The Justification of Knowledge and Truth, Part I

Knowing a Lot About Nothing Much

Ever since Wittgenstein and Foucault burst onto the scene, the justification of knowledge has been a big issue.  To Wittgenstein and the post-modernists that emerged in his wake, all knowledge is the product of perspectives and the sub-set of language which reflects and reinforces each particular perspective.  The  meaning of “linguistic signs” came from the processes of learning the language of each respective perspective, or world-view.  Thus post-modernism was born: all human knowledge is circular, conditioned, and relative.  The assertion, “This is the truth” becomes “This is my perspective”–a far less significant claim. 

One consequence has been the growing focus upon the basis for knowledge, and how knowledge itself can be justified or regarded as authoritative.  Historically, there have been three basic tendencies offered in the non-Christian world to justify knowledge.  The first tendency is rationalism.  The second is empiricism.  The third is subjectivism which is where post-modernism would probably be anchored.  John Frame argues that these three should be regarded as tendencies, rather than schools, since advocates of one of these perspectives inevitably mixes in doses of the other two.  [John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1987), 9.109]

We can illustrate this by considering rationalism.
  The rationalist, or the idealist, wants a certain ground for knowledge that is not dependent upon human senses or human subjectivity.  He would ground certainty in criteria:

For example, we have experienced a great many “circular” objects, one of which, however, is perfectly circular.  In all of them there are defects, tiny in some, more obvious in others.  Thus we have never experienced a more perfect circle.  Yet somehow, mysteriously, we know what a perfect circle is.  We can test circles to see how close or how far removed from perfection they are, because somehow we have in our minds a criterion of circularity.  [Frame, op cit., p. 111.]

These criteria form certain and infallible premises, from which we can deduce truth logically.  For example, the classic rationalist might reason:

A circle is perfectly round
That shape has corners
Therefore, it is not a circle.

But the notion that we can deduce all knowledge from infallible, self-evident, and certain criteria quickly collapses upon examination.  As Frame argues:

We can, however, deduce very little from such a priori ideas.  Certainly, we cannot deduce the whole fabric of human knowledge from them or even enough knowledge to constitute a meaningful philosophy.  Nothing follows from the laws of logic, taken alone, except possible more laws of logic.  From propositions about our own mental states, nothing follows except further propositions about our own mental states. . . .

Thus, if knowledge is limited to the sorts of propositions we have just examined, we will know only about our own minds and not about the real world.  We cannot reason from our mental states to the real world because our mental states often deceive us.  Thus rationalism leaves us know with the body of certainties that Plato and Descartes dreamed of but with no knowledge at all of the real world.  [Ibid., p. 113]

Which is to say that rationalism can provide only the certain knowledge of tautologies–that which is true by definition.  It may be most certainly true that the red barn is red, and the knowledge expressed my be genuine, but we have discovered nothing significant or meaningful at all.

The rationalist seeks certainty outside of God and His Word of revelation to us.  Consequently, certainty and the criteria for thought are grounded in man’s own innate ideas and his reasoning from them.  But the quest for meaningful certainty becomes hopelessly lost.  Abstract truth cannot move out to the real world.  Faced with being locked up in Plato’s cave, cut off from the real world, the rationalist inevitably resorts to empiricism, to data from the senses, in order to escape the prison of generalised, abstract innate ideas.  But it does so only by means of contradicting the fundamental precepts of rationalism itself.  Inescapably, rationalism elides into an irrationalism of internal contradiction.

But rationalism also leads to scepticism and ignorance.

Rationalism seeks the most abstract knowledge possible, but in doing that it finds it can make no specific claims about the world.  The idolatrous quest for exhaustive human knowledge always leads to emptiness, skepticism, and ignorance. [Ibid., p.114]

As a justification for human knowledge, rationalism is a blind alley.  

Letter From America (About a Dishonest Englishman)

A Response to Richard Dawkins

He and his supporters have a right to their atheism, but not to intellectual dishonesty about it.

By  Dennis Prager 

October 1, 2013 12:00 AM

National Review Online

This past Friday, CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on behalf of atheism.  Asked “whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass,” Dawkins responded: “The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible.”

This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists — that not only do we not need religion or God for morality but that we would have a considerably more moral world without them.  This argument is so wrong — both rationally and empirically — that its appeal can be explained only by (a) a desire to believe it and (b) an ignorance of history.

First, the rational argument.

If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions.
They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities.  Every atheist philosopher I have debated has acknowledged this. For example, at Oxford University, I debated Professor Jonathan Glover, the British philosopher and ethicist, who said: “Dennis started by saying that I hadn’t denied his central contention that if there isn’t a God, there is only subjective morality. And that’s absolutely true.”  And the eminent Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty admitted that, for secular liberals such as himself, “there is no answer to the question, ‘Why not be cruel?’”

Atheists such as Dawkins who refuse to acknowledge that without God there are only opinions about good and evil are not being intellectually honest.

None of this means that only believers in God can be good or that atheists cannot be good. There are bad believers and there are good atheists. But this fact is irrelevant to whether good and evil are real.

To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, “Do not murder,” murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses. If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was right; slavery in nearly all the world throughout most of history was right; and clitoridectomies and honor killings in various Muslims societies are right.

So, then, without God, why is murder wrong?  Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?  My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins’s reason does. But, again, so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church’s teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do whatever they wanted.

In addition, reason alone without God is pretty weak in leading to moral behavior. When self-interest and reason collide, reason usually loses. That’s why we have the word “rationalize” —  using reason to argue for what is wrong.  What would reason argue to a non-Jew asked by Jews to hide them when the penalty for hiding a Jew was death? It would argue not to hide those Jews.

In that regard, let’s go to the empirical argument.  Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at Humboldt State University in California and the authors of one of the most highly regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners’ lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.  I asked Samuel Oliner, “Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist, or a Polish priest?”  Without hesitation, he said, “a Polish priest.” And his wife immediately added, “I would prefer a Polish nun.”

That alone should be enough to negate the pernicious nonsense that God is not only unnecessary for a moral world but detrimental to one.

