Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Nature By Grace

Posted on Monday, May 5, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

All right. Now it is time to bring a number of threads together.

The great American classicist Basil Gildersleeve once said that the American Civil War was fought over a point of grammar. He said that it was over whether we should say “the United States is” or “the United States are.” Other great and complicated issues can be reduced to a simple question as well. When it comes to culture wars, same sex mirage, natural law, and so on, we are really asking this: “What is the universe actually like?”

There are two basic options confronting us today. Either the cosmos was created, made, fashioned . . . or it was not. Either God spoke everything into existence from nothing, or there is no God. Eternality is an attribute of something — either the living God, or time and chance acting on matter and energy. If the former, we must do what He says. If the latter, we may do what we want.

But as it is, we are a rebellious house, and want to do what we want to do. We are a conclusion in search of a premise, and so it turns out that all respectable science testifies that Genesis is not a textbook of science, anything but that. The materialists say that Genesis is bogus, and the Christian abandoners of Genesis say that the book is crammed full of spiritual truths for your faith to believe, but you have to take care what you believe. You can’t believe everything you read. But the whole thing is a power play, seeking to drive from the field the only real alternative to their hellish vision for mankind.

Following Foucault, what these men want to do is hump the world, and they want the authority to make anything they want into an object for their lust. The first questions in their sexual catechism always have to do with sodomy, and this is why America now finds herself fiddling “with the lock on this cage of demons” (Swanson, Apostate, p. 24). Sodomy is simply perversion for beginners — anyone who thinks that we are anywhere close to being done with this foolishness is trying to make his peace with the foolishness himself. “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Prov. 27:20, ESV).

The entire rebellion is built on the foundation of a denial of creation. Evolution must be affirmed as the foundational article. There is only one process, and Darwin is its prophet. If we affirm creation — sun and moon, sea and dry land, male and female, and so forth — we are affirming that heaven and earth have set characteristics. Everything has a nature. They all came off God’s workbench, and He is a craftsman who always builds to a purpose. Everything has a telos, and it has that telos all the way down to the atoms and quarks that make it up, and all the way up to the decrees of God that set a place for every numbered hair on every human head. The Word of God cannot be broken, and there is no aimlessness anywhere.

But in the pleasure of God, the Word of God can be resisted for a time. Genesis does not just tell us that all existence came from the mouth of God, according to His purposes. It does not just tell us that everything has a nature that equips it to fulfill those purposes. Genesis also tells us that our first parents fell into sin and confusion. The created order fell together with them, and so it is that we can see that nature has a nature, and that this nature fell and is broken.

God’s redemptive purpose is to restore that created order, to restore that nature, and it is the contrary purpose of the rebels to keep it broken, and moreover, to keep on breaking it into smaller pieces. Since the trouble began with man, who opted for a broken nature to supervise his ongoing breaking of things, any redemption that is to be accomplished must be done by means of a restored nature in man.

The first Adam defected and rebelled, lost his innocence, and became, by nature, an object of wrath. The last Adam refused to defect and never rebelled, retained His righteousness, and persevered in the holiness of His nature. Because of His obedience, we are invited to participate in His nature and in Him, our broken nature is being restored.

This next point is crucial. We are not contrasting a realm of nature and a realm of grace, as though they were two different countries. We are not being invited to go live in the grace country instead of the nature country. No, we are living in the broken nature country that by His grace is being put back into the restored nature country. It will always be nature, and it will always be nature by His grace. When Jesus turned water to wine at Cana, it was natural water and natural wine. The grace was in His Word.

One last thing is essential. Because God has not abandoned us to our folly, when He intervenes in the lives of particular individuals, He grants them the new birth, which has the effect of restoring nature. The new birth does not obliterate nature, any more than a remodel project obliterates the house.

This new birth — not to be confused with the sacramental signs and seals of it — must be indefectible. This is because we are talking about a work of re-creation, and the Word of God in such contexts must accomplish what it speaks. And when it is spoken, there is no going back. Jesus told us not to set our hand to the plow, and then just turn back. When He said this, is it not plain that He never sets His hand to the plow, only to turns back? “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).

When God first spoke and said, “Let there be light,” the darkness did not say it would think about it. There was light. And this is what the new birth actually is. It is an efficacious Word from the Almighty God that cannot be resisted or undone. We are not just talking about a decree that cannot be reversed, we are talking about a light that cannot be put out.

“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

And this is why we cannot fight the forces of polymorphous perversity with arguments alone. We cannot resist it effectively with laws or referenda alone — although good arguments, righteous laws, and good referenda are to be applauded. But what must happen is that we must deploy the only thing capable of countering the seemingly inexorable forces of autonomous lust. That is the gospel of efficacious grace. We have to plead with the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest. And what will they encounter when they get there? They will find a once happy and prosperous nation, huddled immobile in the corner of a wheelchair.

