12/25/05
fw from Murray Gow (sometime editor Stimulus)
I wish I could feel more confident about Mr Grantham's 'Kiwi Bible' version
R
SERMONS & SERMON - LECTIONARY RESOURCES
LAUGHTER SUNDAY - HOLY HUMOUR SUNDAY
Often Observed on The Fourth Sunday in Lent)
On the Fourth Sunday of Lent, following an old tradition, albeit it in a new guise, we celebrate "Laugher Sunday" or "Holy Humour Sunday". We lighten up, we relax, and recall the joy of the Lord in the midst of the Lenten pilgrimage. We celebrate God's presence and goodness in the midst of life. We tell jokes. We share inspirational stories with humorous twists. And we still hear the gospel of the day. Well at least sometimes. Other times we find other texts and proclaim them.
Some Background
I first heard of Laughter Sunday in 1991. A member of my congregation whose parents were German speaking Pastors told me about it and some of it's history in Europe. At the same time several "snow birds" (Canadians who winter in Florida) happened to migrate back home and told me about their experience of worship in a large (2000 member) congregation in Florida each year. One of them in particular was impressed with a service held each year in that church, where the pastors and numerous folk from the congregation told jokes and stories and had everybody all in a wonderful turmoil of laughter and good spirits. He said that the service was called "Holy Humour Sunday" and that it was a wonderful break in the midst of the solemnity of Lent. He looked forward to it each year. As have we ever since...
The Fourth Sunday of Lent is sometimes called "Laetare Sunday" - from the first word of the traditional collect for the day (Rejoice). It is also known as "Refreshment Sunday". It was a day when the austerity of Lent was relaxed a little, and the violet vestments of Lent could be replaced with rose coloured ones. A special kind of fruit cake was often served on this Sunday modestly breaking the Lenten Fast (as Sundays in Lent allow for). A recipe for this cake can be found on our page about Mothering Sunday (or open the recipes in a second window here).
A little research shows that Fourth Sunday in Lent is now being observed in a variety of individual churches around the world as "Holy Humour Sunday" or "Lighten Up Sunday". While this day is not listed on the list of approved feast days of the major liturgical denominations, and while there is no mention of it in the "Revised Common Lectionary", there is an ancient history to what we call "Laughter Sunday" - whether it is celebrated on the Fourth Sunday of Lent (as suggested by the "rejoice" theme of the original collect of the day), or as it has been in the past, on Easter Monday.
Early Orthodox churches gathered on the Monday after Easter to tell stories, jokes and anecdotes. To this day in Slavic regions Christians gather the day after Easter for folk dancing and feasting in the churchyard. This was a time of celebrating the big joke that God pulled on Satan. It is known as Bright Monday, White Monday, Dyngus Day, and Emmaus Day in various countries. The Latins call it ‘Risus Paschalis' - God's Joke, the Easter Laugh. (www.newcelebrations.com)
Whenever "Laugher Sunday" it is celebrated, and by whatever name, it is characterised by joking around, singing, dancing, and merry-making. And it reminds us that God is a God of laughter as well as of sorrow - much as God is Lord of the valleys as well as the mountain tops.
Arranging Stuff:
The first and most important is that you explain the tradition and invite the congregation to take part by bringing clean, good, humour to church. Do this three or so weeks before the Sunday you have chosen for "Laughter Sunday". Sometimes you might want to issue a invitation for the congregation bring humour or cute stories that fits a theme (children's comments, pet stories, church bulletin bloopers, etc), other times you might want to open the door wide to anything that strikes the fancy of the congregation. I find this latter works best. Our very first Laughter or Holy Humour Sunday invited people to "bring some stuff" to church - for "Stuff Sunday". Part of the fun was having people ask what kind of stuff - and replying, "you know. Everyones got stuff. Just bring some."
The second detail is is that the worship leader or liturgist compile a sufficient number of teasers and stories with which he or she might introduce and/or close the various humourous interludes of the day. When building the liturgy you might choose, as we have, to alternate readings and slightly more serious stuff with interludes where the worship leader and the congregation share the material that they have brought.
The final detail is a simple one: Enjoy!
Our Files:
The following are our Holy Humour Sunday services. Some are free floating (non-lectionary services), others are lectionary related. The list will be added to year by year and/or when we can get around it.
• Sermon and Liturgy for Laughter Sunday - Year A - None Lectionary
• Sermon and Liturgy for The Fourth Sunday in Lent - Year A - Lectionary Based
• Sermon and Liturgy For The Fourth Sunday in Lent - Year B - Lectionary Based
• Stuff Sunday - Sermon and Liturgy for The Fourth Sunday In Lent - Year C - Partially Lectionary Based.
• Sermon and Liturgy for The Fourth Sunday In Lent - Year C - Lectionary Based
A Final Note: We would very much appreciate hearing from you about alternative formats and innovative ideas for Holy Humour Sunday - or for services like "Stuff Sunday". You might want to check out www.newcelebrations.com regarding Holy Humour Sunday and other "new" celebrations. You will find there various links, including one to the "The Fellowship of Merry Christians" which provides mailing lists for humour and other items related to being a light (rather than heavy) follower of Christ.
copyright - Rev. Richard J. Fairchild 2002 - 2005
please acknowledge the appropriate author if citing these sermons.
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God has Given Me Cause to Laugh"
Toward a Theology of Humor
Paul Thigpen © 2001 by Paul Thigpen
[A lecture presented at Franciscan University of Steubenville in the spring of 2001.]
Thanks for the opportunity to be here. It's just nice to be somewhere with lots of fellow Catholics around. You know, right now I live out in the country near the little town of Ozark, Missouri. Is anyone here from the Ozarks? Well, if you know the area at all, you know that it's a bit backwards – you know, a little behind the times. I remember how, long ago when I was growing up in Georgia, there were some little country towns that were so backward, they hadn't yet gotten indoor plumb-ing or television. Well, the little town of Ozark is so far behind the times, they haven't yet gotten original sin.
There are some places so remote, so far back in the hills and hollers, that when you go to church there on Sunday mornings, even the Episcopalians handle snakes!
There aren't many Catholics in southwest Missouri, either (maybe that's why they haven't yet gotten original sin!). Former Archbishop John May of St. Louis used to tell about how one day a priest's car broke down on a back road in the Ozarks. When he went to a little trailer off the road to ask for help, a nice couple there invited him in. They commented that they'd never met anyone with a collar on backwards.
The priest said, "Oh, yeah? Well, how come you have a picture of the Pope on the wall?"
"Where?" they asked with horror. The priest pointed to an old photograph over the couch – it was a portrait of Pius XII.
"Who's that?" they asked.
"The Pope," said the priest.
"Great goodness!" the old man exclaimed. "They told us that was Harry Truman in his 33rd-degree Masonic outfit!"
Now I have a reason for beginning this humorous way – and it's not just because the Scripture tells us in Ecclesiastes that there is an appointed "time to laugh" (Ecc 3:4). The truth is that in ancient Catholic tradition, there was one particular appointed time to laugh, to engage in what was called the risus paschalis, or the "Easter laughter." Since it's Easter week, now is that time.
It was once customary for even the most dry and solemn of preachers to begin the Easter homily with a joke. Easter Monday especially was hailed as "God's Laughter Day" – a token of the Christian's scorn for the Devil, who had pretended to win victory over us through death. Easter, of course, proved that the joke was on him instead. In the words of the Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh, the resurrection of Jesus was truly "a laugh freed forever and ever." That laughter has ever since echoed down the centuries.
I remember how, many years ago, I was invited to sing at the funeral of the grandmother of one of my closest friends, a Pentecostal. She was a godly woman, and lived, like Job, to be "full of days." But even though her death lacked the bitterness of an unexpected or untimely loss, sadness hung like a heavy veil over the little wood-frame church where we gathered to say good-bye.
Fighting to hold back the tears, I struggled through my song and then sat down to hear the pastor's sermon. He began mournfully, reflecting the emotional landscape inside all of us. But suddenly his words took what seemed to me at the time to be an odd turn, in the direction of humor. He recalled a few comical anecdotes, and then joked that we could be glad our friend wasn't like the atheist whose tombstone read, "All dressed up and no place to go."
It took us awhile to move with him from grief to amuse-ment, but soon we were smiling and even chuckling. The humor of the message finally reached its climax when he told of how a funeral should remind us that we who were still on earth should view ourselves and others with humility, for "dust thou art, and to dust returneth." "Can you imagine!" he finally shouted, with a comical facial expression of mock disdain. "Here we are: One speck of dust, looking down its nose at another speck of dust, and saying, 'I'm better than you are!'"
The congregation roared with laughter, and for a moment you'd have thought that we were anywhere but a funeral. Yet in that moment, the veil of sadness was torn, and the light of eternal life, the brilliance of the resurrection, shone into that little church. The "laugh" freed from the empty tomb was resounding there. Is it any wonder that the service ended with a magnificent season of solemn worship?
Now I'm not suggesting by comparison that the Mass outside the homily should be punctuated with jokes and laughter; unfortunately, I know a priest who tries to do that, and in his attempt to "lighten up," he robs the liturgy of its beautiful dignity and gravity, and he comes off more like a clown than a priest. Even in that Pente-costal funeral I attended, you see, the humor served the function of preparing a place for solemnity. In the Catholic tradition, such a preparation often takes place at the wake, where cleansing laughter makes room for the solemn rite of the funeral Mass that is to follow.
As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up: "Laughter is the beginning of prayer." Using the imagery of the ancient Jewish temple, he insisted that laughter should be found in the outer courts of the temple, but then, as we approach the Holy of Holies, "laughter is swallowed up in prayer."
This is the dynamic, then, I want to consider today: the way in which humor can become a prelude to wisdom and to worship, as a spiritual discipline of the virtue of hope.
The Nature of Humor
The pastor's jesting at the funeral that day gave us a clarity of perspective that allowed us to see the folly of taking ourselves and our present surroundings too seriously. But what exactly is it about humor that can clarify our vision so effectively? For centuries people have attempted to define the nature of the comic, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to contemporary international conferences on the subject. Though many claim that to analyze humor is to kill it, I believe the effort is well worthwhile.
First I think we must recognize that humor is distinct-ively and universally human. The sense of humor, after all, is part of God's gift of reason; it takes a "rational animal," as the philosophers have called us, to be capable of laughing. G. K. Chesterton – whose wit has made me laugh more times than I can count – described it this way: "Alone among the animals, [man] is shaken with that beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the uni-verse hidden from the universe itself." Laughter is so much a part of who we are as human beings that to lose the sense of humor is as injurious as to lose one of the other, more physical, senses – sight or hearing or touch or taste or smell. Medical researchers, in fact, have noted that one symptom of severe mental disability – in particular, schizophrenia – is the inability to laugh.
Just now my mother is living with us, and she is an Alzheimer's patient. Those of you who are familiar with this difficult condition know well how many moments of grief and even agony there can be as the one who suffers slowly loses the gift of memory, and in doing so, inevitably loses a sense of personal identity. Some days I hardly recognize the soul of the woman I've loved so deeply for as long as I can remember.
And yet there are happy moments, too, shining moments, when just for an instant, Mom as we've always known her comes back to us. And I've noticed that those moments are almost always characterized by humor. The other day, for example, she actually found enough presence of mind to make a little play on words, and then she laughed so hard at her own joke that the tears came to her eyes – and to our eyes, too. We knew that somehow, that precious part of her soul had not yet slipped away.
Now even though we can describe the "humanness of humor" from everyday experience, trying to define humor is no small task. I'm reminded of the judge in a criminal pornography case some years back who, when he was challenged to define pornography, replied, "I can't define it legally – but I sure can recognize it when I see it."
I don't know that anyone has provided a satisfactorily comprehensive definition of humor, even though we can usually recognize it when we see it. In any case, many agree that the central feature of most humor is the element of incongruity, the seemingly inappropriate joining of things that are inconsistent or irreconcilable. This was the claim of Schopenhauer, for example, joined by Kierkegaard and certain other philosophers, who insisted that "laughter is the sudden perception of incongruity" between our ideals and the actualities that are before us.
A glance at most jokes or humorous situations provides ample evidence for this analysis. The earlier-noted Pentecostal preacher's "dust" remarks, for example, were comical because in them we recognize the inappropriateness of creatures acting proudly as if they were gods. His joke about the atheist's tombstone elicits laughter (even, I trust, from atheists) because of the incongruity of dressing up a body that is destined for nothing more than disintegration.
Humor in the Scripture
The humor inherent in certain biblical stories reveals itself through this analysis as well. In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, for example, we find Abraham engaging in the traditional Oriental style of haggling, so typical even now of the Middle Eastern marketplace. [Read Gn 18:20-33.]
Despite the very serious matter at hand, what makes this biblical scene comical, of course, is that Abraham, a mere mortal, dares to bargain in this way with Almighty God. (In fact, it reminds me in some ways of Bill Cosby's old "Noah" routine – how many of you have ever heard that one? Cosby has Noah try to barg-ain with God about building the ark, and every time Noah begins to try to back out, God asks him simply and bluntly, "Noah – how long can you tread water?")
When I read how old Abe slowly ups the ante, I find myself laughing – not only at him, but with him, because I catch myself at times trying to do the same thing, trying to play Advisor to God. We're like Cosby's Noah: When God says He plans to let it rain 400 days and 400 nights to flood the earth, Noah responds: "Why waste so much water? Just let it rain forty days and forty nights, and then wait till all the sewers back up."
The inappropriateness of bargaining with God and advising God is what makes us laugh at this situation. The vision of such incongruity then humbles us and reminds us of who we are. As my wife once pointed out to me: "There are only three Persons in the Holy Trinity, honey, and you're not one of them!"
Such an enlightening view of the world appears in other biblical stories as well, such as that comical episode in which the prophet Balaam receives a divine rebuke from his pack animal in Numbers chapter 22 [21-35]. In our minds, we've established sharply defined categories that separate heaven from earth, or the human from the beast. So when Balaam's ass speaks, or when Balaam himself acts assinine, the inappropriateness makes us laugh – and we see our condition more clearly.
In this way, then, godly humor can become a prelude to wisdom, as we see ourselves aright, and to worship, as we see our Creator aright.
Now as much as I admire Chesterton, and as much as his thought has influenced my own in countless ways, I must confess one tiny point at which I disagree with him. At the end of the brilliant little volume entitled Orthodoxy, he makes the observation – correctly, I think – that "the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear," and that "joy, which was the small publicity of the pagans, is the gigantic secret of the Christians." But then he goes on to speculate about why the Gospel writers never speak of Jesus smiling or laughing, and concludes that perhaps "the one thing that was too great for God to show us while He walked upon our earth … was His mirth." Chesterton thinks that Jesus had to hide it from us.
There's no doubt, I think, and Chesterton would heartily agree, that our Lord laughed and played. After all, laughter is a human universal, and if we're fully – that the Church teaches truly when she teaches that Christ was fully human, like us in all things except sin, then how could we doubt it? But unlike Chesterton, I think that we do see our Lord's mirth in some of His sayings, though it is no doubt a subtle humor, and that the Gospel writers simply had their own reasons for not speaking explicitly of His smiles and laughter.
In fact, the humor of our Lord Jesus provides the classic example, I think, of how laughter can uncover pretense or sham, thus cleansing our vision of the world and of ourselves. Most of His barbs were directed at Pharisees and other religious leaders who had deceived themselves into thinking that they had earned themselves a ticket to the throne of heaven. If any of them were ever able, by God's grace, to let Christ's humor have its intended effect, then I believe they discovered through His words how inverted their perceptions truly were.
Jesus' joking comments about the hypocrites of His day focus on the incongruity of their self-righteousness and their pride. The humor, I think, appears most sharply when we try to imagine such people literally taking part in the activities our Lord described. The image of a blind man leading another blind man, and both falling into a ditch (Lk 6:39), reminds me of bumbling episodes from slapstick TV comedies – the Three Stooges, for example, come to mind. Or a similar picture is evoked by His words about the hypocrites who blow trumpets to announce the jingling of their pennies in the collection plate (Mt 6:2-4).
Then there's Mk 21:4, where Jesus speaks of folks trying to hide their lamps under a bed. Now when you keep in mind that the lamps had open flames, and the beds were probably straw, then you get a comic scene in which a sleepy dullard wakes up to the smell of something burning, only to realize that it's his own pajamas!
Or how about our Lord's words in Mt 23:25-26, which evokes images of primly dressed diners eating from spotless dishes – which are filled with rotting garbage! I almost laugh aloud at the absurdity of a camel trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle (Mt 19:23-24), of an eye doctor busy using tweezers on a patient while a log is sticking out of his own eye (7:3-4), of a gnat-free Pharisee with a camel's hoof stuck between his teeth (23:24).
I laugh, but the laughter is redemptive only when I place myself alongside the Pharisees and see my own pretensions made the butt of the Lord's jokes. To be a corrective for vision and thus a spiritual discipline, humor must go beyond mere scorn of another person's shortcomings to a recognition of our common predica-ment. When it does, it prods us to re-examine ourselves, convicts us of our need for salvation, and allows us to seek God's rescue from ourselves, to cultivate hope that He can transform us and heal the incongruities.
When it doesn't do these things – when, instead, our humor is itself self-righteous, and leads us to mock or look down on others – then humor is no longer in the service of the virtue of hope. Rather it indulges the vice that opposes hope: I mean, of course, presumption.
The Gospel As Humor
Now these comical remarks of our Lord, though certain-ly significant in themselves, point beyond themselves, I think, to a more profound reality. In a sense, the entire Gospel is permeated with the liberating vision of humor.
The human dilemma is, after all, a paradox, an incongruity resulting from the Fall. As the psalmist says, we are mortals who flourish and fade like the grass (Ps 103:15), and yet, as the preacher of the book of Ecclesiastes says, we have a sense of eternity planted in our hearts that makes us hope for immortality (Ecc 3:11). As St. Paul told the Romans, we have the universal moral law written on our hearts (Rom 2:14-15), yet we all sin and fall short of even our own moral standards, not to say the glory of God (3:23). We crawl on earth but we hope for heaven. So how to we reconcile these terrible contradictions of our existence?
The resolution of the paradox comes in the Good News that God is God, and we are beloved dust. If we're willing to listen, then far above the mud in which we wallow, from beyond the skies for which we reach, we'll hear a cosmic tumult. And though it comes to shake the earth like thunder, it won't be thunder. It will be the sound of laughter.
From His throne, the Lord of the galaxies looks down at the earth – His "footstool," as he told the prophet Isaiah (66:1). There, He beholds the specks of dust claiming lordship of their lives and of the earth itself. Not surprisingly, the absurdity of our pretense breaks the divine Countenance into mirth, and as the psalmist tells us, "He who sits in the heavens laughs" (Ps 2:4). If we're willing to lay aside our pretenses, that heavenly laughter can cleanse us and awaken us to repentance. It will quake our faulty foundations, tumble us from lofty and dangerous places, and rip away our masks.
In His great faithfulness, our Lord follows His chasten-ing with a promise of redemption. In the depths of our repentance, when we have at last realized that we can-not save ourselves, we hear again the sound of laughter. No blast like thunder comes this time, but rather the still, small voice of God comes gently laughing. And to our amazement, it's the crystal laughter of a Child.
A Child! Could it possibly be that God Himself should crawl upon His footstool and cry for the breast? Priests, we had expected, prophets, we had anticipated; but who would have thought that God Himself would come in the flesh? The deepest and broadest "joke" of history – the great Incongruity of all the ages – grips us in awesome wonder; and we can only laugh with delight and the utter unpredictability of God.
Yet the surprise of the Incarnation has much more humor in store, for it blossoms into a Gospel of scandalous inappropriateness. The joke has just begun! The King of Kings is born in a stable; the Holy One of Israel is befriended by prostitutes; the Lord of Lords is acclaimed as He rides on a dusty old donkey. He shocks the self-righteous people of His day with His startling behavior, proving what St. Paul would later observe: "Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … For the foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Cor 1:20, 25).
Of course, the mighty and the proud may have scoffed at the scandal of the Gospel. But the joke was on them. For the Son of God has come to crash the world's pom-pous masquerade ball, and His prank won't be complete until He's stolen away every last one of our disguises.
The mischief of Jesus inverted the world's values and priorities, because it had to clarify again that God is God and we are beloved dust – beloved enough to be worth the life of His Son. In the eyes of many, those overturned tables in the Temple were simply chaos. But in the act of turning them over, Jesus was showing the incongruity of worshipping Mammon, and what he did actually restored divine order to the house of God.
The Humor of the Saints
If we need any more evidence that the life of Christ had its humor, we need only look at those who, down through the ages, have imitated His life most closely – I mean, of course, the saints. In their lives, we fill out the portrait, so to speak, of divine life. The kinds of things Jesus did that the four evangelists passed over in silence, we can find echoed in the more detailed accounts of the hagiographers.
Now we could take so many examples; I think first of St. Francis of Assisi, whom Chesterton has rightly called "the court fool of the King of Paradise"; whose entire adult life, it seems, was a startling comic elaboration of Christ's act of overturning the tables, smiling playfully as he did so, and pointing out the absurd incongruities of his contemporaries.
Or there is St. Teresa of Avila. What a quick wit shines through her writings and sparkles in the anecdotes of her biographers! Perhaps you've heard, for example, of how she was on her way one day to perform her administrative duties at one of the religious communities she supervised, when the donkey she was riding on stumbled as he forded a stream. She was thrown into the muddy water. As she picked herself up and wiped off the mud, she was heard to say with a sigh, "Lord, if this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few of them!"
I think, however, that humor as a spiritual discipline has probably found its greatest saintly brilliance in the life and work of St. Thomas More. Unfortunately, what most folks know about him has to do more with tragedy than comedy. For his faithfulness to the Church, of course, he languished for fifteen months in the Tower of London, in the shadow of the scaffold where he finally met his martyrdom. In those terrible days, he wrote some of his finest works, among them his treatise entitled Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation.
What is startling about these works is the sense of free-dom, even a kind of lightness, that characterizes them – the Dialogue, for example, is filled with what More called "foolish merry tales." Such lightness, though a recurrent theme throughout More's life, startled his con-temporaries – as it does ours – when it appeared one last bright time as the saint joked with his executioners.
Weary and stumbling from long ill treatment, and with his hands tied behind his back, he feared that he might not be able to negotiate the shaky steps up to the scaffold to be beheaded. So he turned to the lieutenant beside him and quipped, "I pray you, see me safely up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." Once he had laid his head on the block, he asked the executioner to wait while he moved aside his beard, which had grown long and scraggly during his imprisonment. After all, he observed dryly, his beard had never committed any treason!
It was only the last of many jests from a man who from his early days had been a first-class joker. As a boy he once wrote a stand-up comedy routine to be recited as a welcome to the guests at a feast. His youthful Latin compositions play on the fact that his name in Greek, Moros, means fool (the root of our word "moron"), and they flash with wit: "If your feet were as light as your head," one noted, "you could outrun a hare!"
As an adult he became famous well beyond England for his practical jokes, such as "medicating" the food of distinguished guests at his table – with what kind of surprises he "medicated" them, we can only speculate with glee. (Perhaps hot pepper? Or maybe some kind of purgative?) Even More's formal treatises include a number of funny stories whose good humor can still draw laughter nearly five centuries later. And though he may have taught his children that, as he put it, "virtue and learning are meat" while "play is only the sauce," nevertheless the children well knew that he considered the spice of that sauce indispensable.
Is it any wonder that such a man's household included a live-in professional jester and a pet monkey?
Yet this same saint, at the height of his brilliant career, had his own tomb built and his epigraph engraved as a stark reminder of his own mortality. He wrote a book entitled The Sadness of Christ, and a number of essays about death, judgment and hell. How could he have been at the same time such a "merry saint"?
I think the answer is simple: St. Thomas More was a man of fervent hope, a man who continually looked forward to the next life, to the joy of beholding the face of God. He was able to soar merrily above the anxieties and even the horrors of the moment to behold the promise of glory that awaited him if only he could persevere to the end.
You see this trait in More's life at every turn. As Lord Chancellor of England, a wealthy businessman, a renowned Renaissance scholar, he had everything this world could offer: status, power, wealth, fame. But to save his soul in the midst of the temptations inevitable in such conditions, he persistently practiced a number of spiritual disciplines.
Underneath his ruffled shirts and gold chain, for example, More wore a hairshirt. Though he frequently invited crowds to feast in his home, he himself quietly passed over the dainty delicacies they enjoyed at his table. He continually gave alms; he slept with a log for a pillow; he led his family and servants each evening in prayers; he had Scripture read aloud and discussed at mealtimes; he devoted Fridays to prayer and study; he attended Mass regularly and refused to let even the summons of the King tear him away from the altar rail. He thought and wrote frequently of heaven.
In short, he was someone thoroughly in the world but not of it.
Now all these practices we readily recognize as spiritual disciplines, with the calculated effect of detaching one from the glories of this world and focusing attention on the glories of the next. More said repeatedly in his works that deeds which mortified the flesh were in fact a spiritual "medicine," as were thoughts of death, and of the fate that awaits us after death. If you would prepare for the next life, he insisted, take all these things with a deadly seriousness.
What I am proposing, however, is that for More – and for us – humor can itself be yet another spiritual discipline, a spiritual medicine, with a similar effect. As the book of Proverbs reminds us, "A merry heart is good medicine" (17:22). Far from viewing More's merriment as a contradiction to his mortification, I think instead we must recognize an internal consistency between More's ascetic life and his playful life, between his hairshirt and his humor.
More was a jokester precisely for the same reason that he was an ascetic: Through both means, he desired to expose continually the shadowy nature of this world, the incongruities of this life, by turning upon them the bright light of eternity. For More, the discipline of humor, like the discipline of the hairshirt, bore as its fruit the theological virtue of hope.
Take, for example, the practical joke he played on Anne, his daughter-in-law. She was quite attached to expensive jewelry, and she once begged him to buy her a string of pearls. I can just see the loving sparkle in More's eye when, as she later opened the jewelry box he presented her, expecting that her fondest wish had come true, she realized that inside was a necklace … made of white peas.
They all had a good laugh, and the point of the joke was made: In the end, when we leave all such things behind, pearls will be of no more value, and no more permanence, than peas. In that moment Anne recognized the vanity of costly trinkets, and she learned to long for other things instead, things infinitely more precious and lasting.
You see, Saint Thomas knew the intimate connection between humor and hope. He knew that just as God, in giving us humor, has shown us what we are now, so also, in giving us hope, He has shown us what we can one day become – and in both there is a sweet consolation. If laughter is, after all, our response to the gap between what is and what should be, then a finely tuned sense of humor is often the distinguishing mark of clear vision – the kind that sees this life sharply with all its incongruities, yet sees as well the possibilities and implications that lie hidden beneath the surface. It is in fact one aspect of the virtue of wisdom, and Thomas More, despite his name, was a wise man.
The key here, it seems to me, lies in the last two words of an exhortation that we find repeatedly in the personal letters of this saint. He never tires of urging his family, friends and acquaintances: "Be merry in God." For without God – without the hope of another world beyond this one, for which this one is longing – there could be no true merriment. There could be only the shallow giggle of flippancy, or the hollow mockery of the cynic.
To be truly merry, after all, is to live lightly in this world, to be unburdened with cares about things that are quickly passing away. In a sense, we might say that for those who take God and His will with appropriate seriousness, nothing else need be taken seriously. To be in the world but not of the world is, among other things, to laugh at the world.
And so Saint Thomas More, enduring the ordinary trials we all suffer, and a few more extraordinary ones beside, remained merry for a lifetime, and he called all those around him to merriment as well. Even in his last letter on the eve of his execution, the words ring like the crescendo of a musical refrain that has sounded through all his correspondence: "Be merry in God!" When you lose a loved one, be merry. When the barns burn, be merry. When your career is shattered, when your friends betray you, when you end up in prison, when death stares you in the face – "Be merry in God!" Today's tears, he reminds us all, can water the soil of our souls, and one day, as he so vividly put it, "we will have in heaven a merry, laughing harvest forever!"
Humor in the Next World
More's hopeful remark, and his frequent meditations on the last things, suggest a final question about humor: Does it survive our death? If the purpose of a godly humor is to make us see this world aright, what happens when we have left this world behind? We have spoken of the soteriological value of humor; what is the eschatological status of humor? (Sorry – I had to put those big words in there for the sake of the theologians in the audience.)
Think first of hell. Do the damned laugh?
Years ago I wrote my one and only novel, entitled Gehenna; it borrowed the moral geography and some of the themes from Dante's Inferno and placed them in a contemporary setting. (Well, actually, the setting was hell, but the first chapter was set in contemporary downtown Atlanta, which most of us folks from Georgia believe is next door to hell.)
I was an evangelical Protestant at the time, though my thought had already become increasingly Catholic, and when the evangelical magazine Christianity Today reviewed the book, I thought for sure they would criticize my Catholic tendencies. But oddly enough, what the review offered as its major criticism took me totally by surprise: They rebuked me because in some passages, the book was actually funny, and intentionally so. How dare he, the reviewer thundered, treat such a serious subject with humor? Dante would never have done such a thing!
Well, those of you who have read Dante will recognize the irony here: In places, the Inferno is actually quite funny, and it was from Dante, in fact, that I had taken my cue. From a literary point of view, my guess is that he recognized, as I did, the need for some comic relief in such an otherwise relentlessly sobering story. So we both used the demons as our comic characters.
Why would we portray humor in hell? Primarily for the same reason that Gary Larson's wonderful but – alas! – now retired Far Side comic strip so often was set in the netherworld: The existence of hell shows so sharply the incongruities of our fallenness; the damned are the most incongruous of all. If we laugh redemptively now, we might be saved from becoming the object of demonic laughter ourselves in the end.
But is this to say that in the real hell there will be humor? Laughter, perhaps, but not the kind of redemptive humor we've been talking about. I can imagine certain false attempts at humor there, but such devilish scoffing as there might be will not serve hope – for, as Dante reminded us, the gates of hell proclaim: "Abandon hope, all you who enter here."
Hope, after all, has two opposite vices: presumption and despair. And just as the false humor of this world, the kind that merely scorns others, only indulges our presumption and corrodes rather than cleanses us, the jests of hell will only feed despair. If the damned do in fact laugh, it is no doubt with the meaningless, empty laughter of the maniac, the twisted shrieks of a soul that is unraveling into chaos.
What, then, about purgatory? St. Catherine of Genoa glimpsed the poor souls there, and though she spoke of terrible suffering, she insisted that "the overwhelming love of God" and their assurance that in the end, they will reach heaven, gives to them "a joy beyond words." If there is joy, might there not also be laughter? And if the hope of heaven is so close to fulfillment there, might there not also be that discipline of hope, humor?
If the godly purpose of humor, after all, is to cleanse us, and the purgatorial process is precisely a cleansing process, it's only reasonable that laughter might serve as at least part of the cleansing. St. Catherine also noted that in purgatory, God shows us our weaknesses so that we can know what needs to be burned away. With that in mind, sometimes I think of purgatory as a great mirror, full-length, unclouded, without distortion, brilliantly reflecting the soul to be cleansed in the burning light of God's purifying fire. In it, God shows us ourselves as He sees us; and is it too far-fetched to speculate that we would laugh, as the psalmist says He does, at the absurdity of the sight?
Not a scoffing laugh, of course, but an abrasive one, nonetheless, laughter that would scrub away the corrosion of sin. We would laugh so hard that we would, quite literally, laugh until it hurts, and it would hurt, of course, as nothing else had ever hurt before. But it would still be truly humorous laughter, full of joy and hope despite the pain, because of the assurance that when the joke was over at last, we would be fit to know God fully, even as we had been fully known.
And what, then, of heaven? St. Thomas More's remark tells us that he expects heaven to be filled with eternal laughter; and even his adversarial contemporary, Martin Luther, once said with characteristic brashness, "If we're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there."
On the other hand, the moral theologians tell us that, un-like charity, the theological virtues of faith and hope in-volve a certain essential imperfection – an obscurity of light and an absence of possession – and for that reason, they will cease after this life. That is to say, faith and hope will no longer be necessary in heaven, because they will give way to the perfection of the Beatific vision. If hope thus finds its conclusion in heaven, would there still a place for humor, or even laughter?
It's true that in heaven the incongruities of our present existence will be at last only a memory; praise God, the redeemed will at last be free of them, and become whole as they were meant to be. And yet I wonder whether, precisely as a memory, perhaps the follies of our past might not still present themselves as the occasion, as the subject matter, for a kind of heavenly humor, a holy laughter.
I can just hear it now. "Hey, Scott, remember that time you were so proud of making that eloquent speech at the apologetics conference, with an audience of thousands from around the world – until you got back to your hotel room and found out that the whole night your zipper was down?"
And Scott says, "Oh, yeah! And remember, Paul, how on Judgment Day the Lord asked you what you had to show for your time on earth, and you said, 'Well, Lord, I've written twenty-two books – doesn't that count for anything?" And the Lord answered, 'Well, son, I don't know, I've never read any of 'em!'"
If that is indeed the case, or something like it, then humor will continue for eternity – but instead of being a spiritual discipline of the now-completed virtue of hope, it will become an overflowing expression of gratitude to God in worship; that is, a tiny part of that everlasting virtue, charity. It will become the occasion for looking deep into the eyes of the Father, and saying with a heart transfixed by Love Himself, "Thank You. Thank You! For saving me from my absurdity, for healing all my disordered incongruities, for loving this little speck of dust enough to become a Speck of dust Yourself, I will never cease thanking You."
On that day we will be like Sarah, who was Abraham's wife. Remember her story? (Gn 21:1-6) After so many long days of barrenness, grief and shame, after a lifetime of clinging desperately to hope, she finally gave birth to the promise of God.
And what did she call him? She called him "Isaac," which means, not surprisingly, "laughter."
May the Lord grant each of us an Isaac, the fulfillment of our hope, so that we too will be able to declare through endless ages what Sarah once declared: "God has given me cause to laugh, and all who hear of it will laugh with me" (Genesis 21:6).
+ + +
http://www.paulthigpen.com/humor/causetolaugh.html
I wish I could feel more confident about Mr Grantham's 'Kiwi Bible' version
R
SERMONS & SERMON - LECTIONARY RESOURCES
LAUGHTER SUNDAY - HOLY HUMOUR SUNDAY
Often Observed on The Fourth Sunday in Lent)
On the Fourth Sunday of Lent, following an old tradition, albeit it in a new guise, we celebrate "Laugher Sunday" or "Holy Humour Sunday". We lighten up, we relax, and recall the joy of the Lord in the midst of the Lenten pilgrimage. We celebrate God's presence and goodness in the midst of life. We tell jokes. We share inspirational stories with humorous twists. And we still hear the gospel of the day. Well at least sometimes. Other times we find other texts and proclaim them.
Some Background
I first heard of Laughter Sunday in 1991. A member of my congregation whose parents were German speaking Pastors told me about it and some of it's history in Europe. At the same time several "snow birds" (Canadians who winter in Florida) happened to migrate back home and told me about their experience of worship in a large (2000 member) congregation in Florida each year. One of them in particular was impressed with a service held each year in that church, where the pastors and numerous folk from the congregation told jokes and stories and had everybody all in a wonderful turmoil of laughter and good spirits. He said that the service was called "Holy Humour Sunday" and that it was a wonderful break in the midst of the solemnity of Lent. He looked forward to it each year. As have we ever since...
The Fourth Sunday of Lent is sometimes called "Laetare Sunday" - from the first word of the traditional collect for the day (Rejoice). It is also known as "Refreshment Sunday". It was a day when the austerity of Lent was relaxed a little, and the violet vestments of Lent could be replaced with rose coloured ones. A special kind of fruit cake was often served on this Sunday modestly breaking the Lenten Fast (as Sundays in Lent allow for). A recipe for this cake can be found on our page about Mothering Sunday (or open the recipes in a second window here).
A little research shows that Fourth Sunday in Lent is now being observed in a variety of individual churches around the world as "Holy Humour Sunday" or "Lighten Up Sunday". While this day is not listed on the list of approved feast days of the major liturgical denominations, and while there is no mention of it in the "Revised Common Lectionary", there is an ancient history to what we call "Laughter Sunday" - whether it is celebrated on the Fourth Sunday of Lent (as suggested by the "rejoice" theme of the original collect of the day), or as it has been in the past, on Easter Monday.
Early Orthodox churches gathered on the Monday after Easter to tell stories, jokes and anecdotes. To this day in Slavic regions Christians gather the day after Easter for folk dancing and feasting in the churchyard. This was a time of celebrating the big joke that God pulled on Satan. It is known as Bright Monday, White Monday, Dyngus Day, and Emmaus Day in various countries. The Latins call it ‘Risus Paschalis' - God's Joke, the Easter Laugh. (www.newcelebrations.com)
Whenever "Laugher Sunday" it is celebrated, and by whatever name, it is characterised by joking around, singing, dancing, and merry-making. And it reminds us that God is a God of laughter as well as of sorrow - much as God is Lord of the valleys as well as the mountain tops.
Arranging Stuff:
The first and most important is that you explain the tradition and invite the congregation to take part by bringing clean, good, humour to church. Do this three or so weeks before the Sunday you have chosen for "Laughter Sunday". Sometimes you might want to issue a invitation for the congregation bring humour or cute stories that fits a theme (children's comments, pet stories, church bulletin bloopers, etc), other times you might want to open the door wide to anything that strikes the fancy of the congregation. I find this latter works best. Our very first Laughter or Holy Humour Sunday invited people to "bring some stuff" to church - for "Stuff Sunday". Part of the fun was having people ask what kind of stuff - and replying, "you know. Everyones got stuff. Just bring some."
The second detail is is that the worship leader or liturgist compile a sufficient number of teasers and stories with which he or she might introduce and/or close the various humourous interludes of the day. When building the liturgy you might choose, as we have, to alternate readings and slightly more serious stuff with interludes where the worship leader and the congregation share the material that they have brought.
The final detail is a simple one: Enjoy!
Our Files:
The following are our Holy Humour Sunday services. Some are free floating (non-lectionary services), others are lectionary related. The list will be added to year by year and/or when we can get around it.
• Sermon and Liturgy for Laughter Sunday - Year A - None Lectionary
• Sermon and Liturgy for The Fourth Sunday in Lent - Year A - Lectionary Based
• Sermon and Liturgy For The Fourth Sunday in Lent - Year B - Lectionary Based
• Stuff Sunday - Sermon and Liturgy for The Fourth Sunday In Lent - Year C - Partially Lectionary Based.
• Sermon and Liturgy for The Fourth Sunday In Lent - Year C - Lectionary Based
A Final Note: We would very much appreciate hearing from you about alternative formats and innovative ideas for Holy Humour Sunday - or for services like "Stuff Sunday". You might want to check out www.newcelebrations.com regarding Holy Humour Sunday and other "new" celebrations. You will find there various links, including one to the "The Fellowship of Merry Christians" which provides mailing lists for humour and other items related to being a light (rather than heavy) follower of Christ.
copyright - Rev. Richard J. Fairchild 2002 - 2005
please acknowledge the appropriate author if citing these sermons.
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God has Given Me Cause to Laugh"
Toward a Theology of Humor
Paul Thigpen © 2001 by Paul Thigpen
[A lecture presented at Franciscan University of Steubenville in the spring of 2001.]
Thanks for the opportunity to be here. It's just nice to be somewhere with lots of fellow Catholics around. You know, right now I live out in the country near the little town of Ozark, Missouri. Is anyone here from the Ozarks? Well, if you know the area at all, you know that it's a bit backwards – you know, a little behind the times. I remember how, long ago when I was growing up in Georgia, there were some little country towns that were so backward, they hadn't yet gotten indoor plumb-ing or television. Well, the little town of Ozark is so far behind the times, they haven't yet gotten original sin.
There are some places so remote, so far back in the hills and hollers, that when you go to church there on Sunday mornings, even the Episcopalians handle snakes!
There aren't many Catholics in southwest Missouri, either (maybe that's why they haven't yet gotten original sin!). Former Archbishop John May of St. Louis used to tell about how one day a priest's car broke down on a back road in the Ozarks. When he went to a little trailer off the road to ask for help, a nice couple there invited him in. They commented that they'd never met anyone with a collar on backwards.
The priest said, "Oh, yeah? Well, how come you have a picture of the Pope on the wall?"
"Where?" they asked with horror. The priest pointed to an old photograph over the couch – it was a portrait of Pius XII.
"Who's that?" they asked.
"The Pope," said the priest.
"Great goodness!" the old man exclaimed. "They told us that was Harry Truman in his 33rd-degree Masonic outfit!"
Now I have a reason for beginning this humorous way – and it's not just because the Scripture tells us in Ecclesiastes that there is an appointed "time to laugh" (Ecc 3:4). The truth is that in ancient Catholic tradition, there was one particular appointed time to laugh, to engage in what was called the risus paschalis, or the "Easter laughter." Since it's Easter week, now is that time.
It was once customary for even the most dry and solemn of preachers to begin the Easter homily with a joke. Easter Monday especially was hailed as "God's Laughter Day" – a token of the Christian's scorn for the Devil, who had pretended to win victory over us through death. Easter, of course, proved that the joke was on him instead. In the words of the Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh, the resurrection of Jesus was truly "a laugh freed forever and ever." That laughter has ever since echoed down the centuries.
I remember how, many years ago, I was invited to sing at the funeral of the grandmother of one of my closest friends, a Pentecostal. She was a godly woman, and lived, like Job, to be "full of days." But even though her death lacked the bitterness of an unexpected or untimely loss, sadness hung like a heavy veil over the little wood-frame church where we gathered to say good-bye.
Fighting to hold back the tears, I struggled through my song and then sat down to hear the pastor's sermon. He began mournfully, reflecting the emotional landscape inside all of us. But suddenly his words took what seemed to me at the time to be an odd turn, in the direction of humor. He recalled a few comical anecdotes, and then joked that we could be glad our friend wasn't like the atheist whose tombstone read, "All dressed up and no place to go."
It took us awhile to move with him from grief to amuse-ment, but soon we were smiling and even chuckling. The humor of the message finally reached its climax when he told of how a funeral should remind us that we who were still on earth should view ourselves and others with humility, for "dust thou art, and to dust returneth." "Can you imagine!" he finally shouted, with a comical facial expression of mock disdain. "Here we are: One speck of dust, looking down its nose at another speck of dust, and saying, 'I'm better than you are!'"
The congregation roared with laughter, and for a moment you'd have thought that we were anywhere but a funeral. Yet in that moment, the veil of sadness was torn, and the light of eternal life, the brilliance of the resurrection, shone into that little church. The "laugh" freed from the empty tomb was resounding there. Is it any wonder that the service ended with a magnificent season of solemn worship?
Now I'm not suggesting by comparison that the Mass outside the homily should be punctuated with jokes and laughter; unfortunately, I know a priest who tries to do that, and in his attempt to "lighten up," he robs the liturgy of its beautiful dignity and gravity, and he comes off more like a clown than a priest. Even in that Pente-costal funeral I attended, you see, the humor served the function of preparing a place for solemnity. In the Catholic tradition, such a preparation often takes place at the wake, where cleansing laughter makes room for the solemn rite of the funeral Mass that is to follow.
As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up: "Laughter is the beginning of prayer." Using the imagery of the ancient Jewish temple, he insisted that laughter should be found in the outer courts of the temple, but then, as we approach the Holy of Holies, "laughter is swallowed up in prayer."
This is the dynamic, then, I want to consider today: the way in which humor can become a prelude to wisdom and to worship, as a spiritual discipline of the virtue of hope.
The Nature of Humor
The pastor's jesting at the funeral that day gave us a clarity of perspective that allowed us to see the folly of taking ourselves and our present surroundings too seriously. But what exactly is it about humor that can clarify our vision so effectively? For centuries people have attempted to define the nature of the comic, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to contemporary international conferences on the subject. Though many claim that to analyze humor is to kill it, I believe the effort is well worthwhile.
First I think we must recognize that humor is distinct-ively and universally human. The sense of humor, after all, is part of God's gift of reason; it takes a "rational animal," as the philosophers have called us, to be capable of laughing. G. K. Chesterton – whose wit has made me laugh more times than I can count – described it this way: "Alone among the animals, [man] is shaken with that beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the uni-verse hidden from the universe itself." Laughter is so much a part of who we are as human beings that to lose the sense of humor is as injurious as to lose one of the other, more physical, senses – sight or hearing or touch or taste or smell. Medical researchers, in fact, have noted that one symptom of severe mental disability – in particular, schizophrenia – is the inability to laugh.
Just now my mother is living with us, and she is an Alzheimer's patient. Those of you who are familiar with this difficult condition know well how many moments of grief and even agony there can be as the one who suffers slowly loses the gift of memory, and in doing so, inevitably loses a sense of personal identity. Some days I hardly recognize the soul of the woman I've loved so deeply for as long as I can remember.
And yet there are happy moments, too, shining moments, when just for an instant, Mom as we've always known her comes back to us. And I've noticed that those moments are almost always characterized by humor. The other day, for example, she actually found enough presence of mind to make a little play on words, and then she laughed so hard at her own joke that the tears came to her eyes – and to our eyes, too. We knew that somehow, that precious part of her soul had not yet slipped away.
Now even though we can describe the "humanness of humor" from everyday experience, trying to define humor is no small task. I'm reminded of the judge in a criminal pornography case some years back who, when he was challenged to define pornography, replied, "I can't define it legally – but I sure can recognize it when I see it."
I don't know that anyone has provided a satisfactorily comprehensive definition of humor, even though we can usually recognize it when we see it. In any case, many agree that the central feature of most humor is the element of incongruity, the seemingly inappropriate joining of things that are inconsistent or irreconcilable. This was the claim of Schopenhauer, for example, joined by Kierkegaard and certain other philosophers, who insisted that "laughter is the sudden perception of incongruity" between our ideals and the actualities that are before us.
A glance at most jokes or humorous situations provides ample evidence for this analysis. The earlier-noted Pentecostal preacher's "dust" remarks, for example, were comical because in them we recognize the inappropriateness of creatures acting proudly as if they were gods. His joke about the atheist's tombstone elicits laughter (even, I trust, from atheists) because of the incongruity of dressing up a body that is destined for nothing more than disintegration.
Humor in the Scripture
The humor inherent in certain biblical stories reveals itself through this analysis as well. In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, for example, we find Abraham engaging in the traditional Oriental style of haggling, so typical even now of the Middle Eastern marketplace. [Read Gn 18:20-33.]
Despite the very serious matter at hand, what makes this biblical scene comical, of course, is that Abraham, a mere mortal, dares to bargain in this way with Almighty God. (In fact, it reminds me in some ways of Bill Cosby's old "Noah" routine – how many of you have ever heard that one? Cosby has Noah try to barg-ain with God about building the ark, and every time Noah begins to try to back out, God asks him simply and bluntly, "Noah – how long can you tread water?")
When I read how old Abe slowly ups the ante, I find myself laughing – not only at him, but with him, because I catch myself at times trying to do the same thing, trying to play Advisor to God. We're like Cosby's Noah: When God says He plans to let it rain 400 days and 400 nights to flood the earth, Noah responds: "Why waste so much water? Just let it rain forty days and forty nights, and then wait till all the sewers back up."
The inappropriateness of bargaining with God and advising God is what makes us laugh at this situation. The vision of such incongruity then humbles us and reminds us of who we are. As my wife once pointed out to me: "There are only three Persons in the Holy Trinity, honey, and you're not one of them!"
Such an enlightening view of the world appears in other biblical stories as well, such as that comical episode in which the prophet Balaam receives a divine rebuke from his pack animal in Numbers chapter 22 [21-35]. In our minds, we've established sharply defined categories that separate heaven from earth, or the human from the beast. So when Balaam's ass speaks, or when Balaam himself acts assinine, the inappropriateness makes us laugh – and we see our condition more clearly.
In this way, then, godly humor can become a prelude to wisdom, as we see ourselves aright, and to worship, as we see our Creator aright.
Now as much as I admire Chesterton, and as much as his thought has influenced my own in countless ways, I must confess one tiny point at which I disagree with him. At the end of the brilliant little volume entitled Orthodoxy, he makes the observation – correctly, I think – that "the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear," and that "joy, which was the small publicity of the pagans, is the gigantic secret of the Christians." But then he goes on to speculate about why the Gospel writers never speak of Jesus smiling or laughing, and concludes that perhaps "the one thing that was too great for God to show us while He walked upon our earth … was His mirth." Chesterton thinks that Jesus had to hide it from us.
There's no doubt, I think, and Chesterton would heartily agree, that our Lord laughed and played. After all, laughter is a human universal, and if we're fully – that the Church teaches truly when she teaches that Christ was fully human, like us in all things except sin, then how could we doubt it? But unlike Chesterton, I think that we do see our Lord's mirth in some of His sayings, though it is no doubt a subtle humor, and that the Gospel writers simply had their own reasons for not speaking explicitly of His smiles and laughter.
In fact, the humor of our Lord Jesus provides the classic example, I think, of how laughter can uncover pretense or sham, thus cleansing our vision of the world and of ourselves. Most of His barbs were directed at Pharisees and other religious leaders who had deceived themselves into thinking that they had earned themselves a ticket to the throne of heaven. If any of them were ever able, by God's grace, to let Christ's humor have its intended effect, then I believe they discovered through His words how inverted their perceptions truly were.
Jesus' joking comments about the hypocrites of His day focus on the incongruity of their self-righteousness and their pride. The humor, I think, appears most sharply when we try to imagine such people literally taking part in the activities our Lord described. The image of a blind man leading another blind man, and both falling into a ditch (Lk 6:39), reminds me of bumbling episodes from slapstick TV comedies – the Three Stooges, for example, come to mind. Or a similar picture is evoked by His words about the hypocrites who blow trumpets to announce the jingling of their pennies in the collection plate (Mt 6:2-4).
Then there's Mk 21:4, where Jesus speaks of folks trying to hide their lamps under a bed. Now when you keep in mind that the lamps had open flames, and the beds were probably straw, then you get a comic scene in which a sleepy dullard wakes up to the smell of something burning, only to realize that it's his own pajamas!
Or how about our Lord's words in Mt 23:25-26, which evokes images of primly dressed diners eating from spotless dishes – which are filled with rotting garbage! I almost laugh aloud at the absurdity of a camel trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle (Mt 19:23-24), of an eye doctor busy using tweezers on a patient while a log is sticking out of his own eye (7:3-4), of a gnat-free Pharisee with a camel's hoof stuck between his teeth (23:24).
I laugh, but the laughter is redemptive only when I place myself alongside the Pharisees and see my own pretensions made the butt of the Lord's jokes. To be a corrective for vision and thus a spiritual discipline, humor must go beyond mere scorn of another person's shortcomings to a recognition of our common predica-ment. When it does, it prods us to re-examine ourselves, convicts us of our need for salvation, and allows us to seek God's rescue from ourselves, to cultivate hope that He can transform us and heal the incongruities.
When it doesn't do these things – when, instead, our humor is itself self-righteous, and leads us to mock or look down on others – then humor is no longer in the service of the virtue of hope. Rather it indulges the vice that opposes hope: I mean, of course, presumption.
The Gospel As Humor
Now these comical remarks of our Lord, though certain-ly significant in themselves, point beyond themselves, I think, to a more profound reality. In a sense, the entire Gospel is permeated with the liberating vision of humor.
The human dilemma is, after all, a paradox, an incongruity resulting from the Fall. As the psalmist says, we are mortals who flourish and fade like the grass (Ps 103:15), and yet, as the preacher of the book of Ecclesiastes says, we have a sense of eternity planted in our hearts that makes us hope for immortality (Ecc 3:11). As St. Paul told the Romans, we have the universal moral law written on our hearts (Rom 2:14-15), yet we all sin and fall short of even our own moral standards, not to say the glory of God (3:23). We crawl on earth but we hope for heaven. So how to we reconcile these terrible contradictions of our existence?
The resolution of the paradox comes in the Good News that God is God, and we are beloved dust. If we're willing to listen, then far above the mud in which we wallow, from beyond the skies for which we reach, we'll hear a cosmic tumult. And though it comes to shake the earth like thunder, it won't be thunder. It will be the sound of laughter.
From His throne, the Lord of the galaxies looks down at the earth – His "footstool," as he told the prophet Isaiah (66:1). There, He beholds the specks of dust claiming lordship of their lives and of the earth itself. Not surprisingly, the absurdity of our pretense breaks the divine Countenance into mirth, and as the psalmist tells us, "He who sits in the heavens laughs" (Ps 2:4). If we're willing to lay aside our pretenses, that heavenly laughter can cleanse us and awaken us to repentance. It will quake our faulty foundations, tumble us from lofty and dangerous places, and rip away our masks.
In His great faithfulness, our Lord follows His chasten-ing with a promise of redemption. In the depths of our repentance, when we have at last realized that we can-not save ourselves, we hear again the sound of laughter. No blast like thunder comes this time, but rather the still, small voice of God comes gently laughing. And to our amazement, it's the crystal laughter of a Child.
A Child! Could it possibly be that God Himself should crawl upon His footstool and cry for the breast? Priests, we had expected, prophets, we had anticipated; but who would have thought that God Himself would come in the flesh? The deepest and broadest "joke" of history – the great Incongruity of all the ages – grips us in awesome wonder; and we can only laugh with delight and the utter unpredictability of God.
Yet the surprise of the Incarnation has much more humor in store, for it blossoms into a Gospel of scandalous inappropriateness. The joke has just begun! The King of Kings is born in a stable; the Holy One of Israel is befriended by prostitutes; the Lord of Lords is acclaimed as He rides on a dusty old donkey. He shocks the self-righteous people of His day with His startling behavior, proving what St. Paul would later observe: "Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … For the foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Cor 1:20, 25).
Of course, the mighty and the proud may have scoffed at the scandal of the Gospel. But the joke was on them. For the Son of God has come to crash the world's pom-pous masquerade ball, and His prank won't be complete until He's stolen away every last one of our disguises.
The mischief of Jesus inverted the world's values and priorities, because it had to clarify again that God is God and we are beloved dust – beloved enough to be worth the life of His Son. In the eyes of many, those overturned tables in the Temple were simply chaos. But in the act of turning them over, Jesus was showing the incongruity of worshipping Mammon, and what he did actually restored divine order to the house of God.
The Humor of the Saints
If we need any more evidence that the life of Christ had its humor, we need only look at those who, down through the ages, have imitated His life most closely – I mean, of course, the saints. In their lives, we fill out the portrait, so to speak, of divine life. The kinds of things Jesus did that the four evangelists passed over in silence, we can find echoed in the more detailed accounts of the hagiographers.
Now we could take so many examples; I think first of St. Francis of Assisi, whom Chesterton has rightly called "the court fool of the King of Paradise"; whose entire adult life, it seems, was a startling comic elaboration of Christ's act of overturning the tables, smiling playfully as he did so, and pointing out the absurd incongruities of his contemporaries.
Or there is St. Teresa of Avila. What a quick wit shines through her writings and sparkles in the anecdotes of her biographers! Perhaps you've heard, for example, of how she was on her way one day to perform her administrative duties at one of the religious communities she supervised, when the donkey she was riding on stumbled as he forded a stream. She was thrown into the muddy water. As she picked herself up and wiped off the mud, she was heard to say with a sigh, "Lord, if this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few of them!"
I think, however, that humor as a spiritual discipline has probably found its greatest saintly brilliance in the life and work of St. Thomas More. Unfortunately, what most folks know about him has to do more with tragedy than comedy. For his faithfulness to the Church, of course, he languished for fifteen months in the Tower of London, in the shadow of the scaffold where he finally met his martyrdom. In those terrible days, he wrote some of his finest works, among them his treatise entitled Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation.
What is startling about these works is the sense of free-dom, even a kind of lightness, that characterizes them – the Dialogue, for example, is filled with what More called "foolish merry tales." Such lightness, though a recurrent theme throughout More's life, startled his con-temporaries – as it does ours – when it appeared one last bright time as the saint joked with his executioners.
Weary and stumbling from long ill treatment, and with his hands tied behind his back, he feared that he might not be able to negotiate the shaky steps up to the scaffold to be beheaded. So he turned to the lieutenant beside him and quipped, "I pray you, see me safely up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." Once he had laid his head on the block, he asked the executioner to wait while he moved aside his beard, which had grown long and scraggly during his imprisonment. After all, he observed dryly, his beard had never committed any treason!
It was only the last of many jests from a man who from his early days had been a first-class joker. As a boy he once wrote a stand-up comedy routine to be recited as a welcome to the guests at a feast. His youthful Latin compositions play on the fact that his name in Greek, Moros, means fool (the root of our word "moron"), and they flash with wit: "If your feet were as light as your head," one noted, "you could outrun a hare!"
As an adult he became famous well beyond England for his practical jokes, such as "medicating" the food of distinguished guests at his table – with what kind of surprises he "medicated" them, we can only speculate with glee. (Perhaps hot pepper? Or maybe some kind of purgative?) Even More's formal treatises include a number of funny stories whose good humor can still draw laughter nearly five centuries later. And though he may have taught his children that, as he put it, "virtue and learning are meat" while "play is only the sauce," nevertheless the children well knew that he considered the spice of that sauce indispensable.
Is it any wonder that such a man's household included a live-in professional jester and a pet monkey?
Yet this same saint, at the height of his brilliant career, had his own tomb built and his epigraph engraved as a stark reminder of his own mortality. He wrote a book entitled The Sadness of Christ, and a number of essays about death, judgment and hell. How could he have been at the same time such a "merry saint"?
I think the answer is simple: St. Thomas More was a man of fervent hope, a man who continually looked forward to the next life, to the joy of beholding the face of God. He was able to soar merrily above the anxieties and even the horrors of the moment to behold the promise of glory that awaited him if only he could persevere to the end.
You see this trait in More's life at every turn. As Lord Chancellor of England, a wealthy businessman, a renowned Renaissance scholar, he had everything this world could offer: status, power, wealth, fame. But to save his soul in the midst of the temptations inevitable in such conditions, he persistently practiced a number of spiritual disciplines.
Underneath his ruffled shirts and gold chain, for example, More wore a hairshirt. Though he frequently invited crowds to feast in his home, he himself quietly passed over the dainty delicacies they enjoyed at his table. He continually gave alms; he slept with a log for a pillow; he led his family and servants each evening in prayers; he had Scripture read aloud and discussed at mealtimes; he devoted Fridays to prayer and study; he attended Mass regularly and refused to let even the summons of the King tear him away from the altar rail. He thought and wrote frequently of heaven.
In short, he was someone thoroughly in the world but not of it.
Now all these practices we readily recognize as spiritual disciplines, with the calculated effect of detaching one from the glories of this world and focusing attention on the glories of the next. More said repeatedly in his works that deeds which mortified the flesh were in fact a spiritual "medicine," as were thoughts of death, and of the fate that awaits us after death. If you would prepare for the next life, he insisted, take all these things with a deadly seriousness.
What I am proposing, however, is that for More – and for us – humor can itself be yet another spiritual discipline, a spiritual medicine, with a similar effect. As the book of Proverbs reminds us, "A merry heart is good medicine" (17:22). Far from viewing More's merriment as a contradiction to his mortification, I think instead we must recognize an internal consistency between More's ascetic life and his playful life, between his hairshirt and his humor.
More was a jokester precisely for the same reason that he was an ascetic: Through both means, he desired to expose continually the shadowy nature of this world, the incongruities of this life, by turning upon them the bright light of eternity. For More, the discipline of humor, like the discipline of the hairshirt, bore as its fruit the theological virtue of hope.
Take, for example, the practical joke he played on Anne, his daughter-in-law. She was quite attached to expensive jewelry, and she once begged him to buy her a string of pearls. I can just see the loving sparkle in More's eye when, as she later opened the jewelry box he presented her, expecting that her fondest wish had come true, she realized that inside was a necklace … made of white peas.
They all had a good laugh, and the point of the joke was made: In the end, when we leave all such things behind, pearls will be of no more value, and no more permanence, than peas. In that moment Anne recognized the vanity of costly trinkets, and she learned to long for other things instead, things infinitely more precious and lasting.
You see, Saint Thomas knew the intimate connection between humor and hope. He knew that just as God, in giving us humor, has shown us what we are now, so also, in giving us hope, He has shown us what we can one day become – and in both there is a sweet consolation. If laughter is, after all, our response to the gap between what is and what should be, then a finely tuned sense of humor is often the distinguishing mark of clear vision – the kind that sees this life sharply with all its incongruities, yet sees as well the possibilities and implications that lie hidden beneath the surface. It is in fact one aspect of the virtue of wisdom, and Thomas More, despite his name, was a wise man.
The key here, it seems to me, lies in the last two words of an exhortation that we find repeatedly in the personal letters of this saint. He never tires of urging his family, friends and acquaintances: "Be merry in God." For without God – without the hope of another world beyond this one, for which this one is longing – there could be no true merriment. There could be only the shallow giggle of flippancy, or the hollow mockery of the cynic.
To be truly merry, after all, is to live lightly in this world, to be unburdened with cares about things that are quickly passing away. In a sense, we might say that for those who take God and His will with appropriate seriousness, nothing else need be taken seriously. To be in the world but not of the world is, among other things, to laugh at the world.
And so Saint Thomas More, enduring the ordinary trials we all suffer, and a few more extraordinary ones beside, remained merry for a lifetime, and he called all those around him to merriment as well. Even in his last letter on the eve of his execution, the words ring like the crescendo of a musical refrain that has sounded through all his correspondence: "Be merry in God!" When you lose a loved one, be merry. When the barns burn, be merry. When your career is shattered, when your friends betray you, when you end up in prison, when death stares you in the face – "Be merry in God!" Today's tears, he reminds us all, can water the soil of our souls, and one day, as he so vividly put it, "we will have in heaven a merry, laughing harvest forever!"
Humor in the Next World
More's hopeful remark, and his frequent meditations on the last things, suggest a final question about humor: Does it survive our death? If the purpose of a godly humor is to make us see this world aright, what happens when we have left this world behind? We have spoken of the soteriological value of humor; what is the eschatological status of humor? (Sorry – I had to put those big words in there for the sake of the theologians in the audience.)
Think first of hell. Do the damned laugh?
Years ago I wrote my one and only novel, entitled Gehenna; it borrowed the moral geography and some of the themes from Dante's Inferno and placed them in a contemporary setting. (Well, actually, the setting was hell, but the first chapter was set in contemporary downtown Atlanta, which most of us folks from Georgia believe is next door to hell.)
I was an evangelical Protestant at the time, though my thought had already become increasingly Catholic, and when the evangelical magazine Christianity Today reviewed the book, I thought for sure they would criticize my Catholic tendencies. But oddly enough, what the review offered as its major criticism took me totally by surprise: They rebuked me because in some passages, the book was actually funny, and intentionally so. How dare he, the reviewer thundered, treat such a serious subject with humor? Dante would never have done such a thing!
Well, those of you who have read Dante will recognize the irony here: In places, the Inferno is actually quite funny, and it was from Dante, in fact, that I had taken my cue. From a literary point of view, my guess is that he recognized, as I did, the need for some comic relief in such an otherwise relentlessly sobering story. So we both used the demons as our comic characters.
Why would we portray humor in hell? Primarily for the same reason that Gary Larson's wonderful but – alas! – now retired Far Side comic strip so often was set in the netherworld: The existence of hell shows so sharply the incongruities of our fallenness; the damned are the most incongruous of all. If we laugh redemptively now, we might be saved from becoming the object of demonic laughter ourselves in the end.
But is this to say that in the real hell there will be humor? Laughter, perhaps, but not the kind of redemptive humor we've been talking about. I can imagine certain false attempts at humor there, but such devilish scoffing as there might be will not serve hope – for, as Dante reminded us, the gates of hell proclaim: "Abandon hope, all you who enter here."
Hope, after all, has two opposite vices: presumption and despair. And just as the false humor of this world, the kind that merely scorns others, only indulges our presumption and corrodes rather than cleanses us, the jests of hell will only feed despair. If the damned do in fact laugh, it is no doubt with the meaningless, empty laughter of the maniac, the twisted shrieks of a soul that is unraveling into chaos.
What, then, about purgatory? St. Catherine of Genoa glimpsed the poor souls there, and though she spoke of terrible suffering, she insisted that "the overwhelming love of God" and their assurance that in the end, they will reach heaven, gives to them "a joy beyond words." If there is joy, might there not also be laughter? And if the hope of heaven is so close to fulfillment there, might there not also be that discipline of hope, humor?
If the godly purpose of humor, after all, is to cleanse us, and the purgatorial process is precisely a cleansing process, it's only reasonable that laughter might serve as at least part of the cleansing. St. Catherine also noted that in purgatory, God shows us our weaknesses so that we can know what needs to be burned away. With that in mind, sometimes I think of purgatory as a great mirror, full-length, unclouded, without distortion, brilliantly reflecting the soul to be cleansed in the burning light of God's purifying fire. In it, God shows us ourselves as He sees us; and is it too far-fetched to speculate that we would laugh, as the psalmist says He does, at the absurdity of the sight?
Not a scoffing laugh, of course, but an abrasive one, nonetheless, laughter that would scrub away the corrosion of sin. We would laugh so hard that we would, quite literally, laugh until it hurts, and it would hurt, of course, as nothing else had ever hurt before. But it would still be truly humorous laughter, full of joy and hope despite the pain, because of the assurance that when the joke was over at last, we would be fit to know God fully, even as we had been fully known.
And what, then, of heaven? St. Thomas More's remark tells us that he expects heaven to be filled with eternal laughter; and even his adversarial contemporary, Martin Luther, once said with characteristic brashness, "If we're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there."
On the other hand, the moral theologians tell us that, un-like charity, the theological virtues of faith and hope in-volve a certain essential imperfection – an obscurity of light and an absence of possession – and for that reason, they will cease after this life. That is to say, faith and hope will no longer be necessary in heaven, because they will give way to the perfection of the Beatific vision. If hope thus finds its conclusion in heaven, would there still a place for humor, or even laughter?
It's true that in heaven the incongruities of our present existence will be at last only a memory; praise God, the redeemed will at last be free of them, and become whole as they were meant to be. And yet I wonder whether, precisely as a memory, perhaps the follies of our past might not still present themselves as the occasion, as the subject matter, for a kind of heavenly humor, a holy laughter.
I can just hear it now. "Hey, Scott, remember that time you were so proud of making that eloquent speech at the apologetics conference, with an audience of thousands from around the world – until you got back to your hotel room and found out that the whole night your zipper was down?"
And Scott says, "Oh, yeah! And remember, Paul, how on Judgment Day the Lord asked you what you had to show for your time on earth, and you said, 'Well, Lord, I've written twenty-two books – doesn't that count for anything?" And the Lord answered, 'Well, son, I don't know, I've never read any of 'em!'"
If that is indeed the case, or something like it, then humor will continue for eternity – but instead of being a spiritual discipline of the now-completed virtue of hope, it will become an overflowing expression of gratitude to God in worship; that is, a tiny part of that everlasting virtue, charity. It will become the occasion for looking deep into the eyes of the Father, and saying with a heart transfixed by Love Himself, "Thank You. Thank You! For saving me from my absurdity, for healing all my disordered incongruities, for loving this little speck of dust enough to become a Speck of dust Yourself, I will never cease thanking You."
On that day we will be like Sarah, who was Abraham's wife. Remember her story? (Gn 21:1-6) After so many long days of barrenness, grief and shame, after a lifetime of clinging desperately to hope, she finally gave birth to the promise of God.
And what did she call him? She called him "Isaac," which means, not surprisingly, "laughter."
May the Lord grant each of us an Isaac, the fulfillment of our hope, so that we too will be able to declare through endless ages what Sarah once declared: "God has given me cause to laugh, and all who hear of it will laugh with me" (Genesis 21:6).
+ + +
http://www.paulthigpen.com/humor/causetolaugh.html
11/26/05
Note the times of these releases.
Now THAT'S what I call a rapid response.
R
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1st October 2005 4:15am
BOEING, BELL HELICOPTER ASKED TO PULL 'MOSQUE ATTACK' AD
Magazine ad shows U.S. special forces rappelling onto mosque roof
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 9/30/2005) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on aerospace giants Boeing Co. and Bell Helicopter Textron to pull a print advertisement depicting U.S. troops attacking a mosque.
The ad for the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, published in the September 24 issue of National Journal magazine, depicts soldiers rappelling onto the roof of a building, labeled "Muhammad Mosque" in Arabic. The building has a dome, crescent moon and minaret, all common features of a mosque.
To view the ad, go to: http://www.cair.com/mosqueattackad.pdf
Headlines on the ad read: "It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell." Ad copy states: "The CV-22 delivers Special Forces to insertion points never thought possible."
In a letter to Textron Chairman Lewis B. Campbell, Boeing Company President James A. Bell and Bell Helicopter Chief Executive Officer Michael A. Redenbaugh, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad wrote:
"[The ad] clearly portrays special forces assaulting a mosque, a structure dedicated to civilian worship purposes. This gives the impression that 'the insertion points never thought possible' are Islamic places of worship. . .This advertisement reflects poorly on Bell Helicopter, Textron and Boeing, and offers a questionable picture of your companies' collective opinion of Islam and Muslims."
Awad asked the companies to withdraw the advertisement and conduct an investigation into how it was approved for publication.
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1st October 2005 8:37am
BOEING, BELL, NATIONAL JOURNAL APOLOGIZE FOR 'MOSQUE ATTACK' AD
Boeing: 'We consider the ad offensive, regret its publication and apologize'
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 9/30/2005) - A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group said this afternoon that Boeing Co., Bell Helicopter Textron and National Journal magazine have apologized for a print advertisement depicting U.S. troops attacking a mosque.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it had received a statement of apology from Boeing, which sponsored the ad along with Bell. Boeing wrote:
"The CV-22 advertisement that appeared in the National Journal is clearly offensive, and did not proceed through the normal channels within Boeing before production.
"'We consider the ad offensive, regret its publication and apologize to those who like us are dismayed with its contents,' said Mary Foerster, Vice President of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems Communications.
"'When the Company became aware of the advertisement we immediately requested that our partner's agency withdraw and destroy all print proofs of the advertisement and replace it with one that was appropriate,' Foerster said. 'Unfortunately despite our best efforts to have the ad replaced, a clerical error at the National Journal resulted in its publication this week.'"
Representatives of Bell Helicopter and National Journal also contacted CAIR to express regret for the publication of the ad.
National Journal Executive Vice President Elizabeth Baker Keffer wrote: "[T]he advertisement for Boeing/Bell's V-22 Osprey that ran in the September 24 issue of National Journal was run as the result of a clerical error on our part. We had received specific direction from the agency representing Boeing/Bell to not run the ad. We have apologized to Boeing, their partner Bell, and their advertising agency for this mistake."
A Bell statement sent to CAIR said in part: "We recognize that some organizations and individuals may have been offended by its content and regrets any concerns this advertisement may have raised. Bell and our partners are evaluating creative processes to prevent this from happening again."
The ad for the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft depicted soldiers rappelling onto the roof of a building, labeled "Muhammad Mosque" in Arabic. The building has a dome, crescent moon and minaret, all common features of a mosque.
CAIR sent a letter yesterday to top officials of Boeing, Bell and Textron asking the companies to withdraw the advertisement and conduct an investigation into how it was approved for publication. (Bell Helicopter is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Textron.)
"We thank Boeing, Bell and National Journal for their swift and decisive response to our concerns," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "Mistakes can happen, but the true test of a company's integrity comes in acknowledging and dealing with those mistakes." He said CAIR will follow up with all parties involved to determine how the ad was produced and to help prevent similar incidents in the future.
Awad added that American Muslim groups are always ready to consult with corporations and media outlets on issues related to religious diversity and culturally-sensitive advertising.
Now THAT'S what I call a rapid response.
R
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1st October 2005 4:15am
BOEING, BELL HELICOPTER ASKED TO PULL 'MOSQUE ATTACK' AD
Magazine ad shows U.S. special forces rappelling onto mosque roof
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 9/30/2005) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on aerospace giants Boeing Co. and Bell Helicopter Textron to pull a print advertisement depicting U.S. troops attacking a mosque.
The ad for the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, published in the September 24 issue of National Journal magazine, depicts soldiers rappelling onto the roof of a building, labeled "Muhammad Mosque" in Arabic. The building has a dome, crescent moon and minaret, all common features of a mosque.
To view the ad, go to: http://www.cair.com/mosqueattackad.pdf
Headlines on the ad read: "It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell." Ad copy states: "The CV-22 delivers Special Forces to insertion points never thought possible."
In a letter to Textron Chairman Lewis B. Campbell, Boeing Company President James A. Bell and Bell Helicopter Chief Executive Officer Michael A. Redenbaugh, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad wrote:
"[The ad] clearly portrays special forces assaulting a mosque, a structure dedicated to civilian worship purposes. This gives the impression that 'the insertion points never thought possible' are Islamic places of worship. . .This advertisement reflects poorly on Bell Helicopter, Textron and Boeing, and offers a questionable picture of your companies' collective opinion of Islam and Muslims."
Awad asked the companies to withdraw the advertisement and conduct an investigation into how it was approved for publication.
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1st October 2005 8:37am
BOEING, BELL, NATIONAL JOURNAL APOLOGIZE FOR 'MOSQUE ATTACK' AD
Boeing: 'We consider the ad offensive, regret its publication and apologize'
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 9/30/2005) - A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group said this afternoon that Boeing Co., Bell Helicopter Textron and National Journal magazine have apologized for a print advertisement depicting U.S. troops attacking a mosque.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it had received a statement of apology from Boeing, which sponsored the ad along with Bell. Boeing wrote:
"The CV-22 advertisement that appeared in the National Journal is clearly offensive, and did not proceed through the normal channels within Boeing before production.
"'We consider the ad offensive, regret its publication and apologize to those who like us are dismayed with its contents,' said Mary Foerster, Vice President of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems Communications.
"'When the Company became aware of the advertisement we immediately requested that our partner's agency withdraw and destroy all print proofs of the advertisement and replace it with one that was appropriate,' Foerster said. 'Unfortunately despite our best efforts to have the ad replaced, a clerical error at the National Journal resulted in its publication this week.'"
Representatives of Bell Helicopter and National Journal also contacted CAIR to express regret for the publication of the ad.
National Journal Executive Vice President Elizabeth Baker Keffer wrote: "[T]he advertisement for Boeing/Bell's V-22 Osprey that ran in the September 24 issue of National Journal was run as the result of a clerical error on our part. We had received specific direction from the agency representing Boeing/Bell to not run the ad. We have apologized to Boeing, their partner Bell, and their advertising agency for this mistake."
A Bell statement sent to CAIR said in part: "We recognize that some organizations and individuals may have been offended by its content and regrets any concerns this advertisement may have raised. Bell and our partners are evaluating creative processes to prevent this from happening again."
The ad for the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft depicted soldiers rappelling onto the roof of a building, labeled "Muhammad Mosque" in Arabic. The building has a dome, crescent moon and minaret, all common features of a mosque.
CAIR sent a letter yesterday to top officials of Boeing, Bell and Textron asking the companies to withdraw the advertisement and conduct an investigation into how it was approved for publication. (Bell Helicopter is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Textron.)
"We thank Boeing, Bell and National Journal for their swift and decisive response to our concerns," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "Mistakes can happen, but the true test of a company's integrity comes in acknowledging and dealing with those mistakes." He said CAIR will follow up with all parties involved to determine how the ad was produced and to help prevent similar incidents in the future.
Awad added that American Muslim groups are always ready to consult with corporations and media outlets on issues related to religious diversity and culturally-sensitive advertising.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/26/AR2005092600817_pf.html
Pa. Case Is Newest Round in Evolution Debate
'Intelligent Design' Teaching Challenged
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 27, 2005; A03
HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 26 -- New barrages sounded in the evolution war Monday as lawyers for a group of parents challenged the teaching of "intelligent design" as nothing more than an old argument for God's hand wrapped in fancy new cloth.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural."
This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
Eleven parents from Dover, in central Pennsylvania, are seeking to block their school board from requiring that high school biology teachers read a four-paragraph statement to students that casts doubt on Darwin's theory of evolution. This mandatory statement notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life -- namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an intelligent hand.
The foremost advocates of intelligent design are silent on whether that intelligent hand belongs to God or some other intelligent force, even including a space alien. The school board, represented by the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative, religiously grounded nonprofit firm, took the position that the case was about freedom of speech.
"There is in fact a controversy over Darwin's theory," Richard Thompson, chief counsel for the law center, said afterward during an impromptu news conference on the courthouse steps. "Clearly both theories have religious implications. But this is not about God."
Last year, however, Dover school board members -- who voted 6 to 3 for the new policy -- made it clear that they believed that the origin of life was guided by a heavenly hand. Several of them suggested that their views on evolution are far closer to Young Earth Creationism, which holds that God created the world 6,000 years ago and that Noah's flood covered Earth, than to intelligent design.
One board member told a public meeting -- in a remark he has since tried to deny -- that the nation "was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such."
The war over the teaching of evolution is almost a century old, the first great shot having been fired in Dayton, Tenn., in the famous 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," in which the ACLU defended a teacher convicted of teaching evolution. Former presidential candidate and prairie populist Williams Jennings Bryan represented the school board. Another shot sounded in 1987, when the Supreme Court prohibited the teaching of creationism in public schools, ruling that it was not science but religion and violated the separation of church and state.
Shortly after that Supreme Court ruling, intelligent design began to appear on the lecture circuit, championed by a small band of scientists and academics. Intelligent design advocates tend to concentrate their criticism on Darwinian theory; they have been far less successful at laying a foundation for a new scientific theory, which by definition must be testable.
This was a point hammered at Monday as the ACLU called its first witness, Kenneth R. Miller, a Brown University biology professor and author of a biology textbook used in nearly half the schools in the nation -- including in Dover. Miller noted that virtually every prominent scientific organization in the United States has upheld Darwin's theory of evolution as an unshakable pillar of science.
Intelligent design, he emphasized, has not fared nearly as well.
"Intelligent design is inherently religious. It is a form of creationism," Miller said during four hours of testimony that often resembled an extended college seminar. "If you invoke a spiritual force in science, I can't test or replicate it.
"Scientific theories are not hunches," he added. "When we say 'theory,' we mean a strong, overarching explanation that ties together many facts and enables us to make testable predictions."
The school board's attorneys countered by arguing that several of the leading intelligent design theorists are respected scientists and professors. And they said the school board merely makes students aware of another viewpoint. The board also mandated the placement in the school library of the book "Of Pandas and People." The book makes the case for intelligent design, and the school board's attorneys made the case that it was sort of an alternative textbook.
But Miller rejoined in his testimony that it was nothing of the sort. He pointed out many examples of outdated or distorted science in the book. He said the errors were so numerous as to amount to an intentional misreading of science, designed to drive unwary students to reject evolutionary theory.
"The errors in the book are systematic," Miller said.
Both sides plan to call a long line of witnesses, from scientists to philosophers to local teachers and parents. And, in a rare moment of agreement, they said the case is likely to eventually reach the Supreme Court.
Pa. Case Is Newest Round in Evolution Debate
'Intelligent Design' Teaching Challenged
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 27, 2005; A03
HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 26 -- New barrages sounded in the evolution war Monday as lawyers for a group of parents challenged the teaching of "intelligent design" as nothing more than an old argument for God's hand wrapped in fancy new cloth.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural."
This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
Eleven parents from Dover, in central Pennsylvania, are seeking to block their school board from requiring that high school biology teachers read a four-paragraph statement to students that casts doubt on Darwin's theory of evolution. This mandatory statement notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life -- namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an intelligent hand.
The foremost advocates of intelligent design are silent on whether that intelligent hand belongs to God or some other intelligent force, even including a space alien. The school board, represented by the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative, religiously grounded nonprofit firm, took the position that the case was about freedom of speech.
"There is in fact a controversy over Darwin's theory," Richard Thompson, chief counsel for the law center, said afterward during an impromptu news conference on the courthouse steps. "Clearly both theories have religious implications. But this is not about God."
Last year, however, Dover school board members -- who voted 6 to 3 for the new policy -- made it clear that they believed that the origin of life was guided by a heavenly hand. Several of them suggested that their views on evolution are far closer to Young Earth Creationism, which holds that God created the world 6,000 years ago and that Noah's flood covered Earth, than to intelligent design.
One board member told a public meeting -- in a remark he has since tried to deny -- that the nation "was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such."
The war over the teaching of evolution is almost a century old, the first great shot having been fired in Dayton, Tenn., in the famous 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," in which the ACLU defended a teacher convicted of teaching evolution. Former presidential candidate and prairie populist Williams Jennings Bryan represented the school board. Another shot sounded in 1987, when the Supreme Court prohibited the teaching of creationism in public schools, ruling that it was not science but religion and violated the separation of church and state.
Shortly after that Supreme Court ruling, intelligent design began to appear on the lecture circuit, championed by a small band of scientists and academics. Intelligent design advocates tend to concentrate their criticism on Darwinian theory; they have been far less successful at laying a foundation for a new scientific theory, which by definition must be testable.
This was a point hammered at Monday as the ACLU called its first witness, Kenneth R. Miller, a Brown University biology professor and author of a biology textbook used in nearly half the schools in the nation -- including in Dover. Miller noted that virtually every prominent scientific organization in the United States has upheld Darwin's theory of evolution as an unshakable pillar of science.
Intelligent design, he emphasized, has not fared nearly as well.
"Intelligent design is inherently religious. It is a form of creationism," Miller said during four hours of testimony that often resembled an extended college seminar. "If you invoke a spiritual force in science, I can't test or replicate it.
"Scientific theories are not hunches," he added. "When we say 'theory,' we mean a strong, overarching explanation that ties together many facts and enables us to make testable predictions."
The school board's attorneys countered by arguing that several of the leading intelligent design theorists are respected scientists and professors. And they said the school board merely makes students aware of another viewpoint. The board also mandated the placement in the school library of the book "Of Pandas and People." The book makes the case for intelligent design, and the school board's attorneys made the case that it was sort of an alternative textbook.
But Miller rejoined in his testimony that it was nothing of the sort. He pointed out many examples of outdated or distorted science in the book. He said the errors were so numerous as to amount to an intentional misreading of science, designed to drive unwary students to reject evolutionary theory.
"The errors in the book are systematic," Miller said.
Both sides plan to call a long line of witnesses, from scientists to philosophers to local teachers and parents. And, in a rare moment of agreement, they said the case is likely to eventually reach the Supreme Court.
Religion, Identity & Mideast Peace, by David Rosen [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 10:28:24 PM
Foreign Policy Research Institute
50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
1955-2005
www.fpri.org
E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email
The 10th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
RELIGION, IDENTITY AND MIDEAST PEACE
by Rabbi David Rosen
September 23, 2005
David Rosen is the Director of Inter-religious Affairs for
the American Jewish Committee in Jerusalem. He is the
former Chief Rabbi of Ireland.
The 10th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
RELIGION, IDENTITY AND MIDEAST PEACE
by Rabbi David Rosen
It is true that most conflicts that are portrayed as
religious conflicts are not in essence anything of the sort.
Whether between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir, Buddhists and
Hindus in Sri Lanka, Christians and Muslims in Nigeria or
Indonesia, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or
between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, these conflicts
are not at all religious or theological in origin! They are
all territorial conflicts in which ethnic and religious
differences are exploited and manipulated, often
mercilessly.
However this fact still begs the question. Why and how is
it that religion is so easily exploited and abused? Why is
it that in many contexts of conflict in our world, religion
appears to be more part of the problem than the solution?
The answer, I believe, is to a great extent implicit in the
aforementioned point itself - namely, the socio-cultural
territorial and political contexts in which religion
functions.
Because religion seeks to give meaning and purpose to who we
are, it is inextricably bound up with all the different
components of human identity, from the most basic such as
family, through the larger components of communities, ethnic
groups, nations and peoples, to the widest components of
humanity and creation as a whole. These components of human
identity are the building blocks of our psycho-spiritual
well-being and we deny them at our peril. Scholars studying
the modern human condition have pointed out just how much
the counterculture, drug abuse, violence, cults, etc. are a
search for identity on the part of those who have lost the
traditional compasses of orientation.
In the relationship between religion and identity, the
components or circles within circles of our identity affirm
who we are; but by definition at the same time they affirm
who we are not! Whether the perception of distinction and
difference is viewed positively or negatively, depends upon
the context in which we find or perceive ourselves.
You may recall the work of the popular writer on animal and
human behavior, Robert Ardrey, who referred to three basic
human needs: security, stimulation and identity. Ardrey
pointed out that the absence of security serves as automatic
stimulation that leads to identity. When people sense a
threat, such as in wartime, they do not face the challenge
of loss of identity. On the contrary, the very absence of
security itself guarantees the stimulation that leads to
strengthening of identity. Indeed because religion is so
inextricably bound up with identity, religion itself
acquires far greater prominence in times of threat and
conflict, nurturing and strengthening the identity that
senses itself as threatened, in opposition to that which is
perceived as threatening it. We might note in this regard
the role of the ancient Hebrew prophets in relation to the
people when in exile. Then they do not challenge their lack
of moral responsiveness and ethical outreach -- that they do
when the people are secure. In times of insecurity, they
see their role to protect and enhance the identity that is
under threat.
However, the character that religion assumes under such
circumstances is often not just one of nurturing, but often
one of such self-preoccupation and paradoxically even one of
self-righteousness, that disregards "the other" who is
perceived as not part of one's identity group and even
demonizes that "other" who is perceived as hostile, often
portraying the latter -- in the words of the historian
Richard Hofstadter -- as "a perfect picture of malice."
The image I find useful in explaining the behaviour of
particular identities for good or bad is that of a spiral.
These different components of identity, as I mentioned
before, are circles within circles. When they feel secure
within the wider context in which they find themselves, then
they can open up and affirm the broader context; families
respecting other families; communities respecting other
communities; nations respecting other nations; and religions
affirming the commonality within the family of nations or
humankind. However, when these components of human identity
do not feel comfortable in the broader context, they isolate
themselves, cut themselves off from one another and
generally compound the sense of alienation.
In the Middle East this phenomenon is especially intense.
Everybody in our part of the world feels vulnerable and
threatened; it is just that different groups see themselves
and others in different paradigms! Therefore it is very
difficult within such a context to be able to open to the
other and affirm our common humanity in the recognition and
the importance of the fact not only that every human being
is created in the image of the Divine, but that our
religions -- all our religions -- affirm the value of peace
as an ideal for human society and see violence and war as
being undesirable -- perhaps a necessity in cases, but
certainly not as an ideal.
Moreover, where religion does not provide a prophetic
challenge to political authority, but is both caught up as
part of the political reality and even subordinate and
subject to political authority as it is in the Middle East,
institutional religion tends to be more part of the problem
than part of the solution. The role of the prophetic
challenge to religious identities, to be faithful to their
traditions while affirming the dignity of the other and
promoting reconciliation and peace -- has tended in our part
of the world as in most contexts of conflict, to be the
voice of the non-establishment religious visionaries and
activists.
Christianity has perhaps been a more constructive voice
within this context, but there is the rub: for Christianity
in the Middle East is characterized precisely by the fact
that it is not linked to any political power base. However,
most institutional religion in our part of the world is so
inextricably bound up with the power structures -- with the
heads of the respective Jewish and Muslim communities
actually appointed by the political authorities -- that it
is very rare for a truly prophetic voice to emerge from the
institutional religious leadership of either the Jewish or
Muslim communities. And even within the local Christian
communities there is also a tendency to be hamstrung by the
exigencies of the political realities that impose very
significant restrictions and pressures upon the role of
leadership within such a context.
Because religion is therefore associated more with partisan
insularity if not downright hostility towards the "other,"
there has been an understandable tendency on the part of
peace initiatives in the Middle East to avoid religious
institutions and their authorities, seeing them as obstacles
to any such peace process. This tendency is comprehensible
but terribly misguided, as it fails to address the most
deep-seated dimensions of the communal identities involved
and actually undermines the capacities of positive political
initiatives to succeed. Indeed, I believe this was a
significant factor in the failure of the Oslo Process. Let
me make the point more graphically. On the lawn of the
White House when the famous handshake took place in
September 1992, one saw no visible personality representing
religious leadership either of the Jewish community or of
the Muslim community in the Holy Land supporting the desire
to find a way out of the regional conflict. The message was
clear: religion is something to be kept out of the process.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this attitude
compounded a sense of alienation on the part of the most
fervently religious elements within both communities who did
their best to violently undermine that process (not that I
am suggesting any equivalence here!).
Furthermore, during the last five years, not only have we
witnessed terrible violence in the Holy Land, but we also
have seen a most worrying religious manipulation of a
territorial conflict, using religious symbols and arguments
to poison minds and justify terrible carnage.
Undoubtedly, the global terrorist abuse of religion has
significantly contributed to a dawning realization in the
world and in relation to the Middle East in particular that
not only is religion, as Doug Johnston has described it,
"the missing dimension of statecraft," but that, in fact, if
one does not engage religious institutions that reflect the
most profound identities of the peoples concerned to support
positive political processes, then inevitably one is playing
into the hands of those hostile to them. The real way to
overcome the extremists is to strengthen the hands of the
moderates. The effective way to marginalize the political
abuse of religion is to demonstrate its constructive
political use to embrace the other while respecting the
differences that make us who we are.
It was in this light, amidst the worst violence in recent
years in the Holy Land, that a remarkable gathering took
place three years ago in Alexandria, Egypt, bringing
religious leaders of the Three Faith communities together
for the first time ever in human history, to lend the voices
of their respective traditions to an end to violence and to
promoting peace and reconciliation. But precisely because
of the fear and insecurity that separates our communities in
conflict, it required a third party to bring this about.
And the person to do so was the then Archbishop of
Canterbury, Lord George Carey. Providentially, Canterbury
had an institutional relationship with Al Azhar in Cairo,
the fountainhead of Islamic learning in the Arab world,
indeed in the Muslim world at large, and the Grand Imam of
Al Azhar, Sheikh Tantawi, agreed to host the meeting. This
was crucial in facilitating the success of this initiative.
For while the Chief Rabbis of Israel do not represent all
religious Jews in Israel, let alone in the world,
nevertheless no one in world Jewry would object to their
representing Judaism for the purpose of advancing
interreligious reconciliation. Similarly, while the
Patriarchs of Jerusalem do not represent the whole of
Christendom, their role as representatives of Christianity
in an effort to promote reconciliation in the Middle East
would certainly be affirmed by the Christian world at large.
But, in the Islamic context, the religious leadership within
Palestinian society does not have the standing throughout
the Muslim world to ensure that its voice would be heard and
respected as representing Islam. Thus, the need to have
this major institution of Islamic learning support this
process was of critical importance. In addition, Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak gave the green light to Sheikh
Tantawi to host the gathering, and arranged for all the
participants to subsequently meet with him at his palace in
Cairo for a press conference. This was because President
Mubarak, like other political leaders, now had an interest,
especially after September 11, 2001, in being seen to be on
the side of constructive religious resolution of conflict
rather than to be avoiding it. And not only President
Mubarak, but of course Prime Minister Sharon, and Chairman
Arafat also had an interest in such. The amazing thing was
that they all lent their support to this initiative despite
the violence that was going on at the time.
As mentioned, this summit was indeed an historic event, as
never before had heads of the different three faith
communities in the Holy Land ever come together in one
place. The participants included four leading Sheikhs from
the establishment structure of the Palestinian authority,
including the head of the Shaaria Courts, their Supreme
Islamic Juridicial Authority; five prominent Israeli rabbis,
including the Sephardic Chief Rabbi; and all Patriarchs were
represented, the Latin Patriarch attending in person. After
much discussion we were able to agree on a text of a
declaration that condemned the violent abuse of religion,
suicidal homicides, and all actions that are oppressive and
destructive of human life and dignity. The declaration also
called on political leaders to eschew violence and return to
the negotiating table and to recognize the importance of
religion as a force of reconciliation; and it called for
respect for the rights of both Israeli and Palestinian
peoples.
Notwithstanding the ongoing violence, this was a document of
great significance. While the symbolic significance of this
summit and its declaration in itself should not be
minimized, a number of important developments followed. To
begin with, it initiated a process of real communication
between the religious leaders who had previously had no
ongoing contact between them. The outcome has been the
establishment of a Council of the Religious Leadership
Institutions of the Holy Land involving the Chief Rabbinate
of Israel, the Shaaria Courts of Palestine and all the
recognized Churches of the Holy Land. This body declares
its purpose not only to facilitate ongoing communication
between the religious leadership, but also to engage
respective political leadership in the pursuit of peace and
reconciliation.
The Alexandria summit also led to the establishment of
centers for the promotion of religious teaching on peace and
reconciliation, in Gaza, Kafr Kassem and Jerusalem. One
might also argue that had it not been for the Alexandria
initiative, the historic World Congress of Imams and Rabbis
for peace that took place this year in Brussels under the
patronage of the Kings of Morocco and Belgium, would not
have happened. This led to the formation of an executive
and administrative structure to facilitate such ongoing
dialogue and conversation and the second congress is
scheduled to take place next March in Seville at the Center
for the Three Cultures of the Mediterranean.
Above all, however, the Alexandria initiative has given both
religious institutions in the Holy Land and beyond, a sense
that they can and must play an active role in conflict
resolution and has increased an understanding of this
necessity among political leadership as well.
The potential in this regard is enormous and I would suggest
that an urgent focus needs to be Jerusalem and the Holy
sites.
It has been popular past political wisdom that Jerusalem is
an issue that needs to be left until the end of a peace
process. However, the "religionization" of the Middle East
conflict to which I referred earlier -- not least of all
reflected in the Palestinian designation of the last round
of conflict as the Al Aksa Intifada -- has turned this
"wisdom" on its head.
This negative use of religion reflecting and exploiting an
atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust, has led to a
perception within the Muslim World that Muslim Holy sites in
Jerusalem are somehow under threat. At the same time, Jews
around the world and not only in Israel, are horrified by
what they perceive as the overwhelming denial on the part of
Muslims of any historic attachment of the Jewish people to
Jerusalem at all, let alone to its holy sites. And the
Christian communities are caught between the hammer and the
anvil.
Achieving an accord of the three religious communities on
Jerusalem that would affirm respect for each one's
attachments and sites, and adjuring against any threat in
word or deed to these, would be of enormous psychological
value. It would also be of great assistance for any
political process it there is a will for such.
A serious difficulty however lies -- as I have already
indicated -- in the fact that Palestinian Muslim leadership
cannot speak on behalf of the Muslim world. Accordingly,
any kind of interreligious accord has to involve the wider
Arab Muslim world at least. There are five key "players" in
this regard. In addition to the Palestinians, there is
Jordan, which still has a special role in relation to the
Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem; the Saudis, who see
themselves as the Guardians of all the key Muslim holy
sites; Egypt, which sees itself as the leader of the Arab
world and is the seat of the most important Muslim institute
of religious learning, Al Azhar; and Morocco, whose King
chairs the Jerusalem Committee of the OIC.
Efforts at bringing all these components together to achieve
an accord on Jerusalem and the holy sites are now underway
and, if they succeed, could be of enormous value.
As I have indicated, institutional religion cannot in itself
spearhead a political peace process in the Middle East.
However, it is an essential partner in providing the psycho-
spiritual glue without which no peace process will hold
together.
Simply stated, if we do not want religion to be part of the
problem, it has to be part of the solution - and where else
more so than in the land that is holy and so significant for
all three faiths, and where any accord between the local
communities will have enormous ramifications not only for
our region but indeed for the world as a whole.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
The Templeton Lecture was established by John M. Templeton,
Jr. to provide a public forum for the discussion of the role
of religion in international politics. Essays based on
these lectures are posted at:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
2004: Is Public Theology Necessary for Democracy?
Max L. Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary
2003: The New Jihad and Islamic Tradition
John Kelsay, University of Florida
2002: The Dignity of Difference: Avoiding the Clash of Civilizations
Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth
2001: The Sacred and the Profane: Judaism and International Relations
Harvey Sicherman, President, FPRI
2000: Pope John Paul II and the Dynamics of History
George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center
1999: The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World
Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth University
1998: Religion and Globalization
James Kurth, Swarthmore College and FPRI
1997: Religion and Russia's Future
James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress
1996: Religion and Civic Virtue at Home and Abroad
George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll
For related material, see the Spring 1992 issue of Orbis on
Faith and Statecraft.
----------------------------------------------------------
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50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
1955-2005
www.fpri.org
E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email
The 10th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
RELIGION, IDENTITY AND MIDEAST PEACE
by Rabbi David Rosen
September 23, 2005
David Rosen is the Director of Inter-religious Affairs for
the American Jewish Committee in Jerusalem. He is the
former Chief Rabbi of Ireland.
The 10th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
RELIGION, IDENTITY AND MIDEAST PEACE
by Rabbi David Rosen
It is true that most conflicts that are portrayed as
religious conflicts are not in essence anything of the sort.
Whether between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir, Buddhists and
Hindus in Sri Lanka, Christians and Muslims in Nigeria or
Indonesia, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or
between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, these conflicts
are not at all religious or theological in origin! They are
all territorial conflicts in which ethnic and religious
differences are exploited and manipulated, often
mercilessly.
However this fact still begs the question. Why and how is
it that religion is so easily exploited and abused? Why is
it that in many contexts of conflict in our world, religion
appears to be more part of the problem than the solution?
The answer, I believe, is to a great extent implicit in the
aforementioned point itself - namely, the socio-cultural
territorial and political contexts in which religion
functions.
Because religion seeks to give meaning and purpose to who we
are, it is inextricably bound up with all the different
components of human identity, from the most basic such as
family, through the larger components of communities, ethnic
groups, nations and peoples, to the widest components of
humanity and creation as a whole. These components of human
identity are the building blocks of our psycho-spiritual
well-being and we deny them at our peril. Scholars studying
the modern human condition have pointed out just how much
the counterculture, drug abuse, violence, cults, etc. are a
search for identity on the part of those who have lost the
traditional compasses of orientation.
In the relationship between religion and identity, the
components or circles within circles of our identity affirm
who we are; but by definition at the same time they affirm
who we are not! Whether the perception of distinction and
difference is viewed positively or negatively, depends upon
the context in which we find or perceive ourselves.
You may recall the work of the popular writer on animal and
human behavior, Robert Ardrey, who referred to three basic
human needs: security, stimulation and identity. Ardrey
pointed out that the absence of security serves as automatic
stimulation that leads to identity. When people sense a
threat, such as in wartime, they do not face the challenge
of loss of identity. On the contrary, the very absence of
security itself guarantees the stimulation that leads to
strengthening of identity. Indeed because religion is so
inextricably bound up with identity, religion itself
acquires far greater prominence in times of threat and
conflict, nurturing and strengthening the identity that
senses itself as threatened, in opposition to that which is
perceived as threatening it. We might note in this regard
the role of the ancient Hebrew prophets in relation to the
people when in exile. Then they do not challenge their lack
of moral responsiveness and ethical outreach -- that they do
when the people are secure. In times of insecurity, they
see their role to protect and enhance the identity that is
under threat.
However, the character that religion assumes under such
circumstances is often not just one of nurturing, but often
one of such self-preoccupation and paradoxically even one of
self-righteousness, that disregards "the other" who is
perceived as not part of one's identity group and even
demonizes that "other" who is perceived as hostile, often
portraying the latter -- in the words of the historian
Richard Hofstadter -- as "a perfect picture of malice."
The image I find useful in explaining the behaviour of
particular identities for good or bad is that of a spiral.
These different components of identity, as I mentioned
before, are circles within circles. When they feel secure
within the wider context in which they find themselves, then
they can open up and affirm the broader context; families
respecting other families; communities respecting other
communities; nations respecting other nations; and religions
affirming the commonality within the family of nations or
humankind. However, when these components of human identity
do not feel comfortable in the broader context, they isolate
themselves, cut themselves off from one another and
generally compound the sense of alienation.
In the Middle East this phenomenon is especially intense.
Everybody in our part of the world feels vulnerable and
threatened; it is just that different groups see themselves
and others in different paradigms! Therefore it is very
difficult within such a context to be able to open to the
other and affirm our common humanity in the recognition and
the importance of the fact not only that every human being
is created in the image of the Divine, but that our
religions -- all our religions -- affirm the value of peace
as an ideal for human society and see violence and war as
being undesirable -- perhaps a necessity in cases, but
certainly not as an ideal.
Moreover, where religion does not provide a prophetic
challenge to political authority, but is both caught up as
part of the political reality and even subordinate and
subject to political authority as it is in the Middle East,
institutional religion tends to be more part of the problem
than part of the solution. The role of the prophetic
challenge to religious identities, to be faithful to their
traditions while affirming the dignity of the other and
promoting reconciliation and peace -- has tended in our part
of the world as in most contexts of conflict, to be the
voice of the non-establishment religious visionaries and
activists.
Christianity has perhaps been a more constructive voice
within this context, but there is the rub: for Christianity
in the Middle East is characterized precisely by the fact
that it is not linked to any political power base. However,
most institutional religion in our part of the world is so
inextricably bound up with the power structures -- with the
heads of the respective Jewish and Muslim communities
actually appointed by the political authorities -- that it
is very rare for a truly prophetic voice to emerge from the
institutional religious leadership of either the Jewish or
Muslim communities. And even within the local Christian
communities there is also a tendency to be hamstrung by the
exigencies of the political realities that impose very
significant restrictions and pressures upon the role of
leadership within such a context.
Because religion is therefore associated more with partisan
insularity if not downright hostility towards the "other,"
there has been an understandable tendency on the part of
peace initiatives in the Middle East to avoid religious
institutions and their authorities, seeing them as obstacles
to any such peace process. This tendency is comprehensible
but terribly misguided, as it fails to address the most
deep-seated dimensions of the communal identities involved
and actually undermines the capacities of positive political
initiatives to succeed. Indeed, I believe this was a
significant factor in the failure of the Oslo Process. Let
me make the point more graphically. On the lawn of the
White House when the famous handshake took place in
September 1992, one saw no visible personality representing
religious leadership either of the Jewish community or of
the Muslim community in the Holy Land supporting the desire
to find a way out of the regional conflict. The message was
clear: religion is something to be kept out of the process.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this attitude
compounded a sense of alienation on the part of the most
fervently religious elements within both communities who did
their best to violently undermine that process (not that I
am suggesting any equivalence here!).
Furthermore, during the last five years, not only have we
witnessed terrible violence in the Holy Land, but we also
have seen a most worrying religious manipulation of a
territorial conflict, using religious symbols and arguments
to poison minds and justify terrible carnage.
Undoubtedly, the global terrorist abuse of religion has
significantly contributed to a dawning realization in the
world and in relation to the Middle East in particular that
not only is religion, as Doug Johnston has described it,
"the missing dimension of statecraft," but that, in fact, if
one does not engage religious institutions that reflect the
most profound identities of the peoples concerned to support
positive political processes, then inevitably one is playing
into the hands of those hostile to them. The real way to
overcome the extremists is to strengthen the hands of the
moderates. The effective way to marginalize the political
abuse of religion is to demonstrate its constructive
political use to embrace the other while respecting the
differences that make us who we are.
It was in this light, amidst the worst violence in recent
years in the Holy Land, that a remarkable gathering took
place three years ago in Alexandria, Egypt, bringing
religious leaders of the Three Faith communities together
for the first time ever in human history, to lend the voices
of their respective traditions to an end to violence and to
promoting peace and reconciliation. But precisely because
of the fear and insecurity that separates our communities in
conflict, it required a third party to bring this about.
And the person to do so was the then Archbishop of
Canterbury, Lord George Carey. Providentially, Canterbury
had an institutional relationship with Al Azhar in Cairo,
the fountainhead of Islamic learning in the Arab world,
indeed in the Muslim world at large, and the Grand Imam of
Al Azhar, Sheikh Tantawi, agreed to host the meeting. This
was crucial in facilitating the success of this initiative.
For while the Chief Rabbis of Israel do not represent all
religious Jews in Israel, let alone in the world,
nevertheless no one in world Jewry would object to their
representing Judaism for the purpose of advancing
interreligious reconciliation. Similarly, while the
Patriarchs of Jerusalem do not represent the whole of
Christendom, their role as representatives of Christianity
in an effort to promote reconciliation in the Middle East
would certainly be affirmed by the Christian world at large.
But, in the Islamic context, the religious leadership within
Palestinian society does not have the standing throughout
the Muslim world to ensure that its voice would be heard and
respected as representing Islam. Thus, the need to have
this major institution of Islamic learning support this
process was of critical importance. In addition, Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak gave the green light to Sheikh
Tantawi to host the gathering, and arranged for all the
participants to subsequently meet with him at his palace in
Cairo for a press conference. This was because President
Mubarak, like other political leaders, now had an interest,
especially after September 11, 2001, in being seen to be on
the side of constructive religious resolution of conflict
rather than to be avoiding it. And not only President
Mubarak, but of course Prime Minister Sharon, and Chairman
Arafat also had an interest in such. The amazing thing was
that they all lent their support to this initiative despite
the violence that was going on at the time.
As mentioned, this summit was indeed an historic event, as
never before had heads of the different three faith
communities in the Holy Land ever come together in one
place. The participants included four leading Sheikhs from
the establishment structure of the Palestinian authority,
including the head of the Shaaria Courts, their Supreme
Islamic Juridicial Authority; five prominent Israeli rabbis,
including the Sephardic Chief Rabbi; and all Patriarchs were
represented, the Latin Patriarch attending in person. After
much discussion we were able to agree on a text of a
declaration that condemned the violent abuse of religion,
suicidal homicides, and all actions that are oppressive and
destructive of human life and dignity. The declaration also
called on political leaders to eschew violence and return to
the negotiating table and to recognize the importance of
religion as a force of reconciliation; and it called for
respect for the rights of both Israeli and Palestinian
peoples.
Notwithstanding the ongoing violence, this was a document of
great significance. While the symbolic significance of this
summit and its declaration in itself should not be
minimized, a number of important developments followed. To
begin with, it initiated a process of real communication
between the religious leaders who had previously had no
ongoing contact between them. The outcome has been the
establishment of a Council of the Religious Leadership
Institutions of the Holy Land involving the Chief Rabbinate
of Israel, the Shaaria Courts of Palestine and all the
recognized Churches of the Holy Land. This body declares
its purpose not only to facilitate ongoing communication
between the religious leadership, but also to engage
respective political leadership in the pursuit of peace and
reconciliation.
The Alexandria summit also led to the establishment of
centers for the promotion of religious teaching on peace and
reconciliation, in Gaza, Kafr Kassem and Jerusalem. One
might also argue that had it not been for the Alexandria
initiative, the historic World Congress of Imams and Rabbis
for peace that took place this year in Brussels under the
patronage of the Kings of Morocco and Belgium, would not
have happened. This led to the formation of an executive
and administrative structure to facilitate such ongoing
dialogue and conversation and the second congress is
scheduled to take place next March in Seville at the Center
for the Three Cultures of the Mediterranean.
Above all, however, the Alexandria initiative has given both
religious institutions in the Holy Land and beyond, a sense
that they can and must play an active role in conflict
resolution and has increased an understanding of this
necessity among political leadership as well.
The potential in this regard is enormous and I would suggest
that an urgent focus needs to be Jerusalem and the Holy
sites.
It has been popular past political wisdom that Jerusalem is
an issue that needs to be left until the end of a peace
process. However, the "religionization" of the Middle East
conflict to which I referred earlier -- not least of all
reflected in the Palestinian designation of the last round
of conflict as the Al Aksa Intifada -- has turned this
"wisdom" on its head.
This negative use of religion reflecting and exploiting an
atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust, has led to a
perception within the Muslim World that Muslim Holy sites in
Jerusalem are somehow under threat. At the same time, Jews
around the world and not only in Israel, are horrified by
what they perceive as the overwhelming denial on the part of
Muslims of any historic attachment of the Jewish people to
Jerusalem at all, let alone to its holy sites. And the
Christian communities are caught between the hammer and the
anvil.
Achieving an accord of the three religious communities on
Jerusalem that would affirm respect for each one's
attachments and sites, and adjuring against any threat in
word or deed to these, would be of enormous psychological
value. It would also be of great assistance for any
political process it there is a will for such.
A serious difficulty however lies -- as I have already
indicated -- in the fact that Palestinian Muslim leadership
cannot speak on behalf of the Muslim world. Accordingly,
any kind of interreligious accord has to involve the wider
Arab Muslim world at least. There are five key "players" in
this regard. In addition to the Palestinians, there is
Jordan, which still has a special role in relation to the
Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem; the Saudis, who see
themselves as the Guardians of all the key Muslim holy
sites; Egypt, which sees itself as the leader of the Arab
world and is the seat of the most important Muslim institute
of religious learning, Al Azhar; and Morocco, whose King
chairs the Jerusalem Committee of the OIC.
Efforts at bringing all these components together to achieve
an accord on Jerusalem and the holy sites are now underway
and, if they succeed, could be of enormous value.
As I have indicated, institutional religion cannot in itself
spearhead a political peace process in the Middle East.
However, it is an essential partner in providing the psycho-
spiritual glue without which no peace process will hold
together.
Simply stated, if we do not want religion to be part of the
problem, it has to be part of the solution - and where else
more so than in the land that is holy and so significant for
all three faiths, and where any accord between the local
communities will have enormous ramifications not only for
our region but indeed for the world as a whole.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs
The Templeton Lecture was established by John M. Templeton,
Jr. to provide a public forum for the discussion of the role
of religion in international politics. Essays based on
these lectures are posted at:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
2004: Is Public Theology Necessary for Democracy?
Max L. Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary
2003: The New Jihad and Islamic Tradition
John Kelsay, University of Florida
2002: The Dignity of Difference: Avoiding the Clash of Civilizations
Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth
2001: The Sacred and the Profane: Judaism and International Relations
Harvey Sicherman, President, FPRI
2000: Pope John Paul II and the Dynamics of History
George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center
1999: The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World
Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth University
1998: Religion and Globalization
James Kurth, Swarthmore College and FPRI
1997: Religion and Russia's Future
James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress
1996: Religion and Civic Virtue at Home and Abroad
George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll
For related material, see the Spring 1992 issue of Orbis on
Faith and Statecraft.