But if that isn’t enough, how about the record of the godless 20th century, the cruelest, bloodiest, most murderous century on record? Every genocide of the last century — except for the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians and the Pakistani mass murder of Hindus in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) — was committed by a secular anti-Jewish and anti-Christian regime. And as the two exceptions were Muslim, they are not relevant to my argument. I am arguing for the God and Bible of Judeo-Christian religions.

Perhaps the most powerful proof of the moral decay that follows the death of God is the Western university and its secular intellectuals. Their moral record has been loathsome. Nowhere were Stalin and Mao as venerated as they were at the most anti-religious and secular institutions in Western society, the universities. Nowhere in the West today is anti-Americanism and Israel-hatred as widespread as it is at universities. And Princeton University awarded its first tenured professorship in bioethics to Peter Singer, an atheist who has argued, among other things, that that “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee” and that bestiality is not immoral.

Dawkins and his supporters have a right to their atheism. They do not have a right to intellectual dishonesty about atheism.

I have debated the best known atheists, including Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing), Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Only Richard Dawkins has refused to come on my radio show.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Rational Irrationalism

Quantum Mechanics and the Big Bang

The reviewer for the Dallas Morning News must have been having a bad hair day.  He or she declared that Leon Lederman’s The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) was “the funniest book about physics ever written.”  If that were true, physics must be world’s apart from sophisticated humour.  Closer to the truth is Lederman’s penchant for geeky humour, which often falls flat and is overdone.  Hardly humorous, unless the author was engaged in self-parody, which would be another matter entirely. 

But, humour aside, as a book about particle physics, Lederman’s The God Particle is pretty good.  It covers all the usual “stuff”.  The micro-world of the atom is counter-intuitive and abnormal (as far as our human experience is concerned).  Federman writes

So forget about normal; expect shock, disbelief.  Niels Bohr, one of the founders, said that anyone who isn’t shocked by quantum theory doesn’t understand it.  Richard Feynman asserted that no one understands quantum theory.  (Op cit., p. 143f)

 The overwhelming impression for the non-specialist lay reader is of extreme complexity in the micro-world of matter.
  The “standard model” started out, with Rutherford, proposing that the atom consisted of two components (a nucleus, plus electrons).  Today, says Lederman, we have in the atom

 6 quarks, 6 leptons, 12 gauge bosons and, if you want to be mean, you can count the antiparticles and the colours, because quarks come in three shaded (count 60)  But who’s counting. (Op cit., p. 63.)

It is possible that behind all this complexity will be found a “pristine symmetry” which will reduce it all to some more fundamental, more simple, more basic particles.  This is supposed to be the Higg’s boson, recently claimed to have been discovered by the CERN collider in Switzerland. 

In addition, the behaviour of sub-atomic particles can turn out to be weird.  Quantum mechanics, says Federman, has problems:

This issue has to do with the wave function and what it means.  In spite of the great practical and intellectual success of quantum theory, we cannot be sure we know what the theory means  Our uneasiness may be intrinsic to the mind of man, or it may be that some genius will eventually come up with a conceptual scheme that makes everyone happy.  If it makes you queasy, don’t worry.  You’re in good company.  Quantum theory has made many physicists unhappy, including Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrodinger. (Ibid., p. 185.)

At the end of his book, Federman contemplates the Big Bang.  It is unknowable.  It is the materialist’s idolatrous substitute for the Creator God.  But the ultimate creator is the eternal laws of physics.  This is not a paradox; it is evading the question and clutching at straws.

We can try to imagine the pre-Big Bang universe: timeless, featureless, but in some unimaginable way beholden to the laws of physics . . . .

It is comforting to visualise the disappearance of space and time as we run the universe backward toward the beginning.  What happens as space and time tend toward zero is that the equations we use to explain the universe break down and become meaningless.  At this point we are just plumb out of science.  Perhaps it is just as well that space and time cease to have meaning; it gives us the possibility that the vanishing of the concept takes place smoothly.  What remains?  What remains must be the laws of physics.  (Ibid., p. 402.  Emphasis, ours)

The necessity of eternal laws of physics, as here propounded by Lederman, is not an antinomy (an apparent contradiction between two equally valid principles).  To propose that laws eternally exist in a void of meaningless nothingness is irrational–pure and simple.

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.   

Tricksie

A Grand, But False Edifice

The really momentous, but notorious contributions of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were the French Revolutions’ Reign of Terror, the scourge of Nazism, and the totalitarian embrace of Communism.  These were all directly traceable to the doctrine of the autonomy of human reason, which was the lodestone both the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. 

The other benefits attributed to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were actually incidental to both.  Benefits such as scientific and technological advances during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred due to the foundations laid centuries before.  Rodney Stark has it right when he writes:

The single most remarkable and ironic thing about the “Enlightenment” is that those who proclaimed it made little or no contribution to the accomplishments they hailed as a revolution in human knowledge, while those responsible for these advances stressed continuity with the past. . . . In truth, the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology, for the latter gave direction and confidence to the former . . . [Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 252.]

The ideology of Enlightenment  truly is a trick played at the time upon the dead.  However, that particular trick has remained remarkably durable.  It is repeated ceaselessly in our day as a mantra, a set of propositions which are now regarded as self-evident.  The West, we are told, remained in the thrall of brute ignorance ruthlessly enforced by religious superstitions, until man began to think for himself.  When he finally threw off the shackles of religious superstition knowledge, truth, discovery and science exploded–with all their beneficent fruits. This claim amounts to an elaborate example of the fallacy of false cause.

. . . [T]he historian’s task is not to explain why so much progress has been made since the fifteenth century–that focus is much too late.  The fundamental question about the rise of the West is: What enabled Europeans to begin and maintain the extraordinary and enduring period of rapid progress than enabled them, by the end of the “Dark Ages,” to have far surpassed the rest of the world?  Why was it that, although many civilizations have pursued alchemy, it led to chemistry only in Europe?  Or, while many societies have made excellent observations of the heavens and have created sophisticated systems of astrology, why was this transformed into scientific astronomy only in Europe? . . . .