“And there he found a certain man named Aeneas, which had kept his bed eight years, and was sick of the palsy. And Peter said unto him, Aeneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole: arise, and make thy bed. And he arose immediately” (Acts 9:33–34).

In our day, this would have been like Peter coming across a quadriplegic named George Washington, and telling him that Jesus Christ has made him whole. And he rose up and walked.

“And a certain man named Simon came to Peter, with silver in his hand, and saith unto him, ‘Canst thou give me this power, only without using the name of Jesus? We don’t want to put off the big money Republican donors’” (Acts 52:9).

World Views At War: Merry Warriors Needed

Sex After Christianity

Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one.

By Rod Dreher • April 11, 2013

The American Conservative

Twenty years ago, new president Bill Clinton stepped on a political landmine when he tried to fulfill a campaign promise to permit gay soldiers to serve openly. Same-sex marriage barely registered as a political cause; the country was then three years away from the Defense of Marriage Act and four years from comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s prime-time coming out.

Then came what historians will one day recall as a cultural revolution. Now we’re entering the endgame of the struggle over gay rights and the meaning of homosexuality. Conservatives have been routed, both in court and increasingly in the court of public opinion. It is commonly believed that the only reason to oppose same-sex marriage is rank bigotry or for religious reasons, neither of which—the argument goes—has any place in determining laws or public standards.

The magnitude of the defeat suffered by moral traditionalists will become ever clearer as older Americans pass from the scene. Poll after poll shows that for the young, homosexuality is normal and gay marriage is no big deal—except, of course, if one opposes it, in which case one has the approximate moral status of a segregationist in the late 1960s.

All this is, in fact, a much bigger deal than most people on both sides realize, and for a reason that eludes even ardent opponents of gay rights.
Back in 1993, a cover story in The Nation identified the gay-rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right, and though the word “cosmology” may strike readers as philosophically grandiose, its use now appears downright prophetic. The struggle for the rights of “a small and despised sexual minority” would not have succeeded if the old Christian cosmology had held: put bluntly, the gay-rights cause has succeeded precisely because the Christian cosmology has dissipated in the mind of the West. . . .

This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

. . . It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun. 

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.  Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions. . . .

By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom. 

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”  Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist Christian Smith’s research on what he has termed “moralistic therapeutic deism”—the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the normative version of the faith in contemporary America—suggests that the task will be extremely difficult.

Conservative Christians have lost the fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before anyone even thought same-sex marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.

Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.

They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America, if not American spirituality, is in mortal danger. The future is not foreordained: Taylor shares much of Rieff’s historical analysis but is more hopeful about the potential for renewal. Still, if the faith does not recover, the historical autopsy will conclude that gay marriage was not a cause but a symptom, the sign that revealed the patient’s terminal condition.

Rod Dreher blogs at www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Seven Theses on the Age of the Earth

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Friday, March 7, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

I recently came to the conclusion that it was time to set down in one place my reasons for approaching Genesis the way I do. I have noticed that the topic has become a matter of increased debate in classical Christian circles — and because schools cannot honestly stay out of it — it matters a great deal what we teach and why. So here are seven theses on the age of the earth.

1. First, the age of the earth, considered in isolation, is neither here nor there. The issue is always what God said, and not how old something is. If the earth is six thousand years old now, it will eventually be one hundred thousand years old at some point, about ninety-four thousand years from now. Will theologians at that time still be required to hold to a “young earth” view? So the issue is not age, or day, or young, or old, but rather the substance of what God actually said. Whatever He actually revealed should be what we use as the foundation for all our subsequent thought. After we have our foundation, we may incorporate truth from other sources — natural revelation included — but we must take care that we never privilege what we think we know over what God actually told us.

2. Therefore, the debate — which is most necessary — should be conducted primarily between Christians who accept the Scriptures as the absolute Word of God, perfect and infallible in all that they affirm.
This is because debate is pointless between parties who are appealing to different authorities. The fact that the debate is now being conducted with many of the participants openly saying that the Bible “has mistakes in it” tells us why we are not really getting anywhere.

3. Once we have limited the participants in this way, we have simplified things considerably. Everyone in the debate would be willing to affirm a flannel graph version of the Flood, giraffe and all, if that is what the Bible taught, and everyone in the debate would be willing to affirm a planet creaky with age, if that is what the Bible taught.

That said, the prima facie evidence for the traditional view of Genesis is very strong (historical Adam, continuous genealogies, etc.). Alternative approaches to the text, such as the framework hypothesis or the gap theory, seem like special pleading in order to make room to shoehorn in a cosmology from elsewhere. We should always smell a rat whenever someone notices an anomaly in the text (e.g. the different creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis) and someone else is immediately at your elbow with millions of years he wants to pour in.