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The U of Ak chaplains' mag Real World, where I pubd my first theological paper a dozen y ago, is to pub next month the attached 1500wd. I've sent it also to NYT
!Should I next try on Dawkins' stronghold The Grauniad ?
The challenge is to summarise theistic evolution so that an outline can be presented in many situations. We should include IDT's main point but also many more important.
Sound-bite situations beloved of the media are a largely different challenge but should also I suppose be faced up to also.
IDT®, the thin end of the wedge for Creationism®, is mostly a pseudo-intellectual PR charade.
IDT® cautiously refrains from error, rather in the manner of a student writing exam answers. But they do so at the price of saying very little. Their characteristic point, 'this bacterial flagellum is designed' i.e Paley 1802 gone submicroscopic, is not wrong - OK as far as it goes; but to stand pat on that one point, waiting for Dawkins, Wolpert etc to admit it, is not very educational. (I'm glad to find the recent Discovery Inst bk 'This Privileged Planet' is a broader 'cosmological anthropic' reasoning.)
IDT is tainted by fake scholarship. The IDT storefront www.iscid.org is designed to resemble a scientific forum but comptrollers Dembski, Sparacio have repeatedly refused to let me slap anything onto it. Unnecessary novel terms are injected by Dembski in such a way as to give those unfamiliar with philosophy an impression of scholarly writing. I have remarked that their concentration on submicroscopic 'Paley timepieces' is to a degree obscurantist - requiring instruments and advanced theory to understand what is being studied e.g flagellin, blood clot cascades, etc, whereas the evident planned cooperation in macroscopic ecology is directly accessible to children .
As Don Nield points out, IDT's Wedge is being driven in at the wrong place, causing rifts in wrong places. IDTers Johnson, Dembski etc want to dump methodological materialism, and claim that 'this bacterial flagellum must be designed' is a scientific statement. Instead, it's 'God of the gaps' lo-grade philosophy, and peculiarly narrow & fixed. Dubya has even vaguely endorsed IDT® - kiss of death?!?
What is needed instead is to carry on science with materialism as an axiom of scientific method, but also create a context of philosophy in which science will be conducted, acknowledging all 4 categories of cause (not just 2 as assumed in Dawkins' scientism).
Moral relativism is common among pushers of IDT (Creationism lite) and even of Creationism-hevi. 'Teach the controversy' they intone, as if all ideas enter on an equal footing. Glyn Carpenter likes to give more space to each of Creationism® and IDT® alongside Don Nield's orthodox understanding of evolution which ends up < 33% of the VisioNet booklet. Interestingly, they don't admit to supporting Creationism or even IDT - they just pose as neutral. But these are not tendencies toward which a Christian minister or serious layman should remain neutral. I repeat what I've said about the leaders of Creationism previously:
In 1983 I photographed in the Science Museum, Kensington, an exhibit which asserted the axiom that
*either* organisms have evolved
*or* God has created them.
This furphy, not normally so clearly enunciated, seems to me to be not only the fundamental error of Creationism® but also typical in its illogic of most if not all fundamentalisms. I suggest the racket common to them all is the requirement of assent to propositions which are not subtly but flagrantly false. This is not ancillary or accidental: I believe it is essential, in that once a person has overtly signalled switching-off of God-given reason in favour of a pointedly false slogan from the sect leader(s), obedience can be thereafter required much more generally by the sect leaders.
This is in the nature of totalitarian systems' social psychology. "The Slavs are sub-human" and of course the immortal "the Jews are the cause of all German troubles" are prototypical modern examples of blatantly false slogans which you had to assent to overtly if you were to attain the (temporary) social security of the National Socialist Party. "The first 3 chapters of the Bible, plus the Noah story, can & must be taken literally" is similar mischief. To exhort people to say they believe what cannot actually be believed is mind-buggering for the purpose of totalitarian power.
I don't see why this racket is not more widely & vigorously condemned. Those who propound it do not in fact advocate that other parts of the Bible be read literally; Broom & I point to John the Baptist's hailing "the Lamb of God" - why do fundamentalists not try to insist that Christ assumed ovine form for that occasion on the banks of the Jordan?
These sectarian, totalitarian tendencies are a major cross-current within W. Christianity. Graeme Finlay has emphasized that they are also a serious external embarrassment to Christianity, being used as handy weak targets by anti-religion ravers e.g. Dawkins. I cannot understand why VisioNetNZ is so easily bought off and acts in effect as an undeclared agent for Creationism®.
I have seen enough of the leaders of Creationism & IDT to say their main ideas & methods are demonic. Bruce Nicholls pretends to reply by saying their dupes are not demonic; I agree this is a fact - but why won't Bruce & Glyn face up to the glaring defects in the leaders?
R
Clarifying "the" theory of evolution
L R B Mann
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it more difficult than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
What does the term 'evolution' mean? The OED tells us it comes from the Latin noun evolutio 'unrolling' and means
A. The process by which different kinds of living organisms are believed to have developed from earlier forms, especially by natural selection.
B. Gradual development.
Evolution is the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199
of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 109 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 109 y, mammals 2 x 108 y, and man somewhere in the region 106 -104 y BP. Most species were created much later than the first. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years.
However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometim¬es assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, will require theory - some model of how organisms could have evolved. (The question of how the first organism came to be is a largely different matter.) All categories of cause will be required for any such theoretical model. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle (trans. Flew 1989), hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The material causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.
The efficient cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a final cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material causes, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's formal cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."
I believe the Categories of Cause - surely among the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - constitute the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist" fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.
IDT, a very restricted phenomenon, is a modern version of Paley's 1802 natural theology, insisting that biology bears the marks of design. IDTers refuse to discuss the character, or even the number, of designer(s).
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, purports to explain change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit.
Those two processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution?
DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. The point which IDT® emphasizes is more clearly put: no amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life. (The OED's attempt to privilege natural selection as a theoretical approach is questionable.)
Similarly, megatime is no substitute for purpose in the emergence of new species.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism.
But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution turn out to be always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause? A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only material and efficient causes, but also to advocate that science be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. (This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this last half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.)
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature, without recourse to revelation, with intent to infer who created it - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive to give us the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Less than a century old, eccentric, and mischievous, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 (the creation stories of Judaism & Christianity) & 6-9 (the Noah story). These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science emerged as a way of knowing. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that ultra-sceptical position. But anyhow, let's keep moving, shall we, IDTers? It is not realistic to stand pat on your one little point, Paley's Argument to Design, waiting for Dawkins, S Weinberg, Wolpert etc to concede its logic.
The only theory of evolution anywhere near explaining that marvellous process comes to us by the Christian tradition - today Morton, Broom, and Sheldrake; in the previous generation Sir Alister Hardy and Archbishop Wm Temple.
I would relish a public debate against Dawkins about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.
-----
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
= = =
A biochemist from Wellington via Berkeley, Dr Robt Mann was on the U of Auckland staff for two decades. In retirement he is involved in appropriate technology and in natural theology. He has published in Real World several times from no. 3.
!Should I next try on Dawkins' stronghold The Grauniad ?
The challenge is to summarise theistic evolution so that an outline can be presented in many situations. We should include IDT's main point but also many more important.
Sound-bite situations beloved of the media are a largely different challenge but should also I suppose be faced up to also.
IDT®, the thin end of the wedge for Creationism®, is mostly a pseudo-intellectual PR charade.
IDT® cautiously refrains from error, rather in the manner of a student writing exam answers. But they do so at the price of saying very little. Their characteristic point, 'this bacterial flagellum is designed' i.e Paley 1802 gone submicroscopic, is not wrong - OK as far as it goes; but to stand pat on that one point, waiting for Dawkins, Wolpert etc to admit it, is not very educational. (I'm glad to find the recent Discovery Inst bk 'This Privileged Planet' is a broader 'cosmological anthropic' reasoning.)
IDT is tainted by fake scholarship. The IDT storefront www.iscid.org is designed to resemble a scientific forum but comptrollers Dembski, Sparacio have repeatedly refused to let me slap anything onto it. Unnecessary novel terms are injected by Dembski in such a way as to give those unfamiliar with philosophy an impression of scholarly writing. I have remarked that their concentration on submicroscopic 'Paley timepieces' is to a degree obscurantist - requiring instruments and advanced theory to understand what is being studied e.g flagellin, blood clot cascades, etc, whereas the evident planned cooperation in macroscopic ecology is directly accessible to children .
As Don Nield points out, IDT's Wedge is being driven in at the wrong place, causing rifts in wrong places. IDTers Johnson, Dembski etc want to dump methodological materialism, and claim that 'this bacterial flagellum must be designed' is a scientific statement. Instead, it's 'God of the gaps' lo-grade philosophy, and peculiarly narrow & fixed. Dubya has even vaguely endorsed IDT® - kiss of death?!?
What is needed instead is to carry on science with materialism as an axiom of scientific method, but also create a context of philosophy in which science will be conducted, acknowledging all 4 categories of cause (not just 2 as assumed in Dawkins' scientism).
Moral relativism is common among pushers of IDT (Creationism lite) and even of Creationism-hevi. 'Teach the controversy' they intone, as if all ideas enter on an equal footing. Glyn Carpenter likes to give more space to each of Creationism® and IDT® alongside Don Nield's orthodox understanding of evolution which ends up < 33% of the VisioNet booklet. Interestingly, they don't admit to supporting Creationism or even IDT - they just pose as neutral. But these are not tendencies toward which a Christian minister or serious layman should remain neutral. I repeat what I've said about the leaders of Creationism previously:
In 1983 I photographed in the Science Museum, Kensington, an exhibit which asserted the axiom that
*either* organisms have evolved
*or* God has created them.
This furphy, not normally so clearly enunciated, seems to me to be not only the fundamental error of Creationism® but also typical in its illogic of most if not all fundamentalisms. I suggest the racket common to them all is the requirement of assent to propositions which are not subtly but flagrantly false. This is not ancillary or accidental: I believe it is essential, in that once a person has overtly signalled switching-off of God-given reason in favour of a pointedly false slogan from the sect leader(s), obedience can be thereafter required much more generally by the sect leaders.
This is in the nature of totalitarian systems' social psychology. "The Slavs are sub-human" and of course the immortal "the Jews are the cause of all German troubles" are prototypical modern examples of blatantly false slogans which you had to assent to overtly if you were to attain the (temporary) social security of the National Socialist Party. "The first 3 chapters of the Bible, plus the Noah story, can & must be taken literally" is similar mischief. To exhort people to say they believe what cannot actually be believed is mind-buggering for the purpose of totalitarian power.
I don't see why this racket is not more widely & vigorously condemned. Those who propound it do not in fact advocate that other parts of the Bible be read literally; Broom & I point to John the Baptist's hailing "the Lamb of God" - why do fundamentalists not try to insist that Christ assumed ovine form for that occasion on the banks of the Jordan?
These sectarian, totalitarian tendencies are a major cross-current within W. Christianity. Graeme Finlay has emphasized that they are also a serious external embarrassment to Christianity, being used as handy weak targets by anti-religion ravers e.g. Dawkins. I cannot understand why VisioNetNZ is so easily bought off and acts in effect as an undeclared agent for Creationism®.
I have seen enough of the leaders of Creationism & IDT to say their main ideas & methods are demonic. Bruce Nicholls pretends to reply by saying their dupes are not demonic; I agree this is a fact - but why won't Bruce & Glyn face up to the glaring defects in the leaders?
R
Clarifying "the" theory of evolution
L R B Mann
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it more difficult than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
What does the term 'evolution' mean? The OED tells us it comes from the Latin noun evolutio 'unrolling' and means
A. The process by which different kinds of living organisms are believed to have developed from earlier forms, especially by natural selection.
B. Gradual development.
Evolution is the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199
of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 109 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 109 y, mammals 2 x 108 y, and man somewhere in the region 106 -104 y BP. Most species were created much later than the first. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years. However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometim¬es assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, will require theory - some model of how organisms could have evolved. (The question of how the first organism came to be is a largely different matter.) All categories of cause will be required for any such theoretical model. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle (trans. Flew 1989), hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The material causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.
The efficient cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a final cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material causes, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's formal cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."
I believe the Categories of Cause - surely among the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - constitute the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist" fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.
IDT, a very restricted phenomenon, is a modern version of Paley's 1802 natural theology, insisting that biology bears the marks of design. IDTers refuse to discuss the character, or even the number, of designer(s).
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, purports to explain change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit.
Those two processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution?
DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. The point which IDT® emphasizes is more clearly put: no amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life. (The OED's attempt to privilege natural selection as a theoretical approach is questionable.)
Similarly, megatime is no substitute for purpose in the emergence of new species.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism.
But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution turn out to be always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause? A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only material and efficient causes, but also to advocate that science be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. (This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this last half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.)
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature, without recourse to revelation, with intent to infer who created it - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive to give us the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Less than a century old, eccentric, and mischievous, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 (the creation stories of Judaism & Christianity) & 6-9 (the Noah story). These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science emerged as a way of knowing. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that ultra-sceptical position. But anyhow, let's keep moving, shall we, IDTers? It is not realistic to stand pat on your one little point, Paley's Argument to Design, waiting for Dawkins, S Weinberg, Wolpert etc to concede its logic.
The only theory of evolution anywhere near explaining that marvellous process comes to us by the Christian tradition - today Morton, Broom, and Sheldrake; in the previous generation Sir Alister Hardy and Archbishop Wm Temple.
I would relish a public debate against Dawkins about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.
-----
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
= = =
A biochemist from Wellington via Berkeley, Dr Robt Mann was on the U of Auckland staff for two decades. In retirement he is involved in appropriate technology and in natural theology. He has published in Real World several times from no. 3.
Subject: 10 things..........
TEN THINGS GOD WON'T ASK ON THE DAY YOU DIE...........
1... God won't ask what kind of car you drove. He'll ask how many people
you drove who didn't have transportation.
>If you do it in a wasteful or ostentatious way, he may well count against you what kind of car you drive.
2... God won't ask the square footage of your house, He'll ask how many
people you welcomed into your home.
>- but in the context of square footage, no?
3... God won't ask about the clothes you had in your closet, He'll ask how
many you helped to clothe.
>Why would he ignore extravagance in your wardrobe, even if you give away plenty?
4... God won't ask what your highest salary was. He'll ask if you
compromised your character to obtain it.
>This is getting more & more vulgar & crass.
5... God won't ask what your job title was. He'll ask if you performed your
job to the best of your ability.
>OK - for this relief much thanx
6... God won't ask how many friends you had. He'll ask how many people to
whom you were a friend.
>dubious
7... God won't ask in what neighborhood you lived, He'll ask how you
treated your neighbors.
>OK - but if you go out of your way to amass enough wealth to move into Grace Kelly country, and then stay many y in extreme luxury, might that not count against you?
8... God won't ask about the color of your skin, He'll ask about the
content of your character.
>check
9... God won't ask why it took you so long to seek Salvation.
He'll lovingly take you to your mansion in heaven, and not to the gates of Hell.
>This Universalism is impossible to reconcile with the NT, esp several stern statements of Christ.
N.B handy in the attempt to legitimize greed if you can pretend all are saved anyhow. But if you really believe that Get Smart doctrine, why bother to try to refute suggestions of sin for which you could be penalized at the last judgment?
10... God won't have to ask how many people you forwarded this to, He
already knows your decision.
>A very different point. And sneakily put.
I fw it as an example of glib but dangerous legitimisation of greed, admixed with some other stuff that doesn't cohere.
R
TEN THINGS GOD WON'T ASK ON THE DAY YOU DIE...........
1... God won't ask what kind of car you drove. He'll ask how many people
you drove who didn't have transportation.
>If you do it in a wasteful or ostentatious way, he may well count against you what kind of car you drive.
2... God won't ask the square footage of your house, He'll ask how many
people you welcomed into your home.
>- but in the context of square footage, no?
3... God won't ask about the clothes you had in your closet, He'll ask how
many you helped to clothe.
>Why would he ignore extravagance in your wardrobe, even if you give away plenty?
4... God won't ask what your highest salary was. He'll ask if you
compromised your character to obtain it.
>This is getting more & more vulgar & crass.
5... God won't ask what your job title was. He'll ask if you performed your
job to the best of your ability.
>OK - for this relief much thanx
6... God won't ask how many friends you had. He'll ask how many people to
whom you were a friend.
>dubious
7... God won't ask in what neighborhood you lived, He'll ask how you
treated your neighbors.
>OK - but if you go out of your way to amass enough wealth to move into Grace Kelly country, and then stay many y in extreme luxury, might that not count against you?
8... God won't ask about the color of your skin, He'll ask about the
content of your character.
>check
9... God won't ask why it took you so long to seek Salvation.
He'll lovingly take you to your mansion in heaven, and not to the gates of Hell.
>This Universalism is impossible to reconcile with the NT, esp several stern statements of Christ.
N.B handy in the attempt to legitimize greed if you can pretend all are saved anyhow. But if you really believe that Get Smart doctrine, why bother to try to refute suggestions of sin for which you could be penalized at the last judgment?
10... God won't have to ask how many people you forwarded this to, He
already knows your decision.
>A very different point. And sneakily put.
I fw it as an example of glib but dangerous legitimisation of greed, admixed with some other stuff that doesn't cohere.
R
Wild Rice Resolution Passed within Episcopal diocese [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 09:26:04 PM
Lately, quite a lot of criticism is due within the Anglican (= Episcopal) church (to which I happen to belong).
This item exemplifies a version of racism that has largely taken over in the W.
Christianity, and I believe Judaism, actually forbids the attitude manifested here toward a creature.
British, or even Yank, types of legal system cannot embrace this type of "spirituality" as a basis for controlling gene-tampering.
R
For Immediate Release 9/15/05
Contact: Jennifer Tlumak
Wild Rice Outreach Coordinator
White Earth Land Recovery Project
218.573.3448
jtlumak@welrp.org
Department of Indian Work of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota Resolves
to Protect Wild Rice
St. Cloud, MN: On September 13, 2005 The Department of Indian Work of
the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota forwarded a unanimous resolution to the
Bishop. The resolution, aimed at protecting sacred (??) wild rice from
contamination from potential genetic engineering, passed without dissent.
The group has asked that the Bishop James L. Jelinek of Minnesota
communicate to the Governor of Minnesota, the State House of
Representatives, State Senate, and other relevant State agencies the
"importance of protecting our wild rice resources by prohibiting
genetically engineered wild rice from being introduced into Minnesota."
The Rev. Canon Stephen Schaitberger brought the resolution forward. A man
with a love of the natural world, Rev. Schaitberger is deeply concerned
about the environmental and spiritual implications of the genetic
alteration of rice. "We want to support Minnesota's diverse religious
community, and this issue is of great spiritual importance to our Ojibwe
brothers and sisters," he said. "If wild rice is 'tamed' in the
laboratory through genetic engineering, and planted alongside lake rice,
the environmental consequences could be detrimental. Wild rice is a
state symbol for all Minnesotans, and I, along with this committee, want to
make sure it's protected," Schaitberger stated. He summed up, "Wild rice
is our mother, our sister, our brother; it is a relative [and the Episcopal Church is asked to support this "spirituality" - pathetic ! ! !] as well as a
plant."
The passage of this resolution adds another voice to the growing chorus of
advocacy groups, businesses, and individuals who oppose genetic
engineering of wild rice. Legislation to protect wild rice is expected
to be introduced at the Minnesota Legislature in the upcoming session,
which will begin March 1, 2006.
###
This item exemplifies a version of racism that has largely taken over in the W.
Christianity, and I believe Judaism, actually forbids the attitude manifested here toward a creature.
British, or even Yank, types of legal system cannot embrace this type of "spirituality" as a basis for controlling gene-tampering.
R
For Immediate Release 9/15/05
Contact: Jennifer Tlumak
Wild Rice Outreach Coordinator
White Earth Land Recovery Project
218.573.3448
jtlumak@welrp.org
Department of Indian Work of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota Resolves
to Protect Wild Rice
St. Cloud, MN: On September 13, 2005 The Department of Indian Work of
the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota forwarded a unanimous resolution to the
Bishop. The resolution, aimed at protecting sacred (??) wild rice from
contamination from potential genetic engineering, passed without dissent.
The group has asked that the Bishop James L. Jelinek of Minnesota
communicate to the Governor of Minnesota, the State House of
Representatives, State Senate, and other relevant State agencies the
"importance of protecting our wild rice resources by prohibiting
genetically engineered wild rice from being introduced into Minnesota."
The Rev. Canon Stephen Schaitberger brought the resolution forward. A man
with a love of the natural world, Rev. Schaitberger is deeply concerned
about the environmental and spiritual implications of the genetic
alteration of rice. "We want to support Minnesota's diverse religious
community, and this issue is of great spiritual importance to our Ojibwe
brothers and sisters," he said. "If wild rice is 'tamed' in the
laboratory through genetic engineering, and planted alongside lake rice,
the environmental consequences could be detrimental. Wild rice is a
state symbol for all Minnesotans, and I, along with this committee, want to
make sure it's protected," Schaitberger stated. He summed up, "Wild rice
is our mother, our sister, our brother; it is a relative [and the Episcopal Church is asked to support this "spirituality" - pathetic ! ! !] as well as a
plant."
The passage of this resolution adds another voice to the growing chorus of
advocacy groups, businesses, and individuals who oppose genetic
engineering of wild rice. Legislation to protect wild rice is expected
to be introduced at the Minnesota Legislature in the upcoming session,
which will begin March 1, 2006.
###
Out of the mouths of babes and even of deviants (rarely).. [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 09:18:26 PM
s m a c a
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
18th September 2005
"Election!"
- THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK (Christian Politicians Go Home)
=====================
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
"I choose to believe that the two Christian parties will register barely a blip on the count of votes, and I pray that they will both dissolve themselves and that their members will go back to their churches and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by which they might do some good."
- Garth George (NZ Herald columnist)
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=%1E%FB%F8%C5%28%B6%BA%40
G Geo has provoked much resentment in his control of the NZ Horrid letters. But for once I agree with him.
How the state should be influenced by the church - a theme of at least 2 millennia - is one of the most important questions (far more important than those used for infotainment by the media in our media-produced election). Byzantium at its peak seems to have this issue best resolved; but we can't reproduce that civilisation today. For our country, theocracy was intended by Rev H Williams till as late as Jan 1840. By the Nash/Marshall era arrangements for the church to influence politics were practically nil.
I have contended for nearly a decade now:
Today I interpret the downward slide of civilisation over the past few decades as evidence that the attempt to maintain a system of ethics & law based historically & logically in Christianity is doomed if the religion which gave rise to it is not suitably active in its continuance.
But activity thru political parties seem to be a flop, and I fail to see how they could be an important answer.
How should the church influence the State?
R
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
18th September 2005
"Election!"
- THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK (Christian Politicians Go Home)
=====================
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
"I choose to believe that the two Christian parties will register barely a blip on the count of votes, and I pray that they will both dissolve themselves and that their members will go back to their churches and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by which they might do some good."
- Garth George (NZ Herald columnist)
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=%1E%FB%F8%C5%28%B6%BA%40
G Geo has provoked much resentment in his control of the NZ Horrid letters. But for once I agree with him.
How the state should be influenced by the church - a theme of at least 2 millennia - is one of the most important questions (far more important than those used for infotainment by the media in our media-produced election). Byzantium at its peak seems to have this issue best resolved; but we can't reproduce that civilisation today. For our country, theocracy was intended by Rev H Williams till as late as Jan 1840. By the Nash/Marshall era arrangements for the church to influence politics were practically nil.
I have contended for nearly a decade now:
Today I interpret the downward slide of civilisation over the past few decades as evidence that the attempt to maintain a system of ethics & law based historically & logically in Christianity is doomed if the religion which gave rise to it is not suitably active in its continuance.
But activity thru political parties seem to be a flop, and I fail to see how they could be an important answer.
How should the church influence the State?
R
10/15/05
Natl Geog Nov 2004 pp. 2-35
cover story: Was Darwin Wrong?
David Quammen
review by L R B Mann
Was Darwin Wrong? No. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming - so begins, in big letters, this big-pix major article.
Natural selection is asserted to be the mechanism of evolution. The 5pp. under this heading feature D Futuyma [sic], evolutionary biologist U Mich. who interprets as evidence for mouse/human homology the resemblance between the "30,000 genes" of the two respective spp. Existence of other ideas is merely hinted at - by a notice on a wall in DF's dept: "CREATION VS. EVOLUTION" - "something called the Origins Research Association ... at the local Baptist church." IDT is not mentioned, let alone theistic evolution which is the nearest thing so far to "scientific observation and careful thinking at its best" - what Quammen asserts 'evolution by natural selection' to be.
The status of evolution as a theory is properly defined, and immediately contrasted with "alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis" among "many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews ... Islamic creationists ... Prabhupada of the Hare Krishna movement ... not just scriptural literalists ... Gallup poll 2001 45% of responding U.S. adults agreed 'God created human beings ... at one time within the last 10,000 years or so'." Thus the diabolical fallacy is perpetuated 'evolution or creation'. You'd never know Prof John Morton or Sir Alister Hardy, let alone Rupert Sheldrake or Neil Broom, had written a word. The very existence of theistic evolution is suppressed.
The mischievous Science Museum Kensington/Creationism® furphy is ruthlessly promoted: either creation or evolution. This false crippling axiom should be destroyed, but is instead embraced, assisting both camps Creationism® and atheistic neoDarwinism in their highly irrational non-debate.
Evidence for homology is adduced from domestic breeds' variations e.g pigeons, dogs; and from vestigial organs, male nipples, etc. Such microevolution is not, in this account, properly contrasted with the macroevolutionary discontinuities (saltations) which dominate the fossil record.
A whole p. is given over to the Science Museum, Kensington's 10-bp ball-&-stick model of a (asserted to be 'the') DNA 3° structure.
" The capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous ... they leap from ... animals into humans, adapting ... The biologist Stephen Palumbi has calculated the cost of treating pencillin-resistant and methicillin-resistant staph infections, just in the USA, at 30 billion dollars a year." No mention is made of the propensity for GM-bastards to emanate novel pathogens. Even tho' Palumbi says "humans may be the world's dominant evolutionary force", devolution is not discussed.
You would never learn from this smug article that "evolution by natural selection" is a theory in crisis, let alone that the intimately-related broader scene within which gene-tampering wastes $10^10 (and rising) is an intellectual brothel.
You would certainly not be led to suspect that only 2 of the 4 categories of cause are alluded to by typical neoDarwinists.
Quammen's term 'strict reading of Genesis' is mischievous. What is purported by Creationism® is literal reading - which is actually infeasible, setting up the blatantly irrational mind-buggering totalitarian character of Creationism®. To imply that this represents the main opposition to the attempted hegemony of materialistic neoDarwinism (Dawkins, Gould, Wolpert, S Weinberg) is grossly misleading.
To me as a Christian it is despicable that Natl Geog should publish such a glib, smug, misleading article on this wonky scene. The opening question is itself not a main issue; what matters more today is whether neoDarwinism's intellectual swindles can be salvaged. Evolution as a fact is not open to reasonable dispute; but its mechanisms are scarcely illuminated by neoDarwinist theory (or by IDT). And the age of the Earth is a different question, less fundamental, than whether all spp were created at once.
It worries me deeply that scientific education has sunk so low as to allow such crap to be foisted slickly on readers of what used to be a generally good magazine.
They do usefully direct us to Darwin's books online http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin
and "Coming soon" Darwin's letters http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin
cover story: Was Darwin Wrong?
David Quammen
review by L R B Mann
Was Darwin Wrong? No. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming - so begins, in big letters, this big-pix major article.
Natural selection is asserted to be the mechanism of evolution. The 5pp. under this heading feature D Futuyma [sic], evolutionary biologist U Mich. who interprets as evidence for mouse/human homology the resemblance between the "30,000 genes" of the two respective spp. Existence of other ideas is merely hinted at - by a notice on a wall in DF's dept: "CREATION VS. EVOLUTION" - "something called the Origins Research Association ... at the local Baptist church." IDT is not mentioned, let alone theistic evolution which is the nearest thing so far to "scientific observation and careful thinking at its best" - what Quammen asserts 'evolution by natural selection' to be.
The status of evolution as a theory is properly defined, and immediately contrasted with "alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis" among "many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews ... Islamic creationists ... Prabhupada of the Hare Krishna movement ... not just scriptural literalists ... Gallup poll 2001 45% of responding U.S. adults agreed 'God created human beings ... at one time within the last 10,000 years or so'." Thus the diabolical fallacy is perpetuated 'evolution or creation'. You'd never know Prof John Morton or Sir Alister Hardy, let alone Rupert Sheldrake or Neil Broom, had written a word. The very existence of theistic evolution is suppressed.
The mischievous Science Museum Kensington/Creationism® furphy is ruthlessly promoted: either creation or evolution. This false crippling axiom should be destroyed, but is instead embraced, assisting both camps Creationism® and atheistic neoDarwinism in their highly irrational non-debate.
Evidence for homology is adduced from domestic breeds' variations e.g pigeons, dogs; and from vestigial organs, male nipples, etc. Such microevolution is not, in this account, properly contrasted with the macroevolutionary discontinuities (saltations) which dominate the fossil record.
A whole p. is given over to the Science Museum, Kensington's 10-bp ball-&-stick model of a (asserted to be 'the') DNA 3° structure.
" The capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous ... they leap from ... animals into humans, adapting ... The biologist Stephen Palumbi has calculated the cost of treating pencillin-resistant and methicillin-resistant staph infections, just in the USA, at 30 billion dollars a year." No mention is made of the propensity for GM-bastards to emanate novel pathogens. Even tho' Palumbi says "humans may be the world's dominant evolutionary force", devolution is not discussed.
You would never learn from this smug article that "evolution by natural selection" is a theory in crisis, let alone that the intimately-related broader scene within which gene-tampering wastes $10^10 (and rising) is an intellectual brothel.
You would certainly not be led to suspect that only 2 of the 4 categories of cause are alluded to by typical neoDarwinists.
Quammen's term 'strict reading of Genesis' is mischievous. What is purported by Creationism® is literal reading - which is actually infeasible, setting up the blatantly irrational mind-buggering totalitarian character of Creationism®. To imply that this represents the main opposition to the attempted hegemony of materialistic neoDarwinism (Dawkins, Gould, Wolpert, S Weinberg) is grossly misleading.
To me as a Christian it is despicable that Natl Geog should publish such a glib, smug, misleading article on this wonky scene. The opening question is itself not a main issue; what matters more today is whether neoDarwinism's intellectual swindles can be salvaged. Evolution as a fact is not open to reasonable dispute; but its mechanisms are scarcely illuminated by neoDarwinist theory (or by IDT). And the age of the Earth is a different question, less fundamental, than whether all spp were created at once.
It worries me deeply that scientific education has sunk so low as to allow such crap to be foisted slickly on readers of what used to be a generally good magazine.
They do usefully direct us to Darwin's books online http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin
and "Coming soon" Darwin's letters http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin
The head of religious studies at St Peter's, a RC boys' HS in Ak, just wrote to me
I am on the DAN conference planning committee. (DAN stands for: Dialogue
Australasia Network of some 300 secondary schools in OZ and NZ.)
We are looking for a keynote speaker for the annual DAN conference, to be
held next April 19th - 21st, 2006, at King's College, Auckland.
The 2006 DAN Conference theme is "Educating beyond the Curriculum".
It has been suggested that we invite a well known speaker who can give a
balanced view, scientifically, philosophically and theologically, of the
current evolution-intelligent design debate. Someone who can present the
viewpoints of those for, and those against, both sides of the debate, by
providing a higher viewpoint, not an over-heated one.
Attached are the samples I've sent him - an 'old' paper I'm still content with, and a new unpubd which I hope will convince him to confirm me as the speaker he wants.
I'd be grateful for your prayerful support as I try to fulfil this mission to those who are confused by the cross-currents of mischievous misinformation on this topic.
It occurs to me also that this important gathering of youth could benefit from hearing the facts about same-sex unions ... ;-]
Clarifying "the" theory of evolution
L R B Mann
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand words elsewhere - some at my page www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199 of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 109 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 109 y, mammals 2 x 108 y, and man somewhere in the region 106 -104 y BP. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first.
However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:
* * *
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The material causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.
The efficient cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a final cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's formal cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.
* * *
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."
I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life. Similarly, megatime is no substitute for purpose in production of new species.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution turn out to be always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause? A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes, but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we, IDTers? It is not realistic to stand pat on your one little Paley point waiting for Dawkins, Wolpert etc to concede its logic. And, as Don Nield points out, it is not a very strong point if only because it is in the category of 'god of the gaps' argumentation.
I would relish a public debate against Dawkins about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.
= = =
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
==================================
Creationism v. evolution
but not
creation v. evolution
Robert Mann and Neil Broom
very slightly adapted from Stimulus 8 (2) 16-20 (May 2000)
Many Christians believe that the very idea of evolution – most crucially, the idea that the species Homo sapiens evolved from many previous species now extinct – entails denial of true religion. We wish to argue that there need be no real dispute. The fear appears to be that to admit evolution as a fact - i.e. admit to life unfolding over time with increasing complexity & variety - would bring one into a crisis of faith in Holy Scripture. Maintaining it is a misunderstanding we seek to resolve this apparent conflict in the present paper.
But before we delve into the theory of evolution we note that the facts in direct support of the specific idea of Homo sapiens evolving from ape-like ancestors are – as science now stands – very scanty. The old ‘missing link’ objection still holds good to a large extent regarding factual evidence of immediate human evolution. Indeed, the whole record of evolution is riddled with discontinuities, e.g. the frogs suddenly appear, not preceded by any proto-frogs. The main reason why almost all scientists believe in evolution is that it has been exceedingly successful as an integrating theory within biology.
Nevertheless, one must point out that the evidence is fairly conclusive that humans appeared only about a million years ago, certainly long after many species that have existed for hundreds of millions of years (in contrast to the face value of the story in Genesis 2). More importantly, we maintain that even if a seamless sequence of fossils were demonstrated with no missing links in human evolution, such a finding need have no theological significance regarding the central doctrines that man is created by God and made in the image of God.
Perhaps we should make clear at the start the perspective from which we attempt to contribute to this fraught arena of (sometimes intemperate) argumentation. We are scientists working on aspects of biology, and we are mainstream Christians who hold to traditional doctrines as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed. In other words, we find ourselves able to live by the belief that Christianity does not conflict with a science that is conducted with intellectual integrity - a science that acknowledges the finitude of all human knowing and therefore its inability to proclaim on ultimate issues save what is given by special revelation.
For many Christians the science/God debate automatically focuses on an attempted literal reading of the first two chapters of Genesis. Many assert, and quite strenuously, that Genesis outlines literally the actual history and scientific principles of creation, and any secular science that contradicts this ‘Bible science’ must be rejected outright.
In this literal interpretation of a particular part of Scripture, creation is believed to have taken place over six 24-hour days and perhaps no more than 10,000 years ago. ‘Creation science’ rejects any thought of an ancient earth spanning periods of geological time of many millions of years, and denies any gradual development or evolving of life forms. It is a philosophical position that rejects a huge amount of scientific evidence gathered by a vast community of scientists who hold a wide spectrum of religious (Christian and others) and non-religious viewpoints about the origin of life.
Our personal conviction is that ‘creation science’ is fighting the wrong battle. We say this for two important reasons. Firstly, it makes the dubious assumption that Genesis 1 & 2 must be read in a strictly literal sense if they are to be read in a God-honouring way. It is not at all clear to us that the narrative form of the early chapters of Genesis is literal or even remotely scientific in its intent. The creation texts contain a very simple storyline that is timeless and relevant for all people for all time. But is it science? Science as the modern discipline which gave rise to the creation/evolution discussion hadn’t evolved when the author(s) penned these narratives. The burning issues of the day were what we would call theological, not scientific. Who made the cosmos? Who is in charge of it? Who is to be worshipped? Were the people of God to place their faith in the many divinities of polytheism or in the one true God of the Israelites?
Despite the impact on contemporary culture of postmodernity’s disaffection with science, there is a significant continuing acceptance of 'old fashioned' modernism - scientific materialism and loss of a moral base. The full potential of Genesis 1-3 to help us address these issues will not be realised unless we shoulder the responsibility of interpretation with all the difficulties and even pitfalls that this may entail.
It seems to us that the main point of the creation narratives is to put nature – including mankind – fairly and squarely in its place as created, and thus as a consequence never to be accorded the status of divinity. No part of creation was to be the object of man’s worship. No part of creation was to shape the ultimate destiny of humanity, and this was to include the heavenly bodies. God alone was to be acknowledged as the source and sustainer of all created things.
We must discern very carefully the type of literary narrative being used in each part of scripture. It may be disastrous if we apply an interpretation not intended by the author. It seems to us that when we come to a central Christian truth such as the Resurrection the various accounts given in all four Gospels confront us with a flesh-and-blood, time-and-place narrative that almost ‘screams’ out to be read in a literal sense. Everything about the Resurrection narratives seems to insist we take them literally.
By contrast the early chapters of Genesis do not read in this same flesh-and-blood historic way. They have an entirely contrasting literary flavour. Their structure is much more stylised and poetic. The already-established 7-day Hebrew week is, in all probability, used as a means of systematically working through each realm of the created world with the very powerful pronouncement that all such realms and their inhabitants were the creation of God. What more powerful way to demolish for all time the pagan myth that within the world there were powers and forces that could hold sway over the destinies of people and enslave them in the vice of fear-ridden subservience?
The text reads much more like a series of epic declarations – that God is the supreme commander of the universe, and that all things large and small owe their existence to him. These are, perhaps, words that attempt to describe the indescribable – events of such cosmic proportions as to be literally beyond our understanding as created beings. The language is surely conveying what we would call religious, not scientific truth.
Clear evidence that the text is not meant to be read in a scientific sense is got by comparing the two different creation accounts contained in Genesis 1: 1-2:3 and 2: 4-25. As an obvious example of the author’s(s’) clear disregard for chronological accuracy, in the first account land animals are created before humans whereas in the second account animals are created after man. This apparent conflict is important only if we try to interpret the narratives in a narrow literal sense. Surely an important purpose of both accounts is to place humanity at the apex of creation, separate relationally from all that is beneath; for this theological point, timing is hardly relevant.
We hold that science in general and evolution in particular can offer no genuine conflict with Christianity. There are well-known general grounds for our attitude. The purview of science is restricted: it is as narrow as the physical realm of matter & energy (including living organisms), but no spiritual entities. The fact that science can study only this restricted realm (within which it has achieved very impressive discoveries) is no handicap; it is simply a fact that the scientific method applies only to energy & matter as defined by science, and when science attempts to pronounce on moral questions, let alone spiritual questions, it is a trespasser.
We can say that science is a human activity able to deal only with the lower levels of material cause and effect. By contrast, what we think of as ‘religion’ is concerned with the big picture, the ultimate issues concerning the cosmos and its relationship to the creator. The issues of governance, purpose and meaning are outside the scope of science. The material world operates as a subset within the much larger framework illuminated by revealed religion. In using the word ‘subset’ here we are attempting to stress the importance of not letting theology and science retreat to supposedly unconnected spheres. We wish to provoke renewed co-operation, rather than spurious conflict, between them.
We hope these generalities set the stage as we turn to particulars about the evolution of organisms and about, on the other hand, the vastly more important ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions which only revealed religion can tackle.
Outline of Evolutionary Theory
Modern science has existed for only a few centuries. Why it took so long to begin is discussed in Harold Turner’s recent book and in Renton Maclachlan’s thoughtful review of that book in this journal . Unfortunately that review complains at Rev Dr Turner’s ‘repeated, scathing dismissal of “creation science” without any justification whatsoever being given’. As friends of Harold Turner we are aware he reached the conclusion years ago that “creation science” is a waste of time. He does not bother in his book to expound his reasons for his dismissive attitude to it. Our purpose now is to assist readers by outlining how such a conclusion as Dr Turner’s is not merely reasonable but essential to the goal - dauntingly ambitious to some - of reconciling science and religion.
Since the originators Darwin and Wallace, biology has amassed a compelling body of evidence for organic evolution, i.e. evidence that life has unfolded over a long time, as a tree with many branches and many 'missing' branches, developing a generally more complex range of life-forms, with Homo sapiens appearing only recently. The facts gleaned from fossils, augmented recently by molecular details, strongly suggest that evolution has occurred. The body of evidence from which this deduction flows is so huge, so multi-faceted, and so coherent, that evolution is regarded as a fact by almost every scientist today.
The evidence for evolution, minimally mixed with neo-Darwinian theory, is interesting to review as it stood around the time when modern 'creationism' arose in the USA.
We immediately, emphatically add: how evolution has occurred is a different (and much more difficult) question from the simpler question of whether organisms have evolved. And Goldsmith has pointed out vigorously, in an exchange with the militant atheist Wolpert, that it is a mere assumption to say that evolution must have worked by the mechanism of natural selection.
Many readers will be aware of a supremely confident brand of scientific atheism that is currently fashionable, largely popularised by Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins. Dawkins contemptuously dismisses any suggestion that evolution requires anything more than the blind forces of physics. He says “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Dawkins views Darwin’s idea of natural selection as providing an entirely material means by which the chance variations in an organism’s offspring are channelled in the direction of ‘evolving’ (read increasing) complexity. What is important is that evolution is viewed by Dawkins as an entirely mindless process; hence his confident atheistic stance.
We consider Dawkins in error at a fundamental conceptual level and wish to highlight this by reference to just one of the illustrations he employs to support his scientific atheism - namely the evolution of the eye as expounded in one of his recent books Climbing Mt. Improbable .
Dawkins likens the evolution of the eye to climbing a high mountain. In this scheme of things the evolution of biological novelty (i.e. reaching the summit of Mount Improbable) is achieved in the neo-Darwinian sense by gradual, almost imperceptible steps of improvement. In his metaphor we take a route up the gentle slopes rather than attempting to scale the impossibly steep cliffs and precipices. All that is required is that we head towards the summit.
The emphasis is on small, easy improvements in the organism rather than large leaps in sophistication. Like many of Dawkins’ illustrations, the mountain-climbing analogy seems, at least superficially, to make a lot of sense. It is common for technological advances to proceed in much the same gradual, bit-by-bit fashion.
But let’s look closely at the claimed connection between the development of an eye and Dawkins’ mountain-climbing metaphor.
We arrive at this most improbable structure - the fully functioning eye - by imperceptibly small steps in improvement. No big leaps of innovation, no wild attempts at scaling ‘steep cliffs or precipices’, just an easy meander up the gentle grassy slopes until the summit of optical sophistication is reached.
To support his case Dawkins describes in some detail a computer study conducted by Swedish biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger. These scientists devised a computer program to simulate the evolution of what they describe as a simple eye representation. Remember, this is a virtual, not a real, eye.
They begin with a 2-dimensional picture of a flat layer of imaginary light-sensitive cells sandwiched between an imaginary transparent layer and an imaginary dark backing layer. The two biologists admit in their study that they don’t pretend to explain how the light-sensitive cells that their model commences with might have evolved. This is entirely understandable as the origin of the first living cell remains just one of the innumerable mysteries of the biological world, and how any became light-sensitive is also unknown.
The model works (and always in a virtual sense) by producing at random small percentage changes in the degree of curvature of the sandwich, in the diameter of a light-restricting aperture, in the thickness of the transparent layer, and in the local value of its refractive index (light-bending ability). The computer model is programmed to perform a simple calculation of the sandwich’s optical resolving power every time a change occurs at random in the three variables noted above. This is done by a simple ray-tracing procedure, one familiar to any physics student.
In a relatively small number of steps (1829 steps if each step involved a 1% change in any of the variables) the computer model is shown to transform the flat sandwich through continuous minor improvements into a configuration representing a virtual, focussed eye lens. Dawkins claims this transformation of the initially flat configuration into a focussed configuration by a series of tiny but connected steps is exactly analogous to climbing the mountain of biological complexity: “Going upwards means mutating, one small step at a time, and only accepting mutations that improve optical performance. So, where do we get to? Pleasingly, through a smooth upward pathway, starting from no proper eye at all, we reach a familiar fish eye, complete with lens.” (Climbing Mt. Improbable, p. 151.)
However, any careful reader will immediately see that Dawkins’ claim to explain eye evolution involves a most blatant transgression of the rules of his own materialistic science. Note how logic requires him to impose a highly artificial and purposeful constraint on the behaviour of the eye model: he inserts the crucial proviso of “only accepting mutations that improve optical performance”. In terms of his mountain-climbing analogy, one must “aim for the summit”. He has committed a cardinal breach by introducing a profoundly personal dimension into his scientific materialism: it is persons that have aims, with the foresight to discern whether an immediate change of no use in itself heads toward a distant co-ordinated usefulness.
Ask any serious mountaineer, ask one of New Zealand’s most famous citizens - Sir Edmund Hillary: high summits are conquered only because the mountaineer has a powerful desire to get to the top. The activity is loaded with purpose. The mountaineer is possessed of a burning obsession to achieve the very difficult. Ed Hillary and Norgay Tenzing reached the summit of Everest in 1953 because they really wanted to get there!
If Richard Dawkins is required to use a metaphor such as mountain-climbing to explain the role of ‘natural’ selection then this is surely the most bare-faced admission that he really does require more than a set of purely material mechanisms to explain the evolution of complexity in the living world. ‘Aiming for the top’ is to admit to a guiding principle that cannot be expressed in terms of the impersonal processes of physics and chemistry. For a much more detailed critique of Dawkins’ approach and of scientific materialism in general, the interested reader is referred to the book How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or atheism: should science decide? published recently by one of the present authors.
We do know – insofar as one could know about events in the distant past that cannot be directly observed or repeated – that evolution has occurred; but we have only vague ideas of its mechanisms. It is important to keep clearly distinguished these two distinct questions. In our opinion, the mechanism postulated by neo-Darwinism is very inadequate. We agree that mutations occur (more or less randomly), but we believe the notion of selection among those mutants by "the environment" which is said to be blind and purposeless, is no better than an intellectual con trick. This main axiom of neoDarwinism is a bald unsupported assumption that what Aristotle called final cause is absent from biology. That which is officially denied by Dawkins – purpose – is quietly admitted when he talks about “aiming for the summit”, the vital missing link in modern materialistic biology.
Most educated people are aware that as soon as Darwin announced his concept of the origin of species a heated dispute arose which has been raging fitfully ever since . Our contention is that this is a phoney dispute, a series of misunderstandings; and this leads us naturally to the topic of ‘creationism’.
Creationism
The basic assumption of ‘creationism’ is:-
either God has created and sustained the universe, including all life,
or organisms have evolved (as scientific evidence strongly suggests).
This axiom is – rather obviously – unsatisfactory; the two propositions are not logical alternatives but, from the viewpoint of scientifically informed Christians, both are true. We have every right – even (as we would argue) a duty – to study with our God-given faculties the world as we find it, including the evidence of its past changes; and when we do so, we find overwhelming evidence of evolution – a fact of little or no theological significance.
The body of evidence amassed by thousands of scientists – including no small number of Christians – fills many books. As against this there exists a tiny group of works maintaining a ‘young Earth’ theory and attempting to interpret the facts on the basis of the belief that all species were created within a very short time, relatively recently.
The first comment on this confrontation must be the general principle – which Christians, especially, should never forget – that truth is not decided by voting. The fact that “creation science” is propounded by only a very tiny minority of scientists is no proof of its unreliability; remind yourself of the long series of scientific theories that have been mocked and marginalised for a period after first challenging orthodoxy, but have later gained credence. For instance, Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis was, within living memory, dismissed by the leading biologists and (more persistently) geologists, but has now become standard theory. The history of science is not merely sprinkled with but largely consists of such revolutions in theory . And indeed the idea of evolution itself was, for a while, widely rejected. Today the resistance to it among scientists is down to an extremely tiny minority. But that does not tell us whether it is true.
We suggest to readers who are outside science that this ‘creation science’ does indeed deserve the inverted commas assigned to it by Renton Maclachlan. It is not real science but a form of pseudo-science within which the facts are selectively distorted or ignored for the purpose of forcing a conclusion that cannot follow from application of the scientific method to the full array of known facts.
‘Creationist’ fundamentalists insist that the first three chapters of the Bible must only be read in a strictly literal sense. On this axiom is built the fear that evolution threatens true faith by challenging the reliability of Scripture. This is the essential confusion in the ‘creationism’ position.
Reconciling science with Christianity will require, we suggest, nothing short of the abandonment of the fundamentalism which asserts that there is always a straightforward, clearly recognised, strictly literal, reading of texts and that such a reading is the only possible reading of Scripture. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is impossible – all communication necessarily involves interpretation. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is doomed to failure and should be abandoned. Only if we have faith that God does not play tricks on us, either in the Scriptures or in our observations of the world he has made and sustained, can we break through to the reconciliation which is sorely needed.
This may seem a daunting challenge to some devout Christians whose feelings we have no wish to bruise.
We are puzzled at the insistence of fundamentalists on literal reading of, especially, the first three chapters of Genesis while apparently accepting poetic language in, say, Ezekiel, and in the New Testament (to take one example out of many: John the Baptist hails ‘the lamb of God’ in an important metaphor which nobody tries to take literally). We see no reason to assume that just a few parts of the Bible are devoid of symbolism, figures of speech, even poetry; indeed, on the grand difficult topics of the origins and the nature and the fate of humans we would expect, if anything, unusual recourse to such devices of communication. In dealing with the issue of origins the biblical narrative is entering territory that must surely ultimately transcend what is accessible to the human mind, and especially the mind trained in the sciences. Indeed, the sciences themselves rely on model, metaphor, symbol and analogy to picture the objects of scientific inquiry. How much more will we need pictures and symbols to present reality that lies beyond normal experience, such as the origin of creation?! The language of imagery and symbolism (picture language really) must surely play a crucial role in communicating such cosmic truths to people of all ages and times. We think it is evident that only on such a basis can the creation stories of Genesis be understood at all.
One argument against a non-literal or symbolic reading of the early chapters of Genesis cites the several references to Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, and to Noah in both the Gospels and elsewhere in the NT. How can both Christ and Paul speak of real figures and we then deny their historical reality? Again we need not respond to this challenge by ‘accelerating straight down the road’ of panicky literalism. Theologically there is a recognised plasticity in the meaning of the word ‘Adam’; it is far from certain that it was used in Genesis to speak only of a single first man. The symbolic, representative meaning of Adam may be much more relevant to our deeper understanding of the Genesis narratives than the secular, literal approach with its necessary exclusion of sacred, symbolic content.
It may be helpful to remind ourselves that for most of the Christian era it has been held that the Scriptures should not be available outside a very small exclusive cadre. Those who first tried to make the Bible available to the masses were victimised severely. One reason for that punitive attitude was fear that the individual Christian left to interpret Scripture will fall into error. This fear has today been supplanted by faith that the Holy Spirit will guide our prayerful reading so that on the whole we shall be better off than if interpretation and even reading of Scripture had been reserved to an elite few.
The fundamentalist claim that holy Scripture can be read without interpretation – that the reader can, and should, refrain from interpreting what is read, but should instead somehow simply take it only at ‘face value’, whatever that might actually mean – resembles that earlier belief that ordinary people cannot be entrusted to read the Scriptures at all. Indeed it is worse, in that restriction of Scripture-reading was at the time more or less feasible (if not moral) whereas to read without interpreting is actually infeasible.
We suggest that the promulgation of lay reading of the Bible has been a glorious effort doing vastly more good than harm. The fact that some extremist sects have arisen during this era of vernacular Scripture-reading hardly begins to outweigh the magnificent achievements of the many campaigns to bring the gospel, in writing as well as orally, to every corner of this world in the spirit of the Great Commission.
The Reconciliation
The key theological doctrine which evolution does not, cannot touch, is that the human being is a special creation of God, destined for relationship with him and especially loved. (Christians do not have such clear beliefs about other species, although the Bible is clear that God is the creator of all things and will bring creation as a whole to its fulfilment under the headship of Christ.) In that theological setting, our argument against ‘creationism’ is: the physical series of events whereby the species Homo sapiens came to emerge is a matter for valid investigation by science, and has little if any theological significance.
In maintaining that the holy Scriptures are inspired we wish to suggest that the ‘interpret only literally’ recipe actually leads to an impoverished understanding of the intended meaning of certain texts. Are they to be understood literally? Is there not a deeper level of sacred truth conveyed by these words? This is surely the crucial issue facing any serious student of the Bible. Has not a slavish commitment to a superficial literalism - derived very largely from our secular scientific culture with its own slavish commitment to facts, numbers and data stripped of any symbolic sacred value - hampered the discovering of the sacred meaning of the text?
To those mostly modern Christians who have become habituated to the false antinomy ‘evolution or faith’ we pass the vision of leading scientists such as Professor Morton. Evolution is, as best we can make out the facts, evidently the method whereby God has brought into this world the wonderful range of species (approx. 9/10 of them now extinct). There seems to be no good reason to resist this conclusion drawn, we believe, from a dispassionate examination of the facts revealed by an enormous body of scientific investigation.
One level on which the issue should not be decided is one’s subjective, aesthetic reactions to the two approaches. Nevertheless, we would like to say that, to our mind, the marvellous panoply of unfolding creation over aeons is surely tribute to a Creator who operates on a scale of time that hints at the eternal. Rocks as old as 3,500 million years contain evidence of organisms similar to the photosynthetic blue-green algae still functioning on earth today.
The earliest fossilised animals have been found in a complex of sedimentary rocks that stretch back more than 600 million years. These were first discovered in Australia, and have subsequently been found in South Africa, England, Siberia, and Newfoundland, and form what is called the Ediacara fossil complex. The challenge to us today is to avoid the secular temptation to pit the prescientific, religious Genesis narrative against the hard-won picture that science has unfolded during the past couple of centuries. The narrative reading of the early chapters of Genesis and the narrative reading of a genuinely-conducted science must surely speak from different vantage points. The task before us today is to interpret the Creation narratives of Genesis in the light of what has been discovered within the past couple of centuries. We beseech our fellow Christians to do so in faith that God will not let us down or play tricks with our reasoning. The truth – and only the truth – is consistent. Those who adopt the spurious axiom of Creationism (as discussed above – the assumption that one can believe in either creation or evolution but not both) are risking severe cognitive dissonance. It is a false statement which if adopted must lead to contradictions and endless trouble.
We must object to Renton Maclachlan’s attempt to enlist on the side of modern fundamentalism the great scientists Maxwell and Faraday. It is hypothetical in the worst sense to say ‘if these two were alive today they would be numbered firmly among those holding to . . . "creation science" '. This is a completely untestable, almost meaningless assertion. There can be – short of a miracle – no such thing as Faraday alive today in a position to consider the evidence now available. It is simply impossible to know how that devout (though very nonconformist) Christian would have viewed the issue as it now stands. All one can say is that, as one of the three greatest scientists of all history, Faraday earned a most illustrious reputation for honouring the facts observed by science, and did not allow interpretation of them (as they then stood) to be warped by sectarian dogma.
Ecclesiastical and Political Implications
Those who persist in ‘creationism’ often project it into civil life in objectionable ways. Militant ‘creationist’ campaigns (emanating, so far as we have traced them, out of Lubbock, Tex. and Orange County, Calif.) have attempted to purge library holdings and to censor school science curricula to protect pupils from the teaching of evolution. This is a tragic, and even menacing, confusion. Only if evolution gets taught with the false overlay of suggesting that it contradicts or weakens Christianity should it be interfered with. This is certainly the case with the materialistic explanation for evolution, i.e. neo-Darwinism, but it is certainly not so if we view evolution as the means by which God has unfolded the splendour of his creation. The compromise is readily available for secular public schools to teach evolution as science but without metaphysical comment of any sort. We Christians of course regard such a compromise as unsatisfactory.
There are, however, some leaders who wish to protract the phoney conflict. Psychologically, this mistaken approach tends to consolidate their followers by the well-known mechanism of focussing on the need for solidarity against an external enemy. But science practised with integrity is not an enemy of Christianity, and the sooner this is realised the better. The phoney war makes for bad science and for distorted religion.
Conclusion
The real intellectual battle today is scientific atheism versus biblical theism, not evolution ‘versus ‘ creation. The creation ‘versus ‘ evolution wrangle serves only to channel valuable human energy into a futile side-issue that the secular world assumes to be the defining issue upon which Christianity stands or falls. Scientific atheism (read in part, neo-Darwinism) then rides on in a posture of uncriticised intellectual triumph, gathering apparent strength in the eyes of our materialistic, irreligious culture for having exposed the absurdity of a simplistic ‘creation science’ without having its own absurd assumptions challenged.
Christians are confronted with more than enough genuine tasks to keep us busy in the service of the Lord. Billions of people around the world have never heard the Word, and about one billion are malnourished, often ill-clad and ill-housed. The church cannot justify the dedication of books, rhetoric and misdirected work in the cause of “creation science”. It is not real science, and its theological motives are confused. Let us move beyond this distraction.
Neil Broom is associate professor of Engineering, and Robert Mann was until retirement senior lecturer in Environmental Studies, in the University of Auckland.
I am on the DAN conference planning committee. (DAN stands for: Dialogue
Australasia Network of some 300 secondary schools in OZ and NZ.)
We are looking for a keynote speaker for the annual DAN conference, to be
held next April 19th - 21st, 2006, at King's College, Auckland.
The 2006 DAN Conference theme is "Educating beyond the Curriculum".
It has been suggested that we invite a well known speaker who can give a
balanced view, scientifically, philosophically and theologically, of the
current evolution-intelligent design debate. Someone who can present the
viewpoints of those for, and those against, both sides of the debate, by
providing a higher viewpoint, not an over-heated one.
Attached are the samples I've sent him - an 'old' paper I'm still content with, and a new unpubd which I hope will convince him to confirm me as the speaker he wants.
I'd be grateful for your prayerful support as I try to fulfil this mission to those who are confused by the cross-currents of mischievous misinformation on this topic.
It occurs to me also that this important gathering of youth could benefit from hearing the facts about same-sex unions ... ;-]
Clarifying "the" theory of evolution
L R B Mann
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand words elsewhere - some at my page www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199
of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 109 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 109 y, mammals 2 x 108 y, and man somewhere in the region 106 -104 y BP. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first. However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:
* * *
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The material causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.
The efficient cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a final cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's formal cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.
* * *
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."
I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life. Similarly, megatime is no substitute for purpose in production of new species.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution turn out to be always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause? A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes, but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we, IDTers? It is not realistic to stand pat on your one little Paley point waiting for Dawkins, Wolpert etc to concede its logic. And, as Don Nield points out, it is not a very strong point if only because it is in the category of 'god of the gaps' argumentation.
I would relish a public debate against Dawkins about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.
= = =
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
==================================
Creationism v. evolution
but not
creation v. evolution
Robert Mann and Neil Broom
very slightly adapted from Stimulus 8 (2) 16-20 (May 2000)
Many Christians believe that the very idea of evolution – most crucially, the idea that the species Homo sapiens evolved from many previous species now extinct – entails denial of true religion. We wish to argue that there need be no real dispute. The fear appears to be that to admit evolution as a fact - i.e. admit to life unfolding over time with increasing complexity & variety - would bring one into a crisis of faith in Holy Scripture. Maintaining it is a misunderstanding we seek to resolve this apparent conflict in the present paper.
But before we delve into the theory of evolution we note that the facts in direct support of the specific idea of Homo sapiens evolving from ape-like ancestors are – as science now stands – very scanty. The old ‘missing link’ objection still holds good to a large extent regarding factual evidence of immediate human evolution. Indeed, the whole record of evolution is riddled with discontinuities, e.g. the frogs suddenly appear, not preceded by any proto-frogs. The main reason why almost all scientists believe in evolution is that it has been exceedingly successful as an integrating theory within biology.
Nevertheless, one must point out that the evidence is fairly conclusive that humans appeared only about a million years ago, certainly long after many species that have existed for hundreds of millions of years (in contrast to the face value of the story in Genesis 2). More importantly, we maintain that even if a seamless sequence of fossils were demonstrated with no missing links in human evolution, such a finding need have no theological significance regarding the central doctrines that man is created by God and made in the image of God.
Perhaps we should make clear at the start the perspective from which we attempt to contribute to this fraught arena of (sometimes intemperate) argumentation. We are scientists working on aspects of biology, and we are mainstream Christians who hold to traditional doctrines as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed. In other words, we find ourselves able to live by the belief that Christianity does not conflict with a science that is conducted with intellectual integrity - a science that acknowledges the finitude of all human knowing and therefore its inability to proclaim on ultimate issues save what is given by special revelation.
For many Christians the science/God debate automatically focuses on an attempted literal reading of the first two chapters of Genesis. Many assert, and quite strenuously, that Genesis outlines literally the actual history and scientific principles of creation, and any secular science that contradicts this ‘Bible science’ must be rejected outright.
In this literal interpretation of a particular part of Scripture, creation is believed to have taken place over six 24-hour days and perhaps no more than 10,000 years ago. ‘Creation science’ rejects any thought of an ancient earth spanning periods of geological time of many millions of years, and denies any gradual development or evolving of life forms. It is a philosophical position that rejects a huge amount of scientific evidence gathered by a vast community of scientists who hold a wide spectrum of religious (Christian and others) and non-religious viewpoints about the origin of life.
Our personal conviction is that ‘creation science’ is fighting the wrong battle. We say this for two important reasons. Firstly, it makes the dubious assumption that Genesis 1 & 2 must be read in a strictly literal sense if they are to be read in a God-honouring way. It is not at all clear to us that the narrative form of the early chapters of Genesis is literal or even remotely scientific in its intent. The creation texts contain a very simple storyline that is timeless and relevant for all people for all time. But is it science? Science as the modern discipline which gave rise to the creation/evolution discussion hadn’t evolved when the author(s) penned these narratives. The burning issues of the day were what we would call theological, not scientific. Who made the cosmos? Who is in charge of it? Who is to be worshipped? Were the people of God to place their faith in the many divinities of polytheism or in the one true God of the Israelites?
Despite the impact on contemporary culture of postmodernity’s disaffection with science, there is a significant continuing acceptance of 'old fashioned' modernism - scientific materialism and loss of a moral base. The full potential of Genesis 1-3 to help us address these issues will not be realised unless we shoulder the responsibility of interpretation with all the difficulties and even pitfalls that this may entail.
It seems to us that the main point of the creation narratives is to put nature – including mankind – fairly and squarely in its place as created, and thus as a consequence never to be accorded the status of divinity. No part of creation was to be the object of man’s worship. No part of creation was to shape the ultimate destiny of humanity, and this was to include the heavenly bodies. God alone was to be acknowledged as the source and sustainer of all created things.
We must discern very carefully the type of literary narrative being used in each part of scripture. It may be disastrous if we apply an interpretation not intended by the author. It seems to us that when we come to a central Christian truth such as the Resurrection the various accounts given in all four Gospels confront us with a flesh-and-blood, time-and-place narrative that almost ‘screams’ out to be read in a literal sense. Everything about the Resurrection narratives seems to insist we take them literally.
By contrast the early chapters of Genesis do not read in this same flesh-and-blood historic way. They have an entirely contrasting literary flavour. Their structure is much more stylised and poetic. The already-established 7-day Hebrew week is, in all probability, used as a means of systematically working through each realm of the created world with the very powerful pronouncement that all such realms and their inhabitants were the creation of God. What more powerful way to demolish for all time the pagan myth that within the world there were powers and forces that could hold sway over the destinies of people and enslave them in the vice of fear-ridden subservience?
The text reads much more like a series of epic declarations – that God is the supreme commander of the universe, and that all things large and small owe their existence to him. These are, perhaps, words that attempt to describe the indescribable – events of such cosmic proportions as to be literally beyond our understanding as created beings. The language is surely conveying what we would call religious, not scientific truth.
Clear evidence that the text is not meant to be read in a scientific sense is got by comparing the two different creation accounts contained in Genesis 1: 1-2:3 and 2: 4-25. As an obvious example of the author’s(s’) clear disregard for chronological accuracy, in the first account land animals are created before humans whereas in the second account animals are created after man. This apparent conflict is important only if we try to interpret the narratives in a narrow literal sense. Surely an important purpose of both accounts is to place humanity at the apex of creation, separate relationally from all that is beneath; for this theological point, timing is hardly relevant.
We hold that science in general and evolution in particular can offer no genuine conflict with Christianity. There are well-known general grounds for our attitude. The purview of science is restricted: it is as narrow as the physical realm of matter & energy (including living organisms), but no spiritual entities. The fact that science can study only this restricted realm (within which it has achieved very impressive discoveries) is no handicap; it is simply a fact that the scientific method applies only to energy & matter as defined by science, and when science attempts to pronounce on moral questions, let alone spiritual questions, it is a trespasser.
We can say that science is a human activity able to deal only with the lower levels of material cause and effect. By contrast, what we think of as ‘religion’ is concerned with the big picture, the ultimate issues concerning the cosmos and its relationship to the creator. The issues of governance, purpose and meaning are outside the scope of science. The material world operates as a subset within the much larger framework illuminated by revealed religion. In using the word ‘subset’ here we are attempting to stress the importance of not letting theology and science retreat to supposedly unconnected spheres. We wish to provoke renewed co-operation, rather than spurious conflict, between them.
We hope these generalities set the stage as we turn to particulars about the evolution of organisms and about, on the other hand, the vastly more important ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions which only revealed religion can tackle.
Outline of Evolutionary Theory
Modern science has existed for only a few centuries. Why it took so long to begin is discussed in Harold Turner’s recent book and in Renton Maclachlan’s thoughtful review of that book in this journal . Unfortunately that review complains at Rev Dr Turner’s ‘repeated, scathing dismissal of “creation science” without any justification whatsoever being given’. As friends of Harold Turner we are aware he reached the conclusion years ago that “creation science” is a waste of time. He does not bother in his book to expound his reasons for his dismissive attitude to it. Our purpose now is to assist readers by outlining how such a conclusion as Dr Turner’s is not merely reasonable but essential to the goal - dauntingly ambitious to some - of reconciling science and religion.
Since the originators Darwin and Wallace, biology has amassed a compelling body of evidence for organic evolution, i.e. evidence that life has unfolded over a long time, as a tree with many branches and many 'missing' branches, developing a generally more complex range of life-forms, with Homo sapiens appearing only recently. The facts gleaned from fossils, augmented recently by molecular details, strongly suggest that evolution has occurred. The body of evidence from which this deduction flows is so huge, so multi-faceted, and so coherent, that evolution is regarded as a fact by almost every scientist today.
The evidence for evolution, minimally mixed with neo-Darwinian theory, is interesting to review as it stood around the time when modern 'creationism' arose in the USA.
We immediately, emphatically add: how evolution has occurred is a different (and much more difficult) question from the simpler question of whether organisms have evolved. And Goldsmith has pointed out vigorously, in an exchange with the militant atheist Wolpert, that it is a mere assumption to say that evolution must have worked by the mechanism of natural selection.
Many readers will be aware of a supremely confident brand of scientific atheism that is currently fashionable, largely popularised by Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins. Dawkins contemptuously dismisses any suggestion that evolution requires anything more than the blind forces of physics. He says “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Dawkins views Darwin’s idea of natural selection as providing an entirely material means by which the chance variations in an organism’s offspring are channelled in the direction of ‘evolving’ (read increasing) complexity. What is important is that evolution is viewed by Dawkins as an entirely mindless process; hence his confident atheistic stance.
We consider Dawkins in error at a fundamental conceptual level and wish to highlight this by reference to just one of the illustrations he employs to support his scientific atheism - namely the evolution of the eye as expounded in one of his recent books Climbing Mt. Improbable .
Dawkins likens the evolution of the eye to climbing a high mountain. In this scheme of things the evolution of biological novelty (i.e. reaching the summit of Mount Improbable) is achieved in the neo-Darwinian sense by gradual, almost imperceptible steps of improvement. In his metaphor we take a route up the gentle slopes rather than attempting to scale the impossibly steep cliffs and precipices. All that is required is that we head towards the summit.
The emphasis is on small, easy improvements in the organism rather than large leaps in sophistication. Like many of Dawkins’ illustrations, the mountain-climbing analogy seems, at least superficially, to make a lot of sense. It is common for technological advances to proceed in much the same gradual, bit-by-bit fashion.
But let’s look closely at the claimed connection between the development of an eye and Dawkins’ mountain-climbing metaphor.
We arrive at this most improbable structure - the fully functioning eye - by imperceptibly small steps in improvement. No big leaps of innovation, no wild attempts at scaling ‘steep cliffs or precipices’, just an easy meander up the gentle grassy slopes until the summit of optical sophistication is reached.
To support his case Dawkins describes in some detail a computer study conducted by Swedish biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger. These scientists devised a computer program to simulate the evolution of what they describe as a simple eye representation. Remember, this is a virtual, not a real, eye.
They begin with a 2-dimensional picture of a flat layer of imaginary light-sensitive cells sandwiched between an imaginary transparent layer and an imaginary dark backing layer. The two biologists admit in their study that they don’t pretend to explain how the light-sensitive cells that their model commences with might have evolved. This is entirely understandable as the origin of the first living cell remains just one of the innumerable mysteries of the biological world, and how any became light-sensitive is also unknown.
The model works (and always in a virtual sense) by producing at random small percentage changes in the degree of curvature of the sandwich, in the diameter of a light-restricting aperture, in the thickness of the transparent layer, and in the local value of its refractive index (light-bending ability). The computer model is programmed to perform a simple calculation of the sandwich’s optical resolving power every time a change occurs at random in the three variables noted above. This is done by a simple ray-tracing procedure, one familiar to any physics student.
In a relatively small number of steps (1829 steps if each step involved a 1% change in any of the variables) the computer model is shown to transform the flat sandwich through continuous minor improvements into a configuration representing a virtual, focussed eye lens. Dawkins claims this transformation of the initially flat configuration into a focussed configuration by a series of tiny but connected steps is exactly analogous to climbing the mountain of biological complexity: “Going upwards means mutating, one small step at a time, and only accepting mutations that improve optical performance. So, where do we get to? Pleasingly, through a smooth upward pathway, starting from no proper eye at all, we reach a familiar fish eye, complete with lens.” (Climbing Mt. Improbable, p. 151.)
However, any careful reader will immediately see that Dawkins’ claim to explain eye evolution involves a most blatant transgression of the rules of his own materialistic science. Note how logic requires him to impose a highly artificial and purposeful constraint on the behaviour of the eye model: he inserts the crucial proviso of “only accepting mutations that improve optical performance”. In terms of his mountain-climbing analogy, one must “aim for the summit”. He has committed a cardinal breach by introducing a profoundly personal dimension into his scientific materialism: it is persons that have aims, with the foresight to discern whether an immediate change of no use in itself heads toward a distant co-ordinated usefulness.
Ask any serious mountaineer, ask one of New Zealand’s most famous citizens - Sir Edmund Hillary: high summits are conquered only because the mountaineer has a powerful desire to get to the top. The activity is loaded with purpose. The mountaineer is possessed of a burning obsession to achieve the very difficult. Ed Hillary and Norgay Tenzing reached the summit of Everest in 1953 because they really wanted to get there!
If Richard Dawkins is required to use a metaphor such as mountain-climbing to explain the role of ‘natural’ selection then this is surely the most bare-faced admission that he really does require more than a set of purely material mechanisms to explain the evolution of complexity in the living world. ‘Aiming for the top’ is to admit to a guiding principle that cannot be expressed in terms of the impersonal processes of physics and chemistry. For a much more detailed critique of Dawkins’ approach and of scientific materialism in general, the interested reader is referred to the book How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or atheism: should science decide? published recently by one of the present authors.
We do know – insofar as one could know about events in the distant past that cannot be directly observed or repeated – that evolution has occurred; but we have only vague ideas of its mechanisms. It is important to keep clearly distinguished these two distinct questions. In our opinion, the mechanism postulated by neo-Darwinism is very inadequate. We agree that mutations occur (more or less randomly), but we believe the notion of selection among those mutants by "the environment" which is said to be blind and purposeless, is no better than an intellectual con trick. This main axiom of neoDarwinism is a bald unsupported assumption that what Aristotle called final cause is absent from biology. That which is officially denied by Dawkins – purpose – is quietly admitted when he talks about “aiming for the summit”, the vital missing link in modern materialistic biology.
Most educated people are aware that as soon as Darwin announced his concept of the origin of species a heated dispute arose which has been raging fitfully ever since . Our contention is that this is a phoney dispute, a series of misunderstandings; and this leads us naturally to the topic of ‘creationism’.
Creationism
The basic assumption of ‘creationism’ is:-
either God has created and sustained the universe, including all life,
or organisms have evolved (as scientific evidence strongly suggests).
This axiom is – rather obviously – unsatisfactory; the two propositions are not logical alternatives but, from the viewpoint of scientifically informed Christians, both are true. We have every right – even (as we would argue) a duty – to study with our God-given faculties the world as we find it, including the evidence of its past changes; and when we do so, we find overwhelming evidence of evolution – a fact of little or no theological significance.
The body of evidence amassed by thousands of scientists – including no small number of Christians – fills many books. As against this there exists a tiny group of works maintaining a ‘young Earth’ theory and attempting to interpret the facts on the basis of the belief that all species were created within a very short time, relatively recently.
The first comment on this confrontation must be the general principle – which Christians, especially, should never forget – that truth is not decided by voting. The fact that “creation science” is propounded by only a very tiny minority of scientists is no proof of its unreliability; remind yourself of the long series of scientific theories that have been mocked and marginalised for a period after first challenging orthodoxy, but have later gained credence. For instance, Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis was, within living memory, dismissed by the leading biologists and (more persistently) geologists, but has now become standard theory. The history of science is not merely sprinkled with but largely consists of such revolutions in theory . And indeed the idea of evolution itself was, for a while, widely rejected. Today the resistance to it among scientists is down to an extremely tiny minority. But that does not tell us whether it is true.
We suggest to readers who are outside science that this ‘creation science’ does indeed deserve the inverted commas assigned to it by Renton Maclachlan. It is not real science but a form of pseudo-science within which the facts are selectively distorted or ignored for the purpose of forcing a conclusion that cannot follow from application of the scientific method to the full array of known facts.
‘Creationist’ fundamentalists insist that the first three chapters of the Bible must only be read in a strictly literal sense. On this axiom is built the fear that evolution threatens true faith by challenging the reliability of Scripture. This is the essential confusion in the ‘creationism’ position.
Reconciling science with Christianity will require, we suggest, nothing short of the abandonment of the fundamentalism which asserts that there is always a straightforward, clearly recognised, strictly literal, reading of texts and that such a reading is the only possible reading of Scripture. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is impossible – all communication necessarily involves interpretation. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is doomed to failure and should be abandoned. Only if we have faith that God does not play tricks on us, either in the Scriptures or in our observations of the world he has made and sustained, can we break through to the reconciliation which is sorely needed.
This may seem a daunting challenge to some devout Christians whose feelings we have no wish to bruise.
We are puzzled at the insistence of fundamentalists on literal reading of, especially, the first three chapters of Genesis while apparently accepting poetic language in, say, Ezekiel, and in the New Testament (to take one example out of many: John the Baptist hails ‘the lamb of God’ in an important metaphor which nobody tries to take literally). We see no reason to assume that just a few parts of the Bible are devoid of symbolism, figures of speech, even poetry; indeed, on the grand difficult topics of the origins and the nature and the fate of humans we would expect, if anything, unusual recourse to such devices of communication. In dealing with the issue of origins the biblical narrative is entering territory that must surely ultimately transcend what is accessible to the human mind, and especially the mind trained in the sciences. Indeed, the sciences themselves rely on model, metaphor, symbol and analogy to picture the objects of scientific inquiry. How much more will we need pictures and symbols to present reality that lies beyond normal experience, such as the origin of creation?! The language of imagery and symbolism (picture language really) must surely play a crucial role in communicating such cosmic truths to people of all ages and times. We think it is evident that only on such a basis can the creation stories of Genesis be understood at all.
One argument against a non-literal or symbolic reading of the early chapters of Genesis cites the several references to Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, and to Noah in both the Gospels and elsewhere in the NT. How can both Christ and Paul speak of real figures and we then deny their historical reality? Again we need not respond to this challenge by ‘accelerating straight down the road’ of panicky literalism. Theologically there is a recognised plasticity in the meaning of the word ‘Adam’; it is far from certain that it was used in Genesis to speak only of a single first man. The symbolic, representative meaning of Adam may be much more relevant to our deeper understanding of the Genesis narratives than the secular, literal approach with its necessary exclusion of sacred, symbolic content.
It may be helpful to remind ourselves that for most of the Christian era it has been held that the Scriptures should not be available outside a very small exclusive cadre. Those who first tried to make the Bible available to the masses were victimised severely. One reason for that punitive attitude was fear that the individual Christian left to interpret Scripture will fall into error. This fear has today been supplanted by faith that the Holy Spirit will guide our prayerful reading so that on the whole we shall be better off than if interpretation and even reading of Scripture had been reserved to an elite few.
The fundamentalist claim that holy Scripture can be read without interpretation – that the reader can, and should, refrain from interpreting what is read, but should instead somehow simply take it only at ‘face value’, whatever that might actually mean – resembles that earlier belief that ordinary people cannot be entrusted to read the Scriptures at all. Indeed it is worse, in that restriction of Scripture-reading was at the time more or less feasible (if not moral) whereas to read without interpreting is actually infeasible.
We suggest that the promulgation of lay reading of the Bible has been a glorious effort doing vastly more good than harm. The fact that some extremist sects have arisen during this era of vernacular Scripture-reading hardly begins to outweigh the magnificent achievements of the many campaigns to bring the gospel, in writing as well as orally, to every corner of this world in the spirit of the Great Commission.
The Reconciliation
The key theological doctrine which evolution does not, cannot touch, is that the human being is a special creation of God, destined for relationship with him and especially loved. (Christians do not have such clear beliefs about other species, although the Bible is clear that God is the creator of all things and will bring creation as a whole to its fulfilment under the headship of Christ.) In that theological setting, our argument against ‘creationism’ is: the physical series of events whereby the species Homo sapiens came to emerge is a matter for valid investigation by science, and has little if any theological significance.
In maintaining that the holy Scriptures are inspired we wish to suggest that the ‘interpret only literally’ recipe actually leads to an impoverished understanding of the intended meaning of certain texts. Are they to be understood literally? Is there not a deeper level of sacred truth conveyed by these words? This is surely the crucial issue facing any serious student of the Bible. Has not a slavish commitment to a superficial literalism - derived very largely from our secular scientific culture with its own slavish commitment to facts, numbers and data stripped of any symbolic sacred value - hampered the discovering of the sacred meaning of the text?
To those mostly modern Christians who have become habituated to the false antinomy ‘evolution or faith’ we pass the vision of leading scientists such as Professor Morton. Evolution is, as best we can make out the facts, evidently the method whereby God has brought into this world the wonderful range of species (approx. 9/10 of them now extinct). There seems to be no good reason to resist this conclusion drawn, we believe, from a dispassionate examination of the facts revealed by an enormous body of scientific investigation.
One level on which the issue should not be decided is one’s subjective, aesthetic reactions to the two approaches. Nevertheless, we would like to say that, to our mind, the marvellous panoply of unfolding creation over aeons is surely tribute to a Creator who operates on a scale of time that hints at the eternal. Rocks as old as 3,500 million years contain evidence of organisms similar to the photosynthetic blue-green algae still functioning on earth today.
The earliest fossilised animals have been found in a complex of sedimentary rocks that stretch back more than 600 million years. These were first discovered in Australia, and have subsequently been found in South Africa, England, Siberia, and Newfoundland, and form what is called the Ediacara fossil complex. The challenge to us today is to avoid the secular temptation to pit the prescientific, religious Genesis narrative against the hard-won picture that science has unfolded during the past couple of centuries. The narrative reading of the early chapters of Genesis and the narrative reading of a genuinely-conducted science must surely speak from different vantage points. The task before us today is to interpret the Creation narratives of Genesis in the light of what has been discovered within the past couple of centuries. We beseech our fellow Christians to do so in faith that God will not let us down or play tricks with our reasoning. The truth – and only the truth – is consistent. Those who adopt the spurious axiom of Creationism (as discussed above – the assumption that one can believe in either creation or evolution but not both) are risking severe cognitive dissonance. It is a false statement which if adopted must lead to contradictions and endless trouble.
We must object to Renton Maclachlan’s attempt to enlist on the side of modern fundamentalism the great scientists Maxwell and Faraday. It is hypothetical in the worst sense to say ‘if these two were alive today they would be numbered firmly among those holding to . . . "creation science" '. This is a completely untestable, almost meaningless assertion. There can be – short of a miracle – no such thing as Faraday alive today in a position to consider the evidence now available. It is simply impossible to know how that devout (though very nonconformist) Christian would have viewed the issue as it now stands. All one can say is that, as one of the three greatest scientists of all history, Faraday earned a most illustrious reputation for honouring the facts observed by science, and did not allow interpretation of them (as they then stood) to be warped by sectarian dogma.
Ecclesiastical and Political Implications
Those who persist in ‘creationism’ often project it into civil life in objectionable ways. Militant ‘creationist’ campaigns (emanating, so far as we have traced them, out of Lubbock, Tex. and Orange County, Calif.) have attempted to purge library holdings and to censor school science curricula to protect pupils from the teaching of evolution. This is a tragic, and even menacing, confusion. Only if evolution gets taught with the false overlay of suggesting that it contradicts or weakens Christianity should it be interfered with. This is certainly the case with the materialistic explanation for evolution, i.e. neo-Darwinism, but it is certainly not so if we view evolution as the means by which God has unfolded the splendour of his creation. The compromise is readily available for secular public schools to teach evolution as science but without metaphysical comment of any sort. We Christians of course regard such a compromise as unsatisfactory.
There are, however, some leaders who wish to protract the phoney conflict. Psychologically, this mistaken approach tends to consolidate their followers by the well-known mechanism of focussing on the need for solidarity against an external enemy. But science practised with integrity is not an enemy of Christianity, and the sooner this is realised the better. The phoney war makes for bad science and for distorted religion.
Conclusion
The real intellectual battle today is scientific atheism versus biblical theism, not evolution ‘versus ‘ creation. The creation ‘versus ‘ evolution wrangle serves only to channel valuable human energy into a futile side-issue that the secular world assumes to be the defining issue upon which Christianity stands or falls. Scientific atheism (read in part, neo-Darwinism) then rides on in a posture of uncriticised intellectual triumph, gathering apparent strength in the eyes of our materialistic, irreligious culture for having exposed the absurdity of a simplistic ‘creation science’ without having its own absurd assumptions challenged.
Christians are confronted with more than enough genuine tasks to keep us busy in the service of the Lord. Billions of people around the world have never heard the Word, and about one billion are malnourished, often ill-clad and ill-housed. The church cannot justify the dedication of books, rhetoric and misdirected work in the cause of “creation science”. It is not real science, and its theological motives are confused. Let us move beyond this distraction.
Neil Broom is associate professor of Engineering, and Robert Mann was until retirement senior lecturer in Environmental Studies, in the University of Auckland.
10/14/05
My first theology paper - with no less of a secret coach than Professor J E Morton
Also a glimpse of what I soon had to deal with after returning to regular church participation. These are in the much-superior WP program that was widely used around academia worldwide, before Gates' ghastly pile of crap M$W 6 became a sort of de facto standard. Let me know if you can't crack 'em.
R
Real World (U. of Auckland chaplains' magazine) 3 1993
A NOTE ON FEMINISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Robert Mann
'God-Talk and the Liberation of Women', Susana Carryer's feminist article in Real World 2, deserves some comments. Of Ms Carryer's key statements I quote and comment briefly upon a half-dozen. Then, I offer a glimpse of useful literature on 'the liberation of women'.
(1) "Biblical images of God as a mother . . . point to Mother as a viable and biblically correct option as a name for God."
If that is so, should not a scholarly article give references to those biblical images? Readers who do not know their Bible well enough, such as myself, cannot readily find these neglected passages. This comment is no mere pedantry; readers are entitled to wonder whether the Bible does actually contain passages to the effect (when read in context, as we would all like to do) claimed by Ms Carryer.
(2) " . . . the association of God with Father has become normative in our tradition . . . a cycle that is very difficult to break out of".
In one of God's central disclosures to us about his nature and how we should behave toward him, he has instructed us to address him as "Our Father". That key revelation of the Bible is of course reinforced by many others. This instruction presumably implies that, insofar as our feeble human minds can grasp and briefly refer in human terms to our relationship with God, it is most like that of a human child (male or female) with its father. Calling God 'Father' is no fleeting fashion or mere social construction; ironically, calling him anything else is.
(3) "the maleness of Christ has been converted from an historical accident . . . to being an ontological necessity".
Why God chose to reveal himself in a male rather than a female human constitutes something of a mystery which we may think about (while not hoping to understand fully). But the fact that he did thus choose remains a sheer fact.
To read into this historical given a universal ontological necessity that Christ (or any adequate manifestation of God) had to be masculine would be to go further than the Church has ever officially sought to. But to go to the other extreme and term it a mere accident entails an arrogant posture toward God of criticism which I, for one, find preposterous. God's choice within his creative process to make Jesus male really is a God-given fact not up for questioning. If the world is as God made it, trammelled by us sinners, we are faced with the sufficiently large task of discerning truly what are the facts of providence; speculation about whether Jesus could have been female seems, at best, peculiarly vacuous and evasive of reality.
Any thinking of God as personal entails the model of the human species, which happens to be male or female, as the only mode in which we can understand personality. To abandon gender must mean all too soon to lose personality. Doubtless God is unimaginably more than personal; but in our human apprehending he must be at least personal. The pronoun It would
leave him sub-personal, no more to be found responding to us as I to Thou.
But the colossal recent mistake has been to think of sexuality as the primary and divisive category among us. We are first of all human. It is out of our humanity and His that we acclaim in Christ the human being to gather up and re-present before the Father a whole redeemed humanity.
(4) "Terms promoting a linear rather than hierarchical relationship need to take their rightful place alongside the others . . ."
That Nature is inherently thoroughly and profoundly hierarchical has been detailed in Goldsmith's recent magnum opus 'The Way'. As well speak of an animal body without organs, or a cell without organelles, as babble of a non-hierarchical ecosystem or society. It is vacuous, futile, and confusing.
A further criticism, on the level of logic: to present "linear" and hierarchical as tolerantly co-existing characteristics is woolly-minded. Even if we were not stuck by providence with inherently hierarchical biology and society - that is, if we had a real possibility of supplanting hierarchy with "linearity" - it would indeed be a supplanting that Ms Carryer promotes. Any impression that she is advocating kindly addition 'alongside', not replacement, is at best confused.
(5) "Female images of God . . . are necessary to affirm the goodness and legitimacy of female sexuality and identity." [my emphasis]
I hope the falsity of this assertion will need little exposition. Goodness and legitimacy abound in many aspects of humanity without any necessity of being projected onto God himself. Female sexuality has been affirmed as not merely good but glorious in a colossal mass of literature, song, and art; female images of God have evidently not been necessary for the production of these affirmations.
(6) " . . . women are [represented as] the descendants of Eve, the cause of all the evil in the world . . ."
For many years, readers of the Listener were subjected to endless weekly accusations by feminist Marilyn Waring to the effect that men are to blame for the world's ills. The interpretation of Genesis of which Ms Carryer complains has, I submit, had far less (relatively negligible) influence during the past half-century at least.
Having pointed out these rather obvious comments, one can nevertheless expect that they will be ignored by the political ideology of women's lib, which diligently avoids critical discussion. Christians should be clear-eyed about the nature of this irrational political trend which has already made severe inroads on language, reasoning, politics and religion. (The extent of the latter inroads is glimpsed in the very fact that the article on which I have commented was accepted for publication.) Feminists, while differing amongst many sundering camps, are generally gaining political power (overtly or deviously) on the basis of misrepresentations of providence. I wish therefore to take this opportunity to point out some cogent facts about the way God has actually set up the world. Similar summaries have appeared elsewhere.
Ms Carryer, like most if not all feminists, complains repeatedly about patriarchy as if it were obviously evil and as if social rearrangements can do away with it. The book (Goldberg 1979) which first summarised the findings in the societies that have been studied on the subject of male dominance tells us that in all 1400 societies, men occupy the positions of apparent power. (The Amazons turn out to be a forgery.) Similarly, Keesing's (1976) textbook on cultural anthropology, in its section "womens' worlds", says:-
As 16 women social anthropologists compellingly argue inWoman, Culture, and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), there is no evidence that matriarchal societies have ever existed. The apparent universality of male dominance - at least in public and political realms - must be a starting point for an anthropology of women.
The second edition of this book enlarges in very helpful ways, emphasising the need for both empathy and some measure of detached judgement regarding inferences of 'exploitation'.
Confusion often arises among people who have not looked up the meaning of the term patriarchy. Its characteristics relate merely to the formal, public arenas and social hierarchies, in which men brandish weapons, sometimes use them, march around in uniform, deliver loudly the decisions of society, defend and enforce them, etc. The very different forms of power exerted by women, mostly in private, in the formation of those decisions, are by their nature far less amenable to historical research; but it is a serious error to claim that patriarchy entails a lack of power for women. A particular case is that of many Maori women who are content not to speak on the marae because they do in fact speak through their menfolk, more effectively.
The latest and in many ways the best relevant textbook is Dr Anne Moir's 'Brain Sex' (1989). Like her predecessor Goldberg, Moir is rigorously blacked out, as is Illich's key book 'Gender', by feminist "scholar"s, of whom Margarita Levin (1986) makes some stinging criticisms.
Lisa Tuttle's 'Encyclopedia of Feminism' (1987) records the universality of patriarchy but asserts "alternatives to patriarchy may at least be imagined". I however contend that no such fantasy has actually been formulated, and that we cannot regenerate community on the basis of the erroneous notion - the axiom of feminism - that closely similar ways of life should be led by women and men. That such a notion needs to be pointed out as not only unrealistic but also highly undesirable illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender.
Paul's words about the subjection of women (1 Cor. 7; 1 Tim. 2,8ff.) have not endeared that apostle to radical feminists. To be reconciled with Paul's whole evident position, those passages need to be understood as contingent upon and conditioned by the society Paul lived in. We need the same understanding of Jesus' oft-cited decision to enlist no women in the intimate fellowship of the Twelve. In his human life Jesus, with his disciples, was a Jew faithful in daily matters to the social perceptions of his culture and time. Over and over again in his ministry we find Jesus following these, working "with the grain". Only thus could his mission be accomplished among the people into whom (very oddly as the rhymster says) God chose to become incarnate.
If we want to find Paul's convictions on the plane that counts eternally, we must go to the splendid Gal. iii 28-9: "There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus". Through the centuries this has been the normative text of conduct for any society to be called decently Christian. The first couple - Jew and Gentile - was given recognition in Christian practice during the first century; 'bond and free' took longer, until the 19th century. Let us work to see that 'male and female' become reconciled in the full Galatians sense in our time. Feminism is, on the whole, antagonistic to that Christian challenge.
Much more needs to be written about this important topic. To my mind the real question is, what is the appropriate division of labour between men and women? What, especially, is the meaning for today's men and women of the Bible's first three chapters? Have readers of Real World some thoughtful suggestions on that?
SOME GOOD SOURCES
Goldberg S (1979) 'Male Dominance: the Inevitability of Patriarchy'. Abacus
Goldsmith E R D (1992) 'The Way'. Century
Greer G (1983) 'Sex & Destiny'. Secker & Warburg
Illich I (1982) 'Gender'. Pantheon
Keesing R M (1976; 1981) 'Cultural Anthropology'. Holt Rinehart
Levin M (1986) 'Caring New World: Feminism and Science' Amer. Scholar 57 (winter) 100-106
Lyndon N (1992) 'No More Sex War'. Sinclair-Stevenson
Moir A, Jessel D (1989) 'Brain Sex: the real difference between men and women'. Michael Joseph; see also the epilogue to the American edition (Lyle Stuart 1991).
Tuttle L (1987) 'Encyclopedia of Feminism'. London: Arrow
addendum 2003 :
Hosie, Dorothea 'Jesus and Woman'. Hodder & Stoughton 1946; rev. edn 1956.
34 Norana Ave.
Remuera, Auckland 5
17-5-93
Bishop Bruce Gilberd
Diocese of Auckland
Dear Bishop Gilberd,
I give below the full text of a letter which I wrote on 23-3-93 to A.D. News. The published version omitted the final paragraph of comments.
I dare say the editor (with whom I am, barely, acquainted) will say that shortage of space necessitated the deletion. I cannot fully assess any such claim, but I do think that if it were the case then I should have been asked to provide a briefer version. I confess to the suspicion that not space but ideology was the reason.
Editor
A.D. News
P O Box 37 242
Auckland
Dear Jill,
The Feb. 1993 A.D. News reproduced a cartoon, to illustrate the YWCA-distributed video "designed to give women increased confidence". The cartoon appears to depict an old woman brushing off a young male attacker who has approached her from behind. The attacker is flattened by a blow, with a stick, to the attacker's groin; the woman walks on.
The impression conveyed by the cartoon is that deft, almost casual, violent retaliation is likely to flatten the attacker and thus protect the woman from further attack. That depiction is, I believe, a gravely misleading fantasy. I am left wondering what sort of person would try to build confidence on such a misleading basis. The chances of crippling the attacker are poor (especially if the defender has such "increased confidence" as to refrain from even looking over her shoulder, as in the cartoon!). As a man who has been in a few fights, I believe that to attempt such a blow, so far from being likely to incapacitate temporarily, is more likely to provoke far worse violence.
The video which the cartoon apparently exemplifies is stated in your story to have been produced "with instructions from" a leader of the women's self-defence trade which has been reported on TV as teaching women to prepare for possible attacks by practising throws, holds etc. to the chant 'hate men'. Related slogans include 'women need men like [sic] fish need bicycles' and of course the matchlessly hateful 'all men are rapists'. That such a vicious deluded political trend could have hijacked the Young Women's Christian Association illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender. Much more needs to be written about this important topic; meanwhile, I object to the printing of this mischievous cartoon in a church paper.
====
34 Norana Ave.
Remuera, Auckland 5
-7-93
Bishop Bruce Gilberd
Diocese of Auckland
P O Box 37 242
Auckland
Dear Bishop Gilberd,
I was disappointed and saddened by your reply of 22 June to my complaint about censorship in A.D. News. As with the original complaint, I regret bothering you; but I do think further reasoning is warranted by this little matter, and I hope to find from it some new line of contribution to the church.
I note that no justification whatever is offered for the censorship. Nevertheless you chose to endorse, ex post facto, the evident wrong done. I am afraid that the matter appears therefore to be a classic rubber-stamping by a senior officer, without any attempt to deal with the question of apparent injustice.
When I discussed with Jill Brewis my then-forthcoming letter for A.D. News, she asked whether I might write something on my experiences in returning to formal worship after a quarter-century (foolishly) out of it, I thus have to remind myself that it is capable of error - most frustratingly, gratuitous political compromise where vigorous resistance to political fashion is needed. The crazed political ideology which you have (innocently, I assume) gone along with in this case is thus shown to be even more influential than I had seen.
Also a glimpse of what I soon had to deal with after returning to regular church participation. These are in the much-superior WP program that was widely used around academia worldwide, before Gates' ghastly pile of crap M$W 6 became a sort of de facto standard. Let me know if you can't crack 'em.
R
Real World (U. of Auckland chaplains' magazine) 3 1993
A NOTE ON FEMINISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Robert Mann
'God-Talk and the Liberation of Women', Susana Carryer's feminist article in Real World 2, deserves some comments. Of Ms Carryer's key statements I quote and comment briefly upon a half-dozen. Then, I offer a glimpse of useful literature on 'the liberation of women'.
(1) "Biblical images of God as a mother . . . point to Mother as a viable and biblically correct option as a name for God."
If that is so, should not a scholarly article give references to those biblical images? Readers who do not know their Bible well enough, such as myself, cannot readily find these neglected passages. This comment is no mere pedantry; readers are entitled to wonder whether the Bible does actually contain passages to the effect (when read in context, as we would all like to do) claimed by Ms Carryer.
(2) " . . . the association of God with Father has become normative in our tradition . . . a cycle that is very difficult to break out of".
In one of God's central disclosures to us about his nature and how we should behave toward him, he has instructed us to address him as "Our Father". That key revelation of the Bible is of course reinforced by many others. This instruction presumably implies that, insofar as our feeble human minds can grasp and briefly refer in human terms to our relationship with God, it is most like that of a human child (male or female) with its father. Calling God 'Father' is no fleeting fashion or mere social construction; ironically, calling him anything else is.
(3) "the maleness of Christ has been converted from an historical accident . . . to being an ontological necessity".
Why God chose to reveal himself in a male rather than a female human constitutes something of a mystery which we may think about (while not hoping to understand fully). But the fact that he did thus choose remains a sheer fact.
To read into this historical given a universal ontological necessity that Christ (or any adequate manifestation of God) had to be masculine would be to go further than the Church has ever officially sought to. But to go to the other extreme and term it a mere accident entails an arrogant posture toward God of criticism which I, for one, find preposterous. God's choice within his creative process to make Jesus male really is a God-given fact not up for questioning. If the world is as God made it, trammelled by us sinners, we are faced with the sufficiently large task of discerning truly what are the facts of providence; speculation about whether Jesus could have been female seems, at best, peculiarly vacuous and evasive of reality.
Any thinking of God as personal entails the model of the human species, which happens to be male or female, as the only mode in which we can understand personality. To abandon gender must mean all too soon to lose personality. Doubtless God is unimaginably more than personal; but in our human apprehending he must be at least personal. The pronoun It would
leave him sub-personal, no more to be found responding to us as I to Thou.
But the colossal recent mistake has been to think of sexuality as the primary and divisive category among us. We are first of all human. It is out of our humanity and His that we acclaim in Christ the human being to gather up and re-present before the Father a whole redeemed humanity.
(4) "Terms promoting a linear rather than hierarchical relationship need to take their rightful place alongside the others . . ."
That Nature is inherently thoroughly and profoundly hierarchical has been detailed in Goldsmith's recent magnum opus 'The Way'. As well speak of an animal body without organs, or a cell without organelles, as babble of a non-hierarchical ecosystem or society. It is vacuous, futile, and confusing.
A further criticism, on the level of logic: to present "linear" and hierarchical as tolerantly co-existing characteristics is woolly-minded. Even if we were not stuck by providence with inherently hierarchical biology and society - that is, if we had a real possibility of supplanting hierarchy with "linearity" - it would indeed be a supplanting that Ms Carryer promotes. Any impression that she is advocating kindly addition 'alongside', not replacement, is at best confused.
(5) "Female images of God . . . are necessary to affirm the goodness and legitimacy of female sexuality and identity." [my emphasis]
I hope the falsity of this assertion will need little exposition. Goodness and legitimacy abound in many aspects of humanity without any necessity of being projected onto God himself. Female sexuality has been affirmed as not merely good but glorious in a colossal mass of literature, song, and art; female images of God have evidently not been necessary for the production of these affirmations.
(6) " . . . women are [represented as] the descendants of Eve, the cause of all the evil in the world . . ."
For many years, readers of the Listener were subjected to endless weekly accusations by feminist Marilyn Waring to the effect that men are to blame for the world's ills. The interpretation of Genesis of which Ms Carryer complains has, I submit, had far less (relatively negligible) influence during the past half-century at least.
Having pointed out these rather obvious comments, one can nevertheless expect that they will be ignored by the political ideology of women's lib, which diligently avoids critical discussion. Christians should be clear-eyed about the nature of this irrational political trend which has already made severe inroads on language, reasoning, politics and religion. (The extent of the latter inroads is glimpsed in the very fact that the article on which I have commented was accepted for publication.) Feminists, while differing amongst many sundering camps, are generally gaining political power (overtly or deviously) on the basis of misrepresentations of providence. I wish therefore to take this opportunity to point out some cogent facts about the way God has actually set up the world. Similar summaries have appeared elsewhere.
Ms Carryer, like most if not all feminists, complains repeatedly about patriarchy as if it were obviously evil and as if social rearrangements can do away with it. The book (Goldberg 1979) which first summarised the findings in the societies that have been studied on the subject of male dominance tells us that in all 1400 societies, men occupy the positions of apparent power. (The Amazons turn out to be a forgery.) Similarly, Keesing's (1976) textbook on cultural anthropology, in its section "womens' worlds", says:-
As 16 women social anthropologists compellingly argue inWoman, Culture, and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), there is no evidence that matriarchal societies have ever existed. The apparent universality of male dominance - at least in public and political realms - must be a starting point for an anthropology of women.
The second edition of this book enlarges in very helpful ways, emphasising the need for both empathy and some measure of detached judgement regarding inferences of 'exploitation'.
Confusion often arises among people who have not looked up the meaning of the term patriarchy. Its characteristics relate merely to the formal, public arenas and social hierarchies, in which men brandish weapons, sometimes use them, march around in uniform, deliver loudly the decisions of society, defend and enforce them, etc. The very different forms of power exerted by women, mostly in private, in the formation of those decisions, are by their nature far less amenable to historical research; but it is a serious error to claim that patriarchy entails a lack of power for women. A particular case is that of many Maori women who are content not to speak on the marae because they do in fact speak through their menfolk, more effectively.
The latest and in many ways the best relevant textbook is Dr Anne Moir's 'Brain Sex' (1989). Like her predecessor Goldberg, Moir is rigorously blacked out, as is Illich's key book 'Gender', by feminist "scholar"s, of whom Margarita Levin (1986) makes some stinging criticisms.
Lisa Tuttle's 'Encyclopedia of Feminism' (1987) records the universality of patriarchy but asserts "alternatives to patriarchy may at least be imagined". I however contend that no such fantasy has actually been formulated, and that we cannot regenerate community on the basis of the erroneous notion - the axiom of feminism - that closely similar ways of life should be led by women and men. That such a notion needs to be pointed out as not only unrealistic but also highly undesirable illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender.
Paul's words about the subjection of women (1 Cor. 7; 1 Tim. 2,8ff.) have not endeared that apostle to radical feminists. To be reconciled with Paul's whole evident position, those passages need to be understood as contingent upon and conditioned by the society Paul lived in. We need the same understanding of Jesus' oft-cited decision to enlist no women in the intimate fellowship of the Twelve. In his human life Jesus, with his disciples, was a Jew faithful in daily matters to the social perceptions of his culture and time. Over and over again in his ministry we find Jesus following these, working "with the grain". Only thus could his mission be accomplished among the people into whom (very oddly as the rhymster says) God chose to become incarnate.
If we want to find Paul's convictions on the plane that counts eternally, we must go to the splendid Gal. iii 28-9: "There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus". Through the centuries this has been the normative text of conduct for any society to be called decently Christian. The first couple - Jew and Gentile - was given recognition in Christian practice during the first century; 'bond and free' took longer, until the 19th century. Let us work to see that 'male and female' become reconciled in the full Galatians sense in our time. Feminism is, on the whole, antagonistic to that Christian challenge.
Much more needs to be written about this important topic. To my mind the real question is, what is the appropriate division of labour between men and women? What, especially, is the meaning for today's men and women of the Bible's first three chapters? Have readers of Real World some thoughtful suggestions on that?
SOME GOOD SOURCES
Goldberg S (1979) 'Male Dominance: the Inevitability of Patriarchy'. Abacus
Goldsmith E R D (1992) 'The Way'. Century
Greer G (1983) 'Sex & Destiny'. Secker & Warburg
Illich I (1982) 'Gender'. Pantheon
Keesing R M (1976; 1981) 'Cultural Anthropology'. Holt Rinehart
Levin M (1986) 'Caring New World: Feminism and Science' Amer. Scholar 57 (winter) 100-106
Lyndon N (1992) 'No More Sex War'. Sinclair-Stevenson
Moir A, Jessel D (1989) 'Brain Sex: the real difference between men and women'. Michael Joseph; see also the epilogue to the American edition (Lyle Stuart 1991).
Tuttle L (1987) 'Encyclopedia of Feminism'. London: Arrow
addendum 2003 :
Hosie, Dorothea 'Jesus and Woman'. Hodder & Stoughton 1946; rev. edn 1956.
34 Norana Ave.
Remuera, Auckland 5
17-5-93
Bishop Bruce Gilberd
Diocese of Auckland
Dear Bishop Gilberd,
I give below the full text of a letter which I wrote on 23-3-93 to A.D. News. The published version omitted the final paragraph of comments.
I dare say the editor (with whom I am, barely, acquainted) will say that shortage of space necessitated the deletion. I cannot fully assess any such claim, but I do think that if it were the case then I should have been asked to provide a briefer version. I confess to the suspicion that not space but ideology was the reason.
Editor
A.D. News
P O Box 37 242
Auckland
Dear Jill,
The Feb. 1993 A.D. News reproduced a cartoon, to illustrate the YWCA-distributed video "designed to give women increased confidence". The cartoon appears to depict an old woman brushing off a young male attacker who has approached her from behind. The attacker is flattened by a blow, with a stick, to the attacker's groin; the woman walks on.
The impression conveyed by the cartoon is that deft, almost casual, violent retaliation is likely to flatten the attacker and thus protect the woman from further attack. That depiction is, I believe, a gravely misleading fantasy. I am left wondering what sort of person would try to build confidence on such a misleading basis. The chances of crippling the attacker are poor (especially if the defender has such "increased confidence" as to refrain from even looking over her shoulder, as in the cartoon!). As a man who has been in a few fights, I believe that to attempt such a blow, so far from being likely to incapacitate temporarily, is more likely to provoke far worse violence.
The video which the cartoon apparently exemplifies is stated in your story to have been produced "with instructions from" a leader of the women's self-defence trade which has been reported on TV as teaching women to prepare for possible attacks by practising throws, holds etc. to the chant 'hate men'. Related slogans include 'women need men like [sic] fish need bicycles' and of course the matchlessly hateful 'all men are rapists'. That such a vicious deluded political trend could have hijacked the Young Women's Christian Association illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender. Much more needs to be written about this important topic; meanwhile, I object to the printing of this mischievous cartoon in a church paper.
====
34 Norana Ave.
Remuera, Auckland 5
-7-93
Bishop Bruce Gilberd
Diocese of Auckland
P O Box 37 242
Auckland
Dear Bishop Gilberd,
I was disappointed and saddened by your reply of 22 June to my complaint about censorship in A.D. News. As with the original complaint, I regret bothering you; but I do think further reasoning is warranted by this little matter, and I hope to find from it some new line of contribution to the church.
I note that no justification whatever is offered for the censorship. Nevertheless you chose to endorse, ex post facto, the evident wrong done. I am afraid that the matter appears therefore to be a classic rubber-stamping by a senior officer, without any attempt to deal with the question of apparent injustice.
When I discussed with Jill Brewis my then-forthcoming letter for A.D. News, she asked whether I might write something on my experiences in returning to formal worship after a quarter-century (foolishly) out of it, I thus have to remind myself that it is capable of error - most frustratingly, gratuitous political compromise where vigorous resistance to political fashion is needed. The crazed political ideology which you have (innocently, I assume) gone along with in this case is thus shown to be even more influential than I had seen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1559743,00.html
One side can be wrong
Accepting 'intelligent design' in science classrooms would have disastrous consequences, warn Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Thursday September 1, 2005
The Grauniad
It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.
One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."
As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.
Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.
Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.
Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.
If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.
The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.
In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.
What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.
The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.
Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.
As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.
Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.
If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.
In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.
There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.
The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.
Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.
Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.
Arguments worth having ...
The "Cambrian Explosion"
Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.
The evolutionary basis of human behaviour
The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.
Sexual versus natural selection
Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.
The target of natural selection
Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.
Natural selection versus genetic drift
Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.
Further reading
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc
User-friendly guide to evolution
www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/jacNR.pdf
Critique of Intelligent Design movement, published in New Republic
Climbing Mount Improbable
Richard Dawkins (illustrations by Lalla Ward), Penguin 1997
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Barbara C Forrest and Paul R Gross, Oxford University Press, 2003
· Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago
Richard Dawkins' book 'The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life' is published by Phoenix in paperback today priced £9.99.
One side can be wrong
Accepting 'intelligent design' in science classrooms would have disastrous consequences, warn Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Thursday September 1, 2005
The Grauniad
It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.
One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."
As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.
Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.
Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.
Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.
If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.
The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.
In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.
What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.
The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.
Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.
As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.
Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.
If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.
In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.
There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.
The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.
Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.
Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.
Arguments worth having ...
The "Cambrian Explosion"
Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.
The evolutionary basis of human behaviour
The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.
Sexual versus natural selection
Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.
The target of natural selection
Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.
Natural selection versus genetic drift
Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.
Further reading
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc
User-friendly guide to evolution
www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/jacNR.pdf
Critique of Intelligent Design movement, published in New Republic
Climbing Mount Improbable
Richard Dawkins (illustrations by Lalla Ward), Penguin 1997
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Barbara C Forrest and Paul R Gross, Oxford University Press, 2003
· Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago
Richard Dawkins' book 'The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life' is published by Phoenix in paperback today priced £9.99.
10/01/05
From: Jakov Adler
To: jaadler@netvision.net.il
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 6:53 PM
A very often downplayed aspect of the Middle East conflict.
Best regards,
Jakov.
Communique: 6 September 2005
ANTI-CHRISTIAN POGROM
IN THE WEST BANK
Dear HonestReporting Subscriber,
For years, media outlets have largely refused to report one of the most troubling aspects of the Mideast conflict (Muslim intimidation and violence against Christians in Palestinian-controlled areas).
The latest shocking episode again made its way to very few news consumers: Late Saturday night (Sept. 3), hundreds of armed Palestinian Muslims crying 'Allahu Akbar' descended on the West Bank Christian city of Taibe. For the next few hours, the mob terrorized the community, setting sixteen homes and multiple businesses on fire, looting valuables from both, and destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Said one eyewitness: 'It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs.'