[T]he truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in reason and progress that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe. (Ibid., p. 252f.)

Quite so.   It’s a pity someone has forgotten to tell modern perpetuators of the Enlightenment myth, such as Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Let’s Be Realistic

Why Some Believe in God, and Some Don’t

People who are self-conscious are likely to be relatively more objective than those naive folk who believe that the facts are the facts are the facts.

In reality man is a finite creature and all reasoning is conditioned to some extent by his limitations and experiences.  This is as true for scientists as for musicians and other artists.  Old beliefs control new beliefs.  What one already believes to be true conditions all hypotheses from that point onward.

As Stokes puts it:

We have to stand somewhere while arguing; we always argue from some vantage point, from some perspective.  In Thomas Nagel’s words, there’s no “view from nowhere”.  And when arguing about the vantage point (the scientific theory, for example), you must and on the very thing for which you are arguing. [Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), p. 78]

Those most self-deceived (or dishonest) are those who deny that they are “standing” at some particular vantage point, who imply that they are purely and absolutely objective.  Science (actually scientism) is often claimed by the foolish or dishonest to be just such a discipline–so objective, so committed to just the facts, that there are no previous commitments.  Science, it is claimed, is a higher order way of discovering and knowing the truth.

Consider this fantastic claim by atheist Josh Harris, who objects to those who want to discuss pre-existing paradigms as part of discussing the “facts”.  He argues that such notions lead “many unwary consumers of these ideas” to conclude “that science is just another area of human discourse and, as such, is not more anchored to the facts of this world than literature or religion are.  All truths are up for grabs.”  (Ibid., p. 80.  Emphasis, ours.)

It turns out, of course, that science is just another area of human discourse, as any perusal of the history of science will readily demonstrate.  But acknowledging this makes science more reliable, more objective not less.

So we have people who believe in the Living God, and those who don’t.  In both cases they have been conditioned so to believe (by God Himself–since He is the all-conditioning Conditioner).  Those who believe, if they are objective, will be aware of a cluster of life experiences, relationships, books they have read, personal tragedies experienced, or Christians they have known that predisposed them to believe in God as the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and, therefore, as their Creator to Whom they owe all things, and against Whom they have sinned.

Those who do not believe can likewise, if they are honest, point to life circumstances, upbringing, relationships, teachers and so forth who have predisposed them to Unbelief.  Those that don’t believe, if they are objective, will be aware of how they have been predisposed to Unbelief–and that these predispositions are just as powerful, if not more so, than any arguments about God’s existence.

As atheist Thomas Nagel expressed it:

I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God–anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn’t particularly want either one of the answers to be correct.  (Ibid., p. 83.)

Supercilious Schtick

Hegemonic Liberals

The New Zealand Labour leader, David Shearer has been getting a lot of schtick.  He has confirmed his belief that New Zealand needs to take taniwha seriously.  For our non-Kiwi readers, taniwha are, according to Maori, mythical spirit monster which dwell in the lands, seas, and rivers.  They need to be placated at appropriate times and places, lest they become angry and do damage. 

This from Patrick Gower at TV3 News:

Labour Party leader David Shearer has long-held beliefs that taniwha must be respected when it comes to Maori and their interests in water. His views can be traced back to his master’s thesis, and he stands by them today.  Water has been the big political issue of the year, but when Mr Shearer was first asked who owned it he didn’t know.

But it turns out Mr Shearer has a degree of expertise on the issue – a master’s thesis in fact. It was called Between Two Worlds, Maori Values and Environmental Decision-Making.  In his thesis he advocated that “the belief in taniwha or spiritual pollution…while they may appear irrational to many…cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant”. It’s a belief he still holds today.  

“I absolutely stick by that,” says the Labour Party leader. He says we should acknowledge taniwha. “We have been doing that for the last 20-something years when we have made decisions around water.”

Our interest is not so much on what Shearer believes–if he is someone who holds to superstitious animist nonsense, so what.  That’s par for the course for a modern, rationalist politician who is both a socialist and an egalitarian.  As such, idiocy doth become him.  Rather, our interest has been piqued by those superstitious rationalists who are rejecting Shearer’s position.

Take, for example, David Farrar, who opines sarcastically:

Well I don’t think we should acknowledge or give any credence to taniwha. Such spiritual nonsense should play no part in our laws or decisions.

This from a chap who has gone on record supporting homosexual “marriage” on the grounds that homosexual desires are a combination of genes and conditioning.  Since homosexuals are what they are, they need to be allowed to be what they are: ergo, homosexual “marriage” must be respected and accommodated in law.  One wonders why Mr Farrar takes a different view when it comes to Maori who believe in taniwha. 

Since Maori belief in taniwha has to be a combination of genes and nurture on what basis does Mr Farrar reject such beliefs as “spiritual nonsense”.  If enlightened social policy according to Mr Farrar requires recognition of homosexual “marriage”, why not taniwha? 

This is the same Mr Farrar who imperiously tells us that abortion is not murder because, because . . . . he said so.  Yes, we inquire, but why?  Because the “thing” inside the mother’s womb depends upon the mother and has no independent existence.  And this is important because?  “Because I said so–so there!”

The supercilious arrogance of Unbelief is a fearsome sight to behold.  Rational argument and principles come down to nothing more than bias, cant, and superstition.  As any good post-modernist will tell you, Maori perspectives are just as valid as white, middle class, liberal, male perspectives.  Mr Farrar’s attempt to use law to ram his particular narratives down the throats of those he disagrees with–whose views he happens to consider “superstitious nonsense”, denying them the right to be reflected in law or decisions–is nothing more than arrogant, intellectual hegemonic imperialism. 

When Unbelief magically conjures up sky hooks on which to hang its prejudices, disguised as ethical or rational precepts, the only sound worthy of attention is the laughter of Christians mocking those who profess to be wise, but cannot help playing the fool every time they get on the field. 

Fly, You Fools!

