.  His apparently mundane, modest father had touched the lives of hundreds in profound ways.  “I had put my faith until that moment, in success, money, and family, probably in that order.  I still think these things are important, but I hanker after a bigger frame in which to put them.”  He suddenly saw the difference, as David Brooks puts it, between the “resume self” and the “eulogy self.”

The crucial years, Os states, are from eighteen to twenty-five, the Big Seven, in which people think through their biggest decisions – who they are, which career, who to marry, which worldview.  Accordingly, I find the most interesting and rewarding 121s are on or near college campuses.  Just walk up to a college student, offer him a tract, and ask him if he has figured out what the purpose of life is.  Generally, he’ll talk to you.  But a few years later he might well brush you off after his heart and mind have ossified on some false worldly philosophy.

Some people have signals that puncture their complacency or awareness.  Fyodor Dostoevsky was ecstatic after a last-minute reprieve from execution.  He reexamined his life, all the wasted time, laziness, errors, etc., and set out on a new path.  For Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti it was the death of a friend, “a hole torn in life.”  For me it was a divine encounter with a Christian when I was at the absolute nadir of my atheistic lifepath.  Even without a dramatic signal, though, everyone’s life has elements of transcendence, if they are open to them.

I had a moment about fifteen years ago that gave me a glimpse of Heaven.  Families had gathered at our house at Christmastime.  I was sitting on the living room floor with our daughter, Elizabeth, and our infant grandson Eli and . . . the moment was perfect.  Everything was just right, just as it ought to be, a glimpse of justrightness that I’m sure we’ll experience in the ages to come.

The second phase is a time for answers.  There are countless answers, but only one will be “illuminating and truly adequate.”  Now, this book by Os Guinness is not an apologetic discourse on why the Christian faith is the unique and soul-saving answer.  He admits that.  I’ve written much and reviewed many books on this site that serve that purpose.  What Os is attempting is to stir up the desire for the quest in the heart of the reader.  He (and I) are confident that God has wired every one of His image-bearers to recognize the truth if they sincerely seek it.

C.S. Lewis offers the heart of presuppositional apologetics when he writes, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” What I do not like about evidential apologetics is that is focuses on detailed evidences, and entrusts the rebel (unbeliever) to sit in the Judge’s seat to decide whether the evidence is good enough.  Alternatively, presuppositional apologetics starts with the presupposition that the Bible is true, and suggests that now you can see / understand everything important about life and creation.  You can then toss in those detailed evidences.  They will fit nicely.  But you’re confronted with the entire life-changing Gospel-centered worldview.

 “For with thee is the fountain of life:  in thy light shall we see light.”  Psalm 36:9

Using this approach we can evaluate other religions, too.  In Hinduism the universe is grounded in Atman, unchanging and impersonal.  There is no supreme worth for individuals, resulting in a Dalit or “untouchable,” for example.  Pantheism and monism exclude individual worth and dignity.  Our apparent individuality is illusion.  You aspire for “‘release’” – freedom from individuality, not freedom to be an individual.”  Does your conscience resonate with this?

Similarly, atheism is adamant against the transcendent and everything else beyond the senses and the narrowly drawn scientific method – counting, weighing, measuring.  Are you content to see your identity as merely a clump of molecules in motion?  Do you deny your own personhood?  Is morality just some odd brain chemistry?  Is murder just molecules in collision or is it wrong? How about rape or torturing babies for fun?  Do you actually live with no conscience?

Apparently, Charles Darwin, late in life, admitted that he was less able to appreciate the music of Handel’s Messiah that he had once loved.

Guinness observes that the Christian view of the world gave rise to modern science.  The Hindu did not and could not.

What about other societal impacts?  Human rights and dignity do not derive from either Eastern religions or atheism / secularism.  The huge and shocking (for the better) societal changes due to the entry of Jesus into history are well documented in a book I plan to review a few months from now, The Air We Breathe:  How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, by Glen Scrivener.  What we take for granted in “Western values,” including individual rights, compassion, freedom, science, and progress was determinedly not characteristic of ancient cultures.

Phase three is a time for evidences.  Truth, real truth whether it feels good or not,  is despised in our postmodern culture . . . so get over it.  Truth really matters!

When someone says, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” take them at their word and don’t believe them.  Guinness:  “Truth is all about solid facts and reality.”  The opposites of truth include lies, deceptions, delusions, mistrust, fake news, misinformation, and suspicion.  The world is filled with attacks on truth.  Your life depends on persevering against the “father of lies,” as Jesus described Satan.

“The Christian faith claims to be true in the sense that it fully aligns with reality.  It is true in the sense that, if it is true, it would still be true even if no one believed it; and if it is false, it would still be false even if everyone believed it.”  All questions are open.  When Nathanael scoffed to Philip whether or not Jesus was worth checking out, Philip replied, “Come and see.”

Biblical Christianity is tied to reality.  Real reality simply cannot go out of fashion.  Reality and trust in reality are essential for countless human endeavors such as business, science, journalism, politics, and personal relationships.  Christianity is tied to history and to human experience.  It welcomes examination.  Christians themselves may, and are, found wanting quite often, but the Bible is clear that that will be the case, too.

The big questions on which to examine the veracity of biblical truth include what we see in creation, the nanotechnology of living creatures, flood geology, fulfilled prophecy, the behavior of man (sin / virtue / morality), the logic and experiences of redemption and the new birth, and the resonance of hope in the human soul.  A Christian life philosophy welds together realism and hope, optimism and pessimism.

C.S. Lewis at first tried to read the Gospel accounts as a literary critic and was shaken to his core. “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” he asked, including how to reconcile two aspects of His life – the “depth and sanity of His moral teaching” and “the quite appalling nature of this man’s theological remarks.”

In short, no great moral teacher ever claimed to be God and that was what Jesus claimed repeatedly, even to the point of crucifixion.

Lewis:  “Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great moral teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

The fourth and final phase of the quest is “a time for commitment.”  This is a step of faith, not a leap of faith, a step fully rational and grounded on the conviction that what we see in the Bible is true.  It is a warranted belief.  If true, you must respond, all in or all out.  This is a matter of heart, will, and mind.  It’s personal.

In deciding for Christ, you necessarily repent from all other worldviews, which are demonstrably irrational, in accord with the type of examples mentioned before.

Your warranted belief naturally includes conviction, which leads to trust.  Your entire person commits to a Person, the Lord Jesus.  Now, I wish that Os was more complete in his discussion here, because the conviction and trust that produces a born again conversion necessitates a humility and an admission of sins that need forgiveness, which is why the Cross and the Resurrection occurred.  Repentance from your actual personal sins and trust in the Person of Jesus Christ are the elements that complete the quest . . . the new birth into the family of God.

Which starts a new quest.  The Christian life extends from this point, “a new creature” (2 Cor 5:17), through eternity.

Jesus had a quest, too, to search for us, pictured in Luke 15 as a shepherd searching for a lost sheep, a woman searching for a lost coin, and a father waiting for a lost son to come home.

Once we come home, once we are born again into God’s family, our new quest is to follow in Jesus’ work – to seek and to save that which was lost.  At this point in my life – I’m 70 now, easily fatigued, and have several health issues – I don’t have much ambition or the capacity to fulfill new ambitions, but it is still clear to me that as long as I can walk and talk I can share the Gospel with lost people, both verbally and by tract.  We hand out about 400 tracts per week, I knock doors with my grandsons, and I find interesting ways to reach out to people I would not normally cross paths with.

I don’t do as much as I used to, but I am very grateful that the Lord still has some service for me to perform.

I highly recommend Os Guinness’ book.  He concludes with some beautiful thoughts:  “. . . for a seeker to find Jesus is not the end of all searching, but the beginning of the greatest quest of all . . . to know God better and better, which is the climax and soul of human existence . . . It never ends, not because of the infinity of options and the impossibility of choosing, but because of the infinity and inexhaustibility of the One in whom we have found our answer.”

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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182. Progressive Christianity: Old-Fashioned Apostasy
May 1, 2023

My wife, Bonnie, who has written much of her own perspectives on this site, was raised in a variety of Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches, as her dad’s army career moved him around the country.  But she wasn’t saved until after we were married, listening and processing the teaching we heard in a conservative, Bible-believing Baptist church.

She had never properly understood that she was a lost sinner, that she personally must humble herself, admit her lost condition, repent from her sins, and trust Christ, depending on Him and Him alone for salvation, as a gift not to be earned.

We would now call those churches progressive, but even then a faithful Bible believer would recognize what they taught as old-fashioned apostasy.  The apostle Paul called out such soul-damning apostasy in his letters, the one to the churches in Galatia, for example.  The  apostle Peter called out false teachers quite explicitly in his second letter, as did Jude in his part in Scripture.  In fact, much of the New Testament consists of warnings against the kind of false teachers who “compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”  (Matthew 23:15)

When I taught engineering in Michigan’s UP, I often ate lunch at a local Taco Bell, and would leave a Chick tract on my seat when I left.  Months after I started doing that I got to know a fellow in another department who mentioned that his wife had just gotten saved.  She had been raised Lutheran.  She had found the tract, brought it home, read it, and became deeply disturbed.  She confessed to her husband that she had never understood the Gospel before and suddenly realized that she was lost.

As I knock doors (in Louisiana now) and share the Gospel with America’s religious lost, I marvel at how the simplicity of the Gospel has been perverted so thoroughly that somehow, lifelong churchgoers believe that their lives are sufficiently righteous to warrant a ticket to Heaven.  Yes, the Devil provokes a fair number in the West to atheism, pantheism, and the occult, but his best strategy is to build his own churches, so-called Christian churches, that teach that the Christian life is about being nice, charitable, tolerant, affirming, and everyone goes to Heaven when they die.

I just read Michael J. Kruger’s 2019 book, The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity, just 55 pages, a wonderful summary of Satan’s doctrinal strategy for western churches.  Kruger cites Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen’s 1923 book in response to the rise of liberalism in the mainline denominations of his day.  He argued that ‘liberal’ Christianity was not just a variant version, but an entirely different religion.  “Put simply, liberal Christianity is not Christianity.”

As Solomon wrote, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done:  and there is no new thing under the sun.”  (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

The names may change – “emerging,” “progressive” – as the newest false prophets pretend that they have discovered . . . after all this time . . . something new, “but it is simply a rehash of the same well-worn system that has been around for generations.”  Indeed, since Satan first challenged the authenticity of God’s words in the garden.

Kruger was inspired to respond to ten principles gleaned from a devotional by Richard Rohr, principles in turn drawn from a book by Philip Gulley, If the Church Were Christian:  Rediscovering the Values of Jesus.  Kruger declares “they are, in effect, a Ten Commandments for progressive Christianity.”  Kruger’s book is then a critique of these principles.  He notes that these apostate principles are partially true, half-truths so to speak.  As Benjamin Franklin quipped, “Half the truth is often a great lie.”

I heartily endorse Kruger’s book.  It should be on your shelf for quick reference.  Let’s briefly summarize some of his points.

1^st commandment:  Jesus is a model for living more than an object for worship.  The priority about Jesus is his moral example.  The implication is a rejection of His deity.  A lot of modern churches won’t explicitly deny the deity of Christ.  But they neglect this truth so consistently that the typical lost churchgoer sees ‘the faith’ as merely a preferred set of moral, social, and political choices.

I won’t belabor the Scriptural support for the deity of Christ.  It’s everywhere.  If you’re unsure about this, read the Gospel of John (in the KJV).  Jesus’ deity shows up pretty quick.

Kruger observes the oddity of progressives highlighting the moral example of Jesus at the expense of His deity.  “If Jesus is just an ordinary man, why would we think his particular moral code is any better than anyone else’s?  Why should we think his moral code matters at all?”  Further, aren’t the progressives the ones who despise people who make absolute moral claims?  Isn’t morality fluid and culturally determined?  “Don’t push your morality on me!”

Kruger cites Matthew 19:5-6 regarding Jesus’ teaching that marriage is one man and one woman, and John 14:6 that He is the only way of salvation.  Are progressives willing to follow  those teachings?

No, the Christian faith isn’t a pick-and-choose behavioral code; rather it’s about eternal life, beginning now, by trusting in the only One who can save us, by grace.  In our trust, then, we should be humble enough to follow what the Creator, the Lord Jesus, says about how to live.  (Ephesians 2:8-10, Titus 3:5-8)

2. Affirming people’s potential is more important than reminding them of their brokenness. The issue of sin is a big divide between progressives and born again Bible believers.  Yes, people have potential.  But the potential to live a life that glorifies God and helps others begins with forgiveness of the sins that condemn us, that separate us from a holy God, and that hurt ourselves and others.

The Cross and the Resurrection conquered sin and death, but we must seek God on His terms to access His grace.  The Holy Spirit indwells the born again member of God’s family and enables him to fulfill the potential that God designs him for.

Kruger notes that Gulley argues that churches are guilty of ‘spiritual abuse’ when they teach that people are sinners.  Gulley grew up “in a tradition that emphasized sin and the need for salvation, hadn’t found it helpful, and had resolved to leave it behind.”  Gulley denies that Adam and Eve were real people and denies the historicity of the Genesis creation account.  He even laments hymns like “Amazing Grace.”

If you’re in a church that resonates with Gulley’s perspective, that denies the truth of 1 Timothy 1:15 – “. . . that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners . . .” – then you are lost, in need of the Savior.

3. The work of reconciliation should be valued over making judgments. We mustn’t judge each other.  We should just be helping each other.  Don’t worry about how people relate to God; it’s all about people helping each other.

Doesn’t Scripture tell us to admonish each other on occasion?  Yes.  See Matthew 18:15, Galatians 6:1, and James 5:19-20, for instances.  Ironically, those that condemn judging are judging, too, declaring ‘judging’ to be bad behavior.  Ironic, also, is that the progressive wokists who dominate our culture are the most dogmatic and judgmental in history.  Also, unforgiving.  There is no mercy or grace in cancel culture.  In the last generation, the Christians have been told not to judge, while all the anti-Christians have moved past the ‘tolerance movement’ to gleefully engage in hair-trigger anger, judging, and public humiliation.

If progressives really want reconciliation, they can have it, but only under Biblical principles, “when wrongs are acknowledged, owned, and repented of.  And in order for that to happen, judgments must be made about people’s behavior.”  Right and wrong aren’t arbitrary, either;  the Bible must be the standard.  Reconciliation necessarily includes forgiveness, restoration, and love . . . ideas foreign to progressives.

4. Gracious behavior is more important than right belief. Really?  This one is too easy.  Just a couple of points . . . Should you just be sweet and understanding and ‘affirming’ as your teenage daughter immerses herself in drugs and immorality?  Or insists she wants surgery to change her sex?  How about your atheist or Muslim neighbor?   Perhaps if you’re simply polite and nice and avoid any controversy, somehow they will miss Hell and wind up in Heaven.

5. Inviting questions is more valuable than supplying answers. The idea is to present yourself as humble and inquisitive.  You’re just a pleasant seeker; it’s the other side who are mean, entrenched know-it-alls.  (Like those Bible-thumping fundamentalists.)

But sometimes “I don’t know” is not the right answer because it is possible to know some things, especially if God has revealed truth to us . . . like . . . in a book called the Bible.  Kruger suggests that it is a false intellectual humility to answer “I don’t know” if a friend asks, “Did Abraham Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation?”

The progressive would agree – of course we know that Lincoln signed that!  But somehow they don’t know that Jesus rose from the dead.  But you don’t know the Resurrection is true only if you do know that the Bible is not the reliable word of God.  Well, how do they know that?

On same-sex marriage, progressives claim to know that it’s right and Bible-believers are wrong to say it’s wrong.  Those progressives are so dogmatic!

Back to basics, though – the stakes of this life are infinite, Heaven vs. Hell.  To survive the Great White Throne Judgment, you’ve got to know some things and act on them, dogmatically and deliberately.  If you know how to be saved, you also know that you need to tell others precisely how they can know that, too.

6. Encouraging the personal search is more important than group uniformity. Gulley’s concern is about ‘free thinkers’ who are disfellowshipped or shunned, kicked out of churches for certain behaviors or beliefs.  “They were just trying to think for themselves!”  The main thing is the spiritual “journey.”

According to progressives, everything is in flux.  But not according to God, who has become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and has revealed His explicit will for us, including how to live this life and how to be saved for eternity.  On the big stuff there are plenty of answers!  Those who reject Biblical answers don’t belong in fellowship, week by week, with believers in prayer meetings, Bible studies, evangelistic outreaches, and other spiritual activities.

I (and other Christians) certainly want to answer the questions that skeptics and seekers have.  That’s what this web site is all about!  But then they’ve got to decide whether they like the answers that the Bible explicitly offers.  If they don’t, that’s all right, but they don’t get to be part of the family.  “A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself.” (Titus 3:10-11)

7. Meeting actual needs is more important than maintaining institutions. You can see the plausibility of such a statement.  But the underlying thesis is to despise the church and its primary mission – the Great Commission.  Progressive churches tend to act like secular charities, at the expense of preaching the Gospel and saving sinners.  So, are you really helping  the homeless when you give him a cheeseburger without sharing the Gospel?  He’s a little more comfortable on the road to Hell and, in fact, he’s a little more inoculated against his need for salvation because the ‘Christians’ who gave him the cheeseburger counted that as the important thing.