The mob's 'provocation'? A Muslim woman from their neighboring village had had a relationship with a Christian man from Taibe. The woman was poisoned to death by her own family in an 'honor killing', and soon after, the pogrom against Taibe commenced.
Something tells us this incident would have made international headlines had Jews been responsible for this type of violence.
HISTORY OF MUSLIM ABUSE, CHRISTIAN FLIGHT
Incidents such as this, largely ignored by the western media, have been the leading cause of massive Christian flight from the Holy Land over the past few years.
The historical Christian towns of Bethlehem and Nazereth, once home to large Christian populations, have seen that population flee en masse due to Muslim intimidation and violence. As HonestReporting has documented:
● Over 100 Palestinian terrorists took over the Church of the Nativity in 2002, using it as a fortress from which to fire upon Israeli troops, while holding nuns, priests and monks hostage, and looting or destroying virtually everything of value inside the building.
● During 2000-2002, the PA's Tanzim militia chose the Christian town of Beit Jala as a base for unprovoked shooting at Jerusalem. The Tanzim were specifically positioned in or near Christian homes, hotels, churches, and the Greek Orthodox club, knowing fully well that these sites would be hard-hit by Israeli return fire.
● In 1995, Bethlehem was 62% Christian, but today is less than 20% Christian. Before 1995, Bethlehem had a majority-Christian municipal council, but when the Palestinian Authority took over the town, Yassir Arafat replaced the municipal council with a predominately Muslim council, and Christian Arabs fled Bethlehem in droves after a radical Islamic wave began inciting against them.
● On February 6, 2002, the Boston Globe reported "a rampage of Palestinian Muslims against Christian shops and churches in Ramallah ... Police made no attempt to stop the mob, which besieged and damaged a widely respected youth center associated with the Boy Scouts of America after torching the Christian properties ... 'The truth is this is a problem between Christians and Muslims,' said one Christian businessman."
To: jaadler@netvision.net.il
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 6:53 PM
A very often downplayed aspect of the Middle East conflict.
Best regards,
Jakov.
Communique: 6 September 2005
ANTI-CHRISTIAN POGROM
IN THE WEST BANK
Dear HonestReporting Subscriber,
For years, media outlets have largely refused to report one of the most troubling aspects of the Mideast conflict (Muslim intimidation and violence against Christians in Palestinian-controlled areas).
The latest shocking episode again made its way to very few news consumers: Late Saturday night (Sept. 3), hundreds of armed Palestinian Muslims crying 'Allahu Akbar' descended on the West Bank Christian city of Taibe. For the next few hours, the mob terrorized the community, setting sixteen homes and multiple businesses on fire, looting valuables from both, and destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Said one eyewitness: 'It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs.'
The mob's 'provocation'? A Muslim woman from their neighboring village had had a relationship with a Christian man from Taibe. The woman was poisoned to death by her own family in an 'honor killing', and soon after, the pogrom against Taibe commenced.
Something tells us this incident would have made international headlines had Jews been responsible for this type of violence.
HISTORY OF MUSLIM ABUSE, CHRISTIAN FLIGHT
Incidents such as this, largely ignored by the western media, have been the leading cause of massive Christian flight from the Holy Land over the past few years.
The historical Christian towns of Bethlehem and Nazereth, once home to large Christian populations, have seen that population flee en masse due to Muslim intimidation and violence. As HonestReporting has documented:
● Over 100 Palestinian terrorists took over the Church of the Nativity in 2002, using it as a fortress from which to fire upon Israeli troops, while holding nuns, priests and monks hostage, and looting or destroying virtually everything of value inside the building.
● During 2000-2002, the PA's Tanzim militia chose the Christian town of Beit Jala as a base for unprovoked shooting at Jerusalem. The Tanzim were specifically positioned in or near Christian homes, hotels, churches, and the Greek Orthodox club, knowing fully well that these sites would be hard-hit by Israeli return fire.
● In 1995, Bethlehem was 62% Christian, but today is less than 20% Christian. Before 1995, Bethlehem had a majority-Christian municipal council, but when the Palestinian Authority took over the town, Yassir Arafat replaced the municipal council with a predominately Muslim council, and Christian Arabs fled Bethlehem in droves after a radical Islamic wave began inciting against them.
● On February 6, 2002, the Boston Globe reported "a rampage of Palestinian Muslims against Christian shops and churches in Ramallah ... Police made no attempt to stop the mob, which besieged and damaged a widely respected youth center associated with the Boy Scouts of America after torching the Christian properties ... 'The truth is this is a problem between Christians and Muslims,' said one Christian businessman."
09/26/05
Should we also have one for The Christian Crusader
There may have been a time - ca.7 centuries ago - when that quip would make some sense. It is not now a relevant comment.
and for the Zionist of Genesis 15:11-21?
I may as well confess to you that I wasn't familiar with this passage (I've not read many parts of the Bible).
Do modern Zionists rely much on this passage? If so, it would be an amusing parallel to the Muslim reliance on Mahomet's dream of a 'night flight' (the word Jerusalem not being mentioned). But it's an inexact parallel if only because this Abram dream is relatively specific.
I know little of Zionism. While a grad student in a USA lab dominated in more senses than one by men of Jewish extraction (most of them non-religious, I was pretty sure), I soon learned not to attempt any discussion relating to Israel. As soon as one made any remark, no matter how specific & careful, they would scream "Ve are fighting for our vechy SURVIVAL", to put me on notice that reasoning would not be available. I gave up.
What I did think, and still do, is that in such a complex long dispute what may matter most practically is: which party is in the more sturdy psychological condition to make a concessionary offer. It has usually appeared to me that the non-Israelis (not all of them Arabs!) happen to be in the more precarious psychological position and are therefore the better placed to be generous. By this comparison I do not mean to imply that the Zionists who scream as I've quoted are in any very robust psychological stance - only that the others are even less secure.
I have no opinion on what offer(s) the Zionists might best formulate; as I say, I gave up the attempt to reason on this ghastly imbroglio. I mean now only to make a suggestion on a different level, which I hope will be taken up sympathetically as it is meant.
The above 3 paras was cited by Stuart C Newman as his main reason for quitting the Science For The People email list.
R
If graphics do not show, revert to URL http://kiwijewpundit.blogspot.com/
The Toddler's Creed
If I want it, it's mine.
If I can take it away from you, it's mine.
If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
If it looks like mine, it's mine.
If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's mine.
If we are building something together, all the pieces are mine.
If it's mine, it will never belong to anyone else. No matter what.
Waaaah! My toys! Mine! Give me! Waaaaah...
The Jihadi Creed
If I want it, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If I can take it away from you, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If I had it a little while ago, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If it looks like Dar ul-Islam, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If we are building something together, all the pieces are Dar ul-Islam.
If it's Dar ul-Islam, it will never belong to anyone else. No matter what.
Waaah, my land! Chechnya mine, Palestine mine, Andalus mine, give me!! Waaaah...
--
Jerry Ravetz
111 Victoria Road
Oxford OX2 7QG
+44 [0]1865 512247
Mobile 0790 535 2788
Website: www.jerryravetz.co.uk
Visiting Fellow, the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, Saïd Business School, Oxford University.
Files of my recent papers, available for downloading, can be found on the website www.nusap.net; on the Home Page see Tutorials - Post-Normal Science and NUSAP, and Sections - Reports, papers. See also www.postnormaltimes.net, edited by Sylvia Tognetti.
There may have been a time - ca.7 centuries ago - when that quip would make some sense. It is not now a relevant comment.
and for the Zionist of Genesis 15:11-21?
I may as well confess to you that I wasn't familiar with this passage (I've not read many parts of the Bible).
Do modern Zionists rely much on this passage? If so, it would be an amusing parallel to the Muslim reliance on Mahomet's dream of a 'night flight' (the word Jerusalem not being mentioned). But it's an inexact parallel if only because this Abram dream is relatively specific.
I know little of Zionism. While a grad student in a USA lab dominated in more senses than one by men of Jewish extraction (most of them non-religious, I was pretty sure), I soon learned not to attempt any discussion relating to Israel. As soon as one made any remark, no matter how specific & careful, they would scream "Ve are fighting for our vechy SURVIVAL", to put me on notice that reasoning would not be available. I gave up.
What I did think, and still do, is that in such a complex long dispute what may matter most practically is: which party is in the more sturdy psychological condition to make a concessionary offer. It has usually appeared to me that the non-Israelis (not all of them Arabs!) happen to be in the more precarious psychological position and are therefore the better placed to be generous. By this comparison I do not mean to imply that the Zionists who scream as I've quoted are in any very robust psychological stance - only that the others are even less secure.
I have no opinion on what offer(s) the Zionists might best formulate; as I say, I gave up the attempt to reason on this ghastly imbroglio. I mean now only to make a suggestion on a different level, which I hope will be taken up sympathetically as it is meant.
The above 3 paras was cited by Stuart C Newman as his main reason for quitting the Science For The People email list.
R
If graphics do not show, revert to URL http://kiwijewpundit.blogspot.com/
The Toddler's Creed
If I want it, it's mine.
If I can take it away from you, it's mine.
If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
If it looks like mine, it's mine.
If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's mine.
If we are building something together, all the pieces are mine.
If it's mine, it will never belong to anyone else. No matter what.
Waaaah! My toys! Mine! Give me! Waaaaah...
The Jihadi Creed
If I want it, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If I can take it away from you, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If I had it a little while ago, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If it looks like Dar ul-Islam, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's Dar ul-Islam.
If we are building something together, all the pieces are Dar ul-Islam.
If it's Dar ul-Islam, it will never belong to anyone else. No matter what.
Waaah, my land! Chechnya mine, Palestine mine, Andalus mine, give me!! Waaaah...
--
Jerry Ravetz
111 Victoria Road
Oxford OX2 7QG
+44 [0]1865 512247
Mobile 0790 535 2788
Website: www.jerryravetz.co.uk
Visiting Fellow, the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, Saïd Business School, Oxford University.
Files of my recent papers, available for downloading, can be found on the website www.nusap.net; on the Home Page see Tutorials - Post-Normal Science and NUSAP, and Sections - Reports, papers. See also www.postnormaltimes.net, edited by Sylvia Tognetti.
09/10/05
AshfordGram®: one cleric's reaction to 'new church plantings' [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 11:11:40 PM
New churches mainly drain the disenchanted from other churches. New church plantings have not increased overall membership in the Western "civilization" over the last 2 decades; they have, as it is sometimes described, merely rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.
- Ron Ashford
(Ron is a former Archdeacon of Wanganui, currently completing a MA (Bioethics) at the University of Otago)
- Ron Ashford
(Ron is a former Archdeacon of Wanganui, currently completing a MA (Bioethics) at the University of Otago)
>I concentrate on one aspect of this article:
An Unworkable Theology
Philip Turner
First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 10-12.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0506/opinion/turner.html
The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
...
It’s a theological chasm - one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption.
The message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.
>A few years ago, Get Smart the then vicar of St Aidan's, Remuera, used to deliver sermons expounding Universalism - the idea that all are saved, the overwhelming love of God being such as to turn none away, whether Muslim or never heard the Gospel etc. I would then stand mute with nothing to add to the clear, vigorous remonstrations by a rtd judge as he waded into Get for this heresy. PC operatives like Get are however impervious to reason; he would repeat the offence a few months later.
Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.
>Get is now collecting his pension from the church, but also billed in the media as acting dean of the cathedral. What stipend-boost is he pulling down for the latter work? What will he do if some PowerHarpie demands to take over the position?
An Unworkable Theology
Philip Turner
First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 10-12.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0506/opinion/turner.html
The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
...
It’s a theological chasm - one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption.
The message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.
>A few years ago, Get Smart the then vicar of St Aidan's, Remuera, used to deliver sermons expounding Universalism - the idea that all are saved, the overwhelming love of God being such as to turn none away, whether Muslim or never heard the Gospel etc. I would then stand mute with nothing to add to the clear, vigorous remonstrations by a rtd judge as he waded into Get for this heresy. PC operatives like Get are however impervious to reason; he would repeat the offence a few months later.
Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.
>Get is now collecting his pension from the church, but also billed in the media as acting dean of the cathedral. What stipend-boost is he pulling down for the latter work? What will he do if some PowerHarpie demands to take over the position?
Gareth my Californian man,
>You open up q's which interest me, tho' I don't know much about them.
I Cc some clerks in holy orders, and some other good churchfolk.
Our associate pastor gave the message today and discussed briefly his sabbatical which encompassed a study on church planting.
I haven't thought this through fully, but discussions afterward reinforced the e-mail Robert sent on the disintegration of the church, HOWEVER, our pastor indicated that new churches are sprouting up like crazy.
>They have been proliferating around here for a decade or so; I haven't up-to-date figures on recent developments. The whole trend I view with major suspicion to the extent that it's outside existing denominations. But then, I'm the sort of Clayton's Protestant who regrets the Reformation ... and who deplores the woolly-mindedness of Bahai & Quakers ... and who deplores the quiet omission of all creeds from many services ...
He gave one example of a Baptist sponsored church that was labeled Quaker, primarily because the building used was Quaker owned. The key was the gifted leadership moving it forward ... essentially casting off the trappings of old and even bathing in potentially misleading names, but moving forward with gusto.
>What counts as forward? A dozen watts, if thru efficient speakers, will give you a pretty solid drug effect for guitars, good singers etc to lead simple songs of devotion along the lines 'Jesus, you are the grooviest, altogether lovely, and wholly worthy, and I want to worship you'. Given also good preaching, members & spondulicks are likely to roll in. We are talking church growth here ...
The new 'church', or new congregation within an established church, can grow in numbers, turnover, and evident merit; yet it can simultaneously create a sort of cocoon ignoring key issues of the time. PC ideologies are white-anting the Church, esp Anglican: militant homosexualism is promoted by our diocesan & asst bishop & theol coll principals, who also devote themselves firmly to the other PC ideologies neoRacism and, most of all, wimminsLib. Am I to believe that novel 'planted' independent churches are doing less badly against these evil PC ideologies?
Direct missions by totally inexperienced congregation members get strong support, while proven accomplished missionaries e.g Dr Edric Baker are not supported in their routine enormous accomplishments. Am I to believe that novel 'planted' seedlings are more outward-looking? Who is studying these matters?
The general opinion was to allow the old structures to fall and let many new churches, anchored in the Bible, God, Christ, etc., flourish.
>What does this mean to you gents?
I can't help noticing the extreme lack of liturgy. I wonder whether keen new Christians really do need, or even want, this informal approach. I also feel the lack of disciplined connection to other churches is a crippling defect of this 'church planting' business outside of, say, Anglican, RC, Presby, Baptist, Metho ... and I frankly feel those last 2 or 3 have no valid future. But then, I stand ready to tolerate, indeed celebrate, the end of the Anglican church that has nurtured me from age 5 - if that end is an honourable healing of the non-schism with Rome. I would furthermore like to help in healing the real schism viz. W. - Orthodox, and we may be able to help there before we patch things up with the Vatican ...
There is a key to this AND it is not to support the existing structures OR to try to reform them from within, in my opinion.
>I wish I could see simple slogans like that as sufficiently reliable. I support existing structures in the sense of well-tested hierarchies persisting for centuries against many & various challenges. Bpp, at least 2 ranks of ordained, and perhaps some other lay offices, should therefore be conserved. I feel deeply nervous about the initiatives of pseudo-egalitarians e.g M Kelderman advocating abolition of clergy. What is of interest to me is how to influence the Bpp etc in favour of conserving the main doctrines & offices against Geering, Veitch, Thiering, Spong, etc.
your conservative bro in Christ
R
>You open up q's which interest me, tho' I don't know much about them.
I Cc some clerks in holy orders, and some other good churchfolk.
Our associate pastor gave the message today and discussed briefly his sabbatical which encompassed a study on church planting.
I haven't thought this through fully, but discussions afterward reinforced the e-mail Robert sent on the disintegration of the church, HOWEVER, our pastor indicated that new churches are sprouting up like crazy.
>They have been proliferating around here for a decade or so; I haven't up-to-date figures on recent developments. The whole trend I view with major suspicion to the extent that it's outside existing denominations. But then, I'm the sort of Clayton's Protestant who regrets the Reformation ... and who deplores the woolly-mindedness of Bahai & Quakers ... and who deplores the quiet omission of all creeds from many services ...
He gave one example of a Baptist sponsored church that was labeled Quaker, primarily because the building used was Quaker owned. The key was the gifted leadership moving it forward ... essentially casting off the trappings of old and even bathing in potentially misleading names, but moving forward with gusto.
>What counts as forward? A dozen watts, if thru efficient speakers, will give you a pretty solid drug effect for guitars, good singers etc to lead simple songs of devotion along the lines 'Jesus, you are the grooviest, altogether lovely, and wholly worthy, and I want to worship you'. Given also good preaching, members & spondulicks are likely to roll in. We are talking church growth here ...
The new 'church', or new congregation within an established church, can grow in numbers, turnover, and evident merit; yet it can simultaneously create a sort of cocoon ignoring key issues of the time. PC ideologies are white-anting the Church, esp Anglican: militant homosexualism is promoted by our diocesan & asst bishop & theol coll principals, who also devote themselves firmly to the other PC ideologies neoRacism and, most of all, wimminsLib. Am I to believe that novel 'planted' independent churches are doing less badly against these evil PC ideologies?
Direct missions by totally inexperienced congregation members get strong support, while proven accomplished missionaries e.g Dr Edric Baker are not supported in their routine enormous accomplishments. Am I to believe that novel 'planted' seedlings are more outward-looking? Who is studying these matters?
The general opinion was to allow the old structures to fall and let many new churches, anchored in the Bible, God, Christ, etc., flourish.
>What does this mean to you gents?
I can't help noticing the extreme lack of liturgy. I wonder whether keen new Christians really do need, or even want, this informal approach. I also feel the lack of disciplined connection to other churches is a crippling defect of this 'church planting' business outside of, say, Anglican, RC, Presby, Baptist, Metho ... and I frankly feel those last 2 or 3 have no valid future. But then, I stand ready to tolerate, indeed celebrate, the end of the Anglican church that has nurtured me from age 5 - if that end is an honourable healing of the non-schism with Rome. I would furthermore like to help in healing the real schism viz. W. - Orthodox, and we may be able to help there before we patch things up with the Vatican ...
There is a key to this AND it is not to support the existing structures OR to try to reform them from within, in my opinion.
>I wish I could see simple slogans like that as sufficiently reliable. I support existing structures in the sense of well-tested hierarchies persisting for centuries against many & various challenges. Bpp, at least 2 ranks of ordained, and perhaps some other lay offices, should therefore be conserved. I feel deeply nervous about the initiatives of pseudo-egalitarians e.g M Kelderman advocating abolition of clergy. What is of interest to me is how to influence the Bpp etc in favour of conserving the main doctrines & offices against Geering, Veitch, Thiering, Spong, etc.
your conservative bro in Christ
R
Why doesn't the O'Reilly empire syndicate this O, so correct columnist? [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 10:57:58 PM
LOOSE CANON
Canon G J A Hadlow
Rotorua Daily Post this week
Recent newspaper coverage has been given to a case before the courts where two young men captured a couple of cats and after dousing them with accelerants set them on fire. I have yet to see any comment on the issue by way of letters to editors. It was reported that the arresting officer of the two men had his own family's cat stolen. The severed body of the unfortunate animal was later found in the Police Station car park where he works, indicating that probably there are others also involved in this act of cruelty.
I suspect that the public in general is now beginning to exhibit signs of the onset of emotional fatigue. In the Army it used to be called "shell shock". I met many men of my father's generation from World War I who exhibited symptoms of psychological damage that took many forms. One of his friends found it almost impossible to laugh in a normal way. Instead he would get caught up in a fit of giggling that would then become hysterical.
The New Zealand public seems to have taken another road. That is turning one's psychological back on such horror in the hope that when they look again it will have gone away. It is either that or a reaction that finds total indifference another coping method.
A recent news announcement revealed that those charged with the responsibility of educating our young, were now required to teach "values" in the classroom. I raised the matter in a recent article. Since then several teachers have rung to discuss the issue. Their main complaint is that whereas teachers not all that long ago could rely on children arriving at school having normal physical skills and a developed understanding of fairly simple moral issues, such is not possible today. One or two teachers expressed real concern that a significant number of children when faced with quite simple moral examples just did not possess the mental equipment to understand the issues being presented. In short they could not distinguish between right and wrong. There is a growing alarm that teachers are being required to impart knowledge that is in normal circumstances absorbed as part of a child's subconscious pre-school learning. In short some of them verge on being ethical morons. The commonly expressed view that a child's mind is like a blank canvas is laughable.
Our inherited legal system is largely based on the Christian theology of an ability to live in peace and equity with one's neighbours. Of course that is a counsel of perfection and the fact that it does fail is not a reflection on the issue itself but a reminder that human relationships always call for sensitivity and sound common sense for their success.
One element that is beginning disappear however is the idea of the authority towards which most people react instinctively. To behave illegally is an offence. It is an offence against those who are hurt or damaged by the action but there was a time when it was also an offence against the Almighty. That is why each Parliamentary session begins with the Speaker's prayer. Cynics will ask why a prayer is necessary when Parliamentarians behave with impunity against its intention. If that prayer is removed to what authority is the whole business of Parliament addressed?
Again Christian theology is based on justice which is closely linked to love, not the love that is proffered so cheaply on our television sets but that which sees people reaching out to give aid to those who were inundated by the Boxing Day tsunami. Thousands of people with special expertise, some of them from our own city, went at just a few days notice to help in whatever way was appropriate in such a huge disaster. Doubtless many will repeat their actions in New Orleans and beyond.
The basic unit of all this activity lies with the human family. From each well-functioning and fundamental family unit spring those gifts that make democracy and open-handed generosity the gift that they are to the community. Without such families community falters and fails.
Actions by government agencies sometimes called "Social Engineering" that by default creates the undermining of the family bond if only by a view that any "relationship" is as valid as any other is a heresy that wreaks the destruction of human communities.
**********
THE REV. CANON G.J.J.A. HADLOW
25 Ann Street,
Utuhina,
Rotorua 3201,
NEW ZEALAND
Telephone (07) 348 9894
e-mail: ghadlow@clear.net.nz
***********
Canon G J A Hadlow
Rotorua Daily Post this week
Recent newspaper coverage has been given to a case before the courts where two young men captured a couple of cats and after dousing them with accelerants set them on fire. I have yet to see any comment on the issue by way of letters to editors. It was reported that the arresting officer of the two men had his own family's cat stolen. The severed body of the unfortunate animal was later found in the Police Station car park where he works, indicating that probably there are others also involved in this act of cruelty.
I suspect that the public in general is now beginning to exhibit signs of the onset of emotional fatigue. In the Army it used to be called "shell shock". I met many men of my father's generation from World War I who exhibited symptoms of psychological damage that took many forms. One of his friends found it almost impossible to laugh in a normal way. Instead he would get caught up in a fit of giggling that would then become hysterical.
The New Zealand public seems to have taken another road. That is turning one's psychological back on such horror in the hope that when they look again it will have gone away. It is either that or a reaction that finds total indifference another coping method.
A recent news announcement revealed that those charged with the responsibility of educating our young, were now required to teach "values" in the classroom. I raised the matter in a recent article. Since then several teachers have rung to discuss the issue. Their main complaint is that whereas teachers not all that long ago could rely on children arriving at school having normal physical skills and a developed understanding of fairly simple moral issues, such is not possible today. One or two teachers expressed real concern that a significant number of children when faced with quite simple moral examples just did not possess the mental equipment to understand the issues being presented. In short they could not distinguish between right and wrong. There is a growing alarm that teachers are being required to impart knowledge that is in normal circumstances absorbed as part of a child's subconscious pre-school learning. In short some of them verge on being ethical morons. The commonly expressed view that a child's mind is like a blank canvas is laughable.
Our inherited legal system is largely based on the Christian theology of an ability to live in peace and equity with one's neighbours. Of course that is a counsel of perfection and the fact that it does fail is not a reflection on the issue itself but a reminder that human relationships always call for sensitivity and sound common sense for their success.
One element that is beginning disappear however is the idea of the authority towards which most people react instinctively. To behave illegally is an offence. It is an offence against those who are hurt or damaged by the action but there was a time when it was also an offence against the Almighty. That is why each Parliamentary session begins with the Speaker's prayer. Cynics will ask why a prayer is necessary when Parliamentarians behave with impunity against its intention. If that prayer is removed to what authority is the whole business of Parliament addressed?
Again Christian theology is based on justice which is closely linked to love, not the love that is proffered so cheaply on our television sets but that which sees people reaching out to give aid to those who were inundated by the Boxing Day tsunami. Thousands of people with special expertise, some of them from our own city, went at just a few days notice to help in whatever way was appropriate in such a huge disaster. Doubtless many will repeat their actions in New Orleans and beyond.
The basic unit of all this activity lies with the human family. From each well-functioning and fundamental family unit spring those gifts that make democracy and open-handed generosity the gift that they are to the community. Without such families community falters and fails.
Actions by government agencies sometimes called "Social Engineering" that by default creates the undermining of the family bond if only by a view that any "relationship" is as valid as any other is a heresy that wreaks the destruction of human communities.
**********
THE REV. CANON G.J.J.A. HADLOW
25 Ann Street,
Utuhina,
Rotorua 3201,
NEW ZEALAND
Telephone (07) 348 9894
e-mail: ghadlow@clear.net.nz
***********
I don't rank “open communion for the non-baptized" as of greater concern than"the recent changes in moral teaching and practice", but it has concerned me.
R
An Unworkable Theology
Philip Turner
First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 10-12.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0506/opinion/turner.html
It is increasingly difficult to escape the fact that mainline Protestantism is in a state of disintegration. As attendance declines, internal divisions increase. Take, for instance, the situation of the Episcopal Church in the United States. The Episcopal Church’s problem is far more theological than it is moral - a theological poverty that is truly monumental and that stands behind the moral missteps recently taken by its governing bodies.
Every denomination has its theological articles and books of theology, its liturgies and confessional statements. Nonetheless, the contents of these documents do not necessarily control what we might call the “working theology" of a church. To find the working theology of a church one must review the resolutions passed at official gatherings and listen to what clergy say Sunday by Sunday from the pulpit. One must listen to the conversations that occur at clergy gatherings—and hear the advice clergy give troubled parishioners. The working theology of a church is, in short, best determined by becoming what social anthropologists call a “participant observer."
For thirty-five years, I have been such a participant observer in the Episcopal Church. After ten years as a missionary in Uganda, I returned to this country and began graduate work in Christian Ethics with Paul Ramsey at Princeton University. Three years later I took up a post at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. Full of excitement, I listened to my first student sermon—only to be taken aback by its vacuity. The student began with the wonderful question, “What is the Christian Gospel?" But his answer, through the course of an entire sermon, was merely: “God is love. God loves us. We, therefore, ought to love one another." I waited in vain for some word about the saving power of Christ’s cross or the declaration of God’s victory in Christ’s resurrection. I waited in vain for a promise of the Holy Spirit. I waited in vain also for an admonition to wait patiently and faithfully for the Lord’s return. I waited in vain for a call to repentance and amendment of life in accord with the pattern of Christ’s life.
The contents of the preaching I had heard for a decade from the pulpits of the Anglican Church of Uganda (and from other Christians throughout the continent of Africa) was simply not to be found. One could, of course, dismiss this instance of vacuous preaching as simply another example of the painful inadequacy of the preaching of most seminarians; but, over the years, I have heard the same sermon preached from pulpit after pulpit by experienced priests. The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
From this revelation, we can draw a further conclusion: God wants us to love one another, and such love requires of us both acceptance and affirmation of the other. From this point we can derive yet another: Accepting love requires a form of justice that is inclusive of all people, particularly those who in some way have been marginalized by oppressive social practice. The mission of the Church is, therefore, to see that those who have been rejected are included—for justice as inclusion defines public policy. The result is a practical equivalence between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and a particular form of social justice.
For those who view the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops and its General Convention from the outside, many of their recent actions may seem to represent a denial of something fundamental to the Christian way of life. But for many inside the Episcopal Church, the equation of the Gospel and social justice constitutes a primary expression of Christian truth. This isn’t an ethical divide about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. It’s a theological chasm - one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption.
Look, for example, at the increasingly common practice of inviting non-baptized persons to share in the Holy Eucharist. The invitation is given in the name of “radical hospitality." It is like having a guest at the family meal, so its advocates claim: it is a way to invite people in and evangelize.
Within the Episcopal Church, a sure test of whether an idea is gaining favor is the appearance of a question about it on the general-ordination exam. Questions on divorce and remarriage, the ordination of women, sexual behavior, and abortion all preceded changes in the Episcopal Church’s teaching and practice. On a recent version of the exam, there appeared a question about “open communion for the non-baptized," which suggests that this is far more than a cloud on the horizon. It is, rather, a change in doctrine and practice that is fast becoming well established and perhaps should be of greater concern to the Anglican Communion’s ecumenical partners than the recent changes in moral teaching and practice.
Indeed, it is important to note when examining the working theology of the Episcopal Church that changes in belief and practice within the church are not made after prolonged investigation and theological debate. Rather, they are made by “prophetic actions" that give expression to the doctrine of radical inclusion. Such actions have become common partly because they carry no cost. Since the struggle over the ordination of women, the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops has given up any attempt to act as a unified body or to discipline its membership. Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.
Certain justifications are commonly named for such failure of discipline. The first is the claim of the prophet’s mantle by the innovators—often quickly followed by an assertion that the Holy Spirit Itself is doing this new thing, which need have no perceivable link to the past practice of the church. Backed by claims of prophetic and Spirit-filled insight, each diocese can then justify its action as a “local option,” which is the claimed right of each diocese or parish to go its own way if there seem to be strong enough internal reasons to do so.
All of these justifications are currently being offered for the practice of open communion - which is the clearest possible signal that it is an idea whose time has come in the Episcopal Church. But the deep roots of the idea are in the doctrine of radical inclusion. Once we have reduced the significance of Christ’s resurrection and downplayed holiness of life as a fundamental marker of Christian identity, the notion of radical inclusion produces the view that one need not come to the Father through the Son. Christ is a way, but not the way. The Holy Eucharist is a sign of acceptance on the part of God and God’s people, and so should be open to all - the invitation unaccompanied by a call to repentance and amendment of life.
This unofficial doctrine of radical inclusion, which is now the working theology of the Episcopal Church, plays out in two directions. In respect to God, it produces a quasi-deist theology that posits a benevolent God who favors love and justice as inclusion but acts neither to save us from our sins nor to raise us to new life after the pattern of Christ. In respect to human beings, it produces an ethic of tolerant affirmation that carries with it no call to conversion and radical holiness.
The Episcopal Church’s working theology is also congruent with a form of pastoral care designed to help people affirm themselves, face their difficulties, and adjust successfully to their particular circumstances. The primary (though not the sole) pastoral formation offered to the Episcopal Church’s prospective clergy has for a number of years been “Clinical Pastoral Education,” which takes the form of an internship at a hospital or some other care-giving institution. The focus tends to be the expressed needs of a “client,” the attitudes and contributions of a “counselor,” and the transference and countertransference that define their relationship. In its early days, the supervisors of Clinical Pastoral Education were heavily influenced by the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers, but the theoretical framework employed today varies widely. A dominant assumption in all forms, however, is that the clients have, within themselves, the answer to their perplexities and conflicts. Access to personal resources and successful adjustment are what the pastor is to seek when offering pastoral care.
There may be some merit in putting new clergy in hospital settings, but this particular form does not lend itself easily to the sort of meeting with Christ that leads to faith, forgiveness, judgment, repentance, and amendment of life. The sort of confrontation often necessary to spark such a process is decidedly frowned upon. The theological stance associated with Clinical Pastoral Education is not one of challenge but one in which God is depicted as an accepting presence - not unlike that of the therapist or pastor.
But this should not be an unexpected development. In a theology dominated by radical inclusion, terms such as “faith,” “justification,” “repentance,” and “holiness of life” seem to belong to an antique vocabulary that must be outgrown or reinterpreted. So also does the notion that the Church is a community elected by God for the particular purpose of bearing witness to the saving event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
It is this witness that defines the great tradition of the Church, but a theology of radical inclusion must trim such robust belief. To be true to itself it can find room for only one sort of witness: inclusion of the previously excluded. God has already included everybody, and now we ought to do the same. Salvation cannot be the issue. The theology of radical inclusion, as preached and practiced within the Episcopal Church, must define the central issue as moral rather than religious, since exclusion is in the end a moral issue even for God.
We must say this clearly: The Episcopal Church’s current working theology depends upon the obliteration of God’s difficult, redemptive love in the name of a new revelation. The message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.
Thinking back over my thirty-five years in the Episcopal Church, I was distressed to realize that this new revelation is little different from the basic message communicated to me during the course of my own theological education. Fortunately, in my case God provided an intervening event. I lived for about ten years among the Baganda, a people who dwell on the north shore of Lake Victoria. The Baganda have a proverb which, roughly translated, says, “A person who never travels always praises his own mother’s cooking.” Travel allowed me to taste something different. It was not until I had spent a long time abroad that I realized how far apart the American Episcopal Church stood from the basic content of “Nicene Christianity,” with its thick description of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, its richly developed Christology, and its compelling account of Christ’s call to holiness of life.
The future of Anglicanism as a communion of churches may depend upon the American Episcopal Church’s ability to find a way out of the terrible constraints forced upon it by its working theology. Much of the Anglican communion in Africa sees the problem. Can the Americans? It is not enough simply to refer to the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer and reply, “We are orthodox just like you: we affirm the two testaments as the word of God, we recite the classical creeds in our worship, we celebrate the dominical sacraments, and we hold to episcopal order." The challenge now being put to the Episcopal Church in the United States (and, by implication, to all liberal Protestantism) is not about official documents. It is about the church’s working theology - one which most Anglicans in the rest of the world no longer recognize as Christian.
Philip Turner is the former Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He currently serves as Vice President of the Anglican Communion Institute.
R
An Unworkable Theology
Philip Turner
First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 10-12.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0506/opinion/turner.html
It is increasingly difficult to escape the fact that mainline Protestantism is in a state of disintegration. As attendance declines, internal divisions increase. Take, for instance, the situation of the Episcopal Church in the United States. The Episcopal Church’s problem is far more theological than it is moral - a theological poverty that is truly monumental and that stands behind the moral missteps recently taken by its governing bodies.
Every denomination has its theological articles and books of theology, its liturgies and confessional statements. Nonetheless, the contents of these documents do not necessarily control what we might call the “working theology" of a church. To find the working theology of a church one must review the resolutions passed at official gatherings and listen to what clergy say Sunday by Sunday from the pulpit. One must listen to the conversations that occur at clergy gatherings—and hear the advice clergy give troubled parishioners. The working theology of a church is, in short, best determined by becoming what social anthropologists call a “participant observer."
For thirty-five years, I have been such a participant observer in the Episcopal Church. After ten years as a missionary in Uganda, I returned to this country and began graduate work in Christian Ethics with Paul Ramsey at Princeton University. Three years later I took up a post at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. Full of excitement, I listened to my first student sermon—only to be taken aback by its vacuity. The student began with the wonderful question, “What is the Christian Gospel?" But his answer, through the course of an entire sermon, was merely: “God is love. God loves us. We, therefore, ought to love one another." I waited in vain for some word about the saving power of Christ’s cross or the declaration of God’s victory in Christ’s resurrection. I waited in vain for a promise of the Holy Spirit. I waited in vain also for an admonition to wait patiently and faithfully for the Lord’s return. I waited in vain for a call to repentance and amendment of life in accord with the pattern of Christ’s life.
The contents of the preaching I had heard for a decade from the pulpits of the Anglican Church of Uganda (and from other Christians throughout the continent of Africa) was simply not to be found. One could, of course, dismiss this instance of vacuous preaching as simply another example of the painful inadequacy of the preaching of most seminarians; but, over the years, I have heard the same sermon preached from pulpit after pulpit by experienced priests. The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
From this revelation, we can draw a further conclusion: God wants us to love one another, and such love requires of us both acceptance and affirmation of the other. From this point we can derive yet another: Accepting love requires a form of justice that is inclusive of all people, particularly those who in some way have been marginalized by oppressive social practice. The mission of the Church is, therefore, to see that those who have been rejected are included—for justice as inclusion defines public policy. The result is a practical equivalence between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and a particular form of social justice.
For those who view the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops and its General Convention from the outside, many of their recent actions may seem to represent a denial of something fundamental to the Christian way of life. But for many inside the Episcopal Church, the equation of the Gospel and social justice constitutes a primary expression of Christian truth. This isn’t an ethical divide about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. It’s a theological chasm - one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption.
Look, for example, at the increasingly common practice of inviting non-baptized persons to share in the Holy Eucharist. The invitation is given in the name of “radical hospitality." It is like having a guest at the family meal, so its advocates claim: it is a way to invite people in and evangelize.
Within the Episcopal Church, a sure test of whether an idea is gaining favor is the appearance of a question about it on the general-ordination exam. Questions on divorce and remarriage, the ordination of women, sexual behavior, and abortion all preceded changes in the Episcopal Church’s teaching and practice. On a recent version of the exam, there appeared a question about “open communion for the non-baptized," which suggests that this is far more than a cloud on the horizon. It is, rather, a change in doctrine and practice that is fast becoming well established and perhaps should be of greater concern to the Anglican Communion’s ecumenical partners than the recent changes in moral teaching and practice.
Indeed, it is important to note when examining the working theology of the Episcopal Church that changes in belief and practice within the church are not made after prolonged investigation and theological debate. Rather, they are made by “prophetic actions" that give expression to the doctrine of radical inclusion. Such actions have become common partly because they carry no cost. Since the struggle over the ordination of women, the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops has given up any attempt to act as a unified body or to discipline its membership. Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.
Certain justifications are commonly named for such failure of discipline. The first is the claim of the prophet’s mantle by the innovators—often quickly followed by an assertion that the Holy Spirit Itself is doing this new thing, which need have no perceivable link to the past practice of the church. Backed by claims of prophetic and Spirit-filled insight, each diocese can then justify its action as a “local option,” which is the claimed right of each diocese or parish to go its own way if there seem to be strong enough internal reasons to do so.
All of these justifications are currently being offered for the practice of open communion - which is the clearest possible signal that it is an idea whose time has come in the Episcopal Church. But the deep roots of the idea are in the doctrine of radical inclusion. Once we have reduced the significance of Christ’s resurrection and downplayed holiness of life as a fundamental marker of Christian identity, the notion of radical inclusion produces the view that one need not come to the Father through the Son. Christ is a way, but not the way. The Holy Eucharist is a sign of acceptance on the part of God and God’s people, and so should be open to all - the invitation unaccompanied by a call to repentance and amendment of life.
This unofficial doctrine of radical inclusion, which is now the working theology of the Episcopal Church, plays out in two directions. In respect to God, it produces a quasi-deist theology that posits a benevolent God who favors love and justice as inclusion but acts neither to save us from our sins nor to raise us to new life after the pattern of Christ. In respect to human beings, it produces an ethic of tolerant affirmation that carries with it no call to conversion and radical holiness.
The Episcopal Church’s working theology is also congruent with a form of pastoral care designed to help people affirm themselves, face their difficulties, and adjust successfully to their particular circumstances. The primary (though not the sole) pastoral formation offered to the Episcopal Church’s prospective clergy has for a number of years been “Clinical Pastoral Education,” which takes the form of an internship at a hospital or some other care-giving institution. The focus tends to be the expressed needs of a “client,” the attitudes and contributions of a “counselor,” and the transference and countertransference that define their relationship. In its early days, the supervisors of Clinical Pastoral Education were heavily influenced by the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers, but the theoretical framework employed today varies widely. A dominant assumption in all forms, however, is that the clients have, within themselves, the answer to their perplexities and conflicts. Access to personal resources and successful adjustment are what the pastor is to seek when offering pastoral care.
There may be some merit in putting new clergy in hospital settings, but this particular form does not lend itself easily to the sort of meeting with Christ that leads to faith, forgiveness, judgment, repentance, and amendment of life. The sort of confrontation often necessary to spark such a process is decidedly frowned upon. The theological stance associated with Clinical Pastoral Education is not one of challenge but one in which God is depicted as an accepting presence - not unlike that of the therapist or pastor.
But this should not be an unexpected development. In a theology dominated by radical inclusion, terms such as “faith,” “justification,” “repentance,” and “holiness of life” seem to belong to an antique vocabulary that must be outgrown or reinterpreted. So also does the notion that the Church is a community elected by God for the particular purpose of bearing witness to the saving event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
It is this witness that defines the great tradition of the Church, but a theology of radical inclusion must trim such robust belief. To be true to itself it can find room for only one sort of witness: inclusion of the previously excluded. God has already included everybody, and now we ought to do the same. Salvation cannot be the issue. The theology of radical inclusion, as preached and practiced within the Episcopal Church, must define the central issue as moral rather than religious, since exclusion is in the end a moral issue even for God.
We must say this clearly: The Episcopal Church’s current working theology depends upon the obliteration of God’s difficult, redemptive love in the name of a new revelation. The message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.
Thinking back over my thirty-five years in the Episcopal Church, I was distressed to realize that this new revelation is little different from the basic message communicated to me during the course of my own theological education. Fortunately, in my case God provided an intervening event. I lived for about ten years among the Baganda, a people who dwell on the north shore of Lake Victoria. The Baganda have a proverb which, roughly translated, says, “A person who never travels always praises his own mother’s cooking.” Travel allowed me to taste something different. It was not until I had spent a long time abroad that I realized how far apart the American Episcopal Church stood from the basic content of “Nicene Christianity,” with its thick description of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, its richly developed Christology, and its compelling account of Christ’s call to holiness of life.
The future of Anglicanism as a communion of churches may depend upon the American Episcopal Church’s ability to find a way out of the terrible constraints forced upon it by its working theology. Much of the Anglican communion in Africa sees the problem. Can the Americans? It is not enough simply to refer to the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer and reply, “We are orthodox just like you: we affirm the two testaments as the word of God, we recite the classical creeds in our worship, we celebrate the dominical sacraments, and we hold to episcopal order." The challenge now being put to the Episcopal Church in the United States (and, by implication, to all liberal Protestantism) is not about official documents. It is about the church’s working theology - one which most Anglicans in the rest of the world no longer recognize as Christian.
Philip Turner is the former Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He currently serves as Vice President of the Anglican Communion Institute.
I fw this testimony by an Auckland engineer.
R
Testimony of Kees van den Bosch
The most searching question any person can ask himself is probably, "Why am
I here?" The first time I asked it was at a very early age, somewhere at ten
or eleven years old, a street urchin in Amsterdam under German occupation.
My father disappeared when the Dutch army capitulated in 1940. My mother
went "underground" and left us boys to fend for ourselves at ages six and
seven.
That question, however, had a habit of popping up at odd and frequent times
during my life. It manifested itself most prominently during my search for
an answer, because my mind would not accept that everything and that meant
I, would all end at my death.
During my 42-year extensive search, most of the "Isms" one can bring
to mind got a shoo-in. Religionism, Buddhism, existentialism, nudism,
humanism et al. Humanism had the strongest attraction over me, because it
fitted in very well with my positive self-awareness, or ego.
Placing one (self) at the Center of the Universe has its attractions; but
that hole which needed filling in the Center of my being kept begging to be
filled with something more meaningful. Possessions didn't do it, once my
material needs were filled; more accumulations only became a pain in the
butt, taking up my precious time and thus, freedom. Chasing pleasure did not
do it, because I always came back to that question, what's next? Trying to
discuss these quandaries at social gatherings often tended to spoil the
party atmosphere and killed some party's stone dead, much to the horror of
my hosts.
One year into my second marriage in 1975, a series of events occurred which
completely changed my world. Out of love for my wife I was attending Church
on a regular basis and was invited to join our Church Choir. The choir was
practising for an Evangelical Outreach, which was a combined
interdenominational outreach of three churches. Then, I was just a "pew
warmer", a person without a meaningful belief in God, just going through the
motions of Church attendance and being nice to everybody whilst "fitting in".
I really had some problems with that, as in the past during my search I had
found "religion" to be phoney and something cooked up by a bunch of
hypocrites. And here I was, seemingly in agreement with it, and very much
aware of being such a hypocrite.
On the third day of the actual "outreach", the preacher read that passage of
Psalm 139: 13 - 18, which initiated a dialogue between my Creator and myself
which lasted for the period the preacher was preaching after this reading.
That unforgettable, beautiful voice, telling me facts about my life I
thought no one could know about me whilst scenes from my life were flashed
"on my Mind-Screen" in succession from the time I could first remember to
the present. He spoke phrases like "I shielded you there", "I send that man
to help you", "I closed that door to steer you in my direction" and many
more.
I knew I had met with God and felt so much Love flowing through me, that
tears of utter joy started to flow. When the preacher asked some time later
who wanted to commit himself to Jesus Christ, I went forward without
hesitation and became a re-born Christian that night.
Over the last twenty-nine years, I came to realise that being endowed with
the Holy Spirit is a full-on and full-time experience, influencing every
moment of our day and night. One fact I discovered quite early in my walk
was that with His input and if we are but willing to be receptive, we have
access to the greatest mind and fount of knowledge in existence. He is all
Knowing, All Seeing and All Present!
When we walk in harmony with the Holy Spirit, that aching hole in the Center
of one's being I mentioned, is completely gone and a "peace that passes our
normal understanding" surrounds us, even in the midst of turmoil.
Now, being a mere mortal still, I must confess this peace is not there one
hundred percent of the time even now. Because, although my Creator states in
His Word that "He created "man" (that includes me and you) in His Image, the
"free will" He created within me still rebels against him from time to time.
During periods of rebellion when I, through pride or sheer cussedness want
to pursue a course of action which I know does not have His approval, He
graciously withdraws and leaves me to it. After a, now usually short time,
that hole in the center of my being manifests itself again and prompts me
back onto that straight and narrow path He likes to walk with me.
In my opinion, the "creation of free will" in man and woman is the true
"Pinnacle of His Creation". By doing this, He created beings with the
potential to rise to that point which he talks about in His Word where He
says in Romans 8: 17; "And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and
joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be
also glorified together."
R
Testimony of Kees van den Bosch
The most searching question any person can ask himself is probably, "Why am
I here?" The first time I asked it was at a very early age, somewhere at ten
or eleven years old, a street urchin in Amsterdam under German occupation.
My father disappeared when the Dutch army capitulated in 1940. My mother
went "underground" and left us boys to fend for ourselves at ages six and
seven.
That question, however, had a habit of popping up at odd and frequent times
during my life. It manifested itself most prominently during my search for
an answer, because my mind would not accept that everything and that meant
I, would all end at my death.
During my 42-year extensive search, most of the "Isms" one can bring
to mind got a shoo-in. Religionism, Buddhism, existentialism, nudism,
humanism et al. Humanism had the strongest attraction over me, because it
fitted in very well with my positive self-awareness, or ego.
Placing one (self) at the Center of the Universe has its attractions; but
that hole which needed filling in the Center of my being kept begging to be
filled with something more meaningful. Possessions didn't do it, once my
material needs were filled; more accumulations only became a pain in the
butt, taking up my precious time and thus, freedom. Chasing pleasure did not
do it, because I always came back to that question, what's next? Trying to
discuss these quandaries at social gatherings often tended to spoil the
party atmosphere and killed some party's stone dead, much to the horror of
my hosts.
One year into my second marriage in 1975, a series of events occurred which
completely changed my world. Out of love for my wife I was attending Church
on a regular basis and was invited to join our Church Choir. The choir was
practising for an Evangelical Outreach, which was a combined
interdenominational outreach of three churches. Then, I was just a "pew
warmer", a person without a meaningful belief in God, just going through the
motions of Church attendance and being nice to everybody whilst "fitting in".
I really had some problems with that, as in the past during my search I had
found "religion" to be phoney and something cooked up by a bunch of
hypocrites. And here I was, seemingly in agreement with it, and very much
aware of being such a hypocrite.
On the third day of the actual "outreach", the preacher read that passage of
Psalm 139: 13 - 18, which initiated a dialogue between my Creator and myself
which lasted for the period the preacher was preaching after this reading.
That unforgettable, beautiful voice, telling me facts about my life I
thought no one could know about me whilst scenes from my life were flashed
"on my Mind-Screen" in succession from the time I could first remember to
the present. He spoke phrases like "I shielded you there", "I send that man
to help you", "I closed that door to steer you in my direction" and many
more.
I knew I had met with God and felt so much Love flowing through me, that
tears of utter joy started to flow. When the preacher asked some time later
who wanted to commit himself to Jesus Christ, I went forward without
hesitation and became a re-born Christian that night.
Over the last twenty-nine years, I came to realise that being endowed with
the Holy Spirit is a full-on and full-time experience, influencing every
moment of our day and night. One fact I discovered quite early in my walk
was that with His input and if we are but willing to be receptive, we have
access to the greatest mind and fount of knowledge in existence. He is all
Knowing, All Seeing and All Present!
When we walk in harmony with the Holy Spirit, that aching hole in the Center
of one's being I mentioned, is completely gone and a "peace that passes our
normal understanding" surrounds us, even in the midst of turmoil.
Now, being a mere mortal still, I must confess this peace is not there one
hundred percent of the time even now. Because, although my Creator states in
His Word that "He created "man" (that includes me and you) in His Image, the
"free will" He created within me still rebels against him from time to time.
During periods of rebellion when I, through pride or sheer cussedness want
to pursue a course of action which I know does not have His approval, He
graciously withdraws and leaves me to it. After a, now usually short time,
that hole in the center of my being manifests itself again and prompts me
back onto that straight and narrow path He likes to walk with me.
In my opinion, the "creation of free will" in man and woman is the true
"Pinnacle of His Creation". By doing this, He created beings with the
potential to rise to that point which he talks about in His Word where He
says in Romans 8: 17; "And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and
joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be
also glorified together."
09/03/05
Cardigan, who advertises blessings for same-sex unions, now dispenses with The Atonement (it was too violent) [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 12:28:56 PM
s m a c a
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St. Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
4th September 2005
"Smacking for Jesus"
- THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK (Theological Nonsense)
- FROM THE VICAR "Smacking for Jesus: Beating the Hell Out of Children"
- WEB LINKS Persepctives on Child Punishment
- MORE FROM THE VICAR "Five Courageous Women and the Miracle of 'Godness'"
- SMACAtoon (Missing the Point)
- DIALOGUE (Where you write in and tell us what you think)
- SMACA NewSpots (Hurricane Katrina, Star Wars and Fundamentalists)
- SMACA Prayer (A Prayer of Responsibility for Children)
- WHAT'S HAPPENING at St Matthew-in-the-City
- How to subscribe / unsubscribe from SMACA
Visit our web site! http://www.stmatthews.org.nz.
====================
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
"Let me state this boldly and succinctly: Jesus did not die for your sins or my sins. That proclamation is theological nonsense. It only breeds more violence as we seek to justify the negativity that religious people dump on others because we can no longer carry its load. We must rid ourselves of it. One can hardly refrain from exhorting parents not to spare the rod lest they spoil their child if the portrait of God at the heart of the Christian story is that of an angry parent who punishes the divine Son because he can take it and we cannot."
- John Shelby Spong
("The Sins of Scripture", HarperSanFrancisco, 2005)
====================
"Smacking for Jesus: Beating the Hell Out of Children"
by Glynn Cardy
It is not difficult to find Christian literature that justifies violence against children. Last week a private school in Auckland, Carey College, distributed such material to pupils’ parents.
“Children are not little bundles of innocence,” says one brochure, “they are little bundles of depravity.” This belief is grounded in their understanding of the mythological fall of Adam and Eve. Children are rebellious at heart, says the author, and need to be beaten in order to drive this rebelliousness out.
Quoting the Book of Proverbs, parents are encouraged to use a rod on their child. “He who spares his rod hates his son” [Proverbs 13:24]. In case you’re wondering there is nothing in the brochure suggesting girls should not be beaten.
In this brochure, parents are encouraged to begin hitting even before their children talk. “With infants and toddlers: a wee smack to the forearm or leg…” Does throwing baby rice from the highchair, after being told not to, constitute a rebellious and sinful act?
If none of the above scares you, then turn to the brochure’s last page: “If a child is angry after the smack (slamming doors, pouting, etc.) you have not smacked hard enough [and] you will have to administer another smack." This is encouragement to keep on hitting until the parent thinks the child is properly submissive.
Interspersed amongst the violence there are admonitions for parents to pray for and cuddle their children. This is almost scarier than the beatings. The one being hit by the rod is meant to understand it as an act of love, be grateful for it, and cuddle the hitter afterwards. Sounds like serious mind games to me.
If polls are to be believed, however, there are a majority of New Zealanders who see nothing wrong in hitting a child. They seem to think that whilst it is not right or legal to hit an adult, it is right and should remain legal to hit a child. Children need to be physically disciplined they say. Yet what about an adult, who has not learnt compliance? Should he or she should be physically disciplined too? Should we bring back public whippings perhaps?
Conversely, if it is never okay to hit a man or a woman (save in self-defence), why is it okay to hit those who are young and vulnerable? There is something grossly bizarre about hitting someone because they don’t think like we do, can’t hit back, or talk back, or even vote back. We usually call this behaviour for what it is; bullying.
Every year many adults damage children physically and emotionally. These adults beat with rods, beat girls and boys, beat infants, and beat until they feel like stopping, in the sure and certain belief that they are justified. A number of the children die.
Sue Bradford is the Green Party MP who is trying to remove the words “reasonable force” from section 59 of the New Zealand Crimes Act. The current law allows juries to acquit parents who have beaten their children, despite a number of cases where the children have sustained significant injuries.
On commenting upon the Carey College brochure Ms Bradford said, “It’s based in the Old Testament. I think it is a real pity that a Christian school isn’t following the Christian principles of compassion and love for children rather than advocating physical discipline at this level.”
Sue has a progressive heart, but I suspect she hasn’t read too much theology. You can’t easily cut the Bible in two - saying the Old Testament is about laws and punishment and the New is about Jesus and love. It is better to say that both progressive Jews and Christians struggle with the violence within their scriptures and tradition seeking to 're-image' God as compassionate and loving.
The hard truth is that throughout most of the Bible God is portrayed as righteously pure and righteously punishing. Human beings in contrast are fallen sinful creatures, prone to rebellion. The whole salvific enterprise, as understood by most Christian theology and history, has Jesus dying in order to atone for humanity’s sinfulness.
Beating sin out of people has a long and sad history in the Church. It is based on humans’ erroneous understandings of psychology and sexuality. It is based on the notion of a violent God, who encourages more violence.
This understanding of God, humanity, and Jesus is anathema to many of us. Human beings are not born sinful. Rebellion is often a good thing. We all make mistakes and need to learn to forgive ourselves and put things right. We don’t need someone to die for us; we need someone to inspire us. We don’t believe in a God who punishes and is appeased by blood sacrifice. Rather we believe in a God who is a loving grace-filled energy calling and encouraging us to live loving grace-filled lives.
It is an urgent task of the Church to banish this violent God, consigning it to the pages of a never-to-be-read-again fairy tale, before any more violence is inflicted on our children. It’s the least we owe to the children who have suffered and died at the hands of their 'righteous' parents.
Glynn Cardy
Vicar, St Matthew-in-the-City
====================
WEB LINKS
"Children's voices on physical punishment"
What do children think about physical punishment? There has only been limited consultation with children and young people on this matter. Children's views on the use of physical punishment are essential to the debate on its use.
http://www.community.nsw.gov.au/documents/accan/papers/3S3J-1.pdf
"Epoch New Zealand"
EPOCH New Zealand Inc is a charitable trust with the following aims:
- to end physical punishment of children;
- to educate parents and others about the dangers and disadvantages of physical punishment of children;
- to promote alternative non-violent ways of helping children behave well;
- to promote law reform that supports these aims.
http://www.epochnz.org.nz
"The Sins of Scipture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love"
This new book from progressive Anglican author John Spong devotes a chapter to breaking through the biblical view of God as a punishing parent, so often cited as justification for physical discipline of children. Read some sample pages at this link.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060762055/qid=1125617944/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0309888-3273627?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St. Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
4th September 2005
"Smacking for Jesus"
- THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK (Theological Nonsense)
- FROM THE VICAR "Smacking for Jesus: Beating the Hell Out of Children"
- WEB LINKS Persepctives on Child Punishment
- MORE FROM THE VICAR "Five Courageous Women and the Miracle of 'Godness'"
- SMACAtoon (Missing the Point)
- DIALOGUE (Where you write in and tell us what you think)
- SMACA NewSpots (Hurricane Katrina, Star Wars and Fundamentalists)
- SMACA Prayer (A Prayer of Responsibility for Children)
- WHAT'S HAPPENING at St Matthew-in-the-City
- How to subscribe / unsubscribe from SMACA
Visit our web site! http://www.stmatthews.org.nz.
====================
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
"Let me state this boldly and succinctly: Jesus did not die for your sins or my sins. That proclamation is theological nonsense. It only breeds more violence as we seek to justify the negativity that religious people dump on others because we can no longer carry its load. We must rid ourselves of it. One can hardly refrain from exhorting parents not to spare the rod lest they spoil their child if the portrait of God at the heart of the Christian story is that of an angry parent who punishes the divine Son because he can take it and we cannot."
- John Shelby Spong
("The Sins of Scripture", HarperSanFrancisco, 2005)
====================
"Smacking for Jesus: Beating the Hell Out of Children"
by Glynn Cardy
It is not difficult to find Christian literature that justifies violence against children. Last week a private school in Auckland, Carey College, distributed such material to pupils’ parents.
“Children are not little bundles of innocence,” says one brochure, “they are little bundles of depravity.” This belief is grounded in their understanding of the mythological fall of Adam and Eve. Children are rebellious at heart, says the author, and need to be beaten in order to drive this rebelliousness out.
Quoting the Book of Proverbs, parents are encouraged to use a rod on their child. “He who spares his rod hates his son” [Proverbs 13:24]. In case you’re wondering there is nothing in the brochure suggesting girls should not be beaten.
In this brochure, parents are encouraged to begin hitting even before their children talk. “With infants and toddlers: a wee smack to the forearm or leg…” Does throwing baby rice from the highchair, after being told not to, constitute a rebellious and sinful act?
If none of the above scares you, then turn to the brochure’s last page: “If a child is angry after the smack (slamming doors, pouting, etc.) you have not smacked hard enough [and] you will have to administer another smack." This is encouragement to keep on hitting until the parent thinks the child is properly submissive.
Interspersed amongst the violence there are admonitions for parents to pray for and cuddle their children. This is almost scarier than the beatings. The one being hit by the rod is meant to understand it as an act of love, be grateful for it, and cuddle the hitter afterwards. Sounds like serious mind games to me.
If polls are to be believed, however, there are a majority of New Zealanders who see nothing wrong in hitting a child. They seem to think that whilst it is not right or legal to hit an adult, it is right and should remain legal to hit a child. Children need to be physically disciplined they say. Yet what about an adult, who has not learnt compliance? Should he or she should be physically disciplined too? Should we bring back public whippings perhaps?
Conversely, if it is never okay to hit a man or a woman (save in self-defence), why is it okay to hit those who are young and vulnerable? There is something grossly bizarre about hitting someone because they don’t think like we do, can’t hit back, or talk back, or even vote back. We usually call this behaviour for what it is; bullying.
Every year many adults damage children physically and emotionally. These adults beat with rods, beat girls and boys, beat infants, and beat until they feel like stopping, in the sure and certain belief that they are justified. A number of the children die.
Sue Bradford is the Green Party MP who is trying to remove the words “reasonable force” from section 59 of the New Zealand Crimes Act. The current law allows juries to acquit parents who have beaten their children, despite a number of cases where the children have sustained significant injuries.
On commenting upon the Carey College brochure Ms Bradford said, “It’s based in the Old Testament. I think it is a real pity that a Christian school isn’t following the Christian principles of compassion and love for children rather than advocating physical discipline at this level.”
Sue has a progressive heart, but I suspect she hasn’t read too much theology. You can’t easily cut the Bible in two - saying the Old Testament is about laws and punishment and the New is about Jesus and love. It is better to say that both progressive Jews and Christians struggle with the violence within their scriptures and tradition seeking to 're-image' God as compassionate and loving.
The hard truth is that throughout most of the Bible God is portrayed as righteously pure and righteously punishing. Human beings in contrast are fallen sinful creatures, prone to rebellion. The whole salvific enterprise, as understood by most Christian theology and history, has Jesus dying in order to atone for humanity’s sinfulness.
Beating sin out of people has a long and sad history in the Church. It is based on humans’ erroneous understandings of psychology and sexuality. It is based on the notion of a violent God, who encourages more violence.
This understanding of God, humanity, and Jesus is anathema to many of us. Human beings are not born sinful. Rebellion is often a good thing. We all make mistakes and need to learn to forgive ourselves and put things right. We don’t need someone to die for us; we need someone to inspire us. We don’t believe in a God who punishes and is appeased by blood sacrifice. Rather we believe in a God who is a loving grace-filled energy calling and encouraging us to live loving grace-filled lives.
It is an urgent task of the Church to banish this violent God, consigning it to the pages of a never-to-be-read-again fairy tale, before any more violence is inflicted on our children. It’s the least we owe to the children who have suffered and died at the hands of their 'righteous' parents.
Glynn Cardy
Vicar, St Matthew-in-the-City
====================
WEB LINKS
"Children's voices on physical punishment"
What do children think about physical punishment? There has only been limited consultation with children and young people on this matter. Children's views on the use of physical punishment are essential to the debate on its use.
http://www.community.nsw.gov.au/documents/accan/papers/3S3J-1.pdf
"Epoch New Zealand"
EPOCH New Zealand Inc is a charitable trust with the following aims:
- to end physical punishment of children;
- to educate parents and others about the dangers and disadvantages of physical punishment of children;
- to promote alternative non-violent ways of helping children behave well;
- to promote law reform that supports these aims.
http://www.epochnz.org.nz
"The Sins of Scipture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love"
This new book from progressive Anglican author John Spong devotes a chapter to breaking through the biblical view of God as a punishing parent, so often cited as justification for physical discipline of children. Read some sample pages at this link.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060762055/qid=1125617944/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0309888-3273627?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Theory an assault on faith
Graeme Finlay
NZ Horrid
02.09.05
Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is bursting out everywhere. It has become part of the creed of many Christian churches.
United States President George W. Bush has given his blessing to it. A Dutch politician has suggested that IDT be aired in Europe. Time magazine is full of it. Science journals such as Nature and Science lament its influence. And it has landed in New Zealand.
IDT argues that complex biological structures could not have been assembled stepwise by an evolutionary mechanism.
Take out or alter just one component, so the argument goes, and the rest of the machinery falls apart. Therefore the structure must have been designed by some (non-specified) super-intelligence.
As a student of biology and a disciple of Jesus Christ, I am concerned that IDT is hostile to both science and biblical faith.
IDT is an assault on science because it is a cover-up for the rejection of evolution. This is stated explicitly by at least some IDT leaders, such as the lawyer Philip Johnson.
IDT thus has the same basic purpose as old style "Creationism".
IDT claims that evolution is "only a theory".
This confuses the sense in which "theory" is used.
Evolution is indeed a theory. This does not mean that it is a speculative hypothesis, but that it provides a theoretical framework for biology.
We are told that evolution is a religion and that it cannot be falsified.
This is untrue. Evolution is a scientific paradigm. Like all scientific paradigms, it contains a mass of established facts, working hypotheses, and creative speculations.
People engage in the universal methods of scientific research independently of their religious faiths. Science cannot be categorised into "atheistic", "Christian", "feminist" or particular ethnic varieties.
Someone of an atheistic religious perspective looks at the world that science discloses, accepts the exquisite order of nature as a brute fact, and believes that the evolutionary saga is a colossal accident.
Someone of a theistic perspective looks at the same world, accepts that its order comes from God, and believes that evolution reflects God's creative purpose.
Science can be enveloped in different metaphysical (religious) world views.
We must respect the difference between physics (and other branches of science) and metaphysics (such as atheism or theism).
IDT claims that there is no evidence for large-scale evolution. This is nonsense. Genomic science has provided conclusive evidence for human evolution. We share common ancestors with chimps, all other primates and other mammals. IDT denies evidence-based science.
IDT demands freedom to "teach the controversy". Promoters of IDT want to place stickers, indicating that evolution is controversial, in biology textbooks.
Just as the IDT lobby pleads that evolution is controversial, so the tobacco lobby claims that the smoking-cancer link is controversial, and the fossil fuel lobby denies anthropogenic global warming. But the overall evolutionary paradigm is overwhelmingly accepted by scholars.
Within all scientific fields, there is ongoing debate over the details of particular issues. The "teach the controversy" slogan fails to recognise that all human knowledge is provisional.
Indeed, the one place where the "controversy" is not taught seems to be among groups where "creationism' and IDT are accepted dogma.
IDT claims that complex structures (such as the bacterial flagellum) could not have been assembled stepwise by an evolutionary process.
In other words, the development of complex physical structures cannot in principle be described in terms of known (or as yet unknown) mechanistic principles.
IDT sets huge areas of biology off-limits to science. Biologists can pack up and go home. Science becomes impossible.
IDT is an assault also on biblical faith. It is a classic statement of the "god-of-the-gaps".
This is a god whose existence is postulated on the basis that there are natural phenomena that "science cannot explain". Our ignorance of the origin of the genetic code or of the bacterial flagellum is taken to mean that "God must have done it".
Such "faith" in God rests on an underlying faith that we will be ignorant in perpetuity about the genetic code and the flagellum (and implies that God is not responsible for phenomena that we can describe scientifically).
But science always advances and the stop-gap god always shrinks. An authentic faith in God must be based on a foundation other than our (current) ignorance of flagellar assembly.
IDT drives a wedge between design and evolution. IDT assumes that "evolution" stands for "non-design".
But it is a false antithesis to demand a choice between "design" and "evolution". Christian scientists perceive exquisite design in the process of evolution that has produced the wonder of humanity as the image of God.
IDT protagonists refuse to discuss the nature of the intelligence that they claim to have unearthed. IDT can point to only a remote impersonal deistic god.
Darwin (as a conservative English gentleman) believed in precisely this god. This god is a distant abstraction that is not personal, communicating, holy, loving, redeeming.
The deist god of 19th-century Europe is a stark alternative to the passionate God of the Bible who is revealed in Jesus. It is ironic that IDT rejects Darwin's science even as it settles for Darwin's god.
The faceless god of IDT can morph into to any number of idols. In the 18th century natural theology ("Enlightenment") sought a god who could be known by human intellect.
Human "reason" became the arbiter of what could be known of god. A god who was first sought by reason, then became limited and eventually defined by reason.
People believed of the deity only that which was common sense.
The IDT god is an Enlightenment god, a tidy flagellar draughtsman, an uncomplicated 21st-century technologist, devoid of biblical mystery. IDT is becoming dogma, the mark of true orthodoxy, for some Christians.
The triune God, revealed in Jesus of Nazareth who was resurrected from the dead, is not reducible to neat formulae.
IDT hoopla is making people forget the imperative that those who follow Jesus must proclaim his liberating work in the compassionate, sacrificial spirit of service demonstrated by their Master.
* Graeme Finlay, MSc PhD BTh, is a senior lecturer in general (scientific) pathology at the University of Auckland.
Graeme Finlay
NZ Horrid
02.09.05
Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is bursting out everywhere. It has become part of the creed of many Christian churches.
United States President George W. Bush has given his blessing to it. A Dutch politician has suggested that IDT be aired in Europe. Time magazine is full of it. Science journals such as Nature and Science lament its influence. And it has landed in New Zealand.
IDT argues that complex biological structures could not have been assembled stepwise by an evolutionary mechanism.
Take out or alter just one component, so the argument goes, and the rest of the machinery falls apart. Therefore the structure must have been designed by some (non-specified) super-intelligence.
As a student of biology and a disciple of Jesus Christ, I am concerned that IDT is hostile to both science and biblical faith.
IDT is an assault on science because it is a cover-up for the rejection of evolution. This is stated explicitly by at least some IDT leaders, such as the lawyer Philip Johnson.
IDT thus has the same basic purpose as old style "Creationism".
IDT claims that evolution is "only a theory".
This confuses the sense in which "theory" is used.
Evolution is indeed a theory. This does not mean that it is a speculative hypothesis, but that it provides a theoretical framework for biology.
We are told that evolution is a religion and that it cannot be falsified.
This is untrue. Evolution is a scientific paradigm. Like all scientific paradigms, it contains a mass of established facts, working hypotheses, and creative speculations.
People engage in the universal methods of scientific research independently of their religious faiths. Science cannot be categorised into "atheistic", "Christian", "feminist" or particular ethnic varieties.
Someone of an atheistic religious perspective looks at the world that science discloses, accepts the exquisite order of nature as a brute fact, and believes that the evolutionary saga is a colossal accident.
Someone of a theistic perspective looks at the same world, accepts that its order comes from God, and believes that evolution reflects God's creative purpose.
Science can be enveloped in different metaphysical (religious) world views.
We must respect the difference between physics (and other branches of science) and metaphysics (such as atheism or theism).
IDT claims that there is no evidence for large-scale evolution. This is nonsense. Genomic science has provided conclusive evidence for human evolution. We share common ancestors with chimps, all other primates and other mammals. IDT denies evidence-based science.
IDT demands freedom to "teach the controversy". Promoters of IDT want to place stickers, indicating that evolution is controversial, in biology textbooks.
Just as the IDT lobby pleads that evolution is controversial, so the tobacco lobby claims that the smoking-cancer link is controversial, and the fossil fuel lobby denies anthropogenic global warming. But the overall evolutionary paradigm is overwhelmingly accepted by scholars.
Within all scientific fields, there is ongoing debate over the details of particular issues. The "teach the controversy" slogan fails to recognise that all human knowledge is provisional.
Indeed, the one place where the "controversy" is not taught seems to be among groups where "creationism' and IDT are accepted dogma.
IDT claims that complex structures (such as the bacterial flagellum) could not have been assembled stepwise by an evolutionary process.
In other words, the development of complex physical structures cannot in principle be described in terms of known (or as yet unknown) mechanistic principles.
IDT sets huge areas of biology off-limits to science. Biologists can pack up and go home. Science becomes impossible.
IDT is an assault also on biblical faith. It is a classic statement of the "god-of-the-gaps".
This is a god whose existence is postulated on the basis that there are natural phenomena that "science cannot explain". Our ignorance of the origin of the genetic code or of the bacterial flagellum is taken to mean that "God must have done it".
Such "faith" in God rests on an underlying faith that we will be ignorant in perpetuity about the genetic code and the flagellum (and implies that God is not responsible for phenomena that we can describe scientifically).
But science always advances and the stop-gap god always shrinks. An authentic faith in God must be based on a foundation other than our (current) ignorance of flagellar assembly.
IDT drives a wedge between design and evolution. IDT assumes that "evolution" stands for "non-design".
But it is a false antithesis to demand a choice between "design" and "evolution". Christian scientists perceive exquisite design in the process of evolution that has produced the wonder of humanity as the image of God.
IDT protagonists refuse to discuss the nature of the intelligence that they claim to have unearthed. IDT can point to only a remote impersonal deistic god.
Darwin (as a conservative English gentleman) believed in precisely this god. This god is a distant abstraction that is not personal, communicating, holy, loving, redeeming.
The deist god of 19th-century Europe is a stark alternative to the passionate God of the Bible who is revealed in Jesus. It is ironic that IDT rejects Darwin's science even as it settles for Darwin's god.
The faceless god of IDT can morph into to any number of idols. In the 18th century natural theology ("Enlightenment") sought a god who could be known by human intellect.
Human "reason" became the arbiter of what could be known of god. A god who was first sought by reason, then became limited and eventually defined by reason.
People believed of the deity only that which was common sense.
The IDT god is an Enlightenment god, a tidy flagellar draughtsman, an uncomplicated 21st-century technologist, devoid of biblical mystery. IDT is becoming dogma, the mark of true orthodoxy, for some Christians.
The triune God, revealed in Jesus of Nazareth who was resurrected from the dead, is not reducible to neat formulae.
IDT hoopla is making people forget the imperative that those who follow Jesus must proclaim his liberating work in the compassionate, sacrificial spirit of service demonstrated by their Master.
* Graeme Finlay, MSc PhD BTh, is a senior lecturer in general (scientific) pathology at the University of Auckland.
For Basra's Christians, Hussein era the good old days [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 10:24:39 AM
For Basra's Christians, Hussein era the good old days
Shiite-dominated city's minorities say repression on rise
- Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Basra, Iraq -- For the Christians in Basra, the
downfall of Saddam Hussein has meant a terrible
loss of religious freedom.
The social club where Yousef Lyon and his
friends would gather in the evening to play
dominoes, where families danced or listened to
live music on holidays, is closed. Wedding
celebrations are held quietly at home.
"Of course, during the Saddam regime, it was
better," said Lyon, 40, a member of the city's
small Armenian community. "Now we are afraid from
the religious parties that maybe they will throw
a bomb at us."
Not just the Christians, but many of the city's
minorities -- from obscure sects like the ancient
Sabeans to the sizable Sunni Muslim community - -
live in fear of the hard-line Shiite religious
parties and their militias that now rule Iraq's
second-largest city.
Freedom has been curtailed for women, regardless
of their religion. Several decades ago, almost no
woman in Basra covered her head. Now, they all
do, under fear of harassment or worse.
Women working for foreign companies or
governments, and those considered to have loose
morals, have been marked for death by the
militants -- two Iraqi sisters who worked in the
laundry at the U.S. compound in Basra were
assassinated last year.
Basra is an ancient port city with a proud
cosmopolitan history, where Christians, Jews,
Sunnis, Shiites and many other groups lived in
relative peace for hundreds of years, according
to local historians. The Jews left en masse in
the years following the founding of Israel in
1948. Now, although no one keeps records or
statistics, other minorities are leaving as well.
"Saddam Hussein was a criminal and an oppressor.
Everybody knew that," said Majid, 45, a Sunni
taxi driver who said he was afraid to be
identified further. "These new parties cry for
society, but try to drink the blood of the
people."
Hussein murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis,
most of them Kurds in the north and Shiites in
the south. But he did not see other minorities as
a threat because of their smaller numbers and
because his regime was secular and not hostile to
other religions or the rights of women, unlike
some of Iraq's current officials.
"You can't say no to those people; they will
kill you," Majid said of the current leaders
here. "Even just if you have a different
viewpoint, you will have a problem."
Basra is a city of 2 million people,
predominantly Shiite. An estimated 200,000 to
300,000 Sunnis, and perhaps 5,000 or 6,000
Christians, live in the area.
On a recent Friday evening, about two dozen
Presbyterians gathered for a service designed for
those who must work on the Christian Sabbath.
Their pastor recently fled Basra in fear, so a
young, recent graduate in theology presided.
"At the beginning, we were very happy when the
British army came to Basra. Everything was
totally beautiful," said Zuhair Fathallah, a
plastic surgeon who is an elder of the National
Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
While most of Fathallah's fellow parishioners
disliked Hussein, they were free to practice
their faith. But a year after he was overthrown,
things began to change in Basra. In April 2004,
one of the Shiite militias revolted against the
British army. Christians who had been licensed to
sell alcohol under Hussein were attacked and
sometimes killed by the militants. The church
started to receive threatening letters intended
to extort money, Fathallah said.
"The fanatic people think that if you don't obey
(their) law, they will move against you," he
added.
Social activities have been curtailed. The
nursery school is closed. There is no more Sunday
school because of fear the school bus will be
attacked. The church had 300 mostly large
families during its heyday 30 or more years ago.
Now just 35 families belong -- a total of 150
people.
"If we can survive, we will be a good church,"
Fathallah said. "Basra is the best city, and we
are good survivors."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/08/28/MNGS5EEJOM1.DTL
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
Shiite-dominated city's minorities say repression on rise
- Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Basra, Iraq -- For the Christians in Basra, the
downfall of Saddam Hussein has meant a terrible
loss of religious freedom.
The social club where Yousef Lyon and his
friends would gather in the evening to play
dominoes, where families danced or listened to
live music on holidays, is closed. Wedding
celebrations are held quietly at home.
"Of course, during the Saddam regime, it was
better," said Lyon, 40, a member of the city's
small Armenian community. "Now we are afraid from
the religious parties that maybe they will throw
a bomb at us."
Not just the Christians, but many of the city's
minorities -- from obscure sects like the ancient
Sabeans to the sizable Sunni Muslim community - -
live in fear of the hard-line Shiite religious
parties and their militias that now rule Iraq's
second-largest city.
Freedom has been curtailed for women, regardless
of their religion. Several decades ago, almost no
woman in Basra covered her head. Now, they all
do, under fear of harassment or worse.
Women working for foreign companies or
governments, and those considered to have loose
morals, have been marked for death by the
militants -- two Iraqi sisters who worked in the
laundry at the U.S. compound in Basra were
assassinated last year.
Basra is an ancient port city with a proud
cosmopolitan history, where Christians, Jews,
Sunnis, Shiites and many other groups lived in
relative peace for hundreds of years, according
to local historians. The Jews left en masse in
the years following the founding of Israel in
1948. Now, although no one keeps records or
statistics, other minorities are leaving as well.
"Saddam Hussein was a criminal and an oppressor.
Everybody knew that," said Majid, 45, a Sunni
taxi driver who said he was afraid to be
identified further. "These new parties cry for
society, but try to drink the blood of the
people."
Hussein murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis,
most of them Kurds in the north and Shiites in
the south. But he did not see other minorities as
a threat because of their smaller numbers and
because his regime was secular and not hostile to
other religions or the rights of women, unlike
some of Iraq's current officials.
"You can't say no to those people; they will
kill you," Majid said of the current leaders
here. "Even just if you have a different
viewpoint, you will have a problem."
Basra is a city of 2 million people,
predominantly Shiite. An estimated 200,000 to
300,000 Sunnis, and perhaps 5,000 or 6,000
Christians, live in the area.
On a recent Friday evening, about two dozen
Presbyterians gathered for a service designed for
those who must work on the Christian Sabbath.
Their pastor recently fled Basra in fear, so a
young, recent graduate in theology presided.
"At the beginning, we were very happy when the
British army came to Basra. Everything was
totally beautiful," said Zuhair Fathallah, a
plastic surgeon who is an elder of the National
Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
While most of Fathallah's fellow parishioners
disliked Hussein, they were free to practice
their faith. But a year after he was overthrown,
things began to change in Basra. In April 2004,
one of the Shiite militias revolted against the
British army. Christians who had been licensed to
sell alcohol under Hussein were attacked and
sometimes killed by the militants. The church
started to receive threatening letters intended
to extort money, Fathallah said.
"The fanatic people think that if you don't obey
(their) law, they will move against you," he
added.
Social activities have been curtailed. The
nursery school is closed. There is no more Sunday
school because of fear the school bus will be
attacked. The church had 300 mostly large
families during its heyday 30 or more years ago.
Now just 35 families belong -- a total of 150
people.
"If we can survive, we will be a good church,"
Fathallah said. "Basra is the best city, and we
are good survivors."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/08/28/MNGS5EEJOM1.DTL
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks27aug27,0,6635626.story
Not your daddy's creationists
ROSA BROOKS
August 27, 2005
SOMETIMES IT seems like secular intellectuals just can't win. In the 1980s and '90s, they were attacked by the right for their "relativism" - an alleged refusal to accept the existence of absolute truth. Today, they're under attack once more, only this time the right is mad because secular intellectuals aren't relativist enough.
At any rate, that appears to be the charge put forward by conservatives who advocate the teaching of so-called intelligent design.
These are not your daddy's creationists. When scientists and other members of the reality-based community declare that evolution is the only valid and provable account of our planet's natural history, intelligent design boosters don't cite the Bible. Instead, they earnestly insist that no one ought to claim a monopoly on truth, and that in the interests of intellectual and moral pluralism, "alternatives" to evolution should get a fair hearing in schools.
This week, Arizona Sen. John McCain became the latest Republican politician to urge that "all points of view" be presented to students studying the origins of life. He joined President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who argued recently that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution because people in "a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."
It's the new relativism: when scientific truth can't be squared with your religion or ideology, wax eloquent about the value of pluralism and intellectual diversity.
The new relativism marks quite a shift from the arguments normally employed by the right. Remember the "culture wars" of the late '80s and early '90s, when conservatives in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, such as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, inveighed against the "relativism" that allegedly dominated the thinking of American intellectuals?
Their critique drew on the work of prominent conservatives in the academy, including the late University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, who condemned multiculturalism, postmodernism and relativism in his influential 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind." And, speaking to American students in 1987, Pope John Paul II denounced academic pluralists who think that "ultimate questions about human life and destiny have no final answers or that all beliefs are of equal value."
In the United States, prominent evangelical Christian authors such as Frank Peretti and Chuck Colson also joined the chorus, warning that relativism would undermine American society.
So it's a tad ironic that conservatives and the religious right are now arguing that intelligent design should be taught on the grounds of intellectual pluralism. Needless to say, from the perspective of virtually all reputable scientists, evolution isn't just one theory among many, it's the only
scientifically proven
[sic]
account of the origin and development of life on Earth. Denying evolution isn't merely "another perspective." It's like insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, or that the moon is inhabited by little green guys. Whatever happened to truth?
Of course, maybe we secular types are wrong to keep resisting the right's new relativism. What would happen if we embraced it? Sure, we'd have to tolerate a lot of claptrap about intelligent design in the classroom, but think of the potential benefits.
If the right is sincerely dedicated to supporting pluralism and openness, surely they'd have no further objection to sex education classes that urge condom use, for instance, as long as abstinence-only arguments get equal time. And presumably they wouldn't mind if teachers tell kids that homosexuality is a legitimate form of human behavior, as long as teachers also explain that some people consider it a sin. Nor would conservatives have any basis to object to education about abortion rights, as long as their perspective is also represented.
Granted, there are problems with this approach. For one thing, the school year would need to be lengthened to accommodate all the new curricular material. Because if intelligent design must be taught just because a few crackpot scientists are on board with it, we'll also have to teach about the UFO landings at Roswell and the numerous Elvis sightings that occur each year.
We also would have to brace ourselves for the long-term consequences of the free-for-all ushered in by the right's new relativism: the hospitals that would guarantee equal employment opportunities to faith-based cardiac surgeons who eschew anatomy classes for prayer, and the airlines that would allow faith-based aeronautics to replace modern physics during the design phase of their aircraft.
Never mind. For now, I'm going to stick with old-fashioned thinking. At least when it comes to science, there is such a thing as absolute truth.
Not your daddy's creationists
ROSA BROOKS
August 27, 2005
SOMETIMES IT seems like secular intellectuals just can't win. In the 1980s and '90s, they were attacked by the right for their "relativism" - an alleged refusal to accept the existence of absolute truth. Today, they're under attack once more, only this time the right is mad because secular intellectuals aren't relativist enough.
At any rate, that appears to be the charge put forward by conservatives who advocate the teaching of so-called intelligent design.
These are not your daddy's creationists. When scientists and other members of the reality-based community declare that evolution is the only valid and provable account of our planet's natural history, intelligent design boosters don't cite the Bible. Instead, they earnestly insist that no one ought to claim a monopoly on truth, and that in the interests of intellectual and moral pluralism, "alternatives" to evolution should get a fair hearing in schools.
This week, Arizona Sen. John McCain became the latest Republican politician to urge that "all points of view" be presented to students studying the origins of life. He joined President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who argued recently that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution because people in "a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."
It's the new relativism: when scientific truth can't be squared with your religion or ideology, wax eloquent about the value of pluralism and intellectual diversity.
The new relativism marks quite a shift from the arguments normally employed by the right. Remember the "culture wars" of the late '80s and early '90s, when conservatives in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, such as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, inveighed against the "relativism" that allegedly dominated the thinking of American intellectuals?
Their critique drew on the work of prominent conservatives in the academy, including the late University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, who condemned multiculturalism, postmodernism and relativism in his influential 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind." And, speaking to American students in 1987, Pope John Paul II denounced academic pluralists who think that "ultimate questions about human life and destiny have no final answers or that all beliefs are of equal value."
In the United States, prominent evangelical Christian authors such as Frank Peretti and Chuck Colson also joined the chorus, warning that relativism would undermine American society.
So it's a tad ironic that conservatives and the religious right are now arguing that intelligent design should be taught on the grounds of intellectual pluralism. Needless to say, from the perspective of virtually all reputable scientists, evolution isn't just one theory among many, it's the only
scientifically proven
[sic]
account of the origin and development of life on Earth. Denying evolution isn't merely "another perspective." It's like insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, or that the moon is inhabited by little green guys. Whatever happened to truth?
Of course, maybe we secular types are wrong to keep resisting the right's new relativism. What would happen if we embraced it? Sure, we'd have to tolerate a lot of claptrap about intelligent design in the classroom, but think of the potential benefits.
If the right is sincerely dedicated to supporting pluralism and openness, surely they'd have no further objection to sex education classes that urge condom use, for instance, as long as abstinence-only arguments get equal time. And presumably they wouldn't mind if teachers tell kids that homosexuality is a legitimate form of human behavior, as long as teachers also explain that some people consider it a sin. Nor would conservatives have any basis to object to education about abortion rights, as long as their perspective is also represented.
Granted, there are problems with this approach. For one thing, the school year would need to be lengthened to accommodate all the new curricular material. Because if intelligent design must be taught just because a few crackpot scientists are on board with it, we'll also have to teach about the UFO landings at Roswell and the numerous Elvis sightings that occur each year.
We also would have to brace ourselves for the long-term consequences of the free-for-all ushered in by the right's new relativism: the hospitals that would guarantee equal employment opportunities to faith-based cardiac surgeons who eschew anatomy classes for prayer, and the airlines that would allow faith-based aeronautics to replace modern physics during the design phase of their aircraft.
Never mind. For now, I'm going to stick with old-fashioned thinking. At least when it comes to science, there is such a thing as absolute truth.
08/27/05
>you, along with 10 of
>millions of others, may believe what ever you want, but it will not change
>one single item of that which is true.
an excellent principle which I'm happy to enforce as fully as I can.
>I say there is no god. That is where is begins and where it ends. You say
there is... and nearly 6 billion others say there is but not one will agree
what is the mind of god.. When is the last time you have heard of an atheist
taking the life of another
This line of abuse is one of the more bold rackets tried on
by polemical atheists. The record-holders for mass murder are
militant atheists - Stalin, Mao (40M), etc. And the ways of life,
for those they didn't kill, imposed by these vicious paranoids were
incomparably more terror-laden than anything done by even the worst
excesses of Christendom (which came to an end many centuries ago).
Can you not admire the ethics behind the attached Kipling? What
atheist regime ever achieved decency on such a scale?
>, molesting a child
Rapes by the Red Army as it moved westward to Berlin have
recently been assessed in Paul Beavor's book at around a million.
You think they drew the line at age 16, or 15, or ... ?
Are you not aware of the Mongols' record-winning mass
slaughters? You think they left children out of their 10^5-at-a-time
massacres?
>, stealing from funds set aside
>for the poor... but on the other, how many 'religious' people have?
Interesting that you keep behind rhetorical q's, rather than
asserting any facts. Is this a sign of awareness how far your
insinuations are from the truth?
>
>You can make all claims you wish, as did the majority of Australians did
>concerning Linda Chamberlain, and it will not change the process of life..
>Take a look at ALL the nations where Islam is the main religion and you will
>find a single common factor. In the realm of science, they have contributed
>all most nothing..
There was an interesting brief period when they did - see attached.
>They are technological parasites, feeding off the
>knowledge of others while contributing little in return. Look at them and
>you are seeing a possible future of the US...
I am not primarily concerned to advocate monotheism, tho' I
do think it has a better record on the whole than atheism or other
religions. My primary aim is to point out that one monotheism has
done much better than Judaism let alone Islam.
But then in turn I say that has been a mere 'effortless
byproduct' in this world of preparing for the next.
As I said, our differences would appear to be minimally
susceptible to email. Perhaps we can meet if you ever visit Ak.
cheers
R
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Robt Mann [mailto:robtm@xtra.co.nz]
>Sent: Friday, 26 August 2005 8:32 a.m.
>To: William Ball
>Subject: Re: Intelligent Design?
>
>Dear Wm Ball,
>Your perspective is so different
>from mine that we probably can't get far by email.
>But, just in case, I send some notes that may be of interest.
>I've already pointed out that, whatever
>IDT may be, it certainly isn't an oxymoron.
>
>
>>Scientific method is not a belief, it is the rules set forth to test
>beliefs
>>and Intelligent Design is an oxymoron, with accent is on moron.
>>
>>From time to time I emerge from my cloistered world up here on my hill
>where
>>I commune with bright, kind, intelligent and talented people only to find
>>there still reign a host of muddled minded citizens masquerading as
>>knowledgeable on the subject of evolution, pontificating the merits of
>>Intelligent Design or some similar moronic babble.
>
>
>
>MannGramR: On the roles of mutation v. selection
>March 2004
>
>Neo-Darwinian theory resulted from
>merging 4 lines of theory: mutation,
>selecting-out of the less fit, genetics, and
>population dynamics. It is touted by aggressive
>atheists e.g R Dawkins, S Weinberg, L Wolpert,
>claiming it is a thorough explanation of how
>species evolved.
>NeoDarwinism is at last going thru some
>sceptical examination - and is faring badly as
>in my opinion it deserves to because it can't
>explain much.
>Too few realise that natural selection is
>envisaged only as decreases in the reproduction,
>and therefore after "1 generation the abundance,
>of mutants that are somehow less fit for their
>environment at the successive times when they
>live. No creativity is hinted at in this
>'natural rogueing' role. Natural selection is
>actually claimed only to *narrow* the variance.
>In the strict version, explicitly atheistic,
>natural selection is blind, operating only to
>disfavour those who breed less on the 'strength
>of properties expressed at the time. The
>environment which does the selecting is assumed
>to be utterly unintelligent.
>All the creativity in evolution is thus,
>in this theory, assigned to mutation. This
>process is normally stated to be random - not
>at all to any plan but merely changing nucleic
>acids (DNA or RNA) randomly (through damage by
>radiation or chemical mutagens, etc).
>If you can believe that randomness can
>lead - with remarkable foresight - to
>coordinated ecosystems, or even so much as a
>single cell, I suggest you read N Broom 'How
>Blind is The Watchmaker?' (IVP 2001).
>
>A reason why I summarise this controversy
>is that many have assumed neoDarwinism is well
>founded and a sufficient basis for predicting
>how, say, bees or their pathogens will evolve in
>this or that changed environment.
>Gene-tampering is probably the most
>hazardous 'technology', threatening a wide
>variety of novel epidemics & pathogens. Agencies
>(e.g the NZ govts's quasi-judicial ERMA) claiming
>to assess these hazards in GMOs are bluffing.
>More & more scientists are coming to the view
>that this is a major example of the emperor's new
>clothes.
>In addition to pointing out how
>neoDarwinism is inadequate, we must point out the
>next step forward in this line of theorising -
>morphogenic fields.
>
>R
RECASTING ESTABLISHMENT HISTORY
“THE ROOTS OF SCIENCE”
Harold Turner
Presented abbreviated as a lecture to the symposium 'Science and Christianity',
Auckland 01-4-21.
pub. in 'Science & Christianity' ed. L. R. B. Mann
University of Auckland Centre for Continuing Education 2001
267p pbk, with 14 illustrations
pp.149-176
The 20th century saw the previous century’s fascination with the idea of progress replaced by a focus on the term ‘culture’ as a basic reference point. All human beings and all societies live within one or more cultures; nothing human escapes the cultural. One way of exploring the concept further is to see a culture as made up of the ways in which we habitually relate to the whole human context – the physical context of the natural world, the social context of our fellow humans, and the transcendent context of the spiritual realm .
It is the internal relations of two of these, the first and the last, that I deal with in this paper. We relate to the natural world through technology and our knowledge of science, and to the transcendent realm through our religions. On this occasion our theme is “Science and (one particular religion) Christianity”. We are therefore dealing with two of the basic features of the Western culture to which we primarily belong: with the central place it gives to science, and with its major religious inheritance from Western European Christendom. These features cannot be examined only in their contemporary forms but first of all historically, for “a culture without a history is like someone without a memory”. The history of science, although less than a century old as a discipline, has become essential to our self-understanding; it can help us to see why and how science became such a dominant feature of our culture. The history of Christianity is vastly older but can still produce new dimensions, as we shall see when we come to the long-lost John Philoponus below.
What am I doing here?
In my “Investigative Journey Through the World’s Religions” I found the “Roots of Science” in the same historical milieu as the roots of Christendom, within the emerging culture of the Hebrew people over the two millennia BCE. Science and Christianity, as two of the basic cultural dimensions of Western culture, had their roots historically intertwined. This was in stark contradiction of the received version of the history of science taught in our educational systems. Science, we are told, came from the Greeks, with small inputs from the Arabs and the Indians, and perhaps the Chinese. While still recognizing the specific contributions of each of these peoples I have ventured to say that science developed in spite of their cultures, and only because of the peculiar features of the culture of a small and insignificant people, the Hebrews.
I am by no means the first to make this radical recasting of the history of science, and I am dependent on substantial historical scholars largely bypassed by the establishment – people such as M. B. Foster in the 1930s when the subject was taking shape as a discipline, C. N. Cochrane in 1940 on the basic intellectual bankruptcy of Graeco-Roman culture, and since then Sam Sambursky, Stanley Jaki, C. B. Kaiser, H. P. Nebelsick, Richard Sorabji and T. F. Torrance among others. Most of these scholars are grouped together by the history of science establishment and dismissed as “revisionists”. You will seldom find their names in the indexes or bibliographies of the histories of science, and that in itself starts to tell the story I am exploring.
Now these are all professionals in science, history or philosophy, so how is it that I, neither scientist nor historian, come to be writing about the “historical roots” of science, and making the claim that one of the figures I identify in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, John Philoponus of the 6th century, should be seen as the greatest theoretical natural philosopher before Isaac Newton? How brash can these New Zealanders be?
Laying foundations in Hebrew culture
So I ask myself, how have I come so late in life to be so emphatic on such an unexpected subject for which I had no obvious preparation? The question then becomes autobiographical, and I do not find the answer in my first year of basic sciences as an engineering student, nor in the two years as a demonstrator in the first experimental psychology laboratory in New Zealand, at the university in Christchurch. I now see that the answer to my question lies in another area altogether. The answer begins later, in 1936; there was an entrance scholarship to the theological college of the Presbyterian Church in Dunedin based on an examination in elementary Hebrew to be acquired before theological training – a rather unexpected idea for New Zealand. I needed the money and I mugged up enough Hebrew to win it; I don’t know if there were any other candidates. Then for three years Hebrew was a normal requirement, and later I acquired a B.D. degree where it was also essential.
None of this comes anywhere near making me a Hebrew scholar, but it came in handy when in 1955 I had gone to Britain and was applying for any teaching work that came up. I even had enough nerve, or desperation, to apply for a lectureship in Old Testament in something called the University College of Sierra Leone, wherever that was. The position was offered to a real Old Testament scholar, but he withdrew. It seems I was the only other person with “Hebrew” in his c.v. and who was prepared to go to a country in West Africa formerly known as “the white man’s grave”.
By this queer route I found myself teaching Old Testament in what was recognized as an overseas college of the University of Durham – teaching for the Durham B.A.(Theology) for the laity, where Hebrew was not required, although of course it remained important for the teacher. So for the next seven years I was immersed in the Old Testament. This was an enjoyable and stimulating experience, especially in the multi-cultural situation of the tribal religions and cultures of West Africa. Of course I had no idea that I was getting the feel of that Hebrew culture where I was over 30 years later to find the roots of science.
Religious studies and discovery of the synagogue
During these years I stumbled across the works of the then doyen of religious studies, Mircea Eliade of Chicago, and I discovered this new tool for the study of religions and the world-views at the base of all cultures. Then in 1963 I went to teach religious studies in the new University of Nigeria amid yet another set of cultures. All around was virgin territory for religious research. Besides the tribal shrines and Muslim mosques of Nigeria there were hosts of churches derived from Christian missions and the many varieties of independent African-founded denominations that had in Sierra Leone become a major research subject for me. So one of my projects concerned places of worship, in Nigeria and across all religions.
Fifteen years later this work led to my From Temple to Meeting House . Historical and comparative study revealed that the Hebrew synagogue represented a radical revolution in places of worship, over against the classic sacred places of shrine and temple. The following table sets forth the many layers of contrasts I had found between the temple form of worship and the new form constituted by the synagogue .
TEMPLE FEATURES SYNAGOGUE FEATURES
Special consecrated place or building Any secular and non-consecrated building
Gradation of sanctity towards a sanctuary No gradation of sanctity within building
Sanctuaries as special holy places with altars No sanctuaries or altars
Priestly control, conduct and leadership Lay (rabbis) control, conduct and leadership
Worship occasional, for personal needs, and on major communal occasions Worship regular for all, on daily, weekly, etc. basis, plus special communal occasions
Celebrate mythological and natural events Celebrate formative historical events
Observational worship: main ritual acts delegated to specialists – priests Participatory, corporate worship by the whole congregation
Sacrificial offerings and complex rituals Non-sacrificial, with simple rituals
Special education confined to priests Education and edification for all.
Community centres for ritual purposes only Centres for multiple and secular purposes
This led to a two-part typology of worship places for religious studies, the temple type on the one hand, and the meeting house type on the other – hence the title of the book. The latter form first appeared in history in the Jewish synagogue, and then became the ancestor and norm of the churches and mosques in the related Semitic religions, Christianity and Islam. In comparison with the quite different temples of antiquity the synagogue had nothing going for it, either architecturally or aesthetically, and all it needed was ten men in a room in a private house. It was not a sacred place, not consecrated, had no sacrifices or rituals; it had teaching rabbis instead of ordained priests, and in principle it was no different from a Quaker meeting house. When the synagogue was developing, the Jews had no inkling of what they were initiating, but in terms of the history and phenomenology of religions this was a revolution transcending all others in religious history.
I was then entirely innocent of seeing any significance in this for the history of science, just as the reader will be wondering where all this is getting us on the same subject. But it was apparent that the synagogue was the most explicit and visible expression of this so distinctive Hebrew culture with its radically de-sacralized view of nature – a totally new worldview in human history. That is why in this discussion it occupies the central place as representative of the first formulations of the view of the created world in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the synagogue, matter, space, time and human beings had all been de-sacralized.
Encountering Philoponus
These are some of the main features of my intellectual autobiography up to 1979, but there was still no sign of insights into “the roots of science”. Then in the Scottish Journal of Theology Professor T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh reported a conference in London in 1983 of 75 scholars devoted to the study of a 6th-c. Christian layman of whom I had never heard. This was John Philoponus, a philosopher in the great Academy in Alexandria. I already knew Torrance as a leader in the relations between theology and science, in which I was interested in a general sort of way. Now Torrance was presenting Philoponus’ natural philosophy as a key development in the history of science. This was worth following up, which I have been doing with growing fascination ever since.
Now how did Philoponus shape my thinking and link up with Hebrew culture and its synagogue on the one hand, and with the book I have written on the other? We must start from Aristotle of Athens, the most comprehensive and influential thinker in antiquity in almost all realms. He dominated European thought until well into its second millennium and continues to provide courses of study in our universities . Likewise he dominates the history of science when its origins are traced to the Greeks. Here we are concerned only with Aristotle’s natural philosophy, especially with his physics, the basic science.
John Philoponus (ca. 490 - ca. 566; the name means workaholic) has been called the most learned man of his time, and the Academy at Alexandria was for long established as the greatest centre of learning in the Graeco-Roman world. He was an expert on Aristotle, for whom he had the greatest respect; he had adopted much of his system and wrote commentaries on nine of his works. In these he was led to make a number of radical rejections of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, all of which proved essential for the later development of what we know as science .
De-sacralizing the heavens
One of the most radical changes was to reject the distinction between the earth as an imperfect sub-lunary body and all the other supra-lunary bodies, outside the orbit of the moon; these were perfect, animated and divine beings, a view which is the basis of astrology. For Philoponus all bodies, earthly and heavenly, were made of the same stuff. The light of the stars was the same as the light of a glow-worm – a sheer heresy in the Greek world.
Nor was the universe eternal, or moving in eternal cycles of time; it had a beginning and now had a history, for it was made out of nothing by the Creator God of the Scriptures, not by mere fabrication out of pre-existing material. These radical changes involved a totally new view of the fundamentals of the physical universe. Matter, and with it space, had been de-sacralized, as well also as time. Nor did space contain any inherently sacred places beyond human scrutiny and control. The whole universe outside the earth had been de-divinized and brought into the same categories as this imperfect earth. Matter, space and time were all of a piece anywhere in the universe and were open to human investigation.
This was a revolutionary worldview, asserting the unity and uniformity of the whole universe. Philoponus was rejecting what C. N. Cochrane called “the most vicious of heresies, the heresy of two worlds” . The basic distinction now was between the Creator and the creation, between the sacred located in the divine, and the secular universe where human beings were placed and for which they were responsible. With this new natural philosophy the world had been cleared of gods and spirits, declared to be the good creation of the one rational God, and the foundations had been laid ready for the study of the universe that we know as science.
Impetus: a second form of motion
Philoponus’ second critique concerned another basic concept in physics, that of the motion of material bodies. For Aristotle this was always due to a mover external to the body moved. The issue was discussed in terms of the motion of a projectile. Aristotle explained this as due to the air displaced from the front end rushing down alongside the projectile and then turning in to prevent a vacuum developing behind it and so impelling the projectile as an external force from the rear; a void was an impossibility for Aristotle.
Philoponus made mock of this as “bordering on the fantastic”. He proposed a thought-experiment where 10,000 wind machines blew upon the rear of a row of military projectiles balanced upon the wall of a fortress. Instead of taking off into flight, he said, they would simply fall to the ground a little away from the wall; which of course was true. Philoponus’ caustic comment was matched by my wife, for before I had quite finished explaining Aristotle’s view she burst into laughter! I know it is not quite fair to mock a great man, for his theory was all of a piece with the rest of his physics; but this was simply wrong, as Philoponus’ simple thought-experiment would have shown him if tested. The experimental method, however, was still some two millennia ahead of Aristotle, and another millennium of Philoponus.
In place of all motion being due to an external cause Philoponus proposed a further kind of motion imparted to the projectile and then retained internally by it when the external force was removed. This transfer from external to internal force opened up the concept of impetus given to a moving body. This was a radical development in physics that was further developed by the time of Newton into the concepts of inertia and the momentum possessed by a moving object. This was Newton’s first law of motion – that once launched, a moving body would continue in a straight line indefinitely, unless something interfered. Although Philoponus regarded the internal force not as permanent but as fading out , he had made the radical break from the system of Aristotle into kinetic theory.
A natural philosophy replacing Aristotle's
In other breaks from Aristotelian orthodoxy Philoponus affirmed the reality of a vacuum or void, and anticipated Galileo on the equal acceleration of bodies of different weights when dropped together from a height. Aristotle had taught that their speeds would be proportional to their weights. Philoponus also replaced Aristotle’s static theory of light by a dynamic theory of particles moving from the external seen object to the eye at almost infinite velocity; this is congruent with James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery that both light and electro-magnetic radiations travelled at the same very high speeds.
It would be pretentious to downgrade Aristotle, perhaps the greatest and most influential mind of antiquity; despite his errors in these areas he offered the greatest overall stimulus by any one person towards what has emerged as science. But Aristotle’s physics was simply wrong on the eternity of the universe, on the dualism of its two divisions perfect and imperfect, and therefore on the different composition of the heavens as against the earth, wrong again on the impossibility of a void, on the cause of the motion of a projectile, and on the rate of acceleration of dropped objects.
It is these remarkable corrections by Philoponus, seen as 6th-c. anticipations of Galileo, Newton and Maxwell, that support my description of Philoponus as the greatest natural philosopher before Newton. When we consider also that all this was without benefit of the experimental method and mathematical proofs that mark modern science we are compelled to ask where Philoponus got it all from. The answer to this question will bring us back to where we left off with Hebrew culture and the synagogue.
Were there earlier thinkers among the Greeks who anticipated Philoponus in his new ideas? The chief candidate for this role has been the learned astronomical observer Hipparchus of Nicaea (ca.190 - ca.25 BCE) in whom Galileo and many modern scholars have found the precursor of the impetus theory. In the 1993 London conference on Philoponus, Michael Wolff effectively disposed of an Hipparchian origin, placed Hipparchus firmly back within Aristotelianism, and concluded that apart from Philoponus there was no ancient author who argues for impetus in any sense .
Scientific stirrings among the Ionians
In the 6th c, a de-sacralized universe had appeared among the very first Greek philosophers, in the colonists in the cities of Miletus and Ephesus in the Ionian area of Asia Minor. Here Thales and others took the first critical steps towards science, towards a rational and unified view of the universe. They asked new questions that sought causes within nature itself, and so left the capricious Olympian gods out. They were materialists and monists with no personification or deification of nature; they totally de-sacralized it. Likewise, another Ionian, Democritus in the 5th c, saw the world as the random movement of tiny atoms – a mechanistic view that returned in the 17th century of our era and is still influential in science and the popular mind today.
In the same 6th c. other new scientific ideas emerged among Greek colonists to the west, in southern Italy, where Pythagoras (originally an Ionian) developed a unified view of the world as either actually consisting of numbers or at least ordered mathematically. For this and his work in arithmetic and geometry that anticipated Euclid he has been called “the father of science”. There was a potentiality here to de-sacralize the world, like the other Ionians; on the contrary there was a religious side to the Pythagorean movement with features that were no advance on those found in various tribal faiths and their religious cultures.
Then in the 5th c. another of the pre-Socratic philosophers and again an Ionian, Anaxagoras, had brought new ideas of the universe to Athens itself. Based on the evidence of a meteorite he suggested that the heavenly bodies might be composed of stone-like materials as found on earth, and that the sun was a large incandescent stone. This de-sacralization anticipated Philoponus' views a millennium later, and also what Galileo saw through his telescope after a further millennium. For such heresy Anaxagoras was prosecuted and had to return to Ionia.
Philosophers’ revival of the sacred
In the great 4th c. BCE Plato and Aristotle would have none of these first sights of science, for in removing divinity from the world the Ionians had also deprived it of plan and purpose. So the Athenian philosophers restored these features to the world of nature in the form of Plato’s Demiurge, a rational divine craftsman, or of Aristotle’s Prime Unmoved Mover. These were living deities, far removed from the anthropomorphic Greek gods. Ultimately, however, they were no more than philosophers’ creations which were never able to become the objects of worship in the cult of any actual religion.
Despite its magnificent deposits in literature, art and architecture, its philosophic wrestlings and scientific searchings, its Euclid and Archimedes, its late flowering in Ptolemy and Galen, despite “the glory that was Greece”, its gods were either too close and too human, or too remote and impersonal. Greece went into decline and its great Athenian schools were closed by the 2nd c. CE. A wholly new theology was needed, a re-thinking of what was meant by “divinity”. Amid the decline of the Graeco-Roman world, this was supplied by the theology developing among the unimportant Hebrew people and in the ensuing Christian tradition. As C. N. Cochrane put it in philosophic terms , the new doctrine of the trinitarian God answered the unsolved Greek problem of the relation of the one to the many, the relation of the ultimate unities of the philosophers to the rampant pluralism of the Olympic divinities.
And so to return empty-handed after our search among the Greeks for the origins of Philoponus’ radical departure from Aristotelian natural philosophy. In fairness to Aristotle we must remember that both he and Philoponus were working deductively from their respective worldviews. They got no closer to the later experimental inductive methods than Aristotle with his remarkable biological researches, and Philoponus with his imaginative thought-experiments and some common-sense observations. They were both dependent on the assumptions and concepts of the worldviews available to them, the one in Athens in the 4th c. BCE, the other in Alexandria nearly nine centuries later. In what had happened during those centuries in the world of Philoponus we shall find the clues to his remarkable critiques of Aristotle.
The Alexandrian heritage
Philoponus was working over Aristotle’s questions and answers, but from a quite different “fiduciary stance”. The Academy at Alexandria possessed a long tradition from pre-Christian times. By the second century BCE, here at this same Alexandria the first translation of the Hebrew scriptures had been completed, into Greek as the Septuagint, which later gave Christian scholars ready access to the book of Genesis with its creation stories. Around the turn of the millennium Alexandria had been the largest Jewish city in the world with Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, as its greatest Jewish scholar. From the 2nd c. CE Alexandria had been a major centre of church organization and Christian theology and remained so during the five centuries of Christian thinkers, the patristic period, the age of the Fathers of the Church that produced the classic or ecumenical creeds.
There was also the new doctrine of the created universe, although less prominent in the creeds. By the end of the 1st c. CE Clement of Rome was rejecting Greek dualism, insisting that there was only one universe, all of a piece, created good and orderly by God. In The Roots of Science I have summarized the similar contributions of Clement’s successors: Athenagoras in Alexandria itself, Tertullian, the other Clement (of Alexandria), Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, and Boethius with his great “Hymn to the Creator” and only a decade younger than Philoponus. Further afield Basil in Cappadocia affirmed the same single created universe, and used everyday observations in support – the eternity of the universe was not represented by the circle, because to draw it one had to start and stop somewhere. Likewise he was on the verge of impetus theory in its alternative circular form when he likened the Creator setting the universe in motion to a child setting a top spinning – continuing indefinitely if there was no resistance.
Amid much debate a new doctrine of the universe was being defined. As the patristic period was ending it provided a new cultural atmosphere in natural philosophy, and it was Philoponus who articulated this in a way that has remained substantially intact ever since.
We should also observe that the only place of Jewish worship that the Christian scholars ever saw was the synagogue which implicitly and publicly summed up the central feature of the new worldview, a de-sacralized universe. There is no suggestion that Philoponus ever thought in these particular terms about places of worship; but for me I had already taken the synagogue as an authentic expression of the biblical worldview where the roots of his natural philosophy also lay. This is how the unexpected intrusion of this new figure into my thinking made sense, as I explored Philoponus working out the physical behaviour of a de-divinized Judaeo-Christian creation in ways that supported my synagogue thesis.