 Unbelief’s Dirty Little Secrets

The Bible says that the fool is one who denies God’s existence: “the fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God’.”  (Psalm 14:1).  At first glance this statement on its own does not allow us to declare with certainty that all Unbelievers are therefore fools.  To draw that conclusion would entail us falling into the fourth form logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.  The subsequent declarations in Psalm 14, however, put the matter beyond dispute: all Unbelievers are indeed fools.

1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
    there is none who does good.

² The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
    to see if there are any who understand,
    who seek after God.

³ They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
    there is none who does good,
    not even one. (Psalm 14: 1-3)

On the other hand, Unbelief confronts us with an array of arguments to the opposite: it is the Believer who is foolish and ignorant. Is Belief and Unbelief destined, then, to pass like ships in the night.  Not really.  Unbelief at its most honest candidly acknowledges its own foolishness.
 

Take, for example, the knowledge which comes to us from our senses.  Can we have any knowledge apart from our senses?  Many rationalists would say not.  Yet knowledge and truth from our senses can never be verified by Unbelief, because “proving up” such empirical knowledge relies upon–you guessed it–the senses.  The circle is vicious.  The Unbeliever can never step outside his sense perception to prove the truth of what he is sensing.  We simply cannot step outside our senses to compare the visual images behind our eyes with the objects “out there”.  As Mitch Stokes puts it, “We can’t even check to see whether there is and ‘out there’ out there, to see whether there’s an external world.”  We cannot provide “evidence” for the existence of the external world without employing the very senses we are supposedly attempting to authenticate.  The circle is very tight and incredibly vicious.  Many Unbelievers prefer not to think about it.  It becomes a guilty secret, locked away in the family cupboard, that nobody talks about in polite society lest Unbelief has to face up to how foolish it really is. 

Stokes goes on to cite the enfant terrible of Unbelief:

David Hume–one of the towering inspirations of contemporary atheism–conceded that we really have no good reason to believe that the world outside of us resembles the perceptual images inside us.  Perhaps there isn’t an “external” world; it’s hard to say.  This, he said, is the “whimsical condition of mankind”.  [Believers might rather, more accurately say “the foolish condition of mankind”.]  And the twentieth-century American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine said that the Humean condition is simply the human condition.  Our senses–like us–are destined to remain within the boundary of our skin.  Their limitations are ours. 

This goes for all the ways we form beliefs, for all our cognitive faculties, whether memory, introspection, or even reason itself.  We can never step outside these belief-forming mechanisms to independently verify (sic) their reliability.  [Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), p. 21.]

These limitations are the condition of being a finite creature.  Unbelief means these limitations operate as a vicious circle.  Jean Paul Sartre once observed that unless a fact or point of data or a value has an infinite reference point, it has no meaning.  Hume had already proven that it also has no verification.  Unbelief is foolishness itself.  Or, as Paul puts it, Unbelief professes to be wise, but becomes progressively foolish.  Paul knew his Psalms. 

But Hume was even more destructive of his own.  Stokes goes on:

Speaking of reason itself, Hume has a magnificent argument for what he considers, because of his evidentialism, the flimsiness of inferences we might attempt to make about the surrounding world. It’s one of the best arguments in all of philosophy. 

Hume recognized that we all expect, for example, the sun to rise tomorrow.  he then asked what only a philsopher or child could ask: Why do we expect this?  The answer is, because the sun has always risen.  But Hume notices that this would only count as a good reason if we knew that the future will resemble the past. . . . (T)he argument or reason for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow must be something like this: the sun has always risen in the past, and because the future will resemble the past, the sun will rise tomorrow.  . . .

Hume followed his evidentialism where it inevitably led: he concluded that we’re irrational in believing that the future will resemble the past.  After all, we have no non-circular argument for it; there’s no evidence to support it. And once this belief goes, so must our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow–and for any other belief about things in the world we have yet to see.  (Ibid., p. 21f)

Can anyone actually live like this?  No.  Herein, then, is the foolishness of Unbelief: it cannot deal with the world as it really is; it cannot known for certain what the world is like; its irrationalisms constantly bubble up like Rotorua mud pools.  But Unbelief ignores its irrationality because it has to.  “Our instincts are just too strong for philosophy to overcome.  We’re irrational, but it keeps us alive.  A world of whimsy.”  (Ibid., p. 23). 

Now Hume attempted to escape this dilemma by agreeing that senses lead one into a vicious irrational circle from which there is no escape.  But reason, not human experience, that’s another matter.  Not at all.  It’s just that every bolt hole that Unbelief scurries into has the same dilemmas, the same paradoxes, the same irrationality.  How does one verify one’s reasoning?  By reason.  The Humean paradox remains.  Unbelief is riddled, shot out of the skies with the scepticism that always attends the finite creature basing all upon the foundation of himself. 

    The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
    there is none who does good. (Psalm 14:1)

Universal Acid

Explanations Come to an End–Somewhere

One commentator animadverting upon the post entitled The Unintended Consequences of Homosexual “Marriage” had this to say, after quoting from the post:

“The endgame is that only Christians and the Christian faith have certain and solid foundations for knowing anything. Only Christian epistemology is rational and coherent and true. Everything else is sinking sand.”

Thats (sic) a conceit of enormous proportions John. Besides, putting the words “rational” and “coherent” any where (sic) near the bible or the word “faith” is oxymoronic.

Our trusty commentator, xchequer is naturally talking up his own book here.   He alleges that the “Bible” and “faith” represent a contradiction in terms with “rational” and “coherent”.  Alleges, mind you.  Not argues.  Nevertheless what he says is a helpful illustration of the all-to-common mindset of Unbelief: shout loudly, slur your opponents, and never go near a rational argument.

We, for our part, have alleged that all non-Christian epistemologies are sinking sand; only Christian epistemology is rational, coherent, and true.  It’s a strong claim.  Nevertheless, it’s one we are prepared to argue for.  Rationally.

Unbelief Under Threat

Shout Loudly

We live in an era when Unbelief is vehemently opposed to the Christian faith.  Yet never have the claims of Unbelief (secularist, rationalist, materialist, evolutionist) been so vacuous, so self-defeating, so stupid.  This is more than a state of being “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  It is a fury borne out of the frustration of a vacuous soul.