I am not saying this because I am automatically categorizing any views contrary to my own as special pleading. One alternative view, grounded responsibly in the text, views the days in Genesis as days of revelation, which Adam was recording as God was teaching him how to write. But even this view would simply require someone to stop affirming “six-day creation,” and is not at all inconsistent with “young-earth creation.” So the prima facie evidence for the traditional view is strong enough for me to consider that the burden of proof lies with those who would question it.

4. The fossil record is a record of death. The fossil record is a graveyard. We have exegetical reasons for believing that this paleontological graveyard was planted after the fall of man. We have a time stamp for Adam in the genealogies, and because of what the Scriptures teach about the nature of death, the recorded deaths of all sentient beings needs to be dated after that point.

I exclude from this consideration the “deaths” of any permitted fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the garden, the “deaths” of the bacteria in their digestion systems, and so forth. The Bible teaches that Adam introduced death into the world (Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:21), the Bible gives us an example of the kinds of seed-creatures we are talking about, beasts, birds, fish, and man (1 Cor. 15:38-39), and the Bible teaches that the whole created order groans as it looks toward the final day of liberation (Rom. 8:22). The resurrection of the dead undoes and reverses the Fall into death, and the kinds of creatures found in fossil beds are the kinds of creatures that will be raised. When Adam fell, the creation fell also, and when the sons of God are manifested for what they are, the creation will be restored. So the dislocations that are frequently pointed to as evidence of an old earth are dislocations that Scripture teaches were brought about by the rebellion of man.

5. The next point is related. Independent of any exegetical considerations on this point, there is also a deep theological problem with the view that death antedated mankind. The Bible teaches that Adam produced death. The opposing view has to say that in some manner death produced Adam. But when God pronounced the unfallen creation “good” (Gen. 1:4; Gen. 1:10; Gen. 1:12; Gen. 1:18; Gen. 1:21; Gen. 1:25; Gen. 1:31), this would mean He was “creating” by means of millions of years of nature red in tooth and claw, with countless sentient beings suffering and dying in order to get to the place God was going.

When we describe the kind of creation that God called good, we are affirming something about His character. The view that His “good” included unimaginable suffering without any reason is an insurmountable cliff for any theodicy to climb. The problem of evil has been tough for many apologists with the reason for evil grounded in the rebellion of mankind. But if we are found to be saying that suffering, pain, and anguish are an unfallen good, then this should tie us up in knots. It should also make us a little wary of looking forward to Heaven too much. I don’t want to go to Heaven just to fall into a tar pit.

Death is an enemy (1 Cor. 15:26), and not a good tool that God took out of His good toolbox in order to fashion a good world.

6. The Lord Jesus speaks of an historical Adam easily, and in the same way that He speaks of other historical characters from the Old Testament. There is no good textual reason for dividing Genesis 1-10 from the rest of Genesis, as though the two parts were different kinds of literature. In the same way, the Lord speaks naturally of the first man and woman created at the beginning (Matt. 19:4), and He speaks of them with the same ease that He mentions Moses a few verses later (Matt. 19:8). He does the same with Noah (Matt. 24:37). There are no good reasons why we should not speak in the same way, and impelling reasons for us to insist on speaking that way under His foundational command to “follow me.”

7. I am quite prepared to make dogmatic affirmations from the text of Scripture because I believe that is one of the reasons why the text was given to us — so that we might have light in a dark place. And provided we remember what I mentioned earlier, I am also prepared to receive light from natural revelation and science, and to incorporate it into my understanding of Scripture (say, what an archeologist tells us about the location of Hezekiah’s water supply for Jerusalem).

But there is science and there is science. I am pretty confident that they have figured out the boiling point of water at sea level, and I am grateful for penicillin. But when the Authorities tell me what the temperature was at the center of a particular star, right before the supernova happened, or they entrance me with tales of wormholes, or they dazzle my eyes with string theory, my enthusiasm might be a skosh more tentative. They strike me as men who say they want to read all the works of natural revelation, but who just read the first three words of a ten-volume series, and who then slam it shut because of the need to start lecturing us creationist cornpones.

Time might be one of those complicated things. If God had only created the solar system, and there was nothing else out there, we would be able to get by with everything measured by how many trips around the sun we had taken. And the entire cosmos should be thought of the same way — if God placed it all here at one fell swoop, it does not give me heartburn to thank Him for starlight from a particular star that has no more been to that star than I have. God created the star, the earth, and the entire rope of starlight in between. That should present no more of a problem than God creating both sides of a rock at the same time.