Why then do we hear no more of him?
The immediate question arises: if Philoponus is of this stature why does he not replace the Greeks, and especially Aristotle the most influential of them all, in the succeeding history of science? There are many factors of various import in the answer. The Roman empire was collapsing, and Philoponus stood at the apparent end of Graeco-Roman culture, with the invasions of tribal barbarians from the north and of Islamic armies from east and south. The Greek-speaking Academy at Alexandria came to an end when the city was captured in 646 by the Muslims and much of its library of Greek manuscripts was carried off to their centre of learning in Damascus. Here, and later in their new city of Baghdad and at the Nestorian Christian centre at Nisibis which Islam controlled, these manuscripts were translated into Syriac and Arabic, but not into Latin. Thus it was that the cultural deposits of classical antiquity, including Aristotle and his later commentators and critics such as Philoponus, lay in the east, out of reach of the Latin-speaking Western scholarship during its so-called “dark ages”.
This loose term covers some six succeeding centuries when there were cathedral and monastic schools with their more modest libraries, developed for the education of the clergy. The fate of Philoponus’ scientific achievements was tied to the sad fate of great centres of learning such as the academies at Alexandria, Athens and elsewhere. These were not replaced until the mediaeval European universities developed in the west, in the 12th to the 14th centuries, more independently of the church schools and with wider agenda. These gave science its necessary institutional base, but they were still largely tied to their limited Latin resources, and knew little directly of Plato or Aristotle and almost nothing of Philoponus.
Then classical learning began to filter through to the west by renewed contact through merchants and Crusaders, especially the Fourth Crusade which looted Constantinople in 1204, and above all through the Muslim invasions and the Islamic scholars and resources they brought with them. Thus began the European recovery of the impressive resources of classical Greece that had been preserved and translated in Islam’s eastern centres of learning. Aristotle was rediscovered, along with his commentators and Philoponus among them. Widely distributed Arabic scholars such as the Persian Avicenna (980-1037), and the Spaniards Avempace (d. 113 and Averroes (1126-119, were well aware of the dispute between Aristotelianism and Philoponus over impetus and the eternity of the universe and other matters, but came to no agreed conclusions, and in effect favoured Aristotle. Zimmerman points out why the Christians who should have been promoting Philoponus and so hastening the development of science were in fact doing the opposite – since he was an embarrassment to them. As Zimmerman puts it:
“… the name of Philoponus did not … inspire trust and admiration … his reputation was flawed. For in the eyes of posterity he had doubly disgraced himself by embracing the short-lived Tritheist faction within the Monophysite party and by attacking … his own school (the philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Proclus) from behind ... His writings, then and later, enjoyed notoriety rather than authority … His impetus theory seems to be a case in point: it was adopted without due credit given to its author.”
A heretical “monophysite”?
With these theological charges of heresy we come to the heart of the tragic history and subsequent obscurity of Philoponus. Not long before his time, in 451, the Council of Chalcedon had debated the relation between the two “natures” of Jesus Christ, the divine and the human. It had apparently reconciled the different formulas presented, and issued the famous four-point epistemological guidelines that I suggest are still basic to all thinking today . Different parties, however, were using key words in different senses; the Constantinople (Byzantium) theologians were still under the influence of Greek dualism, whereas the Alexandrians were suspected of a monist emphasis upon the one “nature”, the divine, and so were branded as heretical Monophysites (one “phusis” or “nature”). The issue was vital, and had really been neither solved nor settled at Chalcedon.
Ultimately it arose from the fact that the new Judaeo-Christian worldview was being hammered out by the early Christian Fathers in Alexandria with greater freedom there from Aristotelianism than in the heart of the Byzantine empire. This new worldview, like any such major change, required changed meanings in old terms and some new terms altogether. The New Testament had already done this within the common Greek language of its day; Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein did it again in physics, and we have all had to repeat the process in the new computer world.
This process had begun among predecessors of Philoponus at Alexandria such as Athanasius (d. 373) and Cyril (375-444), as well as Severus (465-535) at Antioch. It is impossible here to follow the various political, ecclesiastical and theological factors at work in several centuries of turgid history, nor the various degrees, as it were, of monophysitism, and the arguments about the use of key words and the effects of different contexts upon their meanings. The overall result was that the Byzantines won and Philoponus was posthumously placed under an anathema as a heretical monophysite and tritheist by the third Council of Constantinople (680-81). This was confirmed by Photius, the powerful Patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th c. “Aristotle became the one officially licensed philosopher of the Byzantine world.” This “retarded scientific development for a thousand years and contributed to the domination of Aristotelianism in the West. That was one of the greatest tragedies in the history of thought.”14
Henceforth, and most importantly when the universities and the sciences were developing in Europe, Christian scholars eschewed him. Aquinas, for example, being no scientist, firmly rejected the impetus theory of projectile motion in favour of Aristotle’s view . Philoponus the heretic was left to the Muslims. Although their theology could not accommodate to him, it was through them that his ideas about the universe and impetus, etc., percolated through without acknowledgement and surfaced as new discoveries for use in the controversies with the Aristotelians. It is true that Christian critique of Aristotelian science took specific shape in the 219 propositions issued in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris that included most of Philoponus’ positions, and later scholars like Buridan and Oresme made advances in impetus and other scientific theory, using the resources of the same Judaeo-Christian tradition upon which Philoponus drew. But he himself had almost vanished from the scene.
The long wait for recognition
The anathema of 681 remained in place for over 13 centuries until through the initiative of Professor T. F. Torrance the Greek Orthodox Church formally lifted it in the 1990s. In a series of studies, some unpublished, Professor Torrance has detailed the language issues, especially as between the terms for “nature” and for “reality” or “truth” . He has shown that Philoponus was no monophysite or tritheist, and also why he was misunderstood in these ways, as he sought to go beyond the static thought-world and logic of the Greeks into the more dynamic way of thinking opened up by his ideas about impetus and about light. This judgement is confirmed by the way the eastern churches, Coptic, Syrian and Armenian, rejected as “monophysite” by Western churches for well over a millennium, have in more recent times been informally recognized as orthodox.
A setback of “a thousand years” – a vast exaggeration, surely? Not if one realizes that when the great scientific development came in the 17th century it was still distorted by the continuing Greek dualism of Descartes and later of Kant. It was something like a millennium after Photius that Faraday and Maxwell broke through to a new dynamic and relational way of thinking, with fields of force that had their first anticipations in the writings of Philoponus. As Christians, all working from their fiduciary stance in trinitarian relational theology, they might well have understood one another.
Here we may speculate upon one of the great might-have-beens of history, greater even than the 17th-c. prospect of a French-speaking North America, or the mid-19th-c. possibility of a nominally Christian China under the Taiping revolution. If Christians had used Philoponus instead of suppressing him, the mediaeval dominance of Aristotle might have ended sooner, and the experimental method and other prerequisites might have developed faster. The historians have missed this might-have-been, but history is full of examples and only some of the more obvious ever receive attention.
The rediscovery of Philoponus after a millennium began in the Renaissance period, when the newly accumulated resources of classical culture through Arabic channels made their public impact on Europe, and the effect of church anathemas on any of their authors might well have been counter-productive among the Renaissance humanists. In the 16th c. the recent advent of printing made the works of Aristotle and all his commentators readily available in Greek, and these were usually shortly followed by Latin translations. Thus it was that Philoponus at last became freely available, as evidenced by his Physics appearing in Latin versions nine times between 1546 and 1581 .
The major figures in the 17th-c. scientific revolution therefore had access to Philoponus, and Galileo thought highly of him. The question then arises: why does he seem to have fallen out of sight for the second time, and again for centuries? In the founding period of modern science most of the leading figures were Christians of one kind or another, so that as a major and early Christian critic of Aristotle he might even have received a certain respect. I have asked around on this question and no-one seems to have an answer. It seems inadequate to suggest that his basic ideas had already been developed beyond his formulations, and that experimental and mathematical methods had replaced his deductive procedures, so that he would not be attuned to the modern scientific atmosphere. The 17th-c. scholars must be excused as not being historians of science in the new 20th-c. manner.
The re-rediscovery of Philoponus
The modern re-rediscovery might be said to have begun in 1847 when the early contribution of Philoponus to the development of impetus theory was warmly recognized by the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt . There was a flurry of interest in the decade around the year 1900, when the Berlin Academy of Sciences published German translations of some of Philoponus’ works. Von Humboldt was picked up and developed rather uncertainly by Emil Wohlwill in an essay in 1906 . But the first to take Philoponus seriously in the history of impetus theory was one of the founders of the modern history of science, Pierre Duhem, as in a 1913 essay . Only eight years later, the only reference to Philoponus in the great 12-volume Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics was in an article on “Tritheism” (of all places) where he was described as a “distinguished Aristotelian”, a monophysite and virtually a tritheist – wrong at every point. This is doubly offensive when I find it was written by the professor of systematic theology in the university where I had my longest and happiest stay, Aberdeen. Unhappily, and surprisingly, this great encyclopaedia, finished in 1921, is still in print in 2001 and so continues to propagate this major error.
The availability of Philoponus in English for serious study commences in 1948 with seven pages of text from his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics . A similar source followed in 1955 , and by 1962 Philoponus rated discussion in a whole final chapter . One might have expected more than one passing reference in Stanley Jaki’s Gifford Lectures in 1974-75, but he devotes three pages to Philoponus in his 1986 Science and Creation . The main work now is the collection of scholarly essays on Philoponus, some of which have been quoted above, edited by Richard Sorabji in 1987 . That the publishing programme of reliable texts initiated at the 1983 London conference is well under way is indicated by the items by or associated with Philoponus now in the library of the University of Auckland. Apart from two translations in French and German, and the early works mentioned above and Sorabji, there are at last checking twelve works of Philoponus himself in English; all of these have been added since 1983, and most in the last few years.
Clearly he is coming into his own in the history of science. But much has yet to be done for he does not rate a personal entry in the recent 900-page Reader’s Guide to the History of Science . It is an illuminating exercise to look for the name of Philoponus in the indexes of works by historians of both science and of Christianity. The content of history of science and Church history courses would be equally revealing. Be prepared for disappointment, for total absence or a mere passing mention or even for gross error. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church has an entry for Philoponus, but still in 1997 leaves him as a condemned monophysite .
Philoponus and the synagogue
It might appear that in this extensive treatment of the neglected Philoponus we are a long way from the synagogue, which I used as a sign of the Judaeo-Christian de-sacralization of the world. Yet behind our account there has been the ongoing articulation of the Christian doctrine of the created world, whether recognized or not as providing the basic worldview and metaphysics necessary for the work of science – a basis I have summed up in the uniqueness of the synagogue among the world’s places of worship. Since my study in this area was published in 1979 there have been two crowded decades of discovery of Philoponus and the Christian Fathers in support of my de-sacralization thesis and its meaning for science.
That is my story. First the apprenticeship in studies of the Hebrew Scriptures, then the application of religious studies to places of worship and discovery of the revolutionary significance of the synagogue, followed by realizing that the de-sacralization of the world represented so vividly in the synagogue was the same as the de-sacralized worldview of this new figure John Philoponus. And so it was that I ventured to write The Roots of Science, showing that the abandonment of the world of temples and the collapse of the Aristotelian world were different expressions of the Judaeo-Christian view of the universe. Since this book was confined to the historical roots of science up to the 17th-c. developments, I found I had to extend this history into our own era in the subsequent Frames of Mind, and as a further testing of the thesis as to the necessary relation between science and the Christian religion.
From dualistic Cartesianism to relational field theory
This I did with critiques of the dualism of two key figures, Descartes and Kant, and with inquiry into the inter-relation of faith and science in Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – the key figures in the transposition from Cartesianism into the scientific world of Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr and so many others of distinction. The biographies of Faraday and Maxwell show how their scientific work and their religious faith were distinguished but never separated. We can see that they came to their scientific inquiries with minds already and continually shaped by the unique trinitarian relational view of God, and found that this was reflected in the relational structures of nature, with their interacting fields of force. They were not producing an argument from nature’s evident design to the existence of nature’s unseen Designer; their independent convictions about the Designer made them receptive to this kind of Designer’s handiwork all around them in nature.
The roots of science and its ongoing development up till our own era therefore depend on theologies – on emancipation from the theology and accompanying worldview of the Greeks and on the adoption of the Judaeo-Christian theology and worldview first developed among the Hebrews. These are sharp alternatives, not matters of degree.
I am now placing Philoponus and the Faraday-Maxwell combination at two of the key points in the history of science, where they broke from the ontology, epistemology and cosmology of the Greek dualist worldview, and replaced it with a more unified, relational and dynamic understanding that corresponds more closely to the way things actually are in the universe. The breakthrough occurred in principle in the 6th c. and might have moved into practice much earlier but for the tragic fate of Philoponus, for which Christians were mainly to blame. The dualist position not only of the Greeks but also of the Axial faiths of Asia was long in the dying in the science of the Western world, for its final obsequies only began in the middle of the 19th c.
Christianity in the happenstance theory
Modern historians of science are mostly prepared to accept a modicum of Judaeo-Christian influence as a contributory factor among the complex of factors evident in that history, but not as the essential basis. I fully recognize that this worldview although absolutely necessary is not in itself sufficient for the rise of science which had to await the historical appearance of alphabetic languages, decimals, the re-discovery of the Greek natural philosophers, Arabic enumeration, universities, technologies such as accurate time measurement and the telescope and microscope, and socio-economic and political changes that provided wealth, leisure and freedom of inquiry and debate, not forgetting the unpredictable individuals of genius like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. Then this multi-factor theory asserts that this fortunate combination of factors, happening in the later centuries of a Europe civilized by Christendom, this unique mix at last had all the ingredients for the birth of science in the 17th c. It is the “happenstance” view of history, asserting that there was no primacy or hierarchy among these factors, and that such a combination might well have occurred in a number of other great cultures – China with its amazing technologies and wealth of resources is often the favoured alternative, although below we see that this was rejected by its chief authority .
This so-called happenstance assembly of factors was by no means casual but was interlocked in known and unknown ways, and especially interlocked with some aspect or other of the comprehensive worldview that was ousting that of the Greeks. At this level there are the three sharp cosmological alternatives that I have presented in the opening sections of The Roots of Science, and this essay is a fuller account of how I have come to choose the Judaeo-Christian option.
This is the “revisionist” position – properly it should be “radical revisionist” since all history is liable to have a degree of revision, or simply “recasting” as in my title. It was well summarized over five pages in an essay by Rolf Gruner back in 1975 (but with no mention of Philoponus), and then rejected as a biased apologetic rather than serious history .
The rejection of revisionist history
A compact rejection of the “revisionist thesis” occurs in an excellent book to which I am much indebted, Geoffrey Cantor’s Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist , which studies the relation between Faraday’s science and his Christian belief as a devoted member of this small (now extinct) Christian church. Unfortunately there is a gratuitous paragraph in the Epilogue summing up the “extreme version” of the revisionist argument, wherein “its proponents (usually Protestants) argue that Christianity and Christianity alone provided the essential soil from which modern science grew”. I am guilty therefore of extremism, which more balanced historians presumably avoid, but I do share this with eminent Catholics, notably Pierre Duhem (Catholic physicist-historian), and especially Stanley Jaki (Benedictine physicist-historian).
“Extremism” is a senseless criterion when thus applied. Must the truth about nature be balanced somewhere between the opposed extremes of Aristotle and Philoponus? One of the Fathers, Origen, tried something like this when he demoted the divine and perfect heavenly bodies to the status of fallen angels, nearer to the class of us human beings, but that didn’t improve his astrology. Nor did the truth about the solar system lie in some balance between Ptolemy’s geocentrism and the heliocentrism of Copernicus. Ptolemy was simply wrong, and when Kepler came to refine the Copernican system it was not by any movement towards the Ptolemaic. A “balanced view” applies when evaluating a large complex of factors and should mean “giving each factor its due”; when applied simpliciter to the many either/or situations in history it quickly becomes ridiculous. Sometimes the truth happens to be at an extreme of some range of possibilities. Shunning of extremes is certainly not a principle of epistemology.
Cantor’s paragraph then proceeds: “There are many arguments against this strong version of the revisionist thesis: for example, it depreciates Greek, Islamic and Chinese science.” Even in my small The Roots of Science I took particular care to avoid this and devoted some five pages to outlining Egyptian, Greek, Indian and Chinese achievements, and later some seven pages to those of Islam, and the impasse that prevented the further development of Islamic science.
He then adds the question as to why, on the revisionist theory, “modern science had to wait in the wings during some 16 centuries of Christianity”. We might ask the parallel question of why the Greek influence had to wait a similar length of time between its classical period in the Athenian academies and its massive impact on mediaeval Western Europe. The collapse of the Hellenic and Roman empires and the rise of the Islamic are well-known factors, and the second factor, the entrance of Islam, is shared by both questions. There is nothing at all unusual in what Cantor turns into a criticism.
In the Christian case I have explained the two main causes of this delay. Firstly, it was internal conflicts and misunderstandings that long prevented the epochal work of Philoponus from bearing fruit. Secondly, the Judaeo-Christian worldview, though essential and basic, was not sufficient in itself to support the emergence of modern science in the 17th c.; the convergence of other contributory factors was also required, and some of these were themselves products of mediaeval Christendom. Even if freed from his anathema Philoponus would probably not have been followed up in the “dark ages”; and then his battles with Aristotelianism would still have had to be fought again by others in the succeeding mediaeval period.
Any historian knows that Christianity was far from “waiting in the wings during some 16 centuries”, as it were idling instead of snapping into modern science. It spent some six centuries articulating its new theology and untangling itself from Greek and gnostic influences, some five centuries providing the only framework for administration and scholarship after the collapse of the Roman empire, then four centuries setting up the first great attempt at a synthesis between the Gospel and culture in public life known as Christendom. This included fighting the renewed Aristotelianism, founding universities as an institutional base for science, encouraging scholarship further in mathematics and physics, and finally attempting a radical internal critique of its own history in the Reformation. It had a pretty busy 16 centuries where it was deeply involved in the - to us - slow processes of history; and when the times were ready it was mainly Christians with a biblical view of creation who took the great leap forward and then founded the Royal Society, the first “scientific guild” in England.
Cantor’s final criticism is that “revisionists are hard put to find passages in the Bible that are manifestly conducive to modern science”. The answer lies not in some verses of literal support, but in the doctrine of creation and its Creator contained in those outstanding first two chapters of Genesis, in Psalm 104 and running through the whole Bible. More precisely, this worldview makes science possible with its orderly structured universe and with human minds similarly structured to understand this, and makes science necessary if humans are to carry out their responsible stewardship within creation and to worship with understanding . It is not revisionism that “turns out to be untenable” but rather each sentence in this unfortunate paragraph.
If not the Greeks, then the Chinese?
The main alternative contender for the origins of science is China, as presented by the greatest Western sinologist of the 20th c., Joseph Needham. His multi-volume and enthusiastic Science and Civilization in China is a fascinating account of the manifold and amazing achievements of Chinese technology and scientific interests when Europe consisted mostly of barbarian tribes. I cannot resist one example: in the 2nd c. BCE they had rigs with steel drilling bits on the end of sectioned bamboo pipes, operated like a modern hammer drill with both rotary and vertical motion, penetrating over 600 metres for natural gas and for brine, and then burning the gas to evaporate the brine for production of salt. And along with technology there were more theoretical achievements such as concerning magnetism, and including decimals and place value for numerals – according to Needham, before these were discovered in India.
The question therefore that faced him was why science developed only in the West when China was so far ahead in so many areas both practical and theoretical. In The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West Needham returns to this question at the end of every essay, and repeatedly admits “the undeniable fact that modern science was born in Europe and only in Europe” . In attempted explanation he rules out Caucasian racial superiority, and also the happenstance theory for this “is to declare the bankruptcy of history as a form of enlightenment of the human mind”.
His explanations include the defects of Chinese philosophy, especially that “It was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed beforetime”. The “ideas of a Supreme Being … present from the earliest times, became depersonalized so soon and … lacked the idea of creativity, that they prevented the … conception of laws ordained from the beginning by a celestial lawgiver for non-human nature” – i.e. laws of nature . The arbitrary dualism of the Yin and Yang structure of the universe, and the polytheism of lesser gods, were no substitute for such a rational, personal ultimate being; the contrast with the Judaeo-Christian worldview is obvious.
Needham (1900-95) was a liturgically-minded Anglo-Catholic with a liberal theology mixed with the Marxism common among Cambridge intellectuals in the 1930s. He had actually tried out a vocation for the priesthood. His Christianity therefore was especially unfitted to recognize the Judaeo-Christian view of the universe and its law-giving Creator as the exact answer to the defect he identified so accurately in Chinese culture. Instead of looking to what he saw as an old-fashioned pre-scientific Christian tradition, he declared over and over again that the explanation of the European birth of science would emerge from fuller analysis not of the theological but of the sociological factors. In this weak answer Needham focussed on the Renaissance which brought the Greek originators of science into play, along with the development of mercantile and industrial capitalism lacking in China but free to support and exploit new developments in Europe. He was therefore not what many would make him, a “revisionist” on behalf of China, and he was a long, long way from the Hebrew worldview I have summarized in the synagogue, which lay behind a Philoponus .
Explaining and closing the gap in the history of science
In finding the roots of science in the Judaeo-Christian worldview I do not intend to denigrate the immense amount of scholarly work in the history of science by professional historians and scientists in its short history since the 1930s. They could not possibly have been expected to start by looking to the Hebrews who had neither science nor notable technology and little philosophy, much less by learning Hebrew and studying the Hebrew Scriptures and the history of Israel and of its places of worship. Nor can they be expected to have found any significant cosmology or worldview in such a mundane object as the synagogue. Yet again, they cannot be blamed for not exploring the Christian theologians of the patristic period and its lead up to Philoponus. Indeed many modern patristic scholars themselves show little sense of his significance, for they are not geared to the history of science, and he is uniformly absent from church histories. From the viewpoint of many in other disciplines in a modern university, and indeed for too many in the churches, the study of Israel is archaic, and the early Christian centuries are seen as full of hair-splitting debates about arcane and useless matters such as an alleged trinitarian God and the incarnate divinity of Jesus.
This atmosphere does not encourage would-be historians of science to look in the Judaeo-Christian direction, so that most have hardly even heard of Philoponus. All this means that the evidence from some two millennia of history that has proved to be of the greatest cultural significance in the making of the modern world has been effectively ignored in the history of science, and certainly in its most popular exponents. This defect is of the utmost seriousness, but the blame can hardly be placed upon these modern scholars; they have been the victims of the resources, the institutions and the culture with which they have been presented. The current emphasis upon the relevance of context within their own discipline applies firstly and clearly to themselves.
My own history and resources have been unexpectedly rich in the very areas where the science historians have been deprived. In no sense is this or my personal discovery of Philoponus to my credit, although I may perhaps take some satisfaction from seeing his significance and relating this to the same significance in the synagogue. In New Testament teaching the Jerusalem temple is not replaced by the synagogue but by the personalized “new temple” as in the Epistle to the Hebrews. By the same token there is no physical temple in the vision of
>millions of others, may believe what ever you want, but it will not change
>one single item of that which is true.
an excellent principle which I'm happy to enforce as fully as I can.
>I say there is no god. That is where is begins and where it ends. You say
there is... and nearly 6 billion others say there is but not one will agree
what is the mind of god.. When is the last time you have heard of an atheist
taking the life of another
This line of abuse is one of the more bold rackets tried on
by polemical atheists. The record-holders for mass murder are
militant atheists - Stalin, Mao (40M), etc. And the ways of life,
for those they didn't kill, imposed by these vicious paranoids were
incomparably more terror-laden than anything done by even the worst
excesses of Christendom (which came to an end many centuries ago).
Can you not admire the ethics behind the attached Kipling? What
atheist regime ever achieved decency on such a scale?
>, molesting a child
Rapes by the Red Army as it moved westward to Berlin have
recently been assessed in Paul Beavor's book at around a million.
You think they drew the line at age 16, or 15, or ... ?
Are you not aware of the Mongols' record-winning mass
slaughters? You think they left children out of their 10^5-at-a-time
massacres?
>, stealing from funds set aside
>for the poor... but on the other, how many 'religious' people have?
Interesting that you keep behind rhetorical q's, rather than
asserting any facts. Is this a sign of awareness how far your
insinuations are from the truth?
>
>You can make all claims you wish, as did the majority of Australians did
>concerning Linda Chamberlain, and it will not change the process of life..
>Take a look at ALL the nations where Islam is the main religion and you will
>find a single common factor. In the realm of science, they have contributed
>all most nothing..
There was an interesting brief period when they did - see attached.
>They are technological parasites, feeding off the
>knowledge of others while contributing little in return. Look at them and
>you are seeing a possible future of the US...
I am not primarily concerned to advocate monotheism, tho' I
do think it has a better record on the whole than atheism or other
religions. My primary aim is to point out that one monotheism has
done much better than Judaism let alone Islam.
But then in turn I say that has been a mere 'effortless
byproduct' in this world of preparing for the next.
As I said, our differences would appear to be minimally
susceptible to email. Perhaps we can meet if you ever visit Ak.
cheers
R
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Robt Mann [mailto:robtm@xtra.co.nz]
>Sent: Friday, 26 August 2005 8:32 a.m.
>To: William Ball
>Subject: Re: Intelligent Design?
>
>Dear Wm Ball,
>Your perspective is so different
>from mine that we probably can't get far by email.
>But, just in case, I send some notes that may be of interest.
>I've already pointed out that, whatever
>IDT may be, it certainly isn't an oxymoron.
>
>
>>Scientific method is not a belief, it is the rules set forth to test
>beliefs
>>and Intelligent Design is an oxymoron, with accent is on moron.
>>
>>From time to time I emerge from my cloistered world up here on my hill
>where
>>I commune with bright, kind, intelligent and talented people only to find
>>there still reign a host of muddled minded citizens masquerading as
>>knowledgeable on the subject of evolution, pontificating the merits of
>>Intelligent Design or some similar moronic babble.
>
>
>
>MannGramR: On the roles of mutation v. selection
>March 2004
>
>Neo-Darwinian theory resulted from
>merging 4 lines of theory: mutation,
>selecting-out of the less fit, genetics, and
>population dynamics. It is touted by aggressive
>atheists e.g R Dawkins, S Weinberg, L Wolpert,
>claiming it is a thorough explanation of how
>species evolved.
>NeoDarwinism is at last going thru some
>sceptical examination - and is faring badly as
>in my opinion it deserves to because it can't
>explain much.
>Too few realise that natural selection is
>envisaged only as decreases in the reproduction,
>and therefore after "1 generation the abundance,
>of mutants that are somehow less fit for their
>environment at the successive times when they
>live. No creativity is hinted at in this
>'natural rogueing' role. Natural selection is
>actually claimed only to *narrow* the variance.
>In the strict version, explicitly atheistic,
>natural selection is blind, operating only to
>disfavour those who breed less on the 'strength
>of properties expressed at the time. The
>environment which does the selecting is assumed
>to be utterly unintelligent.
>All the creativity in evolution is thus,
>in this theory, assigned to mutation. This
>process is normally stated to be random - not
>at all to any plan but merely changing nucleic
>acids (DNA or RNA) randomly (through damage by
>radiation or chemical mutagens, etc).
>If you can believe that randomness can
>lead - with remarkable foresight - to
>coordinated ecosystems, or even so much as a
>single cell, I suggest you read N Broom 'How
>Blind is The Watchmaker?' (IVP 2001).
>
>A reason why I summarise this controversy
>is that many have assumed neoDarwinism is well
>founded and a sufficient basis for predicting
>how, say, bees or their pathogens will evolve in
>this or that changed environment.
>Gene-tampering is probably the most
>hazardous 'technology', threatening a wide
>variety of novel epidemics & pathogens. Agencies
>(e.g the NZ govts's quasi-judicial ERMA) claiming
>to assess these hazards in GMOs are bluffing.
>More & more scientists are coming to the view
>that this is a major example of the emperor's new
>clothes.
>In addition to pointing out how
>neoDarwinism is inadequate, we must point out the
>next step forward in this line of theorising -
>morphogenic fields.
>
>R
RECASTING ESTABLISHMENT HISTORY
“THE ROOTS OF SCIENCE”
Harold Turner
Presented abbreviated as a lecture to the symposium 'Science and Christianity',
Auckland 01-4-21.
pub. in 'Science & Christianity' ed. L. R. B. Mann
University of Auckland Centre for Continuing Education 2001
267p pbk, with 14 illustrations
pp.149-176
The 20th century saw the previous century’s fascination with the idea of progress replaced by a focus on the term ‘culture’ as a basic reference point. All human beings and all societies live within one or more cultures; nothing human escapes the cultural. One way of exploring the concept further is to see a culture as made up of the ways in which we habitually relate to the whole human context – the physical context of the natural world, the social context of our fellow humans, and the transcendent context of the spiritual realm .
It is the internal relations of two of these, the first and the last, that I deal with in this paper. We relate to the natural world through technology and our knowledge of science, and to the transcendent realm through our religions. On this occasion our theme is “Science and (one particular religion) Christianity”. We are therefore dealing with two of the basic features of the Western culture to which we primarily belong: with the central place it gives to science, and with its major religious inheritance from Western European Christendom. These features cannot be examined only in their contemporary forms but first of all historically, for “a culture without a history is like someone without a memory”. The history of science, although less than a century old as a discipline, has become essential to our self-understanding; it can help us to see why and how science became such a dominant feature of our culture. The history of Christianity is vastly older but can still produce new dimensions, as we shall see when we come to the long-lost John Philoponus below.
What am I doing here?
In my “Investigative Journey Through the World’s Religions” I found the “Roots of Science” in the same historical milieu as the roots of Christendom, within the emerging culture of the Hebrew people over the two millennia BCE. Science and Christianity, as two of the basic cultural dimensions of Western culture, had their roots historically intertwined. This was in stark contradiction of the received version of the history of science taught in our educational systems. Science, we are told, came from the Greeks, with small inputs from the Arabs and the Indians, and perhaps the Chinese. While still recognizing the specific contributions of each of these peoples I have ventured to say that science developed in spite of their cultures, and only because of the peculiar features of the culture of a small and insignificant people, the Hebrews.
I am by no means the first to make this radical recasting of the history of science, and I am dependent on substantial historical scholars largely bypassed by the establishment – people such as M. B. Foster in the 1930s when the subject was taking shape as a discipline, C. N. Cochrane in 1940 on the basic intellectual bankruptcy of Graeco-Roman culture, and since then Sam Sambursky, Stanley Jaki, C. B. Kaiser, H. P. Nebelsick, Richard Sorabji and T. F. Torrance among others. Most of these scholars are grouped together by the history of science establishment and dismissed as “revisionists”. You will seldom find their names in the indexes or bibliographies of the histories of science, and that in itself starts to tell the story I am exploring.
Now these are all professionals in science, history or philosophy, so how is it that I, neither scientist nor historian, come to be writing about the “historical roots” of science, and making the claim that one of the figures I identify in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, John Philoponus of the 6th century, should be seen as the greatest theoretical natural philosopher before Isaac Newton? How brash can these New Zealanders be?
Laying foundations in Hebrew culture
So I ask myself, how have I come so late in life to be so emphatic on such an unexpected subject for which I had no obvious preparation? The question then becomes autobiographical, and I do not find the answer in my first year of basic sciences as an engineering student, nor in the two years as a demonstrator in the first experimental psychology laboratory in New Zealand, at the university in Christchurch. I now see that the answer to my question lies in another area altogether. The answer begins later, in 1936; there was an entrance scholarship to the theological college of the Presbyterian Church in Dunedin based on an examination in elementary Hebrew to be acquired before theological training – a rather unexpected idea for New Zealand. I needed the money and I mugged up enough Hebrew to win it; I don’t know if there were any other candidates. Then for three years Hebrew was a normal requirement, and later I acquired a B.D. degree where it was also essential.
None of this comes anywhere near making me a Hebrew scholar, but it came in handy when in 1955 I had gone to Britain and was applying for any teaching work that came up. I even had enough nerve, or desperation, to apply for a lectureship in Old Testament in something called the University College of Sierra Leone, wherever that was. The position was offered to a real Old Testament scholar, but he withdrew. It seems I was the only other person with “Hebrew” in his c.v. and who was prepared to go to a country in West Africa formerly known as “the white man’s grave”.
By this queer route I found myself teaching Old Testament in what was recognized as an overseas college of the University of Durham – teaching for the Durham B.A.(Theology) for the laity, where Hebrew was not required, although of course it remained important for the teacher. So for the next seven years I was immersed in the Old Testament. This was an enjoyable and stimulating experience, especially in the multi-cultural situation of the tribal religions and cultures of West Africa. Of course I had no idea that I was getting the feel of that Hebrew culture where I was over 30 years later to find the roots of science.
Religious studies and discovery of the synagogue
During these years I stumbled across the works of the then doyen of religious studies, Mircea Eliade of Chicago, and I discovered this new tool for the study of religions and the world-views at the base of all cultures. Then in 1963 I went to teach religious studies in the new University of Nigeria amid yet another set of cultures. All around was virgin territory for religious research. Besides the tribal shrines and Muslim mosques of Nigeria there were hosts of churches derived from Christian missions and the many varieties of independent African-founded denominations that had in Sierra Leone become a major research subject for me. So one of my projects concerned places of worship, in Nigeria and across all religions.
Fifteen years later this work led to my From Temple to Meeting House . Historical and comparative study revealed that the Hebrew synagogue represented a radical revolution in places of worship, over against the classic sacred places of shrine and temple. The following table sets forth the many layers of contrasts I had found between the temple form of worship and the new form constituted by the synagogue .
TEMPLE FEATURES SYNAGOGUE FEATURES
Special consecrated place or building Any secular and non-consecrated building
Gradation of sanctity towards a sanctuary No gradation of sanctity within building
Sanctuaries as special holy places with altars No sanctuaries or altars
Priestly control, conduct and leadership Lay (rabbis) control, conduct and leadership
Worship occasional, for personal needs, and on major communal occasions Worship regular for all, on daily, weekly, etc. basis, plus special communal occasions
Celebrate mythological and natural events Celebrate formative historical events
Observational worship: main ritual acts delegated to specialists – priests Participatory, corporate worship by the whole congregation
Sacrificial offerings and complex rituals Non-sacrificial, with simple rituals
Special education confined to priests Education and edification for all.
Community centres for ritual purposes only Centres for multiple and secular purposes
This led to a two-part typology of worship places for religious studies, the temple type on the one hand, and the meeting house type on the other – hence the title of the book. The latter form first appeared in history in the Jewish synagogue, and then became the ancestor and norm of the churches and mosques in the related Semitic religions, Christianity and Islam. In comparison with the quite different temples of antiquity the synagogue had nothing going for it, either architecturally or aesthetically, and all it needed was ten men in a room in a private house. It was not a sacred place, not consecrated, had no sacrifices or rituals; it had teaching rabbis instead of ordained priests, and in principle it was no different from a Quaker meeting house. When the synagogue was developing, the Jews had no inkling of what they were initiating, but in terms of the history and phenomenology of religions this was a revolution transcending all others in religious history.
I was then entirely innocent of seeing any significance in this for the history of science, just as the reader will be wondering where all this is getting us on the same subject. But it was apparent that the synagogue was the most explicit and visible expression of this so distinctive Hebrew culture with its radically de-sacralized view of nature – a totally new worldview in human history. That is why in this discussion it occupies the central place as representative of the first formulations of the view of the created world in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the synagogue, matter, space, time and human beings had all been de-sacralized.
Encountering Philoponus
These are some of the main features of my intellectual autobiography up to 1979, but there was still no sign of insights into “the roots of science”. Then in the Scottish Journal of Theology Professor T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh reported a conference in London in 1983 of 75 scholars devoted to the study of a 6th-c. Christian layman of whom I had never heard. This was John Philoponus, a philosopher in the great Academy in Alexandria. I already knew Torrance as a leader in the relations between theology and science, in which I was interested in a general sort of way. Now Torrance was presenting Philoponus’ natural philosophy as a key development in the history of science. This was worth following up, which I have been doing with growing fascination ever since.
Now how did Philoponus shape my thinking and link up with Hebrew culture and its synagogue on the one hand, and with the book I have written on the other? We must start from Aristotle of Athens, the most comprehensive and influential thinker in antiquity in almost all realms. He dominated European thought until well into its second millennium and continues to provide courses of study in our universities . Likewise he dominates the history of science when its origins are traced to the Greeks. Here we are concerned only with Aristotle’s natural philosophy, especially with his physics, the basic science.
John Philoponus (ca. 490 - ca. 566; the name means workaholic) has been called the most learned man of his time, and the Academy at Alexandria was for long established as the greatest centre of learning in the Graeco-Roman world. He was an expert on Aristotle, for whom he had the greatest respect; he had adopted much of his system and wrote commentaries on nine of his works. In these he was led to make a number of radical rejections of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, all of which proved essential for the later development of what we know as science .
De-sacralizing the heavens
One of the most radical changes was to reject the distinction between the earth as an imperfect sub-lunary body and all the other supra-lunary bodies, outside the orbit of the moon; these were perfect, animated and divine beings, a view which is the basis of astrology. For Philoponus all bodies, earthly and heavenly, were made of the same stuff. The light of the stars was the same as the light of a glow-worm – a sheer heresy in the Greek world.
Nor was the universe eternal, or moving in eternal cycles of time; it had a beginning and now had a history, for it was made out of nothing by the Creator God of the Scriptures, not by mere fabrication out of pre-existing material. These radical changes involved a totally new view of the fundamentals of the physical universe. Matter, and with it space, had been de-sacralized, as well also as time. Nor did space contain any inherently sacred places beyond human scrutiny and control. The whole universe outside the earth had been de-divinized and brought into the same categories as this imperfect earth. Matter, space and time were all of a piece anywhere in the universe and were open to human investigation.
This was a revolutionary worldview, asserting the unity and uniformity of the whole universe. Philoponus was rejecting what C. N. Cochrane called “the most vicious of heresies, the heresy of two worlds” . The basic distinction now was between the Creator and the creation, between the sacred located in the divine, and the secular universe where human beings were placed and for which they were responsible. With this new natural philosophy the world had been cleared of gods and spirits, declared to be the good creation of the one rational God, and the foundations had been laid ready for the study of the universe that we know as science.
Impetus: a second form of motion
Philoponus’ second critique concerned another basic concept in physics, that of the motion of material bodies. For Aristotle this was always due to a mover external to the body moved. The issue was discussed in terms of the motion of a projectile. Aristotle explained this as due to the air displaced from the front end rushing down alongside the projectile and then turning in to prevent a vacuum developing behind it and so impelling the projectile as an external force from the rear; a void was an impossibility for Aristotle.
Philoponus made mock of this as “bordering on the fantastic”. He proposed a thought-experiment where 10,000 wind machines blew upon the rear of a row of military projectiles balanced upon the wall of a fortress. Instead of taking off into flight, he said, they would simply fall to the ground a little away from the wall; which of course was true. Philoponus’ caustic comment was matched by my wife, for before I had quite finished explaining Aristotle’s view she burst into laughter! I know it is not quite fair to mock a great man, for his theory was all of a piece with the rest of his physics; but this was simply wrong, as Philoponus’ simple thought-experiment would have shown him if tested. The experimental method, however, was still some two millennia ahead of Aristotle, and another millennium of Philoponus.
In place of all motion being due to an external cause Philoponus proposed a further kind of motion imparted to the projectile and then retained internally by it when the external force was removed. This transfer from external to internal force opened up the concept of impetus given to a moving body. This was a radical development in physics that was further developed by the time of Newton into the concepts of inertia and the momentum possessed by a moving object. This was Newton’s first law of motion – that once launched, a moving body would continue in a straight line indefinitely, unless something interfered. Although Philoponus regarded the internal force not as permanent but as fading out , he had made the radical break from the system of Aristotle into kinetic theory.
A natural philosophy replacing Aristotle's
In other breaks from Aristotelian orthodoxy Philoponus affirmed the reality of a vacuum or void, and anticipated Galileo on the equal acceleration of bodies of different weights when dropped together from a height. Aristotle had taught that their speeds would be proportional to their weights. Philoponus also replaced Aristotle’s static theory of light by a dynamic theory of particles moving from the external seen object to the eye at almost infinite velocity; this is congruent with James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery that both light and electro-magnetic radiations travelled at the same very high speeds.
It would be pretentious to downgrade Aristotle, perhaps the greatest and most influential mind of antiquity; despite his errors in these areas he offered the greatest overall stimulus by any one person towards what has emerged as science. But Aristotle’s physics was simply wrong on the eternity of the universe, on the dualism of its two divisions perfect and imperfect, and therefore on the different composition of the heavens as against the earth, wrong again on the impossibility of a void, on the cause of the motion of a projectile, and on the rate of acceleration of dropped objects.
It is these remarkable corrections by Philoponus, seen as 6th-c. anticipations of Galileo, Newton and Maxwell, that support my description of Philoponus as the greatest natural philosopher before Newton. When we consider also that all this was without benefit of the experimental method and mathematical proofs that mark modern science we are compelled to ask where Philoponus got it all from. The answer to this question will bring us back to where we left off with Hebrew culture and the synagogue.
Were there earlier thinkers among the Greeks who anticipated Philoponus in his new ideas? The chief candidate for this role has been the learned astronomical observer Hipparchus of Nicaea (ca.190 - ca.25 BCE) in whom Galileo and many modern scholars have found the precursor of the impetus theory. In the 1993 London conference on Philoponus, Michael Wolff effectively disposed of an Hipparchian origin, placed Hipparchus firmly back within Aristotelianism, and concluded that apart from Philoponus there was no ancient author who argues for impetus in any sense .
Scientific stirrings among the Ionians
In the 6th c, a de-sacralized universe had appeared among the very first Greek philosophers, in the colonists in the cities of Miletus and Ephesus in the Ionian area of Asia Minor. Here Thales and others took the first critical steps towards science, towards a rational and unified view of the universe. They asked new questions that sought causes within nature itself, and so left the capricious Olympian gods out. They were materialists and monists with no personification or deification of nature; they totally de-sacralized it. Likewise, another Ionian, Democritus in the 5th c, saw the world as the random movement of tiny atoms – a mechanistic view that returned in the 17th century of our era and is still influential in science and the popular mind today.
In the same 6th c. other new scientific ideas emerged among Greek colonists to the west, in southern Italy, where Pythagoras (originally an Ionian) developed a unified view of the world as either actually consisting of numbers or at least ordered mathematically. For this and his work in arithmetic and geometry that anticipated Euclid he has been called “the father of science”. There was a potentiality here to de-sacralize the world, like the other Ionians; on the contrary there was a religious side to the Pythagorean movement with features that were no advance on those found in various tribal faiths and their religious cultures.
Then in the 5th c. another of the pre-Socratic philosophers and again an Ionian, Anaxagoras, had brought new ideas of the universe to Athens itself. Based on the evidence of a meteorite he suggested that the heavenly bodies might be composed of stone-like materials as found on earth, and that the sun was a large incandescent stone. This de-sacralization anticipated Philoponus' views a millennium later, and also what Galileo saw through his telescope after a further millennium. For such heresy Anaxagoras was prosecuted and had to return to Ionia.
Philosophers’ revival of the sacred
In the great 4th c. BCE Plato and Aristotle would have none of these first sights of science, for in removing divinity from the world the Ionians had also deprived it of plan and purpose. So the Athenian philosophers restored these features to the world of nature in the form of Plato’s Demiurge, a rational divine craftsman, or of Aristotle’s Prime Unmoved Mover. These were living deities, far removed from the anthropomorphic Greek gods. Ultimately, however, they were no more than philosophers’ creations which were never able to become the objects of worship in the cult of any actual religion.
Despite its magnificent deposits in literature, art and architecture, its philosophic wrestlings and scientific searchings, its Euclid and Archimedes, its late flowering in Ptolemy and Galen, despite “the glory that was Greece”, its gods were either too close and too human, or too remote and impersonal. Greece went into decline and its great Athenian schools were closed by the 2nd c. CE. A wholly new theology was needed, a re-thinking of what was meant by “divinity”. Amid the decline of the Graeco-Roman world, this was supplied by the theology developing among the unimportant Hebrew people and in the ensuing Christian tradition. As C. N. Cochrane put it in philosophic terms , the new doctrine of the trinitarian God answered the unsolved Greek problem of the relation of the one to the many, the relation of the ultimate unities of the philosophers to the rampant pluralism of the Olympic divinities.
And so to return empty-handed after our search among the Greeks for the origins of Philoponus’ radical departure from Aristotelian natural philosophy. In fairness to Aristotle we must remember that both he and Philoponus were working deductively from their respective worldviews. They got no closer to the later experimental inductive methods than Aristotle with his remarkable biological researches, and Philoponus with his imaginative thought-experiments and some common-sense observations. They were both dependent on the assumptions and concepts of the worldviews available to them, the one in Athens in the 4th c. BCE, the other in Alexandria nearly nine centuries later. In what had happened during those centuries in the world of Philoponus we shall find the clues to his remarkable critiques of Aristotle.
The Alexandrian heritage
Philoponus was working over Aristotle’s questions and answers, but from a quite different “fiduciary stance”. The Academy at Alexandria possessed a long tradition from pre-Christian times. By the second century BCE, here at this same Alexandria the first translation of the Hebrew scriptures had been completed, into Greek as the Septuagint, which later gave Christian scholars ready access to the book of Genesis with its creation stories. Around the turn of the millennium Alexandria had been the largest Jewish city in the world with Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, as its greatest Jewish scholar. From the 2nd c. CE Alexandria had been a major centre of church organization and Christian theology and remained so during the five centuries of Christian thinkers, the patristic period, the age of the Fathers of the Church that produced the classic or ecumenical creeds.
There was also the new doctrine of the created universe, although less prominent in the creeds. By the end of the 1st c. CE Clement of Rome was rejecting Greek dualism, insisting that there was only one universe, all of a piece, created good and orderly by God. In The Roots of Science I have summarized the similar contributions of Clement’s successors: Athenagoras in Alexandria itself, Tertullian, the other Clement (of Alexandria), Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, and Boethius with his great “Hymn to the Creator” and only a decade younger than Philoponus. Further afield Basil in Cappadocia affirmed the same single created universe, and used everyday observations in support – the eternity of the universe was not represented by the circle, because to draw it one had to start and stop somewhere. Likewise he was on the verge of impetus theory in its alternative circular form when he likened the Creator setting the universe in motion to a child setting a top spinning – continuing indefinitely if there was no resistance.
Amid much debate a new doctrine of the universe was being defined. As the patristic period was ending it provided a new cultural atmosphere in natural philosophy, and it was Philoponus who articulated this in a way that has remained substantially intact ever since.
We should also observe that the only place of Jewish worship that the Christian scholars ever saw was the synagogue which implicitly and publicly summed up the central feature of the new worldview, a de-sacralized universe. There is no suggestion that Philoponus ever thought in these particular terms about places of worship; but for me I had already taken the synagogue as an authentic expression of the biblical worldview where the roots of his natural philosophy also lay. This is how the unexpected intrusion of this new figure into my thinking made sense, as I explored Philoponus working out the physical behaviour of a de-divinized Judaeo-Christian creation in ways that supported my synagogue thesis.
Why then do we hear no more of him?
The immediate question arises: if Philoponus is of this stature why does he not replace the Greeks, and especially Aristotle the most influential of them all, in the succeeding history of science? There are many factors of various import in the answer. The Roman empire was collapsing, and Philoponus stood at the apparent end of Graeco-Roman culture, with the invasions of tribal barbarians from the north and of Islamic armies from east and south. The Greek-speaking Academy at Alexandria came to an end when the city was captured in 646 by the Muslims and much of its library of Greek manuscripts was carried off to their centre of learning in Damascus. Here, and later in their new city of Baghdad and at the Nestorian Christian centre at Nisibis which Islam controlled, these manuscripts were translated into Syriac and Arabic, but not into Latin. Thus it was that the cultural deposits of classical antiquity, including Aristotle and his later commentators and critics such as Philoponus, lay in the east, out of reach of the Latin-speaking Western scholarship during its so-called “dark ages”.
This loose term covers some six succeeding centuries when there were cathedral and monastic schools with their more modest libraries, developed for the education of the clergy. The fate of Philoponus’ scientific achievements was tied to the sad fate of great centres of learning such as the academies at Alexandria, Athens and elsewhere. These were not replaced until the mediaeval European universities developed in the west, in the 12th to the 14th centuries, more independently of the church schools and with wider agenda. These gave science its necessary institutional base, but they were still largely tied to their limited Latin resources, and knew little directly of Plato or Aristotle and almost nothing of Philoponus.
Then classical learning began to filter through to the west by renewed contact through merchants and Crusaders, especially the Fourth Crusade which looted Constantinople in 1204, and above all through the Muslim invasions and the Islamic scholars and resources they brought with them. Thus began the European recovery of the impressive resources of classical Greece that had been preserved and translated in Islam’s eastern centres of learning. Aristotle was rediscovered, along with his commentators and Philoponus among them. Widely distributed Arabic scholars such as the Persian Avicenna (980-1037), and the Spaniards Avempace (d. 113
and Averroes (1126-119, were well aware of the dispute between Aristotelianism and Philoponus over impetus and the eternity of the universe and other matters, but came to no agreed conclusions, and in effect favoured Aristotle. Zimmerman points out why the Christians who should have been promoting Philoponus and so hastening the development of science were in fact doing the opposite – since he was an embarrassment to them. As Zimmerman puts it:“… the name of Philoponus did not … inspire trust and admiration … his reputation was flawed. For in the eyes of posterity he had doubly disgraced himself by embracing the short-lived Tritheist faction within the Monophysite party and by attacking … his own school (the philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Proclus) from behind ... His writings, then and later, enjoyed notoriety rather than authority … His impetus theory seems to be a case in point: it was adopted without due credit given to its author.”
A heretical “monophysite”?
With these theological charges of heresy we come to the heart of the tragic history and subsequent obscurity of Philoponus. Not long before his time, in 451, the Council of Chalcedon had debated the relation between the two “natures” of Jesus Christ, the divine and the human. It had apparently reconciled the different formulas presented, and issued the famous four-point epistemological guidelines that I suggest are still basic to all thinking today . Different parties, however, were using key words in different senses; the Constantinople (Byzantium) theologians were still under the influence of Greek dualism, whereas the Alexandrians were suspected of a monist emphasis upon the one “nature”, the divine, and so were branded as heretical Monophysites (one “phusis” or “nature”). The issue was vital, and had really been neither solved nor settled at Chalcedon.
Ultimately it arose from the fact that the new Judaeo-Christian worldview was being hammered out by the early Christian Fathers in Alexandria with greater freedom there from Aristotelianism than in the heart of the Byzantine empire. This new worldview, like any such major change, required changed meanings in old terms and some new terms altogether. The New Testament had already done this within the common Greek language of its day; Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein did it again in physics, and we have all had to repeat the process in the new computer world.
This process had begun among predecessors of Philoponus at Alexandria such as Athanasius (d. 373) and Cyril (375-444), as well as Severus (465-535) at Antioch. It is impossible here to follow the various political, ecclesiastical and theological factors at work in several centuries of turgid history, nor the various degrees, as it were, of monophysitism, and the arguments about the use of key words and the effects of different contexts upon their meanings. The overall result was that the Byzantines won and Philoponus was posthumously placed under an anathema as a heretical monophysite and tritheist by the third Council of Constantinople (680-81). This was confirmed by Photius, the powerful Patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th c. “Aristotle became the one officially licensed philosopher of the Byzantine world.” This “retarded scientific development for a thousand years and contributed to the domination of Aristotelianism in the West. That was one of the greatest tragedies in the history of thought.”14
Henceforth, and most importantly when the universities and the sciences were developing in Europe, Christian scholars eschewed him. Aquinas, for example, being no scientist, firmly rejected the impetus theory of projectile motion in favour of Aristotle’s view . Philoponus the heretic was left to the Muslims. Although their theology could not accommodate to him, it was through them that his ideas about the universe and impetus, etc., percolated through without acknowledgement and surfaced as new discoveries for use in the controversies with the Aristotelians. It is true that Christian critique of Aristotelian science took specific shape in the 219 propositions issued in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris that included most of Philoponus’ positions, and later scholars like Buridan and Oresme made advances in impetus and other scientific theory, using the resources of the same Judaeo-Christian tradition upon which Philoponus drew. But he himself had almost vanished from the scene.
The long wait for recognition
The anathema of 681 remained in place for over 13 centuries until through the initiative of Professor T. F. Torrance the Greek Orthodox Church formally lifted it in the 1990s. In a series of studies, some unpublished, Professor Torrance has detailed the language issues, especially as between the terms for “nature” and for “reality” or “truth” . He has shown that Philoponus was no monophysite or tritheist, and also why he was misunderstood in these ways, as he sought to go beyond the static thought-world and logic of the Greeks into the more dynamic way of thinking opened up by his ideas about impetus and about light. This judgement is confirmed by the way the eastern churches, Coptic, Syrian and Armenian, rejected as “monophysite” by Western churches for well over a millennium, have in more recent times been informally recognized as orthodox.
A setback of “a thousand years” – a vast exaggeration, surely? Not if one realizes that when the great scientific development came in the 17th century it was still distorted by the continuing Greek dualism of Descartes and later of Kant. It was something like a millennium after Photius that Faraday and Maxwell broke through to a new dynamic and relational way of thinking, with fields of force that had their first anticipations in the writings of Philoponus. As Christians, all working from their fiduciary stance in trinitarian relational theology, they might well have understood one another.
Here we may speculate upon one of the great might-have-beens of history, greater even than the 17th-c. prospect of a French-speaking North America, or the mid-19th-c. possibility of a nominally Christian China under the Taiping revolution. If Christians had used Philoponus instead of suppressing him, the mediaeval dominance of Aristotle might have ended sooner, and the experimental method and other prerequisites might have developed faster. The historians have missed this might-have-been, but history is full of examples and only some of the more obvious ever receive attention.
The rediscovery of Philoponus after a millennium began in the Renaissance period, when the newly accumulated resources of classical culture through Arabic channels made their public impact on Europe, and the effect of church anathemas on any of their authors might well have been counter-productive among the Renaissance humanists. In the 16th c. the recent advent of printing made the works of Aristotle and all his commentators readily available in Greek, and these were usually shortly followed by Latin translations. Thus it was that Philoponus at last became freely available, as evidenced by his Physics appearing in Latin versions nine times between 1546 and 1581 .
The major figures in the 17th-c. scientific revolution therefore had access to Philoponus, and Galileo thought highly of him. The question then arises: why does he seem to have fallen out of sight for the second time, and again for centuries? In the founding period of modern science most of the leading figures were Christians of one kind or another, so that as a major and early Christian critic of Aristotle he might even have received a certain respect. I have asked around on this question and no-one seems to have an answer. It seems inadequate to suggest that his basic ideas had already been developed beyond his formulations, and that experimental and mathematical methods had replaced his deductive procedures, so that he would not be attuned to the modern scientific atmosphere. The 17th-c. scholars must be excused as not being historians of science in the new 20th-c. manner.
The re-rediscovery of Philoponus
The modern re-rediscovery might be said to have begun in 1847 when the early contribution of Philoponus to the development of impetus theory was warmly recognized by the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt . There was a flurry of interest in the decade around the year 1900, when the Berlin Academy of Sciences published German translations of some of Philoponus’ works. Von Humboldt was picked up and developed rather uncertainly by Emil Wohlwill in an essay in 1906 . But the first to take Philoponus seriously in the history of impetus theory was one of the founders of the modern history of science, Pierre Duhem, as in a 1913 essay . Only eight years later, the only reference to Philoponus in the great 12-volume Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics was in an article on “Tritheism” (of all places) where he was described as a “distinguished Aristotelian”, a monophysite and virtually a tritheist – wrong at every point. This is doubly offensive when I find it was written by the professor of systematic theology in the university where I had my longest and happiest stay, Aberdeen. Unhappily, and surprisingly, this great encyclopaedia, finished in 1921, is still in print in 2001 and so continues to propagate this major error.
The availability of Philoponus in English for serious study commences in 1948 with seven pages of text from his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics . A similar source followed in 1955 , and by 1962 Philoponus rated discussion in a whole final chapter . One might have expected more than one passing reference in Stanley Jaki’s Gifford Lectures in 1974-75, but he devotes three pages to Philoponus in his 1986 Science and Creation . The main work now is the collection of scholarly essays on Philoponus, some of which have been quoted above, edited by Richard Sorabji in 1987 . That the publishing programme of reliable texts initiated at the 1983 London conference is well under way is indicated by the items by or associated with Philoponus now in the library of the University of Auckland. Apart from two translations in French and German, and the early works mentioned above and Sorabji, there are at last checking twelve works of Philoponus himself in English; all of these have been added since 1983, and most in the last few years.
Clearly he is coming into his own in the history of science. But much has yet to be done for he does not rate a personal entry in the recent 900-page Reader’s Guide to the History of Science . It is an illuminating exercise to look for the name of Philoponus in the indexes of works by historians of both science and of Christianity. The content of history of science and Church history courses would be equally revealing. Be prepared for disappointment, for total absence or a mere passing mention or even for gross error. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church has an entry for Philoponus, but still in 1997 leaves him as a condemned monophysite .
Philoponus and the synagogue
It might appear that in this extensive treatment of the neglected Philoponus we are a long way from the synagogue, which I used as a sign of the Judaeo-Christian de-sacralization of the world. Yet behind our account there has been the ongoing articulation of the Christian doctrine of the created world, whether recognized or not as providing the basic worldview and metaphysics necessary for the work of science – a basis I have summed up in the uniqueness of the synagogue among the world’s places of worship. Since my study in this area was published in 1979 there have been two crowded decades of discovery of Philoponus and the Christian Fathers in support of my de-sacralization thesis and its meaning for science.
That is my story. First the apprenticeship in studies of the Hebrew Scriptures, then the application of religious studies to places of worship and discovery of the revolutionary significance of the synagogue, followed by realizing that the de-sacralization of the world represented so vividly in the synagogue was the same as the de-sacralized worldview of this new figure John Philoponus. And so it was that I ventured to write The Roots of Science, showing that the abandonment of the world of temples and the collapse of the Aristotelian world were different expressions of the Judaeo-Christian view of the universe. Since this book was confined to the historical roots of science up to the 17th-c. developments, I found I had to extend this history into our own era in the subsequent Frames of Mind, and as a further testing of the thesis as to the necessary relation between science and the Christian religion.
From dualistic Cartesianism to relational field theory
This I did with critiques of the dualism of two key figures, Descartes and Kant, and with inquiry into the inter-relation of faith and science in Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – the key figures in the transposition from Cartesianism into the scientific world of Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr and so many others of distinction. The biographies of Faraday and Maxwell show how their scientific work and their religious faith were distinguished but never separated. We can see that they came to their scientific inquiries with minds already and continually shaped by the unique trinitarian relational view of God, and found that this was reflected in the relational structures of nature, with their interacting fields of force. They were not producing an argument from nature’s evident design to the existence of nature’s unseen Designer; their independent convictions about the Designer made them receptive to this kind of Designer’s handiwork all around them in nature.
The roots of science and its ongoing development up till our own era therefore depend on theologies – on emancipation from the theology and accompanying worldview of the Greeks and on the adoption of the Judaeo-Christian theology and worldview first developed among the Hebrews. These are sharp alternatives, not matters of degree.
I am now placing Philoponus and the Faraday-Maxwell combination at two of the key points in the history of science, where they broke from the ontology, epistemology and cosmology of the Greek dualist worldview, and replaced it with a more unified, relational and dynamic understanding that corresponds more closely to the way things actually are in the universe. The breakthrough occurred in principle in the 6th c. and might have moved into practice much earlier but for the tragic fate of Philoponus, for which Christians were mainly to blame. The dualist position not only of the Greeks but also of the Axial faiths of Asia was long in the dying in the science of the Western world, for its final obsequies only began in the middle of the 19th c.
Christianity in the happenstance theory
Modern historians of science are mostly prepared to accept a modicum of Judaeo-Christian influence as a contributory factor among the complex of factors evident in that history, but not as the essential basis. I fully recognize that this worldview although absolutely necessary is not in itself sufficient for the rise of science which had to await the historical appearance of alphabetic languages, decimals, the re-discovery of the Greek natural philosophers, Arabic enumeration, universities, technologies such as accurate time measurement and the telescope and microscope, and socio-economic and political changes that provided wealth, leisure and freedom of inquiry and debate, not forgetting the unpredictable individuals of genius like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. Then this multi-factor theory asserts that this fortunate combination of factors, happening in the later centuries of a Europe civilized by Christendom, this unique mix at last had all the ingredients for the birth of science in the 17th c. It is the “happenstance” view of history, asserting that there was no primacy or hierarchy among these factors, and that such a combination might well have occurred in a number of other great cultures – China with its amazing technologies and wealth of resources is often the favoured alternative, although below we see that this was rejected by its chief authority .
This so-called happenstance assembly of factors was by no means casual but was interlocked in known and unknown ways, and especially interlocked with some aspect or other of the comprehensive worldview that was ousting that of the Greeks. At this level there are the three sharp cosmological alternatives that I have presented in the opening sections of The Roots of Science, and this essay is a fuller account of how I have come to choose the Judaeo-Christian option.
This is the “revisionist” position – properly it should be “radical revisionist” since all history is liable to have a degree of revision, or simply “recasting” as in my title. It was well summarized over five pages in an essay by Rolf Gruner back in 1975 (but with no mention of Philoponus), and then rejected as a biased apologetic rather than serious history .
The rejection of revisionist history
A compact rejection of the “revisionist thesis” occurs in an excellent book to which I am much indebted, Geoffrey Cantor’s Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist , which studies the relation between Faraday’s science and his Christian belief as a devoted member of this small (now extinct) Christian church. Unfortunately there is a gratuitous paragraph in the Epilogue summing up the “extreme version” of the revisionist argument, wherein “its proponents (usually Protestants) argue that Christianity and Christianity alone provided the essential soil from which modern science grew”. I am guilty therefore of extremism, which more balanced historians presumably avoid, but I do share this with eminent Catholics, notably Pierre Duhem (Catholic physicist-historian), and especially Stanley Jaki (Benedictine physicist-historian).
“Extremism” is a senseless criterion when thus applied. Must the truth about nature be balanced somewhere between the opposed extremes of Aristotle and Philoponus? One of the Fathers, Origen, tried something like this when he demoted the divine and perfect heavenly bodies to the status of fallen angels, nearer to the class of us human beings, but that didn’t improve his astrology. Nor did the truth about the solar system lie in some balance between Ptolemy’s geocentrism and the heliocentrism of Copernicus. Ptolemy was simply wrong, and when Kepler came to refine the Copernican system it was not by any movement towards the Ptolemaic. A “balanced view” applies when evaluating a large complex of factors and should mean “giving each factor its due”; when applied simpliciter to the many either/or situations in history it quickly becomes ridiculous. Sometimes the truth happens to be at an extreme of some range of possibilities. Shunning of extremes is certainly not a principle of epistemology.
Cantor’s paragraph then proceeds: “There are many arguments against this strong version of the revisionist thesis: for example, it depreciates Greek, Islamic and Chinese science.” Even in my small The Roots of Science I took particular care to avoid this and devoted some five pages to outlining Egyptian, Greek, Indian and Chinese achievements, and later some seven pages to those of Islam, and the impasse that prevented the further development of Islamic science.
He then adds the question as to why, on the revisionist theory, “modern science had to wait in the wings during some 16 centuries of Christianity”. We might ask the parallel question of why the Greek influence had to wait a similar length of time between its classical period in the Athenian academies and its massive impact on mediaeval Western Europe. The collapse of the Hellenic and Roman empires and the rise of the Islamic are well-known factors, and the second factor, the entrance of Islam, is shared by both questions. There is nothing at all unusual in what Cantor turns into a criticism.
In the Christian case I have explained the two main causes of this delay. Firstly, it was internal conflicts and misunderstandings that long prevented the epochal work of Philoponus from bearing fruit. Secondly, the Judaeo-Christian worldview, though essential and basic, was not sufficient in itself to support the emergence of modern science in the 17th c.; the convergence of other contributory factors was also required, and some of these were themselves products of mediaeval Christendom. Even if freed from his anathema Philoponus would probably not have been followed up in the “dark ages”; and then his battles with Aristotelianism would still have had to be fought again by others in the succeeding mediaeval period.
Any historian knows that Christianity was far from “waiting in the wings during some 16 centuries”, as it were idling instead of snapping into modern science. It spent some six centuries articulating its new theology and untangling itself from Greek and gnostic influences, some five centuries providing the only framework for administration and scholarship after the collapse of the Roman empire, then four centuries setting up the first great attempt at a synthesis between the Gospel and culture in public life known as Christendom. This included fighting the renewed Aristotelianism, founding universities as an institutional base for science, encouraging scholarship further in mathematics and physics, and finally attempting a radical internal critique of its own history in the Reformation. It had a pretty busy 16 centuries where it was deeply involved in the - to us - slow processes of history; and when the times were ready it was mainly Christians with a biblical view of creation who took the great leap forward and then founded the Royal Society, the first “scientific guild” in England.
Cantor’s final criticism is that “revisionists are hard put to find passages in the Bible that are manifestly conducive to modern science”. The answer lies not in some verses of literal support, but in the doctrine of creation and its Creator contained in those outstanding first two chapters of Genesis, in Psalm 104 and running through the whole Bible. More precisely, this worldview makes science possible with its orderly structured universe and with human minds similarly structured to understand this, and makes science necessary if humans are to carry out their responsible stewardship within creation and to worship with understanding . It is not revisionism that “turns out to be untenable” but rather each sentence in this unfortunate paragraph.
If not the Greeks, then the Chinese?
The main alternative contender for the origins of science is China, as presented by the greatest Western sinologist of the 20th c., Joseph Needham. His multi-volume and enthusiastic Science and Civilization in China is a fascinating account of the manifold and amazing achievements of Chinese technology and scientific interests when Europe consisted mostly of barbarian tribes. I cannot resist one example: in the 2nd c. BCE they had rigs with steel drilling bits on the end of sectioned bamboo pipes, operated like a modern hammer drill with both rotary and vertical motion, penetrating over 600 metres for natural gas and for brine, and then burning the gas to evaporate the brine for production of salt. And along with technology there were more theoretical achievements such as concerning magnetism, and including decimals and place value for numerals – according to Needham, before these were discovered in India.
The question therefore that faced him was why science developed only in the West when China was so far ahead in so many areas both practical and theoretical. In The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West Needham returns to this question at the end of every essay, and repeatedly admits “the undeniable fact that modern science was born in Europe and only in Europe” . In attempted explanation he rules out Caucasian racial superiority, and also the happenstance theory for this “is to declare the bankruptcy of history as a form of enlightenment of the human mind”.
His explanations include the defects of Chinese philosophy, especially that “It was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed beforetime”. The “ideas of a Supreme Being … present from the earliest times, became depersonalized so soon and … lacked the idea of creativity, that they prevented the … conception of laws ordained from the beginning by a celestial lawgiver for non-human nature” – i.e. laws of nature . The arbitrary dualism of the Yin and Yang structure of the universe, and the polytheism of lesser gods, were no substitute for such a rational, personal ultimate being; the contrast with the Judaeo-Christian worldview is obvious.
Needham (1900-95) was a liturgically-minded Anglo-Catholic with a liberal theology mixed with the Marxism common among Cambridge intellectuals in the 1930s. He had actually tried out a vocation for the priesthood. His Christianity therefore was especially unfitted to recognize the Judaeo-Christian view of the universe and its law-giving Creator as the exact answer to the defect he identified so accurately in Chinese culture. Instead of looking to what he saw as an old-fashioned pre-scientific Christian tradition, he declared over and over again that the explanation of the European birth of science would emerge from fuller analysis not of the theological but of the sociological factors. In this weak answer Needham focussed on the Renaissance which brought the Greek originators of science into play, along with the development of mercantile and industrial capitalism lacking in China but free to support and exploit new developments in Europe. He was therefore not what many would make him, a “revisionist” on behalf of China, and he was a long, long way from the Hebrew worldview I have summarized in the synagogue, which lay behind a Philoponus .
Explaining and closing the gap in the history of science
In finding the roots of science in the Judaeo-Christian worldview I do not intend to denigrate the immense amount of scholarly work in the history of science by professional historians and scientists in its short history since the 1930s. They could not possibly have been expected to start by looking to the Hebrews who had neither science nor notable technology and little philosophy, much less by learning Hebrew and studying the Hebrew Scriptures and the history of Israel and of its places of worship. Nor can they be expected to have found any significant cosmology or worldview in such a mundane object as the synagogue. Yet again, they cannot be blamed for not exploring the Christian theologians of the patristic period and its lead up to Philoponus. Indeed many modern patristic scholars themselves show little sense of his significance, for they are not geared to the history of science, and he is uniformly absent from church histories. From the viewpoint of many in other disciplines in a modern university, and indeed for too many in the churches, the study of Israel is archaic, and the early Christian centuries are seen as full of hair-splitting debates about arcane and useless matters such as an alleged trinitarian God and the incarnate divinity of Jesus.
This atmosphere does not encourage would-be historians of science to look in the Judaeo-Christian direction, so that most have hardly even heard of Philoponus. All this means that the evidence from some two millennia of history that has proved to be of the greatest cultural significance in the making of the modern world has been effectively ignored in the history of science, and certainly in its most popular exponents. This defect is of the utmost seriousness, but the blame can hardly be placed upon these modern scholars; they have been the victims of the resources, the institutions and the culture with which they have been presented. The current emphasis upon the relevance of context within their own discipline applies firstly and clearly to themselves.
My own history and resources have been unexpectedly rich in the very areas where the science historians have been deprived. In no sense is this or my personal discovery of Philoponus to my credit, although I may perhaps take some satisfaction from seeing his significance and relating this to the same significance in the synagogue. In New Testament teaching the Jerusalem temple is not replaced by the synagogue but by the personalized “new temple” as in the Epistle to the Hebrews. By the same token there is no physical temple in the vision of
08/26/05
Cuthroat Christans: How Far American Christianity Has Fallen...! [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 11:11:33 PM
Subject: [ecoversity] Situation: How Far American Christianity Has Fallen...!
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 01:13:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: fred woody
Reply-To: ecoversity@yahoogroups.com
To: ecoversity@yahoogroups.com
This is really very sad in a way ... all three versions
of the Ten Commandments include that one about...
"Thou shalt not kill".
1. That particular commandment prohibits murder. We have to kill to live; neither Judaism nor Christianity has ever been confused about that.
2. The headline 'Cuthroat Christans' vaguely implies that Christians tend to commit more murders than some other unspecified groups. Their last major religious wars were centuries ago. Within the past one century, the top-ranking mass murderers have been Stalin, Mao, and other militant atheists.
Or, if you insist on centuries-old evidence as allegedly relevant to what Christianity offers today, look into the all-time record-holders the Mongols.
R
http://www.wfmynews2.com/news/local_state/local_article.aspx?storyid=47339
Reverend Pat Robertson Says US Should Kill Venezuelan President
Associated Press, Maila Rible
8/22/2005
Virginia Beach, VA -- The founder of the Christian
Broadcasting Network says the United States should
assassinate Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez.
On Monday's broadcast of "The 700 Club," the Reverend
Pat Robertson said, "We have the ability to take him
out, and I think the time has come that we exercise
that ability."
Chavez, who often expresses strident opposition to US
policies and influence, has spent the last several
days in Cuba meeting with the island's communist
leader Fidel Castro.
Calling the president of oil-rich Venezuela a threat
to US security, the Reverend Robertson said
assassinating Chavez would be "a whole lot cheaper
than starting a war." He added, "It's a whole lot
easier to have some of the covert operatives do the
job and get it over with."
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 01:13:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: fred woody
Reply-To: ecoversity@yahoogroups.com
To: ecoversity@yahoogroups.com
This is really very sad in a way ... all three versions
of the Ten Commandments include that one about...
"Thou shalt not kill".
1. That particular commandment prohibits murder. We have to kill to live; neither Judaism nor Christianity has ever been confused about that.
2. The headline 'Cuthroat Christans' vaguely implies that Christians tend to commit more murders than some other unspecified groups. Their last major religious wars were centuries ago. Within the past one century, the top-ranking mass murderers have been Stalin, Mao, and other militant atheists.
Or, if you insist on centuries-old evidence as allegedly relevant to what Christianity offers today, look into the all-time record-holders the Mongols.
R
http://www.wfmynews2.com/news/local_state/local_article.aspx?storyid=47339
Reverend Pat Robertson Says US Should Kill Venezuelan President
Associated Press, Maila Rible
8/22/2005
Virginia Beach, VA -- The founder of the Christian
Broadcasting Network says the United States should
assassinate Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez.
On Monday's broadcast of "The 700 Club," the Reverend
Pat Robertson said, "We have the ability to take him
out, and I think the time has come that we exercise
that ability."
Chavez, who often expresses strident opposition to US
policies and influence, has spent the last several
days in Cuba meeting with the island's communist
leader Fidel Castro.
Calling the president of oil-rich Venezuela a threat
to US security, the Reverend Robertson said
assassinating Chavez would be "a whole lot cheaper
than starting a war." He added, "It's a whole lot
easier to have some of the covert operatives do the
job and get it over with."
How Terrorism Obstructs Radical Islam
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
August 23, 2005
Do terrorist atrocities in the West, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001 and those in Bali, Madrid, Beslan, and London, help radical Islam achieve its goal of gaining power?
No, they are counterproductive. That's because radical Islam has two distinct wings - one violent and illegal, the other lawful and political - and they exist in tension with each other. The lawful strategy has proven itself effective, but the violent approach gets in its way.
The violent wing is foremost represented by the world's no. 1 fugitive, Osama bin Laden. The popular and powerful prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdog˜an, represents the lawful wing. Even as "Al Qaeda has more state adversaries than nearly any force in history," as Daniel C. Twining observes, political imams like Yusuf al-Qaradawi instruct huge audiences on Al-Jazeera television and visit with the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. As Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr skulks around Iraq, looking for a role, Ayatollah Sistani dominates the country's political life.
Yes, terrorism kills enemies, instills fear, and disrupts the economy. Yes, it boosts morale and recruits non-Muslims to Islam and Muslims to Islamism. It creates an opportunity for Islamists to fight for their favorite causes, such as the elimination of Israel or the disengagement of coalition forces from Iraq. It provides, as Mark Steyn notes, intelligence information on the enemy. And yes, it prompts politically correct talk about Islam being a "religion of peace," with Muslims portrayed as victims.
But for two main reasons, terrorism does radical Islam more harm than good.
First, it alarms and galvanizes Westerners. For example, the July 7 bombings took place during the G8 summit in Scotland, where world leaders were focused on global warming, aid to Africa, and macro-economic issues. In a London minute, the politicians then redirected their attention toward counterterrorism. Thus did the terrorists stiffen, as Mona Charen points out, "whatever small residue of resolve remains in flaccid Western civilization."
More broadly, Mr. Twining notes, "Al Qaeda's rise has produced the kind of great power entente not seen since the Concert of Europe took shape in 1815." (Even the Madrid bombings, an apparent exception, led to a marked strengthening of counterterrorism measures by Spain and other European countries.)
Second, terrorism obstructs the quiet work of political Islamism. In tranquil times, organizations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Council on American-Islamic Relations effectively go about their business, promoting their agenda to make Islam "dominant" and imposing dhimmitude (whereby non-Muslims accept Islamic superiority and Muslim privilege). Westerners generally respond like slowly boiled frogs are supposed to, not noticing a thing.
Thus does the Muslim Council of Britain delight in a knighthood from the queen, enthusiastic support from Prime Minister Blair, influence within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and £250,000 in taxpayer money from the Department of Trade and Industry.
Across the Atlantic, CAIR insinuates itself into an array of important North American institutions, including the FBI, NASA, and Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. It has won endorsements from high-ranking politicians, both Republican (Florida's governor, Jeb Bush) and Democrat (the House Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi). It has organized a meeting of Muslims with Canada's prime minister Paul Martin. It has gotten a Hollywood studio to change a feature film plot and a television network to run a public service announcement. It has goaded a radio station to fire a talk-show host.
Terrorism impedes these advances, stimulating hostility to Islam and Muslims. It brings Islamic organizations under unwanted scrutiny by the media, the government, and law enforcement. CAIR and MCB then have to fight rearguard battles. The July 7 bombings dramatically (if temporarily) disrupted the progress of "Londonistan," Britain's decline into multicultural lassitude and counterterrorist ineptitude.
Some Islamists recognize this problem. One British writer admonished fellow Muslims on a Web site: "Don't you know that Islam is growing in Europe??? What the heck are you doing mingling things up???" Likewise, a Muslim watch repairer in London observed, "We don't need to fight. We are taking over!" Soumayya Ghannoushi of the University of London bitterly points out that Al-Qaeda's major achievements consist of shedding innocent blood and "fanning the flames of hostility to Islam and Muslims."
Things are not as they seem. Terrorism hurts radical Islam and helps its opponents. The violence and victims' agony make this hard to see, but without education by murder, the lawful Islamist movement would make greater gains.
From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/2888
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
August 23, 2005
Do terrorist atrocities in the West, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001 and those in Bali, Madrid, Beslan, and London, help radical Islam achieve its goal of gaining power?
No, they are counterproductive. That's because radical Islam has two distinct wings - one violent and illegal, the other lawful and political - and they exist in tension with each other. The lawful strategy has proven itself effective, but the violent approach gets in its way.
The violent wing is foremost represented by the world's no. 1 fugitive, Osama bin Laden. The popular and powerful prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdog˜an, represents the lawful wing. Even as "Al Qaeda has more state adversaries than nearly any force in history," as Daniel C. Twining observes, political imams like Yusuf al-Qaradawi instruct huge audiences on Al-Jazeera television and visit with the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. As Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr skulks around Iraq, looking for a role, Ayatollah Sistani dominates the country's political life.
Yes, terrorism kills enemies, instills fear, and disrupts the economy. Yes, it boosts morale and recruits non-Muslims to Islam and Muslims to Islamism. It creates an opportunity for Islamists to fight for their favorite causes, such as the elimination of Israel or the disengagement of coalition forces from Iraq. It provides, as Mark Steyn notes, intelligence information on the enemy. And yes, it prompts politically correct talk about Islam being a "religion of peace," with Muslims portrayed as victims.
But for two main reasons, terrorism does radical Islam more harm than good.
First, it alarms and galvanizes Westerners. For example, the July 7 bombings took place during the G8 summit in Scotland, where world leaders were focused on global warming, aid to Africa, and macro-economic issues. In a London minute, the politicians then redirected their attention toward counterterrorism. Thus did the terrorists stiffen, as Mona Charen points out, "whatever small residue of resolve remains in flaccid Western civilization."
More broadly, Mr. Twining notes, "Al Qaeda's rise has produced the kind of great power entente not seen since the Concert of Europe took shape in 1815." (Even the Madrid bombings, an apparent exception, led to a marked strengthening of counterterrorism measures by Spain and other European countries.)
Second, terrorism obstructs the quiet work of political Islamism. In tranquil times, organizations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Council on American-Islamic Relations effectively go about their business, promoting their agenda to make Islam "dominant" and imposing dhimmitude (whereby non-Muslims accept Islamic superiority and Muslim privilege). Westerners generally respond like slowly boiled frogs are supposed to, not noticing a thing.
Thus does the Muslim Council of Britain delight in a knighthood from the queen, enthusiastic support from Prime Minister Blair, influence within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and £250,000 in taxpayer money from the Department of Trade and Industry.
Across the Atlantic, CAIR insinuates itself into an array of important North American institutions, including the FBI, NASA, and Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. It has won endorsements from high-ranking politicians, both Republican (Florida's governor, Jeb Bush) and Democrat (the House Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi). It has organized a meeting of Muslims with Canada's prime minister Paul Martin. It has gotten a Hollywood studio to change a feature film plot and a television network to run a public service announcement. It has goaded a radio station to fire a talk-show host.
Terrorism impedes these advances, stimulating hostility to Islam and Muslims. It brings Islamic organizations under unwanted scrutiny by the media, the government, and law enforcement. CAIR and MCB then have to fight rearguard battles. The July 7 bombings dramatically (if temporarily) disrupted the progress of "Londonistan," Britain's decline into multicultural lassitude and counterterrorist ineptitude.
Some Islamists recognize this problem. One British writer admonished fellow Muslims on a Web site: "Don't you know that Islam is growing in Europe??? What the heck are you doing mingling things up???" Likewise, a Muslim watch repairer in London observed, "We don't need to fight. We are taking over!" Soumayya Ghannoushi of the University of London bitterly points out that Al-Qaeda's major achievements consist of shedding innocent blood and "fanning the flames of hostility to Islam and Muslims."
Things are not as they seem. Terrorism hurts radical Islam and helps its opponents. The violence and victims' agony make this hard to see, but without education by murder, the lawful Islamist movement would make greater gains.
From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/2888
MannGram®: clarifying "the" theory of evolution
May 2005
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand words elsewhere - some at my page http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199 of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 10^9 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 10^9 y, mammals 2 x 10^8 y, and man somewhere in the region 10^6 -10^5 y BP. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first.
However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:
* * *
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The *material* causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.
The *efficient* cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a *final* cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's *formal* cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.
* * *
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."
I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution are always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause?
A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes, but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we, IDTers? And I challenge Dawkins to a public debate about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.
= = =
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
May 2005
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand words elsewhere - some at my page http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199
of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 10^9 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 10^9 y, mammals 2 x 10^8 y, and man somewhere in the region 10^6 -10^5 y BP. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first. However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:
* * *
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The *material* causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.
The *efficient* cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a *final* cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's *formal* cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.
* * *
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."
I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution are always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause?
A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes, but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we, IDTers? And I challenge Dawkins to a public debate about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.
= = =
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
Hi Robert
Thanks for your thoughtful response, and for taking the trouble to write. If I do get to Auckland I may give you a call.
Many thanks,
barney
----- Original Message -----
From: Robt Mann
To: bzwartz
Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2005
Subject: Oz discussion of ID
I insert comments from a theistic evolution viewpoint.
R
Let's have a proper scientific debate
August 18 2005
http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/08/17/1123958129538.html
Intelligent design evokes strong responses. Time for cool investigation, writes Barney Zwartz.
Opponents of intelligent design theories fear the evolution debate has been hijacked by the fundamentalists. I fear they are right, but it's scientistic (blind faith in science) fundamentalists, not religious.
>sorry - it's both.
Intelligent design theorists say evolution is largely demonstrable but is not the result of mere chance. The traditional
>I object to this label for scientistic neoDarwinism. The really traditional approach is exemplified by John Morton, Neil Broom, Wm Temple, etc.
account of a steady but gradual development, they say, is at odds with the incredible complexity of even the simplest cell, whose structures are interdependent and could not develop without each other.
Intelligent design theorists also point to the "anthropic principle", the recognition in the past 30 years that all the seemingly arbitrary constants in physics have one strange thing in common - they are precisely the values needed for the universe to produce life.
>This is all too rarely mentioned
The concept of intelligent design was developed by non-Christian scientists such as molecular biologist Michael Behe
>It is no secret that he is a Catholic. I see no evidence that this distorts his IDT reasoning. Anyone who tries to wipe Behe's IDT because he's a Christian should also wipe Dawkins because he is what Zwartz later describes him as.
, not because of the presuppositions of faith but because science took them there, through difficulties in making the facts fit the theory. (This, after all, is how scientific progress is supposed to happen.)
The trouble is that evolution is an absolute article of faith with some scientists, at least as deep-rooted as God is with creationists. They believe science has or will have the answer to everything, and no other discourse is needed.
>yes that is the current scientism fad.
Take scientist Richard Dawkins, as extreme an anti-religious bigot as I've come across, who says anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is either stupid, insane or wicked. That's a radical moral judgement for a cool, dispassionate believer in rationality.
I suspect the reason for this clenched-fist, eyes-shut commitment to an evolution beyond questioning is that it is the only counter-explanation to God for the existence of life. Doubt that, and the chasm beckons. It is not science that drives people such as Dawkins but an obsession psychologists might be best equipped to explain.
>check
Let me emphasise that I am not against science, which is in general a brilliantly successful and beneficial field of human endeavour, and I do not fear its findings. Nor do I deny evolution. But it must be qualified.
What scientists should properly say is that evolution is the best explanation we have for the development of life, but it has lacunae and difficulties. Thus, like other "best explanations", such as Newtonian physics, it should be open to question.
But let anyone, theist or not, suggest this and hear the howls emerge from the temples of science and watch the defensive artillery deployed even before the arguments are digested. Take the case of Rick Sternberg, who was hounded out of his job as editor of the Smithsonian Institution's journal after publishing a piece sympathetic to intelligent design theory.
Sternberg got the usual approval from three scientific peers, but the article - on the pre-Cambrian fossil record - outraged the academic establishment because the American Association for the Advancement of Science has proclaimed that intelligent design is "unscientific by definition". And here's the point, put by the paper's author, Stephen Meyer: "Rather than critique the paper on its scientific merits, they appeal to a doctrinal statement." The case demonstrates fundamentalist evolutionists' insecurity. As Meyer says: "You don't resort to authoritarianism if you can answer it." Galileo, here we go again.
>This is a fair outline of that scandalous case.
Philosopher Anthony Flew, one of the world's most famous atheists, said last year that scientific developments, particularly in DNA, had led him to accept intelligent design. But he has not become a Christian.
>He announced that he had become a deist. I predict he cannot long dwell in that peculiar position.
That's because these are separate debates. Intelligent design may have theological implications beyond science, but that's not the business of scientists. Their business is to examine the arguments of irreducible complexity with an open mind. And suppose they do find evidence of design, then its author may be beyond the realms of science.
Now it is true that religious fundamentalists in the United States have seized on intelligent design and pushed it beyond science, but its claims shouldn't be discredited simply because of its fellow travellers.
>check
On this page on Friday, Melbourne University lecturer Robert Marshall attacked intelligent design as fundamentalist religious zealotry under another guise, and said the designer was an unprovable assertion. Certainly it is
>this is an unfortunate, excessively generous concession.
- and his counter-proposal of mere chance is equally unprovable. Chance does not produce changes; you need cause and effect for that.
>yes - that latter is the way out of the current confusion.
I agree that theology must not enter scientific endeavour. I want the intelligent design debate to be properly scientific. And I want proponents of science to stop claiming, as some do, that the answers in every field of human life lie within science.
>check - that scientism is the problem
Marshall says science deals with how, not why. If only scientists all really did that - and only that.
Barney Zwartz is religion editor.
Email: bzwartz@theage.com.au
Thanks for your thoughtful response, and for taking the trouble to write. If I do get to Auckland I may give you a call.
Many thanks,
barney
----- Original Message -----
From: Robt Mann
To: bzwartz
Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2005
Subject: Oz discussion of ID
I insert comments from a theistic evolution viewpoint.
R
Let's have a proper scientific debate
August 18 2005
http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/08/17/1123958129538.html
Intelligent design evokes strong responses. Time for cool investigation, writes Barney Zwartz.
Opponents of intelligent design theories fear the evolution debate has been hijacked by the fundamentalists. I fear they are right, but it's scientistic (blind faith in science) fundamentalists, not religious.
>sorry - it's both.
Intelligent design theorists say evolution is largely demonstrable but is not the result of mere chance. The traditional
>I object to this label for scientistic neoDarwinism. The really traditional approach is exemplified by John Morton, Neil Broom, Wm Temple, etc.
account of a steady but gradual development, they say, is at odds with the incredible complexity of even the simplest cell, whose structures are interdependent and could not develop without each other.
Intelligent design theorists also point to the "anthropic principle", the recognition in the past 30 years that all the seemingly arbitrary constants in physics have one strange thing in common - they are precisely the values needed for the universe to produce life.
>This is all too rarely mentioned
The concept of intelligent design was developed by non-Christian scientists such as molecular biologist Michael Behe
>It is no secret that he is a Catholic. I see no evidence that this distorts his IDT reasoning. Anyone who tries to wipe Behe's IDT because he's a Christian should also wipe Dawkins because he is what Zwartz later describes him as.
, not because of the presuppositions of faith but because science took them there, through difficulties in making the facts fit the theory. (This, after all, is how scientific progress is supposed to happen.)
The trouble is that evolution is an absolute article of faith with some scientists, at least as deep-rooted as God is with creationists. They believe science has or will have the answer to everything, and no other discourse is needed.
>yes that is the current scientism fad.
Take scientist Richard Dawkins, as extreme an anti-religious bigot as I've come across, who says anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is either stupid, insane or wicked. That's a radical moral judgement for a cool, dispassionate believer in rationality.
I suspect the reason for this clenched-fist, eyes-shut commitment to an evolution beyond questioning is that it is the only counter-explanation to God for the existence of life. Doubt that, and the chasm beckons. It is not science that drives people such as Dawkins but an obsession psychologists might be best equipped to explain.
>check
Let me emphasise that I am not against science, which is in general a brilliantly successful and beneficial field of human endeavour, and I do not fear its findings. Nor do I deny evolution. But it must be qualified.
What scientists should properly say is that evolution is the best explanation we have for the development of life, but it has lacunae and difficulties. Thus, like other "best explanations", such as Newtonian physics, it should be open to question.
But let anyone, theist or not, suggest this and hear the howls emerge from the temples of science and watch the defensive artillery deployed even before the arguments are digested. Take the case of Rick Sternberg, who was hounded out of his job as editor of the Smithsonian Institution's journal after publishing a piece sympathetic to intelligent design theory.
Sternberg got the usual approval from three scientific peers, but the article - on the pre-Cambrian fossil record - outraged the academic establishment because the American Association for the Advancement of Science has proclaimed that intelligent design is "unscientific by definition". And here's the point, put by the paper's author, Stephen Meyer: "Rather than critique the paper on its scientific merits, they appeal to a doctrinal statement." The case demonstrates fundamentalist evolutionists' insecurity. As Meyer says: "You don't resort to authoritarianism if you can answer it." Galileo, here we go again.
>This is a fair outline of that scandalous case.
Philosopher Anthony Flew, one of the world's most famous atheists, said last year that scientific developments, particularly in DNA, had led him to accept intelligent design. But he has not become a Christian.
>He announced that he had become a deist. I predict he cannot long dwell in that peculiar position.
That's because these are separate debates. Intelligent design may have theological implications beyond science, but that's not the business of scientists. Their business is to examine the arguments of irreducible complexity with an open mind. And suppose they do find evidence of design, then its author may be beyond the realms of science.
Now it is true that religious fundamentalists in the United States have seized on intelligent design and pushed it beyond science, but its claims shouldn't be discredited simply because of its fellow travellers.
>check
On this page on Friday, Melbourne University lecturer Robert Marshall attacked intelligent design as fundamentalist religious zealotry under another guise, and said the designer was an unprovable assertion. Certainly it is
>this is an unfortunate, excessively generous concession.
- and his counter-proposal of mere chance is equally unprovable. Chance does not produce changes; you need cause and effect for that.
>yes - that latter is the way out of the current confusion.
I agree that theology must not enter scientific endeavour. I want the intelligent design debate to be properly scientific. And I want proponents of science to stop claiming, as some do, that the answers in every field of human life lie within science.
>check - that scientism is the problem
Marshall says science deals with how, not why. If only scientists all really did that - and only that.
Barney Zwartz is religion editor.
Email: bzwartz@theage.com.au
The New York Times
August 22, 2005
In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash
By KENNETH CHANG
At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?
The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.
Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world.
In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse - and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice.
Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly.
Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria.
These complex systems are "always associated with design," Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box," said in an interview. "We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed."
It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith.
But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.
"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."
That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.
And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories.
This is possible, in large part, because evolution leaves tracks like the fossil remains of early animals or the chemical footprints in DNA that have been revealed by genetic research.
For example, while Dr. Behe and other leading design proponents see the blood clotting system as a product of design, mainstream scientists see it as a result of a coherent sequence of evolutionary events.
Early vertebrates like jawless fish had a simple clotting system, scientists believe, involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said Russell F. Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego.
Scientists hypothesize that at some point, a mistake during the copying of DNA resulted in the duplication of a gene, increasing the amount of protein produced by cells.
Most often, such a change would be useless. But in this case the extra protein helped blood clot, and animals with the extra protein were more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, as higher-order species evolved, other proteins joined the clotting system. For instance, several proteins involved in the clotting of blood appear to have started as digestive enzymes.
By studying the evolutionary tree and the genetics and biochemistry of living organisms, Dr. Doolittle said, scientists have largely been able to determine the order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot, eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to support this view.
For example, scientists had predicted that more primitive animals such as fish would be missing certain blood-clotting proteins. In fact, the recent sequencing of the fish genome has shown just this.
"The evidence is rock solid," Dr. Doolittle said.
Intelligent design proponents have advanced their views in books for popular audiences and in a few scientific articles. Some have developed mathematical formulas intended to tell whether something was designed or formed by natural processes.
Mainstream scientists say that intelligent design represents a more sophisticated - and thus more seductive - attack on evolution. Unlike creationists, design proponents accept many of the conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural selection, the central mechanisms of evolution, have acted on the natural world in small ways, for example, leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live underground.
Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the notion that all species came from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution.
Although a vast majority of scientists accept evolution, the Discovery Institute, a research group in Seattle that has emerged as a clearinghouse for the intelligent design movement, says that 404 scientists, including 70 biologists, have signed a petition saying they are skeptical of Darwinism.
Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer.
Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/national/22design.html
August 22, 2005
In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash
By KENNETH CHANG
At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?
The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.
Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world.
In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse - and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice.
Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly.
Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria.
These complex systems are "always associated with design," Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box," said in an interview. "We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed."
It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith.
But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.
"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."
That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.
And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories.
This is possible, in large part, because evolution leaves tracks like the fossil remains of early animals or the chemical footprints in DNA that have been revealed by genetic research.
For example, while Dr. Behe and other leading design proponents see the blood clotting system as a product of design, mainstream scientists see it as a result of a coherent sequence of evolutionary events.
Early vertebrates like jawless fish had a simple clotting system, scientists believe, involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said Russell F. Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego.
Scientists hypothesize that at some point, a mistake during the copying of DNA resulted in the duplication of a gene, increasing the amount of protein produced by cells.
Most often, such a change would be useless. But in this case the extra protein helped blood clot, and animals with the extra protein were more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, as higher-order species evolved, other proteins joined the clotting system. For instance, several proteins involved in the clotting of blood appear to have started as digestive enzymes.
By studying the evolutionary tree and the genetics and biochemistry of living organisms, Dr. Doolittle said, scientists have largely been able to determine the order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot, eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to support this view.
For example, scientists had predicted that more primitive animals such as fish would be missing certain blood-clotting proteins. In fact, the recent sequencing of the fish genome has shown just this.
"The evidence is rock solid," Dr. Doolittle said.
Intelligent design proponents have advanced their views in books for popular audiences and in a few scientific articles. Some have developed mathematical formulas intended to tell whether something was designed or formed by natural processes.
Mainstream scientists say that intelligent design represents a more sophisticated - and thus more seductive - attack on evolution. Unlike creationists, design proponents accept many of the conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural selection, the central mechanisms of evolution, have acted on the natural world in small ways, for example, leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live underground.
Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the notion that all species came from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution.
Although a vast majority of scientists accept evolution, the Discovery Institute, a research group in Seattle that has emerged as a clearinghouse for the intelligent design movement, says that 404 scientists, including 70 biologists, have signed a petition saying they are skeptical of Darwinism.
Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer.
Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/national/22design.html
08/20/05
I insert comments from a theistic evolution viewpoint.
R
Let's have a proper scientific debate
August 18 2005
http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/08/17/1123958129538.html
Intelligent design evokes strong responses. Time for cool investigation, writes Barney Zwartz.
Opponents of intelligent design theories fear the evolution debate has been hijacked by the fundamentalists. I fear they are right, but it's scientistic (blind faith in science) fundamentalists, not religious.
>sorry - it's both.
Intelligent design theorists say evolution is largely demonstrable but is not the result of mere chance. The traditional
>I object to this label for scientistic neoDarwinism. The really traditional approach is exemplified by John Morton, Neil Broom, Wm Temple, etc.
account of a steady but gradual development, they say, is at odds with the incredible complexity of even the simplest cell, whose structures are interdependent and could not develop without each other.
Intelligent design theorists also point to the "anthropic principle", the recognition in the past 30 years that all the seemingly arbitrary constants in physics have one strange thing in common - they are precisely the values needed for the universe to produce life.
>this is all too rarely mentioned
The concept of intelligent design was developed by non-Christian scientists such as molecular biologist Michael Behe
>It is no secret that he is a Catholic. I see no evidence that this distorts his IDT reasoning. Anyone who tries to wipe Behe's IDT because he's a Christian should also wipe Dawkins because he is what Zwartz later describes him as.
, not because of the presuppositions of faith but because science took them there, through difficulties in making the facts fit the theory. (This, after all, is how scientific progress is supposed to happen.)
The trouble is that evolution is an absolute article of faith with some scientists, at least as deep-rooted as God is with creationists. They believe science has or will have the answer to everything, and no other discourse is needed.
>yes that is the current scientism fad.
Take scientist Richard Dawkins, as extreme an anti-religious bigot as I've come across, who says anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is either stupid, insane or wicked. That's a radical moral judgement for a cool, dispassionate believer in rationality.
I suspect the reason for this clenched-fist, eyes-shut commitment to an evolution beyond questioning is that it is the only counter-explanation to God for the existence of life. Doubt that, and the chasm beckons. It is not science that drives people such as Dawkins but an obsession psychologists might be best equipped to explain.
>check
Let me emphasise that I am not against science, which is in general a brilliantly successful and beneficial field of human endeavour, and I do not fear its findings. Nor do I deny evolution. But it must be qualified.
What scientists should properly say is that evolution is the best explanation we have for the development of life, but it has lacunae and difficulties. Thus, like other "best explanations", such as Newtonian physics, it should be open to question.
But let anyone, theist or not, suggest this and hear the howls emerge from the temples of science and watch the defensive artillery deployed even before the arguments are digested. Take the case of Rick Sternberg, who was hounded out of his job as editor of the Smithsonian Institution's journal after publishing a piece sympathetic to intelligent design theory.
Sternberg got the usual approval from three scientific peers, but the article - on the pre-Cambrian fossil record - outraged the academic establishment because the American Association for the Advancement of Science has proclaimed that intelligent design is "unscientific by definition". And here's the point, put by the paper's author, Stephen Meyer: "Rather than critique the paper on its scientific merits, they appeal to a doctrinal statement." The case demonstrates fundamentalist evolutionists' insecurity. As Meyer says: "You don't resort to authoritarianism if you can answer it." Galileo, here we go again.
>this is a fair outline of that scandalous case.
Philosopher Anthony Flew, one of the world's most famous atheists, said last year that scientific developments, particularly in DNA, had led him to accept intelligent design. But he has not become a Christian.
>He announced that he had become a deist. I predict he cannot long dwell in that peculiar position.
That's because these are separate debates. Intelligent design may have theological implications beyond science, but that's not the business of scientists. Their business is to examine the arguments of irreducible complexity with an open mind. And suppose they do find evidence of design, then its author may be beyond the realms of science.
Now it is true that religious fundamentalists in the United States have seized on intelligent design and pushed it beyond science, but its claims shouldn't be discredited simply because of its fellow travellers.
>check
On this page on Friday, Melbourne University lecturer Robert Marshall attacked intelligent design as fundamentalist religious zealotry under another guise, and said the designer was an unprovable assertion. Certainly it is
>this is an unfortunate, excessively generous concession.
- and his counter-proposal of mere chance is equally unprovable. Chance does not produce changes; you need cause and effect for that.
>yes - that latter is the way out of the current confusion.
I agree that theology must not enter scientific endeavour. I want the intelligent design debate to be properly scientific. And I want proponents of science to stop claiming, as some do, that the answers in every field of human life lie within science.
>check - that scientism is the problem
Marshall says science deals with how, not why. If only scientists all really did that - and only that.
Barney Zwartz is religion editor.
Email: bzwartz@theage.com.au
R
Let's have a proper scientific debate
August 18 2005
http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/08/17/1123958129538.html
Intelligent design evokes strong responses. Time for cool investigation, writes Barney Zwartz.
Opponents of intelligent design theories fear the evolution debate has been hijacked by the fundamentalists. I fear they are right, but it's scientistic (blind faith in science) fundamentalists, not religious.
>sorry - it's both.
Intelligent design theorists say evolution is largely demonstrable but is not the result of mere chance. The traditional
>I object to this label for scientistic neoDarwinism. The really traditional approach is exemplified by John Morton, Neil Broom, Wm Temple, etc.
account of a steady but gradual development, they say, is at odds with the incredible complexity of even the simplest cell, whose structures are interdependent and could not develop without each other.
Intelligent design theorists also point to the "anthropic principle", the recognition in the past 30 years that all the seemingly arbitrary constants in physics have one strange thing in common - they are precisely the values needed for the universe to produce life.
>this is all too rarely mentioned
The concept of intelligent design was developed by non-Christian scientists such as molecular biologist Michael Behe
>It is no secret that he is a Catholic. I see no evidence that this distorts his IDT reasoning. Anyone who tries to wipe Behe's IDT because he's a Christian should also wipe Dawkins because he is what Zwartz later describes him as.
, not because of the presuppositions of faith but because science took them there, through difficulties in making the facts fit the theory. (This, after all, is how scientific progress is supposed to happen.)
The trouble is that evolution is an absolute article of faith with some scientists, at least as deep-rooted as God is with creationists. They believe science has or will have the answer to everything, and no other discourse is needed.
>yes that is the current scientism fad.
Take scientist Richard Dawkins, as extreme an anti-religious bigot as I've come across, who says anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is either stupid, insane or wicked. That's a radical moral judgement for a cool, dispassionate believer in rationality.
I suspect the reason for this clenched-fist, eyes-shut commitment to an evolution beyond questioning is that it is the only counter-explanation to God for the existence of life. Doubt that, and the chasm beckons. It is not science that drives people such as Dawkins but an obsession psychologists might be best equipped to explain.
>check
Let me emphasise that I am not against science, which is in general a brilliantly successful and beneficial field of human endeavour, and I do not fear its findings. Nor do I deny evolution. But it must be qualified.
What scientists should properly say is that evolution is the best explanation we have for the development of life, but it has lacunae and difficulties. Thus, like other "best explanations", such as Newtonian physics, it should be open to question.
But let anyone, theist or not, suggest this and hear the howls emerge from the temples of science and watch the defensive artillery deployed even before the arguments are digested. Take the case of Rick Sternberg, who was hounded out of his job as editor of the Smithsonian Institution's journal after publishing a piece sympathetic to intelligent design theory.
Sternberg got the usual approval from three scientific peers, but the article - on the pre-Cambrian fossil record - outraged the academic establishment because the American Association for the Advancement of Science has proclaimed that intelligent design is "unscientific by definition". And here's the point, put by the paper's author, Stephen Meyer: "Rather than critique the paper on its scientific merits, they appeal to a doctrinal statement." The case demonstrates fundamentalist evolutionists' insecurity. As Meyer says: "You don't resort to authoritarianism if you can answer it." Galileo, here we go again.
>this is a fair outline of that scandalous case.
Philosopher Anthony Flew, one of the world's most famous atheists, said last year that scientific developments, particularly in DNA, had led him to accept intelligent design. But he has not become a Christian.
>He announced that he had become a deist. I predict he cannot long dwell in that peculiar position.
That's because these are separate debates. Intelligent design may have theological implications beyond science, but that's not the business of scientists. Their business is to examine the arguments of irreducible complexity with an open mind. And suppose they do find evidence of design, then its author may be beyond the realms of science.
Now it is true that religious fundamentalists in the United States have seized on intelligent design and pushed it beyond science, but its claims shouldn't be discredited simply because of its fellow travellers.
>check
On this page on Friday, Melbourne University lecturer Robert Marshall attacked intelligent design as fundamentalist religious zealotry under another guise, and said the designer was an unprovable assertion. Certainly it is
>this is an unfortunate, excessively generous concession.
- and his counter-proposal of mere chance is equally unprovable. Chance does not produce changes; you need cause and effect for that.
>yes - that latter is the way out of the current confusion.
I agree that theology must not enter scientific endeavour. I want the intelligent design debate to be properly scientific. And I want proponents of science to stop claiming, as some do, that the answers in every field of human life lie within science.
>check - that scientism is the problem
Marshall says science deals with how, not why. If only scientists all really did that - and only that.
Barney Zwartz is religion editor.
Email: bzwartz@theage.com.au
Biased 'journalism' purportedly on behalf of churches [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 02:51:48 PM
Anon.
Broadsheet 103 Aug 2005
newsletter of the Churches' Agency on Social Issues {Methodist, Presbyterian, Churches of Christ, Quakers}
Recently [4 months ago] Dr Bob Mann of Auckland wrote to Broadsheet on the subject of xeno-transplantation, saying the churches were failing to produce 'answers' for concerned people and the true experts, who should be listened to, are 'those who have been stringently tested for knowledge and judgement'.
Dr Mann's letter focussed on the possible health benefits of transplanting pancreas cells from pigs into people with diabetes to undertake [sic] their insulin production.
The anon writer then gives 7x the space to comments by chairharpie Audrey Jarvis, purporting to reply to what I'd said - e.g stating as if a fact that my approach is merely scientific and ignores cultural & religious dimensions.
Readers are of course not to be allowed to see what I actually wrote. Here it is; see whether you think the anon 'CASI' writer (Richard Davis?) has been fair.
The editor, Broadsheet,
Churches' Agency on Social Issues
21-4-05
Dear Sir
Audrey Jarvis mentions, in her questions (Ap 2005) about xenotransplantation, experiments transplanting cultured pig pancreas cells into diabetics, which are no longer allowed in New Zealand.
Half a decade on from her taking over 'interchurch' activities on bioethics, Ms Jarvis is still mainly listing questions. By now some answers are known, and I give below some which should be promulgated.
But I think also that this is a good occasion to look into the context. In many important controversies today, media are presenting pseudo-experts who lack the education &/or experience to qualify them as experts. Individuals incapable of discussing or understanding complex technologies are thus misinforming the public, while actual experts are suppressed.
A current example is the victimisation of the much-respected Professor R B Elliott whose treatment for diabetes is being actively pursued in several countries but is no longer allowed in New Zealand.
The government has persistently declared its belief that biotechnology is a main aspect of what they call Knowledge Economy, Bright Future, etc. Elliott's xenotransplants, developed further by his company Diatranz, would appear to fit the bill - and do not entail any gene-tampering.
In a decade of careful experimentation, this noted medical researcher has developed a method of trickling insulin from cells, cultured from pancreas cells of piglets, contained within a retrievable 'tea-bag' floating in the diabetic's peritoneal liquid. The cells are coated to prevent immune reactions, and the patients' immune systems are not interfered with at all. It is misleading to talk about foreign cells proliferating throughout the body - they cannot get out of the 'tea bag' which itself can be removed altogether should any unforeseen trouble emerge.
Of the most recent 18 informed diabetic volunteers, 9 have reported considerable
benefits from the current version of xenotransplants. Permission was sought for a further 24 monitored patients to improve the treatment.
The obvious good question whether pig insulin is safe for humans had been answered by decades of injecting millions of diabetics with pig insulin (purified from pancreas byproduct of meatworks), which is a slightly different chemical from human insulin. But there is a possible hazard from these xenotransplants. I happened to be the scientist who warned Elliott, a decade ago, of the need to monitor for novel viruses in his volunteer xenotransplant recipients. Each of these patients is now closely monitored by Auckland medical-school experts for any signs of such problems. Both the monitoring and the measured health of the pig-pancreas cells are widely agreed to be world-leading.
Why then have Diatranz's proposals for a further 24 patients been blocked for years by Karen Poutasi M.B, director-general of health - most recently through special legislation to abolish Diatranz's normal legal rights to have such proposals considered? This victimising legislative clause, slipped into a Bill on another subject (_viz_ gene-tampering), was approved by a parliamentary committee including Mss Bunkle, Yates, and Fitzsimons, who were given full details by relevant experts but persisted in the victimisation Poutasi had instigated.
In order to understand what has gone wrong, we must see an important trend of the past decade or so: usurpation of expert status. The persons who have forced Diatranz offshore have mostly been not experts but political operatives.
Professor Roger Morris of the NZ veterinary school is a world expert on transfer of animal viruses to humans - a main advisor to the UK government on foot-&-mouth disease and to the Hong Kong government on duck & hen infections jumping into humans. " It's riskier going to the zoo than to have one of these pancreatic cell transplants" declares this expert - adding "and I don't believe it's risky going to the zoo."
Morris conducted a thorough scientific review of the possibilities for infections from the Diatranz pig cells, including pig endogenous retrovirus (PERV). All mammals have many copies in their DNA of so-called 'endogenous retroviruses', which Morris views as probably a key to mammalian pregnancy, instrumental in formation of the placenta. They are called "endogenous" because they replicate only within a cell as nucleic acid (DNA to RNA to DNA) but without ever forming a virus particle, and are transmitted in the germline.
The name 'endogenous retrovirus' is regrettably misleading in much the same way as 'carcinoma in situ' the misnomer for microscopic anomalies of unknown significance in the cervix which are not carcinomas.
DNA sequences in the misnamed category 'endogenous retrovirus' make up by enormous repetition several percent of typical mammalian genomes (total equipage of DNA). The broad architecture of these DNA sequences is similar across most organisms. Many classes of endogenous retrovirus are known, but currently only two similar blocks of DNA, with other distinctive genes, cause human disease through infectious retrovirus: HIV and HTLV-I & its relatives.