Modern Unbelief is premised upon an angry prejudice against the Living God.  In the early centuries of the Enlightenment there was a characteristic smugness,  hubris, and disdain of religion in general, but of Christianity in particular.  Christians were nothing more than ignorant, superstitious dolts.  As Unbelief went along its not-so-merry way its foundations began to crumble.

A Man Has to Know His Limitations

Round and Round the Garden Went the Teddy Bear

You just have to love Ludwig Wittgenstein–not that he was a very lovable character.  If Hume was the enfant terrible, the dismantler of the Enlightenment’s claim to objective, evidence based, rationalistic “truth”, Wittgenstein was his twentieth century step-child.  He was the gladiatorial, scathing, sarcastic progenitor of post-modernism.

Wittgenstein pointed out that in all reasoning and arguments there are sets of pre-interpretative grids at play which lead one to certain inferences and conclusions about the facts and data being discussed.  All knowledge is circular.  All reasoning is circular.  To Enlightenment rationalists and their twentieth century descendants, this is hateful stuff.

A Shot of Faith to the Head

Evidentialism is Quite Dead

We have just picked up a copy of Mitch Stokes’s A Shot of Faith {To the Head}(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012) which is a well written, very approachable piece of work on the intellectual battle against the Christian faith being waged at a neighbourhood near you.

The work makes the philosophical contributions of men like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff accessible and useful to the wider Christian community.  (For their part, Plantinga and Wolterstorff have, in turn, been making Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid accessible to modern readers.)

Here is an initial excerpt:

Modernist Myths

 Sweet and Sour Reasoning

Rationalists constantly mock Believers as being anti-rational.  It is a dishonest slur–on two levels.  At one level the slur represents a confusion of categories as happens when one confuses medicine with poison.  Both alike are pharmacological, but with entirely different outcomes.  Rationalists believe in a particularly noxious kind of reason–that human reason is the ground of all truth and the highest and final court of appeal. Rationalists believe in human reason as master.  Christians believe in human reason as helpful servant. 

At another level the slur seeks to conceal a dirty secret (one which makes rationalism self-contradictory and at root irrational): rationalism is grounded upon a foundation which cannot itself be verified by human reason.  Try establishing rationally the premise that human reason is the ground of all truth, without arguing in a vicious circle (that is, irrationally). 

Here is David Hart’s exposition of the matter.

All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempt to apply logic to experience.  One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.

A Christian and a confirmed materialist may both believe that there really is a rationally ordered world out there that is susceptible of empirical analysis; but why they should believe this to be the case is determined by their distinctive visions of the world, by their personal experiences of reality, and by patterns of intellectual allegiance that are, properly speaking, primordial to their thinking and that lead toward radically different ultimate conclusions . . . .

What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments (some of which–“blood and soil”, the “master race”, the “socialist Utopia”–produce prodigies of evil precisely to the degrees that they are “rationally” pursued).

We may, obviously, as modern men and women, find certain of the fundamental convictions that our ancestors harbored curious and irrational; but this is not because we are somehow more advanced in our thinking then they were, even if we are aware of a greater number of scientific facts.  We have simply adopted different conventions of thought and absorbed different prejudices, and so we interpret our experiences according to another set of basic beliefs–beliefs that may, for all we know, blind us to entire dimensions of reality.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),  p. 101f.]

Peter Berger on Jurgen Habermas

What Happens when a Leftist Philosopher Discovers God?

Peter Berger

This article first appeared in The American Interest.

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. . . . Habermas has been a public intellectual (a more polite term for celebrity) for a very long time. I have never been terribly interested in Habermas, but the coincidence made me think about him. Portier’s article does tell an intriguing story. It might be called a man-bites-dog story.

Habermas is exactly my age. Our paths crossed briefly in the 1960s, when he was a visiting professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where I was then teaching. We did not particularly take to each other.  I was put off by both his leftist politics and his ponderous philosophical language. (German philosophers, no matter where located on the ideological spectrum, vie with each other in producing texts which are comprehensible only to a small group of initiates.) I also sensed a certain professorial arrogance. I remember reading a response by Habermas to a critic, limited to the statement that he refused to discuss with an individual who quoted Hegel from a secondary source.

Habermas first received a doctorate in philosophy, but moved toward sociology under the influence of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, then acquired a second doctorate in the latter field under the fiercely Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. In 1964 he became a professor in Frankfurt, as successor to Max Horkheimer, who by then was a neo-Marxist icon. Habermas was a hero of the so-called student revolution which erupted in the late 1960s. His students fanned out across West German academia, creating a network which for a while administered an effective ideological hegemony in the human sciences. At the time I found Habermas’ role in this rather objectionable. But I gave him credit for distancing himself sharply from the more radical wing of the student movement, as he later distanced himself from the anti-Enlightenment views of  the postmodernists.

In 1981 Habermas published his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, a strong endorsement of reason as the foundation of public life in a democracy. He retired from his professorship in 1993, but not from his role as an active advocate of Enlightenment rationality. It is debatable how far his more recent work still continues under a neo-Marxist theoretical umbrella. His views on religion have shifted considerably.

Portier distinguishes three phases in Habermas’ treatment of religion. In phase one, lasting up to the early 1980s, he still viewed religion as an “alienating reality”, a tool of domination for the powerful. In good Marxist tradition, he thought that religion would eventually disappear, as modern society comes to be based on “communicative rationality” and no longer needs the old irrational illusions. In phase two, roughly 1985-2000, this anti-religious animus is muted. Religion now is seen as unlikely to disappear, because many people (though presumably not Habermas) continue to need its consolations. The public sphere, however, must be exclusively dominated by rationality. Religion must be relegated to private life. One could say that in this phase, at least in the matter of religion, Habermas graduated from Marxism to the French ideal of laicite—the public life of the republic kept antiseptically clean of religious contamination.