8. Peacemaking is more important than power. Well, who could disagree with that?  Gulley is ranting about dysfunctional leadership in churches, and there is plenty of that to go around!  I’ve written much on the subject in the ‘church’ articles in the Discipleship section of this site.

The bigger issue for Gulley is that the churches should promote pacifism and peace among nations.  Ok, good luck with that.  See what the Bible has to say about prophecy, the end times.  What is in the wheelhouse of local churches is to promote peace between individuals, within families, within communities.  But that starts with the Gospel.  Two individuals who have peace with God, their sins forgiven, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and with strong desire to do God’s will, are lined up in the same direction, because they’re both oriented toward God.  That is the basis for peace between those two individuals.  They have the same worldview and the same desire and the same God.

Kruger says it this way:  “Horizontal peace (between man and man) begins first with recognizing our need for vertical peace (between God and man).  And only Jesus can provide such vertical peace with God.”

9. We should care more about love and less about sex. Kruger’s summary on this point is that progressives believe “you can maintain any questionable sexual activity even as you congratulate yourself on your moral superiority.”

Gulley’s arguments for complete sexual ‘freedom’ include examples of nice people who engage in all kinds of sexual sins, but they still have ‘wonderful’ lives.  Example:  “The home they created was one of deep love and mutual respect . . . nothing about any of that felt like sin to me.”  Q.E.D., apparently.

Sin is only sin when committed by unpleasant people.

Another argument from Gulley is that God has bigger things to worry about.  Ok, as long as Gulley knows that, I guess everything goes.

A big point from Kruger is that sin harms people.  Sin is addictive and destructive.  It is loving to confront sin.  See again James 5:19-20.

10. Life in this world is more important than the afterlife. “Let’s not worry ourselves about what happens after death, we are told, because no one really knows anyway.  All that matters is helping the poor, feeding the hungry, and relieving human suffering.”

I’ve asked multitudes in 1-2-1 evangelism if they ever think about life, death, Heaven, Hell, etc. and what do they believe will happen to them if they die today.  Almost everyone confesses that they “think about it all the time.”  But what they mean is that thoughts of eternity intrude, but they quickly push them aside.  The years go by, death inevitably pounces, and then it’s too late.

Progressive churches major in avoiding thoughts of death and judgment.  They are Satan’s principal means of damning westerners to Hell.

Gulley mocks the church’s “preoccupation” and “overemphasis” on the afterlife and how “fortunes are spent saving people from the imaginary dangers of imaginary places.”  Hell isn’t real, so don’t worry about it.

Jesus was a bit preoccupied, though:  “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  (Mark 8:36)

Finally, I’ll offer a specific takeaway . . . You and I cross paths with members of progressive (to some degree) churches every day.  Recognize that you’re dealing with lost people.  They don’t just need the Gospel.  They need to realize that they need the Gospel.  So give it to them.  At least via tract.  And if they hesitate at all, ask them a question, “So where do you think you’ll be one minute after you die?”  If they can’t give you a definite answer and back it up with a definite and Biblical testimony, then tell them what you know.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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183. Scientism is not Science
June 1, 2023

According to the philosophy of scientism, science is the core, the very quintessence of truth and rationality.  The strong form of scientism is that knowledge is valid or something specific is true if and only if it has been tested by an accepted scientific method.  Outside such testing, you cannot know anything.  Weak scientism is not so strict, allowing some other forms of knowledge, but only in a secondary status, certainly not in the class of scientific truth!

Scientism is self-refuting, however.  The claim that science is the only valid basis for knowledge has not been validated by any scientific method.  Furthermore, making the claim necessitates more foundational elements such as consciousness, rationality, and logic.  Scientism is integrally woven with atheistic materialism which posits that all that ever was in the universe was matter, energy, and forces.  Somehow, conscious beings evolved out of this, introducing for the first time thoughts, desires, and rational discourse.  But there is nothing in the particles of matter or in the laws of physics that describe how they interact, that explains consciousness . . . which must include a free will to allow philosophical choices such as, ‘Is scientism right?’.   How can free will and therefore rational thought occur if ‘you’ are simply the sum of your deterministic brain chemistry?

Consciousness simply does not fit in a naturalistic worldview, explains J. P. Moreland in his book Scientism and Secularism:  Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, 2018.  Moreland cites the naturalist philosopher Colin McGinn:  “How can mere matter originate consciousness?  How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness?  Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the after-effects of the Big Bang; so how did it contrive to spring into being from what preceded it?”

Indeed.  In fact he mustn’t gloss over the wonder of ‘biological tissue.’  I’ve expounded much on this web site regarding the physical and mathematical impossibilities attached to any naturalistic scheme for the origin of even the simplest building blocks of biology, protein and DNA molecules, for example.

Let’s pull some nuggets from Moreland’s book.  He emphasizes the importance of the issue, citing research that links the dominance of scientism in education and in the culture as a primary cause for children rejecting the Christian faith over the last few generations.  He makes the case that scientism is not science, rather it undermines science, provoking people to misuse science in support of ideologies or politics.  Evolution, of course, is the most pervasive anti-evidence, anti-logic, and destructive element of public school education in every generation since Darwin, but we’ve seen even more dramatic misuse of so-called scientific claims since the onset of COVID.  (Unfortunately, Moreland published his book before COVID, or he would have had a wealth of recent notable illustrations.)

Moreland relates a wonderful anecdote about a senior engineer challenging him after he had spoken at an evangelistic conference.  This engineer was just finishing up a late-in-life PhD in physics  at Johns Hopkins U.  He started by confessing that when he was young and immature he enjoyed reading philosophy, but he’s outgrown that, since the only possible knowledge of reality is what can be quantified scientifically in a laboratory.

Moreland let the fellow go on for two to three minutes, then responded with apparent surprise:  “Sir, you have made thirty to forty assertions in the last few minutes, and as far as I can tell, not one of them can be quantified, measured, and scientifically tested in the laboratory . . . By your own standards, all you have been doing in our conversation is spouting your private opinions and idle speculation.  Given this, I am wondering why I or anyone else ought to give you the time of day or think a single thing you said is knowably true.”  The fellow turned red and changed the subject.

A generation ago, in 1989, the state of California issued guidance to science teachers on how to deal with students who resisted evolutionary ideas because of their “religious or philosophical beliefs.”  Teachers were offered a script:  “I understand that you may have personal reservations about accepting this scientific evidence, but it is scientific knowledge about which there is no reasonable doubt among scientists in their field, and it is my responsibility to teach it because it is part of our common intellectual heritage.”

The language is loaded with assertions and appeals to authority.  We must not dare to question scientists, who have “no reasonable doubt.”  That should settle it!  I also find it curious that the priests of evolutionary faith love to use the word ‘evidence’, but never cite any, nor do they discuss validity or counter-evidence.  See my free ebook on the subject of evolution in the free ebookstore on this site.

Throughout my lifetime I have been distressed by the lack of apologetics teaching and training in the churches.  Because Christians cannot defend the truth of biblical history, the Gospel has too often been packaged in a form to appeal to an individual’s felt needs and a promise that Jesus can make your life better.  This is a false Gospel.  It produces multitudes of false converts who try out Jesus, but fall away when life gets difficult – See the parable of the seed and the sower, Matthew 13.

The Gospel is the good news that overcomes the reality of the bad news, that you and I are sinners, justly condemned, in desperate need of the one and only Saviour, Jesus Christ, who shed His blood on a cruel cross, raised Himself from the dead, and promises eternal life to those who thoroughly repent from their sins and trust in Him, and follow Him, demonstrating a spiritual new birth that changes everything about one’s life.  This Gospel is grounded in the history of all of creation that starts in Genesis 1:1 and is traced for 4,000 years until the long-promised arrival of the Messiah who, in future prophetically documented history, will come again to establish His kingdom . . . and so on.

The Gospel is so much more than an antidote for sadness, loneliness, etc.  It’s not about finding something to make life ‘work’ better.  The Gospel is rooted in true history and reality.  Such truth is the enemy of all unbelieving philosophies, including scientism . . . which cannot even account for consciousness and rational thought.  (The Christian worldview can so account!  Our consciousness is a necessary quality of personhood, derived from the person of God, who created us as image-bearers, able to think rationally, and morally, and discerningly with respect to what is really true.)

Moreland:  “Given scientism, moral knowledge is impossible.”  At the most basic level, if our actions are strictly the consequences of brain chemistry, there is no right or wrong, there just is what happens.  But if ought exists, then free will exists and it matters how we treat others.  Secularists talk and act as if they have freedom to do whatever they want to do, as if they have free will to choose.  But in their materialism they have already negated morality, and so they justify the most vile sins, even those that work against their own conscience.  Western societies are now entering the end game, suffering the normalization of abortions up to and beyond birth, the normalization of pedophilia, and the outright promotion of so-called “gender transition” surgeries for children.  Homosexual behavior and gay marriage have become old-fashioned, uncontroversial.

Biblical freedom, however, is a freedom to do right by others, in accord with God’s laws, which are rooted in reality.  God conveyed His laws to us for our peace and prosperity, which include prohibitions on murder, theft, adultery, lying, coveting, etc., knowing that people cannot live happily without moral boundaries.  Declared positively, Jesus sums up the law in two parts:  love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.  Just practice those positives and you don’t need to remember the prohibitions.

I was surprised to see Moreland, an establishment seminary professor, make a pointed criticism of current evangelical church culture.  In neglecting to provide its members with firm reasons for Christian beliefs, “the church has become its own ‘gravedigger.’  The methods and policies of modern church growth produce a church that is anemic and marginalized.”  Megachurches grow via “watered-down, intellectually vacuous, simplistic preaching that is always applied to a parishioner’s private life,” while neglecting the most pressing doctrinal and cultural battles of the day.

He doesn’t mind the use of what he calls “good Christian music” – I don’t agree that it’s “good.”  He likes the small group emphasis – if only there were substance designed in, which I’ve rarely found.  But he points out that absent in a church’s weekly life is the opportunity to stretch minds, to train in defending the faith, to develop “godly, intelligent ambassadors for Christ.”  Amen.  He observes that when challenged by unbelievers, Christians get defensive, whereas knowledge promotes authority and courage.

I recall an adult Sunday School class in which a middle-aged couple told of JW visitors who had knocked on their door that week.  They, of course, shooed them away.  Everyone else in the class nodded, knowingly.  I was aghast and decided to speak up.  “Why didn’t you see this as an opportunity to share the Gospel with them?  They’re just lost people, after all, and came to your door looking for conversation on spiritual matters.”  My query was met with an aggravated silence.  In a class of 30 adult, seasoned Christians, no one spoke up.  (Nobody invited us out to lunch afterward.)

Christians should understand, Moreland notes, that scientism is the enemy of science.  The conclusions of science are built upon presuppositions, which are inherently philosophical.  Such presuppositions include:

1. The “world” exists out there, independent of mind, language, or theory.  Eastern religions deny this, claiming the “world” is illusion.
2. The world’s nature is orderly with a deep structure (atoms, laws of physics) underlying the macroscopic world we see and touch. Furthermore, this structure is reliable, consistent.
3. Objective truth exists.
4. Rationality exists – our sensory and cognitive faculties can discern objective reality. Furthermore, we can make valid, logical inferences not driven purely by brain chemistry.
5. Values and “oughts” exist. Morality is part of reality.
6. The laws of logic and mathematics exist.

Science is built on top of these foundational layers.

Moreland entitles a chapter, “Why Weak Scientism Is No Better Than Strong Scientism.”  In our culture when claims conflict, theologic vs. scientific for example, which claim gets more traction?  Under COVID, the mere pronouncements of government scientists and scientist / bureaucrats were deemed equivalent to SCIENCE!  Those who disagreed were punished and / or cancelled.

Too often Christians have compromised or caved when atheistic scientists make pronouncements that contradict Scripture, even if no evidence is on the table.  The subject is enormously relevant to creation vs. evolution, which I have covered extensively on this site, so I’ll move on.

Moreland spends some time discussing the uncertainties of scientific theories.  Historically, theories come and go.  Often there are competing theories for a phenomenon.  There are certainly criteria and methods to find a ‘winner,’ a best theory.

Math and logic are different.  They involve necessary truths.  “Even God could not create a world in which 2 + 2 = 57.68.”  Nor could He create a world in which something is both true and false at the same time in the same way . . . ie., it is raining and not raining at a specific location and time.

What about conscious states?  A neuroscientist with appropriate sensors may say something definitive about what is happening in my brain, but cannot know with certainty what is going on in my mind.  Introspection is the only way one can know what is going on, and that only in his own mind.

Moreland explores the question, How do we explain things?  When we say that one event causes another, that’s called event-event causation.  A covering law model of event-event causation has two features:   (1) a universal or statistical law of nature, and (2) some initial causal conditions.  For example:

1. All metal rods expand if heated.
2. Metal rod X was heated.
3. Therefore, metal rod X expanded.

Another covering law explanation is associated with the ideal gas law:  PV = nRT

When an ideal gas has a temperature “T”, contains “n” moles, and is enclosed within a volume “V”, with “R” being the gas constant, then the pressure will certainly be measured as “P.”

But no scientist is satisfied at the level of the ideal gas law.  “Why” is it true?  We need an underlying model of atoms and molecules and mechanics that predicts the ideal gas law.  We want to understand the mechanisms involved that relate pressure to temperature.

Now, personal explanations are quite different from scientific explanations.  For example, Judy sets a dinner table in such a way to provide an enjoyable dinner for her neighbors.  Why is the dinner table arranged this way?  Judy has both the intention and the basic power to do so.  An agent brings about a result by exercising a power to fulfill an intention.

In a murder trial, intention (motive) is vital.  The jury seeks personal explanations and assurance that the agent (accused) has the means and opportunity (basic power) to convict the defendant of the result (crime).  The detailed physical laws are not usually relevant, like the frictional interaction of the bullets with air molecules or the enthalpy of the gunpowder’s explosive reaction.

The important issues are properties of persons – intentions and willful actions.  In a materialistic worldview, we’re all just clumps of molecules in motion.  But our entire legal systems are built on personhood.

According to scientism, though, the entire history of the universe is completely described by the physical interactions of particles via the laws of physics . . . wherever they came from.  Consciousness makes complete nonsense of that worldview.  Everything important about human life transcends the merely physical, not only legal justice, as above, but also morality, integrity, love, hope, meaning, and life’s purpose for every made-in-the-image-of-God person.

Moreland lists five things that science cannot, in principle, explain . . . but theism can.  First, science cannot explain the origin of the universe.  Briefly, there had to be a beginning.  The universe cannot be infinitely old.  Just as you cannot count to a positive infinity because you’ll never get there, so also the universe cannot extend backward to a negative infinite age, because you could never reach the present moment.  Think about it.

Furthermore, science cannot explain the origin of the universe and its physical laws and particles because science is defined only by the methods we employ in the universe that already exists, with its forces and particles.  Science presupposes an existing universe.  There is no other kind of science.

Secondly, science cannot explain the physical laws of nature.  Physics is simply how we describe what we see, what happens.  We discover these laws and apply them.  No one has any clue why they are what they are.  Science presupposes the physical laws we know about.  There is no other kind of science.

Third, science cannot explain the universe’s fine-tuning.  The precise value of the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, the speed of light, Planck’s constant, and others enable life to exist.  Just tiny variations would make impossible the very existence of our sun, our solar system, and the biochemistry of life.  This is a big subject, well explored by other authors so I’ll leave it there.  In a Christian worldview, fine-tuning makes perfect sense from a design perspective.

Fourth, science cannot explain the existence of consciousness.  Briefly, on a naturalistic explanation we have particles and forces for billions of years and then we get something from nothing.  “In general, physicochemical reactions do not generate consciousness – not even one little bit . . . The appearance of mind is therefore utterly unpredictable and inexplicable.”  Mental states are different from physical states.  The sweetness of sugar, the blueness of blue, the hurt of pain, the guilt of sin, the self-awaress of “I” – you cannot get there from analytical brain chemistry.

Naturalists often talk of consciousness as an “emergent property” of complex matter.  Emergent is just a mystery word, a place-holder for “we don’t have a clue.”  Moreland asks us to imagine such a complex structure (a brain, for example) composed of billions and billions of molecules.  Now, remove one molecule.  Would consciousness still be there?  Surely it would.  So remove another molecule, etc.  At some point, with just four atoms remaining, perhaps, you would not have enough complexity for consciousness.  Therefore, somewhere along the way, removing just one atom, a small cause indeed, would prevent consciousness, a huge metaphysical effect!  We see that the “emergent property” idea has no explanatory power at all.