There's no reason to believe that even if PERV got established & multiplying in man it would cause disease. The most plausible fear is that it might undergo mutation or recombination to generate a novel retrovirus that might cross species barriers - as presumably HIV did. Retroviruses are notably prone to recombination, though this has not been shown to occur between the pig and the human. The patients are closely monitored for any new viruses.
Infection of immune-intact humans or other mammals by anything originating from genetically unaltered pig tissues has not been demonstrated, despite thousands of attempts to do so over a dozen years. The transplantation of enclosed porcine pancreatic islet cells is an extremely low-risk procedure. Diabetics facing gangrene, blindness, etc within a year or so are not concerned that cancer decades later has not been ruled out - a risk limited to them, as cancer is non-infectious.
Poutasi has posed as ultra-precautionary on this project, while cheerfully condoning far more dubious experiments in GM. This is a case of what we in Australasia call the 'tall poppy syndrome'. But it is also more, and worse, than that. This therapy is being misused as a lightning rod for vague fears - an irrational over-reaction, making the government look cautious while vastly more dangerous procedures go unchallenged.
New Zealand has been a leader in this promising treatment for a nasty disease; we have the healthiest pigs as well as the best monitoring technology. But now New Zealand diabetics will be going overseas for these transplants, which are permitted in such advanced countries as Switzerland, Sweden & the USA.
And all because political power-seekers have usurped expert status.
Their _modus operandi_ is pretty easy to identify, once you've seen its main features. The "science" promoted by the usurpers consists of simplistic slogans, easy to memorize but vague. The prototypical example is "The 'Pap' smear is a good early warning test for cervical cancer" - misleading but the basis for political careers by Bunkle, Coney, & Dame S Cartwright who not merely contradicted but vilified leading experts. A newer example is "Pig viruses might emerge from Diatranz xenotransplants and become endemic in the human", presented repeatedly on TV by an ambitious female politician with a degree in French & music. This saying was, I believe, useful when I stated it a decade ago; but to present it now, instead of expert comment in the light of all that has been found meanwhile, is radically biased.
The science involved in such issues is, unfortunately but incorrigibly, far beyond ordinary citizens' understanding. They cannot make informed judgements on these arcane matters. They must therefore rely on the judgements of the few specialists who do understand the meaning of 'retrovirus' etc. But the media have made hardly any effort to convey expert judgements. Very important issues are thus cynically misused as vehicles for self-publicity by pseudo-experts.
A culture dependent on dangerous technologies will quickly get in trouble this way. (Complex technologies are not the only dangerous ones: look what happens when people feed cows ground-up cow. )
Experts are those who have been stringently tested for knowledge & judgement, not those who merely wish to hijack topics of public concern for personal attention-getting.
This is the context within which the churches are almost comprehensively failing to produce answers for concerned members and the wider public.
Broadsheet 103 Aug 2005
newsletter of the Churches' Agency on Social Issues {Methodist, Presbyterian, Churches of Christ, Quakers}
Recently [4 months ago] Dr Bob Mann of Auckland wrote to Broadsheet on the subject of xeno-transplantation, saying the churches were failing to produce 'answers' for concerned people and the true experts, who should be listened to, are 'those who have been stringently tested for knowledge and judgement'.
Dr Mann's letter focussed on the possible health benefits of transplanting pancreas cells from pigs into people with diabetes to undertake [sic] their insulin production.
The anon writer then gives 7x the space to comments by chairharpie Audrey Jarvis, purporting to reply to what I'd said - e.g stating as if a fact that my approach is merely scientific and ignores cultural & religious dimensions.
Readers are of course not to be allowed to see what I actually wrote. Here it is; see whether you think the anon 'CASI' writer (Richard Davis?) has been fair.
The editor, Broadsheet,
Churches' Agency on Social Issues
21-4-05
Dear Sir
Audrey Jarvis mentions, in her questions (Ap 2005) about xenotransplantation, experiments transplanting cultured pig pancreas cells into diabetics, which are no longer allowed in New Zealand.
Half a decade on from her taking over 'interchurch' activities on bioethics, Ms Jarvis is still mainly listing questions. By now some answers are known, and I give below some which should be promulgated.
But I think also that this is a good occasion to look into the context. In many important controversies today, media are presenting pseudo-experts who lack the education &/or experience to qualify them as experts. Individuals incapable of discussing or understanding complex technologies are thus misinforming the public, while actual experts are suppressed.
A current example is the victimisation of the much-respected Professor R B Elliott whose treatment for diabetes is being actively pursued in several countries but is no longer allowed in New Zealand.
The government has persistently declared its belief that biotechnology is a main aspect of what they call Knowledge Economy, Bright Future, etc. Elliott's xenotransplants, developed further by his company Diatranz, would appear to fit the bill - and do not entail any gene-tampering.
In a decade of careful experimentation, this noted medical researcher has developed a method of trickling insulin from cells, cultured from pancreas cells of piglets, contained within a retrievable 'tea-bag' floating in the diabetic's peritoneal liquid. The cells are coated to prevent immune reactions, and the patients' immune systems are not interfered with at all. It is misleading to talk about foreign cells proliferating throughout the body - they cannot get out of the 'tea bag' which itself can be removed altogether should any unforeseen trouble emerge.
Of the most recent 18 informed diabetic volunteers, 9 have reported considerable
benefits from the current version of xenotransplants. Permission was sought for a further 24 monitored patients to improve the treatment.
The obvious good question whether pig insulin is safe for humans had been answered by decades of injecting millions of diabetics with pig insulin (purified from pancreas byproduct of meatworks), which is a slightly different chemical from human insulin. But there is a possible hazard from these xenotransplants. I happened to be the scientist who warned Elliott, a decade ago, of the need to monitor for novel viruses in his volunteer xenotransplant recipients. Each of these patients is now closely monitored by Auckland medical-school experts for any signs of such problems. Both the monitoring and the measured health of the pig-pancreas cells are widely agreed to be world-leading.
Why then have Diatranz's proposals for a further 24 patients been blocked for years by Karen Poutasi M.B, director-general of health - most recently through special legislation to abolish Diatranz's normal legal rights to have such proposals considered? This victimising legislative clause, slipped into a Bill on another subject (_viz_ gene-tampering), was approved by a parliamentary committee including Mss Bunkle, Yates, and Fitzsimons, who were given full details by relevant experts but persisted in the victimisation Poutasi had instigated.
In order to understand what has gone wrong, we must see an important trend of the past decade or so: usurpation of expert status. The persons who have forced Diatranz offshore have mostly been not experts but political operatives.
Professor Roger Morris of the NZ veterinary school is a world expert on transfer of animal viruses to humans - a main advisor to the UK government on foot-&-mouth disease and to the Hong Kong government on duck & hen infections jumping into humans. " It's riskier going to the zoo than to have one of these pancreatic cell transplants" declares this expert - adding "and I don't believe it's risky going to the zoo."
Morris conducted a thorough scientific review of the possibilities for infections from the Diatranz pig cells, including pig endogenous retrovirus (PERV). All mammals have many copies in their DNA of so-called 'endogenous retroviruses', which Morris views as probably a key to mammalian pregnancy, instrumental in formation of the placenta. They are called "endogenous" because they replicate only within a cell as nucleic acid (DNA to RNA to DNA) but without ever forming a virus particle, and are transmitted in the germline.
The name 'endogenous retrovirus' is regrettably misleading in much the same way as 'carcinoma in situ' the misnomer for microscopic anomalies of unknown significance in the cervix which are not carcinomas.
DNA sequences in the misnamed category 'endogenous retrovirus' make up by enormous repetition several percent of typical mammalian genomes (total equipage of DNA). The broad architecture of these DNA sequences is similar across most organisms. Many classes of endogenous retrovirus are known, but currently only two similar blocks of DNA, with other distinctive genes, cause human disease through infectious retrovirus: HIV and HTLV-I & its relatives.
There's no reason to believe that even if PERV got established & multiplying in man it would cause disease. The most plausible fear is that it might undergo mutation or recombination to generate a novel retrovirus that might cross species barriers - as presumably HIV did. Retroviruses are notably prone to recombination, though this has not been shown to occur between the pig and the human. The patients are closely monitored for any new viruses.
Infection of immune-intact humans or other mammals by anything originating from genetically unaltered pig tissues has not been demonstrated, despite thousands of attempts to do so over a dozen years. The transplantation of enclosed porcine pancreatic islet cells is an extremely low-risk procedure. Diabetics facing gangrene, blindness, etc within a year or so are not concerned that cancer decades later has not been ruled out - a risk limited to them, as cancer is non-infectious.
Poutasi has posed as ultra-precautionary on this project, while cheerfully condoning far more dubious experiments in GM. This is a case of what we in Australasia call the 'tall poppy syndrome'. But it is also more, and worse, than that. This therapy is being misused as a lightning rod for vague fears - an irrational over-reaction, making the government look cautious while vastly more dangerous procedures go unchallenged.
New Zealand has been a leader in this promising treatment for a nasty disease; we have the healthiest pigs as well as the best monitoring technology. But now New Zealand diabetics will be going overseas for these transplants, which are permitted in such advanced countries as Switzerland, Sweden & the USA.
And all because political power-seekers have usurped expert status.
Their _modus operandi_ is pretty easy to identify, once you've seen its main features. The "science" promoted by the usurpers consists of simplistic slogans, easy to memorize but vague. The prototypical example is "The 'Pap' smear is a good early warning test for cervical cancer" - misleading but the basis for political careers by Bunkle, Coney, & Dame S Cartwright who not merely contradicted but vilified leading experts. A newer example is "Pig viruses might emerge from Diatranz xenotransplants and become endemic in the human", presented repeatedly on TV by an ambitious female politician with a degree in French & music. This saying was, I believe, useful when I stated it a decade ago; but to present it now, instead of expert comment in the light of all that has been found meanwhile, is radically biased.
The science involved in such issues is, unfortunately but incorrigibly, far beyond ordinary citizens' understanding. They cannot make informed judgements on these arcane matters. They must therefore rely on the judgements of the few specialists who do understand the meaning of 'retrovirus' etc. But the media have made hardly any effort to convey expert judgements. Very important issues are thus cynically misused as vehicles for self-publicity by pseudo-experts.
A culture dependent on dangerous technologies will quickly get in trouble this way. (Complex technologies are not the only dangerous ones: look what happens when people feed cows ground-up cow. )
Experts are those who have been stringently tested for knowledge & judgement, not those who merely wish to hijack topics of public concern for personal attention-getting.
This is the context within which the churches are almost comprehensively failing to produce answers for concerned members and the wider public.
Geo Monbiot http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1549878,00.html quoth:
Darwinism implies that the only eternal life we have is in the recycling of our atoms. I find that comforting
That article raises several q's. My first is posed by that beginning: if anyone believes their life ceases at death, why would they fear death?
I have long wondered about this. I can see that an 'oblivionist' such as Monbiot claims to be could find impending death annoying - won't be able to finish projects now part-way along, etc. But what could be fearsome about it? If you simply are going to cease to exist, how could that evoke fear?
Monbiot's first sentence also features an error in that Darwinism is merely a theory of how evolution has occurred, and implies nothing about eternal life. It has been used as a weapon to club religion, with the insinuation that it supplants all religion; but this game is a crude bluff. Even if Darwinism were utterly satisfactory as science, it would leave open at the very least deism (the school of thought recently joined by long-time active atheist A Flew).
R
Darwinism implies that the only eternal life we have is in the recycling of our atoms. I find that comforting
That article raises several q's. My first is posed by that beginning: if anyone believes their life ceases at death, why would they fear death?
I have long wondered about this. I can see that an 'oblivionist' such as Monbiot claims to be could find impending death annoying - won't be able to finish projects now part-way along, etc. But what could be fearsome about it? If you simply are going to cease to exist, how could that evoke fear?
Monbiot's first sentence also features an error in that Darwinism is merely a theory of how evolution has occurred, and implies nothing about eternal life. It has been used as a weapon to club religion, with the insinuation that it supplants all religion; but this game is a crude bluff. Even if Darwinism were utterly satisfactory as science, it would leave open at the very least deism (the school of thought recently joined by long-time active atheist A Flew).
R
08/15/05
BLESSING THE BOMBS: THE HIROSHIMA BOMBERS' CHAPLAIN FACES CHRIST
GEORGE ZABELKA
Pax Christi Conference
August, 1985
[This article is excerpted from a speech George Zabelka gave at a Pax Christi
conference in August 1985 (tape of speech obtained from Notre Dame University
Archives). The first two paragraphs are from an interview with Zabelka published in Sojourners magazine, August 1980.]
The destruction of civilians in war was always forbidden by the church, and if a
soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child’s head, I would have told him, absolutely not. That would be mortally sinful. But in 1945 Tinian Island was the largest airfield in the world.
Three planes a minute could take off from it around the clock. Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of children and civilians --- and I said nothing.
I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to the men who were doing it. I was brainwashed! It never entered my mind to protest publicly the consequences of these massive air raids. I was told it was necessary --- told openly by the military and told implicitly by my church’s leadership.
(To the best of my knowledge no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids. Silence in such matters is a stamp of approval.)
I worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights struggle in Flint, Michigan.
His example and his words of nonviolent action, choosing love instead of hate, truth instead of lies, and nonviolence instead of violence stirred me deeply. This brought me face to face with pacifism --- active nonviolent resistance to evil.
I recall his words after he was jailed in Montgomery, and this blew my mind. He said, "Blood may flow in the streets of Montgomery before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood that flows, and not that of the white man. We must not harm a single hair on the head of our white brothers."
I struggled. I argued. But yes, there it was in the Sermon on the Mount, very clear:
"Love your enemies. Return good for evil." I went through a crisis of faith. Either accept what Christ said, as impossible and silly as it may seem, or deny him completely.
For the last 1700 years the church has not only been making war respectable: it has been inducing people to believe it is an honorable profession, an honorable
Christian profession. This is not true. We have been brainwashed. This is a lie.
War is now, always has been, and always will be bad, bad news. I was there. I saw real war. Those who have seen real war will bear me out. I assure you, it is not of Christ. It is not Christ’s way. There is no way to conduct real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus. There is no way to train people for real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.
The morality of the balance of terrorism is a morality that Christ never taught. The ethics of mass butchery cannot be found in the teachings of Jesus. In Just War ethics, Jesus Christ, who is supposed to be all in the Christian life, is irrelevant. He might as well never have existed. In Just War ethics, no appeal is made to him or his teaching, because no appeal can be made to him or his teaching, for neither he nor his teaching gives standards for Christians to follow in order to determine what level of slaughter is acceptable.
So the world is watching today. Ethical hairsplitting over the morality of various types of instruments and structures of mass slaughter is not what the world needs from the church, although it is what the world has come to expect from the followers of Christ.
What the world needs is a grouping of Christians that will stand up and pay up with Jesus Christ. What the world needs is Christians who, in language that the simplest soul could understand, will proclaim: the follower of Christ cannot participate in mass slaughter. He or she must love as Christ loved, live as Christ lived and, if necessary, die as Christ died, loving ones enemies.
For the 300 years immediately following Jesus’ resurrection, the church universally saw Christ and his teaching as nonviolent. Remember that the church taught this ethic in the face of at least three serious attempts by the state to liquidate her. It was subject to horrendous and ongoing torture and death.
If ever there was an occasion for justified retaliation and defensive slaughter, whether in form of a just war or a just revolution, this was it. The economic and political elite of the Roman state and their military had turned the citizens of the state against Christians and were embarked on a murderous public policy of exterminating the Christian community.
Yet the church, in the face of the heinous crimes committed against her members,
insisted without reservation that when Christ disarmed Peter he disarmed all
Christians. Christians continued to believe that Christ was, to use the words of an ancient liturgy, their fortress, their refuge, and their strength, and that if Christ was all they needed for security and defense, then Christ was all they should have. Indeed, this was a new security ethic.
Christians understood that if they would only follow Christ and his teaching, they couldn’t fail. When opportunities were given for Christians to appease the state by joining the fighting Roman army, these opportunities were rejected, because the early church saw a complete and an obvious incompatibility between loving as Christ loved and killing. It was Christ, not Mars, who gave security and peace.
Today the world is on the brink of ruin because the church refuses to be the church, because we Christians have been deceiving ourselves and the non-Christian world about the truth of Christ. There is no way to follow Christ, to love as Christ loved, and simultaneously to kill other people.
It is a lie to say that the spirit that moves the trigger of a flamethrower is the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is a lie to say that learning to kill is learning to be Christ-like. It is a lie to say that learning to drive a bayonet into the heart of another is motivated from having put on the mind of Christ. Militarized Christianity is a lie. It is radically out of conformity with the teaching, life, and spirit of Jesus.
Now, brothers and sisters, on the anniversary of this terrible atrocity carried out by Christians, I must be the first to say that I made a terrible mistake. I was had by the father of lies. I participated in the big ecumenical lie of the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches. I wore the uniform.
I was part of the system. When I said Mass over there I put on those beautiful vestments over my uniform. (When Father Dave Becker left the Trident submarine base in 1982 and resigned as Catholic chaplain there, he said, "Every time I went to Mass in my uniform and put the vestments on over my uniform, I couldn’t help but think of the words of Christ applying to me: Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.")
As an Air Force chaplain I painted a machine gun in the loving hands of the
nonviolent Jesus, and then handed this perverse picture to the world as truth. I sang "Praise the Lord" and passed the ammunition. As Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group, I was the final channel that communicated this fraudulent image of Christ to the crews of the Enola Gay and the Boxcar.
All I can say today is that I was wrong. Christ would not be the instrument to unleash such horror on his people. Therefore no follower of Christ can legitimately unleash the horror of war on God’s people. Excuses and self-justifying explanations are without merit. All I can say is: I was wrong! But, if this is all I can say, this I must do, feeble as it is. For to do otherwise would be to bypass the first and absolutely essential step in the process of repentance and reconciliation: admission of error, admission of guilt.
I was there, and I was wrong. Yes, war is hell, and Christ did not come to justify the creation of hell on earth by his disciples. The justification of war may be compatible with some religions and philosophies, but it is not compatible with the nonviolent teaching of Jesus. I was wrong. And to those of whatever nationality or religion who have been hurt because I fell under the influence of the father of lies, I say with my whole heart and soul I am sorry. I beg forgiveness.
I asked forgiveness from the Hibakushas (the Japanese survivors of the atomic
bombings) in Japan last year, in a pilgrimage that I made with a group from Tokyo to Hiroshima. I fell on my face there at the peace shrine after offering flowers, and I prayed for forgiveness --- for myself, for my country, for my church. Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
This year in Toronto, I again asked forgiveness from the Hibakushas present. I asked forgiveness, and they asked forgiveness for Pearl Harbor and some of the horrible deeds of the Japanese military, and there were some, and I knew of them. We embraced. We cried. Tears flowed. That is the first step of reconciliation --- admission of guilt and forgiveness. Pray to God that others will find this way to peace.
All religions have taught brotherhood. All people want peace. It is only the
governments and war departments that promote war and slaughter. So today again I call upon people to make their voices heard. We can no longer just leave this to our leaders, both political and religious. They will move when we make them move.
They represent us. Let us tell them that they must think and act for the safety and security of all the people in our world, not just for the safety and security of one country. All countries are inter-dependent. We all need one another. It is no longer possible for individual countries to think only of themselves. We can all live together as brothers and sisters or we are doomed to die together as fools in a world holocaust.
Each one of us becomes responsible for the crime of war by cooperating in its
preparation and in its execution. This includes the military. This includes the making of weapons. And it includes paying for the weapons. There’s no question about that.
We’ve got to realize we all become responsible. Silence, doing nothing, can be one of the greatest sins.
The bombing of Nagasaki means even more to me than the bombing of Hiroshima.
By August 9, 1945, we knew what that bomb would do, but we still dropped it. We
knew that agonies and sufferings would ensue, and we also knew—at least our
leaders knew --- that it was not necessary.
The Japanese were already defeated. They were already suing for peace. But we insisted on unconditional surrender, and this is even against the Just War theory. Once the enemy is defeated, once the enemy is not able to hurt you, you must make peace.
As a Catholic chaplain I watched as the Boxcar, piloted by a good Irish Catholic
pilot, dropped the bomb on Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Japan. I knew that St. Francis Xavier, centuries before, had brought the Catholic faith to Japan. I knew that schools, churches, and religious orders were annihilated. And yet I said nothing.
Thank God that I’m able to stand here today and speak out against war, all war. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke out against all false gods of gold, silver, and metal. Today we are worshipping the gods of metal, the bomb. We are putting our trust in physical power, militarism, and nationalism. The bomb, not God, is our security and our strength. The prophets of the Old Testament said simply: Do not put your trust in chariots and weapons, but put your trust in God. Their message was simple, and so is mine.
We must all become prophets. I really mean that. We must all do something for
peace. We must stop this insanity of worshipping the gods of metal. We must take a stand against evil and idolatry. This is our destiny at the most critical time of human history. But it’s also the greatest opportunity ever offered to any group of people in the history of our world --- to save our world from complete annihilation.
Father George Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force, served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and gave them his blessing. Days later he counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of "Fat Man." The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock --- flesh seared, melted, and falling off.
The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: "My God, what have we done?" Over the next twenty years, he gradually came to believe that he had been terribly wrong, that he had denied the very foundations of his faith by lending moral and religious support to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Zabelka died in 1992, but his message, in this speech given on the 40th anniversary of the bombings, must never be forgotten. ]
NAGASAKI MAYOR:
U.S HAS IGNORED INTERNATIONAL COMMITMENTS, MADE NO CHANGE IN STANCE ON NUCLEAR DETERRENCE
KATHLEEN E. MCLAUGHLIN
San Francisco Chronicle
August 10, 2005
The physical devastation is mostly gone or covered over, and the rolling mountains that open into a wide seaport are lush again with greenery.
Still, this forgotten city remembers all too well the day 60 years ago Tuesday when the United States dropped the 4.5-ton bomb called "Fat Man."
Nagasaki is an international city that has become a growing tourist hub in Japan. But it often plays second fiddle to Hiroshima, its unfortunate twin in atomic destruction, even though the devastation wrought here August 9, 1945, was just as heart-wrenching and widespread as that touched off by the first atomic bomb three days earlier and some 200 miles northeast.
Air-raid sirens sounded and bells tolled at 11:02 a.m. Tuesday in Nagasaki as about 6,000 people gathered at the site of the bombing to remember the 40,000 to 70,000 who died instantly and 74,000 others who were horribly wounded that morning. The city added another 2,748 names to its bomb death toll this year, as the hibakusha -- atomic bomb survivors --- age and fade away.
Fumie Sakamoto, a junior high school student home for lunch when the bomb struck Nagasaki, spoke to the crowd with resolve and anger. "The world around me was lost in a cloud of dust," she said, and she ran for shelter in the forest.
"People, clothes ripped and torn, with gaping chest wounds, whose hearts were exposed and could still be seen twitching; people burned so badly one could not tell front from back," she said. "The wood was full of such people."
Sakamoto, dressed in a deep purple kimono, her eyes and voice sharp and clear, said doctors had told her she was bound for death and not worth treating. She somehow survived over a "long and painful road."
"Yet war still persists on this Earth and, far from abolishing nuclear arms, I have heard there are even plans to develop nuclear weapons with new capabilities," she said. "We have devoted our lives to demanding that there never be A-bomb victims again, but why are our voices not heard?"
Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh chastised the United States for continued nuclear proliferation and Japan for taking cover in America's nuclear fold.
"The nuclear weapons states, the United States of America in particular, have ignored their international commitments and have made no change in their unyielding stance on nuclear deterrence," Itoh said. "We strongly resent the trampling of the hopes of the world's people."
Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi --- fresh from dissolving the lower house of parliament a day earlier after losing his battle to privatize the banking arm of the nation's postal service --- spoke briefly and pledged to work toward nuclear nonproliferation. This gathering was much smaller than the one in Hiroshima, but security around Koizumi was far tighter.
Nagasaki's anniversary ceremonies were less staid, packed more emotion and carried more vibrant color than did Hiroshima's.
Nagasaki's famous paper cranes have a lot to do with that. In a tradition started years ago, children from Japan and subsequently around the world make origami cranes to symbolize peace. These vibrant strands of reds, golds, purples and greens now are draped throughout the town on memorials and in the worst-hit areas.
One of those is the site of the rebuilt Urakami Cathedral, which took nearly a direct hit from the atomic bomb. Then called the grandest Catholic church in East Asia, the cathedral was blown to bits and all its clergy killed. This anniversary was very special for the cathedral; it displayed the surviving 11-inch-tall head of the original cathedral's Virgin Mary statue, which somehow remained intact. Long hidden from public view, the head rests on an altar carved by the son of a woman killed by the bomb.
Leaders of Japan's religious sects gathered at the Nagasaki bomb site Monday to pay homage to victims and pray for world peace. From Shinto monks in brilliant white with traditional black headdresses to robed Catholic bishops and gold-clad Buddhist monks, they made a brilliant display of color and music.
"We stand together for peace and human rights," said a Buddhist priest name Kanzaki, who was 5 years old and living in a nearby suburb when the bomb hit.
Nestled on the country's far southwestern edge, Nagasaki has been compared to San Francisco for its rolling hills, streetcars and broad bay, and to some European cities for its legacy of literature and poetry.
For some two centuries during Japan's period of world isolation, it was one of few trading ports open to the outside world. As the setting for Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly," Nagasaki feels far less wholly defined by the A-bomb than its bigger sister. Nagasaki simply didn't need to rely on A- bomb history for economic development, said Brian Burke-Gaffney, a Canadian professor of cross-cultural studies who has lived in Nagasaki since the early 1980s.
The city also is relatively open about its wartime past. Nagasaki is still a major base of operations for Mitsubishi, a leading Japanese arms and warship producer during World War II. In fact, local museums and books point out that the bomb landed on a munitions factory, and many of the people killed in the initial blast were building weapons.
Dozens of those killed in Nagasaki were not Japanese. Many were Chinese, Dutch, Korean and other prisoners of war forced into shipbuilding and other severe labor. The bomb destroyed a wartime prison near Urakami, killing 44 international inmates in what the Nagasaki Testimonial Society describes as "the greatest single disaster in the history of penal servitude."
So why doesn't the world pay as much attention to this place as it does to Hiroshima? It wasn't even the first choice to bomb, hit only after the U.S. plane made three passes over Kuroka to the north and quit because of smoke and cloud cover.
Maybe it's human nature. Scholar Robert Dujarric of the Japan Institute of International Affairs compared it to the moon walk.
"If you're first, you're famous, Neil Armstrong," he said. "If you're second, you're less, Buzz Aldrin."
GEORGE ZABELKA
Pax Christi Conference
August, 1985
[This article is excerpted from a speech George Zabelka gave at a Pax Christi
conference in August 1985 (tape of speech obtained from Notre Dame University
Archives). The first two paragraphs are from an interview with Zabelka published in Sojourners magazine, August 1980.]
The destruction of civilians in war was always forbidden by the church, and if a
soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child’s head, I would have told him, absolutely not. That would be mortally sinful. But in 1945 Tinian Island was the largest airfield in the world.
Three planes a minute could take off from it around the clock. Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of children and civilians --- and I said nothing.
I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to the men who were doing it. I was brainwashed! It never entered my mind to protest publicly the consequences of these massive air raids. I was told it was necessary --- told openly by the military and told implicitly by my church’s leadership.
(To the best of my knowledge no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids. Silence in such matters is a stamp of approval.)
I worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights struggle in Flint, Michigan.
His example and his words of nonviolent action, choosing love instead of hate, truth instead of lies, and nonviolence instead of violence stirred me deeply. This brought me face to face with pacifism --- active nonviolent resistance to evil.
I recall his words after he was jailed in Montgomery, and this blew my mind. He said, "Blood may flow in the streets of Montgomery before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood that flows, and not that of the white man. We must not harm a single hair on the head of our white brothers."
I struggled. I argued. But yes, there it was in the Sermon on the Mount, very clear:
"Love your enemies. Return good for evil." I went through a crisis of faith. Either accept what Christ said, as impossible and silly as it may seem, or deny him completely.
For the last 1700 years the church has not only been making war respectable: it has been inducing people to believe it is an honorable profession, an honorable
Christian profession. This is not true. We have been brainwashed. This is a lie.
War is now, always has been, and always will be bad, bad news. I was there. I saw real war. Those who have seen real war will bear me out. I assure you, it is not of Christ. It is not Christ’s way. There is no way to conduct real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus. There is no way to train people for real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.
The morality of the balance of terrorism is a morality that Christ never taught. The ethics of mass butchery cannot be found in the teachings of Jesus. In Just War ethics, Jesus Christ, who is supposed to be all in the Christian life, is irrelevant. He might as well never have existed. In Just War ethics, no appeal is made to him or his teaching, because no appeal can be made to him or his teaching, for neither he nor his teaching gives standards for Christians to follow in order to determine what level of slaughter is acceptable.
So the world is watching today. Ethical hairsplitting over the morality of various types of instruments and structures of mass slaughter is not what the world needs from the church, although it is what the world has come to expect from the followers of Christ.
What the world needs is a grouping of Christians that will stand up and pay up with Jesus Christ. What the world needs is Christians who, in language that the simplest soul could understand, will proclaim: the follower of Christ cannot participate in mass slaughter. He or she must love as Christ loved, live as Christ lived and, if necessary, die as Christ died, loving ones enemies.
For the 300 years immediately following Jesus’ resurrection, the church universally saw Christ and his teaching as nonviolent. Remember that the church taught this ethic in the face of at least three serious attempts by the state to liquidate her. It was subject to horrendous and ongoing torture and death.
If ever there was an occasion for justified retaliation and defensive slaughter, whether in form of a just war or a just revolution, this was it. The economic and political elite of the Roman state and their military had turned the citizens of the state against Christians and were embarked on a murderous public policy of exterminating the Christian community.
Yet the church, in the face of the heinous crimes committed against her members,
insisted without reservation that when Christ disarmed Peter he disarmed all
Christians. Christians continued to believe that Christ was, to use the words of an ancient liturgy, their fortress, their refuge, and their strength, and that if Christ was all they needed for security and defense, then Christ was all they should have. Indeed, this was a new security ethic.
Christians understood that if they would only follow Christ and his teaching, they couldn’t fail. When opportunities were given for Christians to appease the state by joining the fighting Roman army, these opportunities were rejected, because the early church saw a complete and an obvious incompatibility between loving as Christ loved and killing. It was Christ, not Mars, who gave security and peace.
Today the world is on the brink of ruin because the church refuses to be the church, because we Christians have been deceiving ourselves and the non-Christian world about the truth of Christ. There is no way to follow Christ, to love as Christ loved, and simultaneously to kill other people.
It is a lie to say that the spirit that moves the trigger of a flamethrower is the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is a lie to say that learning to kill is learning to be Christ-like. It is a lie to say that learning to drive a bayonet into the heart of another is motivated from having put on the mind of Christ. Militarized Christianity is a lie. It is radically out of conformity with the teaching, life, and spirit of Jesus.
Now, brothers and sisters, on the anniversary of this terrible atrocity carried out by Christians, I must be the first to say that I made a terrible mistake. I was had by the father of lies. I participated in the big ecumenical lie of the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches. I wore the uniform.
I was part of the system. When I said Mass over there I put on those beautiful vestments over my uniform. (When Father Dave Becker left the Trident submarine base in 1982 and resigned as Catholic chaplain there, he said, "Every time I went to Mass in my uniform and put the vestments on over my uniform, I couldn’t help but think of the words of Christ applying to me: Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.")
As an Air Force chaplain I painted a machine gun in the loving hands of the
nonviolent Jesus, and then handed this perverse picture to the world as truth. I sang "Praise the Lord" and passed the ammunition. As Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group, I was the final channel that communicated this fraudulent image of Christ to the crews of the Enola Gay and the Boxcar.
All I can say today is that I was wrong. Christ would not be the instrument to unleash such horror on his people. Therefore no follower of Christ can legitimately unleash the horror of war on God’s people. Excuses and self-justifying explanations are without merit. All I can say is: I was wrong! But, if this is all I can say, this I must do, feeble as it is. For to do otherwise would be to bypass the first and absolutely essential step in the process of repentance and reconciliation: admission of error, admission of guilt.
I was there, and I was wrong. Yes, war is hell, and Christ did not come to justify the creation of hell on earth by his disciples. The justification of war may be compatible with some religions and philosophies, but it is not compatible with the nonviolent teaching of Jesus. I was wrong. And to those of whatever nationality or religion who have been hurt because I fell under the influence of the father of lies, I say with my whole heart and soul I am sorry. I beg forgiveness.
I asked forgiveness from the Hibakushas (the Japanese survivors of the atomic
bombings) in Japan last year, in a pilgrimage that I made with a group from Tokyo to Hiroshima. I fell on my face there at the peace shrine after offering flowers, and I prayed for forgiveness --- for myself, for my country, for my church. Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
This year in Toronto, I again asked forgiveness from the Hibakushas present. I asked forgiveness, and they asked forgiveness for Pearl Harbor and some of the horrible deeds of the Japanese military, and there were some, and I knew of them. We embraced. We cried. Tears flowed. That is the first step of reconciliation --- admission of guilt and forgiveness. Pray to God that others will find this way to peace.
All religions have taught brotherhood. All people want peace. It is only the
governments and war departments that promote war and slaughter. So today again I call upon people to make their voices heard. We can no longer just leave this to our leaders, both political and religious. They will move when we make them move.
They represent us. Let us tell them that they must think and act for the safety and security of all the people in our world, not just for the safety and security of one country. All countries are inter-dependent. We all need one another. It is no longer possible for individual countries to think only of themselves. We can all live together as brothers and sisters or we are doomed to die together as fools in a world holocaust.
Each one of us becomes responsible for the crime of war by cooperating in its
preparation and in its execution. This includes the military. This includes the making of weapons. And it includes paying for the weapons. There’s no question about that.
We’ve got to realize we all become responsible. Silence, doing nothing, can be one of the greatest sins.
The bombing of Nagasaki means even more to me than the bombing of Hiroshima.
By August 9, 1945, we knew what that bomb would do, but we still dropped it. We
knew that agonies and sufferings would ensue, and we also knew—at least our
leaders knew --- that it was not necessary.
The Japanese were already defeated. They were already suing for peace. But we insisted on unconditional surrender, and this is even against the Just War theory. Once the enemy is defeated, once the enemy is not able to hurt you, you must make peace.
As a Catholic chaplain I watched as the Boxcar, piloted by a good Irish Catholic
pilot, dropped the bomb on Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Japan. I knew that St. Francis Xavier, centuries before, had brought the Catholic faith to Japan. I knew that schools, churches, and religious orders were annihilated. And yet I said nothing.
Thank God that I’m able to stand here today and speak out against war, all war. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke out against all false gods of gold, silver, and metal. Today we are worshipping the gods of metal, the bomb. We are putting our trust in physical power, militarism, and nationalism. The bomb, not God, is our security and our strength. The prophets of the Old Testament said simply: Do not put your trust in chariots and weapons, but put your trust in God. Their message was simple, and so is mine.
We must all become prophets. I really mean that. We must all do something for
peace. We must stop this insanity of worshipping the gods of metal. We must take a stand against evil and idolatry. This is our destiny at the most critical time of human history. But it’s also the greatest opportunity ever offered to any group of people in the history of our world --- to save our world from complete annihilation.
Father George Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force, served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and gave them his blessing. Days later he counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of "Fat Man." The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock --- flesh seared, melted, and falling off.
The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: "My God, what have we done?" Over the next twenty years, he gradually came to believe that he had been terribly wrong, that he had denied the very foundations of his faith by lending moral and religious support to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Zabelka died in 1992, but his message, in this speech given on the 40th anniversary of the bombings, must never be forgotten. ]
NAGASAKI MAYOR:
U.S HAS IGNORED INTERNATIONAL COMMITMENTS, MADE NO CHANGE IN STANCE ON NUCLEAR DETERRENCE
KATHLEEN E. MCLAUGHLIN
San Francisco Chronicle
August 10, 2005
The physical devastation is mostly gone or covered over, and the rolling mountains that open into a wide seaport are lush again with greenery.
Still, this forgotten city remembers all too well the day 60 years ago Tuesday when the United States dropped the 4.5-ton bomb called "Fat Man."
Nagasaki is an international city that has become a growing tourist hub in Japan. But it often plays second fiddle to Hiroshima, its unfortunate twin in atomic destruction, even though the devastation wrought here August 9, 1945, was just as heart-wrenching and widespread as that touched off by the first atomic bomb three days earlier and some 200 miles northeast.
Air-raid sirens sounded and bells tolled at 11:02 a.m. Tuesday in Nagasaki as about 6,000 people gathered at the site of the bombing to remember the 40,000 to 70,000 who died instantly and 74,000 others who were horribly wounded that morning. The city added another 2,748 names to its bomb death toll this year, as the hibakusha -- atomic bomb survivors --- age and fade away.
Fumie Sakamoto, a junior high school student home for lunch when the bomb struck Nagasaki, spoke to the crowd with resolve and anger. "The world around me was lost in a cloud of dust," she said, and she ran for shelter in the forest.
"People, clothes ripped and torn, with gaping chest wounds, whose hearts were exposed and could still be seen twitching; people burned so badly one could not tell front from back," she said. "The wood was full of such people."
Sakamoto, dressed in a deep purple kimono, her eyes and voice sharp and clear, said doctors had told her she was bound for death and not worth treating. She somehow survived over a "long and painful road."
"Yet war still persists on this Earth and, far from abolishing nuclear arms, I have heard there are even plans to develop nuclear weapons with new capabilities," she said. "We have devoted our lives to demanding that there never be A-bomb victims again, but why are our voices not heard?"
Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh chastised the United States for continued nuclear proliferation and Japan for taking cover in America's nuclear fold.
"The nuclear weapons states, the United States of America in particular, have ignored their international commitments and have made no change in their unyielding stance on nuclear deterrence," Itoh said. "We strongly resent the trampling of the hopes of the world's people."
Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi --- fresh from dissolving the lower house of parliament a day earlier after losing his battle to privatize the banking arm of the nation's postal service --- spoke briefly and pledged to work toward nuclear nonproliferation. This gathering was much smaller than the one in Hiroshima, but security around Koizumi was far tighter.
Nagasaki's anniversary ceremonies were less staid, packed more emotion and carried more vibrant color than did Hiroshima's.
Nagasaki's famous paper cranes have a lot to do with that. In a tradition started years ago, children from Japan and subsequently around the world make origami cranes to symbolize peace. These vibrant strands of reds, golds, purples and greens now are draped throughout the town on memorials and in the worst-hit areas.
One of those is the site of the rebuilt Urakami Cathedral, which took nearly a direct hit from the atomic bomb. Then called the grandest Catholic church in East Asia, the cathedral was blown to bits and all its clergy killed. This anniversary was very special for the cathedral; it displayed the surviving 11-inch-tall head of the original cathedral's Virgin Mary statue, which somehow remained intact. Long hidden from public view, the head rests on an altar carved by the son of a woman killed by the bomb.
Leaders of Japan's religious sects gathered at the Nagasaki bomb site Monday to pay homage to victims and pray for world peace. From Shinto monks in brilliant white with traditional black headdresses to robed Catholic bishops and gold-clad Buddhist monks, they made a brilliant display of color and music.
"We stand together for peace and human rights," said a Buddhist priest name Kanzaki, who was 5 years old and living in a nearby suburb when the bomb hit.
Nestled on the country's far southwestern edge, Nagasaki has been compared to San Francisco for its rolling hills, streetcars and broad bay, and to some European cities for its legacy of literature and poetry.
For some two centuries during Japan's period of world isolation, it was one of few trading ports open to the outside world. As the setting for Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly," Nagasaki feels far less wholly defined by the A-bomb than its bigger sister. Nagasaki simply didn't need to rely on A- bomb history for economic development, said Brian Burke-Gaffney, a Canadian professor of cross-cultural studies who has lived in Nagasaki since the early 1980s.
The city also is relatively open about its wartime past. Nagasaki is still a major base of operations for Mitsubishi, a leading Japanese arms and warship producer during World War II. In fact, local museums and books point out that the bomb landed on a munitions factory, and many of the people killed in the initial blast were building weapons.
Dozens of those killed in Nagasaki were not Japanese. Many were Chinese, Dutch, Korean and other prisoners of war forced into shipbuilding and other severe labor. The bomb destroyed a wartime prison near Urakami, killing 44 international inmates in what the Nagasaki Testimonial Society describes as "the greatest single disaster in the history of penal servitude."
So why doesn't the world pay as much attention to this place as it does to Hiroshima? It wasn't even the first choice to bomb, hit only after the U.S. plane made three passes over Kuroka to the north and quit because of smoke and cloud cover.
Maybe it's human nature. Scholar Robert Dujarric of the Japan Institute of International Affairs compared it to the moon walk.
"If you're first, you're famous, Neil Armstrong," he said. "If you're second, you're less, Buzz Aldrin."
The atheist C K Stead is one of New
Zealand's most respected writers of novels,
poetry, and criticism. The slim volume 'Voices'
(GP 1990) was his "response to a commission from
the Hon Dr Michael Bassett, Minister of Arts &
Culture, to write a poem for the New Zealand 1990
sesquicentenary". The book is a sequence of a
few dozen poems. Stead explains that in each
poem "the speaker is a particular persona. Some
are real, some fictional, some a mixture of the
two." The poems have titles like '1941 The
Soldier'. C K is a friend of mine and assures
me he won't make any issue of copyright for use
of this poem.
1820 The Missionary
- C K Stead
1
Ten men to hold the wheel, children screaming,
our whole world shuddering, heaving, breaking -
how potent those words to calm us: "They that go down
to the sea in ships, that have business in great waters,
see the Work of the Lord and his Wonders in the deep."
God who delivered us out of Leviathan's jaws
has brought us here where welcoming thighs open
to the dark pathway. Better we had gone down
in that cold hell than in false paradise.
Dreams and mosquitoes plague me in my tent.
Marsden's lash, Kendall's lusts of the flesh, -
where is our faith? Our half-drunk countrymen trade
muskets for women. The natives kill without rancour.
On still evenings I listen to small waves lapping
along the shoreline. It might be the language of God.
2
Our visitor put on green glasses and a wig.
We shouted "Atua!" The natives ran from our table.
They say their recent dead go by this headland
on their way to Reinga. At night they hear them whistle.
I wonder, mocking their faith, do we mock our own.
For hillslope, riverflat and eastern bay was paid
fish-hooks, hoes, axes, blankets, trousers.
Also tobacco. The old chief made his mark -
eager to sell. Discreetly I asked him why.
He thought me mad. Had I never felt, he asked,
south wind around bare shoulders? Shaped a bone hook?
Felled trees and carved them with stone implements?
Tomorrow, next year, for ever, the land would be there.
We could not take it away. Why did we value so little
iron axes, fish-hooks, trousers, blankets of wool?
3
Today our first plough turned New Zealand soil.
I walked behind six bullocks. Dark loam rolled out
like a bow wave. I thought of what is to come
and wished this day might be remembered well.
How fortunate we first! God speed the plough!
This evening on the estuary, three canoes,
their chant preceeding them - [ italics] hoea! toia!
Over still green water. Soft voiced Hongi Ika
splendid in feathers, kai tangata, eater of men -
he paddles out of silence, and into the past.
I give this moment to my kin-of-place
now and for ever. The seed of your growing is here
in this Bay of Islands. Europe is in our books
and in our boxes. We will unpack them slowly.
God save this bright air, these untroubled waters.
* * *
I congratulated C K on understanding
Christian perspectives to such an extent tho'
he's an atheist. (Also I told him "Marsden's
lash" is no fairer than "Cook's lash"; both of
these great men were as generous as the rules
then allowed in their positions. Look what
happened to Cook's protégé Bligh who flogged even
less.)
Many New Zealandes would find 'Voices' insightful as I did.
Zealand's most respected writers of novels,
poetry, and criticism. The slim volume 'Voices'
(GP 1990) was his "response to a commission from
the Hon Dr Michael Bassett, Minister of Arts &
Culture, to write a poem for the New Zealand 1990
sesquicentenary". The book is a sequence of a
few dozen poems. Stead explains that in each
poem "the speaker is a particular persona. Some
are real, some fictional, some a mixture of the
two." The poems have titles like '1941 The
Soldier'. C K is a friend of mine and assures
me he won't make any issue of copyright for use
of this poem.
1820 The Missionary
- C K Stead
1
Ten men to hold the wheel, children screaming,
our whole world shuddering, heaving, breaking -
how potent those words to calm us: "They that go down
to the sea in ships, that have business in great waters,
see the Work of the Lord and his Wonders in the deep."
God who delivered us out of Leviathan's jaws
has brought us here where welcoming thighs open
to the dark pathway. Better we had gone down
in that cold hell than in false paradise.
Dreams and mosquitoes plague me in my tent.
Marsden's lash, Kendall's lusts of the flesh, -
where is our faith? Our half-drunk countrymen trade
muskets for women. The natives kill without rancour.
On still evenings I listen to small waves lapping
along the shoreline. It might be the language of God.
2
Our visitor put on green glasses and a wig.
We shouted "Atua!" The natives ran from our table.
They say their recent dead go by this headland
on their way to Reinga. At night they hear them whistle.
I wonder, mocking their faith, do we mock our own.
For hillslope, riverflat and eastern bay was paid
fish-hooks, hoes, axes, blankets, trousers.
Also tobacco. The old chief made his mark -
eager to sell. Discreetly I asked him why.
He thought me mad. Had I never felt, he asked,
south wind around bare shoulders? Shaped a bone hook?
Felled trees and carved them with stone implements?
Tomorrow, next year, for ever, the land would be there.
We could not take it away. Why did we value so little
iron axes, fish-hooks, trousers, blankets of wool?
3
Today our first plough turned New Zealand soil.
I walked behind six bullocks. Dark loam rolled out
like a bow wave. I thought of what is to come
and wished this day might be remembered well.
How fortunate we first! God speed the plough!
This evening on the estuary, three canoes,
their chant preceeding them - [ italics] hoea! toia!
Over still green water. Soft voiced Hongi Ika
splendid in feathers, kai tangata, eater of men -
he paddles out of silence, and into the past.
I give this moment to my kin-of-place
now and for ever. The seed of your growing is here
in this Bay of Islands. Europe is in our books
and in our boxes. We will unpack them slowly.
God save this bright air, these untroubled waters.
* * *
I congratulated C K on understanding
Christian perspectives to such an extent tho'
he's an atheist. (Also I told him "Marsden's
lash" is no fairer than "Cook's lash"; both of
these great men were as generous as the rules
then allowed in their positions. Look what
happened to Cook's protégé Bligh who flogged even
less.)
Many New Zealandes would find 'Voices' insightful as I did.
08/14/05
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/08/MNGU5E4JUH1.DTL
Bush pushes very hot button
President's comments embolden anti-evolutionists
- Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005
The real impact of President Bush weighing in on the national debate over how to teach the origins of life may be felt in the classroom, where much of the anti-evolutionary lobbying is done under the radar.
One tactic is for a student or parent to present the teacher with a list that's popular in conservative circles called, "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher."
The result, observers say, is that some teachers fear even mentioning "the e-word."
"That's what people would somewhat jokingly call it," said Al Janulaw, who spent more than 30 years teaching science in elementary and middle schools. For the past six he has been a Sonoma State University instructor teaching student teachers how to teach science.
The White House entered one of the country's most politically charged red- and-blue battles last week when Bush was asked at a news conference about his views on evolution and intelligent design -- a critique that says Charles Darwin's natural selection theory doesn't explain some features of the natural world.
"I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush said. "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
The mere fact that Bush mentioned intelligent design on the same footing as evolutionary teaching is being seen as a huge moral boost for anti-Darwin critics.
Although California schools are not in the center of the debate, as are schools in other parts of the country, some of the state's science teachers are apprehensive and see Bush's comments as an unwelcome intrusion of religion into the science curriculum.
Supporters of intelligent design say some elements of the natural world "are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection," said John West of the Discovery Institute.
But defenders of traditional evolutionary theory say intelligent design is really a euphemism for creationism. If there's an intelligent design, they say, then there must be an intelligent designer. Or creator.
"Our guys here were calling it 'Creationism Lite,' " said California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. He said evolutionary theory is tightly interwoven throughout California's science teaching standards and is not in danger of changing at the statewide level, where policy is crafted.
But many of the attacks on teaching evolution are largely unreported, and are raised in scattered school board meetings and classrooms.
One member of the California Science Teachers Association said the issue is most likely to come up in more conservative Southern California school districts.
"There are teachers who avoid teaching evolution -- or put it off until the end of the curriculum so if they don't get to it, they can skip it," said longtime teacher Judy Scotchmoor, a board member of the association. She said she was speaking only for herself.
"This (evolution controversy) is a very, very weird situation that we're in," she said. "It's a game that we (science teachers) don't know how to play. It's 'he said, she said,' and we're used to proving things scientifically.
UC Berkeley biology Professor David Lindberg tells the story of a Christian pastor who appeared at the classroom of a Contra Costa County teacher on the first day of school.
The pastor had a simple question for the teacher: "How do you plan to teach biology this year?"
The implication of such visits to teachers, according to Lindberg and other evolutionary theory defenders: You'd better at least mention intelligent design or some other critique of evolution or you'll have to answer to some angry parents or other clergy. Or possibly the school board. Or a court.
Even though Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, downplayed the president's remarks by telling the New York Times that "evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology" and "intelligent design is not a scientific concept," others were pleased to hear the remarks coming from the nation's bully pulpit.
"We're happy that he said that," said West of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, one of the nation's leading think tanks in the fight to include Darwinian challenges in the classroom.
West said his organization "isn't pushing for intelligent design; what we are pushing for is for the scientific criticism of Darwin's theory" of all kinds.
Conservative scholars and legal theorists supporting the president's position -- it is a favorite of evangelical Christians -- cast this as a free speech issue, and they feel that their side is not getting equal play in the nation's public schools.
After Bush's remarks, more than 95 percent of the 78,000-plus votes cast in an online poll offered by the conservative American Family Association say "students should be exposed to the theory of intelligent design in public schools" as opposed to "shield(ing) them" from it.
However, 54 percent of 50,000-plus respondents to an America Online poll opposed teaching intelligent design.
"This is about critical thinking," said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a Sacramento organization that generally defends conservative positions in cases involving religious freedom issues. "And critical thinking has nothing to do with theology.
"This shows the degree of close-mindedness academics have when it comes to challenges like this."
Intelligent design has been gaining political support in school districts in several states, but the vast majority of the nation's scientists, starting with the president of the National Academy of Sciences, says intelligent design is not even worthy of being compared to the theory of evolution on a scientific level.
"The president and most people in this country don't understand how science works," said Lindberg, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology and curator for the UC Museum of Paleontology, which created a Web site, evolution.berkeley.edu, to help teachers fend off the attacks of evolutionary challengers.
"Words like 'theory' and 'hypothesis' mean something to scientists. Gravity is a theory. Evolution is a theory," he said. "Science is not a democracy. We don't vote on what theory we like best.
"And I have to say that we, as scientists, have not done a good job explaining to people how science works.'
The Bay Area is home to big thinkers on both sides of this debate -- including one of the leading proponents of intelligent design, UC Berkeley law Professor Phillip Johnson, and evolutionary teaching's defenders at the National Center for Science Education in Oakland -- but few believe that intelligent design has made significant inroads in California.
In Roseville, parent and attorney Larry Caldwell has been fighting for two years -- so far without success -- to have "the scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" included in the public schools there. Dacus said he's fielded calls from school board members in a dozen different districts over the past year or so inquiring about how evolution is taught.
But state schools chief O'Connell said intelligent design is "not an issue in California. It just hasn't come up."
When told about teachers avoiding the e-word, O'Connell said, "That's really regrettable."
"What (Bush) is doing is divisive, something to take people's attention away from all the other things going on with schools," he said.
"Why isn't he talking about funding issues, or class size or," O'Connell said, pausing, "Do you want me to go on?"
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com
--
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949
Bush pushes very hot button
President's comments embolden anti-evolutionists
- Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005
The real impact of President Bush weighing in on the national debate over how to teach the origins of life may be felt in the classroom, where much of the anti-evolutionary lobbying is done under the radar.
One tactic is for a student or parent to present the teacher with a list that's popular in conservative circles called, "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher."
The result, observers say, is that some teachers fear even mentioning "the e-word."
"That's what people would somewhat jokingly call it," said Al Janulaw, who spent more than 30 years teaching science in elementary and middle schools. For the past six he has been a Sonoma State University instructor teaching student teachers how to teach science.
The White House entered one of the country's most politically charged red- and-blue battles last week when Bush was asked at a news conference about his views on evolution and intelligent design -- a critique that says Charles Darwin's natural selection theory doesn't explain some features of the natural world.
"I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush said. "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
The mere fact that Bush mentioned intelligent design on the same footing as evolutionary teaching is being seen as a huge moral boost for anti-Darwin critics.
Although California schools are not in the center of the debate, as are schools in other parts of the country, some of the state's science teachers are apprehensive and see Bush's comments as an unwelcome intrusion of religion into the science curriculum.
Supporters of intelligent design say some elements of the natural world "are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection," said John West of the Discovery Institute.
But defenders of traditional evolutionary theory say intelligent design is really a euphemism for creationism. If there's an intelligent design, they say, then there must be an intelligent designer. Or creator.
"Our guys here were calling it 'Creationism Lite,' " said California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. He said evolutionary theory is tightly interwoven throughout California's science teaching standards and is not in danger of changing at the statewide level, where policy is crafted.
But many of the attacks on teaching evolution are largely unreported, and are raised in scattered school board meetings and classrooms.
One member of the California Science Teachers Association said the issue is most likely to come up in more conservative Southern California school districts.
"There are teachers who avoid teaching evolution -- or put it off until the end of the curriculum so if they don't get to it, they can skip it," said longtime teacher Judy Scotchmoor, a board member of the association. She said she was speaking only for herself.
"This (evolution controversy) is a very, very weird situation that we're in," she said. "It's a game that we (science teachers) don't know how to play. It's 'he said, she said,' and we're used to proving things scientifically.
UC Berkeley biology Professor David Lindberg tells the story of a Christian pastor who appeared at the classroom of a Contra Costa County teacher on the first day of school.
The pastor had a simple question for the teacher: "How do you plan to teach biology this year?"
The implication of such visits to teachers, according to Lindberg and other evolutionary theory defenders: You'd better at least mention intelligent design or some other critique of evolution or you'll have to answer to some angry parents or other clergy. Or possibly the school board. Or a court.
Even though Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, downplayed the president's remarks by telling the New York Times that "evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology" and "intelligent design is not a scientific concept," others were pleased to hear the remarks coming from the nation's bully pulpit.
"We're happy that he said that," said West of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, one of the nation's leading think tanks in the fight to include Darwinian challenges in the classroom.
West said his organization "isn't pushing for intelligent design; what we are pushing for is for the scientific criticism of Darwin's theory" of all kinds.
Conservative scholars and legal theorists supporting the president's position -- it is a favorite of evangelical Christians -- cast this as a free speech issue, and they feel that their side is not getting equal play in the nation's public schools.
After Bush's remarks, more than 95 percent of the 78,000-plus votes cast in an online poll offered by the conservative American Family Association say "students should be exposed to the theory of intelligent design in public schools" as opposed to "shield(ing) them" from it.
However, 54 percent of 50,000-plus respondents to an America Online poll opposed teaching intelligent design.
"This is about critical thinking," said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a Sacramento organization that generally defends conservative positions in cases involving religious freedom issues. "And critical thinking has nothing to do with theology.
"This shows the degree of close-mindedness academics have when it comes to challenges like this."
Intelligent design has been gaining political support in school districts in several states, but the vast majority of the nation's scientists, starting with the president of the National Academy of Sciences, says intelligent design is not even worthy of being compared to the theory of evolution on a scientific level.
"The president and most people in this country don't understand how science works," said Lindberg, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology and curator for the UC Museum of Paleontology, which created a Web site, evolution.berkeley.edu, to help teachers fend off the attacks of evolutionary challengers.
"Words like 'theory' and 'hypothesis' mean something to scientists. Gravity is a theory. Evolution is a theory," he said. "Science is not a democracy. We don't vote on what theory we like best.
"And I have to say that we, as scientists, have not done a good job explaining to people how science works.'
The Bay Area is home to big thinkers on both sides of this debate -- including one of the leading proponents of intelligent design, UC Berkeley law Professor Phillip Johnson, and evolutionary teaching's defenders at the National Center for Science Education in Oakland -- but few believe that intelligent design has made significant inroads in California.
In Roseville, parent and attorney Larry Caldwell has been fighting for two years -- so far without success -- to have "the scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" included in the public schools there. Dacus said he's fielded calls from school board members in a dozen different districts over the past year or so inquiring about how evolution is taught.
But state schools chief O'Connell said intelligent design is "not an issue in California. It just hasn't come up."
When told about teachers avoiding the e-word, O'Connell said, "That's really regrettable."
"What (Bush) is doing is divisive, something to take people's attention away from all the other things going on with schools," he said.
"Why isn't he talking about funding issues, or class size or," O'Connell said, pausing, "Do you want me to go on?"
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com
--
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949
Dear Joe Garofoli,
I appreciated your 'President's comments embolden anti-evolutionists'. If you pursue this topic, you may find some help from my writings below, and the more general pubd article attached. The other attached article is specifically about the 'ten gassers' that you mention in your article.
I'm the founder of a Science & Faith group in Auckland, which staged a symposium for Dembski when he visited here. (He was congenial, but unresponsive.) If ever you're coming over here, perhaps you'd let us know in advance ...
THE ILLOGIC OF CREATIONISM
L R B MANN
Sep 2003
The word 'evolution' has become, for some Christians, a
provocation. They have been led to believe that evolution is essentially
an atheistic idea. This misunderstanding has been misused for much
unnecessary disputing.
VisioNetworkNZ leader Glyn Carpenter writes (DayStar Sep 03) that
the creationist v. evolution argument is "also referred to as the young
earth / old earth debate". This is an unfortunate confusion. Let's get a
clear understanding of what the terms mean, and what are the various main
beliefs, connected with evolution.
Two main sub-sects of "creationism" exist. One version of
"creationism" asserts not only that all species were created in 6 days but
also that this brief period of biological creation occurred less than
10,000 years ago. That is 'young earth creationism' (YEC). 'Old earth
creationism' (OEC), exemplified by Hugh Ross's 'Reasons to Believe'
organisation of S. Calif., acknowledges the scientific evidence that the
Earth is much, much older, but also asserts like YEC that evolution has not
occurred. The difference between these two sub-sects is of some interest,
but it is different from the dispute between those who believe in evolution
and those who refuse to believe that evolution has occurred.
These differing views on evolution and creation can be diagrammed
as a logic-tree, to be read from the bottom:
theistic evolution OEC YEC
x x x
x x x
x creationism
x x
x x
theism deism atheism
x x x
x x x
x x
x x
x x
x
The diagram summarises the main logical options.
You can believe in God, or not; this is the basic, most important,
choice in the logic-tree.
If you choose the atheism fork, you can then try like Dawkins etc
to explain how the incomparable coherent complexity of ecosystems, or even
just the functions of a humble bacterial flagellum, could have evolved by
the workings of physical & chemical laws, with no creative planning.
If instead you choose to believe in God, you have an option of a
largely defunct view, deism, holding that God did create the universe but
that he then turned it loose, like a clockwork toy he had wound up and left
to run by the natural laws which he'd created. By contrast, theism holds
that God not only created the universe but also sustains & guides it from
moment to moment.
The tendency known as creationism is - though not usually billed
as such by its adherents - a version of deism in its purported
explanation of life. Proceeding up the logic-tree, within the creationism
branch, we find the two versions, YEC and OEC, holding that, at least
regarding the creation of species of organism, God did it all at the start
and has not done any more creation since then. Although most creationists
are theists in that they believe in God's continuing involvement in the
world (in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, God's responses to prayer,
etc), they are deists in their biology - they believe in a completed
creation.
Both YEC and OEC are opposed to the mainstream Christian view,
which is theistic evolution, combining traditional theology with scientific
findings that the different types of organism have been created at
successive times over several billion years. God as the maker & sustainer
of the universe is affirmed by theistic evolution. To me as a Christian,
physical & chemical laws are an expression of creative planning, not an
alternative to it. Dawkins just has to accept them as an extraordinary
brute fact, the origin of which he studiously ignores (overlooking two of
the four categories of cause).
Theistic evolution results from reading both the book of scripture
and the book of nature. It relies on faith that God will not mislead us if
we examine honestly what we find in strata, fossils, molecules, and other
aspects of nature that allow us to infer past processes in biology.
Creationists have misrepresented these scientific findings in many ways
(and as a scientist I deeply deplore that misbehaviour, documented in e.g.
Prof. Ian Plimer's book 'Telling Lies for God'). Attached is a batch of
corrections of a minor peripatetic creationist pseudo-scientist.
But it is their logic that is the prime defect of creationism,
counterposing the concepts of creation "vs." evolution, implying that they
are somehow incompatible.
Where in this logic-tree does Intelligent Design fit? Exemplified
by the video 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life' and the writings of William
Dembski, this approach to explaining life confines itself to what is called
natural theology, i.e. reading the book of nature with intent to infer
properties of the designer(s). ID's effect is thus at the base of the
logic-tree, helping those who have yet to decide whether organisms are
caused by merely material processes or are designed. This is the Argument
to Design developed by William Paley two centuries ago. It is fine as far
as it goes but is only a tiny, if basic, part of theistic evolution as set
forth by leading Christian scholars such as William Temple, Sir Alister
Hardy, and our own John Morton (see 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972).
Another leading scholar in natural theology, but taking a broader view than
Dembski expounds, is Neil Broom of the University of Auckland (see 'How
Blind Is the Watchmaker?' IVP 2001). Broom expounds the Argument to
Design as well as anyone, while seeing no theological difficulty in an
ancient biosphere and evolution as shown by science.
My essay in the book 'Science & Christianity' maintains -
following Morton - that a more intelligible, direct & conclusive argument
is to insist on all four causes as required to explain life, rather than
relying principally on gaps in scientific understanding of the evolution of
bacterial flagella etc.
CREATIONISM & IDT
L R B Mann
Oct 2003; rev Jan 2005
Can you imagine what offence is achieved on scientists who are Christians by the persistent lying of "creationism"? The fanatics make aggressive insolent public attacks on evolution, insisting on the moronic, indeed demonic axiom " EITHER the book of scripture OR the book of nature". These demonic agents promulgate fanatically the idea that to read the book of nature honestly is to contradict, even to insult, the book of scripture. Devout scholars such as John Morton are in effect called liars or fools for their reading the book of nature; and the fanatics who do so misrepresent science with a persistent wickedness that is particularly offensive to one brought up in science.
This sectarian tendency, intellectually headquartered near Disneyland and bankrolled out of (so far as I've traced it) Lubbock, Tex., is more active in NZ than ever; DayStar® carried an advertorial 'interview' of which the leading fanatic then has the cheek to complain in the next issue; a large colour advertisement is placed near the advertorial interview. This is a form of corruption I've seen before with other editors.
IDT is an ally of Creationism®, franchised into NZ by Focus on the Family.
IDT is only a small part of natl theol, and is being blown far out of proportion by huge funding linked quietly to "creationist" fanatics thru Johnson & Wells. It relies basically on lack of knowledge - e.g lack of any current explanation how the bacterial flagellum could have evolved in a Darwinian, Steve Jones fashion. This is 'God of the gaps' reasoning, dangerous because the gap may be filled tomorrow by new facts &/or reasoning. Why not reason more directly from the macroscopic observables of ecology? A child can see, without education or instruments, that ecology is wonderfully planned. I believe microstructures needing instruments & theory to imagine - e.g the bacterial flagellum, or a DNA secondary structure - are inferior as main examples of Paley timepieces. They're not wrong, but they are to a degree obscurantist.
At an early age Morton's "claret cameo" should be intelligible; all 4 causes are needed in biology, not just the 2 with which Dawkins tries to make out biology can be explained.
It is murky - annoyingly, and I suppose deliberately - but we have to read the picture as best we can. As Harold Turner said, creationism is a waste of time; and I would add that IDT is at best a drag, pedantically OK but not worth much time. I infer from the glimpses that have come my way that they're connected, organisationally and to a degree intellectually thru e.g Wells, to creationism®.
Meanwhile, Sheldrake & Morton, spearhead of the mainstream thrust thru Temple, are ignored by IDT entrepreneurs.
The IDT site www.iscid.org controllers Sparacio & Dembski have repeatedly refused to allow me to contribute criticisms. Here is an example.
==========
"Creationism" is a significant cross-current within Christianity, distracting efforts from real issues. And it presents to ignorant, lazy or dishonest outsiders a very misleading image of the logic & honesty of Christians. A target is thus created, which is nothing better than a caricature, for atheists to mock.
IDT is essentially Paley 1802 - fine, as far as it goes. Broom's book is the best IDT I know of - and fully acknowledging not only a billions-of-years biosphere but also evolution. The IDT 'wedge' however has become to some extent a front for "creationism". Don Nield has argued, and I agree, that IDT is trying to drive in its wedge at the wrong place.
Full 28 y ago a leading local statistician (later prof.), George Seber, tried to get me to debate publicly against Duane Gish. The notion was in some ways attractive, not least because we're both Berkeley Ph.D biochemists; but I declined, saying I would not dignify his cause by sharing a stage with him. This reticence, uncharacteristic for me, I have never regretted.
Much more recently, I gave a talk on Creationism to our local Christian Academics Group. In moving the vote of thanks, George insisted on ignoring my main point by expressing hope that there will be tolerance of Creationism alongside the mainstream position which I had advocated.
My own position is similar to that of our leading emeritus zoology prof John Morton (see his 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972). Although generally critical of the Vatican, I think its doctrine on evolution is hard to fault, and I credit it for the fact that Rome has had little trouble regarding evolution. On this issue if no others, general Christian doctrine should learn from the Vatican.
Around 2 decade ago Creationists tried to tamper with school book holdings in Hamilton N.Z. I have not learned whether this attempt persisted.
In 1983 I photographed in the Science Museum, Kensington, an exhibit which asserted the axiom that *either* organisms have evolved *or* God has created them. This furphy, not normally so clearly enunciated, seems to me to be not only the fundamental error of the Creationist® fanaticism but also typical in its illogic of most if not all fundamentalisms. I suggest the racket common to them is the requirement of assent to a proposition which is not subtly but flagrantly false. This is not ancillary or accidental: I believe it is essential, in that once a person has overtly signalled switching-off of God-given reason in favour of a pointedly false slogan from the sect leader(s), obedience can be thereafter required much more generally. This is in the nature of totalitarian systems' social psychology. "The Slavs are sub-human" is a prototypical modern example of a blatantly false slogan which you had to assent to overtly if you were to attain the temporary social security of the National Socialist Party. "The first 3 chapters of the Bible, plus the Noah story, must be taken literally" is similar mischief. I don't see why this racket is not more widely & vigorously condemned. Those who propound it do not in fact advocate that other parts of the Bible be read literally; Broom & I point to John the Baptist's hailing "the Lamb of God" - why do fundamentalists not try to insist that Christ assumed ovine form for that occasion on the banks of the Jordan?
As a scientist active in natural theology, I support the general gist of IDT as such but fear that it functions on the edge of a "creationist" whirlpool.
In defence of the persistent lying of creationism®, I've received impassioned slogans 'Jesus died for them too', to which I replied "yes - and for Himmler & Stalin also". A senior Presbyterian minister, Rev Bruce Nicholls, defends the deceivers by claiming they're not proven liars. Prof Don Nield has shown in detail that hevi-doodi creationist J Wells has falsified standard biology texbooks in order to create straw men to knock down. The version of creation presented by main aggressive creationists H Morris, D Gish, J Sarfati, Wells, etc relies on falsifying evidence and on misinterpreting facts grossly, as well as wholesale ignoring of most facts (because they imply a 10^9 y evolution).
The real issue of the day is how to convert the billions who have never heard the Good News, as well as the approx 1 billion overdeveloped who have gone for "Enlightenment"®, Noo Eege, or just nihilism. Christianity has much to offer the children of atheism & agnosticism, starting for many educated in science by a careful exposition of all 4 Causes, a review of facts on evolution, and an honest presentation of natural theology as in Temple, Hardy, Morton & Sheldrake. The USA sects I've been criticising do little or nothing to meet these needs. Their conduct is variously devious, dishonest and mind-buggering. They are distracting lay folk away from what science has to tell them. I'd be grateful if the USA would cease to export these prdkts - whether deemed kmpetit'v or not.
R
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Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
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Creationism v. evolution
but not
creation v. evolution
Robert Mann and Neil Broom
very slightly adapted from Stimulus 8 (2) 16-20 (May 2000)
Many Christians believe that the very idea of evolution – most crucially, the idea that the species Homo sapiens evolved from many previous species now extinct – entails denial of true religion. We wish to argue that there need be no real dispute. The fear appears to be that to admit evolution as a fact - i.e. admit to life unfolding over time with increasing complexity & variety - would bring one into a crisis of faith in Holy Scripture. Maintaining it is a misunderstanding we seek to resolve this apparent conflict in the present paper.
But before we delve into the theory of evolution we note that the facts in direct support of the specific idea of Homo sapiens evolving from ape-like ancestors are – as science now stands – very scanty. The old ‘missing link’ objection still holds good to a large extent regarding factual evidence of immediate human evolution. Indeed, the whole record of evolution is riddled with discontinuities, e.g. the frogs suddenly appear, not preceded by any proto-frogs. The main reason why almost all scientists believe in evolution is that it has been exceedingly successful as an integrating theory within biology.
Nevertheless, one must point out that the evidence is fairly conclusive that humans appeared only about a million years ago, certainly long after many species that have existed for hundreds of millions of years (in contrast to the face value of the story in Genesis 2). More importantly, we maintain that even if a seamless sequence of fossils were demonstrated with no missing links in human evolution, such a finding need have no theological significance regarding the central doctrines that man is created by God and made in the image of God.
Perhaps we should make clear at the start the perspective from which we attempt to contribute to this fraught arena of (sometimes intemperate) argumentation. We are scientists working on aspects of biology, and we are mainstream Christians who hold to traditional doctrines as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed. In other words, we find ourselves able to live by the belief that Christianity does not conflict with a science that is conducted with intellectual integrity - a science that acknowledges the finitude of all human knowing and therefore its inability to proclaim on ultimate issues save what is given by special revelation.
For many Christians the science/God debate automatically focuses on an attempted literal reading of the first two chapters of Genesis. Many assert, and quite strenuously, that Genesis outlines literally the actual history and scientific principles of creation, and any secular science that contradicts this ‘Bible science’ must be rejected outright.
In this literal interpretation of a particular part of Scripture, creation is believed to have taken place over six 24-hour days and perhaps no more than 10,000 years ago. ‘Creation science’ rejects any thought of an ancient earth spanning periods of geological time of many millions of years, and denies any gradual development or evolving of life forms. It is a philosophical position that rejects a huge amount of scientific evidence gathered by a vast community of scientists who hold a wide spectrum of religious (Christian and others) and non-religious viewpoints about the origin of life.
Our personal conviction is that ‘creation science’ is fighting the wrong battle. We say this for two important reasons. Firstly, it makes the dubious assumption that Genesis 1 & 2 must be read in a strictly literal sense if they are to be read in a God-honouring way. It is not at all clear to us that the narrative form of the early chapters of Genesis is literal or even remotely scientific in its intent. The creation texts contain a very simple storyline that is timeless and relevant for all people for all time. But is it science? Science as the modern discipline which gave rise to the creation/evolution discussion hadn’t evolved when the author(s) penned these narratives. The burning issues of the day were what we would call theological, not scientific. Who made the cosmos? Who is in charge of it? Who is to be worshipped? Were the people of God to place their faith in the many divinities of polytheism or in the one true God of the Israelites?
Despite the impact on contemporary culture of postmodernity’s disaffection with science, there is a significant continuing acceptance of 'old fashioned' modernism - scientific materialism and loss of a moral base. The full potential of Genesis 1-3 to help us address these issues will not be realised unless we shoulder the responsibility of interpretation with all the difficulties and even pitfalls that this may entail.
It seems to us that the main point of the creation narratives is to put nature – including mankind – fairly and squarely in its place as created, and thus as a consequence never to be accorded the status of divinity. No part of creation was to be the object of man’s worship. No part of creation was to shape the ultimate destiny of humanity, and this was to include the heavenly bodies. God alone was to be acknowledged as the source and sustainer of all created things.
We must discern very carefully the type of literary narrative being used in each part of scripture. It may be disastrous if we apply an interpretation not intended by the author. It seems to us that when we come to a central Christian truth such as the Resurrection the various accounts given in all four Gospels confront us with a flesh-and-blood, time-and-place narrative that almost ‘screams’ out to be read in a literal sense. Everything about the Resurrection narratives seems to insist we take them literally.
By contrast the early chapters of Genesis do not read in this same flesh-and-blood historic way. They have an entirely contrasting literary flavour. Their structure is much more stylised and poetic. The already-established 7-day Hebrew week is, in all probability, used as a means of systematically working through each realm of the created world with the very powerful pronouncement that all such realms and their inhabitants were the creation of God. What more powerful way to demolish for all time the pagan myth that within the world there were powers and forces that could hold sway over the destinies of people and enslave them in the vice of fear-ridden subservience?
The text reads much more like a series of epic declarations – that God is the supreme commander of the universe, and that all things large and small owe their existence to him. These are, perhaps, words that attempt to describe the indescribable – events of such cosmic proportions as to be literally beyond our understanding as created beings. The language is surely conveying what we would call religious, not scientific truth.
Clear evidence that the text is not meant to be read in a scientific sense is got by comparing the two different creation accounts contained in Genesis 1: 1-2:3 and 2: 4-25. As an obvious example of the author’s(s’) clear disregard for chronological accuracy, in the first account land animals are created before humans whereas in the second account animals are created after man. This apparent conflict is important only if we try to interpret the narratives in a narrow literal sense. Surely an important purpose of both accounts is to place humanity at the apex of creation, separate relationally from all that is beneath; for this theological point, timing is hardly relevant.
We hold that science in general and evolution in particular can offer no genuine conflict with Christianity. There are well-known general grounds for our attitude. The purview of science is restricted: it is as narrow as the physical realm of matter & energy (including living organisms), but no spiritual entities. The fact that science can study only this restricted realm (within which it has achieved very impressive discoveries) is no handicap; it is simply a fact that the scientific method applies only to energy & matter as defined by science, and when science attempts to pronounce on moral questions, let alone spiritual questions, it is a trespasser.
We can say that science is a human activity able to deal only with the lower levels of material cause and effect. By contrast, what we think of as ‘religion’ is concerned with the big picture, the ultimate issues concerning the cosmos and its relationship to the creator. The issues of governance, purpose and meaning are outside the scope of science. The material world operates as a subset within the much larger framework illuminated by revealed religion. In using the word ‘subset’ here we are attempting to stress the importance of not letting theology and science retreat to supposedly unconnected spheres. We wish to provoke renewed co-operation, rather than spurious conflict, between them.
We hope these generalities set the stage as we turn to particulars about the evolution of organisms and about, on the other hand, the vastly more important ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions which only revealed religion can tackle.
Outline of Evolutionary Theory
Modern science has existed for only a few centuries. Why it took so long to begin is discussed in Harold Turner’s recent book and in Renton Maclachlan’s thoughtful review of that book in this journal . Unfortunately that review complains at Rev Dr Turner’s ‘repeated, scathing dismissal of “creation science” without any justification whatsoever being given’. As friends of Harold Turner we are aware he reached the conclusion years ago that “creation science” is a waste of time. He does not bother in his book to expound his reasons for his dismissive attitude to it. Our purpose now is to assist readers by outlining how such a conclusion as Dr Turner’s is not merely reasonable but essential to the goal - dauntingly ambitious to some - of reconciling science and religion.
Since the originators Darwin and Wallace, biology has amassed a compelling body of evidence for organic evolution, i.e. evidence that life has unfolded over a long time, as a tree with many branches and many 'missing' branches, developing a generally more complex range of life-forms, with Homo sapiens appearing only recently. The facts gleaned from fossils, augmented recently by molecular details, strongly suggest that evolution has occurred. The body of evidence from which this deduction flows is so huge, so multi-faceted, and so coherent, that evolution is regarded as a fact by almost every scientist today.
The evidence for evolution, minimally mixed with neo-Darwinian theory, is interesting to review as it stood around the time when modern 'creationism' arose in the USA.
We immediately, emphatically add: how evolution has occurred is a different (and much more difficult) question from the simpler question of whether organisms have evolved. And Goldsmith has pointed out vigorously, in an exchange with the militant atheist Wolpert, that it is a mere assumption to say that evolution must have worked by the mechanism of natural selection.
Many readers will be aware of a supremely confident brand of scientific atheism that is currently fashionable, largely popularised by Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins. Dawkins contemptuously dismisses any suggestion that evolution requires anything more than the blind forces of physics. He says “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Dawkins views Darwin’s idea of natural selection as providing an entirely material means by which the chance variations in an organism’s offspring are channelled in the direction of ‘evolving’ (read increasing) complexity. What is important is that evolution is viewed by Dawkins as an entirely mindless process; hence his confident atheistic stance.
We consider Dawkins in error at a fundamental conceptual level and wish to highlight this by reference to just one of the illustrations he employs to support his scientific atheism - namely the evolution of the eye as expounded in one of his recent books Climbing Mt. Improbable .
Dawkins likens the evolution of the eye to climbing a high mountain. In this scheme of things the evolution of biological novelty (i.e. reaching the summit of Mount Improbable) is achieved in the neo-Darwinian sense by gradual, almost imperceptible steps of improvement. In his metaphor we take a route up the gentle slopes rather than attempting to scale the impossibly steep cliffs and precipices. All that is required is that we head towards the summit.
The emphasis is on small, easy improvements in the organism rather than large leaps in sophistication. Like many of Dawkins’ illustrations, the mountain-climbing analogy seems, at least superficially, to make a lot of sense. It is common for technological advances to proceed in much the same gradual, bit-by-bit fashion.
But let’s look closely at the claimed connection between the development of an eye and Dawkins’ mountain-climbing metaphor.
We arrive at this most improbable structure - the fully functioning eye - by imperceptibly small steps in improvement. No big leaps of innovation, no wild attempts at scaling ‘steep cliffs or precipices’, just an easy meander up the gentle grassy slopes until the summit of optical sophistication is reached.
To support his case Dawkins describes in some detail a computer study conducted by Swedish biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger. These scientists devised a computer program to simulate the evolution of what they describe as a simple eye representation. Remember, this is a virtual, not a real, eye.
They begin with a 2-dimensional picture of a flat layer of imaginary light-sensitive cells sandwiched between an imaginary transparent layer and an imaginary dark backing layer. The two biologists admit in their study that they don’t pretend to explain how the light-sensitive cells that their model commences with might have evolved. This is entirely understandable as the origin of the first living cell remains just one of the innumerable mysteries of the biological world, and how any became light-sensitive is also unknown.
The model works (and always in a virtual sense) by producing at random small percentage changes in the degree of curvature of the sandwich, in the diameter of a light-restricting aperture, in the thickness of the transparent layer, and in the local value of its refractive index (light-bending ability). The computer model is programmed to perform a simple calculation of the sandwich’s optical resolving power every time a change occurs at random in the three variables noted above. This is done by a simple ray-tracing procedure, one familiar to any physics student.
In a relatively small number of steps (1829 steps if each step involved a 1% change in any of the variables) the computer model is shown to transform the flat sandwich through continuous minor improvements into a configuration representing a virtual, focussed eye lens. Dawkins claims this transformation of the initially flat configuration into a focussed configuration by a series of tiny but connected steps is exactly analogous to climbing the mountain of biological complexity: “Going upwards means mutating, one small step at a time, and only accepting mutations that improve optical performance. So, where do we get to? Pleasingly, through a smooth upward pathway, starting from no proper eye at all, we reach a familiar fish eye, complete with lens.” (Climbing Mt. Improbable, p. 151.)
However, any careful reader will immediately see that Dawkins’ claim to explain eye evolution involves a most blatant transgression of the rules of his own materialistic science. Note how logic requires him to impose a highly artificial and purposeful constraint on the behaviour of the eye model: he inserts the crucial proviso of “only accepting mutations that improve optical performance”. In terms of his mountain-climbing analogy, one must “aim for the summit”. He has committed a cardinal breach by introducing a profoundly personal dimension into his scientific materialism: it is persons that have aims, with the foresight to discern whether an immediate change of no use in itself heads toward a distant co-ordinated usefulness.
Ask any serious mountaineer, ask one of New Zealand’s most famous citizens - Sir Edmund Hillary: high summits are conquered only because the mountaineer has a powerful desire to get to the top. The activity is loaded with purpose. The mountaineer is possessed of a burning obsession to achieve the very difficult. Ed Hillary and Norgay Tenzing reached the summit of Everest in 1953 because they really wanted to get there!
If Richard Dawkins is required to use a metaphor such as mountain-climbing to explain the role of ‘natural’ selection then this is surely the most bare-faced admission that he really does require more than a set of purely material mechanisms to explain the evolution of complexity in the living world. ‘Aiming for the top’ is to admit to a guiding principle that cannot be expressed in terms of the impersonal processes of physics and chemistry. For a much more detailed critique of Dawkins’ approach and of scientific materialism in general, the interested reader is referred to the book How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or atheism: should science decide? published recently by one of the present authors.
We do know – insofar as one could know about events in the distant past that cannot be directly observed or repeated – that evolution has occurred; but we have only vague ideas of its mechanisms. It is important to keep clearly distinguished these two distinct questions. In our opinion, the mechanism postulated by neo-Darwinism is very inadequate. We agree that mutations occur (more or less randomly), but we believe the notion of selection among those mutants by "the environment" which is said to be blind and purposeless, is no better than an intellectual con trick. This main axiom of neoDarwinism is a bald unsupported assumption that what Aristotle called final cause is absent from biology. That which is officially denied by Dawkins – purpose – is quietly admitted when he talks about “aiming for the summit”, the vital missing link in modern materialistic biology.
Most educated people are aware that as soon as Darwin announced his concept of the origin of species a heated dispute arose which has been raging fitfully ever since . Our contention is that this is a phoney dispute, a series of misunderstandings; and this leads us naturally to the topic of ‘creationism’.
Creationism
The basic assumption of ‘creationism’ is:-
either God has created and sustained the universe, including all life,
or organisms have evolved (as scientific evidence strongly suggests).
This axiom is – rather obviously – unsatisfactory; the two propositions are not logical alternatives but, from the viewpoint of scientifically informed Christians, both are true. We have every right – even (as we would argue) a duty – to study with our God-given faculties the world as we find it, including the evidence of its past changes; and when we do so, we find overwhelming evidence of evolution – a fact of little or no theological significance.
The body of evidence amassed by thousands of scientists – including no small number of Christians – fills many books. As against this there exists a tiny group of works maintaining a ‘young Earth’ theory and attempting to interpret the facts on the basis of the belief that all species were created within a very short time, relatively recently.
The first comment on this confrontation must be the general principle – which Christians, especially, should never forget – that truth is not decided by voting. The fact that “creation science” is propounded by only a very tiny minority of scientists is no proof of its unreliability; remind yourself of the long series of scientific theories that have been mocked and marginalised for a period after first challenging orthodoxy, but have later gained credence. For instance, Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis was, within living memory, dismissed by the leading biologists and (more persistently) geologists, but has now become standard theory. The history of science is not merely sprinkled with but largely consists of such revolutions in theory . And indeed the idea of evolution itself was, for a while, widely rejected. Today the resistance to it among scientists is down to an extremely tiny minority. But that does not tell us whether it is true.
We suggest to readers who are outside science that this ‘creation science’ does indeed deserve the inverted commas assigned to it by Renton Maclachlan. It is not real science but a form of pseudo-science within which the facts are selectively distorted or ignored for the purpose of forcing a conclusion that cannot follow from application of the scientific method to the full array of known facts.
‘Creationist’ fundamentalists insist that the first three chapters of the Bible must only be read in a strictly literal sense. On this axiom is built the fear that evolution threatens true faith by challenging the reliability of Scripture. This is the essential confusion in the ‘creationism’ position.
Reconciling science with Christianity will require, we suggest, nothing short of the abandonment of the fundamentalism which asserts that there is always a straightforward, clearly recognised, strictly literal, reading of texts and that such a reading is the only possible reading of Scripture. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is impossible – all communication necessarily involves interpretation. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is doomed to failure and should be abandoned. Only if we have faith that God does not play tricks on us, either in the Scriptures or in our observations of the world he has made and sustained, can we break through to the reconciliation which is sorely needed.
This may seem a daunting challenge to some devout Christians whose feelings we have no wish to bruise.
We are puzzled at the insistence of fundamentalists on literal reading of, especially, the first three chapters of Genesis while apparently accepting poetic language in, say, Ezekiel, and in the New Testament (to take one example out of many: John the Baptist hails ‘the lamb of God’ in an important metaphor which nobody tries to take literally). We see no reason to assume that just a few parts of the Bible are devoid of symbolism, figures of speech, even poetry; indeed, on the grand difficult topics of the origins and the nature and the fate of humans we would expect, if anything, unusual recourse to such devices of communication. In dealing with the issue of origins the biblical narrative is entering territory that must surely ultimately transcend what is accessible to the human mind, and especially the mind trained in the sciences. Indeed, the sciences themselves rely on model, metaphor, symbol and analogy to picture the objects of scientific inquiry. How much more will we need pictures and symbols to present reality that lies beyond normal experience, such as the origin of creation?! The language of imagery and symbolism (picture language really) must surely play a crucial role in communicating such cosmic truths to people of all ages and times. We think it is evident that only on such a basis can the creation stories of Genesis be understood at all.
One argument against a non-literal or symbolic reading of the early chapters of Genesis cites the several references to Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, and to Noah in both the Gospels and elsewhere in the NT. How can both Christ and Paul speak of real figures and we then deny their historical reality? Again we need not respond to this challenge by ‘accelerating straight down the road’ of panicky literalism. Theologically there is a recognised plasticity in the meaning of the word ‘Adam’; it is far from certain that it was used in Genesis to speak only of a single first man. The symbolic, representative meaning of Adam may be much more relevant to our deeper understanding of the Genesis narratives than the secular, literal approach with its necessary exclusion of sacred, symbolic content.
It may be helpful to remind ourselves that for most of the Christian era it has been held that the Scriptures should not be available outside a very small exclusive cadre. Those who first tried to make the Bible available to the masses were victimised severely. One reason for that punitive attitude was fear that the individual Christian left to interpret Scripture will fall into error. This fear has today been supplanted by faith that the Holy Spirit will guide our prayerful reading so that on the whole we shall be better off than if interpretation and even reading of Scripture had been reserved to an elite few.
The fundamentalist claim that holy Scripture can be read without interpretation – that the reader can, and should, refrain from interpreting what is read, but should instead somehow simply take it only at ‘face value’, whatever that might actually mean – resembles that earlier belief that ordinary people cannot be entrusted to read the Scriptures at all. Indeed it is worse, in that restriction of Scripture-reading was at the time more or less feasible (if not moral) whereas to read without interpreting is actually infeasible.
We suggest that the promulgation of lay reading of the Bible has been a glorious effort doing vastly more good than harm. The fact that some extremist sects have arisen during this era of vernacular Scripture-reading hardly begins to outweigh the magnificent achievements of the many campaigns to bring the gospel, in writing as well as orally, to every corner of this world in the spirit of the Great Commission.
The Reconciliation
The key theological doctrine which evolution does not, cannot touch, is that the human being is a special creation of God, destined for relationship with him and especially loved. (Christians do not have such clear beliefs about other species, although the Bible is clear that God is the creator of all things and will bring creation as a whole to its fulfilment under the headship of Christ.) In that theological setting, our argument against ‘creationism’ is: the physical series of events whereby the species Homo sapiens came to emerge is a matter for valid investigation by science, and has little if any theological significance.
In maintaining that the holy Scriptures are inspired we wish to suggest that the ‘interpret only literally’ recipe actually leads to an impoverished understanding of the intended meaning of certain texts. Are they to be understood literally? Is there not a deeper level of sacred truth conveyed by these words? This is surely the crucial issue facing any serious student of the Bible. Has not a slavish commitment to a superficial literalism - derived very largely from our secular scientific culture with its own slavish commitment to facts, numbers and data stripped of any symbolic sacred value - hampered the discovering of the sacred meaning of the text?
To those mostly modern Christians who have become habituated to the false antinomy ‘evolution or faith’ we pass the vision of leading scientists such as Professor Morton. Evolution is, as best we can make out the facts, evidently the method whereby God has brought into this world the wonderful range of species (approx. 9/10 of them now extinct). There seems to be no good reason to resist this conclusion drawn, we believe, from a dispassionate examination of the facts revealed by an enormous body of scientific investigation.
One level on which the issue should not be decided is one’s subjective, aesthetic reactions to the two approaches. Nevertheless, we would like to say that, to our mind, the marvellous panoply of unfolding creation over aeons is surely tribute to a Creator who operates on a scale of time that hints at the eternal. Rocks as old as 3,500 million years contain evidence of organisms similar to the photosynthetic blue-green algae still functioning on earth today. The earliest fossilised animals have been found in a complex of sedimentary rocks that stretch back more than 600 million years. These were first discovered in Australia, and have subsequently been found in South Africa, England, Siberia, and Newfoundland, and form what is called the Ediacara fossil complex. The challenge to us today is to avoid the secular temptation to pit the prescientific, religious Genesis narrative against the hard-won picture that science has unfolded during the past couple of centuries. The narrative reading of the early chapters of Genesis and the narrative reading of a genuinely-conducted science must surely speak from different vantage points. The task before us today is to interpret the Creation narratives of Genesis in the light of what has been discovered within the past couple of centuries. We beseech our fellow Christians to do so in faith that God will not let us down or play tricks with our reasoning. The truth – and only the truth – is consistent. Those who adopt the spurious axiom of Creationism (as discussed above – the assumption that one can believe in either creation or evolution but not both) are risking severe cognitive dissonance. It is a false statement which if adopted must lead to contradictions and endless trouble.
We must object to Renton Maclachlan’s attempt to enlist on the side of modern fundamentalism the great scientists Maxwell and Faraday. It is hypothetical in the worst sense to say ‘if these two were alive today they would be numbered firmly among those holding to . . . "creation science" '. This is a completely untestable, almost meaningless assertion. There can be – short of a miracle – no such thing as Faraday alive today in a position to consider the evidence now available. It is simply impossible to know how that devout (though very nonconformist) Christian would have viewed the issue as it now stands. All one can say is that, as one of the three greatest scientists of all history, Faraday earned a most illustrious reputation for honouring the facts observed by science, and did not allow interpretation of them (as they then stood) to be warped by sectarian dogma.
Ecclesiastical and Political Implications
Those who persist in ‘creationism’ often project it into civil life in objectionable ways. Militant ‘creationist’ campaigns (emanating, so far as we have traced them, out of Lubbock, Tex. and Orange County, Calif.) have attempted to purge library holdings and to censor school science curricula to protect pupils from the teaching of evolution. This is a tragic, and even menacing, confusion. Only if evolution gets taught with the false overlay of suggesting that it contradicts or weakens Christianity should it be interfered with. This is certainly the case with the materialistic explanation for evolution, i.e. neo-Darwinism, but it is certainly not so if we view evolution as the means by which God has unfolded the splendour of his creation. The compromise is readily available for secular public schools to teach evolution as science but without metaphysical comment of any sort. We Christians of course regard such a compromise as unsatisfactory.
There are, however, some leaders who wish to protract the phoney conflict. Psychologically, this mistaken approach tends to consolidate their followers by the well-known mechanism of focussing on the need for solidarity against an external enemy. But science practised with integrity is not an enemy of Christianity, and the sooner this is realised the better. The phoney war makes for bad science and for distorted religion.
Conclusion
The real intellectual battle today is scientific atheism versus biblical theism, not evolution ‘versus ‘ creation. The creation ‘versus ‘ evolution wrangle serves only to channel valuable human energy into a futile side-issue that the secular world assumes to be the defining issue upon which Christianity stands or falls. Scientific atheism (read in part, neo-Darwinism) then rides on in a posture of uncriticised intellectual triumph, gathering apparent strength in the eyes of our materialistic, irreligious culture for having exposed the absurdity of a simplistic ‘creation science’ without having its own absurd assumptions challenged.
Christians are confronted with more than enough genuine tasks to keep us busy in the service of the Lord. Billions of people around the world have never heard the Word, and about one billion are malnourished, often ill-clad and ill-housed. The church cannot justify the dedication of books, rhetoric and misdirected work in the cause of “creation science”. It is not real science, and its theological motives are confused. Let us move beyond this distraction.
Neil Broom is associate professor of Engineering, and Robert Mann was until retirement senior lecturer in Environmental Studies, in the University of Auckland.
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This article was published in the New Zealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth" by
Jonathan Wells
Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland
All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000, if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.
The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (see the document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotional description of which reads:
'In this shocking book, Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high school textbooks - and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.
The best known "icons of evolution" - from pictures of apes evolving into humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on tree trunks - are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution that are simply untrue.
These icons of evolution appear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature is full of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that without these icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowingly misinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'
With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of this article correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these in detail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominance in the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censor dissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should be disqualified from receiving public funds.
The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of ten recent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given a failing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests that owners of textbooks can insert in their books.
There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy, and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of the authors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accurately presented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and he has put his own particular spin on those facts.
I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers (the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light of both what Wells has written and what is actually written in the introductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology: Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.
The questions and my answers are:
Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth -- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model was made up of … the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancient world. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actual atmosphere of the early Earth … Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Urey experiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including a mixture having a very low concentration of O2. Abiotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models, though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acids commonly found in organisms … The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth, or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clear that substantial progress has been made.
Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor -- thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion", which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. The so-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea of punctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of life concept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is not refuted.
Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry, then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry -- a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology … Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying that evolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures that functioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whether similarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and this means that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.
Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gill pouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrate embryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identify anatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structures are extensively modified in different ways during later development of the organisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descent with modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that 'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that the development of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of the evolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists have been led astray by their theoretical assumptions.
Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds -- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered the ancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch of the avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modern birds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organisms cannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.
Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection -- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wells refers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authority on the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of the scientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanism in moths.
Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection -- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant just as an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches track changes in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes in characteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-term changes in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breeding stocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers have published more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in the wild.
Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution -- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is not evidence for evolution per se.
Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident -- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says: "Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a series of steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homo sapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of the human family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across the page. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with many splinter groups having traveled down dead ends… " Wells has not presented an accurate account of what is now known about human evolution.
Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact -- even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. The claims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on a misrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM so as to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.
Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.
The writer is grateful to Dr Robert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.
I appreciated your 'President's comments embolden anti-evolutionists'. If you pursue this topic, you may find some help from my writings below, and the more general pubd article attached. The other attached article is specifically about the 'ten gassers' that you mention in your article.
I'm the founder of a Science & Faith group in Auckland, which staged a symposium for Dembski when he visited here. (He was congenial, but unresponsive.) If ever you're coming over here, perhaps you'd let us know in advance ...
THE ILLOGIC OF CREATIONISM
L R B MANN
Sep 2003
The word 'evolution' has become, for some Christians, a
provocation. They have been led to believe that evolution is essentially
an atheistic idea. This misunderstanding has been misused for much
unnecessary disputing.
VisioNetworkNZ leader Glyn Carpenter writes (DayStar Sep 03) that
the creationist v. evolution argument is "also referred to as the young
earth / old earth debate". This is an unfortunate confusion. Let's get a
clear understanding of what the terms mean, and what are the various main
beliefs, connected with evolution.
Two main sub-sects of "creationism" exist. One version of
"creationism" asserts not only that all species were created in 6 days but
also that this brief period of biological creation occurred less than
10,000 years ago. That is 'young earth creationism' (YEC). 'Old earth
creationism' (OEC), exemplified by Hugh Ross's 'Reasons to Believe'
organisation of S. Calif., acknowledges the scientific evidence that the
Earth is much, much older, but also asserts like YEC that evolution has not
occurred. The difference between these two sub-sects is of some interest,
but it is different from the dispute between those who believe in evolution
and those who refuse to believe that evolution has occurred.
These differing views on evolution and creation can be diagrammed
as a logic-tree, to be read from the bottom:
theistic evolution OEC YEC
x x x
x x x
x creationism
x x
x x
theism deism atheism
x x x
x x x
x x
x x
x x
x
The diagram summarises the main logical options.
You can believe in God, or not; this is the basic, most important,
choice in the logic-tree.
If you choose the atheism fork, you can then try like Dawkins etc
to explain how the incomparable coherent complexity of ecosystems, or even
just the functions of a humble bacterial flagellum, could have evolved by
the workings of physical & chemical laws, with no creative planning.
If instead you choose to believe in God, you have an option of a
largely defunct view, deism, holding that God did create the universe but
that he then turned it loose, like a clockwork toy he had wound up and left
to run by the natural laws which he'd created. By contrast, theism holds
that God not only created the universe but also sustains & guides it from
moment to moment.
The tendency known as creationism is - though not usually billed
as such by its adherents - a version of deism in its purported
explanation of life. Proceeding up the logic-tree, within the creationism
branch, we find the two versions, YEC and OEC, holding that, at least
regarding the creation of species of organism, God did it all at the start
and has not done any more creation since then. Although most creationists
are theists in that they believe in God's continuing involvement in the
world (in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, God's responses to prayer,
etc), they are deists in their biology - they believe in a completed
creation.
Both YEC and OEC are opposed to the mainstream Christian view,
which is theistic evolution, combining traditional theology with scientific
findings that the different types of organism have been created at
successive times over several billion years. God as the maker & sustainer
of the universe is affirmed by theistic evolution. To me as a Christian,
physical & chemical laws are an expression of creative planning, not an
alternative to it. Dawkins just has to accept them as an extraordinary
brute fact, the origin of which he studiously ignores (overlooking two of
the four categories of cause).
Theistic evolution results from reading both the book of scripture
and the book of nature. It relies on faith that God will not mislead us if
we examine honestly what we find in strata, fossils, molecules, and other
aspects of nature that allow us to infer past processes in biology.
Creationists have misrepresented these scientific findings in many ways
(and as a scientist I deeply deplore that misbehaviour, documented in e.g.
Prof. Ian Plimer's book 'Telling Lies for God'). Attached is a batch of
corrections of a minor peripatetic creationist pseudo-scientist.
But it is their logic that is the prime defect of creationism,
counterposing the concepts of creation "vs." evolution, implying that they
are somehow incompatible.
Where in this logic-tree does Intelligent Design fit? Exemplified
by the video 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life' and the writings of William
Dembski, this approach to explaining life confines itself to what is called
natural theology, i.e. reading the book of nature with intent to infer
properties of the designer(s). ID's effect is thus at the base of the
logic-tree, helping those who have yet to decide whether organisms are
caused by merely material processes or are designed. This is the Argument
to Design developed by William Paley two centuries ago. It is fine as far
as it goes but is only a tiny, if basic, part of theistic evolution as set
forth by leading Christian scholars such as William Temple, Sir Alister
Hardy, and our own John Morton (see 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972).
Another leading scholar in natural theology, but taking a broader view than
Dembski expounds, is Neil Broom of the University of Auckland (see 'How
Blind Is the Watchmaker?' IVP 2001). Broom expounds the Argument to
Design as well as anyone, while seeing no theological difficulty in an
ancient biosphere and evolution as shown by science.
My essay in the book 'Science & Christianity' maintains -
following Morton - that a more intelligible, direct & conclusive argument
is to insist on all four causes as required to explain life, rather than
relying principally on gaps in scientific understanding of the evolution of
bacterial flagella etc.
CREATIONISM & IDT
L R B Mann
Oct 2003; rev Jan 2005
Can you imagine what offence is achieved on scientists who are Christians by the persistent lying of "creationism"? The fanatics make aggressive insolent public attacks on evolution, insisting on the moronic, indeed demonic axiom " EITHER the book of scripture OR the book of nature". These demonic agents promulgate fanatically the idea that to read the book of nature honestly is to contradict, even to insult, the book of scripture. Devout scholars such as John Morton are in effect called liars or fools for their reading the book of nature; and the fanatics who do so misrepresent science with a persistent wickedness that is particularly offensive to one brought up in science.
This sectarian tendency, intellectually headquartered near Disneyland and bankrolled out of (so far as I've traced it) Lubbock, Tex., is more active in NZ than ever; DayStar® carried an advertorial 'interview' of which the leading fanatic then has the cheek to complain in the next issue; a large colour advertisement is placed near the advertorial interview. This is a form of corruption I've seen before with other editors.
IDT is an ally of Creationism®, franchised into NZ by Focus on the Family.
IDT is only a small part of natl theol, and is being blown far out of proportion by huge funding linked quietly to "creationist" fanatics thru Johnson & Wells. It relies basically on lack of knowledge - e.g lack of any current explanation how the bacterial flagellum could have evolved in a Darwinian, Steve Jones fashion. This is 'God of the gaps' reasoning, dangerous because the gap may be filled tomorrow by new facts &/or reasoning. Why not reason more directly from the macroscopic observables of ecology? A child can see, without education or instruments, that ecology is wonderfully planned. I believe microstructures needing instruments & theory to imagine - e.g the bacterial flagellum, or a DNA secondary structure - are inferior as main examples of Paley timepieces. They're not wrong, but they are to a degree obscurantist.
At an early age Morton's "claret cameo" should be intelligible; all 4 causes are needed in biology, not just the 2 with which Dawkins tries to make out biology can be explained.
It is murky - annoyingly, and I suppose deliberately - but we have to read the picture as best we can. As Harold Turner said, creationism is a waste of time; and I would add that IDT is at best a drag, pedantically OK but not worth much time. I infer from the glimpses that have come my way that they're connected, organisationally and to a degree intellectually thru e.g Wells, to creationism®.
Meanwhile, Sheldrake & Morton, spearhead of the mainstream thrust thru Temple, are ignored by IDT entrepreneurs.
The IDT site www.iscid.org controllers Sparacio & Dembski have repeatedly refused to allow me to contribute criticisms. Here is an example.
==========
"Creationism" is a significant cross-current within Christianity, distracting efforts from real issues. And it presents to ignorant, lazy or dishonest outsiders a very misleading image of the logic & honesty of Christians. A target is thus created, which is nothing better than a caricature, for atheists to mock.
IDT is essentially Paley 1802 - fine, as far as it goes. Broom's book is the best IDT I know of - and fully acknowledging not only a billions-of-years biosphere but also evolution. The IDT 'wedge' however has become to some extent a front for "creationism". Don Nield has argued, and I agree, that IDT is trying to drive in its wedge at the wrong place.
Full 28 y ago a leading local statistician (later prof.), George Seber, tried to get me to debate publicly against Duane Gish. The notion was in some ways attractive, not least because we're both Berkeley Ph.D biochemists; but I declined, saying I would not dignify his cause by sharing a stage with him. This reticence, uncharacteristic for me, I have never regretted.
Much more recently, I gave a talk on Creationism to our local Christian Academics Group. In moving the vote of thanks, George insisted on ignoring my main point by expressing hope that there will be tolerance of Creationism alongside the mainstream position which I had advocated.
My own position is similar to that of our leading emeritus zoology prof John Morton (see his 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972). Although generally critical of the Vatican, I think its doctrine on evolution is hard to fault, and I credit it for the fact that Rome has had little trouble regarding evolution. On this issue if no others, general Christian doctrine should learn from the Vatican.
Around 2 decade ago Creationists tried to tamper with school book holdings in Hamilton N.Z. I have not learned whether this attempt persisted.
In 1983 I photographed in the Science Museum, Kensington, an exhibit which asserted the axiom that *either* organisms have evolved *or* God has created them. This furphy, not normally so clearly enunciated, seems to me to be not only the fundamental error of the Creationist® fanaticism but also typical in its illogic of most if not all fundamentalisms. I suggest the racket common to them is the requirement of assent to a proposition which is not subtly but flagrantly false. This is not ancillary or accidental: I believe it is essential, in that once a person has overtly signalled switching-off of God-given reason in favour of a pointedly false slogan from the sect leader(s), obedience can be thereafter required much more generally. This is in the nature of totalitarian systems' social psychology. "The Slavs are sub-human" is a prototypical modern example of a blatantly false slogan which you had to assent to overtly if you were to attain the temporary social security of the National Socialist Party. "The first 3 chapters of the Bible, plus the Noah story, must be taken literally" is similar mischief. I don't see why this racket is not more widely & vigorously condemned. Those who propound it do not in fact advocate that other parts of the Bible be read literally; Broom & I point to John the Baptist's hailing "the Lamb of God" - why do fundamentalists not try to insist that Christ assumed ovine form for that occasion on the banks of the Jordan?
As a scientist active in natural theology, I support the general gist of IDT as such but fear that it functions on the edge of a "creationist" whirlpool.
In defence of the persistent lying of creationism®, I've received impassioned slogans 'Jesus died for them too', to which I replied "yes - and for Himmler & Stalin also". A senior Presbyterian minister, Rev Bruce Nicholls, defends the deceivers by claiming they're not proven liars. Prof Don Nield has shown in detail that hevi-doodi creationist J Wells has falsified standard biology texbooks in order to create straw men to knock down. The version of creation presented by main aggressive creationists H Morris, D Gish, J Sarfati, Wells, etc relies on falsifying evidence and on misinterpreting facts grossly, as well as wholesale ignoring of most facts (because they imply a 10^9 y evolution).
The real issue of the day is how to convert the billions who have never heard the Good News, as well as the approx 1 billion overdeveloped who have gone for "Enlightenment"®, Noo Eege, or just nihilism. Christianity has much to offer the children of atheism & agnosticism, starting for many educated in science by a careful exposition of all 4 Causes, a review of facts on evolution, and an honest presentation of natural theology as in Temple, Hardy, Morton & Sheldrake. The USA sects I've been criticising do little or nothing to meet these needs. Their conduct is variously devious, dishonest and mind-buggering. They are distracting lay folk away from what science has to tell them. I'd be grateful if the USA would cease to export these prdkts - whether deemed kmpetit'v or not.
R
--
-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
====================
Creationism v. evolution
but not
creation v. evolution
Robert Mann and Neil Broom
very slightly adapted from Stimulus 8 (2) 16-20 (May 2000)
Many Christians believe that the very idea of evolution – most crucially, the idea that the species Homo sapiens evolved from many previous species now extinct – entails denial of true religion. We wish to argue that there need be no real dispute. The fear appears to be that to admit evolution as a fact - i.e. admit to life unfolding over time with increasing complexity & variety - would bring one into a crisis of faith in Holy Scripture. Maintaining it is a misunderstanding we seek to resolve this apparent conflict in the present paper.
But before we delve into the theory of evolution we note that the facts in direct support of the specific idea of Homo sapiens evolving from ape-like ancestors are – as science now stands – very scanty. The old ‘missing link’ objection still holds good to a large extent regarding factual evidence of immediate human evolution. Indeed, the whole record of evolution is riddled with discontinuities, e.g. the frogs suddenly appear, not preceded by any proto-frogs. The main reason why almost all scientists believe in evolution is that it has been exceedingly successful as an integrating theory within biology.
Nevertheless, one must point out that the evidence is fairly conclusive that humans appeared only about a million years ago, certainly long after many species that have existed for hundreds of millions of years (in contrast to the face value of the story in Genesis 2). More importantly, we maintain that even if a seamless sequence of fossils were demonstrated with no missing links in human evolution, such a finding need have no theological significance regarding the central doctrines that man is created by God and made in the image of God.
Perhaps we should make clear at the start the perspective from which we attempt to contribute to this fraught arena of (sometimes intemperate) argumentation. We are scientists working on aspects of biology, and we are mainstream Christians who hold to traditional doctrines as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed. In other words, we find ourselves able to live by the belief that Christianity does not conflict with a science that is conducted with intellectual integrity - a science that acknowledges the finitude of all human knowing and therefore its inability to proclaim on ultimate issues save what is given by special revelation.
For many Christians the science/God debate automatically focuses on an attempted literal reading of the first two chapters of Genesis. Many assert, and quite strenuously, that Genesis outlines literally the actual history and scientific principles of creation, and any secular science that contradicts this ‘Bible science’ must be rejected outright.
In this literal interpretation of a particular part of Scripture, creation is believed to have taken place over six 24-hour days and perhaps no more than 10,000 years ago. ‘Creation science’ rejects any thought of an ancient earth spanning periods of geological time of many millions of years, and denies any gradual development or evolving of life forms. It is a philosophical position that rejects a huge amount of scientific evidence gathered by a vast community of scientists who hold a wide spectrum of religious (Christian and others) and non-religious viewpoints about the origin of life.
Our personal conviction is that ‘creation science’ is fighting the wrong battle. We say this for two important reasons. Firstly, it makes the dubious assumption that Genesis 1 & 2 must be read in a strictly literal sense if they are to be read in a God-honouring way. It is not at all clear to us that the narrative form of the early chapters of Genesis is literal or even remotely scientific in its intent. The creation texts contain a very simple storyline that is timeless and relevant for all people for all time. But is it science? Science as the modern discipline which gave rise to the creation/evolution discussion hadn’t evolved when the author(s) penned these narratives. The burning issues of the day were what we would call theological, not scientific. Who made the cosmos? Who is in charge of it? Who is to be worshipped? Were the people of God to place their faith in the many divinities of polytheism or in the one true God of the Israelites?
Despite the impact on contemporary culture of postmodernity’s disaffection with science, there is a significant continuing acceptance of 'old fashioned' modernism - scientific materialism and loss of a moral base. The full potential of Genesis 1-3 to help us address these issues will not be realised unless we shoulder the responsibility of interpretation with all the difficulties and even pitfalls that this may entail.
It seems to us that the main point of the creation narratives is to put nature – including mankind – fairly and squarely in its place as created, and thus as a consequence never to be accorded the status of divinity. No part of creation was to be the object of man’s worship. No part of creation was to shape the ultimate destiny of humanity, and this was to include the heavenly bodies. God alone was to be acknowledged as the source and sustainer of all created things.