Phase three is more interesting. As of the late 1990s Habermas’ view of religion is more benign. Religion is now seen as having a useful public function, quite apart from its private consolations. The “colonization” of society by “turbo-capitalism” (nice term—I don’t know if Habermas coined it) has created a cultural crisis and has undermined the solidarity without which democratic rationality cannot function. We are now moving into a “post-secular society”, which can make good use of the “moral intuition” that religion still supplies. Following in the footsteps of Ernst Bloch and other neo-Marxist philo-Godders, Habermas also credits Biblical religion, Judaism and Christianity, for having driven out magical thinking (here there is an echo of Max Weber’s idea of “ the disenchantment of the world”), and for having laid the foundations of individual autonomy and rights.

Habermas developed these ideas in a number of publications and media interviews. The most interesting source (not discussed by Portier in the article) is a 2007 publication by a Catholic press, The Dialectics of Secularization. It is a conversation between Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (at the time of this exchange head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI). Habermas here gives credit to Christianity for being the purveyor of a universal egalitarianism and for an openness to reason, thus continuing to provide moral substance for democracy. Not surprisingly, Ratzinger agreed.

I am not sure what Habermas’ personal beliefs are. But I don’t think that his change of mind about religion has anything to do with some sort of personal conversion. Rather, as has been the case with most sociologists of religion, Habermas has looked at the world and concluded that secularization theory—that is, the thesis that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion—does not fit the facts of the matter. Beyond this acknowledgement of the empirical reality of the contemporary world, Habermas admits the historical roots in Biblical religion of modern individualism, and he thinks that this connection is still operative today. Yet, when all is said and done, Habermas now has a positive view of religion (at least in its Judaeo-Christian version) for utilitarian reasons: Religion, whether true or not, is socially useful. 

Let us stipulate that smoking is unhealthy. Let us then assume that a tribe in some remote jungle believes that tobacco smoke attracts malevolent spirits. A public health official sent into the region does not, of course, share this superstition. But he makes use of it in dissuading people from acquiring a taste for newly available cigarettes—because he knows that some people do the right thing for a wrong reason. Eventually, he thinks, people will do the right thing for a better reason. And that will be the end of the demonological theory of tobacco smoke.

Any sociologist will agree that religion, true or not, is useful for the solidarity and moral consensus of society. The problem is that this utility depends on at least some people actually believing that there is the supernatural reality that religion affirms. The utility ceases when nobody believes this anymore.

Edward Gibbon, in chapter 2 of his famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire, has this to say: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful”. When you cross the philosopher with the magistrate, you get Habermas.

Really? No.

Reports of Death Greatly Exaggerated

Post-modernism or “pomo” to the initiated, has been a great boon to us all if you have the perspective of an ancient Assyrian.  In the pre-classical Middle East, when “the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold” everyone knew that bad times were a-comin’.  In expanding their empire, the Assyrians believed they needed to rebuild everything from the bottom up; thus, first they had to destroy everything before them, reduce buildings and people to rubble, and only then could a new order be constructed.  The Assyrians believed order could only come if were preceded by nihilism.  It was the “ultimate solution” of the ancient world.  But what then?  What came after?  What was the “new world order”?

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Too Many Hypocrites in the Halls of Reason

The Odd Delusion
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, July 12, 2011

This is why I could never become an atheist or part of the skeptic community. Too many factions, divisions, snarls, petty fights, and so on. Worshipping the goddess Reason, they descend into frenzies of irrationality at the slightest provocation. I am tempted to say of them what Chesterton once observed about the enlightened ones at the French Revolution. They worshipped at the altar of the goddess Reason, when that was the deity who had smiled upon them least.

>Without God, Without Creed, Part III

>Man In Charge

Christendom lies broke and the temples of Baal are flush, svelte and in charge.  So it has come to be in the West.  Unbelief dominates the culture; the only kind of “Christian” faith tolerable is one which assumes from the outset that its God is finite, limited, a creation of needy minds.  Recognition of Christianity–when it occurs–in the West amounts to nothing more than a piteous condescension to a puerile superstition of yesteryear.  Christians are regarded as those with nothing more than a simplistic nostalgia for the past.

Now when this kind of massive shift occurs in religion–from cultural dominance to subservience–devotees of the new god readily conclude that the old god, the now redundant and replaced god, was impotent and weak.  The Scriptures testify to this.  When Elijah was on Mount Carmel, he taunted the self-lacerated prophets of Baal by lampooning, in this case, the weakness and powerlessness of  Baal.

>Eve Had it Right All Along

>Intelligent Design Theories

We have been reading a book entitled God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards.  Its default position is the promotion of Intelligent Design, with a collection of essays by Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jewish contributors.  In this and some future posts, we will interact with some of the contributions.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0979014166&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Now, on one level–the broadest referent–nobody denies “evolution”–the concept of development, change, and adaptation is  universally taught in the Scriptures and self-evident everywhere in the creation.  In a similar fashion, all Christians acknowledge “intelligent design” of the universe.  To believe that God created all things of nothing necessarily requires a belief in intelligent design.  After all, “in the beginning was the Word. . . . All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.”  (John 1:1-3)  the Greek noun, “logos”, used here for the Word, means rational, verbal expression. 

But Intelligent Design protagonists want to say something more.
  Not only is the universe “intelligently designed” by God, but it can be demonstrated to be intelligently designed. (Well, actually “demonstrated” is too strong a word. More on that in a minute.)  This demonstration can be made sufficiently strongly that it demands respect amongst Unbelievers and Believers as a reasonable, legitimate hypothesis.  On this basis, Intelligent Design proponents want to argue for “air time” in secular schools, universities, and public mass media as offering a reasonable alternative to Darwinian evolution–a scientific hypothesis (not conjecture, mind) that along with all hypotheses can be tested and rejected or accepted–for the time being, anyway.  (It is intrinsic to the nature of scientific knowledge that it remains tentative, and subject to revision by the discovery of further data, or new theorising.  Thus Newtonian physics was replaced by quantum mechanics.)
 