Fifth, science cannot explain moral or rational or aesthetic laws, nor the intrinsic value of what humans hold dear.  A moral example is, “It is wrong to torture babies for fun.”  And, “One ought to pursue love and kindness and avoid racist bigotry.”  But on a naturalistic worldview . . . why?  In short, science at best is merely descriptive.  There is no “ought” in science.

 Moreland, originally trained as a chemist, has five decades of experience in teaching theology at the graduate level and reading widely on the philosophy of science.  He concludes that about 95% of science and theology are cognitively irrelevant to each other.  For example, a theologian cares not whether a methane molecule has four or forty atoms of hydrogen.  And a non-Christian chemist cares not about spiritual gifts.  But in that other 5% there is relevance, including the obvious intelligent design inherent to the information content of DNA, archaeological confirmation of Scriptural history, and psychological discoveries on the flourishing of a human life.

Now, Moreland is not a young-earth creationist and so worries that Genesis 1-11 facilitates conflict between science and biblical history.  He is a progressive creationist, allowing for billions of years of Earth history, with God intervening with creation of species at key times.  As I’ve written much on this subject, I’ll just mention that it is only Moreland’s compromised position that generates his worries.  Accordingly, with a proper view of the inerrancy of Scripture and with close attendance to rational views of the fossil record and evidence for a young Earth, it’s easy to see the Bible as overwhelmingly consistent with physical discoveries and with rational philosophical analysis.

Moreland appropriately cites the late Cornell professor of biology, William Provine, for the baseless hyperbole typically offered up by evolutionists when they claim authoritative knowledge apart from scientific methodology:

“There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind.  There is no life after death.  When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead.  That’s the end for me.  There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.”

So why should I listen to the ravings that result from mere brain chemistry?  Did he not have a purpose in publishing his thoughts, which he certainly believed were freely constructed?  Didn’t he perceive a moral duty in writing what he thought was truth?  Sadly, though, Provine has discovered his errors, alas, too late.

Moreland discerns that the underlying motivation for academic evolutionists is to kick God out of science, out of history, out of everyone’s life.  Groupthink dominates and dissenters  get cancelled.  It’s not about evidence – the evidence for this is that counter-arguments are not allowed in classrooms or textbooks.  No discussion is permitted.  In contrast, the Christian apologist is willing, even enthusiastic to discuss and to debate.

Moreland concludes with a plea to adults to insure that their children and grandchildren understand these issues.  If Christian parents are so negligent as to let their children suffer the indoctrination of a public school, they must at least provide counter-cultural re-education of their own, in parallel.  A child’s very soul is at stake and, if they are converted, their Gospel witness must be founded on a biblical worldview, sharply contrasted with scientism and all other unbelieving philosophies.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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184. Against the Flow
July 1, 2023

The current cultural dominance of identity issues derive from an ancient question, “Who am I, really?”  Psychologist Nola Passmore writes, “The heart cry of the human race is for meaning and purpose, a sense of belonging when human relationships fail to satisfy, a need to know we are unconditionally loved in spite of our circumstances, a need to know that we are not an accident of chance but people of design, a need to know that we have a future and a hope even when everything around us seems to be falling apart.”

Regular readers of this site will note that this theme of purpose and meaning is central to my Christian worldview and my interests.  One might object, “But what about the vast numbers of people who don’t think like that, who respond with a contemptuous ‘Whatever,’ when challenged about the point of their lives?”  Well, I simply don’t know how to reach the ‘whatever’ crowd.  Apathy is a killer, an eternal killer.  I can only hope to persuade those who care at least somewhat about life, death, Heaven, Hell, God, and eternity.

I pulled the Passmore quote from John Lennox’s 2015 book, Against the Flow:  The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism.  As per usual in this essay, I’ll pull some nuggets from the book that I found intriguing.  I do recommend the book, along with everything else that Lennox writes.  My principal caveat on Lennox:  He’s a compromiser on Genesis 1-11, firmly in the Intelligent Design camp, neither a friend to creationists nor to literal Biblical history before Abraham.  Clearly, though, he does embrace the history and prophetic verities of Daniel.

Lennox, a professor of mathematics at Oxford, once gave a lecture on the relationship of science to theology.  He was asked by a physicist how he could possibly be a mathematical scientist in the 21^st century and hold to Christian beliefs, for example, that Jesus was simultaneously human and God.

Lennox replied that he would be delighted to respond if the physicist could answer an easier scientific question first.

Lennox:  “What is consciousness?”

Physicist:  “I don’t know.”

Lennox:  “Never mind, Let’s think of something easier.  What is energy?”

Physicist:  “Well, we can measure it and write down the equations governing its conservation.”

Lennox:  “Yes, I know, but that was not my question.  My question was:  what is it?”

Physicist:  “We don’t know, and I think you were aware of that.”

Lennox:  “Yes, like you I have read Feynman and he says that no one knows what energy is.  That brings me to my main point.  Would I be right in thinking that you were about to dismiss me (and my belief in God) if I failed to explain the divine and human nature of Christ?”  With no response from the physicist, he continued, “Well, by the same token, would you be happy if I now dismiss you and all your knowledge of physics because you cannot explain to me the nature of energy?  After all, energy is surely much less complex than the God who created it.”

Physicist:  “Please don’t!”

Lennox:  “. . . (so) why do you believe in the concepts of consciousness and energy, even though you do not understand them fully?  Is it not because of the explanatory power of those concepts?”

Physicist:  “I see what you are driving at.  You believe that Jesus Christ is God and man because that is the only explanation that has the power to make sense of what we know of him.”

Lennox:  “Exactly.”

Against the Flow is primarily a commentary on the book of Daniel.  Lennox brings in a significant amount of historical insight.  In Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, the temple priests enjoyed enormous power and property.  At the Spring festival, the emperor submitted to a ritual public humiliation by the priests, whereby they slapped him hard enough to bring tears.  The people were reminded that the priests were the power behind the throne, and only then could the great banquet begin.  Such a spectacle would certainly bring spice to American politics!

Babylon’s progenitor, Babel, was led by a people who demanded to “let us make a name” for themselves (Gen 11:4).  In contrast, Abraham was willing to let God rename him and determine his identity and significance.  Abraham trusted God and God marked Abraham as the archetype of faith . . . and faith is the foundation principle of God’s New Jerusalem.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed that the primary human motivational force is the search for meaning, and that the greatest thing we can do for others is to give them hope for the future.  God gave Abraham hope and then fulfilled His promises.  Abraham left Mesopotamia at God’s call and traveled to the land that became named after his grandson, Israel (Jacob).  Daniel, in contrast, was taken forcibly from the land of promise back to the land that Abraham left.  Daniel’s call was to live his faith in God, publicly, in a wicked land.  And so we have the many lessons from Daniel’s life for us in the godless West today.

The emperor forced name changes on Daniel and his three peers, working to erase their Hebrew identities.  They had to learn the Chaldean language and communicate publicly only in that language.  Today’s culture attempts to force certain words and concepts into and out of our language, and will cancel those who do not comply.

Lennox contrasts ancient Greek theology with the Hebrew faith.  The Greek gods were inside the world.  Jehovah wasn’t just about monotheism, but that He is external to the world, creating it and defining its meaning by His will.  God gives meaning to the world, but in the pagan system, the meaning of the system cannot be found inside the system.

A popular atheist objection to Christians goes like this:  “You are atheists with respect to Artemis, Baal, Diana, Wotan, Zeus, and thousands of other gods just like we are.  We just go one god more.”  This is a fallacious argument, because God is not just a part of the system.  He created the universe and sustains it each moment.  In paganism matter is eternal and began in formless chaos.  Some gods ‘arose’ out of the chaos (evolution), but these gods are still part of the stuff; “and so, in some sense, everything is god.”

God as revealed in the Bible is not made of matter-stuff.  He is self-existent, eternal, and Spirit.  God was first.  Everything derives from Him.

Physicist Paul Davies, considering the apparent fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants of the universe famously said, “The impression of design is overwhelming.”  But asked about the nature of said intelligence, he suggests it may be superhuman, but not supernatural.  Davies may well be in sync with Babylonian theology.

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream explores the relationship between reason and revelation.  Atheists often try to pit these two concepts against each other.  But they are not in the same category.  The Babylonian advisors were quite eager to employ their reason on the data available, but the emperor would not reveal the dream.  Unaided reason was helpless.  Daniel, though, understood that God knew both the dream and the meaning and could choose to reveal the data.  Daniel never suspended his reason, but employed it to interpret the meaning of the dream’s symbology in the Chaldean language.

Lennox mentions the fictional detective Hercule Poirot who uses his “little grey cells” to find patterns in the evidence.  Poirot acquires his data by interviewing people who provide him with invaluable revelations of what occurred before the detective arrived on the scene.  Lennox:  “To say that reason and revelation are antithetic does not even rise to the dignity of being false.  It simply doesn’t make sense – it is a confusion of categories, as the philosophers say.”

When young Daniel, in his early 20s, was brought before the throne of Earth’s mightiest emperor, he was likely confronted with live lions chained to each side, adding to the intimidation. He confessed that no man had the power to know and reveal the secrets of the king’s dream, “But there is a God in heaven that reveals secrets . . . But as for me, this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have . . .” (Daniel 2:28, 30), but that it is God’s will to make known to Nebuchadnezzar and his generation what God would do in future history.

Lennox points out that the Jews had failed in their task to witness to the Gentiles, but then there were individuals, like Daniel, who still served faithfully.  The case is analogous today.  Western Christians have singularly failed to preach the Gospel boldly, faithfully, and Scripturally to the last several generations.  But any one of us, individually, may choose to be faithful.  All the gods and worldviews of this age are just as impotent as the pagan religions of Daniel’s day, yet God is the same God as He always has been . . . commanding us to proclaim His message.

In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream there is a stone cut out of a mountain without hands, that smashes the statue representing the coming kingdoms of man, and then fills the Earth.  This speaks against false eschatologies, amillennialism and postmillennialism.  Man’s kingdoms are not God’s kingdoms.  Jesus will come in His own power to establish His own kingdom.  Our mission is not about power or politics, but to prepare born again children to enter His kingdom by preaching the Gospel.

Whether through the Holy Roman Empire or Marxist utopias or an American social gospel, man’s futility is relentless in ignoring the Great Commission.  There will be no paradise on Earth through man’s efforts.  Utopian attempts produce only carnage, poverty, and tyranny, as we see in Western politics right through to the present day.  I believe that if Christians in America would fulfill their responsibilities under the Great Commission diligently, God might just grant us some political freedoms and peace within which to do the job He gave us.  But there is no danger of that, and judgments are falling quickly on our nation.

Last century, The Times newspaper of London asked its readers to answer the question, “What is wrong with the world?”  G.K. Chesterton wrote in:

Dear Sir,

I am.

Yours faithfully,

G.K. Chesterton

Our problem is us; no, not those dastardly skeptics and heretics and cultists and Democrats and Marxists.  It’s us . . . us Christians.  We might just trigger the power of God to turn things around, if we really want to.  But I see no indication of a coming revival in the West, despite the continual hype that infests evangelicalism and pentecostalism.

Nebuchadnezzar decided to take that vision and glorify himself.  That idolatry cost him dearly.  The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) had a great influence on Karl Marx.  Feuerbach declared, “The beginning, middle, and end of religion is MAN.”  Also, “MAN is man’s god.”  Pure idolatry.

A declaration was made at the 1961 Communist Party Congress:  “Until we remove bourgeois moral principles, roots and all, train men in the spirit of communist morality and renew that spiritually and morally, it will not be possible to build a communist society.”  Well, over the last sixty years they have succeeded by a total corruption of the public education system and entertainment media.  I recall conservatives back in the 1960s warning about encroaching immorality and secular humanism in American culture.  Such warnings were typically scoffed at.

By the way, communist morality is the subjugation of every individual to the dictates of the state, absolute conformity, and enmity to any principle or practice with Christian roots.  How is it going?

When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow down before the king’s idol, Nebachudnezzar was shocked.  Surely they didn’t value their religion above their lives?  But he could not force them to bow down.  He could kill them, but the mightiest king on Earth had no power over their conscience or will.  His fury and frustration were pegged.

The additional shock was not that God delivered them from the fire, but that He delivered them in the fire.  The three did not know what God would do, but they knew that they would be in His hands, whether by surviving the furnace or by entering Paradise.  We have similar choices, although not usually of lethal consequences.  Life is not complicated . . . just do right.  And do right again.

All genuine Christians will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.  Daniel chapter 3 is about how seriously we take it.  We’ll get to meet Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah someday.  We’ll doubtless have some appreciative things to say about their story.  When they ask about our story, will we have something to say?

The law of the Medes and Persians plays a role in Daniel’s life (Daniel chapter 6).  Secular histories give undue credit to the Mesopotamians for the origins of legal codes and the principle of equality under the law.  Properly, though, such codes and the principle of equality go back to Moses and God’s exposition of His laws.  In Deuteronomy 17:18-20 we see that the king is subject to God’s laws, just like everyone else, ultimately because we all are made in the image of God.

Daniel 7 looks forward to coming judgments from God.  Most people see judgment as all negative, but for those whose trust is in God, judgment is a cause for joy.  Lennox:  “When you are suffering unfairness, discrimination, harassment, or outright persecution, the uppermost thought on your mind is:  how long is this going to last?  And will anything ever be done about it?”  The New Testament is filled with hope for persecuted saints . . . see 2 Thessalonians chapter 1 for Paul’s comforting promises of judgment for those afflicting the saints at Thessalonica.

We long for justice, but ultimate justice is not seen in our lifetime.  God keeps perfect records and perfect justice will come.  The Judge will be the Son of Man . . . one of us while also God in the flesh.  He has walked in our shoes.  There are no excuses that can deceive Him.

Only the future world government under the Lord Jesus will see justice properly done in day-to-day life.  The world’s elites desperately want to establish their own world government with man at the helm.  They are merely setting themselves up for the Antichrist, whose kingdom will be short and quickly destroyed.

Albert Einstein yearned for peace via a global government under man:  “A world government must be created which is able to solve conflicts between nations by judicial decision.”

This is not a new idea.  In the middle ages the poet and statesman Danti Alighiere (1265-1321) argued that war could be eliminated if “the whole earth and all that humans possess be a monarchy, that is, one government under one ruler . . . he would hold kings contentedly within the borders of their kingdoms, and keep peace among them.”

Philosopher Immaniuel Kant preferred a federal union of free and independent states because he feared that a single power would degenerate into a soulless despotism and crush “the germs of goodness.”

Lennox observes that Daniel 7 is projecting an end-time global tyranny that “will lead inexorably to the greatest state-orchestrated hostility to God that the world has ever seen.”  We see such hostilities breaking out today all over the world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, an atheist, saw the “death of God” as a threat to human freedom and an open door to nihilism and the loss of meaning.

All these issues provide topics for the Christian evangelist.  Everything in the news is connected to unfolding prophecy and the need for lost sinners to find the Saviour.  Only born again children of God will be His co-inheritors when His kingdom is established.  We can challenge unbelievers that they have only two teams to choose from.  One of those teams will rule; the other will be damned.

Daniel 8 predicts the coming rule of Antiochus IV, who ruled over the Jews from 175-164 BC.  He took the title Epiphanes, a claim to divinity meaning “God manifest.”  He was clearly a type of the yet-future Antichrist.

Antiochus shared a difficulty with other emperors, unifying a diverse collection of peoples and religions.  The Jews, in particular, were centered on their Scripture-based God.  Antiochus raged at the recalcitrant Jews, desecrating the temple, and robbing the golden altar and lampstand, along with many golden vessels.

Later he attacked Jerusalem and slaughtered many Jews.  Determined to break their spirit he wrote laws that contradicted vital Jewish religious practices, for example, mandating the sacrifice of pigs and making circumcision illegal.  The temple was rededicated to Zeus.  For the Jews this was abomination upon abomination.

The Maccabean Revolt, led by Judas Maccabeus, led to the recapture of Jerusalem.  The festival of Hanukkah celebrates the victory to this day.

When Jesus arrived on the scene two centuries later, called by His followers Immanuel, “God with us,” along with declaring, “I and my Father are one,” it shocked the Jews.  Was this Antiochus all over again?  Either it was blasphemy or it was true.  They attempted to stone Him and then succeeded in crucifying Him.  In a future day, perhaps not far from now, the temple will be rebuilt and the Antichrist himself will defile it, but Jesus will come in power to establish His righteous kingdom.  It would be best to discern whose side to be on through all these events.

It is noteworthy that in the last century (+ a little), there has been more death and state-sponsored anti-God tyranny than in all of previous history.  It is remarkably consistent how lethally anti-Christian are the tyrannies of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kim family, along with local hate-driven persecution all over the world from anti-Christian religions including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  (Subscribe to the monthly newsletter from Voice of the Martyrs to read story after story of how Christians persevere all over the world today.)