We must discern very carefully the type of literary narrative being used in each part of scripture. It may be disastrous if we apply an interpretation not intended by the author. It seems to us that when we come to a central Christian truth such as the Resurrection the various accounts given in all four Gospels confront us with a flesh-and-blood, time-and-place narrative that almost ‘screams’ out to be read in a literal sense. Everything about the Resurrection narratives seems to insist we take them literally.
By contrast the early chapters of Genesis do not read in this same flesh-and-blood historic way. They have an entirely contrasting literary flavour. Their structure is much more stylised and poetic. The already-established 7-day Hebrew week is, in all probability, used as a means of systematically working through each realm of the created world with the very powerful pronouncement that all such realms and their inhabitants were the creation of God. What more powerful way to demolish for all time the pagan myth that within the world there were powers and forces that could hold sway over the destinies of people and enslave them in the vice of fear-ridden subservience?
The text reads much more like a series of epic declarations – that God is the supreme commander of the universe, and that all things large and small owe their existence to him. These are, perhaps, words that attempt to describe the indescribable – events of such cosmic proportions as to be literally beyond our understanding as created beings. The language is surely conveying what we would call religious, not scientific truth.
Clear evidence that the text is not meant to be read in a scientific sense is got by comparing the two different creation accounts contained in Genesis 1: 1-2:3 and 2: 4-25. As an obvious example of the author’s(s’) clear disregard for chronological accuracy, in the first account land animals are created before humans whereas in the second account animals are created after man. This apparent conflict is important only if we try to interpret the narratives in a narrow literal sense. Surely an important purpose of both accounts is to place humanity at the apex of creation, separate relationally from all that is beneath; for this theological point, timing is hardly relevant.
We hold that science in general and evolution in particular can offer no genuine conflict with Christianity. There are well-known general grounds for our attitude. The purview of science is restricted: it is as narrow as the physical realm of matter & energy (including living organisms), but no spiritual entities. The fact that science can study only this restricted realm (within which it has achieved very impressive discoveries) is no handicap; it is simply a fact that the scientific method applies only to energy & matter as defined by science, and when science attempts to pronounce on moral questions, let alone spiritual questions, it is a trespasser.
We can say that science is a human activity able to deal only with the lower levels of material cause and effect. By contrast, what we think of as ‘religion’ is concerned with the big picture, the ultimate issues concerning the cosmos and its relationship to the creator. The issues of governance, purpose and meaning are outside the scope of science. The material world operates as a subset within the much larger framework illuminated by revealed religion. In using the word ‘subset’ here we are attempting to stress the importance of not letting theology and science retreat to supposedly unconnected spheres. We wish to provoke renewed co-operation, rather than spurious conflict, between them.
We hope these generalities set the stage as we turn to particulars about the evolution of organisms and about, on the other hand, the vastly more important ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions which only revealed religion can tackle.
Outline of Evolutionary Theory
Modern science has existed for only a few centuries. Why it took so long to begin is discussed in Harold Turner’s recent book and in Renton Maclachlan’s thoughtful review of that book in this journal . Unfortunately that review complains at Rev Dr Turner’s ‘repeated, scathing dismissal of “creation science” without any justification whatsoever being given’. As friends of Harold Turner we are aware he reached the conclusion years ago that “creation science” is a waste of time. He does not bother in his book to expound his reasons for his dismissive attitude to it. Our purpose now is to assist readers by outlining how such a conclusion as Dr Turner’s is not merely reasonable but essential to the goal - dauntingly ambitious to some - of reconciling science and religion.
Since the originators Darwin and Wallace, biology has amassed a compelling body of evidence for organic evolution, i.e. evidence that life has unfolded over a long time, as a tree with many branches and many 'missing' branches, developing a generally more complex range of life-forms, with Homo sapiens appearing only recently. The facts gleaned from fossils, augmented recently by molecular details, strongly suggest that evolution has occurred. The body of evidence from which this deduction flows is so huge, so multi-faceted, and so coherent, that evolution is regarded as a fact by almost every scientist today.
The evidence for evolution, minimally mixed with neo-Darwinian theory, is interesting to review as it stood around the time when modern 'creationism' arose in the USA.
We immediately, emphatically add: how evolution has occurred is a different (and much more difficult) question from the simpler question of whether organisms have evolved. And Goldsmith has pointed out vigorously, in an exchange with the militant atheist Wolpert, that it is a mere assumption to say that evolution must have worked by the mechanism of natural selection.
Many readers will be aware of a supremely confident brand of scientific atheism that is currently fashionable, largely popularised by Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins. Dawkins contemptuously dismisses any suggestion that evolution requires anything more than the blind forces of physics. He says “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Dawkins views Darwin’s idea of natural selection as providing an entirely material means by which the chance variations in an organism’s offspring are channelled in the direction of ‘evolving’ (read increasing) complexity. What is important is that evolution is viewed by Dawkins as an entirely mindless process; hence his confident atheistic stance.
We consider Dawkins in error at a fundamental conceptual level and wish to highlight this by reference to just one of the illustrations he employs to support his scientific atheism - namely the evolution of the eye as expounded in one of his recent books Climbing Mt. Improbable .
Dawkins likens the evolution of the eye to climbing a high mountain. In this scheme of things the evolution of biological novelty (i.e. reaching the summit of Mount Improbable) is achieved in the neo-Darwinian sense by gradual, almost imperceptible steps of improvement. In his metaphor we take a route up the gentle slopes rather than attempting to scale the impossibly steep cliffs and precipices. All that is required is that we head towards the summit.
The emphasis is on small, easy improvements in the organism rather than large leaps in sophistication. Like many of Dawkins’ illustrations, the mountain-climbing analogy seems, at least superficially, to make a lot of sense. It is common for technological advances to proceed in much the same gradual, bit-by-bit fashion.
But let’s look closely at the claimed connection between the development of an eye and Dawkins’ mountain-climbing metaphor.
We arrive at this most improbable structure - the fully functioning eye - by imperceptibly small steps in improvement. No big leaps of innovation, no wild attempts at scaling ‘steep cliffs or precipices’, just an easy meander up the gentle grassy slopes until the summit of optical sophistication is reached.
To support his case Dawkins describes in some detail a computer study conducted by Swedish biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger. These scientists devised a computer program to simulate the evolution of what they describe as a simple eye representation. Remember, this is a virtual, not a real, eye.
They begin with a 2-dimensional picture of a flat layer of imaginary light-sensitive cells sandwiched between an imaginary transparent layer and an imaginary dark backing layer. The two biologists admit in their study that they don’t pretend to explain how the light-sensitive cells that their model commences with might have evolved. This is entirely understandable as the origin of the first living cell remains just one of the innumerable mysteries of the biological world, and how any became light-sensitive is also unknown.
The model works (and always in a virtual sense) by producing at random small percentage changes in the degree of curvature of the sandwich, in the diameter of a light-restricting aperture, in the thickness of the transparent layer, and in the local value of its refractive index (light-bending ability). The computer model is programmed to perform a simple calculation of the sandwich’s optical resolving power every time a change occurs at random in the three variables noted above. This is done by a simple ray-tracing procedure, one familiar to any physics student.
In a relatively small number of steps (1829 steps if each step involved a 1% change in any of the variables) the computer model is shown to transform the flat sandwich through continuous minor improvements into a configuration representing a virtual, focussed eye lens. Dawkins claims this transformation of the initially flat configuration into a focussed configuration by a series of tiny but connected steps is exactly analogous to climbing the mountain of biological complexity: “Going upwards means mutating, one small step at a time, and only accepting mutations that improve optical performance. So, where do we get to? Pleasingly, through a smooth upward pathway, starting from no proper eye at all, we reach a familiar fish eye, complete with lens.” (Climbing Mt. Improbable, p. 151.)
However, any careful reader will immediately see that Dawkins’ claim to explain eye evolution involves a most blatant transgression of the rules of his own materialistic science. Note how logic requires him to impose a highly artificial and purposeful constraint on the behaviour of the eye model: he inserts the crucial proviso of “only accepting mutations that improve optical performance”. In terms of his mountain-climbing analogy, one must “aim for the summit”. He has committed a cardinal breach by introducing a profoundly personal dimension into his scientific materialism: it is persons that have aims, with the foresight to discern whether an immediate change of no use in itself heads toward a distant co-ordinated usefulness.
Ask any serious mountaineer, ask one of New Zealand’s most famous citizens - Sir Edmund Hillary: high summits are conquered only because the mountaineer has a powerful desire to get to the top. The activity is loaded with purpose. The mountaineer is possessed of a burning obsession to achieve the very difficult. Ed Hillary and Norgay Tenzing reached the summit of Everest in 1953 because they really wanted to get there!
If Richard Dawkins is required to use a metaphor such as mountain-climbing to explain the role of ‘natural’ selection then this is surely the most bare-faced admission that he really does require more than a set of purely material mechanisms to explain the evolution of complexity in the living world. ‘Aiming for the top’ is to admit to a guiding principle that cannot be expressed in terms of the impersonal processes of physics and chemistry. For a much more detailed critique of Dawkins’ approach and of scientific materialism in general, the interested reader is referred to the book How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or atheism: should science decide? published recently by one of the present authors.
We do know – insofar as one could know about events in the distant past that cannot be directly observed or repeated – that evolution has occurred; but we have only vague ideas of its mechanisms. It is important to keep clearly distinguished these two distinct questions. In our opinion, the mechanism postulated by neo-Darwinism is very inadequate. We agree that mutations occur (more or less randomly), but we believe the notion of selection among those mutants by "the environment" which is said to be blind and purposeless, is no better than an intellectual con trick. This main axiom of neoDarwinism is a bald unsupported assumption that what Aristotle called final cause is absent from biology. That which is officially denied by Dawkins – purpose – is quietly admitted when he talks about “aiming for the summit”, the vital missing link in modern materialistic biology.
Most educated people are aware that as soon as Darwin announced his concept of the origin of species a heated dispute arose which has been raging fitfully ever since . Our contention is that this is a phoney dispute, a series of misunderstandings; and this leads us naturally to the topic of ‘creationism’.
Creationism
The basic assumption of ‘creationism’ is:-
either God has created and sustained the universe, including all life,
or organisms have evolved (as scientific evidence strongly suggests).
This axiom is – rather obviously – unsatisfactory; the two propositions are not logical alternatives but, from the viewpoint of scientifically informed Christians, both are true. We have every right – even (as we would argue) a duty – to study with our God-given faculties the world as we find it, including the evidence of its past changes; and when we do so, we find overwhelming evidence of evolution – a fact of little or no theological significance.
The body of evidence amassed by thousands of scientists – including no small number of Christians – fills many books. As against this there exists a tiny group of works maintaining a ‘young Earth’ theory and attempting to interpret the facts on the basis of the belief that all species were created within a very short time, relatively recently.
The first comment on this confrontation must be the general principle – which Christians, especially, should never forget – that truth is not decided by voting. The fact that “creation science” is propounded by only a very tiny minority of scientists is no proof of its unreliability; remind yourself of the long series of scientific theories that have been mocked and marginalised for a period after first challenging orthodoxy, but have later gained credence. For instance, Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis was, within living memory, dismissed by the leading biologists and (more persistently) geologists, but has now become standard theory. The history of science is not merely sprinkled with but largely consists of such revolutions in theory . And indeed the idea of evolution itself was, for a while, widely rejected. Today the resistance to it among scientists is down to an extremely tiny minority. But that does not tell us whether it is true.
We suggest to readers who are outside science that this ‘creation science’ does indeed deserve the inverted commas assigned to it by Renton Maclachlan. It is not real science but a form of pseudo-science within which the facts are selectively distorted or ignored for the purpose of forcing a conclusion that cannot follow from application of the scientific method to the full array of known facts.
‘Creationist’ fundamentalists insist that the first three chapters of the Bible must only be read in a strictly literal sense. On this axiom is built the fear that evolution threatens true faith by challenging the reliability of Scripture. This is the essential confusion in the ‘creationism’ position.
Reconciling science with Christianity will require, we suggest, nothing short of the abandonment of the fundamentalism which asserts that there is always a straightforward, clearly recognised, strictly literal, reading of texts and that such a reading is the only possible reading of Scripture. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is impossible – all communication necessarily involves interpretation. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is doomed to failure and should be abandoned. Only if we have faith that God does not play tricks on us, either in the Scriptures or in our observations of the world he has made and sustained, can we break through to the reconciliation which is sorely needed.
This may seem a daunting challenge to some devout Christians whose feelings we have no wish to bruise.
We are puzzled at the insistence of fundamentalists on literal reading of, especially, the first three chapters of Genesis while apparently accepting poetic language in, say, Ezekiel, and in the New Testament (to take one example out of many: John the Baptist hails ‘the lamb of God’ in an important metaphor which nobody tries to take literally). We see no reason to assume that just a few parts of the Bible are devoid of symbolism, figures of speech, even poetry; indeed, on the grand difficult topics of the origins and the nature and the fate of humans we would expect, if anything, unusual recourse to such devices of communication. In dealing with the issue of origins the biblical narrative is entering territory that must surely ultimately transcend what is accessible to the human mind, and especially the mind trained in the sciences. Indeed, the sciences themselves rely on model, metaphor, symbol and analogy to picture the objects of scientific inquiry. How much more will we need pictures and symbols to present reality that lies beyond normal experience, such as the origin of creation?! The language of imagery and symbolism (picture language really) must surely play a crucial role in communicating such cosmic truths to people of all ages and times. We think it is evident that only on such a basis can the creation stories of Genesis be understood at all.
One argument against a non-literal or symbolic reading of the early chapters of Genesis cites the several references to Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, and to Noah in both the Gospels and elsewhere in the NT. How can both Christ and Paul speak of real figures and we then deny their historical reality? Again we need not respond to this challenge by ‘accelerating straight down the road’ of panicky literalism. Theologically there is a recognised plasticity in the meaning of the word ‘Adam’; it is far from certain that it was used in Genesis to speak only of a single first man. The symbolic, representative meaning of Adam may be much more relevant to our deeper understanding of the Genesis narratives than the secular, literal approach with its necessary exclusion of sacred, symbolic content.
It may be helpful to remind ourselves that for most of the Christian era it has been held that the Scriptures should not be available outside a very small exclusive cadre. Those who first tried to make the Bible available to the masses were victimised severely. One reason for that punitive attitude was fear that the individual Christian left to interpret Scripture will fall into error. This fear has today been supplanted by faith that the Holy Spirit will guide our prayerful reading so that on the whole we shall be better off than if interpretation and even reading of Scripture had been reserved to an elite few.
The fundamentalist claim that holy Scripture can be read without interpretation – that the reader can, and should, refrain from interpreting what is read, but should instead somehow simply take it only at ‘face value’, whatever that might actually mean – resembles that earlier belief that ordinary people cannot be entrusted to read the Scriptures at all. Indeed it is worse, in that restriction of Scripture-reading was at the time more or less feasible (if not moral) whereas to read without interpreting is actually infeasible.
We suggest that the promulgation of lay reading of the Bible has been a glorious effort doing vastly more good than harm. The fact that some extremist sects have arisen during this era of vernacular Scripture-reading hardly begins to outweigh the magnificent achievements of the many campaigns to bring the gospel, in writing as well as orally, to every corner of this world in the spirit of the Great Commission.
The Reconciliation
The key theological doctrine which evolution does not, cannot touch, is that the human being is a special creation of God, destined for relationship with him and especially loved. (Christians do not have such clear beliefs about other species, although the Bible is clear that God is the creator of all things and will bring creation as a whole to its fulfilment under the headship of Christ.) In that theological setting, our argument against ‘creationism’ is: the physical series of events whereby the species Homo sapiens came to emerge is a matter for valid investigation by science, and has little if any theological significance.
In maintaining that the holy Scriptures are inspired we wish to suggest that the ‘interpret only literally’ recipe actually leads to an impoverished understanding of the intended meaning of certain texts. Are they to be understood literally? Is there not a deeper level of sacred truth conveyed by these words? This is surely the crucial issue facing any serious student of the Bible. Has not a slavish commitment to a superficial literalism - derived very largely from our secular scientific culture with its own slavish commitment to facts, numbers and data stripped of any symbolic sacred value - hampered the discovering of the sacred meaning of the text?
To those mostly modern Christians who have become habituated to the false antinomy ‘evolution or faith’ we pass the vision of leading scientists such as Professor Morton. Evolution is, as best we can make out the facts, evidently the method whereby God has brought into this world the wonderful range of species (approx. 9/10 of them now extinct). There seems to be no good reason to resist this conclusion drawn, we believe, from a dispassionate examination of the facts revealed by an enormous body of scientific investigation.
One level on which the issue should not be decided is one’s subjective, aesthetic reactions to the two approaches. Nevertheless, we would like to say that, to our mind, the marvellous panoply of unfolding creation over aeons is surely tribute to a Creator who operates on a scale of time that hints at the eternal. Rocks as old as 3,500 million years contain evidence of organisms similar to the photosynthetic blue-green algae still functioning on earth today. The earliest fossilised animals have been found in a complex of sedimentary rocks that stretch back more than 600 million years. These were first discovered in Australia, and have subsequently been found in South Africa, England, Siberia, and Newfoundland, and form what is called the Ediacara fossil complex. The challenge to us today is to avoid the secular temptation to pit the prescientific, religious Genesis narrative against the hard-won picture that science has unfolded during the past couple of centuries. The narrative reading of the early chapters of Genesis and the narrative reading of a genuinely-conducted science must surely speak from different vantage points. The task before us today is to interpret the Creation narratives of Genesis in the light of what has been discovered within the past couple of centuries. We beseech our fellow Christians to do so in faith that God will not let us down or play tricks with our reasoning. The truth – and only the truth – is consistent. Those who adopt the spurious axiom of Creationism (as discussed above – the assumption that one can believe in either creation or evolution but not both) are risking severe cognitive dissonance. It is a false statement which if adopted must lead to contradictions and endless trouble.
We must object to Renton Maclachlan’s attempt to enlist on the side of modern fundamentalism the great scientists Maxwell and Faraday. It is hypothetical in the worst sense to say ‘if these two were alive today they would be numbered firmly among those holding to . . . "creation science" '. This is a completely untestable, almost meaningless assertion. There can be – short of a miracle – no such thing as Faraday alive today in a position to consider the evidence now available. It is simply impossible to know how that devout (though very nonconformist) Christian would have viewed the issue as it now stands. All one can say is that, as one of the three greatest scientists of all history, Faraday earned a most illustrious reputation for honouring the facts observed by science, and did not allow interpretation of them (as they then stood) to be warped by sectarian dogma.
Ecclesiastical and Political Implications
Those who persist in ‘creationism’ often project it into civil life in objectionable ways. Militant ‘creationist’ campaigns (emanating, so far as we have traced them, out of Lubbock, Tex. and Orange County, Calif.) have attempted to purge library holdings and to censor school science curricula to protect pupils from the teaching of evolution. This is a tragic, and even menacing, confusion. Only if evolution gets taught with the false overlay of suggesting that it contradicts or weakens Christianity should it be interfered with. This is certainly the case with the materialistic explanation for evolution, i.e. neo-Darwinism, but it is certainly not so if we view evolution as the means by which God has unfolded the splendour of his creation. The compromise is readily available for secular public schools to teach evolution as science but without metaphysical comment of any sort. We Christians of course regard such a compromise as unsatisfactory.
There are, however, some leaders who wish to protract the phoney conflict. Psychologically, this mistaken approach tends to consolidate their followers by the well-known mechanism of focussing on the need for solidarity against an external enemy. But science practised with integrity is not an enemy of Christianity, and the sooner this is realised the better. The phoney war makes for bad science and for distorted religion.
Conclusion
The real intellectual battle today is scientific atheism versus biblical theism, not evolution ‘versus ‘ creation. The creation ‘versus ‘ evolution wrangle serves only to channel valuable human energy into a futile side-issue that the secular world assumes to be the defining issue upon which Christianity stands or falls. Scientific atheism (read in part, neo-Darwinism) then rides on in a posture of uncriticised intellectual triumph, gathering apparent strength in the eyes of our materialistic, irreligious culture for having exposed the absurdity of a simplistic ‘creation science’ without having its own absurd assumptions challenged.
Christians are confronted with more than enough genuine tasks to keep us busy in the service of the Lord. Billions of people around the world have never heard the Word, and about one billion are malnourished, often ill-clad and ill-housed. The church cannot justify the dedication of books, rhetoric and misdirected work in the cause of “creation science”. It is not real science, and its theological motives are confused. Let us move beyond this distraction.
Neil Broom is associate professor of Engineering, and Robert Mann was until retirement senior lecturer in Environmental Studies, in the University of Auckland.
===============
This article was published in the New Zealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth" by
Jonathan Wells
Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland
All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000, if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.
The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (see the document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotional description of which reads:
'In this shocking book, Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high school textbooks - and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.
The best known "icons of evolution" - from pictures of apes evolving into humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on tree trunks - are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution that are simply untrue.
These icons of evolution appear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature is full of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that without these icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowingly misinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'
With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of this article correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these in detail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominance in the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censor dissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should be disqualified from receiving public funds.
The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of ten recent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given a failing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests that owners of textbooks can insert in their books.
There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy, and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of the authors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accurately presented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and he has put his own particular spin on those facts.
I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers (the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light of both what Wells has written and what is actually written in the introductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology: Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.
The questions and my answers are:
Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth -- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model was made up of … the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancient world. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actual atmosphere of the early Earth … Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Urey experiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including a mixture having a very low concentration of O2. Abiotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models, though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acids commonly found in organisms … The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth, or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clear that substantial progress has been made.
Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor -- thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion", which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. The so-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea of punctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of life concept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is not refuted.
Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry, then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry -- a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology … Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying that evolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures that functioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whether similarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and this means that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.
Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gill pouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrate embryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identify anatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structures are extensively modified in different ways during later development of the organisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descent with modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that 'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that the development of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of the evolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists have been led astray by their theoretical assumptions.
Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds -- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered the ancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch of the avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modern birds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organisms cannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.
Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection -- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wells refers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authority on the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of the scientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanism in moths.
Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection -- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant just as an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches track changes in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes in characteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-term changes in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breeding stocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers have published more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in the wild.
Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution -- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is not evidence for evolution per se.
Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident -- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says: "Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a series of steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homo sapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of the human family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across the page. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with many splinter groups having traveled down dead ends… " Wells has not presented an accurate account of what is now known about human evolution.
Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact -- even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. The claims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on a misrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM so as to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.
Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.
The writer is grateful to Dr Robert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.
fw from Ray Bradley, with his attached conceptual map: (Map not included as BLOG will not accept)
> You might also be interested in taking a look at the conceptual map that I have drawn up as a guide to clear thinking about issues involving Intelligent Design. It must be understood in light of the conventions and logical rules laid down at the bottom of the page. (This is the sort of logic diagram that I encouraged you to work on a year or so ago). You will see that, as a matter of strict logic, there is no incompatibility between certain kinds of theism and either evolutionary theory or proposals re biogenesis. I think you agree.
This is a far more elaborate, more nearly complete map, in regard to the number of concepts displayed, than the simple one which Ray mentions (copied below & in attachment). I first composed this in response to VisioNet Glyn Carpenter's mischievous falsehood in DayStar - that the creationist/evolution argument is "also referred to as the young earth / old earth debate". My compughter graphics are far cruder than Ray's, and the following diagram doesn't always come thru email accurately; therefore I attach it also in the article I sent in response to Glyn's furphy.
Ray's map is certainly more complete wrt mentioning concepts. However, I will strongly criticise some of his assertions about the logical relations between them.
First, here's my initial crude logic chart:
> ... These differing views on evolution and creation can be diagrammed
>as a logic-tree, to be read from the bottom. OEC = Old Earth Creationism; YEC = Young Earth Creationism.
theistic evolution OEC YEC
x x x
x x x
x creationism
x x
x x
theism deism atheism
x x x
x x x
x x
x x
x x
x
In response to some constructive criticism from Ray, I added the warning:
The diagram summarises the main logical options. I notice he too stipulates Note that the design concepts depicted here are not exhaustive of all possibilities. Fair enough for both of us. My chart is far less complete in its mentions of concepts, but his too is admittedly still incomplete. (I don't suspect any omission from his will prove very important, and indeed I'm grateful to him for compiling the list of concepts; it's the commissions that are gravely wonky.)
I am at this stage primarily concerned to see ideas fairly represented. Especially do I wish to see theism properly represented. The logic of Bradley's chart is woefully astray.
Ray tells us the GOD OF CREATIONISM is logically implied by
either
Intelligent design
of nature with
revelation plus
intervention to
produce
origins of life
or
Intelligent design
of nature with
revelation plus
creation of each
different species
Ray then tells us that this GOD OF CREATIONISM logically implies - in one of the two ways to logically imply this concept - the
THEISTIC GOD
of e.g. Judaism,
Christianity, Islam
The only other way which he depicts for logical inference of the god of monotheism is from
Intelligent design
of nature with
revelation but no other
subsequent intervention
This from a man brought up a Christian. Need I expatiate on this misrepresentation? It is a drastically false picture of what Christians (and those other monotheistic religions) believe.
For a start, the whole notion of logically inferring God is not a prime motive for Christians' belief in God.
Secondly, it is outlandish to say that Christians believe Intelligent design of nature with revelation but no other subsequent intervention. The interventions in Palestine 2 millennia ago are central, but untold interventions are believed in - especially answers to prayer - down to the present moment, not to mention many in Ur, Egypt, Palestine etc during previous millennia. Ray may himself somehow have tragically ceased to believe thus, but he has no right to misrepresent what is believed by normal Christians.
The logical implications pointing to
DEISTIC GOD
of,e.g., Hume,
Paine, Jefferson
are also in my opinion mis-stated, but perhaps I should leave to new deist A. Flew the defence of that school of thought which Temple said 7 decades ago "is dead, and needs no reviving".
Having thus misrepresented, or at least grossly mis-stated, the logical liaisons of monotheism and theories of origins of life, Ray then across the bottom of his chart sketches how science is supposed to account for life better, obviating need of metaphysical concepts. I leave for a possible future occasion my criticisms of that part of Ray's flow-chart; for now I'll say it's misleadingly defective, in much the same ways that Broom & I have been pointing out for years in the crudities of Dawkins, Wolpert, S Weinberg, etc.
======================
THE ILLOGIC OF CREATIONISM
summarily rejected by DayStar® Sept 03
L R B MANN
The word 'evolution' has become, for some Christians, a provocation. They have been led to believe that evolution is essentially an atheistic idea. This misunderstanding has been misused for much unnecessary disputing.
VisionNetwork leader Glyn Carpenter writes (DayStar Sept 03) that the creationist/evolution argument is "also referred to as the young earth / old earth debate". This is an unfortunate confusion. Let's get a clear understanding of what the terms mean, and what are the various beliefs, connected with evolution.
Two main sub-sects of "creationism" exist. One version of "creationism" asserts not only that all species were created in 6 days but also that this brief period of biological creation occurred less than 10,000 years ago. That is 'young earth creationism' (YEC). 'Old earth creationism' (OEC), exemplified by Hugh Ross's 'Reasons to Believe' organisation of S. Calif., acknowledges the scientific evidence that the Earth is much, much older, but also asserts like YEC that evolution has not occurred. The difference between these two sub-sects is of some interest, but it is different from the dispute between those who believe in evolution and those who refuse to believe in evolution.
These differing views on evolution and creation can be diagrammed as a logic-tree, to be read from the bottom:
theistic evolution OEC YEC
x x x
x x
x creationism
x x
x x
theism deism atheism
x x x
x x x
x x
x x
x x
x
The diagram summarises the main logical options.
You can believe in God, or not; this is the basic, most important, choice in the logic-tree.
If you choose the atheism fork, you can then try like Dawkins etc to explain how the incomparable coherent complexity of ecosystems, or even just the functions of a humble bacterial flagellum, could have evolved by the workings of physical & chemical laws, with no creative planning.
If instead you believe in God, you have an option of a largely defunct view, deism, holding that God did create the universe but that he then turned it loose, like a clockwork toy he'd wound up and left to run by the natural laws which he'd created. In contrast, theism holds that God not only created the universe but also sustains & guides it from moment to moment.
The tendency known as creationism is - though not usually billed as such by its adherents - a version of deism in its purported explanation of life. Proceeding up the logic-tree, within the "creationism" branch, we find the two versions, YEC and OEC, holding that, at least regarding the creation of species of organism, God did it all at the start and has not done any more creation since then. Although most creationists are theists because they believe in God's continuing involvement in the world (in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, God's responses to prayer, etc), they are deists in their biology - they believe in a completed creation.
Both YEC and OEC are opposed to the mainstream Christian view, which is theistic evolution, combining traditional theology with scientific findings that the different types of organism have been created at successive times over several billion years. God as the maker & sustainer of the universe is affirmed by theistic evolution. To me as a Christian, physical & chemical laws are an expression of creative planning, not an alternative to it. Dawkins just has to accept them as an extraordinary brute fact, the origin of which he studiously ignores.
Theistic evolution results from reading both the book of scripture and the book of nature. It relies on faith that God will not mislead us if we examine honestly what we find in strata, fossils, molecules, and other aspects of nature that allow us to infer past processes in biology. Creationists have misrepresented these scientific findings in many ways (and as a scientist I deeply deplore that misbehaviour, documented in e.g. Prof. Ian Plimer's book 'Telling Lies for God'). But it is their logic that is the prime defect of creationism, counterposing the concepts of creation "vs." evolution, implying that they are somehow incompatible.
Where in this logic-tree does Intelligent Design fit? Exemplified by the video 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life' and the writings of William Dembski, this approach to explaining life confines itself to what is known as natural theology, i.e. reading the book of nature with intent to infer properties of the designer(s). The effect is thus at the base of the logic-tree, helping those who have yet to decide whether organisms are caused by merely material processes or are designed. This is the Argument to Design developed by William Paley two centuries ago. It is fine as far as it goes but is only a tiny, if basic, part of theistic evolution as set forth by leading Christian scholars such as William Temple, Sir Alister Hardy, and our own John Morton (see 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972). Another leading scholar in natural theology, but taking a broader view than Dembski expounds, is Neil Broom of the University of Auckland (see 'How Blind Is the Watchmaker?' IVP 2001). Broom expounds the Argument to Design as well as anyone, while seeing no theological difficulty in an ancient biosphere and evolution as shown by science.
My essay available at maintains - following Morton - that a more intelligible, direct & conclusive argument is to be found in reason, insisting on all four causes as required to explain life, rather than relying principally on gaps in scientific understanding of the evolution of bacterial flagella etc.
> You might also be interested in taking a look at the conceptual map that I have drawn up as a guide to clear thinking about issues involving Intelligent Design. It must be understood in light of the conventions and logical rules laid down at the bottom of the page. (This is the sort of logic diagram that I encouraged you to work on a year or so ago). You will see that, as a matter of strict logic, there is no incompatibility between certain kinds of theism and either evolutionary theory or proposals re biogenesis. I think you agree.
This is a far more elaborate, more nearly complete map, in regard to the number of concepts displayed, than the simple one which Ray mentions (copied below & in attachment). I first composed this in response to VisioNet Glyn Carpenter's mischievous falsehood in DayStar - that the creationist/evolution argument is "also referred to as the young earth / old earth debate". My compughter graphics are far cruder than Ray's, and the following diagram doesn't always come thru email accurately; therefore I attach it also in the article I sent in response to Glyn's furphy.
Ray's map is certainly more complete wrt mentioning concepts. However, I will strongly criticise some of his assertions about the logical relations between them.
First, here's my initial crude logic chart:
> ... These differing views on evolution and creation can be diagrammed
>as a logic-tree, to be read from the bottom. OEC = Old Earth Creationism; YEC = Young Earth Creationism.
theistic evolution OEC YEC
x x x
x x x
x creationism
x x
x x
theism deism atheism
x x x
x x x
x x
x x
x x
x
In response to some constructive criticism from Ray, I added the warning:
The diagram summarises the main logical options. I notice he too stipulates Note that the design concepts depicted here are not exhaustive of all possibilities. Fair enough for both of us. My chart is far less complete in its mentions of concepts, but his too is admittedly still incomplete. (I don't suspect any omission from his will prove very important, and indeed I'm grateful to him for compiling the list of concepts; it's the commissions that are gravely wonky.)
I am at this stage primarily concerned to see ideas fairly represented. Especially do I wish to see theism properly represented. The logic of Bradley's chart is woefully astray.
Ray tells us the GOD OF CREATIONISM is logically implied by
either
Intelligent design
of nature with
revelation plus
intervention to
produce
origins of life
or
Intelligent design
of nature with
revelation plus
creation of each
different species
Ray then tells us that this GOD OF CREATIONISM logically implies - in one of the two ways to logically imply this concept - the
THEISTIC GOD
of e.g. Judaism,
Christianity, Islam
The only other way which he depicts for logical inference of the god of monotheism is from
Intelligent design
of nature with
revelation but no other
subsequent intervention
This from a man brought up a Christian. Need I expatiate on this misrepresentation? It is a drastically false picture of what Christians (and those other monotheistic religions) believe.
For a start, the whole notion of logically inferring God is not a prime motive for Christians' belief in God.
Secondly, it is outlandish to say that Christians believe Intelligent design of nature with revelation but no other subsequent intervention. The interventions in Palestine 2 millennia ago are central, but untold interventions are believed in - especially answers to prayer - down to the present moment, not to mention many in Ur, Egypt, Palestine etc during previous millennia. Ray may himself somehow have tragically ceased to believe thus, but he has no right to misrepresent what is believed by normal Christians.
The logical implications pointing to
DEISTIC GOD
of,e.g., Hume,
Paine, Jefferson
are also in my opinion mis-stated, but perhaps I should leave to new deist A. Flew the defence of that school of thought which Temple said 7 decades ago "is dead, and needs no reviving".
Having thus misrepresented, or at least grossly mis-stated, the logical liaisons of monotheism and theories of origins of life, Ray then across the bottom of his chart sketches how science is supposed to account for life better, obviating need of metaphysical concepts. I leave for a possible future occasion my criticisms of that part of Ray's flow-chart; for now I'll say it's misleadingly defective, in much the same ways that Broom & I have been pointing out for years in the crudities of Dawkins, Wolpert, S Weinberg, etc.
======================
THE ILLOGIC OF CREATIONISM
summarily rejected by DayStar® Sept 03
L R B MANN
The word 'evolution' has become, for some Christians, a provocation. They have been led to believe that evolution is essentially an atheistic idea. This misunderstanding has been misused for much unnecessary disputing.
VisionNetwork leader Glyn Carpenter writes (DayStar Sept 03) that the creationist/evolution argument is "also referred to as the young earth / old earth debate". This is an unfortunate confusion. Let's get a clear understanding of what the terms mean, and what are the various beliefs, connected with evolution.
Two main sub-sects of "creationism" exist. One version of "creationism" asserts not only that all species were created in 6 days but also that this brief period of biological creation occurred less than 10,000 years ago. That is 'young earth creationism' (YEC). 'Old earth creationism' (OEC), exemplified by Hugh Ross's 'Reasons to Believe' organisation of S. Calif., acknowledges the scientific evidence that the Earth is much, much older, but also asserts like YEC that evolution has not occurred. The difference between these two sub-sects is of some interest, but it is different from the dispute between those who believe in evolution and those who refuse to believe in evolution.
These differing views on evolution and creation can be diagrammed as a logic-tree, to be read from the bottom:
theistic evolution OEC YEC
x x x
x x
x creationism
x x
x x
theism deism atheism
x x x
x x x
x x
x x
x x
x
The diagram summarises the main logical options.
You can believe in God, or not; this is the basic, most important, choice in the logic-tree.
If you choose the atheism fork, you can then try like Dawkins etc to explain how the incomparable coherent complexity of ecosystems, or even just the functions of a humble bacterial flagellum, could have evolved by the workings of physical & chemical laws, with no creative planning.
If instead you believe in God, you have an option of a largely defunct view, deism, holding that God did create the universe but that he then turned it loose, like a clockwork toy he'd wound up and left to run by the natural laws which he'd created. In contrast, theism holds that God not only created the universe but also sustains & guides it from moment to moment.
The tendency known as creationism is - though not usually billed as such by its adherents - a version of deism in its purported explanation of life. Proceeding up the logic-tree, within the "creationism" branch, we find the two versions, YEC and OEC, holding that, at least regarding the creation of species of organism, God did it all at the start and has not done any more creation since then. Although most creationists are theists because they believe in God's continuing involvement in the world (in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, God's responses to prayer, etc), they are deists in their biology - they believe in a completed creation.
Both YEC and OEC are opposed to the mainstream Christian view, which is theistic evolution, combining traditional theology with scientific findings that the different types of organism have been created at successive times over several billion years. God as the maker & sustainer of the universe is affirmed by theistic evolution. To me as a Christian, physical & chemical laws are an expression of creative planning, not an alternative to it. Dawkins just has to accept them as an extraordinary brute fact, the origin of which he studiously ignores.
Theistic evolution results from reading both the book of scripture and the book of nature. It relies on faith that God will not mislead us if we examine honestly what we find in strata, fossils, molecules, and other aspects of nature that allow us to infer past processes in biology. Creationists have misrepresented these scientific findings in many ways (and as a scientist I deeply deplore that misbehaviour, documented in e.g. Prof. Ian Plimer's book 'Telling Lies for God'). But it is their logic that is the prime defect of creationism, counterposing the concepts of creation "vs." evolution, implying that they are somehow incompatible.
Where in this logic-tree does Intelligent Design fit? Exemplified by the video 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life' and the writings of William Dembski, this approach to explaining life confines itself to what is known as natural theology, i.e. reading the book of nature with intent to infer properties of the designer(s). The effect is thus at the base of the logic-tree, helping those who have yet to decide whether organisms are caused by merely material processes or are designed. This is the Argument to Design developed by William Paley two centuries ago. It is fine as far as it goes but is only a tiny, if basic, part of theistic evolution as set forth by leading Christian scholars such as William Temple, Sir Alister Hardy, and our own John Morton (see 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972). Another leading scholar in natural theology, but taking a broader view than Dembski expounds, is Neil Broom of the University of Auckland (see 'How Blind Is the Watchmaker?' IVP 2001). Broom expounds the Argument to Design as well as anyone, while seeing no theological difficulty in an ancient biosphere and evolution as shown by science.
My essay available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/opinion/05krugman.html
August 5, 2005
Design for Confusion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.
Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.
Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."
"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."
Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.
You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.
The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.
There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.
Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.
But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?
Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.
The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
August 5, 2005
Design for Confusion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.
Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.
Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."
"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."
Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.
You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.
The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.
There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.
Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.
But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?
Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.
The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
The following item is to be found on page A15 of today's NZH. I
think you will wholeheartedly agree with Ray and give him credit for
articulating the exasperation you and I and others have with the
illogical and dismissive attitudes of some Maori towards scientific
studies concerning their origins. Intimately connected with this
obstructive attitude is the crippling diversion to similar racists of
a large fraction of what little govt expenditure goes toward control
of GM.
It is embarrassing that the church has given so little leadership
against the new racism, and has indeed fostered much of it, so that
it is now left to a rabid atheist to make the basic criticism ably
presented here.
A minor regret is failure to condemn the term 'Western science'.
Posturing as 'Maadi science' is a main delusion of Meremere Roberts
and other neoRacists under whose twisted spell have fallen many
official agencies. There is only one science, despite attempts to
create Soviet science, Maadi science, etc.
R
Charlatan Tohunga
Raymond D. Bradley
NZ Herald 05.08.05 p.A15
"The old world created by our Polynesian ancestors has passed away,
and a new world is in the process of being fashioned." So wrote Te
Rangi Hiroa of Taranaki, widely known as Sir Peter Buck, in the
epilogue to his book Vikings of the Sunrise.
Athlete, doctor, health administrator, military leader, politician,
museum director and famed anthropologist, Sir Peter was a true
Renaissance man. For him, the new world was that of science.
So it was for many of his peers. The most distinguished include Sir
Apirana Ngata of Ngati Porou, the first Maori to complete a degree at
the then University of New Zealand, first Maori politician to serve
as Deputy Prime Minister, and well-known promoter of Maori culture
and language.
Sir Maui Pomare of Te Ati Awa, the first Maori to gain a medical
degree, went on to use his scientific knowledge to better the life of
his people. He pressed them to sanitise drinking water.
Verbally attacked at a marae for being brainwashed by Pakeha, he
brought out his microscope and demonstrated that the water they were
drinking was full of "bully-headed bugs" that could be killed only by
boiling. Thus did he, a Maori, introduce the new world of science to
free his people from those he called "charlatan tohunga".
These men and other pioneer scientists would have welcomed the
research being done now by National Geographic's Genographic Project,
a project that seeks to establish, through voluntary DNA sampling
around the world, how and when all its people got where they are
today.
And all would have deplored the irrationality and muddled thinking
displayed by Paul Reynolds, Linita Manu'atu, Michael Mansell, and
Mere Kepa in their diatribes against that project, "Stirring up the
gene pool", in the Weekend Herald.
For Sir Peter Buck, their criticisms, if taken seriously, would have
jeopardised further explorations in the field that was his passion:
research into Maori and Polynesian origins and migrations.
One can easily imagine how these learned men of a century ago would
respond to each of our contemporary tohunga.
To Mere Kepa's outburst, "I'm tired and exhausted of learning from
Western scientists that I'm sad, bad and mad", they might respond:
"Western scientists don't say that sort of thing, and neither do we
Maori scientists. However, your own claim is self-indicting. It is
symptomatic of intellectual paranoia. And paranoia is indeed 'sad,
bad, and mad'. "
To Paul Reynolds' claim, "It's race-based research, and therefore can
be manipulated and used for political purposes," they might respond:
"It's research being facilitated by scientists of all races,
including the likes of Maori anthropologist Mike Stevens. It has no
preconceptions about what it will yield.
"In any case scientific discoveries have a value in themselves, no
matter what practical, religious, or political ends they are made to
serve.
"One shouldn't condemn the discovery of fire because fire was used to
burn religious heretics at the stake."
To Manu'atu's claim, "For Tongans, we were created in Tonga," they
would respond: "The way you put it makes you sound like a
head-in-the-sands creationist, with your gods creating Tongans as a
special kind of creature with no genetic or geographic links to any
other members of our species."
To the claim of Australian Aboriginal Michael Mansell, "We didn't
come from anywhere", they would respond along the same lines as to
Manu'atu, with perhaps the additional remark: "You can't be serious!"
What is especially troubling about our 21st-century tohunga is that
they seem unable to recognise the role and value of myth and its
relationship to science.
The Maori graduates of Te Aute College, which produced Sir Peter
Buck, Sir Maui Pomare and others such as Rewiti Kohere, Tutere We
Rapa, and Edward Ellison, cherished Maori myths about their people's
origins for what they were: poetically imaginative stories. But just
plain myths, for all that. They were not in rivalry with science,
hence were not threatened by it.
But their opponents are akin to the fundamentalists of all races and
religions. They insist on taking literally their sacred stories,
especially their origin myths.
Isaac Asimov once described such literalists as "armies of the night"
intent on riding backward, with their myths held high, into the Dark
Ages where dogma triumphs over reason and superstition shrivels the
seeds of scientific inquiry.
Maoridom has no need for them. Education should have no place for
them. Yet many are teaching in our tertiary institutions. Woe
betide those who fall under their spell.
* Raymond D. Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Simon
Fraser University, and one-time Professor of Philosophy, University
of Auckland.
think you will wholeheartedly agree with Ray and give him credit for
articulating the exasperation you and I and others have with the
illogical and dismissive attitudes of some Maori towards scientific
studies concerning their origins. Intimately connected with this
obstructive attitude is the crippling diversion to similar racists of
a large fraction of what little govt expenditure goes toward control
of GM.
It is embarrassing that the church has given so little leadership
against the new racism, and has indeed fostered much of it, so that
it is now left to a rabid atheist to make the basic criticism ably
presented here.
A minor regret is failure to condemn the term 'Western science'.
Posturing as 'Maadi science' is a main delusion of Meremere Roberts
and other neoRacists under whose twisted spell have fallen many
official agencies. There is only one science, despite attempts to
create Soviet science, Maadi science, etc.
R
Charlatan Tohunga
Raymond D. Bradley
NZ Herald 05.08.05 p.A15
"The old world created by our Polynesian ancestors has passed away,
and a new world is in the process of being fashioned." So wrote Te
Rangi Hiroa of Taranaki, widely known as Sir Peter Buck, in the
epilogue to his book Vikings of the Sunrise.
Athlete, doctor, health administrator, military leader, politician,
museum director and famed anthropologist, Sir Peter was a true
Renaissance man. For him, the new world was that of science.
So it was for many of his peers. The most distinguished include Sir
Apirana Ngata of Ngati Porou, the first Maori to complete a degree at
the then University of New Zealand, first Maori politician to serve
as Deputy Prime Minister, and well-known promoter of Maori culture
and language.
Sir Maui Pomare of Te Ati Awa, the first Maori to gain a medical
degree, went on to use his scientific knowledge to better the life of
his people. He pressed them to sanitise drinking water.
Verbally attacked at a marae for being brainwashed by Pakeha, he
brought out his microscope and demonstrated that the water they were
drinking was full of "bully-headed bugs" that could be killed only by
boiling. Thus did he, a Maori, introduce the new world of science to
free his people from those he called "charlatan tohunga".
These men and other pioneer scientists would have welcomed the
research being done now by National Geographic's Genographic Project,
a project that seeks to establish, through voluntary DNA sampling
around the world, how and when all its people got where they are
today.
And all would have deplored the irrationality and muddled thinking
displayed by Paul Reynolds, Linita Manu'atu, Michael Mansell, and
Mere Kepa in their diatribes against that project, "Stirring up the
gene pool", in the Weekend Herald.
For Sir Peter Buck, their criticisms, if taken seriously, would have
jeopardised further explorations in the field that was his passion:
research into Maori and Polynesian origins and migrations.
One can easily imagine how these learned men of a century ago would
respond to each of our contemporary tohunga.
To Mere Kepa's outburst, "I'm tired and exhausted of learning from
Western scientists that I'm sad, bad and mad", they might respond:
"Western scientists don't say that sort of thing, and neither do we
Maori scientists. However, your own claim is self-indicting. It is
symptomatic of intellectual paranoia. And paranoia is indeed 'sad,
bad, and mad'. "
To Paul Reynolds' claim, "It's race-based research, and therefore can
be manipulated and used for political purposes," they might respond:
"It's research being facilitated by scientists of all races,
including the likes of Maori anthropologist Mike Stevens. It has no
preconceptions about what it will yield.
"In any case scientific discoveries have a value in themselves, no
matter what practical, religious, or political ends they are made to
serve.
"One shouldn't condemn the discovery of fire because fire was used to
burn religious heretics at the stake."
To Manu'atu's claim, "For Tongans, we were created in Tonga," they
would respond: "The way you put it makes you sound like a
head-in-the-sands creationist, with your gods creating Tongans as a
special kind of creature with no genetic or geographic links to any
other members of our species."
To the claim of Australian Aboriginal Michael Mansell, "We didn't
come from anywhere", they would respond along the same lines as to
Manu'atu, with perhaps the additional remark: "You can't be serious!"
What is especially troubling about our 21st-century tohunga is that
they seem unable to recognise the role and value of myth and its
relationship to science.
The Maori graduates of Te Aute College, which produced Sir Peter
Buck, Sir Maui Pomare and others such as Rewiti Kohere, Tutere We
Rapa, and Edward Ellison, cherished Maori myths about their people's
origins for what they were: poetically imaginative stories. But just
plain myths, for all that. They were not in rivalry with science,
hence were not threatened by it.
But their opponents are akin to the fundamentalists of all races and
religions. They insist on taking literally their sacred stories,
especially their origin myths.
Isaac Asimov once described such literalists as "armies of the night"
intent on riding backward, with their myths held high, into the Dark
Ages where dogma triumphs over reason and superstition shrivels the
seeds of scientific inquiry.
Maoridom has no need for them. Education should have no place for
them. Yet many are teaching in our tertiary institutions. Woe
betide those who fall under their spell.
* Raymond D. Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Simon
Fraser University, and one-time Professor of Philosophy, University
of Auckland.
08/13/05
The Orthodox Avant-Garde
Armed with traditional faith, these Christians subverted the establishment, putting secular ideas under the microscope of the eternal.
Interview by Rob Moll | posted 07/26/2005 09:00 a.m.
It's not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English professor at California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political, denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be faithful to Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian.
Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?
These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They're interesting people because they're both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith.
They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn't just protest against it or isolate from it.
If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and social critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political, artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet, they still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective would be very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an attractive philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have somebody like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United States was to defend small families and small farms and collectives and indigenous poor against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with American culture during the Cold War years.
Few people know these believers were Christians. E.F. Schumacher, the Small Is Beautiful fellow, is often recognized as the guy who wrote about Buddhist economics, because of a chapter in his book Small Is Beautiful. But he was a Christian, and he said he put in Buddhism because he didn't want it to seem like special pleading. He just wanted to make it clear that the economic systems had religious under pinning. In order to demonstrate that in a way that he could get a hearing, he used the example of Buddhism. But he himself was a Christian thinker.
Not only was their Christianity misunderstood, but often their message was misunderstood. You include Jack Kerouac, who dismissed his hippie followers who got into Buddhism, but Kerouac was a conservative and a Catholic.
Kerouac was really only a Buddhist for three years of his life. He was a very traditional Catholic growing up, and then he toyed with Buddhism for about three years. He came back to his faith and wrote a lot of stuff about Jesus and refused to give up his love of Jesus for the Buddha. Later, when he was having a hard time kicking his alcoholism, he started getting attacked by the New York critics for a pretty accurate description of his work, in which they said, This is a form of Christian primitivism.
Kerouac captures a spiritual search in a way that many novelists don't. You make the point that the novel has the ability to probe the soul in a way that Enlightenment attempts to discover truth can't.
That's why Solzhenitsyn was so wise to novelize his history of the gulag. When he transformed the sufferings of millions of people into stories we could feel, it became real. Pasternack, in Doctor Zhivago, made the spiritual sufferings of the lost intelligentsia of the revolution real in a way that we could feel. Kerouac does the same thing with a spiritual longing that was useful in the 50s and 60s to say there's more going on then just the Cold War. We should be telling our stories to one another about our inner lives.
Thomas Merton was another Catholic writing spiritual literature during the Cold War years.
The Seven Storey Mountain was a great conversion story. It provided a criticism of materialism, modernism, the Bohemian art theme, and left-wing politics, all these things that tempted him, that he turned away from 20 years before anybody else in the country had discovered them.
Then after he died, all his journals and letters came out, and it turns out that all those years that he was in the monastery, he was having these deep conversations with people from all different backgrounds and was thinking through his faith and bringing it into dialogue with all kinds of things, which made him a different writer. Now, we even read The Seven Storey Mountain differently.
It's ironic that while Merton had left the world for the monastery, through his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a different take on political action.
If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive Christian perspective that doesn't argue about things so much as reveal things.
Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these people don't want to change the world. Changing the world is not their number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will listen. You don't come in with this top down agenda and take everybody's life apart so that you can put it back together again.
[Kentucky writer and farmer] Wendell Berry's method is to ask how this reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing one's suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that's why ideological posturing, even if you're right, is counterproductive.
What kind of impact have these thinkers had, or should have?
In the 20th century, the contemplative side of Christianity was made much more accessible by Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Solzhenitsyn also had a great world impact.
Some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been misunderstood or co-opted. We think of him more as a civil-rights icon than as an engaged prophetic Christian trying to figure out non violence. I think he had a much more troubled, interesting, complex message to America than what we have decided it was in our history books and in our one-paragraph summaries of him. I would say that his legacy probably has not been fully understood.
I don't think the full impact of what Schumacher has written about economics has really hit yet, the defense of family business and local community economies. That's starting to have resurgence in the third world with these micro credit organizations. If you start taking Schumacher seriously, then economics is due for a quantum leap, and that hasn't happened yet. We need to rethink the way we do economics, to question the assumption that we're all self-maximizing individuals.
I think Northrop Frye is another one who was understood too quickly, or misunderstood. Literary studies over the past 20 years has been struggling with a lot of competing materialisms. Frye had offered in the early 60s a radical mystic contemplative vision of the literary studies, which doomed him to obsolescence in 1963. But now that practices like lectio divina and those contemplative ways of reading are being rediscovered, you look back at Northrop Frye, and he's the guy who provides the most interesting ideas and paradigms. But I think such a recovery is going to have to be done by religious folk. Because if you try secularizing his categories, they just don't work. It's only through religious eyes that Frye's literary cosmology makes sense, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has a deeper meaning to those who see its Christian themes.
In Frye's letters and journals and also his sermons, because he was a pastor, you get to see the full Christian dimension of his thinking. He discussed how to read prophetically, how to read contemplatively. These were issues that Frye addressed that the last 20- 25-five years of literary criticism just ignored. I think what's going to happen in about 10 years is they're going to rediscover the language in which Frye was writing and learn he was trying to teach us how to read in a way that deepened our inner lives, not just increased our intellectual sophistication.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
The Twilight of Atheism
Why this once exciting and 'liberating' philosophy failed to capture the world's imagination.
by Alister McGrath | posted 02/28/2005 09:30 a.m.
The celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 marked the high point of British imperial history. It was a supreme moment of national self-confidence and congratulation. The British had created an empire on which the sun never set, and much of its colorful diversity was on display in the streets of London that summer.
But Earth's proud empires fade away. The same process of growth and decay can be seen in the empires of the mind. There comes a point when their attraction pales and their credibility falters. To wit: Atheism is in trouble. Its future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its natural habitat.
Pathology No Longer
Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. With time, it turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as religion does. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O'Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respectively.
One of the most important criticisms that Sigmund Freud directed against religion was that it encourages unhealthy and dysfunctional outlooks on life. Having dismissed religion as an illusion, Freud went on to argue that it is a negative factor in personal development. At times, Freud's influence has been such that the elimination of a person's religious beliefs has been seen as a precondition for mental health.
Freud is now a fallen idol, the fall having been all the heavier for its postponement. There is now growing awareness of the importance of spirituality in health care, both as a positive factor in relation to well-being and as an issue to which patients have a right. The "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine" conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School in 1998 brought reports that 86 percent of Americans as a whole, 99 percent of family physicians, and 94 percent of hmo professionals believe that prayer, meditation, and other spiritual and religious practices exercise a major positive role within the healing process.
Restoring Community
With the breakdown of social cohesion in recent decades, creating a sense of community has become an increasingly important political issue in many Western cultures. The question of how community can be recovered invites a comparison of religious and atheistic approaches.
One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms--Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Great Britain, and in France, Muslims from Algeria and other North African nations.
Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. People want to belong, not just believe.
The growth of community churches has helped meet this need. There is a sense of belonging to a common group, of shared common values, and of knowing each other. People don't just go to community churches; they see themselves as belonging there. At a time when American society appears to be fragmenting, the community churches offer cohesion.
It is important to make this connection with the changing face of America. In his much-cited article "The Age of Social Transformation," published in the November 1994 Atlantic Monthly, management guru Peter Drucker pointed out that traditional communities of family, village, and parish have practically disappeared.
"Their place has largely been taken by the new unit of social integration, the organization," Drucker wrote. "Where community was fate, organization is voluntary membership." In the old days, community was defined by where you lived. It was part of the inherited order of things, something that you were born into. Now, it has to be created--and the agency that creates this community is increasingly the voluntary organization. Christian churches are strategically placed to create and foster community. The community churches have proved especially effective in this role, and have grown immensely in consequence.
But what of atheism? The former Soviet Union realized the importance of creating a sense of community. Having eliminated religion from the public life of the nation, Soviet planners recognized the importance of creating rituals and events, which fostered social cohesion and a sense of identity. Thus the Saturday just before Easter was celebrated as Communist Saturday. Other holidays included May Day, Victory Day (May 9), Constitution Day (October 7), and Revolution Day (November 7-. The Soviets devised additional rituals as counterparts to the Christian rites of baptism and confirmation--for example, the "family event" to mark the birth of a new child, or the ceremony to mark admission to the Communist Party.
The nearest thing in the West to this Soviet model is found in Canada, which seems to think that a sense of community identity can only be created by eliminating any religious presence in the public arena. In the United States, atheism spawns organizations; it does not create community. The state chapters and national convention of American Atheists, coupled with this organization's atheist equivalent of creeds, certainly did something to create a sense of shared identity. Yet the community thus created seems to be based solely on distaste for religion. It doesn't even have a good organizational base and lacks charismatic leadership--a fatal weakness, to which we now turn.
Institutional Atheism
Atheist thinkers are more than happy to appear on the nation's chat shows to promote their latest books. But they have failed to communicate a compelling vision of atheism that is capable of drawing and holding large numbers of people.
Atheists widely discuss this comprehensive failure of leadership within their circles. Howard Thompson, sometime editor of the Texas Atheist, is undoubtedly one of the most able and reflective atheists in the United States. Thompson has criticized the movement for its lack of direction: "Atheism in America is poorly defined with little organization," he wrote in an op-ed piece. "We have less social and cultural infrastructure than even the smallest religious groups. . . . Atheism desperately needs effective public voices."
And why has this failed to happen? Thompson lays much of the blame at the feet of O'Hair, whom he regards as the movement's greatest liability. He believes her organization has failed to learn from her mistakes and persists in depicting her as a hero, even a martyr, for the atheist cause.
For 30 years O'Hair was the most visible atheist. What O'Hair did and said was atheism to the public, and it was nasty. The disappearance of the O'Hairs in September 1995 gave hope that more positive atheist initiatives might develop. That's why atheists should worry about the revival of her American Atheists under the leadership of Ellen Johnson, who assumed the office of president in a questionable board of directors meeting. Johnson is also a die-hard O'Hair fan who continues to present her as an atheist heroine. What atheism doesn't need is a continuation of O'Hair's negativity; her style and limited vision stifled positive atheist growth.
Her atheism was crude, anti-intellectual, and homophobic, making even the most zealous fundamentalist Christian seem a model of liberal values. For Thompson, the answer is clear: Grow leaders. In another op-ed piece, "The Unlit Bonfire," Thompson argues that a new dawn awaits--if only the leadership issue can be resolved. "Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition by programming or choice." But who will lead them? And can this goal actually be achieved?
The fatal flaw within Thompson's argument, found within many other atheist tracts and publications, is his strident insistence that humanity has been enslaved by supernaturalist superstition. It is merely necessary to educate people, he believes, and these mad ideas will fall away. Thompson and his colleagues have not even begun to understand a fundamental fact about religion: People actually like their faith, find it helpful in structuring their lives, and inconveniently believe that it might actually be true.
Thompson's alternative to the rich fare of a transcendent faith is "a materialistic culture that frees humanity from superstition." This sounds dull, dated, and gray, about as exciting as a lecture on Bulgarian Marxist dialectics. The failure of atheism to capture the public imagination in the West reflects its failure to articulate a compelling, imaginative vision of a godless future that is capable of exciting people and making them want to gather together to celebrate and proclaim it.
The same dullness pervades the National Secular Society (founded in 1866), the nearest thing Great Britain has to an atheist network. In 2002, its website included a museum of modernity, untroubled by the awkward rise of postmodernity. You could buy a secular mug with the slogan "Just say no to religion!" Or even better, you could download an official Certificate of De-Baptism (medieval font needed) that lets your friends know that you have rejected the "creeds and all other such superstition" in the name of reason.
Rationalism, having quietly died out in most places, still lives on here. Yet Western culture has bypassed this aging little ghetto, having long since recognized the limitations of reason. The Enlightenment lives on for secularists. Atheism is wedded to philosophical modernity, and both are aging gracefully in the cultural equivalent of an old folks' home.
And, for those who find their tracts wearisome, the society thoughtfully provides a religious jokes page--though in poor taste, they carry a significantly higher intellectual content than the rest of the site. Here's an example of atheism's winsome arguments: Question: What's the difference between Jesus and a painting? Answer: It only takes one nail to hang a painting.
The joke makes my friends outside the church cringe. Yet I have the impression this is actually meant to persuade people of the intellectual and cultural superiority of a world without religion. Thompson clearly has a point.
Nevertheless, serious issues are occasionally debated on the website, including the question of why secular humanism, with its commitment to atheism, has so singularly failed to capture the public imagination. One obvious answer might be the National Secular Society itself, which exudes a pious tedium, trapped in a time warp of the closing decades of the 19th century, that seems almost to have been deliberately designed to alienate potential recruits.
Reginald Le Sueur put his finger unerringly on the real point at issue: "The problem with humanism as such is that, although rational, secular, and 'true,' it is, in comparison with major religions, somewhat wishy-washy and just plain unexciting."
Le Sueur recognizes atheism as derivative, its attraction residing primarily in what it denies rather than what it articulates as an alternative. So does atheism have a future?
No doubt it does--but not an especially distinguished or exciting future. Listen to John Updike: "Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position." I have to confess that I now share his catatonic sense of utter tedium when I reread some of the atheist works I once found fascinating as a teenager. They now seem simplistic, failing to engage with the complexities of human experience, and seriously out of tune with our postmodern culture.
Why Atheism Matters
On the other hand, the greatest virtue of atheism is its moral seriousness--its criticisms and passionate demands for justice directed against the corruptions of, say, the French church of the 18th century.
The moral passion of atheism, especially when set alongside the laziness and complacency of European state churches in the 18th century, cannot be dismissed. Some Christian leaders at the time of the French Revolution saw that event as a divine judgment against a failing church. Some believed God was using the atheist critiques of the church as a means of reforming it.
Paradoxically, what propels people toward atheism is above all a sense of revulsion against the excesses and failures of organized religion. Atheism is ultimately a worldview of fear--a fear, often merited, of what might happen if religious maniacs were to take over the world.
As the critics of Homeric religion made clear, the attractions of a godless world rest upon a sense of revulsion against the gods. Who wanted to worship or imitate gods such as Zeus and Athena, when they merely immortalized the worst moral failings of human beings?
Moving Target
In the end, debates about whether God's existence can be proved remain marginal. The central issue is moral and imaginative. The most fundamental criticisms directed against Christianity have to do with the moral character of its God. They often focus on the issue of eternal punishment. No theological issue posed greater difficulties for Victorian England, as the writings of George Eliot make clear. It was for this reason that Charles Darwin found his faith, surprisingly unchallenged by his views on evolution, to be stretched beyond its modest capacity.
Others had similarly serious misgivings. "Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty," said secular humanist orator Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), "and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment." Despite its opportunistic overstatement, Ingersoll's complaint resonates deeply with many who find a contradiction between their deepest intuitions of fairness and the Christian God.
We cannot assert eternal damnation and expect Western culture to nod approvingly. This culture is not predisposed to reject Christian doctrines as a matter of principle; rather, it is surprised by what seems a massive retreat from society's fundamental notions of decency and evenhandedness. Atheism arises mainly through a profound sense that religious ideas and values are at least inferior to, and possibly irreconcilable with, the best moral standards and ideals of human culture.
In its most intense and authentic forms, atheism enters a powerful protest against what it sees to be morally or intellectually inferior visions of reality. In their place, atheism offers visions of a larger freedom, allowing humanity to throw aside its chains and enter a new and glorious phase in history. It is perhaps not surprising that many sympathize with Dostoyevsky's character Ivan Karamazov when he respectfully returns God's ticket, in the face of the suffering, pain, and injustice of the world. Christianity must provide good answers to such fair questions.
But the real significance of atheism has to do with its critique of power and privilege. Whatever their failings, atheist organizations are right in challenging the idea that any religious grouping can enjoy special privileges in a democratic society. Such groupings deserve respect. But when religion becomes the establishment, a corrupting abuse of power can result. Atheism soars in its appeal.
The converse can be true. The rise of militant Islam in Afghanistan was the direct outcome of the Soviet invasion of that nation in 1979 and its clumsy attempts to support an atheistic regime. As Karen Armstrong points out in her The Battle for God (2000), the best way to encourage the rise of religious fundamentalism is to impose a secular agenda on people who want to get on with their religious lives.
Atheism's concerns about the Christian exertion of power resonate with many within the church. The assumption of the New Testament is that Christianity is excluded from the establishment and thus insulated from the temptations and corruption that power brings. For many reflective Christians, the church began to lose its compelling moral and spiritual vision with the conversion of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. A movement that was at its most authentic while powerless and weak now became exposed to forces that compromised its integrity.
Yet it must be noted that Christianity is a dynamic entity, constantly changing in its forms as it seeks to relate its foundational heritage in the New Testament to the situations in which it finds itself. Atheist criticisms of the church are at their most compelling and persuasive when they are directed against the failings of the church.
The essential difficulty here is that, with the rise of dynamic churches especially in the Southern Hemisphere, the classic atheist criticisms of the church do not quite ring true any longer--even in the homelands of the much-derided state churches of Western Europe. The repetition of stale clichés from the golden age of atheism sounds increasingly out of touch with postmodern reality.
The atheist dilemma is that Christianity is a moving target, whose trajectory is capable of being redirected without losing its anchor point in the New Testament. And as theologian John Henry Newman pointed out, Christianity must listen to such criticisms from outside its bounds, precisely because listening may be a way of recapturing its vision of the gospel.
Some atheists have argued that the phenomenon of globalization can only advance a secularist agenda, eliminating religion from the public arena. If the world is to have a shared future, it can only be by eliminating what divides its nations and peoples--such as religious beliefs. Yet many have pointed out in response that globalization seems to be resulting in a quite different outcome.
Far from being secularized, the West is experiencing a new interest in religion. Patterns of immigration mean that Islam and Hinduism are now major living presences in the cities of Western Europe and North America. Pentecostalism is a rapidly growing force, strengthened by the arrival of many Asian and African Christians in the West. The future looks nothing like the godless and religionless world so confidently predicted 40 years ago. The atheist agenda, once seen as a positive force for progress, is now seen as disrespectful toward cultural diversity.
Paradoxically, the future of atheism will be determined by its religious rivals. Those atheists looking for a surefire way to increase their appeal need only to hope for harsh, vindictive, and unthinking forms of religion to arise in the West.
In his problematic but fascinating work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler argued that history shows that cultures came into being for religious reasons. As they exhausted the potential of that spirituality, religion gave way to atheism, before a phase of religious renewal gave them a new sense of direction. Might atheism have run its course, and now give way to religious renewal? The tides of cultural shift have, for the time being, left atheism beached on the sands of modernity, while Westerners explore a new postmodern interest in the forbidden fruit of spirituality.
Alister McGrath is professor of historical theology at Oxford University, and author of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (Doubleday, 2004), from which this essay was excerpted and condensed.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3, Page 36
Armed with traditional faith, these Christians subverted the establishment, putting secular ideas under the microscope of the eternal.
Interview by Rob Moll | posted 07/26/2005 09:00 a.m.
It's not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English professor at California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political, denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be faithful to Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian.
Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?
These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They're interesting people because they're both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith.
They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn't just protest against it or isolate from it.
If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and social critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political, artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet, they still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective would be very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an attractive philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have somebody like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United States was to defend small families and small farms and collectives and indigenous poor against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with American culture during the Cold War years.
Few people know these believers were Christians. E.F. Schumacher, the Small Is Beautiful fellow, is often recognized as the guy who wrote about Buddhist economics, because of a chapter in his book Small Is Beautiful. But he was a Christian, and he said he put in Buddhism because he didn't want it to seem like special pleading. He just wanted to make it clear that the economic systems had religious under pinning. In order to demonstrate that in a way that he could get a hearing, he used the example of Buddhism. But he himself was a Christian thinker.
Not only was their Christianity misunderstood, but often their message was misunderstood. You include Jack Kerouac, who dismissed his hippie followers who got into Buddhism, but Kerouac was a conservative and a Catholic.
Kerouac was really only a Buddhist for three years of his life. He was a very traditional Catholic growing up, and then he toyed with Buddhism for about three years. He came back to his faith and wrote a lot of stuff about Jesus and refused to give up his love of Jesus for the Buddha. Later, when he was having a hard time kicking his alcoholism, he started getting attacked by the New York critics for a pretty accurate description of his work, in which they said, This is a form of Christian primitivism.
Kerouac captures a spiritual search in a way that many novelists don't. You make the point that the novel has the ability to probe the soul in a way that Enlightenment attempts to discover truth can't.
That's why Solzhenitsyn was so wise to novelize his history of the gulag. When he transformed the sufferings of millions of people into stories we could feel, it became real. Pasternack, in Doctor Zhivago, made the spiritual sufferings of the lost intelligentsia of the revolution real in a way that we could feel. Kerouac does the same thing with a spiritual longing that was useful in the 50s and 60s to say there's more going on then just the Cold War. We should be telling our stories to one another about our inner lives.
Thomas Merton was another Catholic writing spiritual literature during the Cold War years.
The Seven Storey Mountain was a great conversion story. It provided a criticism of materialism, modernism, the Bohemian art theme, and left-wing politics, all these things that tempted him, that he turned away from 20 years before anybody else in the country had discovered them.
Then after he died, all his journals and letters came out, and it turns out that all those years that he was in the monastery, he was having these deep conversations with people from all different backgrounds and was thinking through his faith and bringing it into dialogue with all kinds of things, which made him a different writer. Now, we even read The Seven Storey Mountain differently.
It's ironic that while Merton had left the world for the monastery, through his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a different take on political action.
If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive Christian perspective that doesn't argue about things so much as reveal things.
Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these people don't want to change the world. Changing the world is not their number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will listen. You don't come in with this top down agenda and take everybody's life apart so that you can put it back together again.
[Kentucky writer and farmer] Wendell Berry's method is to ask how this reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing one's suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that's why ideological posturing, even if you're right, is counterproductive.
What kind of impact have these thinkers had, or should have?
In the 20th century, the contemplative side of Christianity was made much more accessible by Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Solzhenitsyn also had a great world impact.
Some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been misunderstood or co-opted. We think of him more as a civil-rights icon than as an engaged prophetic Christian trying to figure out non violence. I think he had a much more troubled, interesting, complex message to America than what we have decided it was in our history books and in our one-paragraph summaries of him. I would say that his legacy probably has not been fully understood.
I don't think the full impact of what Schumacher has written about economics has really hit yet, the defense of family business and local community economies. That's starting to have resurgence in the third world with these micro credit organizations. If you start taking Schumacher seriously, then economics is due for a quantum leap, and that hasn't happened yet. We need to rethink the way we do economics, to question the assumption that we're all self-maximizing individuals.
I think Northrop Frye is another one who was understood too quickly, or misunderstood. Literary studies over the past 20 years has been struggling with a lot of competing materialisms. Frye had offered in the early 60s a radical mystic contemplative vision of the literary studies, which doomed him to obsolescence in 1963. But now that practices like lectio divina and those contemplative ways of reading are being rediscovered, you look back at Northrop Frye, and he's the guy who provides the most interesting ideas and paradigms. But I think such a recovery is going to have to be done by religious folk. Because if you try secularizing his categories, they just don't work. It's only through religious eyes that Frye's literary cosmology makes sense, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has a deeper meaning to those who see its Christian themes.
In Frye's letters and journals and also his sermons, because he was a pastor, you get to see the full Christian dimension of his thinking. He discussed how to read prophetically, how to read contemplatively. These were issues that Frye addressed that the last 20- 25-five years of literary criticism just ignored. I think what's going to happen in about 10 years is they're going to rediscover the language in which Frye was writing and learn he was trying to teach us how to read in a way that deepened our inner lives, not just increased our intellectual sophistication.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
The Twilight of Atheism
Why this once exciting and 'liberating' philosophy failed to capture the world's imagination.
by Alister McGrath | posted 02/28/2005 09:30 a.m.
The celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 marked the high point of British imperial history. It was a supreme moment of national self-confidence and congratulation. The British had created an empire on which the sun never set, and much of its colorful diversity was on display in the streets of London that summer.
But Earth's proud empires fade away. The same process of growth and decay can be seen in the empires of the mind. There comes a point when their attraction pales and their credibility falters. To wit: Atheism is in trouble. Its future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its natural habitat.
Pathology No Longer
Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. With time, it turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as religion does. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O'Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respectively.
One of the most important criticisms that Sigmund Freud directed against religion was that it encourages unhealthy and dysfunctional outlooks on life. Having dismissed religion as an illusion, Freud went on to argue that it is a negative factor in personal development. At times, Freud's influence has been such that the elimination of a person's religious beliefs has been seen as a precondition for mental health.
Freud is now a fallen idol, the fall having been all the heavier for its postponement. There is now growing awareness of the importance of spirituality in health care, both as a positive factor in relation to well-being and as an issue to which patients have a right. The "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine" conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School in 1998 brought reports that 86 percent of Americans as a whole, 99 percent of family physicians, and 94 percent of hmo professionals believe that prayer, meditation, and other spiritual and religious practices exercise a major positive role within the healing process.
Restoring Community
With the breakdown of social cohesion in recent decades, creating a sense of community has become an increasingly important political issue in many Western cultures. The question of how community can be recovered invites a comparison of religious and atheistic approaches.
One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms--Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Great Britain, and in France, Muslims from Algeria and other North African nations.
Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. People want to belong, not just believe.
The growth of community churches has helped meet this need. There is a sense of belonging to a common group, of shared common values, and of knowing each other. People don't just go to community churches; they see themselves as belonging there. At a time when American society appears to be fragmenting, the community churches offer cohesion.
It is important to make this connection with the changing face of America. In his much-cited article "The Age of Social Transformation," published in the November 1994 Atlantic Monthly, management guru Peter Drucker pointed out that traditional communities of family, village, and parish have practically disappeared.
"Their place has largely been taken by the new unit of social integration, the organization," Drucker wrote. "Where community was fate, organization is voluntary membership." In the old days, community was defined by where you lived. It was part of the inherited order of things, something that you were born into. Now, it has to be created--and the agency that creates this community is increasingly the voluntary organization. Christian churches are strategically placed to create and foster community. The community churches have proved especially effective in this role, and have grown immensely in consequence.
But what of atheism? The former Soviet Union realized the importance of creating a sense of community. Having eliminated religion from the public life of the nation, Soviet planners recognized the importance of creating rituals and events, which fostered social cohesion and a sense of identity. Thus the Saturday just before Easter was celebrated as Communist Saturday. Other holidays included May Day, Victory Day (May 9), Constitution Day (October 7), and Revolution Day (November 7-
. The Soviets devised additional rituals as counterparts to the Christian rites of baptism and confirmation--for example, the "family event" to mark the birth of a new child, or the ceremony to mark admission to the Communist Party.The nearest thing in the West to this Soviet model is found in Canada, which seems to think that a sense of community identity can only be created by eliminating any religious presence in the public arena. In the United States, atheism spawns organizations; it does not create community. The state chapters and national convention of American Atheists, coupled with this organization's atheist equivalent of creeds, certainly did something to create a sense of shared identity. Yet the community thus created seems to be based solely on distaste for religion. It doesn't even have a good organizational base and lacks charismatic leadership--a fatal weakness, to which we now turn.
Institutional Atheism
Atheist thinkers are more than happy to appear on the nation's chat shows to promote their latest books. But they have failed to communicate a compelling vision of atheism that is capable of drawing and holding large numbers of people.
Atheists widely discuss this comprehensive failure of leadership within their circles. Howard Thompson, sometime editor of the Texas Atheist, is undoubtedly one of the most able and reflective atheists in the United States. Thompson has criticized the movement for its lack of direction: "Atheism in America is poorly defined with little organization," he wrote in an op-ed piece. "We have less social and cultural infrastructure than even the smallest religious groups. . . . Atheism desperately needs effective public voices."
And why has this failed to happen? Thompson lays much of the blame at the feet of O'Hair, whom he regards as the movement's greatest liability. He believes her organization has failed to learn from her mistakes and persists in depicting her as a hero, even a martyr, for the atheist cause.
For 30 years O'Hair was the most visible atheist. What O'Hair did and said was atheism to the public, and it was nasty. The disappearance of the O'Hairs in September 1995 gave hope that more positive atheist initiatives might develop. That's why atheists should worry about the revival of her American Atheists under the leadership of Ellen Johnson, who assumed the office of president in a questionable board of directors meeting. Johnson is also a die-hard O'Hair fan who continues to present her as an atheist heroine. What atheism doesn't need is a continuation of O'Hair's negativity; her style and limited vision stifled positive atheist growth.
Her atheism was crude, anti-intellectual, and homophobic, making even the most zealous fundamentalist Christian seem a model of liberal values. For Thompson, the answer is clear: Grow leaders. In another op-ed piece, "The Unlit Bonfire," Thompson argues that a new dawn awaits--if only the leadership issue can be resolved. "Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition by programming or choice." But who will lead them? And can this goal actually be achieved?
The fatal flaw within Thompson's argument, found within many other atheist tracts and publications, is his strident insistence that humanity has been enslaved by supernaturalist superstition. It is merely necessary to educate people, he believes, and these mad ideas will fall away. Thompson and his colleagues have not even begun to understand a fundamental fact about religion: People actually like their faith, find it helpful in structuring their lives, and inconveniently believe that it might actually be true.
Thompson's alternative to the rich fare of a transcendent faith is "a materialistic culture that frees humanity from superstition." This sounds dull, dated, and gray, about as exciting as a lecture on Bulgarian Marxist dialectics. The failure of atheism to capture the public imagination in the West reflects its failure to articulate a compelling, imaginative vision of a godless future that is capable of exciting people and making them want to gather together to celebrate and proclaim it.
The same dullness pervades the National Secular Society (founded in 1866), the nearest thing Great Britain has to an atheist network. In 2002, its website included a museum of modernity, untroubled by the awkward rise of postmodernity. You could buy a secular mug with the slogan "Just say no to religion!" Or even better, you could download an official Certificate of De-Baptism (medieval font needed) that lets your friends know that you have rejected the "creeds and all other such superstition" in the name of reason.
Rationalism, having quietly died out in most places, still lives on here. Yet Western culture has bypassed this aging little ghetto, having long since recognized the limitations of reason. The Enlightenment lives on for secularists. Atheism is wedded to philosophical modernity, and both are aging gracefully in the cultural equivalent of an old folks' home.
And, for those who find their tracts wearisome, the society thoughtfully provides a religious jokes page--though in poor taste, they carry a significantly higher intellectual content than the rest of the site. Here's an example of atheism's winsome arguments: Question: What's the difference between Jesus and a painting? Answer: It only takes one nail to hang a painting.
The joke makes my friends outside the church cringe. Yet I have the impression this is actually meant to persuade people of the intellectual and cultural superiority of a world without religion. Thompson clearly has a point.
Nevertheless, serious issues are occasionally debated on the website, including the question of why secular humanism, with its commitment to atheism, has so singularly failed to capture the public imagination. One obvious answer might be the National Secular Society itself, which exudes a pious tedium, trapped in a time warp of the closing decades of the 19th century, that seems almost to have been deliberately designed to alienate potential recruits.
Reginald Le Sueur put his finger unerringly on the real point at issue: "The problem with humanism as such is that, although rational, secular, and 'true,' it is, in comparison with major religions, somewhat wishy-washy and just plain unexciting."
Le Sueur recognizes atheism as derivative, its attraction residing primarily in what it denies rather than what it articulates as an alternative. So does atheism have a future?
No doubt it does--but not an especially distinguished or exciting future. Listen to John Updike: "Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position." I have to confess that I now share his catatonic sense of utter tedium when I reread some of the atheist works I once found fascinating as a teenager. They now seem simplistic, failing to engage with the complexities of human experience, and seriously out of tune with our postmodern culture.
Why Atheism Matters
On the other hand, the greatest virtue of atheism is its moral seriousness--its criticisms and passionate demands for justice directed against the corruptions of, say, the French church of the 18th century.
The moral passion of atheism, especially when set alongside the laziness and complacency of European state churches in the 18th century, cannot be dismissed. Some Christian leaders at the time of the French Revolution saw that event as a divine judgment against a failing church. Some believed God was using the atheist critiques of the church as a means of reforming it.
Paradoxically, what propels people toward atheism is above all a sense of revulsion against the excesses and failures of organized religion. Atheism is ultimately a worldview of fear--a fear, often merited, of what might happen if religious maniacs were to take over the world.
As the critics of Homeric religion made clear, the attractions of a godless world rest upon a sense of revulsion against the gods. Who wanted to worship or imitate gods such as Zeus and Athena, when they merely immortalized the worst moral failings of human beings?
Moving Target
In the end, debates about whether God's existence can be proved remain marginal. The central issue is moral and imaginative. The most fundamental criticisms directed against Christianity have to do with the moral character of its God. They often focus on the issue of eternal punishment. No theological issue posed greater difficulties for Victorian England, as the writings of George Eliot make clear. It was for this reason that Charles Darwin found his faith, surprisingly unchallenged by his views on evolution, to be stretched beyond its modest capacity.
Others had similarly serious misgivings. "Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty," said secular humanist orator Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), "and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment." Despite its opportunistic overstatement, Ingersoll's complaint resonates deeply with many who find a contradiction between their deepest intuitions of fairness and the Christian God.
We cannot assert eternal damnation and expect Western culture to nod approvingly. This culture is not predisposed to reject Christian doctrines as a matter of principle; rather, it is surprised by what seems a massive retreat from society's fundamental notions of decency and evenhandedness. Atheism arises mainly through a profound sense that religious ideas and values are at least inferior to, and possibly irreconcilable with, the best moral standards and ideals of human culture.
In its most intense and authentic forms, atheism enters a powerful protest against what it sees to be morally or intellectually inferior visions of reality. In their place, atheism offers visions of a larger freedom, allowing humanity to throw aside its chains and enter a new and glorious phase in history. It is perhaps not surprising that many sympathize with Dostoyevsky's character Ivan Karamazov when he respectfully returns God's ticket, in the face of the suffering, pain, and injustice of the world. Christianity must provide good answers to such fair questions.
But the real significance of atheism has to do with its critique of power and privilege. Whatever their failings, atheist organizations are right in challenging the idea that any religious grouping can enjoy special privileges in a democratic society. Such groupings deserve respect. But when religion becomes the establishment, a corrupting abuse of power can result. Atheism soars in its appeal.
The converse can be true. The rise of militant Islam in Afghanistan was the direct outcome of the Soviet invasion of that nation in 1979 and its clumsy attempts to support an atheistic regime. As Karen Armstrong points out in her The Battle for God (2000), the best way to encourage the rise of religious fundamentalism is to impose a secular agenda on people who want to get on with their religious lives.
Atheism's concerns about the Christian exertion of power resonate with many within the church. The assumption of the New Testament is that Christianity is excluded from the establishment and thus insulated from the temptations and corruption that power brings. For many reflective Christians, the church began to lose its compelling moral and spiritual vision with the conversion of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. A movement that was at its most authentic while powerless and weak now became exposed to forces that compromised its integrity.
Yet it must be noted that Christianity is a dynamic entity, constantly changing in its forms as it seeks to relate its foundational heritage in the New Testament to the situations in which it finds itself. Atheist criticisms of the church are at their most compelling and persuasive when they are directed against the failings of the church.
The essential difficulty here is that, with the rise of dynamic churches especially in the Southern Hemisphere, the classic atheist criticisms of the church do not quite ring true any longer--even in the homelands of the much-derided state churches of Western Europe. The repetition of stale clichés from the golden age of atheism sounds increasingly out of touch with postmodern reality.
The atheist dilemma is that Christianity is a moving target, whose trajectory is capable of being redirected without losing its anchor point in the New Testament. And as theologian John Henry Newman pointed out, Christianity must listen to such criticisms from outside its bounds, precisely because listening may be a way of recapturing its vision of the gospel.
Some atheists have argued that the phenomenon of globalization can only advance a secularist agenda, eliminating religion from the public arena. If the world is to have a shared future, it can only be by eliminating what divides its nations and peoples--such as religious beliefs. Yet many have pointed out in response that globalization seems to be resulting in a quite different outcome.
Far from being secularized, the West is experiencing a new interest in religion. Patterns of immigration mean that Islam and Hinduism are now major living presences in the cities of Western Europe and North America. Pentecostalism is a rapidly growing force, strengthened by the arrival of many Asian and African Christians in the West. The future looks nothing like the godless and religionless world so confidently predicted 40 years ago. The atheist agenda, once seen as a positive force for progress, is now seen as disrespectful toward cultural diversity.
Paradoxically, the future of atheism will be determined by its religious rivals. Those atheists looking for a surefire way to increase their appeal need only to hope for harsh, vindictive, and unthinking forms of religion to arise in the West.
In his problematic but fascinating work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler argued that history shows that cultures came into being for religious reasons. As they exhausted the potential of that spirituality, religion gave way to atheism, before a phase of religious renewal gave them a new sense of direction. Might atheism have run its course, and now give way to religious renewal? The tides of cultural shift have, for the time being, left atheism beached on the sands of modernity, while Westerners explore a new postmodern interest in the forbidden fruit of spirituality.
Alister McGrath is professor of historical theology at Oxford University, and author of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (Doubleday, 2004), from which this essay was excerpted and condensed.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3, Page 36
Posted on Mon, Aug. 01, 2005
Bush endorses teaching `intelligent design' theory in schools
By Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools.
On other topics, Bush said he has no idea how Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts would vote in a case challenging the legality of abortion because he never asked him about it. He also defended Baltimore Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro, who was suspended Monday for using performance-enhancing steroids.
Bush declined to state his personal views on "intelligent design," the belief that life forms are so complex that their creation can't be explained by Darwinian evolutionary theory alone, but rather points to intentional creation, presumably divine.
The theory of evolution, first articulated by British naturalist Charles Darwin in 1859, is based on the idea that life organisms developed over time through random mutations and factors in nature that favored certain traits that helped species survive.
Scientists concede that evolution doesn't answer every question about the creation of life, but most consider intelligent design an attempt to inject religion into science courses.
Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over "creationism," a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. As governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.
On Monday the president said he favors the same approach for intelligent design "so people can understand what the debate is about."
The Kansas Board of Education is considering changes to encourage the teaching of intelligent design in Kansas schools, and Christian conservatives are pushing for similar changes in other school districts across the country.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. " You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have both concluded that there's no scientific basis for intelligent design and oppose its inclusion in school science classes.
"The claim that equity demands balanced treatment of evolutionary theory and special creation in science classrooms reflects a misunderstanding of what science is and how it is conducted," the academy said in a 1999 assessment. "Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."
Some scientists have declined to join the debate, fearing that amplifying the discussion only gives intelligent design more legitimacy.
But advocates of intelligent design also claim support from scientists. The Discovery® Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle that's the leading proponent for intelligent design, said it has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists, including 70 biologists, who are skeptical about evolution.
"The fact is that a significant number of scientists are extremely skeptical that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life," John West, associate director of the organization's Center for Science and Culture, said in a prepared statement.
Bush didn't seem eager to talk about the topic.
Full: http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12278497.htm
Bush endorses teaching `intelligent design' theory in schools
By Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools.
On other topics, Bush said he has no idea how Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts would vote in a case challenging the legality of abortion because he never asked him about it. He also defended Baltimore Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro, who was suspended Monday for using performance-enhancing steroids.
Bush declined to state his personal views on "intelligent design," the belief that life forms are so complex that their creation can't be explained by Darwinian evolutionary theory alone, but rather points to intentional creation, presumably divine.
The theory of evolution, first articulated by British naturalist Charles Darwin in 1859, is based on the idea that life organisms developed over time through random mutations and factors in nature that favored certain traits that helped species survive.
Scientists concede that evolution doesn't answer every question about the creation of life, but most consider intelligent design an attempt to inject religion into science courses.
Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over "creationism," a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. As governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.
On Monday the president said he favors the same approach for intelligent design "so people can understand what the debate is about."
The Kansas Board of Education is considering changes to encourage the teaching of intelligent design in Kansas schools, and Christian conservatives are pushing for similar changes in other school districts across the country.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. " You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have both concluded that there's no scientific basis for intelligent design and oppose its inclusion in school science classes.
"The claim that equity demands balanced treatment of evolutionary theory and special creation in science classrooms reflects a misunderstanding of what science is and how it is conducted," the academy said in a 1999 assessment. "Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."
Some scientists have declined to join the debate, fearing that amplifying the discussion only gives intelligent design more legitimacy.
But advocates of intelligent design also claim support from scientists. The Discovery® Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle that's the leading proponent for intelligent design, said it has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists, including 70 biologists, who are skeptical about evolution.
"The fact is that a significant number of scientists are extremely skeptical that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life," John West, associate director of the organization's Center for Science and Culture, said in a prepared statement.
Bush didn't seem eager to talk about the topic.
Full: http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12278497.htm
As a scientist I take a humble empirical attitude to many
aspects of human organisation. An arrangement that has worked for a
couple millennia should not be blithely brushed aside.
To take a notorious example: the social engineerings of
Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Mao, Bertrand Russell, Attlee, H
Clark, M Wilson etc assume improved structures & procedures within a
generation on the basis of ill-tested theory, whereas the
incrementalism of conservatives like me takes full account of the
superior accomplishments of applied Christianity - glimpsed in e.g
attached Kipling.
The British in those parts of India with pre-existing
princely states were sensible enough to leave them largely
undisturbed. A 'resident', often a junior officer, was inserted in
the capital, and operated a more or less extensive spy system, but
the existing political & religious order was largely untouched.
Heavily taxed, but not wrecked.
To advocate overthrow of the clergy system, as I take the
creepy Kelderman to do, is a feckless flailing-about. What is needed
by Bpp & Revs is revival, more genuine contact with lay people,
including better impingement from constructive critics like John
Morton, you, and me. Usurpation or severe warping of ministers'
roles is broadly unwise. Let us add renewed lay theology &
apologetics etc to improved deaconate, priesthood, & episcopate.
Let us not imagine that more drastic changes can be wrought without
unforeseen harmful side-effects.
Moreover, the theories behind the social sabotages by the
"progressive" operatives are largely suspect. The worst offenders
have been overtly, indeed rabidly, atheistic. Even the more
sophisticated, e.g Clark, less flagrantly but very effectively
undermine the only known basis for a decent society viz. Christianity.
The attached frank strategy - much of which has been
'successful' in the ensuing 2 decades - should warn us to some
extent what we're up against.
R
The White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling
McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899)
---------------------------------------------------------
Take up the White Man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man's burden --
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden --
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper --
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward --
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: --
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden --
Ye dare not stoop to less --
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.
Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days --
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
-------------------------------------------------------
Citation: Kipling, Rudyard. "The White Man's Burden". McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
http://www.boondocksnet.com/kipling/kipling.html
in Jim Zwick (ed) Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935.
=================================
STRATEGIES OF THE HOMOSEXUAL MOVEMENT
(The following article called "The Overhauling of Straight
America'' was written by Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill and
appeared in Guide Magazine, November 1987. As you read the
article, keep in mind it was printed that many years ago. Many of the
strategies have already been put into place and have achieved their
desired results.)
The first order of business is desensitization of the American
public concerning gays and gay rights. To desensitize the public
is to help it view homosexuality with indifference instead of with
keen emotion. Ideally, we would have straights register differences in sexual preference the way they register different tastes for ice cream or sports games: she likes strawberry and I like vanilla; he follows baseball and I follow football. No big deal.
At least in the beginning, we are seeking public desensitization
and nothing more. We do not need and cannot expect a full
"appreciation" or "understanding" of homosexuality from the
average American. You can forget about trying to persuade the
masses that homosexuality is a good thing. But if only you can get them to think that it is just another thing, with a shrug of their shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won. And to get to shoulder-shrug stage, gays as a class must cease to appear mysterious, alien, loathsome and contrary. A large-scale media campaign will be required in order to change the image of gays in America. And any campaign to accomplish this turnaround should do six things.
[1] TALK ABOUT GAYS AND GAYNESS AS LOUDLY AND
AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.
The principle behind this advice is simple: almost any behavior
begins to look normal if you are exposed to enough of it at close
quarters and among your acquaintances. The acceptability of the
new behavior will ultimately hinge on the number of one's fellows
doing it or accepting it. One may be offended by its novelty at
first--many, in times past, were momentarily scandalized by
"streaking,'' eating goldfish, and premarital sex. But as long as Joe
Six-pack feels little pressure to perform likewise, and as long as the
behavior in question presents little threat to his physical and financial
security, he soon gets used to it and life goes on. The skeptic may still
shake his head and think "people arc crazy these days," but over time
his objections are likely to become more reflective, more philosophical,
less emotional.
The way to benumb raw sensitivities about homosexuality is to
Have a lot of people talk a great deal about the subject in a neutral
or supportive way. Open and frank talk makes the subject seem
less furtive, alien, and sinful, more above-board. Constant talk
builds the impression that public opinion is at least divided on the
subject, and that a sizable segment accepts or even practices
homosexuality. Even rancorous debates between opponents and
defenders serve the purpose of desensitization so long as "respectable"
gays are front and center to make their own pitch. The main thing is to
talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.
And when we say talk about homosexuality, we mean just that. In
the early stages of any campaign to reach straight America, the
masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure
to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex should be
downplayed and gay rights should be reduced to an abstract social
question as much as possible. First let the camel get his nose
inside the tent -- only later his unsightly derriere!
"... In the early stages of any campaign to reach straight America,
the masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure
to homosexul behavior itself."
Where we talk is important. The visual media, film and
television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western
civilization. The average American household watches over seven hours of TV
daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of
straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far
as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message--of
normalcy. So far, gay Hollywood has provided our best covert
weapon in the battle to desensitize the mainstream. Bit by bit
over the past ten years, gay characters and gay themes have been
introduced into TV programs and films (though often this has been done to achieve comedic and ridiculous affects). On the whole the impact has been
encouraging. The prime-time presentation of Consenting Adults on
a major network in 1985 is but one high-water mark in favorable
media exposure of gay issues. But this should be just the
beginning of a major publicity blitz by gay America.
Would a desensitizing campaign of open and sustained talk about
gay issues reach every rabid opponent of homosexuality? Of course
not. While public opinion is one primary source of mainstream
values, religious authority is the other. When conservative
churches condemn gays, there are only two things we can do to
confound the homophobia of true believers. First, we can use talk
to muddy the moral waters. This means publicizing support for gays
by more moderate churches, raising theological objections of our own about
conservative interpretations of biblical teachings, and exposing hatred
and inconsistency. Second, we can undermine the moral authority of
homophobia churches by portraying them as antiquated backwaters,
badly out of step with the times and with the latest findings of
psychology. Against the mighty pull of institutional Religion one
must set the mightier draw of Science and Public Opinion (the
shield and sword of the accursed "secular humanism"'). Such an
unholy alliance has worked well against churches before, on such
topics as divorce and abortion. With enough open talk about the
prevalence and acceptability of homosexuality, that alliance can
work again here.
[2] PORTRAY GAYS AS VICTIMS, NOT AS AGGRESSIVE CHALLENGERS.
In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as
victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined
by reflex to assume the role of protector. If gays are presented,
instead, as a strong and prideful tribe promoting a rigidly
nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more likely to be
seen as a public menace that justifies resistance and oppression. For
that reason, we must forego the temptation to strut our "gay pride"
publicly when it conflicts with the Gay Victim image. And we must
walk the fine line between impressing straights with our great
numbers, on the one hand, and sparking their hostile
paranoia - "They are all around us!" - on the other. A media
campaign to promote the Gay Victim image should make use of symbols which
reduce the mainstream's sense of threat, which lower its guard,
and which enhance the plausibility of victimization. In practical
terms, this means that jaunty mustachioed musclemen would keep very low
profile in gay commercials and other public presentations, while
sympathetic figures of nice young people, old people, and
attractive women would be featured. (It almost goes without
saying that groups on the farthest margin of acceptability such as
NAMBLA [Ed note -- North American Man-Boy Love Association] must
play no part at all in such a campaign: suspected child-molesters
will never look like victims.)
Now, there are two different messages about the Gay Victim that
arc worth communicating. First, the mainstream should be told
that gays arc victims of fate, in the sense that most never had a
choice to accept or eject their sexual preference. The message
must read: "As far as gays can tell, they were born gay, just as
you were born heterosexual or white or black or bright or
athletic. Nobody ever tricked or seduced them; they never made a choice,
and are not morally blameworthy. What they do isn't wilfully contrary
- it's only natural for them. This twist of fate could as easily have
happened to you!"
Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims.
Mr and Mrs. Public must be given no extra excuses to say "they are
not like us." To this end, the persons featured in the public
campaign should be decent and upright, appealing and admirable by
straight standards, completely unexceptionable in appearance -- in
a word, they should be indistinguishable from the straights we would like
to reach. (To return to the terms we have used in previous articles,
spokemen for our cause must be R-type "straight gays" rather than
Q-type "homosexuals on display." ) Only under such conditions
will the message be read correctly: "These folks are victims of a fate
that could have happened to me."
By the way, we realize that many gays will question an
advertising technique which might threaten to make homosexuality look like
some dreadful disease which strikes fated "victims". But the
plain fact is that the gay community is weak, including the play for
sympathy. In any case, we compensate for the negative aspect of
this gay victim appeal under Principle 4 Below.
The second message would portray gays as victims of society. The
straight majority does not recognize the suffering it brings to
the lives of gays and must be shown: graphic pictures of
brutalized gays; dramatizations of job and housing insecurity,
loss of child custody, and public humiliation: and the dismal
list goes on.
"... In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector."
[3] GIVE PROTECTORS A JUST CAUSE.
A media campaign that casts gays as society's victims and
encourages straights to be their protectors must make it easier
for those to respond to assert and explain their new
protectiveness. Few straight women, and even fewer straight men, wilt
want to defend homosexuality boldly as such. Most would rather attach
their awakened protective impulse to some principle of justice or law,
to some general desire for consistent and fair treatment in society. Our
campaign should not demand direct support for homosexual practices, but
should instead take anti-discrimination as its theme. The right to free
speech, freedom of beliefs, freedom of association, due process and equal
protection of laws--these should be the concerns brought to mind by our
campaign.
It is especially important for the gay movement to hitch its
cause to accepted standards of law and justice because its straight
supporters must have at hand a cogent reply to the moral
arguments of its enemies. The homophobes clothe their emotional revulsion
in the daunting robes of religious dogma, so defenders of gay rights
must be ready to counter dogma with principle.
[4] MAKE GAYS LOOK GOOD.
In order to make a Gay Victim sympathetic to straights you have
to portray him as Everyman. But an additional theme of the campaign
should be more aggressive and upbeat: to offset the increasingly
bad press that these times have brought to homosexual men and
women, the campaign should paint gays as superior pillars of
society. Yes, yes, we know--this trick is so old it creaks. Other
minorities use it all the time in ads that announce proudly, "Did
you know that this Great Man (or Woman) was _____?" But the message
is vital for all those straights who still picture gays as "queer"
people-- shadowy, lonesome, fail, drunken, suicidal, child-snatching misfits.
The honor roll of prominent gay or bisexual men and women is truly eyepopping.
From Socrates to Shakespeare, from Alexander the Great to Alexander
Hamilton, from Michelangelo to Walt Whitman, from Sappho to
Gertrude Stein, the list is old hat to us but shocking news to
heterosexual America. In no time, a skillful and clever media
campaign could have the gay community looking like the veritable
fairy godmother to Western Civilization.
Along the same lines, we shouldn't overlook the Celebrity Endorsement. The celebrities can be straight (God bless you, Ed Asner, wherever you are) or gay.
[5] MAKE THE VICTIMIZERS LOOK BAD.
At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights-long after
other gay ads have become commonplace--it will be time to get
tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be
vilified. (This will be all the more necessary because, by that
time, the entrenched enemy will have quadrupled its output of
vitriol and disinformation.) Our goal here is twofold. First, we seek
to replace the mainstream's self-righteous pride about its homophobia
with shame and guilt. Second, we intend to make the antigays look so nasty
that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.
The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose
secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America. These images
might include: the Ku Klux Klan demanding that gays be burned
alive or castrated; bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged; menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the "fags" they have killed or would like to kill; a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homoscxuals were tortured and gassed.
A campaign to vilify the victimizers is going to enrage our most fervid enemies, of course. But what else can we say? The shoe fits, and we should make them try it on for size, with all of America watching.
[6] SOLICIT FUNDS.
The buck stops here. Any massive campaign of this kind would
require unprecedented expenditures for months or even years--an
unprecedented fundraising drive.
Effective advertising is a costly proposition: several million
dollars would get the ball rolling. There are 10-15 million
primarily homosexual adults in this country: if each one of them
donated just two dollars to the campaign, its war chest would
actually rival that of its most vocal enemies. And because those
gays not supporting families usually have more discretionars income than
average, they could afford to contribute much more.
"... We intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will
want to dissociate themselves from such types."
But would they? Or is they, [sic] gay community as feckless,
selfish, uncommitted, and short-sighted as its critics claim? We
will never know unless the new campaign simultaneously launches a
concerted nationwide appeal for funding support from both known
and anorymous donors. The appeal should be directed both at gays and at
straights who care about social justice.
In the beginning, for reasons to be explained in a moment, the
appeal for funds may have to be launched exclusively through the
gay press--national magazines, local newspapers, flyers at bars,
notices in glossy skin magazines. Funds could also come through
the outreach of local gay organizations on campuses and in
metropolitan areas. Eventually, donations would be solicited directly
alongside advertisements in the major straight media.
There would be no parallel to such an effort in the history of
the gay community in America. It failed to generate the needed
capital to get started, there would be little hope for the campaign and l
little hope for major progress toward gay rights in the near
future. For the moment let us suppose that gays could see how
donations would greatly serve their long term interest, and that
sufficient funds could be raised. An heroic assumption.
GETTING ON THE AIR, OR, YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE.
Without access to TV, radio, and the mainstream press, there will
be no campaign. This is a tricky problem, because many impresarios
of the media simply refuse to accept what they call
"issue-advertising" -- persuasive advertising can provoke a storm
of resentment from the public and from sponsors, which is bad for
business. The courts have confirmed the broadcaster's right to
refuse any "issue advertising" he dislikes.
What exactly constitutes "issue advertising"? It evidently does
not include platitudinous appeals to the virtues of family unity
(courtesy of the Mormons) neither does it include tirades against
perfidious Albion courtesy of Lyndon LaRouche; neither does it
include reminders that a Mind-Is-a Terrible Thing to Waste
(courtesy of the United Negro College Fund); neither does it include
religious shows which condemn gay "sinners"; neither does it
include condemnations of nuclear war or race discrimination--at
least not in Massachusetts. Some guys get all the breaks.
What issue-advertising does include these days is almost any
communique presented openly by a homosexual organization. The
words "gay" and "homosexual"' arc considered controversial
whenever they appear.
Because most straightforward appeals are impossible, the National
Gay Task Force has had to cultivate quiet backroom liaisons with
broadcast companies and newsrooms in order to make sure that
issues important to the gay community receive some coverage; but
such an arrangement is hardly ideal, of course, because it means that
the gay community's image is controlled by the latest news event instead
of by careful design--and recently most of the news about gays has been
negative. So what can be done to crash the gates of the major media?
Several things, advanced in several stages.
START WITH THE FINE PRINT
Newspapers and magazines may very well be more hungry for gay
advertising dollars than television and radio arc. And the cost
of ads in print is generally lower. But remember that the press, for
the most part, is only read by better educated Americans, many of
whom arc already more accepting of homosexuality in any case. So
to get more impact for our dollars, we should skip the New Republic
and New Left Review readers and head for Time, People , and the
National Enquirer. (Of course, the gay community may have to
establish itself as a regular advertising presence in more sophisticated
forums first before it is accepted into the mass press. )
While we're storming the battlements with salvos of ink, we
should also warm the mainstream up a bit with a subtle national campaign
on highway billboards. In simple bold print on dark backgrounds,
a series of unobjectionable messages should be introduced:
IN RUSSIA, THEY TELL YOU WHAT TO BE. IN AMERICA WE HAVE THE FREEDOM T0 BE OURSELVES ... AND TO BE THE BEST.
or
PEOPLE HELPING INSTEAD OF HATING -- THAT'S WHAT
AMERICA IS ALL ABOUT.
And so on. Each sign will tap patriotic sentiment, each message
will drill a seemingly agreeable proposition into mainstream
heads--a "public service message" suited to our purposes. And, if
their owners will permit it, each billboard w ill be signed, in
slightly smaller letters, "Courtesy of the National Gay Task
Force" -- to build positive associations and get the public used to
seeing such sponsorship.
VISUAL STAGE 1: YOU REALLY OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES
As for television and radio, a more elaborate plan may be needed
to break the ice. For openers, naturally, we must continue to
encourage the appearance of favorable gay characters in films and
TV shows. Daytime talk shows also remain a useful avenue for exposure.
But to speed things up we might consider a bold stratagem to gain
media attention. The scheme we have in mind would require careful
preparations, yet it would save expense even while it elevated
the visibility and stature of the gay movement overnight. Well before
the next elections for national office, we might lay careful plans
to run symbolic gay candidates for every high political office in
this country. (Such plans would have to deal somehow with the
tricky problem of inducing gays and straights to sign enough endorsement
petitions to get us on the ballot.) Our 50-250 candidates would participate
in such debates as they could, run gay-themed advertisements coordinated
at our national headquarters, and demand equal time on the air. They could
then graciously pull out of the races before the actual elections, while
formally endorsing more viable straight contenders. (With malicious humor,
perhaps, in some states we could endorse our most rabid opponents.) It
is essential not to ask people actually to vote Yea or Nay on the gay
issue at this early stage: such action would end up committing most to
the Nay position and would only tally huge and visible defeats for our
cause.
Through such a political campaign, the mainstream would get over the initial shock of seeing gay ads, and the acceptability of such ads would be fortified by the most creditable context possible; and all this would be accomplished before non-electoral advertising was attempted by the gay community. During the campaign all hell would break loose, but if we behaved courageously and respectable our drive would gain legitimacy in and case and might even become a cause celebre.
If all went as planned, the somewhat desensitized public and the
major networks themselves would be readied for the next step of
our program.
VISUAL STAGE 2: PEEKABOO ADVERTISING
At this point the gay community has its foot in the door, and it
is time to ask the networks to accept gay sponsorship of certain
ads and shows. Timing is critical: The request must be made
immediately after our national political ads disappear. Failing
that, we should request sponsorship the next time one of the
networks struts its broad- mindedness by televising a film or show
with gay characters or themes. If they wish to look consistent instead
of hypocritical, we'll have them on the spot.
But the networks would still be forced to say No unless we made
their resistance look patently unreasonable, and possibly illegal.
We'd do just that by proposing "gay ads" patterned exactly after
those currently sponsored by the Mormons and others. As usual,
viewers would be treated to squeak-clean skits on the importance
of family harmony and understanding --this time the narrator
would end by saying, "This message was brought to you by --the National
Gay Task Force." All very quiet and subdued. Remember: exposure is
everything, and the medium is the message.
"... Exposure is everything and the medium is the message."
The gay community should join forces with other civil liberties groups of respectable cast to promote bland messages about America the Melting Pot, always ending with an explicit reference to the Task Force of some other gay organization. Making the best of a bad situation, we can also propose sympathetic media appeals for gifts and donations to fund AIDS research--if Jerry Lewis and the March of Dimes can do it, so can we. Our next indirect step will be to advertise locally on behalf of support groups peripheral to the gay community: frowzy straight moms and dads announcing phone numbers and meeting times for "Parents of Gays" or similar gatherings. Can't you just see such ads now, presented between messages from the Disabled Vets and the Postal Workers Union?
VISUAL STAGE 3: ROLL OUT THE BIG GUNS
By this point, our salami tactics will have carved out, slice by
slice, a large portion of access to the mainstream media. So what
then? It would finally be time to bring gay ads out of the closet.
The messages of such ads should directly address lingering public
fears about homosexuals as loathsome and contrary aliens. For
examples, the following are possible formats for TV or radio
commercials designed to chip away at chronic misperceptions.
Format A for Familiarization: The Testimonial.
To make gays seem less mysterious, present a series of short
spots featuring the boy- or girl-next- door. fresh and appealing, or
warm and lovable grandma grandpa types. Seated in homey
surroundings, they respond to an offcamera interviewer with
assurance, good nature, and charm. Their comments bring out three
social facts:
(1) There is someone special in their life, a long-term relationship
(to stress gay stability, monogamy, commitment);
(2) Their families are very important to them, and are supportive
of them (to stress that gays are not "anti-family," and that
families need not be anti-gay.)
(3) As far as they can remember the! have always been gay, and
were probably born gay; they certainly never decided on a preference
one way or the other (stressing that gays are doing what is
natural for them, and are not being wilfully contrary).
The subjects should be interviewed alone, not with their lovers
or children, for to include others in the picture would unwisely
raise disturbing questions about the complexities of gay social
relations, which these commercials could not explain. It is best
instead to take one thing at a time.
Format B for Positive associations: The Celebrity Spot.
While it might be useful to present celebrity endorsement by
currently popular gay figures and straight sympathizers (Johnny
Mathis? Marlo Thomas?), the homophobia climate of America would
make such brash endorsements unlikely in the near future. So early
celebrity spots will instead identify historical gay or bisexual
personalities who are illustrious and dignified...and dead. The
ads could be sardonic and indirect. For example, over regal music
and a portrait or two, a narrator might announce simply:
William Shakespeare--the greatest playwright in the history of
the English language. Yet, if he were alive today, some people
wouldn't let him teach a high school English class. Now isn't
that a shame?
The rhetorical question forces the viewer to answer Yes. And to
explain the Bard's failing, the ad would end simply: "A message
from the National Gay Task Force." Similar commercials could
feature Michelangelo (an art class), Tchaikovsky (a music class),
Tennessee Williams (a drama class), etc.
Format C for Victim Sympathy: Our Campaign to Stop Child Abuse.
As we said earlier, there arc many ways to portray gays as
victims of discrimination: images of brutality, tales of job loss and
family separation, and so on. But we think something like the
following 30-sccond commercials would get to the heart of the
matter best of all.