But even on the reckoning of the astrophysicists’ bigbangery, time (about which we are speaking) should be considered complicated enough for them to stop lecturing us in simplistic terms — as though their view allows the cosmos to have one timer on whole thing. Suppose everything that exists all blew out of a volatile little pinprick, and Gabriel has had himself a blast since that time surfing the event horizon — a celestial maverick. We try to tell him that the earth was fashioned six thousand years go. Pah! he replies, singing for joy. I was there, and it has only been a minute.

It’s a Mad Materialist World

Superstition and Avatar II

Is the world ultimately personal or impersonal?  The Christian position is clear, without ambiguity.  If a hair falls from one’s head or a sparrow dies, such apparently random events are indeed ultimately personal in the sense that they are at the will, command, and direction of a person–the Living God.  When a hair falls from one’s head it is from the Lord.  When the sparrow dies, it is by the Lord’s will and command.  Even what appears to us to be the most random act is actually not; it is infinitely personal. 

The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33

Modern man has a diametrically opposed view.  His confession of faith is that the world is ultimately random and impersonal.  Since there is no person behind it all, the universe is thoroughly and ultimately impersonal.  What is just is.  And what exists is just matter, or more precisely, matter, energy and motion.  That’s it.
  Everything, literally everything, can be reduced to a trinity of these three, and ultimately to inanimate energy.  We call this view materialism.  Here is Vern Poythress’s description of the West’s official, established religion:

According to materialism, the world consists in matter and energy and motion.  The world is physical in its most basic and deepest structure.  Everything else is built up from complex combinations and interactions of matter and energy and motion.  Elementary particles form into atoms; atoms form into molecules; molecules form into larger structures like crystals and living cells; cells form organs and organisms; and each one of us is such and organism.  The structure of our brains leads to complex humans actions and thoughts, and these lead to human meaning.  [Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2012), p. 28.]

And here are some of the implications of this established religion:

According to materialism, the universe as we know it originated in the big bang.  Human beings are random products of biological evolution, so we have no particular distinct significance except what we create for ourselves  The goal of living is whatever each of us as an individual chooses.  But the cosmos as a whole has no goal, no purpose.  And it looks as though life itself is only temporary, because the winding down of the amount of free energy in the universe will eventually make it impossible for life to exist.  The universe will end up cold and inert.  

According to this view, there is nothing wrong with the world–the world simply is.  There is no afterlife.  Morality is a by-product of the human brain in its biological structure and human social interaction. (Ibid.)

Imagine we were watching a fierce debate over the meaning of life.  Imagine in the heat of debate one of the protagonists pulled out a gun and shot his opponent dead.  Materialism requires us to acknowledge that the shooter won the debate.  There was no retort after the shot, no counterpoint was made.  Silence represents defeat.  There was no true moral significance or portent to one shooting the other.  There is nothing actually wrong with the one shooting the other. Any suggestions of morality reflect only social conventions, which are really nothing more than prejudices–and stupid at that, because they are merely superstitions.

Few people really believe such dogma–although every so often you meet people who claim that they do.  The vast majority of ordinary folk are only nominal believers in the materialist religion.  They confess it to be true when it is convenient.  But they spend most of their lives adding superstition upon superstition to give themselves a modicum of comfort. 

They long for human significance.  They find ways of adding more comfortable extra stories onto the materialist substructure of matter and energy and motion.  Some people may add a religious dimension of a pantheistic sort.  They may postulate a kind of spiritual “energy” in the cosmos, with which they can commune.  Nature becomes “Mother Nature.”  As a society, we become pluralistic in our views of human significance, just as we are pluralistic in many other respects.  We autonomously choose which ideas we wish to embrace, even when those ideas are at odds with reality. (Ibid, p. 28,29.)

Doubtless if we just took a superficial sounding of everyday human actions and beliefs we might conclude that materialism is not the established and accepted religion of our culture.  People do not act as if it were.  But the reality remains: materialism rules in the kitchen.  Everything else is superstitious comfort food. 

This ultimate impersonalism often goes together with some kind of acknowledgement of personal significances.  In fact, it is no so hard for some people to desire to reanimate dead matter by ascribing semi-personal characteristics to phenomena of nature.  We already mentioned the expression “Mother Nature”.  Such an expression gives to nature semi-personal characteristics. 

If matter is at the bottom of everything, there is continuity between human beings and trees. . . . A hard-nosed scientific materialism in one part of the mind can actually be combined with a soft yearning for communion with spirits; people can travel toward new forms of animism, spiritism, polytheism, and pantheism  Everyday, people within advanced industrial societies are looking into astrology and fortune-telling and spirits and meditation.  That direction might seem paradoxical.  But actually it is not surprising.  In principle a thoroughgoing materialism breaks down all hard-and-fast distinctions within the world.  If a materialist viewpoint is correct all is one.  And the many–the diversity of phenomena–all flow into this one.  (Ibid., p. 30,31.)