Antiochus was just representative of what Satan attempts to do every time he can get one of his minions into power.  Consider the Kim family, notably North Korea’s first despot, Kim Il Sung.   Juche, the official state ideology of North Korea, embraces the core principle that “man is the master of everything and decides everything.”  Kim is seen as a Messianic liberator of all humankind.  His birthplace and life events are commemorated by shrines, requiring pilgrimages by the North Korean people.  Kim’s portrait is in every household and people begin every day by reading his words.  ‘Reflection’ meetings are held wherein people repent of wrong actions and wrong thoughts.

The devil is warming up in preparation for his Antichrist.

We ought to be busy about the Great Commission.  That never changes.

I’ll end here.  Lennox’s commentary and insights are voluminous and rich.  You ought to have his book on your shelf of commentaries . . . and I believe you’ll simply enjoy reading it through.  The main thing about prophecy is that it motivates us to be about the Lord’s work in this present age while souls are so much at stake.  Jesus is coming soon.  Let’s finish strong.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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185. Why bother believing?
August 1, 2023 

“Am I claiming that the tragedy of human existence is evidence that God exists?  No.  Instead, I am claiming that the tragedy of human existence absolutely and finally strips us of any claimed right to apathy.” 

So argues Neil Shenvi in his 2022 book, Why Believe?  A Reasoned Approach to Christianity.  The world is, and always has been, filled with injustice, corruption, disease, poverty, misery, and . . . and certain death, sooner or later, for everyone who draws a breath from Earth’s air.  Accordingly, the truth claims of the Christian faith, with a frightening judgment for lost sinners who reject the Gospel, and eternal life on a New Earth for those who  humble themselves and find forgiveness in Christ, are awesome in their import.  It is irrational to say, “Christianity might be true or it might not be, but it doesn’t really matter to me.”

This is not Pascal’s wager, which suggests that it is far better to believe, since the consequences of unbelief are tragic and the consequences of belief are infinitely rewarding if the Bible is true, but if the Bible is false, then nothing is lost.  Frankly, you cannot become a born again child of God by playing the odds and hoping for the best.  Salvation requires sincerity and genuine humility, repentance, and trust.

I’ve met many unbelievers with the “Whatever” attitude.  Spiritual zombies.  Walking dead men and women.  There is far more hope for the argumentative anti-theist.  At least there you might have a conversation and a discussion about evidence and moral realities.

C.S. Lewis:  “Christianity . . ., if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance.  The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

The existence of God, the biblical God, is “a question of death and life,” Shenvi asserts.  We are dying men and women, justly condemned for our willful sins which manifest throughout the corrupt world we see around us, yet we are offered not only forgiveness and a resurrection body (eternal life), but also sonship in God’s family.  “If this claim is even possibly true, we ought to take it very seriously.”

Secular philosophies, including those of political parties, sell hope through reformed educational systems, ‘better’ government, social activism, or therapy.  Religions offer redemption through good deeds, moral codes, prayers, and ritual practices.  The common deceit is that we can fix ourselves.

In stark contrast, the Gospel claims that we need a Saviour, a Rescuer, and there is nothing we can do to please God apart from Him – the Lord Jesus Christ.  But if we come His way, then we’ll be aligned with others pointed in the same direction, and we can actually live productive lives.  The Bible provides details on how to relate to God and to others.  Becoming a Christian is not a “bare intellectual exercise.”  “Jesus is a real Saviour for people desperately in need of rescue . . . people like us.”

Shenvi’s book includes a variety of arguments from traditional apologetics, but also some less traditional.  Consider the field of onomastics – the study of the history and origin of names.  For example, the most popular name for a Jewish boy in 1^st century Israel was Simon; for girls the favorite was Mary.  A study of names found in the first five books of the New Testament shows a strong correlation with historical records, including names found on ossuaries.

Why does this support the historical validity of the Gospel accounts?  Shenvi suggests you enlist four different American authors to write novellettes set in Honduras during the Vietnam War, involving about twenty characters.  What are the chances that the names chosen by the authors would match statistically the name frequencies of actual Hondurans during the 1970s?  Apart from the internet (a very recent invention), “how accessible are foreign census records from a half century ago?”

Shenvi encourages skeptics to read the Gospel accounts carefully.  They might be in for a surprise.  The modern view of Jesus is shaped by Renaissance art (he would not have had long hair), TV preachers (most of which are not actually born again Christians), dim recollections from youth of Sunday School (watered-down lessons), and pop culture (Jesus is love, Jesus is cool).  Read the Gospel accounts and yes, you will find Jesus to be compassionate and gentle, but also speaking with power and authority.  He publicly and loudly condemned religious hypocrisy.  He embraced outcasts, caring for their souls – not for their social standing.  He warned of God’s wrath, teaching more about Hell than anyone else throughout the Bible.  Jesus simply did not fit conventional stereotypes.  “Never man spake like this man,” reported the soldiers who had been ordered to arrest Jesus, but came back empty-handed.

The Bible itself is the ultimate challenge to the skeptic, because these matters are spiritual and God’s word is designed to touch the spirit of man.  John 20:31 – “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”

In his chapter on the Resurrection, Shenvi makes the evidential case, and deals with the various naturalistic explanations that have been offered.  Interestingly, he cites atheist Jeff Lowder who cautions Christians that “. . . apologists need to recognize that, until atheists are shown that theism is plausible, atheists will continue to regard the resurrection as a highly implausible event.”

In short, the rejection of the resurrection by atheists is a simple consequence of their belief that God does not exist.  The resurrection is not the preeminent miracle (intervention by God) reported in the Bible.  Rather, the prime event is Genesis 1:1, the fiat creation of everything.  Given Genesis 1:1, the resurrection is no stretch at all.  Shenvi:  “The most common reason that people reject the resurrection . . . is a commitment to naturalism.”  Under naturalism, miracles are impossible, not just unlikely.  (I have designed a tract for the committed atheist, entitled “Who are you?”, which you can find on ThinkTracts.com.)

Shenvi observes that many people ask why God doesn’t prove Himself by miraculous signs?  What if He has?  In the middle of human history, the resurrection of Jesus validated His person, His ministry, and His mission.  Everything changed for His crushed and defeated followers, and for all history to follow, when He raised Himself from the dead.  Raising yourself from the dead – that’s credibility!  Many have studied the circumstances and history around that single historical event and have been transformed from skeptics to Christians.

Shenvi suggests that if the message “God exists” were scrawled across the moon in fiery letters, some skeptics might turn to theism, but there would be nothing to tell us what God is like or what He expects of us.  I would guess that skeptics would more likely invoke an alien visitation.

But if Jesus was intended by God to be God’s personal revelation to humanity, then His resurrection and the biblical record serve just fine, thank you, for provoking a worldview-changing response . . . if the skeptic can get past his “Whatever” attitude.

I do recommend Shenvi’s book, but have a cautionary note:  He’s a Big-Banger.  He argues, logically, that if all space, matter, and time came into being with the Big Bang, then the cause must be outside of nature.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims assert that this cause is God.  He cites the famous quote by astronomer Robert Jastrow who closes his book God and the Astronomers:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.  He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

He goes on to discuss fine-tuning arguments in a conventional way.  More interestingly, he mentions the “weirdness” objection to theism, that it’s “absurd” to imagine an immaterial Mind who designed and created the universe when it is simpler and more “plausible” to embrace the idea that nothing is “there” except what we can see, hear, and touch.

I would use the word “outrageous” to describe the Christian / theist’s position. Also that the atheist / evolutionist’s worldview is “outrageous” – that nothing became everything and that everything is ordered into spiral galaxies and planets in stable orbits around stars and that our planet is filled with an ecosystem that is based on outrageously brilliant nanotechnology.

The point is that whatever you decide to believe, it is outrageous.  But something is true, so get over it and figure out what makes the most sense.  That leads directly and with overwhelming evidence and logic to biblical Christianity.

By the way, as a PhD-educated physicist, I can attest to the weirdness / outrageousness of relativity and quantum mechanics, which describe how the universe works at the most basic level, yet don’t connect to common-sense experience in many ways.  As Shenvi notes, “We balk at the existence of immaterial realities but seem curiously unconcerned with the proliferation of ten-dimensional strings, parallel universes, closed-time loops, and nonlocal entanglement.”*  Also, “The presence of actual angels or ghosts in Star Trek would be exceptionally jarring, even in a fictional account.  But if the captain announces that a ‘hyperdimensional tachyon-based life-form has materialized on the bridge,” we can suspend our disbelief.

*Note:  All but the last are purely speculative ideas, yet are believed ‘real’ by many scientists, while the last item seems real, but nobody understands it.

Shenvi writes a thoughtful chapter on morality as evidence for God as revealed in the Bible.  A typical atheistic position was voiced by Bertrand Russell:  “The question whether a [moral] code is good or bad is the same as the question whether or not it promotes human happiness.”  Similarly, Sam Harris:  “Questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures.  If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them.”

What is the foundation for morality in a materialistic universe?  Russell and Harris suggest a calculus that measures net happiness as a determinant for moral policy.  The devil is in the details, though.  Would the suffering of one fellow outweigh the flourishing of a hundred?  Is slavery or organ harvesting justified if it brings pleasure to enough people?  Perhaps it’s the ‘important people’ whose happiness is most valued.

Why are humans valuable at all?  Materialistically – atheistically – we are just bags of chemicals moving about, interacting with other bags.  Besides, who am “I” and who are “you” if your alleged thoughts and observed actions are merely the results of random brain chemistry?  Personhood requires a soul, a spirit.

Atheist French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was honest about all this:  “God does not exist and all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him . . . Everything is permissible if God does not exist.”  Sartre lived accordingly, self-centered and mistreating the women in his life.

In his 2010 essay, “An Amoral Manifesto (Part 1),” atheist philosopher Joel Marks clarifies:  “A ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality, but the religious fundamentalists are correct:  without God, there is no morality.”

If human beings are persons with free will and rationality, made in the image of God and accountable to Him and to others, well, that changes everything, doesn’t it?

Since postmodernism began to dominate the culture and the institutions about 30 years ago, ethical subjectivism holds sway in the minds and hearts of many.  Briefly, everyone sets his own moral standards.  It matters not how evil you think are the actions of another; if he asserts his actions are moral, you have no ground for criticism.  Identity chaos in politics and sexuality is built on the same quicksand.  In ethical subjectivism the laws and standards of a community or a nation are determined by who can amass power and enforce his preferences.  Yes, it’s ultimately all about power.

In practice, Shenvi notes, no one actually lives consistently as a moral relativist.  It’s wrong to molest babies for fun.  It’s wrong for my spouse to cheat on me.  It’s wrong for someone to steal from me.  I’ve observed over the years that the most despicably evil political leaders tend to avoid bragging about the wrong that they do.  Instead, they cover up or lie about what they did, knowing that the vast majority of people will judge them evil if they are forthright about their relativistic ‘moral’ code.

Shenvi observes that skeptics often use the very  existence of evil in the world, whether caused by natural events or by people, as an argument against God.  Rather, he argues, the despair caused by evil in the world is an argument for God.  If the world is strictly materialistic, why is there any distinction between evil and good?  It’s all just molecules in motion.  There is no ‘justice’ in clumps of molecules that collide with each other.  That’s just physics.

But if we are all persons, image-bearers, then justice and tragedy have meaning.  Biblically, evil occurs in the world because this world is currently in a fallen state due to sin.  The Fall accounts both for natural evil and for man’s crimes against man.  The Christian has an assured hope that this will change.  A judgment is on the horizon for everyone and everything.  A New Heaven and a New Earth await the redeemed, wherein dwelleth righteousness.  In materialism, of course, there is no hope.  None.

Furthermore, but secondarily, some of the evil, particularly the trials of life, serve to produce character and dependence on God.  Shenvi:  “But if God is less interested in our physical comfort and more interested in producing in us a certain kind of character, then it makes much more sense that we face trials, hardships, and suffering that can produce in us forbearance, bravery, mercy, and compassion – virtues that wouldn’t exist . . .”, if God made the present Earth into a “a sunny beach with an endless supply of snacks and free WiFi.”

The Bible has much to say about how to walk with God and endure the trouble we all experience in this life.  The biggest trouble, by far, is death, of course.  Death overwhelms all other troubles.  What is the materialist’s answer for those who face death?  Facing that question does not prove the Christian faith, but it certainly highlights the infinite stakes attached to whatever reality is.  By the way, what lies beyond death for the materialist is far, far worse than he imagines.

Shenvi poses a poignant challenge to the skeptic.  Suppose that Jesus visited you, performed miracles in your presence, and proved to you that He is who He says He is.  Let’s say you are convinced now that the Bible is true and Jesus is Lord and Saviour.  So how do you feel about Him?  Will you now choose to be His disciple, to seek His will in all your big decisions?  Will you repent from the cherished sins in your life?  Will you submit to God’s standards for sex, marriage, business, relationships?  Will you make your life’s mission one of telling others about Him, warning them of a coming judgment, pleading with them to repent and trust Christ to become born again children of God?

Will you do and be all that?  Shenvi:  “God’s purpose is to change hearts, not merely to change minds.”

In evangelism we must not miss this emphasis.  Avoid the sidetrack of evidential apologetics when the real problems are heart problems, when the real reason that skeptics avoid Jesus is their love for their favorite sins.  Yes, sometimes an evidential or historical or scientific or philosophical issue is a genuine stumbling block.  Then by all means use, gently, the best apologetics arguments to help tear that barrier down.  But the main thing is to preach law, sin, judgment, repentance, faith, the cross and the resurrection, and the new birth.  The main thing is the heart.

Preaching the Gospel and making the conditions for salvation personal is the ultimate apologetic, as Shenvi argues in his final chapters.  There is a compelling moral logic in the obvious sinfulness of everyone and the fouled-up consequences we can all see around us . . . and especially in our own lives.  Sin is a violation of the moral order God designed into us.  There is a moral logic and a soul-deep relief in the Gospel message, that we need a Rescuer and should be fearful of the ultimate Judge.  That salvation is a gift not to be earned is glorious news, not a feature of any other religion or philosophy on Earth.  That the price for this gift was paid by God Himself, who became one of us(!) is so familiar that we’ve forgotten how incredible this truth is.  That in a moment of time you can pass from death to life, from damnation to salvation, from lost to a born again child of the King of the universe . . . There is no competition to these truths from any other philosophy or narrative throughout human history.  There are no other players in the ballpark.  Game over.  Choose victory and glory or choose death.

Shenvi reviews other religions to compare their messages and promises.  Nicely done.  Only the Christian faith is honest about the reality of the human condition and realistic about the solution.  It’s just not hard to figure this out.

Shenvi:  “According to the Bible, our primary problem is not a lack of self-affirmation, a bad environment, or even material poverty; our primary problem is our sin.”  Contrast this point with everything you hear in the culture and from politicians.  They will identify as problems (for which only they have the solutions) everything under the sun . . . except sin!  The only solution for sin – which by individual choice afflicts everyone – is repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  The new birth changes not just your eternal destination, but your hope and attitude and actions for every day of this life.  No politician or media pundit or academic is going to go there!

Neil Shenvi’s book is both informative and encouraging, especially the last few chapters.  It’s worth having.  I’ll close with one of his final thoughts:  “If Christianity is true, what is the only rational response to a God like this?  Worship.  Utter delight, awe, praise, and amazement.  A repentant heart supremely values this infinitely good God not merely because He commands it, but also because He is so consummately worthy of it.  In contrast, an unrepentant heart is not merely wicked; it is irrational.  Anyone who would trade the eternal, certain, and infinite pleasure of knowing and delighting in God for the fleeting, uncertain, finite pleasures of this life is a madman.”

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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186. Identity, History, Reality
September 1, 2023

The ideas, intuitions, and philosophies that dominate the attention of today’s culture did not spring forth suddenly, nor did they arise by chance.  In particular, the identity and gender claims that were once so counterintuitive – “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” – seem reasonable to so many because of the penetration of critical theory and poststructuralism in the schools and other institutions.  History matters and has led inexorably to where we are today.

This is the theme of Carl Trueman’s excellent 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self:  Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.  While Trueman’s treatment is sweeping and insightful, he neglects the invisible roots of all societal degradations – the spiritual war in which Satan schemes to destroy families, corrupt children, and damn souls.  What Trueman does masterfully is to analyze the human and historical instruments Satan uses to infest culture, education, media, and politics.

The cultural changes in the West have moved with startling rapidity.  Twenty years ago a majority was basically opposed to gay marriage, and most of the laws were consistent with that opposition.  Today gay marriage is uncontroversial and trans ideology is dogmatically embraced by all the institutions.

Key historical figures played pivotal roles in what has become a tsunami of moral change.  Trueman notes that Sigmund Freud was key to the sexual revolution by shifting the understanding of self:  “The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized.”  Sex used to be for procreation and recreation.  Freud reinterpreted sex to define “who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species.”  To Freud we are fundamentally sexual beings from infancy on.  Our sexual desires define who we are.  (What a pitiful contrast to the biblical view of individuals created in God’s image!)