The camera slowly moves in on a middle-class teenager, sitting
alone in his semi-darkened bedroom. The boy is pleasing and
unexceptional in appearance, except that he has been roughed up
and is starring silently, pensively, with evident distress. As
the camera gradually focuses in on his face, a narrator comments:
It will happen to one in every ten sons. As he grows up. he will realize
that he feels differently about things than most of his friends. If he
lets it show, he'll be an outsider made fun of, humiliated, attacked.
If he confides in his parents, they may throw him out of the house, onto
the streets. Some will say he is "anti-family." Nobody will let him be
himself. So he will have to hide. From his friends, his family. And that's
hard. It's tough enough to be a kid these days, but to be the one in
ten... A message from the National Gay Task Force.
What is nice about such an ad is that it would economically portray gays as innocent and vulnerable, victimized and misunderstood, surprisingly numerous yet not menacing. It also renders the "anti-family" charge absurd and hypocritical.
Format D for Identification with Victims: The Old Switcheroo.
The mainstream will identify better with the plight of gays if straights can, once in a while, walk a mile in gay shoes. A humorous television or radio ad to help them do this might involve a brief animated or dramatized scenario, as follows.
The camera approaches the mighty oak door of the boss's office, which swings open, and the camera (which represents you the viewer) enters the room. Behind the oversized desk sits a fat and scowling old curmudgeon chomping on a cigar. He looks up at the camera (i.e. at the viewer) and snarls, " So it's you, Smithers. Well You're fired!" The voice of a younger man is heard to reply with astonishment, "But-but--Mr. Thomburg, I've been with your company for ten years. I thought you liked my work." The boss responds, with a tone of disgust, "Yes, yes, Smithers your work is quite adequate. But I've heard rumors that you've been seen around town with some kind of girlfriend. A girlfriend! Frankly I'm shocked. We're not about to start hiring any heterosexuals in this company. Now get out." The younger man speaks once more: "But boss, that's just not fair! What if it were you?" The boss glowers back as the camera pulls quickly out of the room and the big door slams shut. Printed on the door: "A message from the National Gay Task Force."
One can easily imagine similar episodes involving housing or other discrimination.
Format E for Vilification of Victimizers: Damn the Torpedoes.
We have already indicated some of the images which might be
damaging to the homophobic vendetta: ranting and hateful
religious extremists neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen made to look
evil and ridiculous (hardly a difficult task).
These images should be combined with those of their gay victims
By a method propagandists call the "bracket technique." For example,
for a few seconds an unctuous beady-eyed Southern preacher is
seen pounding the pulpit in rage about "those sick, abominable
creatures." While his tirade continues over the soundtrack,. the
picture switches to pathetic photos of gays who look decent,
harmless, and likable; and then we cut back to the poisonous face
of the preacher, and so forth. The contrast speaks for itself. The effect
is devastating.
"...it would portray gays as innocent and vulnerable, victimized and
misunderstood, surprisingly numerous, yet not menacing."
Format F for Funds: S.O.S.
Alongside or during these other persuasive advertisements, we
would have to solicit donations so that the campaign might
continue. Direct appeals from celebrities (preferable living
ones, thank you) might be useful here. All appeals must stress that
money can be given anonymously (e.g. via money orders) and that all
donations are confidential. "We can't help unless you help," and all that.
The Time Is Now
We have sketched out here a blueprint for transforming the social
values of straight America At the core of our program is a media
campaign to change the way the average citizens view homosexuality. It is
quite easy to find fault with such a campaign. We have tried to be practical
and specific here, but the proposals may still have a visionary sheen.
There are one hundred reasons why the campaign could not be done
or would be risky. But there are at least 20 million good reasons
why some such program must be tried in the coming years: the
welfare and happiness of every gay man and woman in this country
demand it. As the last large, legally oppressed minority in
American society, it is high time that gays took effective measures
to rejoin the mainstream in pride and strength. We believe that, like
it or not, such a campaign is the only way of doing so anytime soon.
And, let us repeat, time may be running out. The AIDS epidemic is
sparking anger and fear in the heartland of straight America. As
the virus leaks out of homosexual circles and into the rest of
society, we need have no illusions about who is receiving the
blame. The ten years ahead may decide for the next forty whether
gays claim their liberty and equality or are driven back, once
again, as America's caste of detested untouchables. It’s more than
a quip: speak now or forever hold your peace.
****
(Keep in mind this article was published in 1987. Since that time
homosexual activists have made remarkable progress in their media
campaign. Just look at TV programs like Roseanne, Melrose Place,
Picket Fences, and Northern Exposure, where homosexuality is presented
as normal, natural behavior on a regular basis. NBC News did a three-day
series on "Gays in America" in September that had no opposing view, other
than one brief statement by Dr. Paul Cameron. There's a proliferation
of "gay" propaganda being shoved down our throats in movies like "The
Crying Game", "Philadelphia", "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", "Go Fish",
and many more.
"... Hollywood is coming out of the closet, and
homosexual activists are jumping up and down for joy."
Hollywood is indeed coming, out a of the closet, and homosexual activists are jumping up and down for joy. Why? Because they know Americans flock to the movie theaters in droves, and that gradually the message of accepting homosexuality as a normal variant of human sexuality is getting through to people-minds are being
changed.
For those of you who want to investigate more about the homosexual agenda and various strategies I recommend the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90’s by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen [Plume 1989]. [] Both authors are Harvard grads -- Kirk is a researcher in neuropsychiatry, while Madsen is "an expert on public persuasion tactics and social marketing." The book is an expansion of the above article complete with sample print ads to use, as well as suggestions for radio, TV spots.)
email to : comments@sphi.com
Copyright 1998 by SPHI. All Rights Reserved.
aspects of human organisation. An arrangement that has worked for a
couple millennia should not be blithely brushed aside.
To take a notorious example: the social engineerings of
Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Mao, Bertrand Russell, Attlee, H
Clark, M Wilson etc assume improved structures & procedures within a
generation on the basis of ill-tested theory, whereas the
incrementalism of conservatives like me takes full account of the
superior accomplishments of applied Christianity - glimpsed in e.g
attached Kipling.
The British in those parts of India with pre-existing
princely states were sensible enough to leave them largely
undisturbed. A 'resident', often a junior officer, was inserted in
the capital, and operated a more or less extensive spy system, but
the existing political & religious order was largely untouched.
Heavily taxed, but not wrecked.
To advocate overthrow of the clergy system, as I take the
creepy Kelderman to do, is a feckless flailing-about. What is needed
by Bpp & Revs is revival, more genuine contact with lay people,
including better impingement from constructive critics like John
Morton, you, and me. Usurpation or severe warping of ministers'
roles is broadly unwise. Let us add renewed lay theology &
apologetics etc to improved deaconate, priesthood, & episcopate.
Let us not imagine that more drastic changes can be wrought without
unforeseen harmful side-effects.
Moreover, the theories behind the social sabotages by the
"progressive" operatives are largely suspect. The worst offenders
have been overtly, indeed rabidly, atheistic. Even the more
sophisticated, e.g Clark, less flagrantly but very effectively
undermine the only known basis for a decent society viz. Christianity.
The attached frank strategy - much of which has been
'successful' in the ensuing 2 decades - should warn us to some
extent what we're up against.
R
The White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling
McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899)
---------------------------------------------------------
Take up the White Man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man's burden --
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden --
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper --
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward --
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: --
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden --
Ye dare not stoop to less --
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.
Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days --
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
-------------------------------------------------------
Citation: Kipling, Rudyard. "The White Man's Burden". McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
http://www.boondocksnet.com/kipling/kipling.html
in Jim Zwick (ed) Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935.
=================================
STRATEGIES OF THE HOMOSEXUAL MOVEMENT
(The following article called "The Overhauling of Straight
America'' was written by Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill and
appeared in Guide Magazine, November 1987. As you read the
article, keep in mind it was printed that many years ago. Many of the
strategies have already been put into place and have achieved their
desired results.)
The first order of business is desensitization of the American
public concerning gays and gay rights. To desensitize the public
is to help it view homosexuality with indifference instead of with
keen emotion. Ideally, we would have straights register differences in sexual preference the way they register different tastes for ice cream or sports games: she likes strawberry and I like vanilla; he follows baseball and I follow football. No big deal.
At least in the beginning, we are seeking public desensitization
and nothing more. We do not need and cannot expect a full
"appreciation" or "understanding" of homosexuality from the
average American. You can forget about trying to persuade the
masses that homosexuality is a good thing. But if only you can get them to think that it is just another thing, with a shrug of their shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won. And to get to shoulder-shrug stage, gays as a class must cease to appear mysterious, alien, loathsome and contrary. A large-scale media campaign will be required in order to change the image of gays in America. And any campaign to accomplish this turnaround should do six things.
[1] TALK ABOUT GAYS AND GAYNESS AS LOUDLY AND
AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.
The principle behind this advice is simple: almost any behavior
begins to look normal if you are exposed to enough of it at close
quarters and among your acquaintances. The acceptability of the
new behavior will ultimately hinge on the number of one's fellows
doing it or accepting it. One may be offended by its novelty at
first--many, in times past, were momentarily scandalized by
"streaking,'' eating goldfish, and premarital sex. But as long as Joe
Six-pack feels little pressure to perform likewise, and as long as the
behavior in question presents little threat to his physical and financial
security, he soon gets used to it and life goes on. The skeptic may still
shake his head and think "people arc crazy these days," but over time
his objections are likely to become more reflective, more philosophical,
less emotional.
The way to benumb raw sensitivities about homosexuality is to
Have a lot of people talk a great deal about the subject in a neutral
or supportive way. Open and frank talk makes the subject seem
less furtive, alien, and sinful, more above-board. Constant talk
builds the impression that public opinion is at least divided on the
subject, and that a sizable segment accepts or even practices
homosexuality. Even rancorous debates between opponents and
defenders serve the purpose of desensitization so long as "respectable"
gays are front and center to make their own pitch. The main thing is to
talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.
And when we say talk about homosexuality, we mean just that. In
the early stages of any campaign to reach straight America, the
masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure
to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex should be
downplayed and gay rights should be reduced to an abstract social
question as much as possible. First let the camel get his nose
inside the tent -- only later his unsightly derriere!
"... In the early stages of any campaign to reach straight America,
the masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure
to homosexul behavior itself."
Where we talk is important. The visual media, film and
television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western
civilization. The average American household watches over seven hours of TV
daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of
straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far
as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message--of
normalcy. So far, gay Hollywood has provided our best covert
weapon in the battle to desensitize the mainstream. Bit by bit
over the past ten years, gay characters and gay themes have been
introduced into TV programs and films (though often this has been done to achieve comedic and ridiculous affects). On the whole the impact has been
encouraging. The prime-time presentation of Consenting Adults on
a major network in 1985 is but one high-water mark in favorable
media exposure of gay issues. But this should be just the
beginning of a major publicity blitz by gay America.
Would a desensitizing campaign of open and sustained talk about
gay issues reach every rabid opponent of homosexuality? Of course
not. While public opinion is one primary source of mainstream
values, religious authority is the other. When conservative
churches condemn gays, there are only two things we can do to
confound the homophobia of true believers. First, we can use talk
to muddy the moral waters. This means publicizing support for gays
by more moderate churches, raising theological objections of our own about
conservative interpretations of biblical teachings, and exposing hatred
and inconsistency. Second, we can undermine the moral authority of
homophobia churches by portraying them as antiquated backwaters,
badly out of step with the times and with the latest findings of
psychology. Against the mighty pull of institutional Religion one
must set the mightier draw of Science and Public Opinion (the
shield and sword of the accursed "secular humanism"'). Such an
unholy alliance has worked well against churches before, on such
topics as divorce and abortion. With enough open talk about the
prevalence and acceptability of homosexuality, that alliance can
work again here.
[2] PORTRAY GAYS AS VICTIMS, NOT AS AGGRESSIVE CHALLENGERS.
In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as
victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined
by reflex to assume the role of protector. If gays are presented,
instead, as a strong and prideful tribe promoting a rigidly
nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more likely to be
seen as a public menace that justifies resistance and oppression. For
that reason, we must forego the temptation to strut our "gay pride"
publicly when it conflicts with the Gay Victim image. And we must
walk the fine line between impressing straights with our great
numbers, on the one hand, and sparking their hostile
paranoia - "They are all around us!" - on the other. A media
campaign to promote the Gay Victim image should make use of symbols which
reduce the mainstream's sense of threat, which lower its guard,
and which enhance the plausibility of victimization. In practical
terms, this means that jaunty mustachioed musclemen would keep very low
profile in gay commercials and other public presentations, while
sympathetic figures of nice young people, old people, and
attractive women would be featured. (It almost goes without
saying that groups on the farthest margin of acceptability such as
NAMBLA [Ed note -- North American Man-Boy Love Association] must
play no part at all in such a campaign: suspected child-molesters
will never look like victims.)
Now, there are two different messages about the Gay Victim that
arc worth communicating. First, the mainstream should be told
that gays arc victims of fate, in the sense that most never had a
choice to accept or eject their sexual preference. The message
must read: "As far as gays can tell, they were born gay, just as
you were born heterosexual or white or black or bright or
athletic. Nobody ever tricked or seduced them; they never made a choice,
and are not morally blameworthy. What they do isn't wilfully contrary
- it's only natural for them. This twist of fate could as easily have
happened to you!"
Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims.
Mr and Mrs. Public must be given no extra excuses to say "they are
not like us." To this end, the persons featured in the public
campaign should be decent and upright, appealing and admirable by
straight standards, completely unexceptionable in appearance -- in
a word, they should be indistinguishable from the straights we would like
to reach. (To return to the terms we have used in previous articles,
spokemen for our cause must be R-type "straight gays" rather than
Q-type "homosexuals on display." ) Only under such conditions
will the message be read correctly: "These folks are victims of a fate
that could have happened to me."
By the way, we realize that many gays will question an
advertising technique which might threaten to make homosexuality look like
some dreadful disease which strikes fated "victims". But the
plain fact is that the gay community is weak, including the play for
sympathy. In any case, we compensate for the negative aspect of
this gay victim appeal under Principle 4 Below.
The second message would portray gays as victims of society. The
straight majority does not recognize the suffering it brings to
the lives of gays and must be shown: graphic pictures of
brutalized gays; dramatizations of job and housing insecurity,
loss of child custody, and public humiliation: and the dismal
list goes on.
"... In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector."
[3] GIVE PROTECTORS A JUST CAUSE.
A media campaign that casts gays as society's victims and
encourages straights to be their protectors must make it easier
for those to respond to assert and explain their new
protectiveness. Few straight women, and even fewer straight men, wilt
want to defend homosexuality boldly as such. Most would rather attach
their awakened protective impulse to some principle of justice or law,
to some general desire for consistent and fair treatment in society. Our
campaign should not demand direct support for homosexual practices, but
should instead take anti-discrimination as its theme. The right to free
speech, freedom of beliefs, freedom of association, due process and equal
protection of laws--these should be the concerns brought to mind by our
campaign.
It is especially important for the gay movement to hitch its
cause to accepted standards of law and justice because its straight
supporters must have at hand a cogent reply to the moral
arguments of its enemies. The homophobes clothe their emotional revulsion
in the daunting robes of religious dogma, so defenders of gay rights
must be ready to counter dogma with principle.
[4] MAKE GAYS LOOK GOOD.
In order to make a Gay Victim sympathetic to straights you have
to portray him as Everyman. But an additional theme of the campaign
should be more aggressive and upbeat: to offset the increasingly
bad press that these times have brought to homosexual men and
women, the campaign should paint gays as superior pillars of
society. Yes, yes, we know--this trick is so old it creaks. Other
minorities use it all the time in ads that announce proudly, "Did
you know that this Great Man (or Woman) was _____?" But the message
is vital for all those straights who still picture gays as "queer"
people-- shadowy, lonesome, fail, drunken, suicidal, child-snatching misfits.
The honor roll of prominent gay or bisexual men and women is truly eyepopping.
From Socrates to Shakespeare, from Alexander the Great to Alexander
Hamilton, from Michelangelo to Walt Whitman, from Sappho to
Gertrude Stein, the list is old hat to us but shocking news to
heterosexual America. In no time, a skillful and clever media
campaign could have the gay community looking like the veritable
fairy godmother to Western Civilization.
Along the same lines, we shouldn't overlook the Celebrity Endorsement. The celebrities can be straight (God bless you, Ed Asner, wherever you are) or gay.
[5] MAKE THE VICTIMIZERS LOOK BAD.
At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights-long after
other gay ads have become commonplace--it will be time to get
tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be
vilified. (This will be all the more necessary because, by that
time, the entrenched enemy will have quadrupled its output of
vitriol and disinformation.) Our goal here is twofold. First, we seek
to replace the mainstream's self-righteous pride about its homophobia
with shame and guilt. Second, we intend to make the antigays look so nasty
that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.
The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose
secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America. These images
might include: the Ku Klux Klan demanding that gays be burned
alive or castrated; bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged; menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the "fags" they have killed or would like to kill; a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homoscxuals were tortured and gassed.
A campaign to vilify the victimizers is going to enrage our most fervid enemies, of course. But what else can we say? The shoe fits, and we should make them try it on for size, with all of America watching.
[6] SOLICIT FUNDS.
The buck stops here. Any massive campaign of this kind would
require unprecedented expenditures for months or even years--an
unprecedented fundraising drive.
Effective advertising is a costly proposition: several million
dollars would get the ball rolling. There are 10-15 million
primarily homosexual adults in this country: if each one of them
donated just two dollars to the campaign, its war chest would
actually rival that of its most vocal enemies. And because those
gays not supporting families usually have more discretionars income than
average, they could afford to contribute much more.
"... We intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will
want to dissociate themselves from such types."
But would they? Or is they, [sic] gay community as feckless,
selfish, uncommitted, and short-sighted as its critics claim? We
will never know unless the new campaign simultaneously launches a
concerted nationwide appeal for funding support from both known
and anorymous donors. The appeal should be directed both at gays and at
straights who care about social justice.
In the beginning, for reasons to be explained in a moment, the
appeal for funds may have to be launched exclusively through the
gay press--national magazines, local newspapers, flyers at bars,
notices in glossy skin magazines. Funds could also come through
the outreach of local gay organizations on campuses and in
metropolitan areas. Eventually, donations would be solicited directly
alongside advertisements in the major straight media.
There would be no parallel to such an effort in the history of
the gay community in America. It failed to generate the needed
capital to get started, there would be little hope for the campaign and l
little hope for major progress toward gay rights in the near
future. For the moment let us suppose that gays could see how
donations would greatly serve their long term interest, and that
sufficient funds could be raised. An heroic assumption.
GETTING ON THE AIR, OR, YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE.
Without access to TV, radio, and the mainstream press, there will
be no campaign. This is a tricky problem, because many impresarios
of the media simply refuse to accept what they call
"issue-advertising" -- persuasive advertising can provoke a storm
of resentment from the public and from sponsors, which is bad for
business. The courts have confirmed the broadcaster's right to
refuse any "issue advertising" he dislikes.
What exactly constitutes "issue advertising"? It evidently does
not include platitudinous appeals to the virtues of family unity
(courtesy of the Mormons) neither does it include tirades against
perfidious Albion courtesy of Lyndon LaRouche; neither does it
include reminders that a Mind-Is-a Terrible Thing to Waste
(courtesy of the United Negro College Fund); neither does it include
religious shows which condemn gay "sinners"; neither does it
include condemnations of nuclear war or race discrimination--at
least not in Massachusetts. Some guys get all the breaks.
What issue-advertising does include these days is almost any
communique presented openly by a homosexual organization. The
words "gay" and "homosexual"' arc considered controversial
whenever they appear.
Because most straightforward appeals are impossible, the National
Gay Task Force has had to cultivate quiet backroom liaisons with
broadcast companies and newsrooms in order to make sure that
issues important to the gay community receive some coverage; but
such an arrangement is hardly ideal, of course, because it means that
the gay community's image is controlled by the latest news event instead
of by careful design--and recently most of the news about gays has been
negative. So what can be done to crash the gates of the major media?
Several things, advanced in several stages.
START WITH THE FINE PRINT
Newspapers and magazines may very well be more hungry for gay
advertising dollars than television and radio arc. And the cost
of ads in print is generally lower. But remember that the press, for
the most part, is only read by better educated Americans, many of
whom arc already more accepting of homosexuality in any case. So
to get more impact for our dollars, we should skip the New Republic
and New Left Review readers and head for Time, People , and the
National Enquirer. (Of course, the gay community may have to
establish itself as a regular advertising presence in more sophisticated
forums first before it is accepted into the mass press. )
While we're storming the battlements with salvos of ink, we
should also warm the mainstream up a bit with a subtle national campaign
on highway billboards. In simple bold print on dark backgrounds,
a series of unobjectionable messages should be introduced:
IN RUSSIA, THEY TELL YOU WHAT TO BE. IN AMERICA WE HAVE THE FREEDOM T0 BE OURSELVES ... AND TO BE THE BEST.
or
PEOPLE HELPING INSTEAD OF HATING -- THAT'S WHAT
AMERICA IS ALL ABOUT.
And so on. Each sign will tap patriotic sentiment, each message
will drill a seemingly agreeable proposition into mainstream
heads--a "public service message" suited to our purposes. And, if
their owners will permit it, each billboard w ill be signed, in
slightly smaller letters, "Courtesy of the National Gay Task
Force" -- to build positive associations and get the public used to
seeing such sponsorship.
VISUAL STAGE 1: YOU REALLY OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES
As for television and radio, a more elaborate plan may be needed
to break the ice. For openers, naturally, we must continue to
encourage the appearance of favorable gay characters in films and
TV shows. Daytime talk shows also remain a useful avenue for exposure.
But to speed things up we might consider a bold stratagem to gain
media attention. The scheme we have in mind would require careful
preparations, yet it would save expense even while it elevated
the visibility and stature of the gay movement overnight. Well before
the next elections for national office, we might lay careful plans
to run symbolic gay candidates for every high political office in
this country. (Such plans would have to deal somehow with the
tricky problem of inducing gays and straights to sign enough endorsement
petitions to get us on the ballot.) Our 50-250 candidates would participate
in such debates as they could, run gay-themed advertisements coordinated
at our national headquarters, and demand equal time on the air. They could
then graciously pull out of the races before the actual elections, while
formally endorsing more viable straight contenders. (With malicious humor,
perhaps, in some states we could endorse our most rabid opponents.) It
is essential not to ask people actually to vote Yea or Nay on the gay
issue at this early stage: such action would end up committing most to
the Nay position and would only tally huge and visible defeats for our
cause.
Through such a political campaign, the mainstream would get over the initial shock of seeing gay ads, and the acceptability of such ads would be fortified by the most creditable context possible; and all this would be accomplished before non-electoral advertising was attempted by the gay community. During the campaign all hell would break loose, but if we behaved courageously and respectable our drive would gain legitimacy in and case and might even become a cause celebre.
If all went as planned, the somewhat desensitized public and the
major networks themselves would be readied for the next step of
our program.
VISUAL STAGE 2: PEEKABOO ADVERTISING
At this point the gay community has its foot in the door, and it
is time to ask the networks to accept gay sponsorship of certain
ads and shows. Timing is critical: The request must be made
immediately after our national political ads disappear. Failing
that, we should request sponsorship the next time one of the
networks struts its broad- mindedness by televising a film or show
with gay characters or themes. If they wish to look consistent instead
of hypocritical, we'll have them on the spot.
But the networks would still be forced to say No unless we made
their resistance look patently unreasonable, and possibly illegal.
We'd do just that by proposing "gay ads" patterned exactly after
those currently sponsored by the Mormons and others. As usual,
viewers would be treated to squeak-clean skits on the importance
of family harmony and understanding --this time the narrator
would end by saying, "This message was brought to you by --the National
Gay Task Force." All very quiet and subdued. Remember: exposure is
everything, and the medium is the message.
"... Exposure is everything and the medium is the message."
The gay community should join forces with other civil liberties groups of respectable cast to promote bland messages about America the Melting Pot, always ending with an explicit reference to the Task Force of some other gay organization. Making the best of a bad situation, we can also propose sympathetic media appeals for gifts and donations to fund AIDS research--if Jerry Lewis and the March of Dimes can do it, so can we. Our next indirect step will be to advertise locally on behalf of support groups peripheral to the gay community: frowzy straight moms and dads announcing phone numbers and meeting times for "Parents of Gays" or similar gatherings. Can't you just see such ads now, presented between messages from the Disabled Vets and the Postal Workers Union?
VISUAL STAGE 3: ROLL OUT THE BIG GUNS
By this point, our salami tactics will have carved out, slice by
slice, a large portion of access to the mainstream media. So what
then? It would finally be time to bring gay ads out of the closet.
The messages of such ads should directly address lingering public
fears about homosexuals as loathsome and contrary aliens. For
examples, the following are possible formats for TV or radio
commercials designed to chip away at chronic misperceptions.
Format A for Familiarization: The Testimonial.
To make gays seem less mysterious, present a series of short
spots featuring the boy- or girl-next- door. fresh and appealing, or
warm and lovable grandma grandpa types. Seated in homey
surroundings, they respond to an offcamera interviewer with
assurance, good nature, and charm. Their comments bring out three
social facts:
(1) There is someone special in their life, a long-term relationship
(to stress gay stability, monogamy, commitment);
(2) Their families are very important to them, and are supportive
of them (to stress that gays are not "anti-family," and that
families need not be anti-gay.)
(3) As far as they can remember the! have always been gay, and
were probably born gay; they certainly never decided on a preference
one way or the other (stressing that gays are doing what is
natural for them, and are not being wilfully contrary).
The subjects should be interviewed alone, not with their lovers
or children, for to include others in the picture would unwisely
raise disturbing questions about the complexities of gay social
relations, which these commercials could not explain. It is best
instead to take one thing at a time.
Format B for Positive associations: The Celebrity Spot.
While it might be useful to present celebrity endorsement by
currently popular gay figures and straight sympathizers (Johnny
Mathis? Marlo Thomas?), the homophobia climate of America would
make such brash endorsements unlikely in the near future. So early
celebrity spots will instead identify historical gay or bisexual
personalities who are illustrious and dignified...and dead. The
ads could be sardonic and indirect. For example, over regal music
and a portrait or two, a narrator might announce simply:
William Shakespeare--the greatest playwright in the history of
the English language. Yet, if he were alive today, some people
wouldn't let him teach a high school English class. Now isn't
that a shame?
The rhetorical question forces the viewer to answer Yes. And to
explain the Bard's failing, the ad would end simply: "A message
from the National Gay Task Force." Similar commercials could
feature Michelangelo (an art class), Tchaikovsky (a music class),
Tennessee Williams (a drama class), etc.
Format C for Victim Sympathy: Our Campaign to Stop Child Abuse.
As we said earlier, there arc many ways to portray gays as
victims of discrimination: images of brutality, tales of job loss and
family separation, and so on. But we think something like the
following 30-sccond commercials would get to the heart of the
matter best of all.
The camera slowly moves in on a middle-class teenager, sitting
alone in his semi-darkened bedroom. The boy is pleasing and
unexceptional in appearance, except that he has been roughed up
and is starring silently, pensively, with evident distress. As
the camera gradually focuses in on his face, a narrator comments:
It will happen to one in every ten sons. As he grows up. he will realize
that he feels differently about things than most of his friends. If he
lets it show, he'll be an outsider made fun of, humiliated, attacked.
If he confides in his parents, they may throw him out of the house, onto
the streets. Some will say he is "anti-family." Nobody will let him be
himself. So he will have to hide. From his friends, his family. And that's
hard. It's tough enough to be a kid these days, but to be the one in
ten... A message from the National Gay Task Force.
What is nice about such an ad is that it would economically portray gays as innocent and vulnerable, victimized and misunderstood, surprisingly numerous yet not menacing. It also renders the "anti-family" charge absurd and hypocritical.
Format D for Identification with Victims: The Old Switcheroo.
The mainstream will identify better with the plight of gays if straights can, once in a while, walk a mile in gay shoes. A humorous television or radio ad to help them do this might involve a brief animated or dramatized scenario, as follows.
The camera approaches the mighty oak door of the boss's office, which swings open, and the camera (which represents you the viewer) enters the room. Behind the oversized desk sits a fat and scowling old curmudgeon chomping on a cigar. He looks up at the camera (i.e. at the viewer) and snarls, " So it's you, Smithers. Well You're fired!" The voice of a younger man is heard to reply with astonishment, "But-but--Mr. Thomburg, I've been with your company for ten years. I thought you liked my work." The boss responds, with a tone of disgust, "Yes, yes, Smithers your work is quite adequate. But I've heard rumors that you've been seen around town with some kind of girlfriend. A girlfriend! Frankly I'm shocked. We're not about to start hiring any heterosexuals in this company. Now get out." The younger man speaks once more: "But boss, that's just not fair! What if it were you?" The boss glowers back as the camera pulls quickly out of the room and the big door slams shut. Printed on the door: "A message from the National Gay Task Force."
One can easily imagine similar episodes involving housing or other discrimination.
Format E for Vilification of Victimizers: Damn the Torpedoes.
We have already indicated some of the images which might be
damaging to the homophobic vendetta: ranting and hateful
religious extremists neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen made to look
evil and ridiculous (hardly a difficult task).
These images should be combined with those of their gay victims
By a method propagandists call the "bracket technique." For example,
for a few seconds an unctuous beady-eyed Southern preacher is
seen pounding the pulpit in rage about "those sick, abominable
creatures." While his tirade continues over the soundtrack,. the
picture switches to pathetic photos of gays who look decent,
harmless, and likable; and then we cut back to the poisonous face
of the preacher, and so forth. The contrast speaks for itself. The effect
is devastating.
"...it would portray gays as innocent and vulnerable, victimized and
misunderstood, surprisingly numerous, yet not menacing."
Format F for Funds: S.O.S.
Alongside or during these other persuasive advertisements, we
would have to solicit donations so that the campaign might
continue. Direct appeals from celebrities (preferable living
ones, thank you) might be useful here. All appeals must stress that
money can be given anonymously (e.g. via money orders) and that all
donations are confidential. "We can't help unless you help," and all that.
The Time Is Now
We have sketched out here a blueprint for transforming the social
values of straight America At the core of our program is a media
campaign to change the way the average citizens view homosexuality. It is
quite easy to find fault with such a campaign. We have tried to be practical
and specific here, but the proposals may still have a visionary sheen.
There are one hundred reasons why the campaign could not be done
or would be risky. But there are at least 20 million good reasons
why some such program must be tried in the coming years: the
welfare and happiness of every gay man and woman in this country
demand it. As the last large, legally oppressed minority in
American society, it is high time that gays took effective measures
to rejoin the mainstream in pride and strength. We believe that, like
it or not, such a campaign is the only way of doing so anytime soon.
And, let us repeat, time may be running out. The AIDS epidemic is
sparking anger and fear in the heartland of straight America. As
the virus leaks out of homosexual circles and into the rest of
society, we need have no illusions about who is receiving the
blame. The ten years ahead may decide for the next forty whether
gays claim their liberty and equality or are driven back, once
again, as America's caste of detested untouchables. It’s more than
a quip: speak now or forever hold your peace.
****
(Keep in mind this article was published in 1987. Since that time
homosexual activists have made remarkable progress in their media
campaign. Just look at TV programs like Roseanne, Melrose Place,
Picket Fences, and Northern Exposure, where homosexuality is presented
as normal, natural behavior on a regular basis. NBC News did a three-day
series on "Gays in America" in September that had no opposing view, other
than one brief statement by Dr. Paul Cameron. There's a proliferation
of "gay" propaganda being shoved down our throats in movies like "The
Crying Game", "Philadelphia", "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", "Go Fish",
and many more.
"... Hollywood is coming out of the closet, and
homosexual activists are jumping up and down for joy."
Hollywood is indeed coming, out a of the closet, and homosexual activists are jumping up and down for joy. Why? Because they know Americans flock to the movie theaters in droves, and that gradually the message of accepting homosexuality as a normal variant of human sexuality is getting through to people-minds are being
changed.
For those of you who want to investigate more about the homosexual agenda and various strategies I recommend the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90’s by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen [Plume 1989]. [] Both authors are Harvard grads -- Kirk is a researcher in neuropsychiatry, while Madsen is "an expert on public persuasion tactics and social marketing." The book is an expansion of the above article complete with sample print ads to use, as well as suggestions for radio, TV spots.)
email to : comments@sphi.com
Copyright 1998 by SPHI. All Rights Reserved.
07/31/05
Giles could have asked at least another half -dozen highly relevant
questions - but these two will do for starters.
R
Dear Moderate Muslims
Doug Giles
July 16, 2005 townhall.com
Dear Moderate Muslims,
What’s up? I see that you guys have been in the news a lot lately. I
thought I’d write you a letter and ask you some questions because it seems
as if some Muslims are involved in some very bad stuff around the globe,
i.e. targeting and killing innocent people and all in the name of your
god.
After the damnable 911 terror attacks, President Bush stated that, “Islam
is a religion of peace" and the people who carried out these atrocious
acts of war are the evil fringe adherents of a good religion. We’d all
like to believe him. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, says that
those who carried out the 7/7 attacks on London held “poisonous and
perverted" views of Islam that are inconsistent with what the Quran
teaches.
So . . . what I’m getting from President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and
many others is that Islam, as it is taken from the Quran, condemns both
violent acts and those behind them and tables via its teachings harmony
with all of humanity. I’d like to believe that, and seeing that you’re a
moderate adherent, I’ve got a couple of questions to ask you regarding
some of the radicals who are seriously fouling your peaceful religion's
public persona.
Look, I know that all groups and families have relatives and constituents
they wish wouldn’t align themselves with their party or family because they
are . . . let’s say . . . uh . . . loopy. Like my one-eyed, Uncle Slappy
White who works for the Muleshoe, Texas sanitation department. Man, you
do not want to bring him around your friends, especially when he’s all
liquored up. He can be quite the embarrassment. Therefore, I can
empathize with being wrongfully associated with some weirdos who clearly
do not represent who you are.
Please indulge me, moderate Muslims. I have two simple questions regarding
your current religious beliefs, as we would not want you to be confused
with the aberrant devotees with whom, we were told, you wholeheartedly
disagree.
1. Seeing as how you differ with the radical lunatic fringe players in your
religion, we can safely know and state that you do not view the West and
those who do not share your religious beliefs as “The Great Satan" -
correct?
I mean . . . I know we eat pork, watch PG-13 movies, dance to Michael
Jackson, believe Hillary Clinton [at least some do on the left] and watch
Paris Hilton . . . it’s bad, I know. But c'mon . . . “The Great
Satan"??? Thank God, that as a moderate Muslim, you do not go so far as to
label the entire Western Civilization as satanic just because it isn’t
based on an Islamic worldview. Amen?
2. What are you going to do about all the verses in the Quran that instruct
Muslims to convert, conquer or kill those who will not bow their knees
to Allah? You don’t believe that stuff, do you? You don’t believe that
peaceful Jews, Christians and secularists are belligerent infidels,
right? I would think not, because that would be extreme.
As a moderate Muslim, can we rest assured that you do not believe that
warfare and terror are any way to establish your religion in people’s
lives? Can we also be certain that those of us who do not believe and
will not believe your particular take on divinity can feel completely safe
around you and that we can confidently expect you to work with us to build
our world into a better place without condemnation being breathed down upon
our heads?
Well, that’s it for now. If you could help me with these two questions
that would be really cool. Also, it would probably help us in the U.S. and
London if you’d work to communicate more regularly and vociferously, given
the continued bad press your radical adherents are getting, that you
fundamentally disagree with their violent behavior against an unarmed
citizenry. Communicating that and working very hard towards eradicating
their global threats would kind of help to balance things out a bit.
In addition, your public and incessant condemnation of extremism within
your ranks would also serve the purpose of exonerating all moderates from
the smallest hint of supporting such behavior. The reason why? It’s
simple. Usually, when groups are silent regarding an issue that should be
condemned it leads other people to believe that the groups really don’t
disagree at all with what has occurred and are, therefore, in agreement
with the bad people that perpetrated the despicable act.
I’m really glad that you are moderate in your religious views and are ready
and willing to work with us in stamping out these terrorists before they
can do any more damage to our people or your people. No doubt, as you see
people reeling from this most recent disaster in London, carried out by
people who you condemn as crazy, we can count on you to help lead the
charge in putting them down. We can count on you to monitor your mosques,
to get on radio and TV and to “out” these nuts, wherever they may be
found. Yes, it is good to know that we can trust you to blow the whistle
on evil plans - even if it means turning in some of your family members,
clerics or close friends.
Thank you for your help and all the best . . .
*Logon to ClashRadio.com to hear Doug's interview with Robert Spencer,
author of the book Onward Muslim Soldiers.
questions - but these two will do for starters.
R
Dear Moderate Muslims
Doug Giles
July 16, 2005 townhall.com
Dear Moderate Muslims,
What’s up? I see that you guys have been in the news a lot lately. I
thought I’d write you a letter and ask you some questions because it seems
as if some Muslims are involved in some very bad stuff around the globe,
i.e. targeting and killing innocent people and all in the name of your
god.
After the damnable 911 terror attacks, President Bush stated that, “Islam
is a religion of peace" and the people who carried out these atrocious
acts of war are the evil fringe adherents of a good religion. We’d all
like to believe him. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, says that
those who carried out the 7/7 attacks on London held “poisonous and
perverted" views of Islam that are inconsistent with what the Quran
teaches.
So . . . what I’m getting from President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and
many others is that Islam, as it is taken from the Quran, condemns both
violent acts and those behind them and tables via its teachings harmony
with all of humanity. I’d like to believe that, and seeing that you’re a
moderate adherent, I’ve got a couple of questions to ask you regarding
some of the radicals who are seriously fouling your peaceful religion's
public persona.
Look, I know that all groups and families have relatives and constituents
they wish wouldn’t align themselves with their party or family because they
are . . . let’s say . . . uh . . . loopy. Like my one-eyed, Uncle Slappy
White who works for the Muleshoe, Texas sanitation department. Man, you
do not want to bring him around your friends, especially when he’s all
liquored up. He can be quite the embarrassment. Therefore, I can
empathize with being wrongfully associated with some weirdos who clearly
do not represent who you are.
Please indulge me, moderate Muslims. I have two simple questions regarding
your current religious beliefs, as we would not want you to be confused
with the aberrant devotees with whom, we were told, you wholeheartedly
disagree.
1. Seeing as how you differ with the radical lunatic fringe players in your
religion, we can safely know and state that you do not view the West and
those who do not share your religious beliefs as “The Great Satan" -
correct?
I mean . . . I know we eat pork, watch PG-13 movies, dance to Michael
Jackson, believe Hillary Clinton [at least some do on the left] and watch
Paris Hilton . . . it’s bad, I know. But c'mon . . . “The Great
Satan"??? Thank God, that as a moderate Muslim, you do not go so far as to
label the entire Western Civilization as satanic just because it isn’t
based on an Islamic worldview. Amen?
2. What are you going to do about all the verses in the Quran that instruct
Muslims to convert, conquer or kill those who will not bow their knees
to Allah? You don’t believe that stuff, do you? You don’t believe that
peaceful Jews, Christians and secularists are belligerent infidels,
right? I would think not, because that would be extreme.
As a moderate Muslim, can we rest assured that you do not believe that
warfare and terror are any way to establish your religion in people’s
lives? Can we also be certain that those of us who do not believe and
will not believe your particular take on divinity can feel completely safe
around you and that we can confidently expect you to work with us to build
our world into a better place without condemnation being breathed down upon
our heads?
Well, that’s it for now. If you could help me with these two questions
that would be really cool. Also, it would probably help us in the U.S. and
London if you’d work to communicate more regularly and vociferously, given
the continued bad press your radical adherents are getting, that you
fundamentally disagree with their violent behavior against an unarmed
citizenry. Communicating that and working very hard towards eradicating
their global threats would kind of help to balance things out a bit.
In addition, your public and incessant condemnation of extremism within
your ranks would also serve the purpose of exonerating all moderates from
the smallest hint of supporting such behavior. The reason why? It’s
simple. Usually, when groups are silent regarding an issue that should be
condemned it leads other people to believe that the groups really don’t
disagree at all with what has occurred and are, therefore, in agreement
with the bad people that perpetrated the despicable act.
I’m really glad that you are moderate in your religious views and are ready
and willing to work with us in stamping out these terrorists before they
can do any more damage to our people or your people. No doubt, as you see
people reeling from this most recent disaster in London, carried out by
people who you condemn as crazy, we can count on you to help lead the
charge in putting them down. We can count on you to monitor your mosques,
to get on radio and TV and to “out” these nuts, wherever they may be
found. Yes, it is good to know that we can trust you to blow the whistle
on evil plans - even if it means turning in some of your family members,
clerics or close friends.
Thank you for your help and all the best . . .
*Logon to ClashRadio.com to hear Doug's interview with Robert Spencer,
author of the book Onward Muslim Soldiers.
07/27/05
Maxim Institute - real issues - No 165
Vandalism - selective indignation?
There has been widespread condemnation of those responsible for the
vandalism of Auckland mosques following the attacks in London last week.
Six mosques had windows broken and the words 'RIP LONDON' scrawled on their
walls. Religious and political leaders have deplored the behaviour, and
rightly so. This sort of thing stirs up ethnic and religious unrest and
wrongly suggests that all Muslims - even those living 12,000 kilometres
away from the terrorists - were somehow responsible.
Like adherents of other numerically large faiths, there is a widespread
variation of belief within Islam, and those responsible (assuming they were
linked to al-Qaeda and inspired by Jihad against the West) represent only a
small minority. Many New Zealand Muslims are grateful to have escaped
war-torn homelands and seek a more peaceful and tolerant society.
What we haven't heard about, though, are the recent attacks on Christian
churches in Taupo. A number of worship centres including Taupo Baptist, St
Andrew's Anglican, and St Paul's Church have been vandalised in the town
with considerable damage caused. Beyond the local area this hasn't made
national news, but in light of the publicity surrounding the Auckland
mosques it is reasonable to ask why.
Could it be that the politicised notion of tolerance that has become
fashionable means that attacks (verbal or tangible) on Christianity are now
somehow less serious than those directed at other faiths? Christians don't
fit under the profile of a 'minority' or 'oppressed group'. On the
contrary, for many Christianity represents a 'hegemonic' order whose
principles are not only outdated, but to be challenged and resisted.
While it is right to condemn any wanton destruction, our leaders show
selective indignation when they speak out about one instance, while
ignoring others.
Vandalism - selective indignation?
There has been widespread condemnation of those responsible for the
vandalism of Auckland mosques following the attacks in London last week.
Six mosques had windows broken and the words 'RIP LONDON' scrawled on their
walls. Religious and political leaders have deplored the behaviour, and
rightly so. This sort of thing stirs up ethnic and religious unrest and
wrongly suggests that all Muslims - even those living 12,000 kilometres
away from the terrorists - were somehow responsible.
Like adherents of other numerically large faiths, there is a widespread
variation of belief within Islam, and those responsible (assuming they were
linked to al-Qaeda and inspired by Jihad against the West) represent only a
small minority. Many New Zealand Muslims are grateful to have escaped
war-torn homelands and seek a more peaceful and tolerant society.
What we haven't heard about, though, are the recent attacks on Christian
churches in Taupo. A number of worship centres including Taupo Baptist, St
Andrew's Anglican, and St Paul's Church have been vandalised in the town
with considerable damage caused. Beyond the local area this hasn't made
national news, but in light of the publicity surrounding the Auckland
mosques it is reasonable to ask why.
Could it be that the politicised notion of tolerance that has become
fashionable means that attacks (verbal or tangible) on Christianity are now
somehow less serious than those directed at other faiths? Christians don't
fit under the profile of a 'minority' or 'oppressed group'. On the
contrary, for many Christianity represents a 'hegemonic' order whose
principles are not only outdated, but to be challenged and resisted.
While it is right to condemn any wanton destruction, our leaders show
selective indignation when they speak out about one instance, while
ignoring others.
ROME, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - One of the best known
English-speaking Vatican reporters, John Allen, reports that the
long-expected Vatican document calling attention to the fact that
homosexual persons are not to be admitted to the priesthood is "now in the
hands of Pope Benedict XVI". The document will come as no surprise to
Vatican watchers since Rome has previously released two official documents
barring homosexuals from the priesthood. As Allen puts it, with the new
document, the teaching won't "change, but the level of authority and
clarity" will, since the new document will be directly authorized by the
Pope.
The former Church documents make it clear that not only men who have been
sexually active as homosexuals but also those inclined to homosexual sex
would be barred from the priesthood. A 1961 document produced by the
Sacred Congregation for Religious states: "Those affected by the perverse
inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from
religious vows and ordination," because priestly ministry would place such
persons in "grave danger". (See coverage here:
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2002/mar/02032701.html )
In a 2002 statement, Cardinal Estevez of the Congregation for Divine
Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments stated in answer to a
question by a bishop: "Ordination to the deaconate and the priesthood of
homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable
and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A
homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore,
fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders." (see that full letter here:
http://www.adoremus.org/Notitiae-Ordination.html )
However, Allen suggests that some American bishops are hoping the Vatican
shelves the document since they contend it will "generate controversy and
negative press".
Last month, as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was meeting, Chicago
Cardinal Francis George spoke on the subject. The Chicago Tribune quoted
the Cardinal as saying, "Also, anyone who has been part of a gay subculture
or who has lived promiscuously as a heterosexual would not be admitted ...
no matter how many years in his background that might have occurred."
See John Allen's 'Word from Rome' column:
http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/
English-speaking Vatican reporters, John Allen, reports that the
long-expected Vatican document calling attention to the fact that
homosexual persons are not to be admitted to the priesthood is "now in the
hands of Pope Benedict XVI". The document will come as no surprise to
Vatican watchers since Rome has previously released two official documents
barring homosexuals from the priesthood. As Allen puts it, with the new
document, the teaching won't "change, but the level of authority and
clarity" will, since the new document will be directly authorized by the
Pope.
The former Church documents make it clear that not only men who have been
sexually active as homosexuals but also those inclined to homosexual sex
would be barred from the priesthood. A 1961 document produced by the
Sacred Congregation for Religious states: "Those affected by the perverse
inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from
religious vows and ordination," because priestly ministry would place such
persons in "grave danger". (See coverage here:
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2002/mar/02032701.html )
In a 2002 statement, Cardinal Estevez of the Congregation for Divine
Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments stated in answer to a
question by a bishop: "Ordination to the deaconate and the priesthood of
homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable
and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A
homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore,
fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders." (see that full letter here:
http://www.adoremus.org/Notitiae-Ordination.html )
However, Allen suggests that some American bishops are hoping the Vatican
shelves the document since they contend it will "generate controversy and
negative press".
Last month, as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was meeting, Chicago
Cardinal Francis George spoke on the subject. The Chicago Tribune quoted
the Cardinal as saying, "Also, anyone who has been part of a gay subculture
or who has lived promiscuously as a heterosexual would not be admitted ...
no matter how many years in his background that might have occurred."
See John Allen's 'Word from Rome' column:
http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/
The awful Dawkins, himself rather blatantly dishonest, is also
largely correct in his accusations here. One can only ackn & credit such
courage as it may take for him to speak up thus - which is more than is
forthcoming from many cowardly Christians around here.
R
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,592-1619264,00.html
Weekend Review
May 21, 2005
Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant
As the Religious Right tries to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas,
Richard Dawkins speaks up for scientific logic
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: "Most
scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance
that drives them on." Science mines ignorance. Mystery - that which we
don't yet know; that which we don't yet understand - is the mother lode
that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay
mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it
gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It
is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those
constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage.
Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the
effect that creationism or "intelligent design theory" (ID) is having,
especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible
and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of
creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons,
under a new name.
It isn't even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a
rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts
of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration,
could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess,
absurd in the highest degree." You will find this sentence of Charles
Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what
follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity.
Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of
the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design.
The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called "The
fortyfold Path to Enlightenment" in honour of the fact that, far from being
difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently
around the animal kingdom.
[this is highly implausible compared with the hypothesis that a
given type of eye - there are only several - has spread by transposons
- RM]
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as
saying that organisms "appear to have been carefully and artfully
designed". Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the
powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The
isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on "appear to", leaving
exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience - in Kansas, for instance -
wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda
ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But
such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious
Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is
a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical
heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in
nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: "If it could
be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly
have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory
would absolutely break down." Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty
in order to abuse his challenge. "Bet you can't tell me how the elbow
joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?"
If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a
default conclusion is drawn: "Right, then, the alternative theory;
'intelligent design' wins by default."
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B
must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the
scientist's rejoicing in uncertainty. Today's scientist in America dare
not say: "Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog's ancestors
did evolve their elbow joint. I'll have to go to the university library
and take a look." No, the moment a scientist said something like that the
default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet:
"Weasel frog could only have been designed by God."
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the
words: "It is as though the fossils were planted there without any
evolutionary history." Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to
whet the reader's appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was
gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore "gaps" in the fossil
record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less
continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and
these are the famous "gaps". Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that
if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a "gap", the creationist will
declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default.
If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition,
the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have
intervened.
The creationists' fondness for "gaps" in the fossil record is a metaphor
for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are
filled by God. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't
understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is
photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist,
don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them.
Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is
God's gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The
Ancestor's Tale.
largely correct in his accusations here. One can only ackn & credit such
courage as it may take for him to speak up thus - which is more than is
forthcoming from many cowardly Christians around here.
R
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,592-1619264,00.html
Weekend Review
May 21, 2005
Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant
As the Religious Right tries to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas,
Richard Dawkins speaks up for scientific logic
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: "Most
scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance
that drives them on." Science mines ignorance. Mystery - that which we
don't yet know; that which we don't yet understand - is the mother lode
that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay
mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it
gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It
is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those
constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage.
Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the
effect that creationism or "intelligent design theory" (ID) is having,
especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible
and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of
creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons,
under a new name.
It isn't even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a
rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts
of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration,
could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess,
absurd in the highest degree." You will find this sentence of Charles
Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what
follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity.
Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of
the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design.
The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called "The
fortyfold Path to Enlightenment" in honour of the fact that, far from being
difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently
around the animal kingdom.
[this is highly implausible compared with the hypothesis that a
given type of eye - there are only several - has spread by transposons
- RM]
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as
saying that organisms "appear to have been carefully and artfully
designed". Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the
powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The
isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on "appear to", leaving
exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience - in Kansas, for instance -
wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda
ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But
such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious
Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is
a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical
heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in
nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: "If it could
be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly
have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory
would absolutely break down." Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty
in order to abuse his challenge. "Bet you can't tell me how the elbow
joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?"
If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a
default conclusion is drawn: "Right, then, the alternative theory;
'intelligent design' wins by default."
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B
must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the
scientist's rejoicing in uncertainty. Today's scientist in America dare
not say: "Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog's ancestors
did evolve their elbow joint. I'll have to go to the university library
and take a look." No, the moment a scientist said something like that the
default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet:
"Weasel frog could only have been designed by God."
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the
words: "It is as though the fossils were planted there without any
evolutionary history." Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to
whet the reader's appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was
gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore "gaps" in the fossil
record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less
continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and
these are the famous "gaps". Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that
if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a "gap", the creationist will
declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default.
If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition,
the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have
intervened.
The creationists' fondness for "gaps" in the fossil record is a metaphor
for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are
filled by God. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't
understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is
photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist,
don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them.
Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is
God's gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The
Ancestor's Tale.
NYT: 1. Cardinal on evolution ; 2. Miller "Science cannot speak on this." [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 09:29:10 PM
Finding Design in Nature -- NY Times OP ED
By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN
Published: July 7, 2005
Vienna -- EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a
term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of
neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at
least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their
theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.
But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many
details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of
reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and
design in the natural world, including the world of living things.
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in
the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random
variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that
denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in
biology is ideology, not science.
Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather
vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere
cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general
audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:
"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a
similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks
to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal
finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in
a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one
to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator."
He went on: "To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator,
some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To
speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization
in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be
equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it
appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects
without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would
thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."
Note that in this quotation the word "finality" is a philosophical term
synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another
general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, "It is clear that the
truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of
materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an
evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity."
Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees:
"Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the
question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with
certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." It adds: "We
believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the
product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance."
In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists
recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied
evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a
2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out
that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that
the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used
by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.
The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of
the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on
the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the
commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket
approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a
neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any
truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."
Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary
process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply
cannot exist."
Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict
proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.
Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each
of us is loved, each of us is necessary."
Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by
Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd
position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th
century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the
"death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know
the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the
philosophers.
Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims
like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to
avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern
science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming
that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories
that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance
and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an
abdication of human intelligence.
Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, was
the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church
Followup article on front page of NY Times, July 9, 2005
An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been
regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that
belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with
Catholic faith.
The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who
is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article
in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of
common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -
an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -
is not."
In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on
retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the
Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election
in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about
the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more
explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said
Cardinal Schönborn.
He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians,
many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as
endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.
Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal
Schönborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with
confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's
sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.
Cardinal Schönborn, who is on the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic
Education, said the office had no plans to issue new guidance to teachers
in Catholic schools on evolution. But he said he believed students in
Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just
one of many theories. Many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in
which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms
drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.
Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While
researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays
out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory.
American Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians have been a
potent united front in opposing abortion, stem cell research and
euthanasia, but had parted company on the death penalty and the teaching
of evolution. Cardinal Schönborn's essay and comments are an indication
that the church may now enter the debate over evolution more forcefully on
the side of those who oppose the teaching of evolution alone.
One of the strongest advocates of teaching alternatives to evolution is
the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the idea, termed
intelligent design, that the variety and complexity of life on earth
cannot be explained except through the intervention of a designer of some
sort.
Mark Ryland, a vice president of the institute, said in an interview that
he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and
Cardinal Schönborn said that an essay in May in The Times about the
compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a
physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to
them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.
The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public
relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the
Discovery Institute.
Mr. Ryland, who said he knew the cardinal through the International
Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, where he is chancellor and Mr.
Ryland is on the board, said supporters of intelligent design were "very
excited" that a church leader had taken a position opposing Darwinian
evolution. "It clarified that in some sense the Catholics aren't fine with
it," he said.
Bruce Chapman, the institute's president, said the cardinal's essay "helps
blunt the claims" that the church "has spoken on Darwinian evolution in a
way that's supportive."
But some biologists and others said they read the essay as abandoning
longstanding church support for evolutionary biology.
"How did the Discovery Institute talking points wind up in Vienna?"
wondered Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science
Education, which advocates the teaching of evolution. "It really did look
quite a bit as if Cardinal Schönborn had been reading their Web pages."
Mr. Ryland said the cardinal was well versed on these issues and had
written the essay on his own.
Dr. Francis Collins, who headed the official American effort to decipher
the human genome, and who describes himself as a Christian, though not a
Catholic, said Cardinal Schönborn's essay looked like "a step in the wrong
direction" and said he feared that it "may represent some backpedaling from
what scientifically is a very compelling conclusion, especially now that
we have the ability to study DNA."
"There is a deep and growing chasm between the scientific and the
spiritual world views," he went on. "To the extent that the cardinal's
essay makes believing scientists less and less comfortable inhabiting the
middle ground, it is unfortunate. It makes me uneasy."
"Unguided," "unplanned," "random" and "natural" are all adjectives that
biologists might apply to the process of evolution, said Dr. Kenneth R.
Miller, a professor of biology at Brown and a Catholic. But even so, he
said, evolution "can fall within God's providential plan." He added:
"Science cannot rule it out. Science cannot speak on this."
Dr. Miller, whose book "Finding Darwin's God" describes his reconciliation
of evolutionary theory with Christian faith, said the essay seemed to
equate belief in evolution with disbelief in God. That is alarming, he
said. "It may have the effect of convincing Catholics that evolution is
something they should reject."
Dr. Collins and other scientists said they could understand why a cleric
might want to make the case that, as Dr. Collins put it, "evolution is the
mechanism by which human beings came into existence, but God had something
to do with that, too." Dr. Collins said that view, theistic evolution,
"is shared with a very large number of biologists who also believe in God,
including me."
But it does not encompass the idea that the workings of evolution required
the direct intervention of a supernatural agent, as intelligent design
would have it.
In his essay, Cardinal Schönborn asserted that he was not trying to break
new ground but to correct the idea, "often invoked," that the church
accepts or at least acquiesces to the theory of evolution.
He referred to widely cited remarks by Pope John Paul II, who, in a 1996
address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, noted that the scientific
case for evolution was growing stronger and that the theory was "more than
a hypothesis."
In December, Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo, chairman of the Committee on
Science and Human Values of the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops, cited those remarks in writing to the nation's bishops that "the
Church does not need to fear the teaching of evolution as long as it is
understood as a scientific account of the physical origins and development
of the universe." But in his essay, Cardinal Schönborn dismissed John
Paul's statement as "rather vague and unimportant."
Francisco Ayala, a professor of biology at the University of California,
Irvine, and a former Dominican priest, called this assessment "an insult"
to the late pope and said the cardinal seemed to be drawing a line between
the theory of evolution and religious faith, and "seeing a conflict that
does not exist."
Dr. Miller said he was already hearing from people worried about the
cardinal's essay. "People are saying, does the church really believe
this?" He said he would not speculate. "John Paul II made it very clear
that he regarded scientific rationality as a gift from God," Dr. Miller
said, adding, "There are more than 100 cardinals and they often have
conflicting opinions."
By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN
Published: July 7, 2005
Vienna -- EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a
term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of
neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at
least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their
theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.
But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many
details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of
reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and
design in the natural world, including the world of living things.
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in
the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random
variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that
denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in
biology is ideology, not science.
Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather
vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere
cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general
audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:
"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a
similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks
to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal
finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in
a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one
to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator."
He went on: "To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator,
some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To
speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization
in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be
equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it
appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects
without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would
thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."
Note that in this quotation the word "finality" is a philosophical term
synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another
general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, "It is clear that the
truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of
materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an
evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity."
Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees:
"Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the
question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with
certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." It adds: "We
believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the
product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance."
In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists
recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied
evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a
2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out
that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that
the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used
by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.
The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of
the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on
the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the
commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket
approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a
neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any
truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."
Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary
process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply
cannot exist."
Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict
proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.
Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each
of us is loved, each of us is necessary."
Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by
Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd
position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th
century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the
"death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know
the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the
philosophers.
Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims
like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to
avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern
science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming
that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories
that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance
and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an
abdication of human intelligence.
Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, was
the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church
Followup article on front page of NY Times, July 9, 2005
An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been
regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that
belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with
Catholic faith.
The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who
is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article
in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of
common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -
an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -
is not."
In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on
retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the
Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election
in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about
the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more
explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said
Cardinal Schönborn.
He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians,
many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as
endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.
Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal
Schönborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with
confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's
sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.
Cardinal Schönborn, who is on the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic
Education, said the office had no plans to issue new guidance to teachers
in Catholic schools on evolution. But he said he believed students in
Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just
one of many theories. Many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in
which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms
drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.
Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While
researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays
out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory.
American Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians have been a
potent united front in opposing abortion, stem cell research and
euthanasia, but had parted company on the death penalty and the teaching
of evolution. Cardinal Schönborn's essay and comments are an indication
that the church may now enter the debate over evolution more forcefully on
the side of those who oppose the teaching of evolution alone.
One of the strongest advocates of teaching alternatives to evolution is
the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the idea, termed
intelligent design, that the variety and complexity of life on earth
cannot be explained except through the intervention of a designer of some
sort.
Mark Ryland, a vice president of the institute, said in an interview that
he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and
Cardinal Schönborn said that an essay in May in The Times about the
compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a
physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to
them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.
The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public
relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the
Discovery Institute.
Mr. Ryland, who said he knew the cardinal through the International
Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, where he is chancellor and Mr.
Ryland is on the board, said supporters of intelligent design were "very
excited" that a church leader had taken a position opposing Darwinian
evolution. "It clarified that in some sense the Catholics aren't fine with
it," he said.
Bruce Chapman, the institute's president, said the cardinal's essay "helps
blunt the claims" that the church "has spoken on Darwinian evolution in a
way that's supportive."
But some biologists and others said they read the essay as abandoning
longstanding church support for evolutionary biology.
"How did the Discovery Institute talking points wind up in Vienna?"
wondered Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science
Education, which advocates the teaching of evolution. "It really did look
quite a bit as if Cardinal Schönborn had been reading their Web pages."
Mr. Ryland said the cardinal was well versed on these issues and had
written the essay on his own.
Dr. Francis Collins, who headed the official American effort to decipher
the human genome, and who describes himself as a Christian, though not a
Catholic, said Cardinal Schönborn's essay looked like "a step in the wrong
direction" and said he feared that it "may represent some backpedaling from
what scientifically is a very compelling conclusion, especially now that
we have the ability to study DNA."
"There is a deep and growing chasm between the scientific and the
spiritual world views," he went on. "To the extent that the cardinal's
essay makes believing scientists less and less comfortable inhabiting the
middle ground, it is unfortunate. It makes me uneasy."
"Unguided," "unplanned," "random" and "natural" are all adjectives that
biologists might apply to the process of evolution, said Dr. Kenneth R.
Miller, a professor of biology at Brown and a Catholic. But even so, he
said, evolution "can fall within God's providential plan." He added:
"Science cannot rule it out. Science cannot speak on this."
Dr. Miller, whose book "Finding Darwin's God" describes his reconciliation
of evolutionary theory with Christian faith, said the essay seemed to
equate belief in evolution with disbelief in God. That is alarming, he
said. "It may have the effect of convincing Catholics that evolution is
something they should reject."
Dr. Collins and other scientists said they could understand why a cleric
might want to make the case that, as Dr. Collins put it, "evolution is the
mechanism by which human beings came into existence, but God had something
to do with that, too." Dr. Collins said that view, theistic evolution,
"is shared with a very large number of biologists who also believe in God,
including me."
But it does not encompass the idea that the workings of evolution required
the direct intervention of a supernatural agent, as intelligent design
would have it.
In his essay, Cardinal Schönborn asserted that he was not trying to break
new ground but to correct the idea, "often invoked," that the church
accepts or at least acquiesces to the theory of evolution.
He referred to widely cited remarks by Pope John Paul II, who, in a 1996
address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, noted that the scientific
case for evolution was growing stronger and that the theory was "more than
a hypothesis."
In December, Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo, chairman of the Committee on
Science and Human Values of the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops, cited those remarks in writing to the nation's bishops that "the
Church does not need to fear the teaching of evolution as long as it is
understood as a scientific account of the physical origins and development
of the universe." But in his essay, Cardinal Schönborn dismissed John
Paul's statement as "rather vague and unimportant."
Francisco Ayala, a professor of biology at the University of California,
Irvine, and a former Dominican priest, called this assessment "an insult"
to the late pope and said the cardinal seemed to be drawing a line between
the theory of evolution and religious faith, and "seeing a conflict that
does not exist."
Dr. Miller said he was already hearing from people worried about the
cardinal's essay. "People are saying, does the church really believe
this?" He said he would not speculate. "John Paul II made it very clear
that he regarded scientific rationality as a gift from God," Dr. Miller
said, adding, "There are more than 100 cardinals and they often have
conflicting opinions."
This article is notable for being written by a self-declared
irreligious Yank. Why does it take such a person to say what's needed?
Why is mainstream Christianity so feeble?
R
Scary Stuff
April 28, 2005
This column was written by Stanley Kurtz.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harper's Magazine's May cover stories about "The Christian Right's War On America," frightened me, although not the way Harper's meant them to. I fear these stories could mark the beginning of a systematic campaign of hatred directed at traditional Christians. Whether this is what Harper's intends, I cannot say. But regardless of the intention, the effect seems clear.
The phrase "campaign of hatred" is a strong one, and I worry about amplifying an already dangerous dynamic of recrimination on both sides of the culture wars. I don't doubt that conservatives, Christian and otherwise, are sometimes guilty of rhetorical excess. Yet despite what we've been told, the most extreme political rhetoric of our day is being directed against traditional Christians by the left.
It's been said that James Dobson overstepped legitimate bounds when he compared activist judges to the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, that was an ill-considered remark. I hope and expect it will not be repeated. But Dobson made that comparison extemporaneously and in passing. If that misstep was such a problem, what are we to make of a cover story in Harper's that systematically identifies conservative Christianity with fascism? According to Harper's, conservative Christians are making "war on America." Can you imagine the reaction to a cover story about a "war on America" by blacks, gays, Hispanics, or Jews? Then there's Frank Rich's April 24New York Times op-ed comparing conservative Christians to George Wallace, segregationists, and lynch mobs.
These comparisons are both inflammatory and mistaken. Made in the name of opposing hatred, they license hatred. It was disturbing enough during the election when even the most respectable spokesmen on the left proudly proclaimed their hatred of president Bush. Out of that hatred flowed pervasive, if low-level, violence. I fear that Bush hatred is now being channeled into hatred of Christian conservatives. The process began after the election and is steadily growing worse. This hatred of conservative Christians isn't new, but it is being fanned to a fever pitch.
Chris Hedges, who wrote one of the Harper's cover pieces, is a former reporter for the New York Times and a popular author among those who oppose the Iraq war. Hedges's article will be noticed on the Left. I fear it will set the tone for a powerful new anti-Christian rhetoric. The article's entitled "Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters." If you still don't get it, notice the picture juxtaposing a cross with an attack dog. Of course, reducing America's most popular Christian broadcasters to a hate group is itself a way of inviting hatred.
Hedges is worried about extreme Christian theocrats called "Dominionists." He's got little to say about who these Dominionists are, and he qualifies his vague characterizations by noting in passing that not all Dominionists would accept the label or admit their views publicly. That little move allows Hedges to paint a highly questionable picture of a virtually faceless and nameless "Dominionist" Christian mass. Hedges seems to be worried that the United States is just a few short steps away from having apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft declared capital crimes. Compare this liberal fantasy of imminent theocracy to the reality of Lawrence v. Texas and Roper v. Simmons (the Supreme Court decision that appealed to European precedents to overturn capital punishment for juveniles).
Both of these decisions relied on the existence of a supposed national consensus on behalf of social liberalism. In conjuring up that false consensus, the Court treated conservative Christians as effectively nonexistent. That is the reality of where the law is, and where it is headed. It is completely unsurprising that after a long train of such decisions, conservative Christians have decided they're tired of being trampled on by the courts. The reality we face is judicially imposed same-sex marriage in opposition to the clearly expressed wishes of the American people. Yet to cover its imperial judicial agenda, the Left is now concocting nonsensical fantasies of theocratically imposed capital punishment for witchcraft. Yes, witchcraft is back. Only now traditional Christians have been cast in the role of devious enemies who need to be ferreted out by society's defenders.
Hedges invokes the warnings of his old Harvard professor against "Christian fascists." Supposedly, Christians carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance are the new Hitlers. The Left is loathe to treat Islamic terrorists as moral reprobates, but when it comes to conservative Christians, Hedges calls on his fellow liberals to renounce their relativist scruples and acknowledge "the power and allure of evil."
Hedges needn't worry. For a very long time now, secular liberals have treated conservative Christians as the modern embodiment of evil, the one group you're allowed to openly hate. Although barely noticed by the rest of us, this poison has been floating through our political system for decades. Traditional Christians are tired of it, and I don't blame them. That doesn't justify rhetorical excess from either side. But the fact of the matter is that the Left's rhetorical attacks on conservative Christians have long been more extreme, more widely disseminated, and more politically effective than whatever the Christians have been hurling back. And now that their long ostracism by the media has finally forced conservative Christians to demand redress, the Left has abandoned all rhetorical restraint.
Of course,Harper's has every right to accuse conservative Christians of making war on America, to treat them as a hate group, to warn us that conservative Christians are the new fascists, and to invite us to battle their supposedly Hitler-like evil. Certainly it would be folly to try to control this kind of anti-religious rhetoric legislatively. But I do believe the Harper's attack on traditional Christians is dangerous, unfair, and extreme -- far more so than Dobson's rhetorical slip. The way to handle the Harper's matter is to expose it and condemn it. Or is that sort of public complaint reserved for Dobson alone?
Meanwhile, asHarper's levels vicious attacks on conservative Christians, the California assembly has passed a bill designed to prevent politicians from using "anti-gay rhetoric" in their political campaigns. Opposition to same-sex marriage itself is considered by many to be "anti-gay." So has public opposition to same-sex marriage been legislatively banned? As a secular American, I don't personally see homosexuality as sinful. Like many Americans, I welcome the increased social tolerance for homosexuality we've seen since the 1950s. Yet it's outrageous to ban political speech by Christians who do sincerely understand homosexuality to be a sin.
Along with the move toward same-sex marriage in Scandinavia and Canada, we've seen systematic efforts to criminalize and silence expressions of the traditional Christian understanding of homosexuality. We've been told that the American tradition of free speech will prevent that sort of abuse here. Yet now, California's battle for same-sex marriage is calling forth legislation that takes us way too far down the path toward banning the expression of traditional Christian views. While Harper's is spinning out fantasies of a Christian theocracy, the California state legislature gives us the reality of a secular autocracy.
The companion piece to the Hedges article inHarper's is a long report by Jeffrey Sharlet on Christian conservatives in Colorado. Sharlet notes the conviction of these Christians that they're being turned into "outcasts in their own land." He treats the notion that traditional Christians need to flee the urban centers of Blue America as a paranoid fantasy. Well, California's latest attempt to control political speech shows the fears are real. And what happens to traditional Christians who refuse to flee the cities? King's College, a quality Christian school that's decided to move from the countryside to the heart of New York City, is about to be destroyed by the New York State Board of Regents. It's hard to see in this move anything other than anti-Christian bias.
Conservative Christians have good reason to fear cultural ostracism. The mere expression of their core religious views is being legislated against. The courts have banned traditional morality as a basis for law and have turned instead to secular Europe for guidance. Traditional Christians can't even set up a college in New York City. And now Harper's is calling them evil fascists. Yes, conservative Christians have the ear of the president and of the Republican leadership -- you bet they do. Given the way they're being treated in the culture at large, they'd be fools not to protect themselves by turning to politics.
Yet traditional Christians are playing defense, not offense. Harper's speaks of a "new militant Christianity." But if Christians are increasingly bold and political, they've been forced into that mode by 40 years of revolutionary social reforms. David Brooks has already explained how Roe v. Wade unnecessarily polarized the country, making it impossible for religious conservatives to have a voice in ordinary political give and take. We're still paying the price for that liberal judicial arrogance.
Now judicial imposition of same-sex marriage has poured fuel on the fire. When Frank Rich compares conservative Christians to segregationist bigots, when Chris Hedges compares conservative Christians to evil fascist supporters of Hitler, it's the Christian understanding of homosexuality that's driving the wild rhetoric. None of the American Founders would have approved of same-sex marriage, yet suddenly we're expected to equate opposition to gay marriage with Hitler's genocidal persecutions.
Last Sunday'sNew York Times gave us a clear explanation of the Catholic Church's understanding of sexuality. The Catholic position rests on the idea that there is a special tie between marriage, motherhood, and sexuality. Now there's room to differ on the nature and extent of the links between parenthood, marriage, and sexuality. Traditional Catholics will see the matter differently from traditional Protestants, who in turn will see things differently from secular social conservatives. Whatever your view on how marriage, sexuality, and parenthood ought to be related, there can be little doubt that important social consequences will follow -- and have followed -- from how we handle these issues. We can argue about whether same-sex marriage will strengthen or weaken the family, but the debate itself is, or ought to be, necessary and legitimate.
Yet to much of the mainstream media, the complicated question of how society should structure the relationship between sexuality and the family has been reduced to an all-or-nothing choice between bigotry and freedom. The overreach of this sort of intolerant secular liberalism is the real source of our cultural battles. The drive for same-sex marriage has been every bit as much of a political disaster for this country as the ill-conceived conflict over abortion. The mistake was to frame the debate as a fight against bigotry instead of as a tough decision about how to structure our most fundamental social institution. On same-sex marriage, the Left took the easy way out -- not only using the courts to make an end-run around the public, but deliberately framing the issue in a way designed to silence and stigmatize all opposition.
Now we see the results of this terrible decision. Traditional Christians are openly excoriated in the mainstream press as evil, fascist, segregationist bigots. Their political speech is placed under legislative threat. Their institutions of higher education are attacked and destroyed. Naturally, America's traditional Christians are fighting back. They've turned to the political process in hopes of securing for themselves a space in which to exist. Weary of being the butt of hatred by those who proclaim tolerance, conservative Christians are complaining, with justice, about the all-too-successful attempts to exclude them from society.
If "Dominionists" try to force all Americans to pay church tithes, or call for the execution of blasphemers and witches, I will oppose them. But that is not the danger we face. The real danger is that a growing campaign of hatred against traditional Christians by secular liberals will deepen an already dangerous conflict. The solution is to continue our debates, but to change their framing. Conservative Christians cannot stop complaining of exclusion and prejudice until cultural liberals pare back their own excesses. Let's stop treating honest differences on same-sex marriage as simple bigotry. Let's stop using the courts as a way around democratic decision-making. Let's stop trying to criminalize religious expression. Let's allow Christians to establish their own institutions of higher learning. And let's stop calling traditional Christians fascists. It would be nice if the folks complaining about "Justice Sunday" addressed these issues as well.
Stanley Kurtz is a contributing editor to NRO.
By Stanley Kurtz
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
irreligious Yank. Why does it take such a person to say what's needed?
Why is mainstream Christianity so feeble?
R
Scary Stuff
April 28, 2005
This column was written by Stanley Kurtz.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harper's Magazine's May cover stories about "The Christian Right's War On America," frightened me, although not the way Harper's meant them to. I fear these stories could mark the beginning of a systematic campaign of hatred directed at traditional Christians. Whether this is what Harper's intends, I cannot say. But regardless of the intention, the effect seems clear.
The phrase "campaign of hatred" is a strong one, and I worry about amplifying an already dangerous dynamic of recrimination on both sides of the culture wars. I don't doubt that conservatives, Christian and otherwise, are sometimes guilty of rhetorical excess. Yet despite what we've been told, the most extreme political rhetoric of our day is being directed against traditional Christians by the left.
It's been said that James Dobson overstepped legitimate bounds when he compared activist judges to the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, that was an ill-considered remark. I hope and expect it will not be repeated. But Dobson made that comparison extemporaneously and in passing. If that misstep was such a problem, what are we to make of a cover story in Harper's that systematically identifies conservative Christianity with fascism? According to Harper's, conservative Christians are making "war on America." Can you imagine the reaction to a cover story about a "war on America" by blacks, gays, Hispanics, or Jews? Then there's Frank Rich's April 24New York Times op-ed comparing conservative Christians to George Wallace, segregationists, and lynch mobs.
These comparisons are both inflammatory and mistaken. Made in the name of opposing hatred, they license hatred. It was disturbing enough during the election when even the most respectable spokesmen on the left proudly proclaimed their hatred of president Bush. Out of that hatred flowed pervasive, if low-level, violence. I fear that Bush hatred is now being channeled into hatred of Christian conservatives. The process began after the election and is steadily growing worse. This hatred of conservative Christians isn't new, but it is being fanned to a fever pitch.
Chris Hedges, who wrote one of the Harper's cover pieces, is a former reporter for the New York Times and a popular author among those who oppose the Iraq war. Hedges's article will be noticed on the Left. I fear it will set the tone for a powerful new anti-Christian rhetoric. The article's entitled "Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters." If you still don't get it, notice the picture juxtaposing a cross with an attack dog. Of course, reducing America's most popular Christian broadcasters to a hate group is itself a way of inviting hatred.
Hedges is worried about extreme Christian theocrats called "Dominionists." He's got little to say about who these Dominionists are, and he qualifies his vague characterizations by noting in passing that not all Dominionists would accept the label or admit their views publicly. That little move allows Hedges to paint a highly questionable picture of a virtually faceless and nameless "Dominionist" Christian mass. Hedges seems to be worried that the United States is just a few short steps away from having apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft declared capital crimes. Compare this liberal fantasy of imminent theocracy to the reality of Lawrence v. Texas and Roper v. Simmons (the Supreme Court decision that appealed to European precedents to overturn capital punishment for juveniles).
Both of these decisions relied on the existence of a supposed national consensus on behalf of social liberalism. In conjuring up that false consensus, the Court treated conservative Christians as effectively nonexistent. That is the reality of where the law is, and where it is headed. It is completely unsurprising that after a long train of such decisions, conservative Christians have decided they're tired of being trampled on by the courts. The reality we face is judicially imposed same-sex marriage in opposition to the clearly expressed wishes of the American people. Yet to cover its imperial judicial agenda, the Left is now concocting nonsensical fantasies of theocratically imposed capital punishment for witchcraft. Yes, witchcraft is back. Only now traditional Christians have been cast in the role of devious enemies who need to be ferreted out by society's defenders.
Hedges invokes the warnings of his old Harvard professor against "Christian fascists." Supposedly, Christians carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance are the new Hitlers. The Left is loathe to treat Islamic terrorists as moral reprobates, but when it comes to conservative Christians, Hedges calls on his fellow liberals to renounce their relativist scruples and acknowledge "the power and allure of evil."
Hedges needn't worry. For a very long time now, secular liberals have treated conservative Christians as the modern embodiment of evil, the one group you're allowed to openly hate. Although barely noticed by the rest of us, this poison has been floating through our political system for decades. Traditional Christians are tired of it, and I don't blame them. That doesn't justify rhetorical excess from either side. But the fact of the matter is that the Left's rhetorical attacks on conservative Christians have long been more extreme, more widely disseminated, and more politically effective than whatever the Christians have been hurling back. And now that their long ostracism by the media has finally forced conservative Christians to demand redress, the Left has abandoned all rhetorical restraint.
Of course,Harper's has every right to accuse conservative Christians of making war on America, to treat them as a hate group, to warn us that conservative Christians are the new fascists, and to invite us to battle their supposedly Hitler-like evil. Certainly it would be folly to try to control this kind of anti-religious rhetoric legislatively. But I do believe the Harper's attack on traditional Christians is dangerous, unfair, and extreme -- far more so than Dobson's rhetorical slip. The way to handle the Harper's matter is to expose it and condemn it. Or is that sort of public complaint reserved for Dobson alone?
Meanwhile, asHarper's levels vicious attacks on conservative Christians, the California assembly has passed a bill designed to prevent politicians from using "anti-gay rhetoric" in their political campaigns. Opposition to same-sex marriage itself is considered by many to be "anti-gay." So has public opposition to same-sex marriage been legislatively banned? As a secular American, I don't personally see homosexuality as sinful. Like many Americans, I welcome the increased social tolerance for homosexuality we've seen since the 1950s. Yet it's outrageous to ban political speech by Christians who do sincerely understand homosexuality to be a sin.
Along with the move toward same-sex marriage in Scandinavia and Canada, we've seen systematic efforts to criminalize and silence expressions of the traditional Christian understanding of homosexuality. We've been told that the American tradition of free speech will prevent that sort of abuse here. Yet now, California's battle for same-sex marriage is calling forth legislation that takes us way too far down the path toward banning the expression of traditional Christian views. While Harper's is spinning out fantasies of a Christian theocracy, the California state legislature gives us the reality of a secular autocracy.
The companion piece to the Hedges article inHarper's is a long report by Jeffrey Sharlet on Christian conservatives in Colorado. Sharlet notes the conviction of these Christians that they're being turned into "outcasts in their own land." He treats the notion that traditional Christians need to flee the urban centers of Blue America as a paranoid fantasy. Well, California's latest attempt to control political speech shows the fears are real. And what happens to traditional Christians who refuse to flee the cities? King's College, a quality Christian school that's decided to move from the countryside to the heart of New York City, is about to be destroyed by the New York State Board of Regents. It's hard to see in this move anything other than anti-Christian bias.
Conservative Christians have good reason to fear cultural ostracism. The mere expression of their core religious views is being legislated against. The courts have banned traditional morality as a basis for law and have turned instead to secular Europe for guidance. Traditional Christians can't even set up a college in New York City. And now Harper's is calling them evil fascists. Yes, conservative Christians have the ear of the president and of the Republican leadership -- you bet they do. Given the way they're being treated in the culture at large, they'd be fools not to protect themselves by turning to politics.
Yet traditional Christians are playing defense, not offense. Harper's speaks of a "new militant Christianity." But if Christians are increasingly bold and political, they've been forced into that mode by 40 years of revolutionary social reforms. David Brooks has already explained how Roe v. Wade unnecessarily polarized the country, making it impossible for religious conservatives to have a voice in ordinary political give and take. We're still paying the price for that liberal judicial arrogance.
Now judicial imposition of same-sex marriage has poured fuel on the fire. When Frank Rich compares conservative Christians to segregationist bigots, when Chris Hedges compares conservative Christians to evil fascist supporters of Hitler, it's the Christian understanding of homosexuality that's driving the wild rhetoric. None of the American Founders would have approved of same-sex marriage, yet suddenly we're expected to equate opposition to gay marriage with Hitler's genocidal persecutions.
Last Sunday'sNew York Times gave us a clear explanation of the Catholic Church's understanding of sexuality. The Catholic position rests on the idea that there is a special tie between marriage, motherhood, and sexuality. Now there's room to differ on the nature and extent of the links between parenthood, marriage, and sexuality. Traditional Catholics will see the matter differently from traditional Protestants, who in turn will see things differently from secular social conservatives. Whatever your view on how marriage, sexuality, and parenthood ought to be related, there can be little doubt that important social consequences will follow -- and have followed -- from how we handle these issues. We can argue about whether same-sex marriage will strengthen or weaken the family, but the debate itself is, or ought to be, necessary and legitimate.
Yet to much of the mainstream media, the complicated question of how society should structure the relationship between sexuality and the family has been reduced to an all-or-nothing choice between bigotry and freedom. The overreach of this sort of intolerant secular liberalism is the real source of our cultural battles. The drive for same-sex marriage has been every bit as much of a political disaster for this country as the ill-conceived conflict over abortion. The mistake was to frame the debate as a fight against bigotry instead of as a tough decision about how to structure our most fundamental social institution. On same-sex marriage, the Left took the easy way out -- not only using the courts to make an end-run around the public, but deliberately framing the issue in a way designed to silence and stigmatize all opposition.
Now we see the results of this terrible decision. Traditional Christians are openly excoriated in the mainstream press as evil, fascist, segregationist bigots. Their political speech is placed under legislative threat. Their institutions of higher education are attacked and destroyed. Naturally, America's traditional Christians are fighting back. They've turned to the political process in hopes of securing for themselves a space in which to exist. Weary of being the butt of hatred by those who proclaim tolerance, conservative Christians are complaining, with justice, about the all-too-successful attempts to exclude them from society.
If "Dominionists" try to force all Americans to pay church tithes, or call for the execution of blasphemers and witches, I will oppose them. But that is not the danger we face. The real danger is that a growing campaign of hatred against traditional Christians by secular liberals will deepen an already dangerous conflict. The solution is to continue our debates, but to change their framing. Conservative Christians cannot stop complaining of exclusion and prejudice until cultural liberals pare back their own excesses. Let's stop treating honest differences on same-sex marriage as simple bigotry. Let's stop using the courts as a way around democratic decision-making. Let's stop trying to criminalize religious expression. Let's allow Christians to establish their own institutions of higher learning. And let's stop calling traditional Christians fascists. It would be nice if the folks complaining about "Justice Sunday" addressed these issues as well.
Stanley Kurtz is a contributing editor to NRO.
By Stanley Kurtz
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
06/19/05
The flagellum/TTSS science - as sent also to Orr [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 01:25:55 PM
The trendy Paley watch this past half-decade has been the bacterial
flagellum, a microscopic organelle billed as so complex that it couldn't
have evolved in Darwinian fashion (especially if gradualism is -
unaccountably - insisted upon, megamutations being neglected, assumed
irrelevant).
This watch is running, at 15,000 rpm in E. coli and 100,000 rpm in
a vibrio. And it is reversible.
Why is this organelle chosen as most important among Paley
timepieces? Denton, and Broom, have pointed out numerous other watches,
grandfather clocks, atomic oscillators, hourglasses, clymnestras, etc which
can be approximately as useful in the Design argument.
Behe & Dembski say that the flagellum is complex enough so that
nobody has imagined a scenario that could evolve it gradually; but on the
other hand it is simple enough so that we have an impressively detailed
model of a couple dozen different macromolecules composing the rotor &
stator of the motor, and the protein-accelerator that squirts new flagellin
molecules along the hollow thread (which is an order of magnitude longer
than the cell). This appears ordered, for a purpose; a good Paley
timepiece, if arcane to the ordinary senses.
The chloroplast is another, briefly described by Broom in the best
IDT book 'How Blind is The Watchmaker?'. This organelle, earlier studied
than the flagellum, has proven harder to describe in both structure and,
especially, functions. It is considerably bigger & more complex. It might
be supposed that it's therefore even harder to describe how the chloroplast
could have evolved de novo. Margulis proposes it didn't, but originated as
an endosymbiont, a previously autonomous blue-green alga which became
'captured'. Its own DNA & ribosomes are consistent with this. So the more
complex organelle is not necessarily the harder to scenarioize.
Pros & cons could be tabulated for the timepieces described by Behe
and by Broom. Such a tabulation would be worth assembling. The flagellum
would, I suspect, be seen as having some advantages, but suffers from the
severe handicap that most people don't know the meaning of the term
'molecule'. Inordinate emphasis on this microscopic item is therefore open
to the accusation of obscurantism, compared with study of cooperative order
in macroscopic ecology, evident to the child, not needing instruments or
education.
The question arises, how much more IDT can we use? If Design is
not yet conceded by Dawkins, Wolpert, etc, why should anyone think they
will ever concede the logical point?
And I still don't grasp why Dembski says IDT is no variety of
natural theology.
Nevertheless, the flagellum will continue as an important example
of design. Its similarity to the TTSS ('needle organelle' etc) is
interesting, but that connection has been mentioned in peculiar ways. As
Macnab points out, the flagellum is believed to be ancient, whereas the
higher cells into which the TTSS injects toxic proteins are far more
recent. (Direct evidence for how ancient the flagellum actually is should
be sought, but meanwhile most will tend to agree with Macnab.) Thus, any
homology must be in the direction that the TTSS derived from some
threadless mutant flagellate. It is difficult to understand why Miller
doesn't mention this timing. Does Dembski mention it?
If I glimpse the outlines of the wrangle clearly enough:-
1 MB, WD: the flagellum is so complex no-one has imagined a scenario for
its gradual emergence.
2 Miller: the TTSS is v similar to the flagellar basal structure, and has
one of its functions (the protein-ejection), turned to another end. The
relationship between them is inferred to be homology. This is implied to
refute MB, WD.
3 RM: If they're homologous it's likely in the direction
flagellum-to-TTSS. The TTSS, which if discovered first would surely have
been deemed irreducibly complex, is plausibly explained by a threadless
mutation of the flagellum. The origin of the flagellum is therefore not
illuminated by the similarity to the TTSS.
Exploring the flagellum/TTSS science interests me, not only because
it is interesting science but also because this has become the arena for
conflict between neoDarwinism and some versions of Christianity. Whereas 2
decades ago evolution theory could ignore, indeed feel a duty to shun, the
embarrassingly crooked Gish & Morris, today Behe & Dembski present a much
more credible image. However, the campaigns using B & D as their champion
scientists are not straight but fanatical to various extents. And their
main critic Miller may not be so clean.
It is helpful that I knew main flagellum researcher Macnab of Yale
(recently deceased). We were grad students together. His attached review
in J Bact is useful.
The debate is odd. Why does the flagellum expert shown by
Discovery® in their video not feature in Macnab's refs? Where _does_ he
feature? Why can't Miller spell the name of his Ivy League counterpart -
which he spells McNab, as wrong as could be (for the pronunciation)? Why
is Miller so keen to use the key term 'homology' when Macnab does not?
Where are the discussions of sequences in flagellar proteins as compared
with TTSS proteins?
IMHO Miller's criticism of Dembski's "improbability drive" is
plainly correct and calls in question Dembski's competence - as a
mathematician. He may even be the sort of ignoramus who doesn't really
know the defn of the term 'probability'
On the other hand, my
experiences with Geo Seber suggest to me the bitter conclusion that once
the type of fanatical faith exemplified by "creationism" takes hold, a math
expert can soon talk rubbish.
We cannot overlook the link btw Dembski and the polemical raver
Johnson who - after I've done him good - writes to me "you are not an
ally". Dembski said recently that theistic evolutionists are his most
implacable enemies.
=================
Journal of Bacteriology,
December 1999, p. 7149-7153,
Vol. 181, No. 23
0021-9193/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American
Society for Microbiology. All
rights reserved.
GUEST COMMENTARY
The Bacterial Flagellum:
Reversible Rotary Propellor
and Type III Export Apparatus
Robert M. Macnab*
Department of Molecular
Biophysics and Biochemistry,
Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut 06520-8114
INTRODUCTION
Flagella and motility represent two of the richest
subjects in microbiology, involving not only
bacterial genetics, molecular biology, and
physiology but also bioenergetics, hydrodynamics,
structural analysis, and macromolecular assembly.
Our knowledge that bacteria actively move goes as far back as the discovery
of bacteria themselves (7). To quote from an article by Howard Berg in
1975 (4), written not long after the modern era of investigation of
bacterial flagella, motility, and chemotaxis had begun:
When Antony van Leeuwenhoek looked through a single-lens
microscope in 1676 and observed man's first recorded glimpse of
bacteria, it was their motion that most delighted him: "I must
say, for my part, that no more pleasant sight has ever yet come
before my eye than these many thousands of living creatures, seen
all alive in a little drop of water, moving among one another,
each several creature having its own proper motion."
Leeuwenhoek goes on to say, in a charming phrase: "...I can make out no
paws...[yet] I am persuaded that they too are furnished with paws withal."
The bacterial "paw," more commonly known as the flagellum, is a structure
with a very long (ca. 10-µm), thin (ca. 20-nm-diameter) external filament.
Besides its extreme thinness and length, the first thing that strikes one
about the flagellar filament is its "waviness." The active propagation of
this wave during motility was evident from early high-speed movies, so
there was no doubt that flagella were the organelles of bacterial motility.
Cells typically displayed more than one type of movement: in some cases,
simple forward and backward swimming and in other cases (e.g., Salmonella),
swimming and tumbling.
Around 1970, the major questions about bacterial motility could be
summarized as follows: (i) What is the shape of the wave, and is it
intrinsic to the flagellar structure? (ii) How is the waveform propagated?
(iii) What is the nature of the motor? (iv) What is responsible for the two
types of motility (swimming and tumbling in the case of Salmonella)? (v)
What is the energy source? In only a few years, the answers to these
questions were obtained, at least in broad outline.
A HELICAL PROPELLOR
Kamiya and colleagues (13) carried out extensive in vitro studies of
flagellar filaments. Their principal conclusions were that the waveform of
a filament in aqueous suspension is a perfect helix, that the helicity is
intrinsic (in vitro depolymerization and repolymerization occurs readily)
and so is a cause rather than a consequence of motility, and that filaments
exhibit polymorphism. At least two of the polymorphic forms are important
to normal motility (23). The helicity of the filament is both remarkable
and essential. Remarkable, because it is a consequence of a subtle breaking
of symmetry in a polymer made (in many species) from identical subunits;
normally, one would expect such a polymer to be straight. Essential,
because without the helicity, propulsion would be impossible.
Structural studies of filament, hook, basal body, etc. by DeRosier, Namba,
and others (mostly by analysis of electron microscopic images) have become
ever more refined, so that the subunit shapes and their quaternary
interactions are being seen in more and more detail, although the data
still do not approach atomic resolution.
A REVERSIBLE ROTARY MOTOR
There was a general presumption until the early 1970s that the waveform was
propagated as a conformational wave (much as one can drive a wave along a
rope by wrist movement). There was no evidence in favor of such a model,
and several good arguments against it. Yet the alternative[---]a rotational
model[---]seemed to be unpalatable, even though it could accommodate many
of the known observations (5). Then, in three back-to-back papers in
1974 from the laboratories of Simon, Adler, and Berg (3, 20, 32), the
rotational model was established beyond doubt, mostly on the basis of
experiments with tethered Escherichia coli cells, which whirled around
merrily.
These experiments generated another, equally important, finding. Not only
did the motor rotate, it rotated in both directions, clockwise (CW) and
counterclockwise (CCW). It reversed stochastically and indefinitely in the
absence of stimulation, rotated almost exclusively CCW upon addition of an
attractant, and almost exclusively CW upon addition of a repellent. Thus,
the basis for selective motion in response to chemical gradients,
chemotaxis, was reduced to the simple notion of a binary switch whose CCW
versus CW states had probabilities that were modulated by environmental
signals.
A tethered cell presents an artificially high load to the motor, so the
cell rotates relatively slowly (less than 500 rpm). At the much lower load
of a freely rotating filament, the motor is capable of astonishing speeds,
e.g. around 15,000 rpm in E. coli (21). The world record is for a Vibrio
cell clocked at 100,000 rpm by laser microscopy (24)!
STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION OF THE FLAGELLAR MOTOR
What does this rotary motor look like? Electron micrographs of isolated
flagella taken by Cohen-Bazire and London in 1967 (6) had revealed a basal
structure containing four rings threaded by a rod. Subsequent work showed
that two of them, the M and S rings, lay in the cytoplasmic membrane and
just above it, respectively. Any rotary motor must have a rotor (the part
that does external work) and a stator (the anchor), so it was natural to
think that the M and S rings might fulfil such roles. The M and S rings,
however, are a single, double-flanged ring made from subunits of just one
protein (34). Also, studies of mutants showed that the MS ring does not
contribute to torque generation. Other studies established that the stator
consists of a series of membrane-imbedded studs or Mot complexes spaced
around the MS ring (15). These studs contain two components, MotA and MotB,
with the latter apparently binding to the peptidoglycan layer[---]about as
good a cellular anchor as one can get. The rotor turned out to be an
extensive structure projecting from the MS ring into the cytoplasm (10, 14,
16) and termed the C ring, a vital piece of the basal body that had escaped
detection with the protocols used heretofore. The C ring contains three of
the most interesting proteins in the flagellum, the motor/switch proteins.
These work against the Mot complexes to generate torque, and they also have
the ability to change their conformational state in a bimodal fashion, so
that the motor direction can be switched from CCW to CW and vice versa.
Despite much effort and the accumulation of much detailed
structure-function information, the nature of the conformational change
underlying motor switching remains elusive.
FLAGELLA ARE DRIVEN BY IONIC POTENTIALS, NOT ATP
Because of the large body of research into muscle and other biological
structures whose function is to produce mechanical work (all of them driven
by ATP hydrolysis), it was probably natural to suppose that ATP might drive
the bacterial flagellar motor also. This notion was dispelled in 1974 by
Larsen et al. (19), who showed that uncouplers of oxidative phosphorylation
like carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone, or mutations that uncouple
the process, block motility even though ATP levels remain high. This was at
a time when Peter Mitchell's chemiosmotic hypothesis (27), while in general
circulation, had not gained full understanding or acceptance. Thus, the
Larsen et al. paper studiously avoids the statement that bacterial motility
is driven by proton motive force. Only in 1977 was this term used
explicitly, in a paper by Manson et al. (25) that included a staunch
Mitchellian, Franklin Harold, as one of its authors. Many bacterial
species, incidentally, use sodium motive force, arguing for an
electrostatic mechanism and against a hydrogen-bonding one.
HOW DOES THE MOTOR WORK?
In the 25 years since the rotary mechanism and the ionic energy source were
discovered, the bioenergetics of the motor have been studied in ever
greater detail by the laboratories of Berg, Aizawa, and others, so that its
empirical characteristics are well established. What is not well understood
is the mechanism by which ionic energy is converted into mechanical work.
Given the ubiquitous yet elusive character of the proton, this may not be
too surprising.
Initially, a common assumption was that the proton (or sodium ion) would
travel down its gradient via a series of binding sites contributed jointly
by the stator (Mot complexes) and rotor (motor/switch complex), developing
torque in the process. This notion has become less attractive as a result
of recent mutational analyses by Zhou and coworkers (37), who have found
that only one of the conserved protonatable residues in the five Mot and
switch proteins is essential. They suggest that the proton conductance
pathway may reside entirely within the Mot complexes and cause a
conformationally strained structure which, interacting with the
motor/switch complexes, relaxes to generate torque.
THE FLAGELLAR GENE SYSTEM IS COMPLEX
A structure such as the flagellum has, not surprisingly, a large genetic
basis. Our current detailed understanding of the many genes, their
products, and their transcriptional controls owes an enormous debt to the
classical work that has been carried out over several decades since the
1950s in many laboratories (including, for E. coli and Salmonella alone,
those of T. Iino, Komeda, K. Kutsukake, Parkinson, Simon, B. A. D. Stocker,
and Yamaguchi). In the early 1950s, a distinction was made between mutants
that lacked flagella (nonflagellate or fla mutants) and those that had
flagella but could not move them (paralyzed or mot mutants) (33). Later, it
was recognized that there were mutants that, though highly motile, were
nonchemotactic (che mutants) (2). Their motility was unusual in that it
consisted either of swimming with essentially no tumbling or tumbling with
essentially no swimming (now recognized as being due to a high CCW bias or
a high CW bias, respectively). There then followed an extended period of
research in which mutants were divided into ever finer complementation
groups, which now correspond to the genes that are known today by physical
mapping and sequencing.
Just how extensive are these gene systems? In Salmonella, there are
currently 44 known flagellar genes. Twenty-three of these encode structural
components of the flagellum. Of these components, five (MotA, MotB, FliG,
FliM, and FliN) are needed for torque generation and three of these five
(FliG, FliM and FliN) are also needed for switching; these components are
the heart of the motor. The principal remaining components are the filament
(propellor), the hook (universal joint), and the basal body; the latter can
be broken down into rod (transmission shaft), MS ring (motor mounting
plate), and LP ring or outer cylinder (bushing).
Another five flagellar genes or so fulfil regulatory roles. There is a
hierarchy of expression whose full complexity is just beginning to be
realized. One regulatory feature involves a flagellum-specific sigma factor
and its antagonist. The concept of a specialized sigma factor is not
unusual these days. What is unusual is the mechanism by which the
anti-sigma factor is inactivated at the appropriate point in flagellar
assembly: it is exported from the cell by the same system that is
responsible for assembling the flagellum itself (11, 1 (see below).
Almost all of the remaining genes (about 11 of them) appear to encode
components that are responsible for flagellar assembly. This brings us to
the point that[---]as the title to this Commentary indicates[---]the
flagellum performs not just one function, but two (Fig. 1). Not only is it
the organelle of propulsion for the bacterium but it also functions as a
sophisticated export and self-assembly apparatus.
FIG. 1. The flagellum is the motor organelle
for bacterial propulsion. Driven by a
View larger version transmembrane proton gradient
it rotates both CCW and CW;
the filament is helical and so converts torque
into thrust. The motor consists of stators or
Mot complexes (red) and a rotor or C ring
which also serves as the CCW
CW switch. As well as being
the organelle of motility, the flagellum is a
specialized type III export apparatus (lilac),
translocating subunits of its substrates (pale
blue) in an ATP-dependent manner across the
plane of the cytoplasmic membrane (CM) and
delivering them into a central channel in the
basal body-hook-filament structure where they
eventually reach their assembly point at the
distal end of the structure. PG, peptidoglycan
layer; OM, outer membrane.
FLAGELLAR PROTEINS TRAVEL THROUGH THEIR OWN STRUCTURE
The story of flagellar protein export begins with two reports published by
Iino in 1969 (12) and by Emerson et al. in 1970 (; both reports presented
convincing evidence that new flagellin monomers are added to growing
filaments at their distal end. It was known from structural studies in the
early 1960s (e.g., reference 22) that flagellar filaments were hollow
tubes, and we now know that this is true of the basal-body rod and the hook
also. Iino speculated on roles that the flagellar basal structure might
play: flagellin synthesis (where he was wrong [there is no flagellar
ribosome]), flagellar motion, and initiation of flagellar assembly.
Presciently, he suggested that "... accumulation of flagellin molecules in
the basal structure might cause the efficient diffusion or pushing of the
molecules through the hole to the tip of the flagellum."
AN ANTI-SIGMA FACTOR, A MURAMIDASE, AND A HOOK-LENGTH PROTEIN?
Most of the flagellar proteins that are exported are structural components,
but there are three interesting exceptions: One is the anti-sigma factor
that was alluded to earlier[---]when you no longer need it, get rid of it!
Another is a muramidase (2. Why would the cell want a flagellum-specific
muramidase, and why would it want to export this enzyme? The answer, for
which we already have some experimental support, is almost certainly to
punch a hole in the peptidoglycan layer in the early stage of flagellar
morphogenesis, in order to let the nascent rod penetrate it. The third
example is a fascinating protein that is implicated in controlling the
length of the flagellar hook; it has only recently been shown that it is
exported, and how it functions in the process of length control is not well
understood.
THE FLAGELLAR EXPORT APPARATUS
After the papers reporting distal growth, there followed a long hiatus in
the investigation of flagellar protein export, perhaps because everyone was
too busy examining flagellar structure, composition, function, genetics,
etc. But as the function of more and more flagellar genes was established,
it became evident that there was a residuum with no known function. This
triggered (at least in my mind) the realization that there was also a
function, flagellar protein export, with no known genes. Maybe there was a
match? In 1991, we performed a very simple experiment that yielded the
first tentative identification of a few export component genes (36); one of
these components is an ATPase that, inexplicably, is related to the
catalytic subunit of the F0F1 ATPase (1, 36). Subsequently, the total
number of components of the flagellar export apparatus has risen to at
least 8 (26) and perhaps as high as 13 if one includes components that may
have specialized functions such as chaperones.
AN EXPORT APPARATUS WITHIN THE BASAL-BODY MS RING?
Six of the export components are integral membrane proteins, three of which
we have already shown to be associated with the basal body (9, 26). Given
that their substrates have to be delivered into the hollow channel in the
rod-hook-filament structure, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion
that the export apparatus resides in a patch of membrane within the central
pore of the MS ring. Soluble components, such as the ATPase, presumably
interact in a dynamic fashion with this membrane complex. Efforts to build
up evidence in support of this model represent an active area of current
research.
FLAGELLAR PROTEINS AND MANY VIRULENCE FACTORS ARE EXPORTED BY RELATED PATHWAYS
Bacteria export or secrete proteins by several different pathways (of which
perhaps the best known is the type II Sec-dependent general secretory
pathway or GSP (30), which entails signal peptide cleavage during
translocation of the protein across the cytoplasmic membrane). In the field
of bacterial pathogenesis, genes needed for export of virulence factors by
the so-called type III pathway (35), whose characteristics include a lack
of signal peptide cleavage, were rapidly being discovered during the 1990s,
and as their sequences and the sequences of putative flagellar export genes
became available, there was an almost overnight realization by many
laboratories that the flagellar export pathway and type III export pathways
for virulence factors are closely related (see, e.g., references 29 and
31). I consider, in fact, that the flagellar pathway is a type III pathway,
differing only in the nature of its export substrates and in the fact that
it operates via a working organelle of propulsion.
If the flagellar export apparatus resides within the basal body, is there a
corresponding structure for the virulence factor export apparatus? The
answer appears to be yes. Kubori et al. (17) have recently described the
existence in Salmonella of a "needle complex" that is constructed from
components of the export pathway and closely resembles a flagellar basal
body with an elongated rod (but of course no hook or filament!).
Ironically, S.-I. Aizawa (an author on the paper by Kubori et al.) and I
saw these structures in 1984 but dismissed them as being, perhaps,
virus-related[---]a clear illustration that (to misquote Pasteur) chance
disfavors the unprepared mind.
Which is the original pathway, the one for flagellar proteins or the one
for virulence factors? Flagella are very ancient organelles, predating by
far the targets for bacterial pathogenesis[---]plants, mammals, etc. So, it
seems to me that the rest of the type III pathways must have evolved from
the flagellar one.
FINAL COMMENTS
I leave the reader to contemplate the flagellum in all of its wonderful
complexity. It is an organelle that receives sensory information from the
cytoplasm, yet extends far beyond the cell itself; it rotates at high
speed, and switches rotation in a controlled fashion; at the same time, it
exports its own component proteins through itself and assembles them at its
distant tip; and together with its cognate sensory transduction system, it
generates a behavior, chemotaxis, that is critical for the cell's survival.
Although we have come a long way in our understanding of the flagellum,
much remains to be done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Work in my laboratory is supported in part by USPHS grants AI12202 and
GM40335.
FOOTNOTES
* Mailing address: Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry,
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8114. Phone: (203) 432-5590. Fax:
(203) 432-9782. E-mail: robert.macnab@yale.edu.
The views expressed in this Commentary do not necessarily reflect the views
of the journal or of ASM.
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Journal of Bacteriology, December 1999, p. 7149-7153, Vol. 181, No. 23
0021-9193/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
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flagellum, a microscopic organelle billed as so complex that it couldn't
have evolved in Darwinian fashion (especially if gradualism is -
unaccountably - insisted upon, megamutations being neglected, assumed
irrelevant).
This watch is running, at 15,000 rpm in E. coli and 100,000 rpm in
a vibrio. And it is reversible.
Why is this organelle chosen as most important among Paley
timepieces? Denton, and Broom, have pointed out numerous other watches,
grandfather clocks, atomic oscillators, hourglasses, clymnestras, etc which
can be approximately as useful in the Design argument.
Behe & Dembski say that the flagellum is complex enough so that
nobody has imagined a scenario that could evolve it gradually; but on the
other hand it is simple enough so that we have an impressively detailed
model of a couple dozen different macromolecules composing the rotor &
stator of the motor, and the protein-accelerator that squirts new flagellin
molecules along the hollow thread (which is an order of magnitude longer
than the cell). This appears ordered, for a purpose; a good Paley
timepiece, if arcane to the ordinary senses.
The chloroplast is another, briefly described by Broom in the best
IDT book 'How Blind is The Watchmaker?'. This organelle, earlier studied
than the flagellum, has proven harder to describe in both structure and,
especially, functions. It is considerably bigger & more complex. It might
be supposed that it's therefore even harder to describe how the chloroplast
could have evolved de novo. Margulis proposes it didn't, but originated as
an endosymbiont, a previously autonomous blue-green alga which became
'captured'. Its own DNA & ribosomes are consistent with this. So the more
complex organelle is not necessarily the harder to scenarioize.
Pros & cons could be tabulated for the timepieces described by Behe
and by Broom. Such a tabulation would be worth assembling. The flagellum
would, I suspect, be seen as having some advantages, but suffers from the
severe handicap that most people don't know the meaning of the term
'molecule'. Inordinate emphasis on this microscopic item is therefore open
to the accusation of obscurantism, compared with study of cooperative order
in macroscopic ecology, evident to the child, not needing instruments or
education.
The question arises, how much more IDT can we use? If Design is
not yet conceded by Dawkins, Wolpert, etc, why should anyone think they
will ever concede the logical point?
And I still don't grasp why Dembski says IDT is no variety of
natural theology.
Nevertheless, the flagellum will continue as an important example
of design. Its similarity to the TTSS ('needle organelle' etc) is
interesting, but that connection has been mentioned in peculiar ways. As
Macnab points out, the flagellum is believed to be ancient, whereas the
higher cells into which the TTSS injects toxic proteins are far more
recent. (Direct evidence for how ancient the flagellum actually is should
be sought, but meanwhile most will tend to agree with Macnab.) Thus, any
homology must be in the direction that the TTSS derived from some
threadless mutant flagellate. It is difficult to understand why Miller
doesn't mention this timing. Does Dembski mention it?
If I glimpse the outlines of the wrangle clearly enough:-
1 MB, WD: the flagellum is so complex no-one has imagined a scenario for
its gradual emergence.
2 Miller: the TTSS is v similar to the flagellar basal structure, and has
one of its functions (the protein-ejection), turned to another end. The
relationship between them is inferred to be homology. This is implied to
refute MB, WD.
3 RM: If they're homologous it's likely in the direction
flagellum-to-TTSS. The TTSS, which if discovered first would surely have
been deemed irreducibly complex, is plausibly explained by a threadless
mutation of the flagellum. The origin of the flagellum is therefore not
illuminated by the similarity to the TTSS.
Exploring the flagellum/TTSS science interests me, not only because
it is interesting science but also because this has become the arena for
conflict between neoDarwinism and some versions of Christianity. Whereas 2
decades ago evolution theory could ignore, indeed feel a duty to shun, the
embarrassingly crooked Gish & Morris, today Behe & Dembski present a much
more credible image. However, the campaigns using B & D as their champion
scientists are not straight but fanatical to various extents. And their
main critic Miller may not be so clean.
It is helpful that I knew main flagellum researcher Macnab of Yale
(recently deceased). We were grad students together. His attached review
in J Bact is useful.
The debate is odd. Why does the flagellum expert shown by
Discovery® in their video not feature in Macnab's refs? Where _does_ he
feature? Why can't Miller spell the name of his Ivy League counterpart -
which he spells McNab, as wrong as could be (for the pronunciation)? Why
is Miller so keen to use the key term 'homology' when Macnab does not?
Where are the discussions of sequences in flagellar proteins as compared
with TTSS proteins?
IMHO Miller's criticism of Dembski's "improbability drive" is
plainly correct and calls in question Dembski's competence - as a
mathematician. He may even be the sort of ignoramus who doesn't really
know the defn of the term 'probability'
On the other hand, myexperiences with Geo Seber suggest to me the bitter conclusion that once
the type of fanatical faith exemplified by "creationism" takes hold, a math
expert can soon talk rubbish.
We cannot overlook the link btw Dembski and the polemical raver
Johnson who - after I've done him good - writes to me "you are not an
ally". Dembski said recently that theistic evolutionists are his most
implacable enemies.