Cosmic impersonalism produces rampant superstition where personality and personalism is ascribed to physical matter, whether living or inert.  A new animism emerges–just as debilitating  and silly as the old animism.  Meanwhile, the hard nosed materialists breathlessly await Avatar II. 

Attempts to Curry Favour

Unworthy of God and Man

One of the sad features of many modern Christians is how deeply they have been influenced by the propaganda of Unbelief. 

A central plank of the cascade of scepticism towards the Christian faith is that (Unbelieving, rationalistic, atheistic) science is objective and deals only with brute facts.  Therefore, to many  the pronouncements of science reflect infallible and certain truths which are testable and verifiable.  Anyone who denies or questions the veracities of Unbelieving rationalistic science consequently must be ignorant, foolish, stubborn or blind–of a combination of all of the above. 

Many Christians dislike the idea that they would be regarded as ignorant or foolish.
  So they seek to made accommodations between Scripture and Unbelieving science–which means they deny the evident testimony of Scripture and bend it in the attempt to to make our faith more conformable to the objective, verifiable “truths” of science.  This represents a sad, treacherous response.  It shows a lack of understanding of the tentative nature of the scientific enterprise and of the constant revision of once “verified facts” of science throughout its history. 

In reality, many conclusions of modern science are neither purely scientific nor genuinely empirical.  The common perception that science deals only with verifiable facts and direct observation is utterly naive, as is the notion that scientists are purely objective truth seekers.  Indeed, many of the so-called facts of nature are more ‘interprefacts’ than verifiable facts.  Even Forster and Marston admit “[t]he notion that science is ‘verifiable’ is dead.  Scientific knowledge is always partial, and even a scientific “theory of everything” never will be total knowledge.’  Yet many theologians continue to treat scientific conclusions as simply “matter of fact”, while failing to recognize the ideology behind them.  [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.40.]

Unbelieving rationalistic science presents itself as objective and interested in “just the facts, ma’am”.   Naive Christians, contrary to the Bible’s teaching, believe the propaganda.  They have not taken account of the deep black-magic in every unbelieving heart, regnant to one degree or another: fallen man instinctively hates God and suppresses the truth about Him as Creator and sovereign Lord.  There is a spiritual bias against God from the outset.  For Christians to ignore the existence of this bias is foolish. 

When Christians seek to engage in science using precepts and presuppositions and assumptions that are consistent with the Christian faith they are routinely mocked as being prejudiced.  “Of course you would say that,” is the sarcastic rebuttal.  Many Christians have not learned to regard Unbelieving science in the same vein: it too is prejudiced, but in the opposite direction.

Worse, the prejudice of Unbelief is vicious in the sense of being riven with internal contradictions.  It claims to believe in an objective, rationalistic cosmos that exists by chance, yet all the while it deploys values and concepts that reflect anything but randomness–such as language that conveys meaningful content.

For a Christian to give up the clear meaning of the text of Scripture in a vain attempt to impress Unbelief is a very sorry business.  Playing the fool to gain the respect of other fools is unworthy of both God and man.   

Hiding Behind Infinity

The Foolishness of the Age

In the debate between the pseudo-science of evolutionism and Christian belief one battleground is over what is called the “anthropic principle”.  The idea is that the earth has and endless sequence of “just so” conditions that support human and other forms of life.  The physical structure of the world is precisely what it has to be in order to support life.  Without any one of these conditions, life would not be possible. 

Evolutionism insists that these “just so” pre-conditions and conditions for life are the product of random accidents.  But the more we learn about the number and intrinsic complexity of these pre-conditions, the more unbelievable the evolutionist hypothesis becomes.  This has been acknowledged by evolutionism and pagan cosmologists in a peculiar way, which we address below. 

But, first, let’s consider some of the anthropic aspects of the material world.  Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey provide some examples:

Consider, for example, Earth’s orbit. . . . If Earth were even slightly closer to the sun, all its water would boil away, and life would be impossible.  On the other hand, if Earth were only slightly farther away from the sun, all its water would freeze and the terrestrial landscape would be nothing but barren deserts.

And it’s not only the landscape that is affected by the position of our planet.  The processes inside our bodies also rely on these hospitable conditions.  The chemical reactions necessary for life to function occur within a narrow temperature range, and Earth is exactly the right distance from the sun to fall within that range.  What’s more, for all this to happen, Earth must remain about the same distance from the sun in its orbit; that is, its orbit must be nearly circular–which is in contrast to the elliptical orbits of most other planets in our solar system. 

Are these finely calibrated distances a product of mere happenstance?  Or were they designed to support life? [Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 62. Emphasis, authors’.]