Karl Marx laid the foundation to make sex political.  In Marx’s day oppression was about economics or legal / class distinctions.  Now oppression has been psychologized.  Freud’s ideas were combined with Marx’s by leftists like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.  Politics is now internal and subjective.  Nobody is allowed to tell you that you’re wrong.  Evidence is irrelevant.  And so is reality.  You define reality.  You are the god of your identity.

Trueman observes that (what I recall growing up in the 1960s as) the sexual revolution has gone far beyond a relaxing of boundaries or a higher incidence of moral transgressions.  Rather, the intent and the practice has been to abolish moral codes entirely.  Furthermore, anyone that clings to traditional or, worse, biblical morals is evil and should be punished.  We live in the culture described by the prophet Isaiah, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil . . .” (Isaiah 5:20-23).  Anyone that isn’t happy in the new Wild West of sexual immorality becomes a political enemy.

May we debate these issues, perhaps on the campuses of our institutions of higher learning?  Karl Marx offered advice on how to use criticism to defeat the enemies of the revolution:  “Its essential sentiment is indignation; its essential activity is denunciation.”  And so we see no dialogoues, no debates.  What matters is power and the squashing of opposition, with as much prejudice as possible.

Accordingly, the language has been transformed to deligitimize dissent.  Say anything negative about homosexual behavior and you are guilty of homophobia.  The term phobia puts you into the realm of the irrational and stigmatizes you as bigoted.

Ultimately, of course, this is a worldview battle at the intellectual level and a spiritual battle at its foundation.  Trueman observes that Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin destroyed teleology (meaning, purpose) for generations to follow.  No God, no meaning – therefore, no morality.  What you can do and what you can get others to do is up to you and whether you have the power to make it happen.  Morals are just a matter of taste.  All this groundwork, Trueman asserts, is laid by the end of the 19^th century.

Trueman describes the worldview battle in terms highlighted by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, mimesis and poiesis.  A mimetic view sees the world as ordered and external; it’s up to us to discover how it works.  A poietic view sees the world as raw material that can be fashioned by the individual; it’s up to us to create meaning and purpose as we like.

It is no surprise that from ancient times most people take the mimetic view.  Trueman considers medieval Europe, a mostly agrarian society.  Farming was dependent on geography, seasons, and weather, and the farmer had to cope with what was available in soils and seeds.  He was at the mercy of an external environment.  “The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it.”

Technology shifted the perspective.  Irrigation allowed water to move or to be stored, fertilizers and pesticides increased yield, genetic engineering allowed more variety (or less) and more immunity to pests.  Such innovations shift the way we think about the world.  Childbirth is not so risky.  Transportation and communication developments allow us to live and work in ways never dreamed of centuries ago.  With online games and with virtual reality you can pretend to be somebody else!

In short, reality seems to be manipulatable.  So, back to “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” . . . why can’t I use technology to do something about that!  Well, for one thing, the nanotechnology of life is far beyond human science.  Surgeries and chemicals do not actually transform a man into a woman, not at the genetic level, nor at the physiological level, and not even at the functional level.

Nevertheless, the medical establishment is eager to make huge profits by doing something to pretend that the impossible was achieved.

We hate limits, don’t we?  We enjoy our creativity, we have a free will that yearns for more than life typically allows . . . hey, can’t we be like gods?  These desires aren’t new.  See Genesis chapter 3 for how that worked the first time people tried it.

Trueman’s grandfather left school at fifteen and worked for decades as a sheet metal worker in a Birmingham factory.  If you had asked him about job satisfaction he might not have understood the question – he did not belong to “psychological man’s” world.  But he certainly embraced the need for the job to put food on his family’s table and shoes on the kids’ feet.  So yeah, the job was satisfying.  In the ‘old days’ the key to self-esteem was about production and taking care of others around you.  The key to self is outward directed.

In contrast, for Trueman, a university professor, and for his students, fulfillment comes from the pleasure of teaching, learning new concepts, growing intellectually.  Feelings are central; the focus is inward.  Modern life has many options.

Counseling and therapy have changed in modern times.  Historically, it was about helping someone to understand their community and environment so they could adapt, fit in, even conform to the “canons and protocols of society.”  Now it’s about you, about your feelings.

Trueman summarizes history in an interesting way.  “The ancient Athenian was committed to the assembly, the medieval Christian to his church, and the 20^th century factory worker to his trade union and working-man’s club.”  A man’s purpose necessitated commitment to something outside himself.  Today’s psychological man, though, is committed first and foremost to self.

Thus we see schools and churches as places “to perform, not to be formed.”  Churches strive to be seeker-sensitive.  If we ‘don’t like it,’ we try another.  Schools work to assure and reassure; they don’t examine, challenge, and confront a spectrum of beliefs.  The phenomenon of ‘snowflakes’ is the result of the psychologizing of self and the inward-directed focus of therapy.  It’s all about me and if I run into anything that challenges my comfort, I’m proudly and loudly triggered.

I have a right to psychological happiness.  If anyone says something I can perceive as racially or sexually offensive, I’m thrilled; oops, I mean outraged because I’ve been oppressed.  I’m a glorious victim.  Words are now more important than violence; rather, words are violence.

Freedom of speech is dead.

Yet it is not enough to avoid offense.  Everyone must affirm and celebrate what they used to call sin.  If you object to homosexual behavior or trans ideology you are attacking – violently – the identity of people.

Alasdair MacIntyre defines emotivism as the doctrine that all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, attitude, or feeling.  Thus, saying Homosexual behavior is wrong means I personally disapprove of it and you should do likewise.  Trouble comes when the emotivists in favor of homosexual behavior, sodomy, or trans surgeries for children achieve political power.  At that point, their personal preference becomes dogmatic truth enforced by law.  All of the new moralities, which were evil immoralities for thousands of years, become universal moral imperatives and you must conform instantly and enthusiastically.  If you weren’t aware that everything had changed, that’s tough.  You can’t ask questions.

Conservative Christians, who believe in a transcendent God who defines reality and has declared moral laws that are wired into the reality of human persons, have no common ground on which to debate such matters, since the cultural consensus equates each psychologized man as his own god with no higher authority.

But is that true?  Is there no common ground?  The Bible teaches us that God has wired into each of us a conscience that discerns right and wrong.  The biblical pattern is to declare truth boldly and compassionately, because God has written His law into our hearts.  Since Trueman is a professing Christian I think he shouldn’t miss this point.  The spiritual war must be fought with spiritual weapons.  Share the Gospel, hand out Gospel tracts, speak truth even and especially when it is counter-cultural.  Trust the Holy Spirit to bring fruit where the seed finds good soil, even if we see no evidence of results.  God gave us our job to do.  He’ll do His job.

The Gospel was born into a wicked, pagan culture.  Living the open and honest Christian life was not easy then.  Why should it be easy now?  Apart from the West, the Christian life in this world entails suffering and, often, death.  Above all, the Christian life, as Jesus summarized as the two greatest commandments, is to love God and to love others.

Today’s non-Christian world owes its philosophy, in part, to 18^th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who professed his perspective in his autobiography:  “It is the history of my soul that I promised . . . all I need do, as I have done up until now, is to look inside myself.”

To Rousseau and to the modern anti-Christian culture, the essence of a person is the inner psychological life.  Thus, the young Rousseau explains away his crime of petty theft as the result of social pressure.  Additional vices afflicted him because others treated him badly, and so he became lazy and started lying.  When his father punished him that made him manipulative and covetous.  All Rousseau’s problems were the fault of others.  He was a victim!  But this is just childishness!  Do we not live in a culture in which all the kids have never grown up?

20^th century sociology was fascinated by primitive cultures.  Many concluded that the only way to be authentic was to become a hypothetical savage, unencumbered by society’s expectations.  To fit into modern culture requires suppression of natural instincts.  Far better to be “true to one’s inner (real) self.”  Accordingly, let’s deconstruct Christian morality and let everyone’s inner self out for fully authentic expression.

Tragically, as the 21^st century dawned and Western culture had disemboweled Christianity, it was replaced by woke culture, which demands absolute conformity and whose principles are viciously dogmatic and inauthentic with regard to reality.  I’ve noticed lately some debate in the media about how to define wokism.  That’s easy if you’re willing to be blunt.  Wokism stands for everything the Christian faith stands against, and stands against everything virtuous the Bible teaches.  Just go through the list regarding woke dogma on marriage, sexuality, abortion, transgenderism, freedom of thought and speech, mercy and forgiveness, civility, honesty in debate and dialogue, racism, free markets, responsibility, hard work, rewards based on merit, law and order, crime and punishment . . . the list is actually much longer.

Rousseau’s inner construction of the authentic self, unconstrained by others, “is the necessary philosophical precondition for modern identity politics,” including sexual politics, Trueman concludes.  With trans ideology the inner voice is freed “even from chromosomes and the primary sexual characteristics of the physical body.”

Moderns have imagined they have become little gods, fulfilling the promise of Satan to Eve in the garden.  Even the secular conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has pointed out that there is no compromise with Christianity in this.  The Christian faith and trans ideology are antagonists and in collision.

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was representative of radical thought at the beginning of the 19^th century.  Shelley advocated sexual freedom.  Christian morality hindered such freedom, especially regarding marriage.  Shelley also despised the commercial marketplace, seeing it somehow as preventing people from being truly free, since everything must have its price and prices are governed by the forces of the market.  His sentiments here anticipated Karl Marx later in the century.

Modern consumerism promises that you can be transformed, or at least feel better, with the swipe of a card.  Now you have that car or fridge or purse or suit that will fulfill you.  But just wait a little while and you must have the newest model or upgrade.  Trueman:  “The  underlying dynamic of the consumer marketplace is that desires can never be fully satisfied.”

Reality – individual limitations – intervene when trying to reinvent ourselves.  I might desire to be the #1 tennis player in the world, but at age 71 it would be foolish to try.  I might yearn to explore, in person, Jupiter’s moons or the Andromeda galaxy, but the technology and resources simply don’t exist . . . yet.  (I’m hoping that during the Millennium, or beyond, what is impossible now . . .)

I don’t want to become a woman, but if I did, the medical science and technology do not come close.  I could just ‘say’ I’m a woman, but what would that even mean?  Our newest Supreme Court Justice, apparently a woman because the President insisted on appointing a woman, could not explain in open hearings just what a woman is.

Reality matters.  Trueman reprints Nietzsche’s “God is dead” passage from The Gay Science to point out that once they have killed God, there is no foundation upon which the townspeople can build their stable, comfortable lives.  The nonexistence of God is not like that of unicorns or centaurs.  Nothing is built on that mythology.  But, Trueman writes, “To dispense with God, however, is to destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.”

Of course, Nietzsche was content with the supposed death of God; what he wanted was to reexamine and reinvent science, logic, and morality in light of a naturalistic worldview.   Well, how’s it going?  The Christian faith has been deconstructed in the West.  What is taking its place?  Chaos, confusion, and misery.  Just one data point:  In the last generation, for the first time in history, most Americans don’t want to have children.  In the U.S. the replacement birth rate is 1.6.  You need 2.1 to break even.  Most of the rest of the West is even worse than America.  This reflects self-absorption and hopelessness.

What Darwin accomplished was to provide a pseudo-scientific foundation for atheism, an intellectual excuse to banish God despite the utter lack of evidence to support evolution.  (See my free ebook on the subject.)  With the Christian worldview gone, we are no longer image-bearers, we are not accountable to anyone higher than ourselves, and we can make any rules we like, including rules defining identity.

Back to Nietzsche . . . no God means no ultimate future.  Only the present matters and what pleasure and personal satisfaction you can find.  This certainly reflects our present age.

With man focused on himself and how he can make others conform, Marx provides strategies for power.  History is about oppression and in politics, economics, and cultural ideas, you can imagine powerful groups marginalizing others.  All social organizations become political until all of life is about political power.  Trueman:  “Everything – from the Boy Scouts to Hollywood movies to cake baking – has become politicized.”  Play the game well enough and your group can be on top, oppressing others.

You can see this in modern politics and culture.  Oppression of others is supposedly evil, but when leftists use tactics to accuse and denigrate their opponents, and then cancel or oppress or even prosecute them, it’s apparently a righteous act.

Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, along with their philosophical heirs, hate Christianity above all.  That’s strange, isn’t it?  Shouldn’t they despise Islam above all, considering its history, present collection of Islamic tyrannies, and its treatment of women, even in the West?

The superficial complaint has always been that Christianity hinders people from freedom and happiness, although history dramatically shows the reverse to be true.  Anti-Christian tyrannies have always been and are still today, along with Islamic states, destroyers of personal freedom and well-being, except for their privileged elites.

The facts of history are embarrassing, though, and so history must be erased, textbooks rewritten, statues smashed.  Trueman extends the thought to transgenderism,  which must erase the individual’s history, and rewrite not only science, but simple common sense.

Freud was so focused on sex that he redefined true happiness as sexual satisfaction.  Trueman:  “The way to be happy is to engage in behavior that leads one to be sexually satisfied.”  This necessarily starts, according to Freud, in childhood, even in infancy.  You can see the genesis of today’s dystopian efforts to sexualize children, even if that seems best served by confusing them and coercing them into mutilating surgeries.

Contemporary education follows Freud, especially in government-controlled schools, in their efforts to liberate the sexual instincts of children and separating them from any Christian influence.

Freud’s committed focus led him to despise Christianity, of course.  He concluded that “scientifically,” religious belief correlated with mental deficiency or emotional immaturity.  This attitude has taken hold of our culture and legal system.  Yet Freud was concerned about loosing the boundaries that Christianity provided to restrain the dark and violent tendencies in man.  His alternative?  Psychoanalysis!  A professional class of psychologists will surely guide mankind toward a golden age.

Wilhelm Reich’s writings in the 1930s combined ideas from Marx and Freud to argue for abolishing the nuclear family to enable political liberation.  Reich argued that the family is the totalitarian state in miniature, producing compliant youth.  Reich was trying to explain the rise of Fascism and Nazism.  At the core of Reich’s strategy was sex education and sexual freedom for children.  Parents were enemies and obstacles to overcome.  The state should be used to punish parents who resist.

In the 1960s Herbert Marcuse encouraged ‘free love’ and ‘untrammeled sexual experimentation’ as vital factors in the revolutionary liberation of society.  Marcuse equated sexual freedom with political freedom and sought to shatter the heterosexual norms.  Marcuse saw the need for speech to be regulated to foster the right political consciousness across society and to insure proper outcomes.  Bad words and bad ideas inflict psychological damage and oppression, so the language must be deconstructed.  Only the elites on the Left are qualified to make such changes.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s companion, Simone de Beauvoir, published her text on feminist theory, The Second Sex, in 1949.  She laid the foundation for the trans movement when she wrote, “The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such.”  The body itself is less important.  Now, the medical establishment pretends they can use technology to transform the body from male to female or vice versa.  It’s a crude con.

Trueman cites Joanne Herman who asks why so many who claim to be trans seek surgery and hormone treatments.  If gender is merely a social construct, then the body is not important for gender identity.  I would extend the thought:  Why not insist the medical establishment guarantee full functionality and performance in the new physical gender?  Let an impartial panel judge whether they can measure any differences between your new body and one born in that physical gender.  Let the guarantee be indemnified by a ten million dollar bond, because if the transition fails, a life is wrecked . . . as many indeed do testify.

The famous feminist Germaine Greer, in The Female Eunuch (1971) wrote, “No so-called sex change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight.”  And then, Trueman observes, there is menstruation and pregnancy.  Trueman reports that Greer believes that men who claim they have transitioned to women are simply trying to conform themselves to what they, as males, think women should be.  Is not this the ultimate in mansplaining?

From the Christian / biblical / reality point of view, cleaving gender from sex or expanding the definition of marriage is to deny and destroy what God wired into the world.  Beneath the political and cultural battles is a spiritual war waged by a relentless enemy – Satan.  Christians should grieve for those duped by the culture into gender dysphoria.  It’s become a ‘fad’ amplified by social media and a complicit educational establishment, although the word ‘fad’ seems too trivial for the human tragedies sweeping the West.

The only answer for individuals who have been caught up in these social movements and Satanic ideologies is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Repentance and trust in the Savior generates the new birth, a truly transformed spiritual creature, who can tap God’s strength and power to live a constructive and fruitful life.  If you’re a Christian who has been obedient to share the Gospel regularly, consistently, then keep at it, graciously and boldly.  You may just save a soul and a life.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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187. The Miraculous Cell
October 1, 2023

About one-fifth of the atoms of the Periodic Table are vitally employed in life, specifically in the machinery of the cell.  The “mutual fitness” of these atoms, “provides more convincing evidence of design in nature and purpose in the universe.”  Michael Denton, in his 2020 book, The Miracle of the Cell, views the fine tuning of the design of carbon and the other key elements as “irresistible” evidence that the fundamental atomic building blocks of the universe were contrived to enable life.