In this sense, Intelligent Design can never be “demonstrated”.  It can only claim reasonableness.  Which is to say, it seeks recognized status as a scientific hypothesis.  But status amongst whom?  Amongst Christians?  That would be a no-brainer.  As argued above, all Christians believe the universe is intelligently designed.  Christian science presupposes this, and merrily goes about researching and testing derivative hypotheses.  But this is not what Intelligent Design protagonists are about.  They want the Unbelieving science establishment to accept not just the possibility that the universe is intelligently designed, but the reasonable possibility of such.  They want respect in the Academy.

Underneath this lies a critical assumption that all Intelligent Design protagonists make.  They assume that all men, both Believers and Unbelievers alike, can step outside their fundamental religious presuppositions and core religious beliefs, and, for the sake of argument, stand on neutral epistemological ground, looking objectively and dispassionately at the evidence.  All Intelligent Design protagonists believe that the Fall did not affect the mind of man.  It remained fundamentally untouched by sin.

This being the case, or so Intelligent Design folk assume, the Believer can engage in rational, objective scientific discussion with Unbelievers.  Both are capable of objectively assessing the data and evidence.  Both can reach reasonable agreement on what the objective data present to honest enquirers.  Given this, it is reasonable both to ask and expect that the scientific establishment, the Academy, will give not only equal air-time to Intelligent Design theories, but if the evidence appears fortuitous, even swing over to its acceptance.

Herein lies the fundamental flaw in Intelligent Design theories.  Sadly, the world of man is not as they assume it to be.  Sadly, and inevitably, the mind of man did not escape the Fall, but was perverted by it.  When Eve began a “rational investigation” of the “facts” she was already in sinful rebellion against God.  What we mean by this is that prior to the Serpent’s entrance to Eden both Adam and Eve were totally objective in their analysis of the world in which they had been placed.  Their seeing and thinking about the world was perfectly in accord with the way the world actually was.

But when the Serpent–that Liar from the beginning as our Lord names him–came to Eve, he offered an alternative conjecture about God, Man and the Creation.  He suggested to Eve that she consider the possibility that created reality was not as God said it was, but that there was another explanation–namely, that God was the liar and deceiver, and that He was driven by evil envious motives against Eve and her husband.

Eve moved the conjecture to the status of a hypothesis and began empirical research to establish the truth, one way or the other–at that point she was in sin, before she reached forth to take the fruit.  (Note that the text is quite explicit about the rationalism and empiricism and evidentialism employed by Eve: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.” [Genesis 3:6]  In other words, her decision was evidence based–but not really.  It was no longer objective.  Her decision was based on how she saw and interpreted the evidence, not on how things really were, in themselves. In reality, she rejected objectivity and brought her rebellious perspective and sinful narrative to bear upon the evidence.)  Was God telling the truth or the Serpent?  Sadly, her “objective” inquiry was anything but.  By stepping outside of God’s pre-interpreting Word, she was asserting her own autonomy over God Himself.  She was sinning and sinful in her heart before she ate–and the heart, you recall, is the seat of all the intellect, emotions and will.

Now the Intelligent Design folk think not only that Eve’s empirical inquiry and ratiocinations about the “evidence” was not sinful in itself.  They also believe (and want us to join them in the belief) that all mankind descending from Adam by ordinary generation are in exactly the same place that Eve was prior to the Fall.  Moreover they assert that all men,  with respect to their ability,  in the same way as Eve, must engage in holy and truthful empirical inquiry untainted by sin, yet independent of God–despite the fact that Eve was sinning in so doing.  And this, despite what the Scripture says about the perverted nature of all men’s thoughts.  The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, we are told.  (Jeremiah 17:10).  Not so, say the Intelligent Design folk: we can assume the human heart is honest, truthful, and without sin.  When it comes to assessing the evidence for the origin of the world, scientists are neither deceitful nor desperately wicked in the way they do their science.

The Intelligent Design protagonists point us to Romans 1, where Paul says that the evidence for God being the Creator of the world is plain and compelling for all to see (Romans 1:19).  Since that is the case, they jump to the conclusion that it is possible to have an evidence based discussion with Unbelievers about the origins of the world.  Sadly they overlook the previous verse, where God tells us that all Unbelieving men suppress the truth which is evident to them.  This is exactly what Eve did.  The truth was clearly evident to Eve, but she suppressed it, put it aside (for sake of argument) and began to consider the possibility of God being a liar and the Serpent’s alternate hypothesis true.  Her empiricism–which required putting God and His truth off to one side, whilst she conducted her own rationalistic inquiry which considered alternative hypotheses–was the precise attitude and act of suppression of the truth that Paul talks about. What Paul confirms is that all men do this–which is a sinful state of mind–which is why the wrath of God is revealed against all men (Romans 1:18). 

Sadly, what the Intelligent Design folk are doing is unwittingly confirming they believe that the Serpent had it right and was legitimately in the Garden.  There are legitimate, competing, reasonable, alternative hypotheses.  It is the place and prerogative of man to use his faculties to decide which is right.  God is therefore reasonably in the dock and it is appropriate to put Him there. 

Ah, that’s why God did not judge Adam and Eve, right?  That’s why He did not curse them and the creation for eating the apple.  They had been acting righteously all along.  Sure, their conclusions were a bit wonky–but that’s because they had not processed the data rightly, or there was additional data that they had not considered. They had made a mere procedural mistake.  That’s why He came to Adam and Eve and argued more compellingly for the God-hypothesis, so that they would conclude that the Serpent hypothesis was not supported by the weight of evidence, and they would reverse their decision. That’s what Genesis says happened, right?

When men set out to test God–to prove Him to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of their autonomous, sinful, rebellious minds–even if they conclude that, yes there is lots of evidence for God, so that to accept the hypothesis may be reasonable–they need never honour Him as God, nor worship Him, nor aught they.  For a God who exists by virtue of man’s approbation, can likewise be dismissed at will. Therefore, by definition, He cannot be God.

The Intelligent Design folk need to hear this command above all else: Thou shalt not put the Lord Thy God to the test!