The evolutionist position is that these are mere co-incidences, accidents, random “isms”.  Colson and Pearcey provide some more examples of anthropicity:

For another example, consider the existence of water, that common substance we take for granted.  Water has a host of unique properties absolutely indispensable for life.  For example, it is the only known substance whose solid phase (ice) is less dense than its liquid phase.  This is why ice forms on the top of oceans and lakes instead of on the bottom, allowing fish and other marine life to survive the winter.  On the microscopic level, water molecules exhibit something called the hydrophobic effect, which gives water the unique ability to shape proteins and nucleic acids in DNA.  From a molecular standpoint, “the various properties of water are nothing short of miraculous,” writes Michael Corey in God and the New Cosmology; “no other compound even comes close to duplicating its many life-supporting properties.”  (Ibid., p.63)

Of course it’s not just one condition of anthropicity that is at issue; it is that they are all interdependent.  The mutual interdependence of these factors exponentially lowers the probability of these occurring by chance.  Here is another “just so” condition:

The anthropic principle draws together a staggering number of “cosmic coincidences” that make life possible.  For example, the big bang had to have exploded with just the right degree of vigor for our present universe to have formed.  If it has occurred with too little velocity, the universe would have collapsed back in on itself shortly after the big bang because of gravitational forces; if it had occurred with too much velocity, the matter would have streaked away so fast that it would have been impossible for galaxies and solar systems to subsequently form. To state it another way, the force of gravity must be fine-tuned to allow the universe to expand at precisely the right rate (accurate to within 1 part in 10^60).  The fact that she force of gravity just happens to be the right number with “such stunning accuracy,” writes physicist Paul Davies, “is surely one of the great mysteries of cosmology.” (Ibid.)

Colson and Pearcey summarise anthropicity as follows:

The list of “coincidences” goes on and on.  It turns out that the slightest tinkering with the values of the fundamental forces of physics–gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces–would have resulted in a universe where life was utterly impossible.  The anthropic principle states that in our own universe, all these seemingly arbitrary and unrelated values in physics have one strange thing in common: they are precisely the values needed to get a universe capable of supporting life.  (Ibid.)

Funny that.  How do the atheistic cosmologists and evolutionists deal with the challenge of anthropicity?  The Unbelieving conjurers of chance feel the force of the problem.  A radical “solution” has been devised.  They have had to double down.  Anthropicity itself must be made a produce of chance.  But now its obvious that the probabilities are just so low they cannot be detected by an electron microscope.  What to do?  Well, let’s postulate that there are an infinite number of other universes which exist.  If there are an infinite number of universes, even the lowest probabilities of something existing by chance cannot be ruled out.  But what is the evidence for the existence of these infinite number of parallel universes? Zippo.   They are just part of an artificial warranting concept, a speculation, to warrant the possibility of anthropicity existing in our universe by chance.   Here is one of the clearest exemplars in our day of the truth proclaimed in Scripture:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, has been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.  So they are without excuse. . . . Claiming to be wise, they became fools.  (Romans 1: 19-22)

The men and women feted as the most bright, the most intellectual, the most clever, the most wise, the spirit of genius in our age, reduced to such foolishness and desperate speculation.  And the rest of the chattering classes: the elites, the Commentariat, the scientists, the educators, the media, and the politicians  clap their hands, applauding the wonder of this nonsense.  What wonderful infinite clothes the emperor has.  How stunning!  How chic!

Another age had words for this kind of thing–words like superstition, fable, myth, and augury. 

Unbelief’s Best Shot

The Mother of Invention

We recently began perusing The God Particle by Leon Lederman.  The author is a Nobel winning particle physicist with a gift for whimsical prose.  The intent of the author is to provide the lay person with a rough  general knowledge of arcane particle physics.  The book consists of a journey through the history of physics in general and particle physics in particular.

Lederman is a materialist.  All that exists is atomic particles and space.  So far, so good.  Below is his description for the layman of how it all began.
 

The matter we see around us today is complex.  There are about a hundred chemical atoms.  The number of useful combinations of atoms can be calculated, and it is huge: billions and billions.  Nature uses these combinations, called molecules, to build planets, suns, viruses, mountains, paychecks, Valium, literary agents, and other useful items.  It was not always so. 

During the earliest moments after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, there was no complex matter as we know it today.  No nuclei, no atoms, nothing that was made of simpler pieces.  this is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects; such objects, if formed by transient collisions, would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents.  There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force–or even a unified particle/force–and the laws of physics.