Michael Denton is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, a nexus for the Intelligent Design movement, and holds the PhD in biochemistry.  I have essayed previously on two of his previous books, Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis and Natures’s Destiny.  The Miracle of the Cell is a marvelous exposition of some of the technological wonders of cellular life and would be a worthy addition to your personal library.  A cautionary note, though, which I’ll amplify at the end of this essay:  Denton is not a biblical creationist; rather, he is firmly ensconced in the ID camp.  Accordingly, he wobbles in his conclusions, rather than decisively identifying the Designer of life as the Lord Jesus Christ.  Converting the reader to support for ID is woefully short of saving a soul.  Clearly, Denton has not experienced this salvation himself.  But let’s pull some nuggets from this scientifically illuminating book!

Denton cites Erica Hayden who writes in the journal Nature about how research continues to reveal layers of complexity in the design of life:  “Delving into it has been like zooming into a Mandelbrot set . . . that reveals ever more intricate patterns as one peers closer at its boundary.”

Denton himself observes that life’s complexity is akin to a third realm of infinity, the first as the infinite reaches of the cosmos, and the second as the realm of the infinitely small subatomic realm.  As for a third realm:  “The cell feels infinitely complex.”

The basic design of the cell is adapted to a seemingly infinite variety of functions.  Consider, he suggests, contrasting a neuron with a red blood cell, a liver cell with a skin cell, a leukocyte with a muscle cell.  All fill vital functions within the human body, which is a coordinated complex of about 100 trillion cells.  Cells build humans and whales and butterflies and redwoods.  But then we find a vast diversity of independent, single-celled protozoans and radiolarians – look up photos of these creatures and the shells they produce.

Cellular movement is diverse, too.  Some travel via their flagellum’s propeller-like action, a system far superior to any human technology.  Some move via cilia action.  Some crawl and some exude pseudopedia to grab onto objects in their path.  Some have internal clocks and some can usefully sense electric or magnetic fields or chemical signals.  All can replicate, a technological feat also far beyond human tech.

Cells are not stupid.  Observing amoebas, behaviorist Herbert Jennings commented, “If Amoeba were a large animal . . . its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog.”  Jennings wondered whether the amoeba might just be sentient.

The ultimate building blocks for cellular design are atoms, of course.  Carbon stands alone in its capacity to form a vast array of complex organic compounds with diversely useful properties.  The number of known carbon compounds is about ten million, far more than the total of all other non-carbon compounds.

The strength of carbon bonds is ‘just right.’  The bond must be strong enough to survive molecular collisions, but must be weak enough to allow enzymes to deform and break the bond during cellular processes.  The careful control and regulation of chemical processes within the cell enables life.  In short, biochemistry is possible because carbon compounds are uniquely metastable in the temperature range of life.  No other atom compares.

The key structural components of life, like amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars, involving many types of atoms, employ covalent bonds, the sharing of electrons.  Yet the higher-order structure of proteins (how they fold into 3-D shapes) and DNA (the double-helix), depend on van der Waals forces, electrostatic interactions about ten to twenty times weaker than covalent bonds.  Especially in DNA, this ‘weakness’ is vital to allow the strands to separate during replication and transcription, and then to reattach afterwards . . . and all very quickly!

This principle of optimal weakness also applies to the attachment of an enzyme to its substrate.  Enzymes enable the hundreds of specialized metabolic reactions to occur quickly at body temperatures.  Enzymes speed up metabolic reactions by factors of millions to trillions.  Namely, the reactions of life could not occur without just the right structure and just the right weak-bond interactions.

Denton notes that if the weak bonds were just ten times stronger, then the biochemistry essential to cellular life would be impossible.  But they can’t be much weaker without being disrupted by simple molecular collisions.

Carbon works together with hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to form cell membrances and to fold proteins.  The charge asymmetry of oxygen-hydrogen bonds leads to the hydrophobic (water-fearing) force, both to clump hydrocarbons into membranes and to clump particular amino acids into the center of protein molecules, determining the functional shape of the protein.  Alternatively, the symmetry of carbon-hydrogen bonds gives long hydrocarbon chains their hydrophobic, water-avoiding behavior.

Cell membranes are electrical insulators, and so a charge can be built up across the membrane.  This enables the transmission of nerve impulses along the axons of neurons (nerve cells).  Nerve impulse speeds up to one hundred meters per second involve the sudden influx of millions of sodium ions (Na+) into a cell in less than a millisecond.  The precise values of the charges and insulating potentials of these systems enable the very possibility of large beings like ourselves.  Typing, playing the piano, judo . . . we couldn’t do these things without extremely efficient intercellular communication systems.

Life is a continual process of acquiring energy, storing energy, and using energy for a wide variety of tasks.  The ATP molecule (adenosine triphosphate) plays the central role.  An early researcher wrote, “It is no exaggeration to say ‘without phosphorus:  no life.’”

Denton explains that the phosphate bond’s energy levels are well-matched to enable cellular chemical processes.  He cites Rob Phillips, who likens ATP to a 20 dollar bill.  Spending cash in $100 increments is clumsy because the bill is hard to break.  Spending $1 bills is annoying because it takes so many of them to buy something useful.

Unfortunately, Denton then pays homage to evolution – “In four billion years of evolution, the many forms of life on Earth have repeatedly testified to what chemists have recently affirmed:  phosphate radicals are the best means of storing and transferring energy for the activities of the cell.”  Idiot.  What evidence does Denton have that evolution ever happened?  He invests his authorship in several books that scream design, but then he doesn’t want to be so controversial as to avoid kneeling at Darwin’s feet, after all.  Yuk.

Back to the good stuff . . . ATP is synthesized by using food energy to pump protons across cell membranes.  Denton cites Nick Lane who describes just one part of the process:  “Protons are passed from one water molecule to another through dynamic clefts, opening and closing in swift succession, a perilous route through the protein that slams closed instantly after the passage of the proton, preventing its retreat. . . . All that power, all that ingenuity, all the vast protein structures, all of that is dedicated to pumping protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane.”  Each cell has these mitochondria, power plants to drive the energy-demanding processes of the rest of the cell.  Our 40 trillion cells hold about a quadrillion mitochondria, with a total surface area equal to about four football fields.  About 10²¹ protons are pumped across these membranes every second, nearly as many protons as there are stars in the universe.

Perhaps not taught in high school biology is the importance of metal ions in cellular life.  About 1/3 of all enzymes employ a metal ion in an essential way.  Iron and copper are part of ATP synthesis.  In respiration, iron atoms are used to bind oxygen to hemoglobin, allowing us to breathe.  Some metal ions are used in a chain to draw electrons along, as if on a wire, to enable other processes.  The spacing of the ions is critical, typically 15 Angstroms apart so electrons can hop from one ion to another without getting lost.  (Lost electrons produce unwanted negative ions which can damage the cell.)

Denton cites Robert Williams and J.J.R. Frausto da Silva:  “Man makes his wires from metals such as copper; biology makes hop conductors from metal ions embedded in proteins.”

We know of at least ten different metal atoms essential to life, and therefore essential parts of your diet:  sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc.

Sodium and potassium bind weakly and so are mobile and can move to maintain charge balance across membranes.  Their mobility is also unmatched to enable nerve impulse transmissions.  Magnesium is a key part of chlorophyll, which converts photons from sunlight into energy for plant metabolism.  Peter Atkins:  “Without chlorophyll, the world would be a damp warm rock instead of the softly green haven of life that we know, for chlorophyll holds its magnesium eye to the sun and captures the energy of sunlight, in the first step of photosynthesis.”

I recently watched a debate between atheist Peter Atkins and John Lennox on the existence of God.  To so appreciate the brilliance of creation and yet to deny the Creator . . . how foolish!

Denton states that the reversible binding we see in the attachment of oxygen to hemoglobin (when we breathe) “is close to a miracle.”  Indeed.  When you look superficially at the structures and process involved in binding and transporting oxygen from the lungs to all of the tissues, it might seem more complex than necessary.  The challenge, though, is that the incredibly useful oxygen atom binds tightly in its compounds.  To extract oxygen, for example, from H₂O, CO₂, or Fe₂O₃ (iron oxide), requires extreme physical or chemical procedures.  Whereas oxygen is bound delicately to hemoglobin and then “comes off effortlessly in the tissues merely because of a drop in the concentration of O₂ molecules.”  And so we can breathe.

I’ll note that the hemoglobin protein (like any protein molecule) is ridiculously too complex to arise from random, spontaneous chemistry . . . even if you filled the universe with amino acids and bound them repeatedly and rapidly in chains, desperately hoping to hit on the right sequence.  Similarly, any protein is far too complex to arise from random mutations from one generation to another, no matter how many billions or trillions of years you imagine the age of the universe to be.  Evolution, therefore, is sunk without a trace.  (See my book on Creation / Evolution in the free ebookstore on this site.)

Molybdenum is part of four key enzymes in our bodies.  It’s also part of the enzyme nitrogenase which ‘fixes’ nitrogen in the soil for plants to use.  Nitrogenase breaks the N₂ bond in atmospheric nitrogen, resulting in ammonia, NH₃.  That’s fertilizer!

The different metal atoms are designed for different, but vital cellular processes.  God designed the elements of the Periodic Table specifically with life in mind.

Denton makes the case that the most staggeringly complex process in creation is the development of the human embryo, as cells divide and relocate, sensing each other and communicating electrically and chemically.  This involves precisely timed expression of particular genes and “exquisitely ordered movements of actin filaments, molecular motors, and microtubules, which act together to generate continual changes in the cells’ architecture.”  At the end of the process we see neurons, red blood cells, photoreceptors, muscle cells, etc., all arranged into tissues and organized into a single fully functional creature.

Construction of a supercomputer is trivial in comparison.  For one thing, your growth from fertilized egg to adult human did not require continuous intelligent oversight and hands-on craftmanship.  The awesomely brilliant intelligent design and craftmanship was ‘programmed in’ way back in Genesis chapter 1.  Also, life is integrated nanotechnology, far advanced from the microtechnology of human-designed high tech.

There are innumerable other design issues for life.  The size of cells, the maximum possible size, is constrained by the diffusion rate of molecules in water.  (We are made mostly of water by weight.)   Oxygen, for example, diffuses quickly (enough) in cells, but if the cells were larger, it wouldn’t work at all.  Diffusion times increase with the square of the distance, and required quantities with the cube.  And so the physics of diffusion tightly constrains cell design.  “If diffusion rates were ten times less than they are, then maintaining the same oxygen consumption would required the volume of a roughly spherical cell to shrink by a thousand-fold.”  A much tinier cell could not contain all the other necessary machinery.

Denton spends some time talking about the uniqueness of water, the solvent which enables the interaction of the huge number of biomolecules that are essential to life.  Water is such a good solvent that it is very difficult to find pure samples and it takes considerable effort to artificially produce pure quantities.  No other liquid comes close to water’s performance as a universal solvent.

And yet, oil and water don’t mix.  Oil forms a layer on the surface of water.  Oils have long hydrocarbon chains, electrically non-polar – electrons are distributed uniformly so that you don’t have ‘hot’ positively or negatively charged regions around the neutral molecule.  Accordingly, water molecules don’t bond; rather, they ‘bead’ away.  This exception to water’s solvent skills enables membranes to form and proteins to fold.  Perfect exceptions!

Something I had not run across before . . . Proton pumping for cellular energetics makes use of water’s hydrogen-bonding character – adjacent water molecules tend to line up, the hydrogen side of one (positive) attracted to the oxygen side of the next (negative).  Whereas electrons have to move physically to transport themselves, a proton attaches to one end of a water-based ‘proton wire,’ and in a split second, each of the hydrogen bonds spin in sequence and a proton drops off the water molecule at the other end of the ‘wire.’  The initial proton has not traveled, but its charge and energy have been transferred off the other end.

As Denton works his way toward philosophical conclusions, he admits, “The origin of life remains as arguably the biggest unsolved problem in science.”  That is only because he and those committed to materialistic / atheistic evolution reject the eyewitness account of the Creator himself in Genesis.  I would rather insist that science, with vast theoretical constructs and enormous resources invested in chemical and physical experiments, has proven that life cannot arise without top-down design and omnipotent creative action.  It is obvious and even axiomatic that information can be produced only by the action of a mind.  Life is the ultimate example of information, coded not just in the DNA of billions of living creatures, but also in the 3-D structure of specialized cells and the incredibly complex machinery wired into cell membranes . . . the latter two systems coding more information than is found in DNA.  But I’ve already written much on this for this site.

Denton confesses his own position:  “. . . there are new laws, or novel properties of matter yet to be discovered, which enabled the path from chemistry to the cell.”  But this is just blind faith, a blind faith that says that we don’t understand the science of chemistry much at all.  Baloney.  We do understand chemistry and mechanics extremely well, well enough to know definitely that the complex systems in life’s nanotech machines require design.  You’ve got to be very stubborn to deny what is so obvious.

Denton cites Robert Shapiro, who has researched and written much on the supposed naturalistic origin of life:  “Self-replicating systems capable of Darwinian evolution appear too complex to have arisen suddenly from a prebiotic soup.  This conclusion applies to both nucleic acid systems and to hypothetical protein-based genetic systems.  Another evolutionary principle is needed to take us across the gap from mixtures of simple natural chemicals to the first effective replicator.”

Denton cites several other atheistic evolutionary scientists who profess a blind hope to discover entirely new physical principles.  Namely, that all we know about the relevant science must be trashed.

Interestingly, he cites a paper by a team led by Tommaso Bellini that characterizes the traditional Darwinian ideas as “fantastic luck theories.”  (I’ll note that Darwinism is not presented to school kids as a “fantastic luck theory.”)  Their hope is that something mysterious is woven into the deep structure of Nature (yes, they capitalize ‘Nature’).

Anything but God will do.

Denton does allow for some vague possibility of God when he concludes, “Only someone committed to rejecting out of hand all evidence of teleology (purpose) in nature could fail to see in these ensembles of fitness and in this elegent parsimony evidence of design.”

He also concludes, naively, that if “it is eventually established that there is no natural path across the great gulf from non-life to life, and that only the additional exertion of an intelligent agent could have assembled the first cell on Earth, that will be equally a watershed in human thought.”

The satanic, atheistic worldview will never admit there is no way to explain life without God.  Fellows like Denton are already doing just that when they dream of a physics and chemistry yet undiscovered.  No, the evidence is already in.

Rather than start with science, which requires and therefore is built atop rationality and personhood – namely, we humans are more than just clods of molecules and our thoughts are more than just materialistic brain chemistry – we should start with the Bible and see if that makes sense of biology, geology, astronomy, and the human experience which includes logic, rationality, integrity, love, and other aspects of nonmaterial personhood.

Indeed, it does.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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188. The Air We Breathe
November 1, 2023

For many generations now, most people share a common understanding of concepts like humanity, history, freedom, progress, kindness, and equality.  These concepts are grounded in the Christian worldview, although they are embraced by most non-Christians, too.

This is the thesis of Glen Scrivener’s 2022 book, The Air We Breathe:  Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality.

For example, equality:  For most of human history, rigid moral hierarchies (with graded privileges) were the norm.  Now we want to root out inequalities everywhere.

Compassion for the poor or disabled was once considered to be weakness, but now a virtue.  Consent (sexually) used to be irrelevant.  Powerful men possessed those whom they pleased; now, that’s abuse.  Education was a luxury, now a necessity.  Freedom has historically been for the privileged few, with slavery widespread and multitudes restricted by class.  Freedom now is an unalienable right.

Scrivener:  “An older goldfish swishes past a couple of small fry.  “How’s the water, boys?” he enquires.  “Water,” they ask.  “What’s water?”

In the West, the author argues, Christianity is the water in which we swim, or rather, Christianity is the air we breathe, unseen and all-pervasive.  Our values, our goals, our hopes and dreams, have been distinctively shaped or at least influenced by what Jesus of Nazareth did, and continues to do through His followers.

Even if someone is not a Christian, in the West he is constrained by the Christian view of equality:  each individual has equal moral standing, regardless of race, gender, wealth, etc.  This is a Christian view grounded in man’s creation in the image of God.  Men, women, slaves, free, rich, poor . . . we all stand accountable before God in need of salvation through Jesus Christ.  As sinners, our attitudes should begin with humility.

Joseph Henrich coined the acronym W.E.I.R.D. to describe modern Western values:  Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.  The roots are Christian.  Most of the world, through most of history would heartily agree that ‘weird’ is the right term.

Consider the roots of the Gospel.  We see the cross as a symbol of redemption and salvation even for the lowly.  Its inventors, though, the Romans, saw the cross as degradation, worthlessness, torture, and unrecoverable loss.  Tacitus called it “the extreme penalty.”  The crucified body was tossed away as garbage, to be eaten by dogs and birds.

Crucifixions were public spectacles, like hangings were in more recent eras.  Crucifixions were offered as ‘half-time’ entertainment in gladiatorial games.  A crucifixion was an ‘un-person-ing’ and a warning:  Do not go the way of this wretch.