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>There’s Work to Be Done; Each of Us Must Do It

Now Jehoshaphat . . . walked in the way of his father Asa and did not depart from it, doing right in the sight of the Lord. The high places, however, were not removed; the people had not yet directed their hearts to the God of their fathers. (II Chronicles 20: 31–33)

The Kingdom of God reached its high water mark in the reign of Solomon, “the Younger”. Following Solomon’s later unfaithfulness to the Lord, the Kingdom split after his death. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was substantially lost to the faith from that point, finally being destroyed by Sennacherib in 722 BC. The Southern Kingdom of Judah limped on for another century or so.

Judah had a mixture of good and bad kings. Jehoshaphat was one of the more faithful, God fearing kings. But so often we read a litany of even relatively faithful kings accepting idolatrous religion and worship and tolerating its admixture with the worship of the one true Living God. The “high places” were altars to idol gods scattered throughout Judah.

The declension of the Davidic line occurred for at least one very pressing reason: it made the hearts of the faithful long for the coming of David’s promised greater Son, Messiah who would be utterly true to His God and Father and who would keep covenant perfectly all the days of His life. Every admixture with idolatry, every compromise, every expression of unfaithfulness in the Kingdom and the kings of Judah made the longing and yearning for Messiah deeper and more desperate.

We, now, are privileged to live in the days of Messiah. He has come forth. The promises of God in Him are yea and amen.  He has taken the throne of David. He sits forever upon that throne in the heavens. He works, rules, and judges tirelessly to remould, remake, and perfect the Kingdom of God–which, as He taught us–is the matter of seeing God’s will done upon earth as it is in heaven. No longer are we cast down in spirit when our rulers and the powers of this world turn away from God and His Christ. For Messiah rules and He will deal with each one. No longer do we need to accept unfaithfulness and defalcation, for Christ rules in heaven and all enemies are gradually being placed under His feet.

In the history of His Church since Pentecost we have seen, as in the line of David’s house, admixtures of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, of true worship of the true God mixed with idolatry and unfaithfulness. But our longing and our labour to put these things right, whilst similar to the great reformers and prophets under the Old Covenant, is different in this one great respect: we no longer yearn for the coming forth of Messiah. He has come and He is now filling up the earth with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. This work is infallible, sure, and certain for God has given Him the Kingdom, having accepted the perfection of His death and resurrection on our behalf. Therefore, feet are surer, hands are steadier, and hope is stronger.

But we must understand that God is not served by lies. There remains in far too many places a toleration of idolatry in the Church, just as in Judah of old. It will not do.

When a man mixes idol worship with the fear of the Lord he invariably and inevitably commits this great sin: he measures and balances and restricts and proscribes the Lord in his heart and mind, as he divides his loyalty and genuflects to, and makes room for, false gods. The root of the sin lies here: he is measuring God and making God, as it were, conform to the desires of his heart, rather than wholeheartedly submitting to God and accepting that God measures him, not the reverse.

This determination to measure God and make Him conform to our feeble reasoning lies at the root of much of the present weakness and enervation in the modern Church. We would believe about God only what makes sense to us. We would progress toward God by understanding before we believe. This makes God the servant and we the master. This makes God the creature, and we the creator.  Whereas Augustine rightly declared that he believed in order to understand, an idolatrous rationalism has so infected the modern church that we have become as Judah of old. We would worship God, but only according to the way and precepts of our rationalistic consent, only if we keep the altars on the high places of our hearts and minds firmly in place.

It is the spirit of the age, and the Church has become all too unfaithfully devoted to it. The Church in the West remains fundamentally syncretisic–as it was during the days of the kings in Judah. But Messiah will never, ever accept it–not in the life of an individual believer, and not in His Church.

Casting out the idolatry by which we pay respect and homage to other authorities and powers must be done. It must be done in individual hearts and minds, person by person, believer by believer. It must be done in our families. It must be done in our congregations and places of worship. It is what the Lord commands us to be about. The high places of our hearts and minds, our families and our communities, and our holy places of worship must be removed and we must direct our hearts to King Jesus–and King Jesus alone. All else flows and cascades down from that.

>Laughable

>A Demi-God Has Spoken

To many in the West, Stephen Hawking is a demi-god. In the rationalist mindset of the Enlightenment those deemed to be the most brilliant or intelligent are honoured above all. If you happen to be a materialist scientist to boot, let alone a physicist then one’s status and place on the Olympian heights is assured. So it is with Hawking. The fact that he suffers such physical impairment only serves to underscore the semi-divine quality of pure Reason–a theme close to the heart of the Enlightenment.

Hawking, along with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, has written a book to “explain” how existence came into being. It is all to do with his quest for a meta-theory of everything. Not yet published, we have been confined to reviews and excerpts, which we acknowledge to be dangerous. We may be rushing to premature judgment, but assuming that the reviews and excerpts are accurate and faithful, Hawking’s latest book, The Grand Design will show that Hawking is indeed a very, very foolish man.

Firstly, like all Unbelievers Hawking believes that all reality (which he now assures us must be conceived of as billions of universes) exists by chance. Randomness, brute chance, is the ultimate reality, period.

Secondly, he assures us that not only our universe, but all possible universes came into existence spontaneously, out of nothing. While he is forced to adopt language such as “creation” he is pleased to proclaim to the world that the existence of a creation does not require a creator. Creation was spontaneously ex-nihilo. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something,” he says. How can that be? Well, things like that could happen in a random multi-verse.

Thirdly, he insists on stealing and using entirely inappropriate language–the use of which implicitly denies and undermines the case he is trying to make. He speaks of the “law” of gravity, and of natural laws in general. He utilises concepts such as “necessity” and “requirement”. Catch these howlers: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” (Emphasis, ours.)

In other words, even as he strives to construct, describe, and argue for a spontaneous random existence out of nothing, he denies thereby his case. It is like the child who wants to deny the existence of hammers and nails by nailing up billboards to that effect. Every constructed and uttered sentence must presuppose the omnipotent God Who created all things out of nothing and controls and governs every sub-atomic particle in the creation, as well as all non material reality. To presuppose God in order to deny Him is folly indeed. It is childish.

Either Hawking is aware of this and accepts the irony, being too embarrassed or unable to deal with it, or he is unaware of it. Either way he is not to be commended.

Has not God spoken truly: “the fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God'”? (Psalm 14:1)