Within this primordial entity were contained the seeds of the complex world in which humans evolved, perhaps primarily to think about these things.  You might find the primordial universe boring, but to the particle physicist, those were the days!  Such simplicity, such beauty, however mistily visualised in our speculations.  [Leon Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What Is the Question? (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006 [1993]), p.3]

Lederman is honest enough to give a hat tip to the speculative nature of the Big Bang theory (“there was perhaps one kind of particle . . . “).  This is materialist cosmology at its best–that is, the best that it can do.  Faced with these limitations and with a cosmology that can only proceed if it builds upon a theory of meaninglessness and randomness lying at the root of everything, Lederman cannot avoid “calling” upon concepts and realities that lie completely at odds with a random beginning upon which “evolution” worked its magic.  At the beginning of everything, he suggests, there was perhaps one kind of particle or a unified particle/force and the laws of physics. 

Pardon me.  How did the laws of physics get into this supposedly brutally random universe?  The self-deceit, the intellectual dishonesty is hard to credit.  These are school boy errors and inconsistencies, but necessary for materialist particle physics to maintain its Unbelief.  And, as we know, necessity has always been the mother of invention. 

Now it is one thing for scientists in general and particle physicists in particular to be faced with the unknown, when current hypotheses fail or paradigms reach their limitations or gaps in knowledge force agnosticism.  That we all expect.  It is part of the human condition, and the joy of inquiry.  Those who do not wrestle with what they don’t know will never enjoy the “eureka” moment of discovery.  As Lederman himself observes, there are times when the hair stands up on the back of the neck when conducting experiments in particle physics. 

But it is quite another thing to clasp irrationality and fundamental rationalist-irrationalist dichotomies to one’s bosom, insisting upon them, making them central to one’s understanding of all reality, merely because one’s religious world-view demands it and nothing else “makes sense”.  It’s curious indeed to see a leading particle physicist resorting to such just-so stories. 

Eruptions and Vented Spleen over Charter Schools

Turning Up the Heat

The brouhaha over charter schools (called Partnership Schools in New Zealand) is merrily spewing forth ash clouds reminiscent of the recent eruption at Mount Tongariro.  We have had one Robin Duff, head of a teachers union protesting the very idea that tax payers’ money would be used to fund a school which taught the biblical doctrine of creation.

The Post Primary Teachers Association has concerns about public money funding religious activities in schools, and president Robin Duff said the types of people who appeared to be interested in charter schools, would not have made it through teacher education. “In the case of the trust, we’d be concerned if an organisation with a ‘statement of faith’ that denies evolution and claims creation according to the Bible is a historical event, were to receive state-funding.”

“Given the criticism of public schools over the quality of science teaching, you’d think they’d have concerns about taxpayer dollars being used to fund religious indoctrination rather than education, but apparently not.”

This sounds horrendous.  Robby’s problem is that creation is “unscientific”.  He lambasts those who would teach children fairy stories and myths in place of good old hard science.  And to add insult to injury, the gummint is going to fund it.

Let’s unpack the spleen, bit by bit.

It’s an Accident

A Mere Drop in an Ocean of Chance

Harper’s Magazine, in the December 2011 edition, carried an “emperor has no clothes” piece by Alan P Lightman entitled The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith. 

The crisis of faith is occurring amongst the high priests of scientism–that religion-cum-philosophy which asserts that only matter exists and the study of matter alone reveals truth and knowledge.  And it is the high-priests of scientism who are in crisis.  The high-priests, of course, are the theoretical physicists. And the crisis is one of existence being so random that ultimately nothing has meaning.
 

Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

Now this is not at all surprising to the Christian.  All Unbelieving rational thought ends up in a rational-irrational dichotomy, which is precisely where the theoretical physicists are today.  Lightman explains how they work:

Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion. Experimental scientists occupy themselves with observing and measuring the cosmos, finding out what stuff exists, no matter how strange that stuff may be. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy. 

So far, so good.  But a problem arises when the same phenomena can “explain” many different universes.  Or, when endless universes have to be conjectured to exist in order to “explain” our own.  Actually, the existence of many different universes (a multiverse) is a giant cop-out.  The more sub-atomic physics confronts the inordinate complexity of matter, the more it leans over into irrationalism.  The conjecture that there must be many universes is the last desperate throw of the Unbelieving rationalist.  Meaninglessness rules. 

However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

How on earth did theoretical physics get to this point?  It is a cautionary tale–one we have seen many times before in Unbelief.  Theoretical physics worked out that this universe is a “near run” thing.  Change just one parameter, even slightly, and life could not exist. 

. . . the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine­tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it. Actually, the word anthropic, from the Greek for “man,” is a misnomer: if these fundamental parameters were much different from what they are, it is not only human beings who would not exist. No life of any kind would exist.

Enter the Intelligent Design rationalists.  See–they argue–the parameters and the variable are so precise and fine, the existence of a “Designer” is demanded as a scientific hypothesis.  If you won’t go with us down this road, then you must be deeply prejudiced.  You must have an axe to grind, they argue.  Now Intelligent Design is just a throwback to rationalistic eighteen and nineteen century Deism.  But Unbelief has taken such a brute grip upon the modern mind that even that cannot be contemplated.