A Gospel – “good news” – that put the Creator on a cross willingly, guiltless, sinless, and as a substitute for our justly deserved judgment . . . that was ridiculous, foolish, as Paul put it.  That each of us, then and now, deserved what Jesus suffered – and more because the wrath of God was more than physical – required awesome humility and repentance.  Every sinner must see his just reward as on the cross that the Lord Jesus took in our place.  Righteousness could only be imputed, it could not be earned.  This was incredibly radical stuff!

In a typical Roman’s eyes, or to most of the Greeks on Mars Hill, Christ was necessarily a loser, “his worshippers fools and his religion a perversity.  If Roman citizens could not bear to have the name of the cross on their lips, what sort of God would show up as its victim?”

On the matter of justice, Scrivener observes, ancients believed that justice was the enforcement of inequality.  Of course the nobles and the wealthy should not be held accountable to the same standards as the peasants and the slaves!  This is precisely the reverse of our modern concept of justice, which derives from our moral equality under God’s laws.

Slavery in ancient times was woven into the economy, politics, and religion.  But the New Testament equates slave and free in God’s eyes, and in each other’s eyes, too.  Over the next few centuries after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, minds and hearts changed, cultures changed, everything changed.  Yes, history is still messy and ‘Christianity’ was warped and derailed in many ways . . . it still is . . . but the moral air we breathe has been transformed dramatically.

As Scrivener relates, “Now the idea of humble sacrifice has gone from shameful to glorious.  Now we consider equality, compassion, freedom, and all the WEIRD values this book explores as obvious.”

During COVID, former UK Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption declared, “I don’t accept that all lives are of equal value.”  It was a TV debate regarding the damage lockdowns would do to the young, in contrast with the elderly’s risk to viral exposure.  Well, outrage ensued.   “Who are you to put a value on life?” asked an opponent.

Now, if Plato had heard Sumption’s declaration, he might have thought, “Just what is the debate about exactly?”  The father of Western philosophy would think it trivially obvious that lives are of unequal value.  Women, men, Greeks, barbarians, free, slaves, rich, poor, wise, foolish . . . of course some are more valuable than others and so should enjoy proportionate privileges!

Logically, from a secular viewpoint, you can make a strong case for Plato’s view.  Only under the Christian perspective, with each man, woman, child, slave, etc., made an eternal soul in the image of God, is equality of a life’s value a moral imperative.

Scrivener:  “What we see are differences.  What we seek is equality.”  But you cannot find the equality your conscience yearns for in DNA sequences or IQ tests, or in anything physically measurable.

How are we to be valued?  By the chemicals that comprise our bodies?  By our projected life’s wages?  We know that our worth must transcend the physical, the economic.  We know this because God, the God described in the Bible, is real and is the Personal Foundation for our present being and for our eternity.  It is frankly impossible for one to imagine how he might cease to exist some day.  No, we know that we are souls that transcend our fragile bodies and we yearn for our heavenly Father to welcome us home.  At age 71, such thoughts rise in poignancy.

Ancients would choke on the idea that male and female are both and equally made in God’s image, and will reign in God’s restored world.  Maybe a king might be so destined.  But a peasant (born again) in India?  A factory worker (born again) in Milwaukee?  Indeed.

On the other hand, consider our accountability.  Our world is messed up and deteriorating rapidly.  The Bible is clear – that’s our fault!  Our willful and heinous sins, from Adam to you and me, are the root cause of Earth’s fallenness, the earthquakes and hurricanes, the diseases and wars, the crimes and the broken families.  We are to blame . . . but . . . God delivered the Gospel, the ultimate good news, for sinners, from Adam to you and me.  Upon individual and willful repentance and faith in Jesus, we are reborn into God’s family, and He is preparing a new home for us, New Jerusalem, and eventually a New Earth for us to enjoy dominion over, ‘wherein dwelleth righteousness.’

Regarding the air of compassion, Plato and Aristotle believed that defective newborns should be abandoned in garbage dumps or drowned in rivers.  Infanticide was legal under Roman law.  The oldest known treatise on gynaecology included a section, “How to Recognize the Newborn that is Worth Rearing.”  If not, expose it to die in the elements and try again.

Why so harsh?  Raising a disabled child was inconvenient.  This, of course, is the dominant reason for abortion, then and now.  With ultrasound and other techniques, it is more convenient than ever to opt for abortion.  It is the Christian worldview that fights against the murder of the unborn.  Note that the most wicked activists and politicians in this country work to legalize the slaughter of infants if they survive an attempted abortion.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) explained the worldview connection:  “Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.”  I get it.  If evolution is how we got here, if matter is everything, if God is not there and we are not souls but merely clods of matter in motion, then choose convenience.

Nietzsche again:  “Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life.”  So, Christianity is the enemy of ruthless convenience.  Well, thank you, Friedrich.  We affirm your accusation.

In the Roman world, John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world . . .” – was strange, ridiculous.  That God would send His Son as a sacrifice . . . crazy.  That’s why Paul calls the Gospel foolishness to his culture.  The Romans already had a ‘son of God.’  Caesar Augustus, their emperor, was also called ‘Lord,’ ‘Saviour of the world.’  Julius Caesar’s claims to divinity included killing a million Gauls and enslaving another million.  Caesar boasted about that; it was evidence of his godhood.

Yet the Christians proclaimed that the essence of God’s love was God’s son on a Roman cross, with arms outstretched to His enemies, offering forgiveness.  Jesus came to serve, not to rule . . . not the first time, that is.  But He will judge and rule when He returns.

Now, servant leadership is so common as to be a cliché.  Christian elders are termed ‘ministers,’ the equivalent of ‘servants.’  In the UK, cabinet members are called ‘ministers.’

Historian William Lecky argues that the viciously bloody gladiatorial games were finally outlawed by Christian influence.  Similarly, Christians produced the end of exposing / killing infants by exercising sacrificial love to the poor, the sick, and the abandoned.  This was not simply a matter of legal victories; rather, the preaching and practice of the Gospel changed hearts, minds, and culture.

I’ll comment that most of the moral protest and efforts of American Christians in my lifetime seem to have focused on legalities.  Modern Christians have woefully neglected Gospel preaching and personal witness.  They seem, rather, to enjoy building megachurch campuses and watching the show.

Scrivener turns to the issue of sexual consent.  He cites the case of predator Larry Nassar, who abused at least 265 girls over decades as team doctor for USA gymnastics.  One of his victims pleaded with the judge to impose the maximum possible sentence to send the message that the victims were worth everything.  Nassar received multiple sentences totalling 100 to 200 years.

Scrivener:  “How much is a little girl worth?  We want to answer, ‘Everything.’”

The ancients didn’t see it this way.  Once you bought a slave, you could do as you like to her, or to him.  Also, prostitution was an open, prominent industry.  “A quick visit to the nearest brothel (and they were everywhere), would set you back the price of a loaf of bread.”

Christians created the very concept of sexual abuse.  The idea would be nonsense to the freeborn Roman man, who had an unquestioned right to the bodies of lower-class women, children, slaves, and prostitutes.  It wasn’t abuse; it was merely use.

The ‘Jesus revolution’ was far different from the 1960s sexual revolution.  The latter sought to remove taboos around female sexuality.  The former imposed restrictions on men.  The 1960s said, ‘Women can be as free as men,’ while the New Testament teaches, ‘Men must be as restricted as women.’  Furthermore, social and psychological science has finally caught up with biblical morality, discovering that a faithful, lifelong, marital relationship enables better sex, better physical and mental health, a longer life, and far more happiness.

Why is this so?  God designed reality and so He gives us principles whereby we can successfully live.  Marriage joins two people whom God has joined together.  What we do with our flesh has a strong spiritual component.  It matters to God and facilitates our relationship with Him.  Casual sex and easy divorce are anathema to the reality of how God designed human beings.  1 Corinthians chapter 7 teaches a stunning mutuality and equality regarding male and female in marriage.  1 Corinthians chapter 13 defines love in a way that is totally foreign to most of the world throughout most of history, but now . . . it’s simply the air we breathe.

There is a long-documented history of the Christian roots of universities.  Oxford, for example, stood on its motto, “God is my guiding light.”  Sadly, the moral and philosophical decline of the West’s universities is due to Marxist scheming and influence that has not been sufficiently resisted.

On politics, consider the “rights” of citizens.  If individuals possess rights, then rulers cannot have unlimited powers.  The biblical principal is revealed in 2 Samuel 23:3 – “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.”  The King is neither God nor a god; rather a man, subject to God’s judgment.  Be warned, tyrant!

The modern foundations for rights-centric democracies were laid down in the Middle Ages:  separation of church and state, human rights, just war theory, just and constrained rulers, rule by law.  These concepts all have Christian roots and are not in sync with the history of those parts of the world with scant Christian influence.  Scrivener particularly points out that the so-called Enlightenment’s emphasis on man’s reason (apart from God) did not lead to freedom.  Atheism and Communism are the perpetual enemies of freedom.

The Christian roots of science, affirmed by many secular scholars, are grounded in God’s free choice.  He could have deemed planetary orbits to be triangular, for example.  There is no way the universe must be.  God’s freedom to create the world’s dynamical patterns – physical laws that we are free to discover – motivates our desire to explore.  Philosophers of science use terms like “intelligibility” and “comprehensibility” to marvel at the fact that we are actually able to figure out the patterns; for example, the inverse-squared law for gravitational and electromagnetic forces.

Because we believe that God is not capricious (as opposed to Islam), we anticipate order in the universe, so that orbits work the same today as they did thousands of years ago, and that hydrogen spectra have the same physical cause in a far away galaxy as they do in a laboratory in Albuquerque.  Albert Einstein:  “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility . . .The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”

God, indeed, designed our brains so that we could explore His works and glorify Him.  Psalm 104:31 – “The glory of the Lord shall endure forever:  the Lord shall rejoice in his works.”  And God wants us to share in appreciating His works.  Cats, dogs, and chimps cannot so share.  If evolution were true, and we are mere survival machines, our truth-seeking abilities would be suspect . . . and we would not have the innate capacity to doubt our own conclusions.  (Doubt, testing, and verification are logical and essential elements of science.)  Scrivener observes that properly done science must take human fallibility, including agendas and biases, into account.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman insisted that the first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.  Then there are the disastrous ‘science’ fiascoes of the COVID experience, including the rush to develop dangerous vaccines without adequate testing, the deliberate lies of scientists in public health organizations, and the suppression of data regarding masking, natural immunity, and adverse vaccine reactions . . . which continue to this day.

Why is there moral outrage about phony, life-threatening science?  On a Christian worldview, outrage is appropriate.  To the Marxist, or Nietzschean, or wokist, though, truth is defined by the established narrative; it’s all about power.

The modern heroes of science (such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton) loved God and yearned to discover His mighty works.  They believed science was possible because God was the Creator of all.  Newton, for example:  “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an Intelligent Powerful Being.”  Despite the world’s complexity, they believed that God created the human mind fit for the task of understanding God’s works.

On liberty . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  (Declaration of Independence, 1776.)

Considering the history of the world, to claim that equality and human rights are “self-evident” is audacious.  This truth is resonant only to the heart, mind, and conscience tuned to a biblical worldview.  Ancient civilizations knew nothing of the kind.  Scrivener suggests that slavery is a stronger candidate for a universal ground to civilization.  “Rights are weird,” he notes, “nonsense on steroids,” as characterized by philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

The source and ground for the idea of unalienable rights is the Christian faith, specifically that we are all souls made in God’s image, and stand equally before Him, both accountable and redeemable, via perfectly equal standards.

What about slavery?  “Abolition was not an Enlightenment movement.”  It was entirely a Christian initiative, both in England and in the U.S. in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  How ironic is it that the leftists in the West, who damn our history of slavery (as do we), especially hate Christianity, the source and bulwark of human freedom?  But modern Marxists (or wokists) are either genuine or practical atheists, with no moral ground at all to criticize slavery . . . and no motivation to fight for freedom, either, as shown horrifically in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Soviet empire, and yet today in China, North Korea, and Cuba.

On progress . . . In ancient cultures the past was seen as better than the present.  In the past resided heroes and gods.  The only way forward to the ancient Greeks was down, although it was possible that we might cycle around again.  The Hindu grand narrative invokes cycles going back into eternity.

The Bible, however, portrays an arrow pointing onwards and upwards through history, with unique events enroute, such as the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, the coming of the Messiah, and above all, the 2^nd coming of Christ and a New Heaven and a New Earth in our future.

The Marxist (or wokist) strives to establish utopia on Earth, administered, of course, by their own privileged elites.  Urban America is presently suffering the consequences.  “Progressives” have a truly dark vision of a godless, secular future.  Their attempts at utopia since the beginning of the 20^th century have resulted in the misery and deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.  Do they admit error?  No.  Adolf Hitler was once asked what was the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity.

His answer did not include his own rise to power.  Rather, he opined, “The coming of Christianity.”  Continuing, “This filthy reptile [Christianity] raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on.  We have no use for a fairy story invented by the Jews.”

This sentiment is still shared by Marxists, wokists, academics, and corporate elites.

What was the basis for the judgments in the trials at Nuremberg (1945-46)?  Why did the Allies insist on prosecuting the Nazi leaders for their atrocities in WW2?  Didn’t the Germans have their own culture?  Aren’t all cultures equally valid?  Doesn’t might make right?  What standard could be used for judgment?

The Nazis were prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.”  But “humanity” was present on all sides of every issue.  Some humans ruthlessly gassed the Jews and some, at great risk, hid and rescued them.  Humans both lost the war and won the war.  Himmler, a defendant, stated that he was “but a part of this world.”  Goebbels admitted that the Jew is a man, but the flea is also an animal.  To the evolutionist there is no intrinsic moral difference between man and flea.

In short, there is no transcendent justice to condemn Nazism, unless you are immersed in the atmosphere of Christianity.  The Allies couldn’t go so far as to invoke God, but their moral outrage relied on the Western public’s acceptance of biblical morality.  The Allies depended on the air we breathe.

Progress is doomed to disintegrate, according to biblical prophecy, during the Tribulation, under the rule of the Antichrist.  But progress will reignite when Jesus returns.  Can’t wait.

Hopefully, we’re  close.  Under modernism and postmodernism, it was understood that, as the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “without God . . . all things are permitted.”

Now, under post-postmodernism, anti-Christians have discovered that they love preaching, they love moralizing, they love finger-wagging.  Accordingly, the most virulent judgmentalists are the woke cancel-culture sociopaths.  Social media magnifies and supercharges outrage.  Getting offended gives many a cheap high.  And they want everyone to know just how angry they are!  The world is now filled with woke evangelists.

Scrivener observes that the heart of this new zealotry lacks what Christianity features – above all:  forgiveness.  Sin against almighty God and forgiveness is immediately available via humility and confession.  Offend a Christian and the true Christian is obligated to forgive you, even unto seventy times seven.  Offend a wokist, though, and you’re doomed for life.  Who wants to live in that world?

Psalm 130:3 . . . If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?

 God is omniscient and eternal, yet He promises to forget sins when we repent.  Psalm 103:12 . . . As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

Scrivener has much more to say.  I recommend his book.  His final advice is, To the “Won”:  Be Weird.  If you’re a genuine born again Christian, embrace it.  You’re on the (future) winning side of history.  As for today, and every day, be a witness, speak up, be salt, be light, share some Gospel truth, hand out a tract . . . even if you get some grief.  Your Lord will appreciate it.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

 

 

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189. Intellectuals
December 1, 2023

We live in a nasty, uncivil culture, don’t we?  Reason, logic, and evidence have become irrelevant in public policy, subordinated to whatever it takes to gain and to hold power.  If you have been slammed by cancel culture, there is no point in apologizing for your supposed offense – forgiveness is not available.

We find ourselves, perhaps, at the end of cultural history, where critical theory, including specific branches like critical race theory, permeate the educational, entertainment, political, and even business power centers.  Critical theory, of course, is all about tearing down long-held principles and institutions, including the family, rule by law, freedom of speech, sexual morality, and everything associated with biblical Christianity.

Karl Marx laid much groundwork for the present chaos.  This was his doctrine for the use of criticism:  “Its essential sentiment is indignation; its essential activity is denunciation.”  How enthusiastically has our present generation embraced this doctrine!  Why go to the trouble of weaving evidence and logic to make your point when you can simply vilify and cancel those you disagree with?  The lockdowns and vaccine mandates in recent years were well-greased with indignation and denunciation.  This is how tyranny works.

Tyrants, therefore, need not be intelligent, but merely find it useful to be unconstrained by anything resembling biblical morality.  The elites know best, so whatever it takes to control the masses, that’s good.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18^th century French ‘intellectual,’ likened the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.”  Karl Marx insisted, “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”  Namely, they only mattered if they fulfilled his communist vision.  George Bernard Shaw suggested the working classes were “detestable people” who “have no right to live.”  Recall that Hillary Clinton called us “deplorables.”

Mussolini, a darling of the left and its ‘intellectuals’ until well into the 1930s, opined, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”  Only after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and teamed up with Adolf Hitler, did the left disavow Mussolini and labeled him as on “the right.”