 If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

No, a far more congenial conjecture that the existence of a Designer is that there has to be an endless number of universes, and at least one has randomly developed to the point where life could happen.  

Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not. Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and others will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds. From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

Now this appears to ward off the threat of coming face to face with the Living God.  Anything rather than that.  But at what cost?  Irrationalism.  It has to be embraced with a vengeance, despite the fact that it makes everything–yes, everything–meaningless in the end. Rather that, than courageously face up to the Living God.  How truly the Scripture has spoken: “the fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God’ “. 

The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”

 Unbelieving scientism reasons that if “science” can explain some phenomenon in the creation, there is no need for God.  Of course the dichotomy is false, but that hasn’t stopped Unbelief nursing its bitter rebellions.  Multiverse theory “explains” away the data, but the cost is a rising tide of irrationalism.  Unbelieving rationalism would rather kill off its children and make itself sterile than bow the knee.

Put it another way–irrationalism has to be welcomed into the world of theoretical physics in order to preserve its rationalism, its belief in its Unbelief.  Without grasping the nettles of meaninglessness and irrationality, theoretical physics can offer no meaning at all about anything.  The only way it can explain rationally the natural order is to assert that meaninglessness and irrationality rules. 

Back to the intelligent fish. The wizened old fish conjecture that there are many other worlds, some with dry land and some with water. Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

As always, things in Unbelief eventually come to a pretty pass–both predictable and pathetic. 

>Scientism

>Yet Another Superstitious Idolatry

Yet another prevalent idol of our age is the belief that naturalistic science–the “rigorous” study of the material world–is the ultimate reality and path to truth. Part of the catechism of scientism is the assertion that rationalistic science alone is rational, that it alone deals in truth, that all else rests on speculation, superstition and myth. This is, of course, itself a myth–part of a carefully woven and desperately protected mythology.

When Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow published their latest book on the origin of the material universe, they were desperate to keep the faith, asserting that the material world was self-created, ex nihilo–out of nothing. This superstition had to be preserved because Hawking has argued for years that the cosmos had a solitary beginning point of existence. Once it was not, then it was. But in trying to fit this into the theology of scientism they descend into the irrational.

J P Moreland explains:

Scientism Makes Scientists Laughable

Posted by: J.P. Moreland

September 22, 2010

In their recent book, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claim that the laws of nature are consistent with the universe popping into existence from nothing, and in fact, they affirm that this is exactly what happened. Apparently, this desperate move results from the fact that they recognize that the universe had a beginning and they want to deflect the need for a transcendent Cause to explain the universe’s origin.

To my knowledge, they do not argue that the laws of nature themselves created the universe, and that’s a good thing. Why? Because the laws of nature are formal causes that direct the “flow” of causation, but they are not efficient causes that produce anything whatsoever. Thus, this claim, if made, would be a simple category fallacy. However, their actual claim is just as egregious, and that for two reasons.

First, the laws of nature do not apply unless there already is a universe. Those laws govern transitions of state of entities that exist ontologically prior to the laws themselves. Thus, an appeal to the laws of nature to explain how the universe could come from nothing is otiose; those laws presuppose a universe for their applicability and cannot in any sense be employed to explain what they presuppose. And coming-into-existence is not a process that could be governed by laws; it is, rather, an instantaneous occurrence. In general, “e comes-to-be at time t” is to be analyzed as “there is some property P such that e has P at t, and there are no times t’ earlier than t or properties Q such that e had Q at t’.”

Second, the principle “something cannot come from nothing without a cause” is a metaphysically necessary philosophical principle that is known a priori from an analysis of “nothing” which, as it turns out, is the complete absence of anything whatever, including properties, relations, causal powers, and so forth. Thus, “nothing” is not some sort of shadowy thing that could serve as a material or efficient cause. Note carefully, that this principle is not a scientific one; it is not an empirical generalization, but a necessary truth of philosophy.

The fact that many people have been influenced by the claims of Hawking and Mlodinow is sad to me. Here’s why. In previous times when average people knew more philosophy, these claims would simply be laughable because they are philosophical assertions being made by scientists who have little or no philosophical training. Thus, however brilliant they are in their own field, Hawking and Mlodinow are laypersons when it comes to the relevant issue at hand. But we live in a scientistic culture. When a scientist speaks, he is taken to be an authority irrespective of what the topic is. And that attitude reflects poorly on the educational level of the public.

Thus, the deeper issue for me in all this is not whether or not the universe could come into existence from nothing without a cause. It is, rather, the scientism that lies at the heart of Western culture. I have long believed that philosophical naturalism, with its unjustified scientism, has helped to create an intellectually unsophisticated culture, and (the public discourse surrounding Hawking’s latest speculations) is one reason why I think this way.