These last few examples are cited by Thomas Sowell in his wonderful 2011 book, Intellectuals and Society.  Here’s a hint:  he doesn’t like intellectuals.  He applies the T.S. Eliot quote:  “Half of the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important.  They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them.  Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

Sowell describes the consequences of the environmental crusade to outlaw use of DDT because of the potential danger to the eggs of some songbirds.  During the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, DDT had drastically reduced the mosquito populations that fostered malaria.  Banning DDT then produced a resurgence of malaria that cost millions of lives, “even in countries where the disease had been all but eradicated.  Rachel Carson may have been responsible for more deaths of human beings than anyone without an army.  Yet she remains a revered figure among environmental crusaders.”

What is an intellectual?  Sowell defines this as someone whose occupation deals primarily with ideas – “writers, academics, and the like.”  Not brain surgeons or engineers, despite the training and demanding mental skills involved.  Surgeons, engineers, physicists, and other such professionals apply their mental skills to discover how things work, or to actually make things work.  Intellectuals don’t have to live with the consequences of the ideas they promote.

Intellectuals, notes Sowell, desire power regardless of how little knowledge or accomplishment they can demonstrate.  Effectively, they want to transfer decision-making from the masses to themselves.  Recent examples include our government’s war on fossil fuels, mandates to replace ICEs with EVs, and establishing speech codes on campuses and within workplaces.  An impressive historical example Sowell cites is the case of the Soviet Union’s central planners, who set prices for 24 million goods and services, without any possible understanding of the relative scarcities or costs.  While impossible for central planners to avoid disasters in exercising such authority, the task is quite manageable for market economies in which millions of individuals are experts in tracking and evaluating the relatively few prices important to them.

In brief, the masses of a market economy are far wiser than the intellectuals at the top of a socialist scheme.

To be fair, Sowell admits, “Intellectuals are often extraordinary within their own specialties – but so too are chess grandmasters, musical prodigies, and many others.”  Yet these other ‘specialists’ would not dare to imagine that they should pontificate to or direct a whole society.

Sowell:  “Everything from economic central planning to environmentalism epitomizes the belief that third party elites know best and should be empowered to over-ride the decisions of others.”

Sowell relates the obvious when he writes that the most knowledgeable person on Earth has less that one percent of a society’s useful knowledge.  A member of the intellectual elite may have more knowledge per capita, which tempts some to demand the right to lead or to direct others.  But “the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge – in the mundane sense – than the elites, even if that knowledge is scattered in individually unimpressive fragments among vast numbers of people.”

The free market idea and its practice is akin to a vast analog computer, running ‘simulations’ continuously to discover what works best for billions of real people.  Free markets are quick, adaptable, resilient, and efficient.  Top-down planned economies run by arrogant intellectuals (forgive the redundancy) are not.

He mentions the particular arrogance of philosopher Simone deBeauvoir, who said, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.  Society should be totally different.  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”  I don’t know if deBeauvoir ever laid out the specifics on how to restructure families and societies and how that might work out.

The track record of intellectuals who have had their way is dismal indeed.   New and “innovative” and “exciting” educational theories in the 1960s resulted in substantially lower test scores despite much increased spending per student.  New theories on crime produced new crime waves.  (Consider in recent years how defund-the-police-and-replace-them-with-social-workers programs have destroyed urban America.)  For generations now, welfare policies supposedly intended to help black communities, have destroyed families and produced multi-generational dependence on the state.

Surgeons and engineers are judged by external standards, Sowell observes.  If the patient lives and recovers, the surgeon is good.  If the computer works efficiently or the satellite achieves orbit, the engineer is competent.  The intellectual, though – the leftist / Marxist pundit – has no external standard.  He is successful or esteemed if his fellow Marxists admire his ideas or phraseology.  If his writing is elegant or interesting, he is respected.  This was Lenin’s pedigree, by the way.  He only had a real job briefly, once in his early life.  He didn’t like it. But he loved to write progaganda rags and make speeches.

Vince Lombardi’s ideas about playing football were tested on the field.  If his teams had not won, his name would be unknown and his career would have been short.  Einstein’s ideas on relativity were not accepted based on plausibility or aesthetics.  They were validated in the laboratory.  But the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao “had enormous – and often lethal – impact on millions of people,” regardless of their evil or denial of reality or rejection by anyone with the freedom to do so.

Alternatively, the teachings of Jesus Christ have been tested and proven by the multitudes of those delivered from the bondage of sin, and the transformation of lives from selfishness and wickedness to virtue and benevolence.  Of course, biblical teachings are true because God wired reality and told us what truth is.  But Jesus also told us, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

Public policies across the spectrum are influenced or dictated by intellectuals who acquire power.  Pundits or politicians may express outrage at the number of shots fired by police in a confrontation with criminals, “even if many of these intellectuals have never fired a gun in their lives, much less faced life-and-death dangers requiring split-second decisions.”

A  New York City Police Dept. study found that half the shots fired by police miss completely . . . within a range of six feet!  From 50 to 75 feet, about the distance from 1^st base to 2^nd base on a Little League field, only 14% of shots hit the target.

An example from microeconomics on the cost of financial services in low-income neighborhoods:  Personal loans are often tied to short-term needs, facilitating “payday loan” businesses, which may charge $15 interest per $100 loaned . . . until payday.  On an annual basis, this interest rate is astronomical, prompting the intelligentsia to cry for an end to “exploitative” and “unconscionable” interest rates.  Accordingly, Oregon capped the annual interest rate on loans, and 75% of loan businesses closed down.  If you can charge only $1.50 for a 2-week loan of $100, you can’t make any profit, much less accept the risk of making such loans.  And so the “oppressed poor” don’t even have the opportunity for tide-over loans.

But the intellectuals feel good about themselves.

Socialists / communists tend to see economics as a zero-sum game.  Somebody has to decide how to divide the fixed pie.  But capitalism and free markets are about cooperation between capital and labor, with innovation to create wealth that would not exist otherwise.  Biblical teachings are completely consistent with the notions of private property, limited government, innovation derived from God’s gifts to individuals, and honest cooperation.

When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s, only the rich had color TVs, fat monstrosities that failed quickly; few had air conditioning, none had the internet, MRIs, electric toothbrushes, smart phones, or tablets.  How did our modern tech world come to be?  Innovation, protection of intellectual property, cooperation between sources of capital and labor, and free markets were certainly essential to progress.

What is deemed poverty now in the West would have been considered prosperity, even opulence, to previous generations.  Communist nations, on the drastically other hand, simply do not work to reduce poverty; their goal is control – violently, if required, as it often is.

Sowell cites historian Paul Johnson who notes that violence often walks hand-in-hand with the intellectual elite.  Mussolini was popular with many intellectuals, and not just Italian ones.  Hitler was singularly successful on campus, drawing votes from students at a higher rate than from the general population.  Intellectuals were drawn frequently into the upper echelons of the Nazi Party.  Stalin, Mao, and Castro had legions of intellectual admirers.  The killing fields of Cambodia were sourced in a group of French intellectuals, including teachers, a professor, a civil servant, and an economist.  In recent times, American intellectuals were quite supportive of the violent riots fostered by BLM and ANTIFA.

Interventions by ‘intellectuals’ among politicians, judges, or bureaucrats to “insure fairness” typically harm or destroy enterprise.  For example, minimum wage laws usually produce higher unemployment rates and rent control laws reduce the available housing.  There are no personal consequences for the 3^rd party intellectuals who contrive simplistic policies on how the world ‘should be.’ People directly involved in free market transactions can more easily decide what they want at what price and that influences the sellers who must work to please those desires.

Sowell contrasts the “vision of the anointed” with the “tragic vision.”  Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared, “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.”  Accordingly, the  problems in society are solvable by the morally anointed intellectual elites.  Sowell cites Thucydides on the tragic vision of human nature . . . “a human race that escaped chaos and barbarism by preserving with difficulty a thin layer of civilization,” based on “moderation and prudence” derived from experience.

I’d rather take the biblical position that we live in a sinfully fallen world and are accountable to God and His laws.  Accordingly, our institutions and policies should account for man’s sinfulness / selfishness / etc., by dispersing power and rewarding virtue.  The founding fathers were quite mindful of the biblical worldview when they established a tripartite government, along with state / federal distinctives, with a Constitution that constrained the power of government and rulers in vital ways.

Sowell writes that in the tragic vision, social and legal contrivances seek to restrict bad behavior, but these restrictions themselves cause a certain amount of unhappiness.  Professor Richard A. Epstein (U. of Chicago):  “The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections.”

In the tragic vision public policymaking always requires tradeoffs.  In the anointed vision, man is perfectable and can solve all of his problems.  (Replace police with social workers and decline to prosecute criminals because ‘man’ is good at heart and you will get more crime, lots more crime.)

One result is a perverted moral stance from the two camps.  Joseph Epstein (NY Times Magazine, 1985):  “Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope.  Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil.”

It is ironic that a generation ago, the postmodern leftists largely abhorred moral judgments, but now the woke crowd is viciously judgmental and unforgiving.  My take on Epstein’s summary is that both stereotypical camps are wrong.  The woke / communist / leftist crowd is, in fact, definitely evil, anti-Christian, anti-reality, openly antagonistic to God, the family, the Constitution, rule by law, freedom of speech . . . everything that enables physical and moral prosperity.  The conservative / ‘right’ / Republican crowd is wrong in that their opponents are not merely making pragmatic mistakes, but rather are opposing the way God wired physical and moral reality.

Testing the fruits of opposing worldviews, studies have shown that conservatives (in contrast with ‘liberals’) donate more to charity (although the average conservative income is less), donate more time as volunteers, and donate far more blood.  This result is surprising to the intelligentsia.  Anecdotally, but notably, Ronald Reagan donated more of his income to charity than did Ted Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What is called social justice is often about correcting the imbalances of fate, or life in a fallen world.  Sowell considers mental aptitude or scholastic qualification tests, which have long been under attack for not being ‘fair.’  Rather, Sowell suggests, “The tests are not unfair.  Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.”  There is a fundamental difference, Sowell reminds us, “between conveying a difference that already exists and causing a difference to exist.”  If you fail to understand this – and it seems that the intellentsia routinely do – then you cannot possibly find the root causes and help the people who suffer.

The triumph of Western civilization, especially the prosperity and freedom enjoyed over the last couple of centuries in the English speaking world, is due in part, not to social justice, but formal justice, equality before the law and “a government of laws, not of men.”  Sowell notes that formal justice has taken centuries of struggle to achieve, and cost many lives.  Formal justice is foundationally a biblical concept, grounded in God’s laws written in stone for the Israelites.

If some social justice crusade were implemented by people who actually cared to improve lives, there would be analysis and investigations to insure that negative unintended consequences do not make life worse.  As before, if minimum wage laws destroyed entry level jobs or if rent controls grossly diminished housing availability, such policies would be reversed and lessons learned would be publicized.  But if the crusade is merely to proclaim the elite on the side of the angels, then there will be no interest in evaluation; rather, investigations will be ignored or even prevented.  (Note, for example, the enormous international efforts to cover up the dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines.)

Hypocritically, and sadly, success by means other than what revolutionaries promote is despised.  Prosperity and the relative uniformity of comfortable economic benefits has been achieved in the West over the last century by means of free markets and the other attributes of Western civilization.  But Marxists give no credit, rather doubling down on efforts to magnify the power of the State and to restrict the freedom of individuals.

The intelligentsia routinely misjudge their opponents.  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was vilified in his confirmation hearings; afterward his enemies in the media wrote of him as “Washington’s most famous recluse,” apparently a friend only to his wife, the couple’s life described as “one of shared, brooding isolation.”

The reality is that Thomas is probably the most accessible and personable Justice in history.  He will notice a group of schoolchildren visiting the Court and invite them to his chambers.  He and his wife travel the country in an RV, visiting small towns and striking up conversations with all kinds of people.  He made a point of getting to know “every employee of the Court, from cafeteria cooks to the nighttime janitors.  He played hoops with the marshals and security guards . . . Thomas had an uncanny ability to recall details of an employee’s personal life.”  A prominent lawyer calls him “the most real person” among all the Justices.

Sowell has a significant chapter on how intellectuals have perverted the law; for example, as far back as 1908 the Dean of the Harvard Law School wrote of the desirability of “a living constitution by judicial interpretation.”  Dean Roscoe Pound insisted that law should reflect “social justice” (without defining it), and despite the prevailing morality of the people.  Louis Brandeis believed that judges are best suited to be the arbiters of social needs, and also used the term “social justice” without defining it.

On war, Sowell considers American President Woodrow Wilson, a lifelong academic who helped sow the seeds of World War 2, by redrawing the map of eastern Europe at the end of WW1.  He mandated the breakup of the old empires into small countries so that people could have their own homeland . . . ignoring vital elements of history, economics, demography, and military security.  His idea of rescuing oppressed minorities ignored the reality of human nature, that when they became rulers themselves, they were sure to begin oppressing other minorities.

Wilson’s famous declaration, “The world must be made safe for democracy” — Sound familiar? – generated unworkable policies that led to brutal totalitarian regimes in command of Russia, Italy, and Germany.  Wilson, along with his British counterparts, helped undermine the interim revolutionary government that replaced the Czar in Russia, leaving the field open for the Bolsheviks (Lenin, Stalin), for which the whole world suffers to this present day.

Intellectuals were largely responsible for the growth of pacifism between the wars, which enabled Germany, Japan, and Italy to get the jump on the rest of the world.  The New Statesman characterized Winston Churchill in 1931 as a mind “confined in a militaristic mould,” because he wanted to maintain the French Army and the British Navy at full strength.  Editor Kingsley Martin concluded that anyone who disagreed with the virtues of pacifism had psychological defects.

The French teachers’ unions promoted pacifism between the wars, objecting to textbooks that favorably described the French soldiers who had shed their blood to defend their homeland.  The ‘intellectual’ position was that nationalism was bad and a cause for war, but internationalism and ‘impartiality’ were good.  Nothing has changed since then.

When France surrendered to the German army in 1940, Charles Degaulle and other leaders blamed a lack of national will and general moral decay for their humiliating collapse.  Thank you, intellectuals.  Hitler, by the way, drove his nation to war against the recommendations of his generals, who knew that France had significant more military strength than did Germany.  But Hitler had analyzed the French people, and knew they would cave quickly.  Particularly, Hitler perceived that France lacked patriotism and a sense of national honor.  At that point he was more in touch with reality, enabling a shocking military victory.

The British PM, Neville Chamberlain, was criticized (before the war) by John Maynard Keynes, who said, “. . . our statesmen have lost the capacity to appear formidable.  It is in that loss that our greatest danger lies . . . our power to avoid a war depends not less than on our recovering that capacity to appear formidable, which is a quality of will and demeanour.”  Sowell goes on to describe how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and effectively broke up the Soviet Union without firing a shot.  Both Reagan and British PM Margaret Thatcher were formidable in the eyes of the Soviets.

Intellectuals who gain political power are responsible, Sowell explains, for the usual asymmetry between democratic and autocratic governments over the last century.  The intelligentsia often create a climate of opinion eager for treaties while uncritical of their specifics.  In this week’s news (as I draft this), once again there are moves by the U.S. government to establish a nuclear weapons deal with Iran, despite decades of deceit and untrustworthiness on the other side.  Sowell cites many other examples, including the cease-fire negotiated to supposedly end the Vietnam War, which was used by the Communists to complete their conquest.

Sowell, in this book, and in many other writings, has much to say about race.  He reports how the intellectuals of the early 20^th century were the driving forces behind eugenics . . . “as late as 1928, there were 376 courses devoted to eugenics” in the universities.  He quotes Professor Henry Seager of Columbia:  “We must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have proved to be undesirable,” even if that requires “isolation or sterilization.”  Today, it is the same type of people, namely ‘intellectuals,’ who are behind Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and trans surgeries for children.

I’ll close with one of Sowell’s most notable historical analyses.  The successful development, both technologically and economically, of 19^th century Japan and 18^th century Scotland, resulted from building tangible skills in engineering and medicine, for example.  In contrast, the 20^th century saw a host of 3^rd world leaders who went to college in the West to study sociology and Marxist-friendly ideologies.  The countries they went back to and led to independence then suffered economic stagnation (or worse), along with internal polarization, with politics aimed at pitting group against group.  A startling current example is the utter degradation in South Africa under the ruling party’s Marxist leaders.

So . . . ideas matter.  Worldview matters.  Truth really matters.  This world would experience enormous peace and prosperity if its people and its leaders worked to embrace biblical principles, even if they didn’t embrace the Gospel itself.  Because God wired reality, because He designed human nature and the physical environment in which we live, it simply makes sense, even for selfish reasons, to follow God’s laws . . . foster freedom, work hard, be honest and kind, treat others how you want to be treated yourself, obey lawful authorities, exercise careful stewardship over Earth’s resources, and constrain evil.  None of this is complicated, as we will find out by demonstration during the coming Millennium under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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