=================
Journal of Bacteriology,
December 1999, p. 7149-7153,
Vol. 181, No. 23
0021-9193/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American
Society for Microbiology. All
rights reserved.
GUEST COMMENTARY
The Bacterial Flagellum:
Reversible Rotary Propellor
and Type III Export Apparatus
Robert M. Macnab*
Department of Molecular
Biophysics and Biochemistry,
Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut 06520-8114
INTRODUCTION
Flagella and motility represent two of the richest
subjects in microbiology, involving not only
bacterial genetics, molecular biology, and
physiology but also bioenergetics, hydrodynamics,
structural analysis, and macromolecular assembly.
Our knowledge that bacteria actively move goes as far back as the discovery
of bacteria themselves (7). To quote from an article by Howard Berg in
1975 (4), written not long after the modern era of investigation of
bacterial flagella, motility, and chemotaxis had begun:
When Antony van Leeuwenhoek looked through a single-lens
microscope in 1676 and observed man's first recorded glimpse of
bacteria, it was their motion that most delighted him: "I must
say, for my part, that no more pleasant sight has ever yet come
before my eye than these many thousands of living creatures, seen
all alive in a little drop of water, moving among one another,
each several creature having its own proper motion."
Leeuwenhoek goes on to say, in a charming phrase: "...I can make out no
paws...[yet] I am persuaded that they too are furnished with paws withal."
The bacterial "paw," more commonly known as the flagellum, is a structure
with a very long (ca. 10-µm), thin (ca. 20-nm-diameter) external filament.
Besides its extreme thinness and length, the first thing that strikes one
about the flagellar filament is its "waviness." The active propagation of
this wave during motility was evident from early high-speed movies, so
there was no doubt that flagella were the organelles of bacterial motility.
Cells typically displayed more than one type of movement: in some cases,
simple forward and backward swimming and in other cases (e.g., Salmonella),
swimming and tumbling.
Around 1970, the major questions about bacterial motility could be
summarized as follows: (i) What is the shape of the wave, and is it
intrinsic to the flagellar structure? (ii) How is the waveform propagated?
(iii) What is the nature of the motor? (iv) What is responsible for the two
types of motility (swimming and tumbling in the case of Salmonella)? (v)
What is the energy source? In only a few years, the answers to these
questions were obtained, at least in broad outline.
A HELICAL PROPELLOR
Kamiya and colleagues (13) carried out extensive in vitro studies of
flagellar filaments. Their principal conclusions were that the waveform of
a filament in aqueous suspension is a perfect helix, that the helicity is
intrinsic (in vitro depolymerization and repolymerization occurs readily)
and so is a cause rather than a consequence of motility, and that filaments
exhibit polymorphism. At least two of the polymorphic forms are important
to normal motility (23). The helicity of the filament is both remarkable
and essential. Remarkable, because it is a consequence of a subtle breaking
of symmetry in a polymer made (in many species) from identical subunits;
normally, one would expect such a polymer to be straight. Essential,
because without the helicity, propulsion would be impossible.
Structural studies of filament, hook, basal body, etc. by DeRosier, Namba,
and others (mostly by analysis of electron microscopic images) have become
ever more refined, so that the subunit shapes and their quaternary
interactions are being seen in more and more detail, although the data
still do not approach atomic resolution.
A REVERSIBLE ROTARY MOTOR
There was a general presumption until the early 1970s that the waveform was
propagated as a conformational wave (much as one can drive a wave along a
rope by wrist movement). There was no evidence in favor of such a model,
and several good arguments against it. Yet the alternative[---]a rotational
model[---]seemed to be unpalatable, even though it could accommodate many
of the known observations (5). Then, in three back-to-back papers in
1974 from the laboratories of Simon, Adler, and Berg (3, 20, 32), the
rotational model was established beyond doubt, mostly on the basis of
experiments with tethered Escherichia coli cells, which whirled around
merrily.
These experiments generated another, equally important, finding. Not only
did the motor rotate, it rotated in both directions, clockwise (CW) and
counterclockwise (CCW). It reversed stochastically and indefinitely in the
absence of stimulation, rotated almost exclusively CCW upon addition of an
attractant, and almost exclusively CW upon addition of a repellent. Thus,
the basis for selective motion in response to chemical gradients,
chemotaxis, was reduced to the simple notion of a binary switch whose CCW
versus CW states had probabilities that were modulated by environmental
signals.
A tethered cell presents an artificially high load to the motor, so the
cell rotates relatively slowly (less than 500 rpm). At the much lower load
of a freely rotating filament, the motor is capable of astonishing speeds,
e.g. around 15,000 rpm in E. coli (21). The world record is for a Vibrio
cell clocked at 100,000 rpm by laser microscopy (24)!
STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION OF THE FLAGELLAR MOTOR
What does this rotary motor look like? Electron micrographs of isolated
flagella taken by Cohen-Bazire and London in 1967 (6) had revealed a basal
structure containing four rings threaded by a rod. Subsequent work showed
that two of them, the M and S rings, lay in the cytoplasmic membrane and
just above it, respectively. Any rotary motor must have a rotor (the part
that does external work) and a stator (the anchor), so it was natural to
think that the M and S rings might fulfil such roles. The M and S rings,
however, are a single, double-flanged ring made from subunits of just one
protein (34). Also, studies of mutants showed that the MS ring does not
contribute to torque generation. Other studies established that the stator
consists of a series of membrane-imbedded studs or Mot complexes spaced
around the MS ring (15). These studs contain two components, MotA and MotB,
with the latter apparently binding to the peptidoglycan layer[---]about as
good a cellular anchor as one can get. The rotor turned out to be an
extensive structure projecting from the MS ring into the cytoplasm (10, 14,
16) and termed the C ring, a vital piece of the basal body that had escaped
detection with the protocols used heretofore. The C ring contains three of
the most interesting proteins in the flagellum, the motor/switch proteins.
These work against the Mot complexes to generate torque, and they also have
the ability to change their conformational state in a bimodal fashion, so
that the motor direction can be switched from CCW to CW and vice versa.
Despite much effort and the accumulation of much detailed
structure-function information, the nature of the conformational change
underlying motor switching remains elusive.
FLAGELLA ARE DRIVEN BY IONIC POTENTIALS, NOT ATP
Because of the large body of research into muscle and other biological
structures whose function is to produce mechanical work (all of them driven
by ATP hydrolysis), it was probably natural to suppose that ATP might drive
the bacterial flagellar motor also. This notion was dispelled in 1974 by
Larsen et al. (19), who showed that uncouplers of oxidative phosphorylation
like carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone, or mutations that uncouple
the process, block motility even though ATP levels remain high. This was at
a time when Peter Mitchell's chemiosmotic hypothesis (27), while in general
circulation, had not gained full understanding or acceptance. Thus, the
Larsen et al. paper studiously avoids the statement that bacterial motility
is driven by proton motive force. Only in 1977 was this term used
explicitly, in a paper by Manson et al. (25) that included a staunch
Mitchellian, Franklin Harold, as one of its authors. Many bacterial
species, incidentally, use sodium motive force, arguing for an
electrostatic mechanism and against a hydrogen-bonding one.
HOW DOES THE MOTOR WORK?
In the 25 years since the rotary mechanism and the ionic energy source were
discovered, the bioenergetics of the motor have been studied in ever
greater detail by the laboratories of Berg, Aizawa, and others, so that its
empirical characteristics are well established. What is not well understood
is the mechanism by which ionic energy is converted into mechanical work.
Given the ubiquitous yet elusive character of the proton, this may not be
too surprising.
Initially, a common assumption was that the proton (or sodium ion) would
travel down its gradient via a series of binding sites contributed jointly
by the stator (Mot complexes) and rotor (motor/switch complex), developing
torque in the process. This notion has become less attractive as a result
of recent mutational analyses by Zhou and coworkers (37), who have found
that only one of the conserved protonatable residues in the five Mot and
switch proteins is essential. They suggest that the proton conductance
pathway may reside entirely within the Mot complexes and cause a
conformationally strained structure which, interacting with the
motor/switch complexes, relaxes to generate torque.
THE FLAGELLAR GENE SYSTEM IS COMPLEX
A structure such as the flagellum has, not surprisingly, a large genetic
basis. Our current detailed understanding of the many genes, their
products, and their transcriptional controls owes an enormous debt to the
classical work that has been carried out over several decades since the
1950s in many laboratories (including, for E. coli and Salmonella alone,
those of T. Iino, Komeda, K. Kutsukake, Parkinson, Simon, B. A. D. Stocker,
and Yamaguchi). In the early 1950s, a distinction was made between mutants
that lacked flagella (nonflagellate or fla mutants) and those that had
flagella but could not move them (paralyzed or mot mutants) (33). Later, it
was recognized that there were mutants that, though highly motile, were
nonchemotactic (che mutants) (2). Their motility was unusual in that it
consisted either of swimming with essentially no tumbling or tumbling with
essentially no swimming (now recognized as being due to a high CCW bias or
a high CW bias, respectively). There then followed an extended period of
research in which mutants were divided into ever finer complementation
groups, which now correspond to the genes that are known today by physical
mapping and sequencing.
Just how extensive are these gene systems? In Salmonella, there are
currently 44 known flagellar genes. Twenty-three of these encode structural
components of the flagellum. Of these components, five (MotA, MotB, FliG,
FliM, and FliN) are needed for torque generation and three of these five
(FliG, FliM and FliN) are also needed for switching; these components are
the heart of the motor. The principal remaining components are the filament
(propellor), the hook (universal joint), and the basal body; the latter can
be broken down into rod (transmission shaft), MS ring (motor mounting
plate), and LP ring or outer cylinder (bushing).
Another five flagellar genes or so fulfil regulatory roles. There is a
hierarchy of expression whose full complexity is just beginning to be
realized. One regulatory feature involves a flagellum-specific sigma factor
and its antagonist. The concept of a specialized sigma factor is not
unusual these days. What is unusual is the mechanism by which the
anti-sigma factor is inactivated at the appropriate point in flagellar
assembly: it is exported from the cell by the same system that is
responsible for assembling the flagellum itself (11, 1
(see below).Almost all of the remaining genes (about 11 of them) appear to encode
components that are responsible for flagellar assembly. This brings us to
the point that[---]as the title to this Commentary indicates[---]the
flagellum performs not just one function, but two (Fig. 1). Not only is it
the organelle of propulsion for the bacterium but it also functions as a
sophisticated export and self-assembly apparatus.
FIG. 1. The flagellum is the motor organelle
for bacterial propulsion. Driven by a
View larger version transmembrane proton gradient
it rotates both CCW and CW;
the filament is helical and so converts torque
into thrust. The motor consists of stators or
Mot complexes (red) and a rotor or C ring
which also serves as the CCW
CW switch. As well as being
the organelle of motility, the flagellum is a
specialized type III export apparatus (lilac),
translocating subunits of its substrates (pale
blue) in an ATP-dependent manner across the
plane of the cytoplasmic membrane (CM) and
delivering them into a central channel in the
basal body-hook-filament structure where they
eventually reach their assembly point at the
distal end of the structure. PG, peptidoglycan
layer; OM, outer membrane.
FLAGELLAR PROTEINS TRAVEL THROUGH THEIR OWN STRUCTURE
The story of flagellar protein export begins with two reports published by
Iino in 1969 (12) and by Emerson et al. in 1970 (
; both reports presentedconvincing evidence that new flagellin monomers are added to growing
filaments at their distal end. It was known from structural studies in the
early 1960s (e.g., reference 22) that flagellar filaments were hollow
tubes, and we now know that this is true of the basal-body rod and the hook
also. Iino speculated on roles that the flagellar basal structure might
play: flagellin synthesis (where he was wrong [there is no flagellar
ribosome]), flagellar motion, and initiation of flagellar assembly.
Presciently, he suggested that "... accumulation of flagellin molecules in
the basal structure might cause the efficient diffusion or pushing of the
molecules through the hole to the tip of the flagellum."
AN ANTI-SIGMA FACTOR, A MURAMIDASE, AND A HOOK-LENGTH PROTEIN?
Most of the flagellar proteins that are exported are structural components,
but there are three interesting exceptions: One is the anti-sigma factor
that was alluded to earlier[---]when you no longer need it, get rid of it!
Another is a muramidase (2
. Why would the cell want a flagellum-specificmuramidase, and why would it want to export this enzyme? The answer, for
which we already have some experimental support, is almost certainly to
punch a hole in the peptidoglycan layer in the early stage of flagellar
morphogenesis, in order to let the nascent rod penetrate it. The third
example is a fascinating protein that is implicated in controlling the
length of the flagellar hook; it has only recently been shown that it is
exported, and how it functions in the process of length control is not well
understood.
THE FLAGELLAR EXPORT APPARATUS
After the papers reporting distal growth, there followed a long hiatus in
the investigation of flagellar protein export, perhaps because everyone was
too busy examining flagellar structure, composition, function, genetics,
etc. But as the function of more and more flagellar genes was established,
it became evident that there was a residuum with no known function. This
triggered (at least in my mind) the realization that there was also a
function, flagellar protein export, with no known genes. Maybe there was a
match? In 1991, we performed a very simple experiment that yielded the
first tentative identification of a few export component genes (36); one of
these components is an ATPase that, inexplicably, is related to the
catalytic subunit of the F0F1 ATPase (1, 36). Subsequently, the total
number of components of the flagellar export apparatus has risen to at
least 8 (26) and perhaps as high as 13 if one includes components that may
have specialized functions such as chaperones.
AN EXPORT APPARATUS WITHIN THE BASAL-BODY MS RING?
Six of the export components are integral membrane proteins, three of which
we have already shown to be associated with the basal body (9, 26). Given
that their substrates have to be delivered into the hollow channel in the
rod-hook-filament structure, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion
that the export apparatus resides in a patch of membrane within the central
pore of the MS ring. Soluble components, such as the ATPase, presumably
interact in a dynamic fashion with this membrane complex. Efforts to build
up evidence in support of this model represent an active area of current
research.
FLAGELLAR PROTEINS AND MANY VIRULENCE FACTORS ARE EXPORTED BY RELATED PATHWAYS
Bacteria export or secrete proteins by several different pathways (of which
perhaps the best known is the type II Sec-dependent general secretory
pathway or GSP (30), which entails signal peptide cleavage during
translocation of the protein across the cytoplasmic membrane). In the field
of bacterial pathogenesis, genes needed for export of virulence factors by
the so-called type III pathway (35), whose characteristics include a lack
of signal peptide cleavage, were rapidly being discovered during the 1990s,
and as their sequences and the sequences of putative flagellar export genes
became available, there was an almost overnight realization by many
laboratories that the flagellar export pathway and type III export pathways
for virulence factors are closely related (see, e.g., references 29 and
31). I consider, in fact, that the flagellar pathway is a type III pathway,
differing only in the nature of its export substrates and in the fact that
it operates via a working organelle of propulsion.
If the flagellar export apparatus resides within the basal body, is there a
corresponding structure for the virulence factor export apparatus? The
answer appears to be yes. Kubori et al. (17) have recently described the
existence in Salmonella of a "needle complex" that is constructed from
components of the export pathway and closely resembles a flagellar basal
body with an elongated rod (but of course no hook or filament!).
Ironically, S.-I. Aizawa (an author on the paper by Kubori et al.) and I
saw these structures in 1984 but dismissed them as being, perhaps,
virus-related[---]a clear illustration that (to misquote Pasteur) chance
disfavors the unprepared mind.
Which is the original pathway, the one for flagellar proteins or the one
for virulence factors? Flagella are very ancient organelles, predating by
far the targets for bacterial pathogenesis[---]plants, mammals, etc. So, it
seems to me that the rest of the type III pathways must have evolved from
the flagellar one.
FINAL COMMENTS
I leave the reader to contemplate the flagellum in all of its wonderful
complexity. It is an organelle that receives sensory information from the
cytoplasm, yet extends far beyond the cell itself; it rotates at high
speed, and switches rotation in a controlled fashion; at the same time, it
exports its own component proteins through itself and assembles them at its
distant tip; and together with its cognate sensory transduction system, it
generates a behavior, chemotaxis, that is critical for the cell's survival.
Although we have come a long way in our understanding of the flagellum,
much remains to be done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Work in my laboratory is supported in part by USPHS grants AI12202 and
GM40335.
FOOTNOTES
* Mailing address: Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry,
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8114. Phone: (203) 432-5590. Fax:
(203) 432-9782. E-mail: robert.macnab@yale.edu.
The views expressed in this Commentary do not necessarily reflect the views
of the journal or of ASM.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Journal of Bacteriology, December 1999, p. 7149-7153, Vol. 181, No. 23
0021-9193/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
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>These should be of interest to you.
naturally
Orr, mentioned, has not ackn my msg below.
> Suddenly, all the left wing newspaper are getting religion and publishing
>such stuff. Whatever is this world coming to?
They're not publishing traditional analyses of this phoney issue.
>Attachment converted: HD:In science, seeking Creator's i (PDF /CARO)
>(00059484)
Dear Prof Orr,
I've read with interest your recent NYer article. I hope
you get some stimulation from these few comments. Although I've been plain
in my criticisms, I can promise you polite discussion if you wish to take
up any of the disputed points.
Sincerely
R Mann
> http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact
> ANNALS OF SCIENCE DEVOLUTION
> by H. ALLEN ORR
> Why intelligent design isn't.
> Issue of 2005-05-30
>I.D. is not Biblical literalism. Unlike earlier generations of
>creationists - the so-called Young Earthers and scientific creationists
>- proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the universe was
>created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or that the
>fossil record was deposited during Noah's flood.
How could Orr know what they believe on these issues?
Main IDTer Phil Johnson (a polemical lawyer and main strategist of
the ill-conceived 'wedge' strategy) refuses to tell me how old he thinks
the Earth is. Behe, a Roman Catholic, presumably believes according to RC
doctrines (which are pretty sensible to my mind). Dembski, so far as I'm
aware, never answers q's about the nature, or even number, of designer(s).
There is no reason to believe that IDTers all or nearly all believe any one
answer to each of these respective q's.
>(Indeed, they shun the label "creationism" altogether.) Nor does I.D.
>flatly reject evolution: adherents freely admit that some evolutionary
>change occurred during the history of life on Earth. Although the
>movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various
>conservative Christian groups - and although I.D. plainly maintains that
>life was created - it is generally silent about the identity of the
>creator.
This should read 'creator(s)' - i.e the Christians and Judaists
among them are failing to admit to main doctrines of their religions,
starting with the First Commandment. Hard-core IDTers, notably Dembski,
refuse to say anything about the designer(s); they merely harp on the
inference of design, waiting for Dawkins etc to admit it. They have a long
wait in store, with such radically illogical operatives as Dawkins.
>by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection was a key force driving
>this evolution.
Natural selection is actually claimed only to narrow the variance
among the mutants, selecting against the less fit. This fails to explain
the emergence of new taxa, let alone their cooperation in ecology. It is
the biggest con-trick in intellectual history.
>Who says those thirty flagellar proteins weren't present in bacteria long
>before bacteria sported flagella? They may have been performing other
>jobs in the cell and only later got drafted into flagellum-building.
>Indeed, there's now strong evidence that several flagellar proteins once
>played roles in a type of molecular pump found in the membranes of
>bacterial cells.
Orr is either ignorant or dishonest on this point. The 'molecular
pump' he mentions, more precisely known as the TTSS, is hundreds of
millions of years newer than the flagellum. Its function is to inject
pathogens thru higher-cell membranes which didn't exist for most of the
aeons that bacteria have been squirting flagellin along their hollow
flagella using the basal structure from which the TTSS presumably evolved.
>because subsequent evolution builds on this addition, a part that was at
>first just advantageous might become essential. As this process is
>repeated through evolutionary time, more and more parts that were once
>merely beneficial become necessary. This idea was first set forth by H. J.
>Muller, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, in 1939, but it's a familiar
>process in the development of human technologies.
We add new parts like global-positioning systems to cars not because
they're necessary but because they're nice.
Those who claim evolution is blind, unplanned, not designed, cannot
validly use this analogy with technology which is planned.
>It's important to see that this process is thoroughly Darwinian: each
>change might well be small and each represents an improvement.
This is Broom's strong charge against Dawkins - the swindle of
assuming 'improvement' in creation of mutants when pretending that the
process is random & blind.
>The other leading theorist of the new creationism, William A. Dembski,
>holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, another in philosophy, and a master of
>divinity in theology. He has been a research professor in the conceptual
>foundations of science at Baylor University, and was recently appointed to
>the new Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological
>Seminary. (He is a longtime senior fellow at the Discovery Institute as
>well.) Dembski publishes at a staggering pace. His books - including
>"The Design Inference," "Intelligent Design," "No Free Lunch," and "The
>Design Revolution" - are generally well written and packed with
>provocative ideas.
I disagree; I'd call them suspiciously verbose & obscure.
>Dembski's arguments have been met with tremendous enthusiasm in the I.D.
>movement. In part, that's because an innumerate public is easily impressed
>by a bit of mathematics. Also, when Dembski is wielding his equations, he
>gets to play the part of the hard scientist busily correcting the errors
>of those soft-headed biologists. (Evolutionary biology actually features
>an extraordinarily sophisticated body of mathematical theory, a fact not
>widely known because neither of evolution's great popularizers - Richard
>Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould - did much math.)
Can it really be claimed that Dembski did much math, either?
>Organisms aren't trying to match any "independently given pattern":
>evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn't trying to get
>anywhere.
It is good to have this slogan spelt out; Orr should make clear
that it's a statement of faith, an axiom, rather than a fact.
>Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science: it has
>produced countless important experiments (let's re-create a natural
>species in the lab - yes, that's been done)
Again Orr is either drastically ignorant or dishonest. Nothing
remotely approaching the (re)creation of a natural sp in the lab has been
achieved, even by big-time businessman J Celera Venter who declared a few y
ago that he was setting out to do it.
>the idea that Darwinism is yoked to atheism, though popular, is also wrong.
This is a confusing statement. Prominent Christian biologists e.g
J E Morton, and indeed the whole church of Rome, have found Darwinism
proper to be fully consistent with monotheism. The problem arises when
Dawkins, L Wolpert, S Weinberg, etc claim that (neo)Darwinism fully
explains the creation of spp. and generally obviates religion.
>Pope John Paul II himself acknowledged, in a 1996 address to the
>Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that new research "leads to the
>recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis."
Right on J P. On the level of fact, evolution is proven. What is
in dispute is whether neoDarwinism provides a full explanation - a full
ascription of causes - for evolution.
>Intelligent design has come this far by faith.
- and so too has the atheistic version of Darwinism so crudely
asserted by Dawkins.
The only question is where you will place your faith. It is not
possible to live without faith. To take up Orr's word in his title, the
main devolution this past half-century has been the emergence of aggressive
crude atheists masquerading as intellectually fulfilled.
R
naturally
Orr, mentioned, has not ackn my msg below.
> Suddenly, all the left wing newspaper are getting religion and publishing
>such stuff. Whatever is this world coming to?
They're not publishing traditional analyses of this phoney issue.
>Attachment converted: HD:In science, seeking Creator's i (PDF /CARO)
>(00059484)
Dear Prof Orr,
I've read with interest your recent NYer article. I hope
you get some stimulation from these few comments. Although I've been plain
in my criticisms, I can promise you polite discussion if you wish to take
up any of the disputed points.
Sincerely
R Mann
> http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact
> ANNALS OF SCIENCE DEVOLUTION
> by H. ALLEN ORR
> Why intelligent design isn't.
> Issue of 2005-05-30
>I.D. is not Biblical literalism. Unlike earlier generations of
>creationists - the so-called Young Earthers and scientific creationists
>- proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the universe was
>created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or that the
>fossil record was deposited during Noah's flood.
How could Orr know what they believe on these issues?
Main IDTer Phil Johnson (a polemical lawyer and main strategist of
the ill-conceived 'wedge' strategy) refuses to tell me how old he thinks
the Earth is. Behe, a Roman Catholic, presumably believes according to RC
doctrines (which are pretty sensible to my mind). Dembski, so far as I'm
aware, never answers q's about the nature, or even number, of designer(s).
There is no reason to believe that IDTers all or nearly all believe any one
answer to each of these respective q's.
>(Indeed, they shun the label "creationism" altogether.) Nor does I.D.
>flatly reject evolution: adherents freely admit that some evolutionary
>change occurred during the history of life on Earth. Although the
>movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various
>conservative Christian groups - and although I.D. plainly maintains that
>life was created - it is generally silent about the identity of the
>creator.
This should read 'creator(s)' - i.e the Christians and Judaists
among them are failing to admit to main doctrines of their religions,
starting with the First Commandment. Hard-core IDTers, notably Dembski,
refuse to say anything about the designer(s); they merely harp on the
inference of design, waiting for Dawkins etc to admit it. They have a long
wait in store, with such radically illogical operatives as Dawkins.
>by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection was a key force driving
>this evolution.
Natural selection is actually claimed only to narrow the variance
among the mutants, selecting against the less fit. This fails to explain
the emergence of new taxa, let alone their cooperation in ecology. It is
the biggest con-trick in intellectual history.
>Who says those thirty flagellar proteins weren't present in bacteria long
>before bacteria sported flagella? They may have been performing other
>jobs in the cell and only later got drafted into flagellum-building.
>Indeed, there's now strong evidence that several flagellar proteins once
>played roles in a type of molecular pump found in the membranes of
>bacterial cells.
Orr is either ignorant or dishonest on this point. The 'molecular
pump' he mentions, more precisely known as the TTSS, is hundreds of
millions of years newer than the flagellum. Its function is to inject
pathogens thru higher-cell membranes which didn't exist for most of the
aeons that bacteria have been squirting flagellin along their hollow
flagella using the basal structure from which the TTSS presumably evolved.
>because subsequent evolution builds on this addition, a part that was at
>first just advantageous might become essential. As this process is
>repeated through evolutionary time, more and more parts that were once
>merely beneficial become necessary. This idea was first set forth by H. J.
>Muller, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, in 1939, but it's a familiar
>process in the development of human technologies.
We add new parts like global-positioning systems to cars not because
they're necessary but because they're nice.
Those who claim evolution is blind, unplanned, not designed, cannot
validly use this analogy with technology which is planned.
>It's important to see that this process is thoroughly Darwinian: each
>change might well be small and each represents an improvement.
This is Broom's strong charge against Dawkins - the swindle of
assuming 'improvement' in creation of mutants when pretending that the
process is random & blind.
>The other leading theorist of the new creationism, William A. Dembski,
>holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, another in philosophy, and a master of
>divinity in theology. He has been a research professor in the conceptual
>foundations of science at Baylor University, and was recently appointed to
>the new Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological
>Seminary. (He is a longtime senior fellow at the Discovery Institute as
>well.) Dembski publishes at a staggering pace. His books - including
>"The Design Inference," "Intelligent Design," "No Free Lunch," and "The
>Design Revolution" - are generally well written and packed with
>provocative ideas.
I disagree; I'd call them suspiciously verbose & obscure.
>Dembski's arguments have been met with tremendous enthusiasm in the I.D.
>movement. In part, that's because an innumerate public is easily impressed
>by a bit of mathematics. Also, when Dembski is wielding his equations, he
>gets to play the part of the hard scientist busily correcting the errors
>of those soft-headed biologists. (Evolutionary biology actually features
>an extraordinarily sophisticated body of mathematical theory, a fact not
>widely known because neither of evolution's great popularizers - Richard
>Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould - did much math.)
Can it really be claimed that Dembski did much math, either?
>Organisms aren't trying to match any "independently given pattern":
>evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn't trying to get
>anywhere.
It is good to have this slogan spelt out; Orr should make clear
that it's a statement of faith, an axiom, rather than a fact.
>Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science: it has
>produced countless important experiments (let's re-create a natural
>species in the lab - yes, that's been done)
Again Orr is either drastically ignorant or dishonest. Nothing
remotely approaching the (re)creation of a natural sp in the lab has been
achieved, even by big-time businessman J Celera Venter who declared a few y
ago that he was setting out to do it.
>the idea that Darwinism is yoked to atheism, though popular, is also wrong.
This is a confusing statement. Prominent Christian biologists e.g
J E Morton, and indeed the whole church of Rome, have found Darwinism
proper to be fully consistent with monotheism. The problem arises when
Dawkins, L Wolpert, S Weinberg, etc claim that (neo)Darwinism fully
explains the creation of spp. and generally obviates religion.
>Pope John Paul II himself acknowledged, in a 1996 address to the
>Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that new research "leads to the
>recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis."
Right on J P. On the level of fact, evolution is proven. What is
in dispute is whether neoDarwinism provides a full explanation - a full
ascription of causes - for evolution.
>Intelligent design has come this far by faith.
- and so too has the atheistic version of Darwinism so crudely
asserted by Dawkins.
The only question is where you will place your faith. It is not
possible to live without faith. To take up Orr's word in his title, the
main devolution this past half-century has been the emergence of aggressive
crude atheists masquerading as intellectually fulfilled.
R
06/11/05
Darwinian brand of evolution is becoming increasingly vulnerable [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 11:18:30 AM
Forbes.com - Magazine Article
Current Events
Thoughts on the Existence of God
Paul Johnson, 06.20.05
Of all the fundamentalist groups at large in the world today, the
Darwinians seem to me the most objectionable. They are just as strident
and closed to argument as Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, but unlike
those two groups the Darwinians enjoy intellectual respectability.
Darwinians and their allies dominate the scientific establishments of the
West. They rule the campus. Their militant brand of atheism makes them
natural allies of the philosophical atheists who control most college
philosophy faculties. They dominate the leading scientific magazines and
prevent their critics and opponents from getting a hearing, and they secure
the best slots on TV. Yet the Darwinian brand of evolution is becoming
increasingly vulnerable as the progress of science reveals its weaknesses.
One day, perhaps soon, it will collapse in ruins.
Weak Underpinnings
Few people today doubt the concept of evolution as such. What seems
mistaken is Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, whereby species
evolve by infinitesimally small stages. Neither Darwin nor any of his
followers--nor his noisy champions today--was a historian. None of them
thought of time historically or made their calculations chronologically.
Had they done so, they'd have seen that natural selection works much too
slowly to fit into the time line allowed by the ages of the universe and
our own planet. The process must somehow have been accelerated in jumps or
by catastrophes or outside intervention.
{tho' I've not seen Bird's work, many clever people have tried to
estimate whether there has been enough time for darwinian evolution. The
usual result is such huge uncertainties as to render the exercise
inconclusive.
But I think the error is not merely quantitative but worse -
qualitative: as I put it, megatime is no substitute for purpose in the
creation of coordinated working ecological order. - RM }
There are five other weaknesses the Darwinians cannot explain away either.
The best summary of these can be found in Richard J. Bird's Chaos and Life
(Columbia University Press), page 53. Warning: This book is tough going
but will reward the persistent.
If the theory of natural selection is incorrect, then the Darwinians' view
that there is no need or place for God in the universe is itself weakened,
though not necessarily overthrown. Physics, however, increasingly tends to
suggest that there is a God role, particularly with regard to the origin of
the universe. We now know this occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, and
our knowledge of what happened immediately afterward is becoming
increasingly detailed, down to the last microsecond.
Few now doubt there was a Big Bang. We know when it occurred and what
followed. But we are just as far as ever from understanding why it
happened or what--or who--caused it. Indeed, all calculations about the Big
Bang are based on the
assumption that nothing preceded it. It took place in an infinite vacuum.
There was no process of ignition, or traces of it would have been left.
Hence, this fundamental happening in history seems to conflict with all the
laws of physics and our notions of how the universe operates. It was an
event without a cause.
It also produced something out of nothing. More: It produced everything
out of nothing. The expansion of the universe has proceeded ever since,
and all the creative processes involved in it--including Earth and homo
sapiens--were written into the laws laid down in that first tremendous
explosion. We do not have to believe in an entirely deterministic universe
to see that the first microsecond of history foreshadowed everything that
has followed over the last 13-plus billion years.
If the laws of physics cannot explain how and why this event occurred, we
must invoke metaphysics. And that means some kind of divine force. I've
been rereading what Sir Isaac Newton wrote about God in the second edition
of his Principia (1713). Newton saw God not as a perfect being--or any
kind of being at all--but as a power, what he termed a "dominion." "We
reverence and adore Him on account of His dominion," he wrote. This power
was exercised "in a manner not at all human Š in a manner utterly unknown
to us." Newton knew God only through His works. "He is utterly void of
all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard,
nor touched." Our knowledge of Him is limited "by His most wise and
excellent contrivances of things."
"... and the Word Was God"
This notion of God as an impersonal power or force, wholly outside the laws
of physics, fits with the role assigned him as author of the Big Bang. And
since that primal event there has been no need of further intervention by
God in the affairs of the universe.
Or has there? I've also been reading Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of
Language (Metropolitan Books) and reflecting on the nature of words.
Speech is the greatest of man's inventions and the mother of all others.
Yet, in truth, nobody invented it. Its emergence and evolution proceeded
in ways that are still almost a total mystery. It is as close to a miracle
as anything associated with human beings.
Both the Hebrews and the Greeks, in different ways, believed there was
something divine about "the word," or logos. The Greeks thought the word
was the abstract principle of reason exhibited by an orderly universe. The
Jews thought it the image of God, the beginning and origin of all things.
It is possible, then, that the giving of the word to humanity was the
second intervention of the metaphysical force or dominion in the process of
history. That, I think, is the conclusion I have come to in these
difficult matters. What will be the third, I wonder?
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author; Lee Kuan Yew, minister
mentor of Singapore; and Ernesto Zedillo, director, Yale Center for the
Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico; in addition to Forbes
Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. To see past
Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.
Current Events
Thoughts on the Existence of God
Paul Johnson, 06.20.05
Of all the fundamentalist groups at large in the world today, the
Darwinians seem to me the most objectionable. They are just as strident
and closed to argument as Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, but unlike
those two groups the Darwinians enjoy intellectual respectability.
Darwinians and their allies dominate the scientific establishments of the
West. They rule the campus. Their militant brand of atheism makes them
natural allies of the philosophical atheists who control most college
philosophy faculties. They dominate the leading scientific magazines and
prevent their critics and opponents from getting a hearing, and they secure
the best slots on TV. Yet the Darwinian brand of evolution is becoming
increasingly vulnerable as the progress of science reveals its weaknesses.
One day, perhaps soon, it will collapse in ruins.
Weak Underpinnings
Few people today doubt the concept of evolution as such. What seems
mistaken is Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, whereby species
evolve by infinitesimally small stages. Neither Darwin nor any of his
followers--nor his noisy champions today--was a historian. None of them
thought of time historically or made their calculations chronologically.
Had they done so, they'd have seen that natural selection works much too
slowly to fit into the time line allowed by the ages of the universe and
our own planet. The process must somehow have been accelerated in jumps or
by catastrophes or outside intervention.
{tho' I've not seen Bird's work, many clever people have tried to
estimate whether there has been enough time for darwinian evolution. The
usual result is such huge uncertainties as to render the exercise
inconclusive.
But I think the error is not merely quantitative but worse -
qualitative: as I put it, megatime is no substitute for purpose in the
creation of coordinated working ecological order. - RM }
There are five other weaknesses the Darwinians cannot explain away either.
The best summary of these can be found in Richard J. Bird's Chaos and Life
(Columbia University Press), page 53. Warning: This book is tough going
but will reward the persistent.
If the theory of natural selection is incorrect, then the Darwinians' view
that there is no need or place for God in the universe is itself weakened,
though not necessarily overthrown. Physics, however, increasingly tends to
suggest that there is a God role, particularly with regard to the origin of
the universe. We now know this occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, and
our knowledge of what happened immediately afterward is becoming
increasingly detailed, down to the last microsecond.
Few now doubt there was a Big Bang. We know when it occurred and what
followed. But we are just as far as ever from understanding why it
happened or what--or who--caused it. Indeed, all calculations about the Big
Bang are based on the
assumption that nothing preceded it. It took place in an infinite vacuum.
There was no process of ignition, or traces of it would have been left.
Hence, this fundamental happening in history seems to conflict with all the
laws of physics and our notions of how the universe operates. It was an
event without a cause.
It also produced something out of nothing. More: It produced everything
out of nothing. The expansion of the universe has proceeded ever since,
and all the creative processes involved in it--including Earth and homo
sapiens--were written into the laws laid down in that first tremendous
explosion. We do not have to believe in an entirely deterministic universe
to see that the first microsecond of history foreshadowed everything that
has followed over the last 13-plus billion years.
If the laws of physics cannot explain how and why this event occurred, we
must invoke metaphysics. And that means some kind of divine force. I've
been rereading what Sir Isaac Newton wrote about God in the second edition
of his Principia (1713). Newton saw God not as a perfect being--or any
kind of being at all--but as a power, what he termed a "dominion." "We
reverence and adore Him on account of His dominion," he wrote. This power
was exercised "in a manner not at all human Š in a manner utterly unknown
to us." Newton knew God only through His works. "He is utterly void of
all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard,
nor touched." Our knowledge of Him is limited "by His most wise and
excellent contrivances of things."
"... and the Word Was God"
This notion of God as an impersonal power or force, wholly outside the laws
of physics, fits with the role assigned him as author of the Big Bang. And
since that primal event there has been no need of further intervention by
God in the affairs of the universe.
Or has there? I've also been reading Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of
Language (Metropolitan Books) and reflecting on the nature of words.
Speech is the greatest of man's inventions and the mother of all others.
Yet, in truth, nobody invented it. Its emergence and evolution proceeded
in ways that are still almost a total mystery. It is as close to a miracle
as anything associated with human beings.
Both the Hebrews and the Greeks, in different ways, believed there was
something divine about "the word," or logos. The Greeks thought the word
was the abstract principle of reason exhibited by an orderly universe. The
Jews thought it the image of God, the beginning and origin of all things.
It is possible, then, that the giving of the word to humanity was the
second intervention of the metaphysical force or dominion in the process of
history. That, I think, is the conclusion I have come to in these
difficult matters. What will be the third, I wonder?
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author; Lee Kuan Yew, minister
mentor of Singapore; and Ernesto Zedillo, director, Yale Center for the
Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico; in addition to Forbes
Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. To see past
Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.
05/27/05
May 2005
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A
thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to
discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task
of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand
words elsewhere - some at my page
http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis &
Schwartz 199 of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus,
family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large
body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4
x 10^9 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 10^9 y,
mammals 2 x 10^8 y, and man somewhere in the region 10^6 -10^5 y BP. Thus,
insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes,
evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over
billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first.
However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has
been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes
assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all
categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause,
originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution
theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution
theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution
theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's
period in the development of science he was in no position to understand
chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I
précis and commend for wide spreading:
* * *
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The *material* causes include the grape juice and the yeast,
materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance
claret.
The *efficient* cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the
making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and
some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some
minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a *final* cause: a person (named
Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances
which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the
purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient
cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of
the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's *formal* cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in
Babich's mind.
* * *
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it
asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again
... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is
suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism)
will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in
terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes,
this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas
covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?"
"Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and
others."
I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the
most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break
the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, IDT®, and
neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains
change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by
natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting
against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and
efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an
organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is
known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the
several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of
proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As
Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause
other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or
vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person
implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things
to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which
IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material &
efficient causes can suffice to explain life.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the
universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause.
The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in
the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed
this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?"
disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of
ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution are
always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause?
A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological
convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes,
but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context
of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be
readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so
misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no
tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical
elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species
of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes
- including energy conversions - which result in new physical
situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science
can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific
theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate
in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains
to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of
nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation
- is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology
will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal
causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's
process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the
fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These
very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and
were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by
the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as
literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's
quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect
compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some
infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame
performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back
as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we,
IDTers? And I challenge Dawkins to a public debate about his depauperate
2-causes philosophy.
= = =
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn
IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames &
Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A
thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to
discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.
A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task
of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand
words elsewhere - some at my page
http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )
1. Fact as distinct from Theory
The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis &
Schwartz 199
of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus,family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large
body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4
x 10^9 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 10^9 y,
mammals 2 x 10^8 y, and man somewhere in the region 10^6 -10^5 y BP. Thus,
insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes,
evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over
billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first.
However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has
been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes
assumed.
2. Theory
To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all
categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause,
originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution
theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution
theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution
theory.
The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's
period in the development of science he was in no position to understand
chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I
précis and commend for wide spreading:
* * *
What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The *material* causes include the grape juice and the yeast,
materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance
claret.
The *efficient* cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the
making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and
some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some
minor chemicals characteristic of claret.
But my bottle of claret has also a *final* cause: a person (named
Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances
which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the
purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient
cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of
the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.
Aristotle's *formal* cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in
Babich's mind.
* * *
Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it
asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again
... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is
suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism)
will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in
terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes,
this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas
covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?"
"Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and
others."
I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the
most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break
the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, IDT®, and
neoDarwinism.
NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains
change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by
natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting
against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and
efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.
What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an
organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is
known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the
several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of
proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As
Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause
other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or
vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person
implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things
to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which
IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material &
efficient causes can suffice to explain life.
Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the
universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause.
The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in
the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed
this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?"
disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of
ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution are
always laden with the language of purpose.
How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause?
A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological
convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes,
but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context
of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be
readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so
misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no
tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.
If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical
elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species
of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes
- including energy conversions - which result in new physical
situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science
can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific
theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate
in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains
to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of
nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation
- is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology
will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal
causes in evolution.
The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's
process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the
fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These
very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and
were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by
the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as
literally contradicting science.
Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's
quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect
compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some
infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame
performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back
as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we,
IDTers? And I challenge Dawkins to a public debate about his depauperate
2-causes philosophy.
= = =
Readings
Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn
IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames &
Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/005/565uukdg.asp?pg=1
The Islamization of French Schools
A disturbing report is leaked.
by Olivier Guitta
The Weekly Standard
9 May 2005 V.10 (32 )
AN OFFICIAL REPORT DEALING WITH religious expression in French schools
has become a must read for anyone interested in the Islamization of
France. Written under the auspices of the top national education
official, Jean-Pierre Obin, the report was not initially released by the
Ministry of Education. But it was leaked on the Internet in March and
now can be found in its entirety at www.proche-orient.info and other
websites.
The 37-page report is the product of a study carried out between October
2003 and May 2004 by a team of 10 inspectors, including Obin. In
addition to examining the recent literature on religion and schools in
France, they visited 61 academic and vocational high schools in 24
départements, chosen not as a cross-section of public schools, but
rather as schools typical of those where religious expression has become
a problem because of the high concentration of ethnic and religious
minorities. Many are located in ethnically segregated neighborhoods now
often referred to, the report says, "by analogy with the United States,
as 'ghettos.'"
In each school, inspectors interviewed the management team, staff, and
teachers, as well as lay people from the community, including parents,
social workers, and elected officials. In addition, regional education
officials were asked to submit accounts of their experiences in primary
schools.
Amid much diversity--some of the schools were rural, some urban; some
had fairly homogeneous student populations, others immigrants from many
different countries--the inspectors report two consistent findings: a
marked increase in religious expression, especially Muslim expression,
in schools; and denial on the part of officials at all levels--from the
classroom, to the principal's office, to the regional
administration--that this phenomenon is occurring.
The researchers began by studying the neighborhoods surrounding the
schools. Mostly, these were depressed areas abandoned by anyone with a
secure income. The report describes the flight of "French" residents and
"European" shops--sometimes after they have been the targets of
violence--in tandem with the arrival of immigrants and the collapse of
real estate values.
Scores of informants told the Obin team that these neighborhoods were
undergoing a "rapid and recent swing" toward Islamization, thanks to the
growing influence of religious activists. These young men, intense and
highly intellectual in their piety, are sometimes former residents of
the neighborhood who have been to prison, where they were converted to
Islam. More often, however, they are educated men with degrees from
universities in France, North Africa, or the Middle East. They have come
to be known as "bearded ones" (distinctive beards are a marker of Muslim
purists and extremists--think of bin Laden) or "big brothers" (a name
evocative of the worldwide jihadist movement's Muslim Brotherhood), and
they offer young people a proud identity--Muslim--in place of the dismal
identity of unassimilated immigrant.
The biggest social change entailed by this Islamization, Obin reports,
is a deterioration in the position of females. Teenage girls are
forbidden to play sports and are constantly watched by an informal
religious police made up of young men, sometimes their own younger
brothers. Makeup, skirts, and form-fitting dresses are forbidden; dark,
loose trousers are the strongly recommended attire. To go to the
blackboard in front of a class, some Muslim girls put on long coats.
Often, they are forced to wear the headscarf, or hijab, and forbidden to
frequent coed movie theaters, community centers, and gyms, or even to go
out at all on weekends. Lots of young women were afraid to tell the Obin
team what punishments are in store for them if they disobey. Not only
female students but also female teachers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike,
are frequently subjected to sexist remarks by male teenagers.
In primary schools, the report cites instances of first grade boys'
refusing to participate in coed activities and Muslim children's
refusing to sing, dance, or draw a face. In one school, restrooms were
segregated: some for Muslim students and some for "French." Some
lunchrooms were segregated, by section or table. Some students required
halal meat; at one school, the principal provided only halal meat for
everyone.
With Muslim proselytizing on the rise, the report states that students
are under pressure to observe Ramadan, the annual month during which
Muslims fast during the day. In some high schools, it is simply
impossible for Muslim kids not to join in, whether they like it or not.
Obin cites one student who tried to commit suicide because of
intimidation and threats from other kids over this issue. Obin also
emphasizes that many conversions to Islam are taking place under duress.
Inevitably, the report records rampant "Judeophobia," to use the term in
vogue in France. Among even the youngest students, the term "Jew" has
become the all-purpose insult. Obin deplores the fact that principals
and teachers do not strenuously object to this, treating it simply as
part of the youth culture. Even more serious is the increase in assaults
on Jews or those presumed to be Jewish. Usually the assailants are
Muslim students. Sometimes the victims are, too: One Turkish high-school
girl was relentlessly harassed and bullied at school because her country
is an ally of Israel. The section of the report on anti-Semitism winds
up with this sad conclusion: In France today, Jewish kids are not
welcome at every school. Many are forced to switch schools or even
conceal their identity to escape anti-Semitism.
According to the report, Muslim students perceive a large gap between
the French and themselves. Even though most of the Muslim kids are
actually French citizens, they see themselves as Muslims first, and more
and more of them hail Osama bin Laden as their hero. In their eyes, he
represents a victorious Islam triumphing over the West.
FINALLY, THE REPORT DISCUSSES a host of difficulties teachers encounter
in dealing with specific subjects in the classroom. Most Muslim kids
refuse to participate in sports or swimming, the girls out of modesty,
the boys because they do not want to swim in "girls' water" or
"non-Muslim water." When it comes to literature, French philosophers
such as Voltaire and Rousseau are very often boycotted because of their
supposed Islamophobia. Molière, the father of French satiric comedy, is
among the writers most often boycotted.
As for history, Muslim students object to its Judeo-Christian bias and
blatant falsehood. They loudly protest the Crusades, and commonly deny
the Holocaust. Under the circumstances, many teachers censor their own
material, often skipping entire topics, like the history of Israel or of
Christianity. The report cites one teacher who keeps a Koran on his desk
for reference whenever a thorny issue arises. It cites Muslim students
who refuse to use the plus sign in mathematics because it looks like a
cross. Field trips, especially to churches, cathedrals, and monasteries,
are boycotted.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, these pathologies are now present
across France. Muslim "ghettos" are found not only in the suburbs of
major cities but in towns and villages as well. Obin describes them as
islands of counterculture, sealed off and opposed to modern democratic
society.
Summing up, Obin explains his disturbing findings as the result
primarily of indoctrination orchestrated over years by international
Muslim organizations. From an early age, students are taught what to
think, what to believe, and to regard their school teachers as liars.
The goal of the radical groups seeking to segregate Muslim communities
and denouncing integration as oppression, Obin writes, is to take the
Muslim residents of France out of the French nation and make them think
of themselves as part of the international Muslim community.
In a particularly interesting observation, Obin notes that it is the
schools that have reached accommodations with the extremists that are
most plagued by violence against girls, Jews, and teachers. Schools that
refuse to tolerate the intolerable have coped much better with the
problems described in the report. As a result, Obin calls for a policy
of no compromise with Islamist demands.
Still unclear is how French educators can be expected to hang tough
while their government refuses to own up to the problem--as demonstrated
by its failure to make public the Obin report. With the Muslim share of
the French population already over 10 percent and growing, the schools
are only the tip of the iceberg.
Olivier Guitta is a freelance writer specializing in the Middle East and
Europe.
The Islamization of French Schools
A disturbing report is leaked.
by Olivier Guitta
The Weekly Standard
9 May 2005 V.10 (32 )
AN OFFICIAL REPORT DEALING WITH religious expression in French schools
has become a must read for anyone interested in the Islamization of
France. Written under the auspices of the top national education
official, Jean-Pierre Obin, the report was not initially released by the
Ministry of Education. But it was leaked on the Internet in March and
now can be found in its entirety at www.proche-orient.info and other
websites.
The 37-page report is the product of a study carried out between October
2003 and May 2004 by a team of 10 inspectors, including Obin. In
addition to examining the recent literature on religion and schools in
France, they visited 61 academic and vocational high schools in 24
départements, chosen not as a cross-section of public schools, but
rather as schools typical of those where religious expression has become
a problem because of the high concentration of ethnic and religious
minorities. Many are located in ethnically segregated neighborhoods now
often referred to, the report says, "by analogy with the United States,
as 'ghettos.'"
In each school, inspectors interviewed the management team, staff, and
teachers, as well as lay people from the community, including parents,
social workers, and elected officials. In addition, regional education
officials were asked to submit accounts of their experiences in primary
schools.
Amid much diversity--some of the schools were rural, some urban; some
had fairly homogeneous student populations, others immigrants from many
different countries--the inspectors report two consistent findings: a
marked increase in religious expression, especially Muslim expression,
in schools; and denial on the part of officials at all levels--from the
classroom, to the principal's office, to the regional
administration--that this phenomenon is occurring.
The researchers began by studying the neighborhoods surrounding the
schools. Mostly, these were depressed areas abandoned by anyone with a
secure income. The report describes the flight of "French" residents and
"European" shops--sometimes after they have been the targets of
violence--in tandem with the arrival of immigrants and the collapse of
real estate values.
Scores of informants told the Obin team that these neighborhoods were
undergoing a "rapid and recent swing" toward Islamization, thanks to the
growing influence of religious activists. These young men, intense and
highly intellectual in their piety, are sometimes former residents of
the neighborhood who have been to prison, where they were converted to
Islam. More often, however, they are educated men with degrees from
universities in France, North Africa, or the Middle East. They have come
to be known as "bearded ones" (distinctive beards are a marker of Muslim
purists and extremists--think of bin Laden) or "big brothers" (a name
evocative of the worldwide jihadist movement's Muslim Brotherhood), and
they offer young people a proud identity--Muslim--in place of the dismal
identity of unassimilated immigrant.
The biggest social change entailed by this Islamization, Obin reports,
is a deterioration in the position of females. Teenage girls are
forbidden to play sports and are constantly watched by an informal
religious police made up of young men, sometimes their own younger
brothers. Makeup, skirts, and form-fitting dresses are forbidden; dark,
loose trousers are the strongly recommended attire. To go to the
blackboard in front of a class, some Muslim girls put on long coats.
Often, they are forced to wear the headscarf, or hijab, and forbidden to
frequent coed movie theaters, community centers, and gyms, or even to go
out at all on weekends. Lots of young women were afraid to tell the Obin
team what punishments are in store for them if they disobey. Not only
female students but also female teachers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike,
are frequently subjected to sexist remarks by male teenagers.
In primary schools, the report cites instances of first grade boys'
refusing to participate in coed activities and Muslim children's
refusing to sing, dance, or draw a face. In one school, restrooms were
segregated: some for Muslim students and some for "French." Some
lunchrooms were segregated, by section or table. Some students required
halal meat; at one school, the principal provided only halal meat for
everyone.
With Muslim proselytizing on the rise, the report states that students
are under pressure to observe Ramadan, the annual month during which
Muslims fast during the day. In some high schools, it is simply
impossible for Muslim kids not to join in, whether they like it or not.
Obin cites one student who tried to commit suicide because of
intimidation and threats from other kids over this issue. Obin also
emphasizes that many conversions to Islam are taking place under duress.
Inevitably, the report records rampant "Judeophobia," to use the term in
vogue in France. Among even the youngest students, the term "Jew" has
become the all-purpose insult. Obin deplores the fact that principals
and teachers do not strenuously object to this, treating it simply as
part of the youth culture. Even more serious is the increase in assaults
on Jews or those presumed to be Jewish. Usually the assailants are
Muslim students. Sometimes the victims are, too: One Turkish high-school
girl was relentlessly harassed and bullied at school because her country
is an ally of Israel. The section of the report on anti-Semitism winds
up with this sad conclusion: In France today, Jewish kids are not
welcome at every school. Many are forced to switch schools or even
conceal their identity to escape anti-Semitism.
According to the report, Muslim students perceive a large gap between
the French and themselves. Even though most of the Muslim kids are
actually French citizens, they see themselves as Muslims first, and more
and more of them hail Osama bin Laden as their hero. In their eyes, he
represents a victorious Islam triumphing over the West.
FINALLY, THE REPORT DISCUSSES a host of difficulties teachers encounter
in dealing with specific subjects in the classroom. Most Muslim kids
refuse to participate in sports or swimming, the girls out of modesty,
the boys because they do not want to swim in "girls' water" or
"non-Muslim water." When it comes to literature, French philosophers
such as Voltaire and Rousseau are very often boycotted because of their
supposed Islamophobia. Molière, the father of French satiric comedy, is
among the writers most often boycotted.
As for history, Muslim students object to its Judeo-Christian bias and
blatant falsehood. They loudly protest the Crusades, and commonly deny
the Holocaust. Under the circumstances, many teachers censor their own
material, often skipping entire topics, like the history of Israel or of
Christianity. The report cites one teacher who keeps a Koran on his desk
for reference whenever a thorny issue arises. It cites Muslim students
who refuse to use the plus sign in mathematics because it looks like a
cross. Field trips, especially to churches, cathedrals, and monasteries,
are boycotted.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, these pathologies are now present
across France. Muslim "ghettos" are found not only in the suburbs of
major cities but in towns and villages as well. Obin describes them as
islands of counterculture, sealed off and opposed to modern democratic
society.
Summing up, Obin explains his disturbing findings as the result
primarily of indoctrination orchestrated over years by international
Muslim organizations. From an early age, students are taught what to
think, what to believe, and to regard their school teachers as liars.
The goal of the radical groups seeking to segregate Muslim communities
and denouncing integration as oppression, Obin writes, is to take the
Muslim residents of France out of the French nation and make them think
of themselves as part of the international Muslim community.
In a particularly interesting observation, Obin notes that it is the
schools that have reached accommodations with the extremists that are
most plagued by violence against girls, Jews, and teachers. Schools that
refuse to tolerate the intolerable have coped much better with the
problems described in the report. As a result, Obin calls for a policy
of no compromise with Islamist demands.
Still unclear is how French educators can be expected to hang tough
while their government refuses to own up to the problem--as demonstrated
by its failure to make public the Obin report. With the Muslim share of
the French population already over 10 percent and growing, the schools
are only the tip of the iceberg.
Olivier Guitta is a freelance writer specializing in the Middle East and
Europe.
05/21/05
I insert some criticisms. As almost always in USA media, confusion is significant if not reigning.
R
WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIAN MODERATES?
SAM SMITH
Progressive® Review
May 9, 2005
The failure of Christian moderates to take on publicly religious extremists
who claim the same Bible and theology sadly brings to mind the failure of
liberals to take on Joseph McCarthy. As with McCarthyism, extremism
thrives in the valley of fear and silence.
In McCarthy's case it was some New England Republicans --- not liberals ---
who finally stood up effectively against McCarthy. They, like the
liberals, had kept silent too long, but at least they finally got the
courage to speak out.
Christian moderates need to look no further back than the civil rights
movement for a model of reaction. For it was some of the same sects ---
including the white southern Baptists --- who most fiercely opposed
desegregation. Judge Thomas P. Brady, a deacon and Sunday school teacher
at a Baptist church in Mississippi described the Supreme Court's
desegregation decision this way:
"Black Monday ranks in importance with July 4th, 1776.... May 17th, 1954 is
the date upon which the declaration of socialistic doctrine was officially
proclaimed throughout this nation. It was on Black Monday that the
judicial branch of our government usurped the sacred privilege and right of
the respective states of this union to educate their youth. This
usurpation constitutes the greatest travesty of the American Constitution
and jurisprudence in the history of this nation."
As late as 1997, Jim Wallis could write in Sojourners that:
"White evangelicalism simply has been wrong on the issue of race for a very
long time. Indeed, conservative white Christians have served as a bastion
of racial segregation and a bulwark against racial justice efforts for
decades, in the South and throughout the country.
"All during the civil rights struggle, the vast majority of white
evangelicals and their churches were on the wrong side --- the wrong side
of the truth, the Bible, and the gospel."
These are the same voices that have transferred their hatred and targets
for dominance from blacks to women and gays, who want their mean myopia to
be national policy, and who blaspheme the very icon they profess to worship
by their cruelty, prejudice and intolerance.
There are two big differences, however. The first is that the media refers
to and pictures these extremists not as bigots but as "people of faith."
To a remarkable degree, the press has accepted the virulent public policies
of the Christian right as worthy of respect and even admiration.
The second differences is that the voice of rational, moderate Christianity
is largely silent. Not only is there no Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
offering an appealing alternative to hate [I see - so Rev Al Sharplin etc
offer hate?] , but white bishops from the Episcopal Church are not being
pictured with locked arms walking with the weak towards freedom. There are
few coalitions of conscience in major cities and there is a lack of
sermons, donations, and activism.
By the 1960s, the reactionary religious right found itself with a vigorous
opponent helping to open the doors of hope it was blockading. Even the
Catholic Church was better known for its worker priests and liberation
theology than for its opposition to abortion. The secular and the
religious had joined in making America a better land. [NB - failure to
oppose abortion makes a better land, on the assumption of this Smith]
Nothing similar is happening now. This is not a sudden transition. The
observant have noted the retreat from progressive social action on the part
of moderate Christian churches over the past couple of decades. Just one
small example: how often have you seen a moderate Christian service or
commentator on television? [I see - so absence of a cause or viewpoint
from TV could not be a choice of the infotainment producers? Principled
informed objections to GM are absent from TV because I and other scientists
who agree with me lack courage to speak out??]
But, as with McCarthyism, it is better to be late than not to act at all.
Faced with the rise of the American Taliban [this is an outrageous
propagandistic term which almost alone would serve to condemn Smith as a
bigot], it is past time for moderate Christians to return their own faith
to honor and social good rather than to let it be defined by the tainted
turmoil of false prophets. Humanists and free thinkers can't do all the
work. These moderate Christians must stand up to our contemporary
religious bigots just as their predecessors did during the civil rights
struggle. And time is running out.
R
WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIAN MODERATES?
SAM SMITH
Progressive® Review
May 9, 2005
The failure of Christian moderates to take on publicly religious extremists
who claim the same Bible and theology sadly brings to mind the failure of
liberals to take on Joseph McCarthy. As with McCarthyism, extremism
thrives in the valley of fear and silence.
In McCarthy's case it was some New England Republicans --- not liberals ---
who finally stood up effectively against McCarthy. They, like the
liberals, had kept silent too long, but at least they finally got the
courage to speak out.
Christian moderates need to look no further back than the civil rights
movement for a model of reaction. For it was some of the same sects ---
including the white southern Baptists --- who most fiercely opposed
desegregation. Judge Thomas P. Brady, a deacon and Sunday school teacher
at a Baptist church in Mississippi described the Supreme Court's
desegregation decision this way:
"Black Monday ranks in importance with July 4th, 1776.... May 17th, 1954 is
the date upon which the declaration of socialistic doctrine was officially
proclaimed throughout this nation. It was on Black Monday that the
judicial branch of our government usurped the sacred privilege and right of
the respective states of this union to educate their youth. This
usurpation constitutes the greatest travesty of the American Constitution
and jurisprudence in the history of this nation."
As late as 1997, Jim Wallis could write in Sojourners that:
"White evangelicalism simply has been wrong on the issue of race for a very
long time. Indeed, conservative white Christians have served as a bastion
of racial segregation and a bulwark against racial justice efforts for
decades, in the South and throughout the country.
"All during the civil rights struggle, the vast majority of white
evangelicals and their churches were on the wrong side --- the wrong side
of the truth, the Bible, and the gospel."
These are the same voices that have transferred their hatred and targets
for dominance from blacks to women and gays, who want their mean myopia to
be national policy, and who blaspheme the very icon they profess to worship
by their cruelty, prejudice and intolerance.
There are two big differences, however. The first is that the media refers
to and pictures these extremists not as bigots but as "people of faith."
To a remarkable degree, the press has accepted the virulent public policies
of the Christian right as worthy of respect and even admiration.
The second differences is that the voice of rational, moderate Christianity
is largely silent. Not only is there no Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
offering an appealing alternative to hate [I see - so Rev Al Sharplin etc
offer hate?] , but white bishops from the Episcopal Church are not being
pictured with locked arms walking with the weak towards freedom. There are
few coalitions of conscience in major cities and there is a lack of
sermons, donations, and activism.
By the 1960s, the reactionary religious right found itself with a vigorous
opponent helping to open the doors of hope it was blockading. Even the
Catholic Church was better known for its worker priests and liberation
theology than for its opposition to abortion. The secular and the
religious had joined in making America a better land. [NB - failure to
oppose abortion makes a better land, on the assumption of this Smith]
Nothing similar is happening now. This is not a sudden transition. The
observant have noted the retreat from progressive social action on the part
of moderate Christian churches over the past couple of decades. Just one
small example: how often have you seen a moderate Christian service or
commentator on television? [I see - so absence of a cause or viewpoint
from TV could not be a choice of the infotainment producers? Principled
informed objections to GM are absent from TV because I and other scientists
who agree with me lack courage to speak out??]
But, as with McCarthyism, it is better to be late than not to act at all.
Faced with the rise of the American Taliban [this is an outrageous
propagandistic term which almost alone would serve to condemn Smith as a
bigot], it is past time for moderate Christians to return their own faith
to honor and social good rather than to let it be defined by the tainted
turmoil of false prophets. Humanists and free thinkers can't do all the
work. These moderate Christians must stand up to our contemporary
religious bigots just as their predecessors did during the civil rights
struggle. And time is running out.
05/05/05
Do there exist today any special antennae for New Zealand (or any
other scale of society you care to specify) to tune-in the Holy Spirit? Or
is it just every man for himself?
The attached article is should remind us that conservation is no
mere fringe or luxury item. Humans are unnecessarily ruining the
biosphere. It will therefore be important to propagate the understanding
of nature from the leading biologists. I agree with John Morton that
Sheldrake is the greatest biologist since Darwin; indeed I rank Sheldrake
far ahead of Darwin. Yet New Zealand little uses this devout Christian
scholar. Mort himself became almost disused by the Anglicans a decade ago.
To take another case, a theologian concerned with origins & errors in
science, Harold Turner was considerably marginalised by his own
Presbyterians during his highly productive 'retirement'. David Young omits
all mention of my contributions to conservation in his book on the subject.
This trend is explainable, in part at least, by the ascendancy of PC rule
in NZ - the good I've done is evidently eclipsed, for the purpose of
ruling on my historical status, by my speaking out against PC ideologies
(especially within the church).
Carolyn King complains at my pointing out the marginalised status
of the Kiwi who makes bold to carry on dialectical realism and furthermore
to oppose PC ideologies which - to say the least - interfere with
evangelism. I hope my work on science & Christianity will suitably connect
to Mort's prophetic role; whether or not Ms King complains, I firmly intend
to keep on. The insistent call in the 1970s by Mort, myself, and some
others, to ecological education & policy seemed to the silent majority
'unrealistic', 'uneconomic' etc, but those were ignorant evasions. I'd
rank Mort as a main prophet of conservation. Yet the main recent
contribution allowed for Mort is a mere PR use for promotion of the key IDT
video. And the posture of ecoprophet is usurped by the atheist Geering and
others who latched onto conservation very late.
It is of some interest that Mort is largely blacked out
notwithstanding his being in some ways thoroughly PC e.g. instrumental in
procuring the ordination of women; my inference is that to be an
accomplished senior male is enough to bring punishment upon one from
feminazis and (especially) their front-wimps, even if one actually supports
PC.
I am claiming that the strand of prophetic warnings based in
applied ecology interpreted from an orthodox theological perspective is
suppressed to a large extent, for un-Christian reasons. Thus the human
duty as God's custodians of the biosphere is warped & hampered.
From the fringes of ancient Hebrew society prophets said from time
to time "our way of life is astray from God's plan" or words to that
effect. Some are still famous e.g Jeremiah; but they tended much more in
their own time to be infamous, ignored &/or vilified. This pattern
continues today; reasonable warnings & moral exhortations of prophetic
kinds are mocked & dismissed by the PC operatives who have to a large
extent seized power not only in the secular realm within the overdeveloped
world but also in the Church. Mort has moved from an influential position
to near-obscurity, at a time when his mind dwarfs almost all. Even the
publication of his landmark textbook, unprecedented in the history of
science, was almost outblacked by the PC media.
At this rate, I think the following recent USA piece applies to us.
your bro in Christ
R
=====
Passed along by The Word Warriorette
Contact: WordWarriorette-owner@yahoogroups.com
--------------------------------------
http://www.crossroad.to/Victory/stories/church-tolerant.htm
The Church of the Comfortable and Tolerant
By Jesse Morrell
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Once upon a time in the land called Feel Good there was a Church. This new
Church was called "The Church of the Comfortable and Tolerant". Very
recently this Church hired a new Pastor, Pastor Peace Keeper, who just
graduated from the Seminary of Smooth Talking.
The congregation "of the Comfortable and Tolerant" loved the new Pastor's
sermons. Some of their favorites were "God is happy with everyone",
"Everything is fine and dandy", and "There is nothing but good times
ahead".
Pastor Peace Keeper once made a terrible mistake. He wrongfully allowed
Mr. Conscience into the pulpit. Mr. Conscience did nothing but call human
mistakes "sins" and called the good folks of the congregation to "repent".
Mr Conscience had never been to the Seminary of Smooth Talking, and maybe
he should have before attempting to preach. The congregation of the
Comfortable and Tolerant were shocked at Mr. Consciences audacity and
arrogance. They said things among themselves like "who does this
self-righteous legalist think he is coming and talking to us like that!
Why should we allow this false preacher among us any longer to continue to
persecute us?"
Pastor Peace Keeper terribly regretted letting Mr. Conscience into the
pulpit. Mr Conscience has betrayed the trust he had with the Pastor. So
Pastor Peace Keeper asked Mr. Conscience to please leave the church, he was
not welcome there any longer. Everyone was happy that Mr. Conscience was
asked to leave, except one member called Holy Spirit. So Holy Spirit and
Mr. Conscience left together and after awhile nobody even noticed that they
were gone.
Once things were back to normal, the way they had always been, everyone was
happy once again in the land called Feel Good. Pastor Peace Keeper
continued to sugar coat sweet and wonderful lies that made everyone
comfortable in their sins and heavily guarded his pulpit from abrasive
truths. Who could blame him? You see, the Pastor loved his new home, his
new church, and of course he loved his new income. He couldn't put such
precious things on the line! So he absolutely guaranteed that "The Church
of the Comfortable and Tolerant" were as satisfied and as happy as they
possibly could be while they sat in their complacency.
They lived the rest of their days happily ever after - that is, until
they were finally cast into hell.
The point: Rather then preparing the way of the Lord and making His paths
straight, preachers are removing the bumps in the road to hell to make it
as comfortable as possible for those who travel on them. The backslidden
church utterly refused to remove the log out of her own eye and therefore
also utterly refuses to remove anything from anyone else's eye. She
vehemently opposes those who try to do so also. God help those who attempt
to clean up the church and the world! Joseph Parks said it best: "The man
whose little sermon is 'repent' sets himself against his age, and will ...
be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There
is but one end for such a man. 'Off with his head!" You had better not try
to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven."
Learn more about Jesse and the ministry God has given him at his website:
http://www.newenglandoutreach.com/main2.html
RATHER TOO LITTLE DOOM SAID
L R B Mann
rejected without comment, The Ecologist
'It's Getting Late to Switch to a Viable World Economy' write Lester Brown, President of the Worldwatch Institute, and Christopher Flavin his V-P, in the International Herald Tribune, Paris (19-1-99). Their review of the state of the biosphere deserves the currency it achieved on e-mail, and much more. The Ecologist does well to reprint such competent reviews which summarise the ever-mounting evidence that the 'doomsayers' of the early 1970s - notably the founder and early editorial staff of this magazine - were right.
Indeed, many problems have worsened at an even faster rate than was expected a quarter-century ago by the few who were willing to face up to the already mounting scientific evidence that the biosphere was beset by unprecedented threats to civilisation and indeed to the continued existence of many species.
It is conventional to date the modern science-based conservation awareness from the landmark 1962 Carson book 'Silent Spring', but 1972 was annus mirabilis - Goldsmith et al. 'A Blueprint for Survival', Ehrlich & Ehrlich 'Population, Resources, Environment', several other good books, and the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
The main problems came into focus in four categories:
• overpopulation
• depletion of resources
• multiple forms of pollution
• threats of wars of mass destruction.
The wave of ecological awareness which surged within that year 1972 expanded somewhat through that decade. A few changes poked a foothold into some educational institutions, but the principal planners of industry and governments have generally paid only lip service to the dangers pointed out by the marginalised 'stirrers' such as Goldsmith, and the past 15-20y has seen considerable losing of ground as the PR trade has refined the counterattacks on ecology.
One of the most respected living New Zealanders, Sir Edmund Hillary, has said lately "the world environment is still in a very critical state". His subtle one word "still" implies, correctly, that we have been some time in this dire state.
The Worldwatch Institute has been a top source for both reliable facts and reasonable interpretations, and it is undoubtedly correct in its key declaration that current trends cannot continue for many more years.
Yet I will argue that on the whole, the picture they present is less dismaying than the facts would suggest. The real story is even worse than the Worldwatch Institute claims.
The compromises selected by Brown for the purpose of retaining funding from US liberal wealth may well be as shrewd as could be; but independent intellectuals have a duty to present a less compromised picture. Therefore I interpolate my comments in what, I repeat, is a very good article.
>WASHINGTON - The bright promise of a new century is clouded by
>unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world. Rapid
>deforestation, falling water tables and accelerating climate change could
>undermine economies around the world in the decades ahead.
These trends, and many others, not merely could but beyond any reasonable doubt WILL, within a few decades, wreak havoc on any national economy based to a large extent on natural resources - and many still are. To the extent that the New Four Horsemen are now steeply accelerating many types of harm in the biosphere, not only abstractions like 'economies' but most indices of biological welfare are doomed on current planning to get much worse within a decade or two.
> In the past 100 years, world population has increased by more than 4 billion
> - three times the number of people when the century began.
More striking primary facts are that the population net increase this year is around 90 million, taking us to 6 billion of whom at least one billion are desperately hungry.
>The use of
>energy and raw materials has grown [in the past century] more than 10 times. These trends cannot
>continue for many more years.
Goldsmith has reviewed from time to time during the period since 'A Blueprint for Survival' the trends in harm, and has not found an improving outlook. But always the challenge is to warn of impending disasters without losing too much credibility with those captains of industry who cling to the wilfully ignorant dream of expanding industrial activity when the only hope is to diminish throughputs several-fold.
One of the genuine handicaps for those who warn of ecological disaster has been to define what condition is being foreseen. Warnings of time limits such as 5000 days become meaningful only if an end-point constituting disaster has been defined, i.e. a state from which recovery is not foreseeable. Perhaps this review will stimulate clarification. Meanwhile, good old Richard Willson cartoons of the 'so far so good' variety deserve regular reprinting.
>The question is whether we can muster the will and ingenuity to change
>rapidly enough to stave off environmentally based economic decline.
Now that is an unfortunate phrase - "environmentally based economic decline". I am not so concerned about a decline in 'the economy' caused by environmental decay. What I care about is destruction of species, habitats, and ecochemical cycles; and it is worship of 'the economy' that has largely caused this lately.
Indeed, Brown & Flavin proceed immediately to refer to the other direction in the awful two-way vicious cycle between economism and ecodestruction:
>In their fascination with information technologies, many of today's thinkers
>seem to have forgotten that our modern civilization is entirely dependent
>on ecological foundations that the economy is now eroding.
well put!
>Since our emergence as a species, human societies have continually run up
>against local environmental limits that have caused them to collapse, as
>forests and cropland were overstressed. But the advances in technology that
>have allowed us to surmount these local limits have transferred the problem
>of environmental barriers to the global level, where human activities now
>threaten planetary systems. Among the problems we now face:
>
>•--World energy needs are projected to double in the next several decades,
>but no credible geologist foresees a doubling of world oil production,
>which is projected to peak within the next few decades.
A main reason why 'The Limits to Growth' is not listed with the top books of 1972 is that it erred on definitions of mineable resources, failing to appreciate that 'economic reserves' are only those judged by the accountant mentality to be worth proving to high confidence (by drilling) for a short time-scale, whereas for many resources such as natural gas there is strong evidence of much larger amounts which would be accessible when wanted. A much better understanding of definitions emerged in the Ehrlichs' new edition (with Holdren) titled 'Ecoscience' in 1977.
Thomas Gold's theory - see USGS prof. paper 1570 57-80 (1993) - presents very strong evidence of literally astronomical lodes of natural gas at depths around 10km in many parts of our planet. This is primordial, not fossil, hydrocarbon. Some gets elaborated by microbes in the Earth's crust to make the more superficial deposits of oil; some gets trapped in the near-surface gas domes now being depleted; and an under-noticed fraction emerges at the surface to contribute several dozens of times more powerfully, per molecule, than does carbon dioxide to the acceleration of the greenhouse effect.
Running out of hydrocarbon fuels is not an imminent prospect. By the way, Gold's theory of huge gas lodes under land would imply abandoning offshore drilling because the risk of marine devastation from blowouts is readily avoidable.
>•--Protein demands are also projected to double in the century ahead, but
>no respected marine biologist expects the oceanic fish catch, which has
>plateaued in the last decade, to double. The world's oceans are being
>pushed beyond the breaking point, due to a lethal combination of pollution
>and over-exploitation.
>
>•--Eleven of the 15 most important oceanic fisheries and 70 percent of the
>major fish species are now fully or over-exploited, according to experts.
>
>•--Increasing stress can be seen in the world's woodlands, where the
>clearing of tropical forests has contributed to unprecedented fires across
>large areas of Southeast Asia, the Amazon and Central America.
>
>•--Environmental deterioration is taking a growing toll on a wide range of
>living organisms. Of the 242,000 plant species surveyed by the World
>Conservation Union in 1997, some 33,000, or 14 percent, are threatened with
>extinction, mainly as a result of massive land clearing for housing, roads
>and industries. This mass extinction is disrupting nature's ability to
>provide essential ecosystem services, ranging from pollination to flood
>control.
>
>•--The atmosphere is under assault. The billions of tons of carbon that
>have been released since the Industrial Revolution have pushed atmospheric
>concentrations of carbon dioxide to their highest level in 160,000 years -
>a level that continues to rise each year. Temperatures are rising along
>with the concentration of carbon dioxide.
>
>•--The latest jump in 1998 left the global temperature at its highest
>level since record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Higher
>temperatures may threaten
come, come - the brutal truth reads 'almost certainly will decrease'
>food supplies in the next century, while more
>severe storms cause further economic damage, and rising seas inundate
>coastal cities.
>
>We approach a new century with an economy that cannot take us where we
>want to go. Satisfying the projected needs of 8 billion or more people
>with the type of economy we now have is simply not possible. The Western
>industrial model - the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throw-away
>economy that so dramatically raised living standards in this century - is
>in trouble.
>
>The shift to an environmentally sustainable economy may be as profound a
>transition as the Industrial Revolution. But the broad outlines of a
>sustainable economic system that can meet the human needs of the next
>century are beginning to emerge.
>
>The foundation of such a system is a new design principle, one that shifts
>from the onetime depletion of natural resources to an economy based on
>renewable energy and which continually reuses and recycles materials. A
>sustainable economy will be a solar-powered, bicycle/rail-based,
>reuse/recycle economy, one that uses energy, water, land and materials
>much more efficiently and wisely than we do today. Building an
>environmentally sustainable world economy depends on a cooperative global
>effort. No country acting alone can protect the diversity of life on earth
>or the health of oceanic fisheries.
>
>So far, national governments have largely failed effectively to implement
>the last decade's landmark environmental treaties on climate change and
>biodiversity. One of the big challenges of the early 21st century will be to
>fulfill their ambitious promises to stabilize the climate and slow the
>destruction of species.
>
>Without a concerted effort by the wealthy to address the problems of
>poverty and deprivation, building a sustainable future may not be
>possible. Growing poverty, and the political and economic chaos that can
>be provoked by it, reverberate around the world, as was seen in 1998 with
>the Asian economic meltdown, which pushed tens of millions of people below
>the poverty line in just a few months. Meeting the needs of the more than
>a billion people now in poverty is essential to making the transition to
>an environmentally sustainable world economy.
>
>We will also need a new understanding and values to support a restructuring
>of the global economy. The 21st century will require a new ethic of
>sustainability. We will need a new set of human responsibilities - to the
>natural world and to future generations - to go with our newfound human
>rights.
>
>One key to reversing environmental degradation is to tax the activities
>that cause it. By putting a price on these activities, the market can be
>harnessed to spur progress. If coal burning is taxed, solar energy becomes
>more economically competitive. If auto emissions are taxed, cleaner forms
>of transportation become more affordable. The new German government has
>embarked on the world's most ambitious environmental tax reform, reducing
>taxes on wages by 2.4 percent while raising energy taxes by an identical
>amount. This is a landmark step that will push Europe's largest economy in
>an environmentally sustainable direction.
>
>Europe is also leading the way in some of the industries that are the
>foundations of a solar economy. For example, it has added 5,000 megawatts
>of wind power in the last five years, half of it in Germany, where
>Schleswig-Holstein gets 15 percent of its electricity from the wind. Wind
>power, now one of Europe's fastest growing manufacturing industries,
>employs thousands of workers. Sales of other new energy technologies are
>soaring as well. The production of solar photovoltaic cells has doubled in
>the last five years, propelled in part by the Japanese government's
>efforts to promote solar rooftops as a standard option for new suburban
>homes. Fuel cells that turn hydrogen into electricity, with water as the
>only by-product, are being spurred by billions of dollars of investment
>capital, as companies pursue them as a replacement for everything from the
>coal-fired power plant to the internal combustion engine.
>
>The effort to replace today's unsustainable economy with one suited to the
>demands of the 21st century will create some of the new century's largest
>investment opportunities. Bill Ford, incoming chairman of the Ford Motor
>Co., plans to increase profits by replacing the internal combustion
>engine that was at the center of his great-grandfather's success. ''Smart
>companies will get ahead of the wave,'' Mr. Ford says. ''Those that don't
>will be wiped out.''
>
>The challenge now is to mobilize public support for a fundamental economic
>transformation, a shift to a 21st century economy far less
>resource-intensive and polluting yet even more productive than today's.
This admirable article will, we must all hope, spread awareness of the need to curb industrial & economic activity. If even this relatively forthright review is (as I have argued) actually understated, let long-time activists gain from it renewed urgency & vigour.
``~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~``
Dr Robert Mann was Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies at the
University of Auckland, and has been a conservation activist in several
organisations. He now works mainly on solar thermal and motorcycling inventions.
other scale of society you care to specify) to tune-in the Holy Spirit? Or
is it just every man for himself?
The attached article is should remind us that conservation is no
mere fringe or luxury item. Humans are unnecessarily ruining the
biosphere. It will therefore be important to propagate the understanding
of nature from the leading biologists. I agree with John Morton that
Sheldrake is the greatest biologist since Darwin; indeed I rank Sheldrake
far ahead of Darwin. Yet New Zealand little uses this devout Christian
scholar. Mort himself became almost disused by the Anglicans a decade ago.
To take another case, a theologian concerned with origins & errors in
science, Harold Turner was considerably marginalised by his own
Presbyterians during his highly productive 'retirement'. David Young omits
all mention of my contributions to conservation in his book on the subject.
This trend is explainable, in part at least, by the ascendancy of PC rule
in NZ - the good I've done is evidently eclipsed, for the purpose of
ruling on my historical status, by my speaking out against PC ideologies
(especially within the church).
Carolyn King complains at my pointing out the marginalised status
of the Kiwi who makes bold to carry on dialectical realism and furthermore
to oppose PC ideologies which - to say the least - interfere with
evangelism. I hope my work on science & Christianity will suitably connect
to Mort's prophetic role; whether or not Ms King complains, I firmly intend
to keep on. The insistent call in the 1970s by Mort, myself, and some
others, to ecological education & policy seemed to the silent majority
'unrealistic', 'uneconomic' etc, but those were ignorant evasions. I'd
rank Mort as a main prophet of conservation. Yet the main recent
contribution allowed for Mort is a mere PR use for promotion of the key IDT
video. And the posture of ecoprophet is usurped by the atheist Geering and
others who latched onto conservation very late.
It is of some interest that Mort is largely blacked out
notwithstanding his being in some ways thoroughly PC e.g. instrumental in
procuring the ordination of women; my inference is that to be an
accomplished senior male is enough to bring punishment upon one from
feminazis and (especially) their front-wimps, even if one actually supports
PC.
I am claiming that the strand of prophetic warnings based in
applied ecology interpreted from an orthodox theological perspective is
suppressed to a large extent, for un-Christian reasons. Thus the human
duty as God's custodians of the biosphere is warped & hampered.
From the fringes of ancient Hebrew society prophets said from time
to time "our way of life is astray from God's plan" or words to that
effect. Some are still famous e.g Jeremiah; but they tended much more in
their own time to be infamous, ignored &/or vilified. This pattern
continues today; reasonable warnings & moral exhortations of prophetic
kinds are mocked & dismissed by the PC operatives who have to a large
extent seized power not only in the secular realm within the overdeveloped
world but also in the Church. Mort has moved from an influential position
to near-obscurity, at a time when his mind dwarfs almost all. Even the
publication of his landmark textbook, unprecedented in the history of
science, was almost outblacked by the PC media.
At this rate, I think the following recent USA piece applies to us.
your bro in Christ
R
=====
Passed along by The Word Warriorette
Contact: WordWarriorette-owner@yahoogroups.com
--------------------------------------
http://www.crossroad.to/Victory/stories/church-tolerant.htm
The Church of the Comfortable and Tolerant
By Jesse Morrell
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Once upon a time in the land called Feel Good there was a Church. This new
Church was called "The Church of the Comfortable and Tolerant". Very
recently this Church hired a new Pastor, Pastor Peace Keeper, who just
graduated from the Seminary of Smooth Talking.
The congregation "of the Comfortable and Tolerant" loved the new Pastor's
sermons. Some of their favorites were "God is happy with everyone",
"Everything is fine and dandy", and "There is nothing but good times
ahead".
Pastor Peace Keeper once made a terrible mistake. He wrongfully allowed
Mr. Conscience into the pulpit. Mr. Conscience did nothing but call human
mistakes "sins" and called the good folks of the congregation to "repent".
Mr Conscience had never been to the Seminary of Smooth Talking, and maybe
he should have before attempting to preach. The congregation of the
Comfortable and Tolerant were shocked at Mr. Consciences audacity and
arrogance. They said things among themselves like "who does this
self-righteous legalist think he is coming and talking to us like that!
Why should we allow this false preacher among us any longer to continue to
persecute us?"
Pastor Peace Keeper terribly regretted letting Mr. Conscience into the
pulpit. Mr Conscience has betrayed the trust he had with the Pastor. So
Pastor Peace Keeper asked Mr. Conscience to please leave the church, he was
not welcome there any longer. Everyone was happy that Mr. Conscience was
asked to leave, except one member called Holy Spirit. So Holy Spirit and
Mr. Conscience left together and after awhile nobody even noticed that they
were gone.
Once things were back to normal, the way they had always been, everyone was
happy once again in the land called Feel Good. Pastor Peace Keeper
continued to sugar coat sweet and wonderful lies that made everyone
comfortable in their sins and heavily guarded his pulpit from abrasive
truths. Who could blame him? You see, the Pastor loved his new home, his
new church, and of course he loved his new income. He couldn't put such
precious things on the line! So he absolutely guaranteed that "The Church
of the Comfortable and Tolerant" were as satisfied and as happy as they
possibly could be while they sat in their complacency.
They lived the rest of their days happily ever after - that is, until
they were finally cast into hell.
The point: Rather then preparing the way of the Lord and making His paths
straight, preachers are removing the bumps in the road to hell to make it
as comfortable as possible for those who travel on them. The backslidden
church utterly refused to remove the log out of her own eye and therefore
also utterly refuses to remove anything from anyone else's eye. She
vehemently opposes those who try to do so also. God help those who attempt
to clean up the church and the world! Joseph Parks said it best: "The man
whose little sermon is 'repent' sets himself against his age, and will ...
be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There
is but one end for such a man. 'Off with his head!" You had better not try
to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven."
Learn more about Jesse and the ministry God has given him at his website:
http://www.newenglandoutreach.com/main2.html
RATHER TOO LITTLE DOOM SAID
L R B Mann
rejected without comment, The Ecologist
'It's Getting Late to Switch to a Viable World Economy' write Lester Brown, President of the Worldwatch Institute, and Christopher Flavin his V-P, in the International Herald Tribune, Paris (19-1-99). Their review of the state of the biosphere deserves the currency it achieved on e-mail, and much more. The Ecologist does well to reprint such competent reviews which summarise the ever-mounting evidence that the 'doomsayers' of the early 1970s - notably the founder and early editorial staff of this magazine - were right.
Indeed, many problems have worsened at an even faster rate than was expected a quarter-century ago by the few who were willing to face up to the already mounting scientific evidence that the biosphere was beset by unprecedented threats to civilisation and indeed to the continued existence of many species.
It is conventional to date the modern science-based conservation awareness from the landmark 1962 Carson book 'Silent Spring', but 1972 was annus mirabilis - Goldsmith et al. 'A Blueprint for Survival', Ehrlich & Ehrlich 'Population, Resources, Environment', several other good books, and the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
The main problems came into focus in four categories:
• overpopulation
• depletion of resources
• multiple forms of pollution
• threats of wars of mass destruction.
The wave of ecological awareness which surged within that year 1972 expanded somewhat through that decade. A few changes poked a foothold into some educational institutions, but the principal planners of industry and governments have generally paid only lip service to the dangers pointed out by the marginalised 'stirrers' such as Goldsmith, and the past 15-20y has seen considerable losing of ground as the PR trade has refined the counterattacks on ecology.
One of the most respected living New Zealanders, Sir Edmund Hillary, has said lately "the world environment is still in a very critical state". His subtle one word "still" implies, correctly, that we have been some time in this dire state.
The Worldwatch Institute has been a top source for both reliable facts and reasonable interpretations, and it is undoubtedly correct in its key declaration that current trends cannot continue for many more years.
Yet I will argue that on the whole, the picture they present is less dismaying than the facts would suggest. The real story is even worse than the Worldwatch Institute claims.
The compromises selected by Brown for the purpose of retaining funding from US liberal wealth may well be as shrewd as could be; but independent intellectuals have a duty to present a less compromised picture. Therefore I interpolate my comments in what, I repeat, is a very good article.
>WASHINGTON - The bright promise of a new century is clouded by
>unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world. Rapid
>deforestation, falling water tables and accelerating climate change could
>undermine economies around the world in the decades ahead.
These trends, and many others, not merely could but beyond any reasonable doubt WILL, within a few decades, wreak havoc on any national economy based to a large extent on natural resources - and many still are. To the extent that the New Four Horsemen are now steeply accelerating many types of harm in the biosphere, not only abstractions like 'economies' but most indices of biological welfare are doomed on current planning to get much worse within a decade or two.
> In the past 100 years, world population has increased by more than 4 billion
> - three times the number of people when the century began.
More striking primary facts are that the population net increase this year is around 90 million, taking us to 6 billion of whom at least one billion are desperately hungry.
>The use of
>energy and raw materials has grown [in the past century] more than 10 times. These trends cannot
>continue for many more years.
Goldsmith has reviewed from time to time during the period since 'A Blueprint for Survival' the trends in harm, and has not found an improving outlook. But always the challenge is to warn of impending disasters without losing too much credibility with those captains of industry who cling to the wilfully ignorant dream of expanding industrial activity when the only hope is to diminish throughputs several-fold.
One of the genuine handicaps for those who warn of ecological disaster has been to define what condition is being foreseen. Warnings of time limits such as 5000 days become meaningful only if an end-point constituting disaster has been defined, i.e. a state from which recovery is not foreseeable. Perhaps this review will stimulate clarification. Meanwhile, good old Richard Willson cartoons of the 'so far so good' variety deserve regular reprinting.
>The question is whether we can muster the will and ingenuity to change
>rapidly enough to stave off environmentally based economic decline.
Now that is an unfortunate phrase - "environmentally based economic decline". I am not so concerned about a decline in 'the economy' caused by environmental decay. What I care about is destruction of species, habitats, and ecochemical cycles; and it is worship of 'the economy' that has largely caused this lately.
Indeed, Brown & Flavin proceed immediately to refer to the other direction in the awful two-way vicious cycle between economism and ecodestruction:
>In their fascination with information technologies, many of today's thinkers
>seem to have forgotten that our modern civilization is entirely dependent
>on ecological foundations that the economy is now eroding.
well put!
>Since our emergence as a species, human societies have continually run up
>against local environmental limits that have caused them to collapse, as
>forests and cropland were overstressed. But the advances in technology that
>have allowed us to surmount these local limits have transferred the problem
>of environmental barriers to the global level, where human activities now
>threaten planetary systems. Among the problems we now face:
>
>•--World energy needs are projected to double in the next several decades,
>but no credible geologist foresees a doubling of world oil production,
>which is projected to peak within the next few decades.
A main reason why 'The Limits to Growth' is not listed with the top books of 1972 is that it erred on definitions of mineable resources, failing to appreciate that 'economic reserves' are only those judged by the accountant mentality to be worth proving to high confidence (by drilling) for a short time-scale, whereas for many resources such as natural gas there is strong evidence of much larger amounts which would be accessible when wanted. A much better understanding of definitions emerged in the Ehrlichs' new edition (with Holdren) titled 'Ecoscience' in 1977.
Thomas Gold's theory - see USGS prof. paper 1570 57-80 (1993) - presents very strong evidence of literally astronomical lodes of natural gas at depths around 10km in many parts of our planet. This is primordial, not fossil, hydrocarbon. Some gets elaborated by microbes in the Earth's crust to make the more superficial deposits of oil; some gets trapped in the near-surface gas domes now being depleted; and an under-noticed fraction emerges at the surface to contribute several dozens of times more powerfully, per molecule, than does carbon dioxide to the acceleration of the greenhouse effect.
Running out of hydrocarbon fuels is not an imminent prospect. By the way, Gold's theory of huge gas lodes under land would imply abandoning offshore drilling because the risk of marine devastation from blowouts is readily avoidable.
>•--Protein demands are also projected to double in the century ahead, but
>no respected marine biologist expects the oceanic fish catch, which has
>plateaued in the last decade, to double. The world's oceans are being
>pushed beyond the breaking point, due to a lethal combination of pollution
>and over-exploitation.
>
>•--Eleven of the 15 most important oceanic fisheries and 70 percent of the
>major fish species are now fully or over-exploited, according to experts.
>
>•--Increasing stress can be seen in the world's woodlands, where the
>clearing of tropical forests has contributed to unprecedented fires across
>large areas of Southeast Asia, the Amazon and Central America.
>
>•--Environmental deterioration is taking a growing toll on a wide range of
>living organisms. Of the 242,000 plant species surveyed by the World
>Conservation Union in 1997, some 33,000, or 14 percent, are threatened with
>extinction, mainly as a result of massive land clearing for housing, roads
>and industries. This mass extinction is disrupting nature's ability to
>provide essential ecosystem services, ranging from pollination to flood
>control.
>
>•--The atmosphere is under assault. The billions of tons of carbon that
>have been released since the Industrial Revolution have pushed atmospheric
>concentrations of carbon dioxide to their highest level in 160,000 years -
>a level that continues to rise each year. Temperatures are rising along
>with the concentration of carbon dioxide.
>
>•--The latest jump in 1998 left the global temperature at its highest
>level since record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Higher
>temperatures may threaten
come, come - the brutal truth reads 'almost certainly will decrease'
>food supplies in the next century, while more
>severe storms cause further economic damage, and rising seas inundate
>coastal cities.
>
>We approach a new century with an economy that cannot take us where we
>want to go. Satisfying the projected needs of 8 billion or more people
>with the type of economy we now have is simply not possible. The Western
>industrial model - the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throw-away
>economy that so dramatically raised living standards in this century - is
>in trouble.
>
>The shift to an environmentally sustainable economy may be as profound a
>transition as the Industrial Revolution. But the broad outlines of a
>sustainable economic system that can meet the human needs of the next
>century are beginning to emerge.
>
>The foundation of such a system is a new design principle, one that shifts
>from the onetime depletion of natural resources to an economy based on
>renewable energy and which continually reuses and recycles materials. A
>sustainable economy will be a solar-powered, bicycle/rail-based,
>reuse/recycle economy, one that uses energy, water, land and materials
>much more efficiently and wisely than we do today. Building an
>environmentally sustainable world economy depends on a cooperative global
>effort. No country acting alone can protect the diversity of life on earth
>or the health of oceanic fisheries.
>
>So far, national governments have largely failed effectively to implement
>the last decade's landmark environmental treaties on climate change and
>biodiversity. One of the big challenges of the early 21st century will be to
>fulfill their ambitious promises to stabilize the climate and slow the
>destruction of species.
>
>Without a concerted effort by the wealthy to address the problems of
>poverty and deprivation, building a sustainable future may not be
>possible. Growing poverty, and the political and economic chaos that can
>be provoked by it, reverberate around the world, as was seen in 1998 with
>the Asian economic meltdown, which pushed tens of millions of people below
>the poverty line in just a few months. Meeting the needs of the more than
>a billion people now in poverty is essential to making the transition to
>an environmentally sustainable world economy.
>
>We will also need a new understanding and values to support a restructuring
>of the global economy. The 21st century will require a new ethic of
>sustainability. We will need a new set of human responsibilities - to the
>natural world and to future generations - to go with our newfound human
>rights.
>
>One key to reversing environmental degradation is to tax the activities
>that cause it. By putting a price on these activities, the market can be
>harnessed to spur progress. If coal burning is taxed, solar energy becomes
>more economically competitive. If auto emissions are taxed, cleaner forms
>of transportation become more affordable. The new German government has
>embarked on the world's most ambitious environmental tax reform, reducing
>taxes on wages by 2.4 percent while raising energy taxes by an identical
>amount. This is a landmark step that will push Europe's largest economy in
>an environmentally sustainable direction.
>
>Europe is also leading the way in some of the industries that are the
>foundations of a solar economy. For example, it has added 5,000 megawatts
>of wind power in the last five years, half of it in Germany, where
>Schleswig-Holstein gets 15 percent of its electricity from the wind. Wind
>power, now one of Europe's fastest growing manufacturing industries,
>employs thousands of workers. Sales of other new energy technologies are
>soaring as well. The production of solar photovoltaic cells has doubled in
>the last five years, propelled in part by the Japanese government's
>efforts to promote solar rooftops as a standard option for new suburban
>homes. Fuel cells that turn hydrogen into electricity, with water as the
>only by-product, are being spurred by billions of dollars of investment
>capital, as companies pursue them as a replacement for everything from the
>coal-fired power plant to the internal combustion engine.
>
>The effort to replace today's unsustainable economy with one suited to the
>demands of the 21st century will create some of the new century's largest
>investment opportunities. Bill Ford, incoming chairman of the Ford Motor
>Co., plans to increase profits by replacing the internal combustion
>engine that was at the center of his great-grandfather's success. ''Smart
>companies will get ahead of the wave,'' Mr. Ford says. ''Those that don't
>will be wiped out.''
>
>The challenge now is to mobilize public support for a fundamental economic
>transformation, a shift to a 21st century economy far less
>resource-intensive and polluting yet even more productive than today's.
This admirable article will, we must all hope, spread awareness of the need to curb industrial & economic activity. If even this relatively forthright review is (as I have argued) actually understated, let long-time activists gain from it renewed urgency & vigour.
``~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~``
Dr Robert Mann was Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies at the
University of Auckland, and has been a conservation activist in several
organisations. He now works mainly on solar thermal and motorcycling inventions.
Improving Tract® for season between Easter & Pentecost [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 10:19:19 PM
The attached Improving Tract was pubd by _Real World_ when the then
U of Ak chaplain Rev Dr Murray Rae was building that organ to a peak of
quality. I offer it for the current season of the church year.
I doubt it's a draft sermon; those like me & Mort who try to carry
on the Temple tradition of thought tend for some reason to assume that
entailed in that dialectical realism is sentence-length & complexity
tending to restrict utility in speech. But I hope sermons may be
influenced by the questions I raise.
I'd be glad to hear of any Gk expert who has chased up the query I
raise about 'the'. But this is a minor point.
My main point is that the Anglican church in my experience
under-emphasizes the Holy Spirit. I invite those of other denominations to
take stock of how they are organised to teach about, and to 'tune in', the
Holy Spirit. The only potential basis for a decent society is Christian
ethics, but if the religion that gave rise to Christian ethics is not
suitably active in politics then evil ideologies will gain power. This
issue of state/church relations is the issue addressed variously by
Marsden, Godley, Selwyn, etc. The Holy Spirit may have exerted maximal
political influence in Byzantium (before the women took too much political
power). Anyhow, we sure need more effective ways to tune-in the Spirit.
R
The Big Thing from small beginnings
- reflections on Pentecost
Robert Mann
slightly adapted from Real World 1998
Once Jesus had ascended back to heaven, the most important thing left for his faithful few was the Holy Spirit. That Spirit remains for us today The Big Thing - our most important asset, the continuing inspiration which we require to carry on proclaiming the Good News and living by it as best we can. But this important Third Person of the Holy Trinity became known to humanity through a quiet beginning.
On the festival of Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the church as recounted in Acts 2 - a flamboyant occasion of doubtless crucial significance on that historic day and ever since. The so-called pentecostal sects emphasise visible direct operations of the spirit in group worship today, e.g. speaking in tongues.
Some more elderly congregations tend to prefer the name Whitsunday, and to read for that day's lesson John 20 19-23, a far quieter occasion. For those who have never spoken in tongues, let alone seen holy fire on each others' heads, that event at the closing of the first Easter Day is perhaps especially precious.
I would go so far as to suggest that, whatever Anglicans may think of 'pentecostal' tendencies, the Anglican church is open to the accusation of having gone too far the other way - too little emphasis on the Holy Spirit. In any case I wish to argue that a better understanding of the Holy Spirit will be encouraged if both John 20 19-23 and Acts 2 1-41 are embraced in preaching on Pentecost.
Jesus prefigured, with memorable if mysterious breath, a continuing spiritual presence, at his resurrected appearance amongst the disciples late in the evening of the day when Mary Magdalene had found the tomb empty. Translations typically quote him, having breathed upon them, "Receive the Holy Spirit". However, the Archbishop of Canterbury widely viewed as this century's most talented, William Temple, in his valuable book 'Readings in St. John's Gospel' (Macmillan 1938; reprinted through 1955) translates instead
"Receive holy spirit (or breath)".
Temple specifically insists on this wording by adding, in explanation,
not "the Holy Spirit" and goes on immediately to expound:
What is bestowed is not the Divine Person Himself but the power and energy of which He is the source. Earlier it had been said not yet was there spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7, 39). But now that glorification is complete, and it is possible for the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God, to begin its activity . . . only so far as the Church in and through its members fulfils the condition - Receive holy spirit - can it discharge this function.
The gospels were written in Greek. The word for spirit in the John 20 passage is simply the same as for breath (pneuma), the common word for spirit in the NT. The word paracletos appears in the NT only 5 times, all by St John (Jn 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7; 1Jn 2:1). It seems straightforwardly justified therefore to adopt Temple's reading of the John 20 passage, rather than the more popular translation which infers that the Holy Spirit was conferred on that occasion.
The persistence of the popular translation - as if omission of "the" in gospel Greek could be casual or alternatively from some pious tampering - I must leave to biblical scholars to review. It would appear, e.g. from the biography by Iremonger, and generally from his fluent & profound arguments using Greek throughout his works, that Temple was a better Greek scholar than most or all today. J B Phillips in the late 1950s simply concurred with Temple's translation, whereas the prolix Rudolph Schnackenberg (1990) ignores it. I find Temple's reading much the more convincing.
He was, in 1938, very quiet in mentioning the error; and he did not comment at all on its possible origins. One may infer that Temple thought it would be needlessly critical of highly respected authorities if he were to make any fuss of this correction. (Would that many a modern stirrer were so thoughtful & restrained! It is easy to point out defects in the powers that be; but unless we have a good purpose in view, we should not do so.)
Pious insertions have occurred in the fraught history of our precious scriptures, e.g. the minor confusion in 1 John 5 7-8 complained of by Sir Isaac Newton. Even the Great Commission (the final 3 verses of St Matthew's gospel) is suspected of being a later addition rather than actual words of Christ. It would appear that "Receive the Holy Spirit" is a comparable pious embellishment of the Lord's more subtle words "Receive holy spirit".
An interpretation thus seems open that the John 20 phrase is a gentle prefiguring - with memorable breath, but nevertheless gentle compared to the mighty wind when, 50 days later, the faithful few must have needed firmer reassurance. I do not dispute Temple's toning-down in 1938 of his correction, but I do suggest that today it is due for acceptance rather than continued ignore.
Temple's reading is consistent with the promise in Acts 1 "not many days after this you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit", implied if not clearly presented as coming just before the Ascension, and certainly after Easter.
Within two months the few went through the agony & despair of Calvary; the eerie encouragement of the empty tomb; the quiet visitation later that day, unrecognised in that moment, on the road to Emmaeus; the Resurrected Lord that evening in the locked room conferring on the disciples awesome power after breathing holy spirit over them; other resurrection appearances, once to 500; the loss - if triumphant - of the Ascension; and then 50 days after Easter the overwhelming manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Evidently the emergence of the Paraclete in this world was a gradual process rather than sudden. (This should come as no surprise; Christ himself within his earthly life blossomed in a process of development - "day by day like us he grew".)
The question for us now is, therefore, what are we today doing to utilise and contribute to what Temple called the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God. This two-way process empowers, if dauntingly, the human species of the Christian era. The Holy Spirit, though of simple beginnings in earthly emergence, has become The Big Thing for us today. Are we with it - availing ourselves of this power, and also contributing to its working? Let us pray, feeding on him in our heart with thanksgiving, for faith to do so - believing that one prayer which is always answered is the prayer for stronger faith.
U of Ak chaplain Rev Dr Murray Rae was building that organ to a peak of
quality. I offer it for the current season of the church year.
I doubt it's a draft sermon; those like me & Mort who try to carry
on the Temple tradition of thought tend for some reason to assume that
entailed in that dialectical realism is sentence-length & complexity
tending to restrict utility in speech. But I hope sermons may be
influenced by the questions I raise.
I'd be glad to hear of any Gk expert who has chased up the query I
raise about 'the'. But this is a minor point.
My main point is that the Anglican church in my experience
under-emphasizes the Holy Spirit. I invite those of other denominations to
take stock of how they are organised to teach about, and to 'tune in', the
Holy Spirit. The only potential basis for a decent society is Christian
ethics, but if the religion that gave rise to Christian ethics is not
suitably active in politics then evil ideologies will gain power. This
issue of state/church relations is the issue addressed variously by
Marsden, Godley, Selwyn, etc. The Holy Spirit may have exerted maximal
political influence in Byzantium (before the women took too much political
power). Anyhow, we sure need more effective ways to tune-in the Spirit.
R
The Big Thing from small beginnings
- reflections on Pentecost
Robert Mann
slightly adapted from Real World 1998
Once Jesus had ascended back to heaven, the most important thing left for his faithful few was the Holy Spirit. That Spirit remains for us today The Big Thing - our most important asset, the continuing inspiration which we require to carry on proclaiming the Good News and living by it as best we can. But this important Third Person of the Holy Trinity became known to humanity through a quiet beginning.
On the festival of Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the church as recounted in Acts 2 - a flamboyant occasion of doubtless crucial significance on that historic day and ever since. The so-called pentecostal sects emphasise visible direct operations of the spirit in group worship today, e.g. speaking in tongues.
Some more elderly congregations tend to prefer the name Whitsunday, and to read for that day's lesson John 20 19-23, a far quieter occasion. For those who have never spoken in tongues, let alone seen holy fire on each others' heads, that event at the closing of the first Easter Day is perhaps especially precious.
I would go so far as to suggest that, whatever Anglicans may think of 'pentecostal' tendencies, the Anglican church is open to the accusation of having gone too far the other way - too little emphasis on the Holy Spirit. In any case I wish to argue that a better understanding of the Holy Spirit will be encouraged if both John 20 19-23 and Acts 2 1-41 are embraced in preaching on Pentecost.
Jesus prefigured, with memorable if mysterious breath, a continuing spiritual presence, at his resurrected appearance amongst the disciples late in the evening of the day when Mary Magdalene had found the tomb empty. Translations typically quote him, having breathed upon them, "Receive the Holy Spirit". However, the Archbishop of Canterbury widely viewed as this century's most talented, William Temple, in his valuable book 'Readings in St. John's Gospel' (Macmillan 1938; reprinted through 1955) translates instead
"Receive holy spirit (or breath)".
Temple specifically insists on this wording by adding, in explanation,
not "the Holy Spirit" and goes on immediately to expound:
What is bestowed is not the Divine Person Himself but the power and energy of which He is the source. Earlier it had been said not yet was there spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7, 39). But now that glorification is complete, and it is possible for the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God, to begin its activity . . . only so far as the Church in and through its members fulfils the condition - Receive holy spirit - can it discharge this function.
The gospels were written in Greek. The word for spirit in the John 20 passage is simply the same as for breath (pneuma), the common word for spirit in the NT. The word paracletos appears in the NT only 5 times, all by St John (Jn 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7; 1Jn 2:1). It seems straightforwardly justified therefore to adopt Temple's reading of the John 20 passage, rather than the more popular translation which infers that the Holy Spirit was conferred on that occasion.
The persistence of the popular translation - as if omission of "the" in gospel Greek could be casual or alternatively from some pious tampering - I must leave to biblical scholars to review. It would appear, e.g. from the biography by Iremonger, and generally from his fluent & profound arguments using Greek throughout his works, that Temple was a better Greek scholar than most or all today. J B Phillips in the late 1950s simply concurred with Temple's translation, whereas the prolix Rudolph Schnackenberg (1990) ignores it. I find Temple's reading much the more convincing.
He was, in 1938, very quiet in mentioning the error; and he did not comment at all on its possible origins. One may infer that Temple thought it would be needlessly critical of highly respected authorities if he were to make any fuss of this correction. (Would that many a modern stirrer were so thoughtful & restrained! It is easy to point out defects in the powers that be; but unless we have a good purpose in view, we should not do so.)
Pious insertions have occurred in the fraught history of our precious scriptures, e.g. the minor confusion in 1 John 5 7-8 complained of by Sir Isaac Newton. Even the Great Commission (the final 3 verses of St Matthew's gospel) is suspected of being a later addition rather than actual words of Christ. It would appear that "Receive the Holy Spirit" is a comparable pious embellishment of the Lord's more subtle words "Receive holy spirit".
An interpretation thus seems open that the John 20 phrase is a gentle prefiguring - with memorable breath, but nevertheless gentle compared to the mighty wind when, 50 days later, the faithful few must have needed firmer reassurance. I do not dispute Temple's toning-down in 1938 of his correction, but I do suggest that today it is due for acceptance rather than continued ignore.
Temple's reading is consistent with the promise in Acts 1 "not many days after this you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit", implied if not clearly presented as coming just before the Ascension, and certainly after Easter.
Within two months the few went through the agony & despair of Calvary; the eerie encouragement of the empty tomb; the quiet visitation later that day, unrecognised in that moment, on the road to Emmaeus; the Resurrected Lord that evening in the locked room conferring on the disciples awesome power after breathing holy spirit over them; other resurrection appearances, once to 500; the loss - if triumphant - of the Ascension; and then 50 days after Easter the overwhelming manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Evidently the emergence of the Paraclete in this world was a gradual process rather than sudden. (This should come as no surprise; Christ himself within his earthly life blossomed in a process of development - "day by day like us he grew".)
The question for us now is, therefore, what are we today doing to utilise and contribute to what Temple called the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God. This two-way process empowers, if dauntingly, the human species of the Christian era. The Holy Spirit, though of simple beginnings in earthly emergence, has become The Big Thing for us today. Are we with it - availing ourselves of this power, and also contributing to its working? Let us pray, feeding on him in our heart with thanksgiving, for faith to do so - believing that one prayer which is always answered is the prayer for stronger faith.
From: Mission America
Subject: New Jewish Group To Fight Anti-Christian Bias
To view the entire article, visit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43987
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jewish group fights anti-Christian bias
By Ron Strom
------------------------------------------------------------------
A longtime columnist and author has birthed a new organization made up of
Jews who are committed to battling anti-Christian bias and discrimination
in the culture.
Don Feder, a Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist for 19 years, is
president of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, or JAACD.
Members of the group's advisory board include rabbis, commentators,
academics, authors, activists, Zionist leaders and an entertainer.
"Members span the spectrum from Orthodox to secular, but are united in
their determination to support our beleaguered brothers and sisters in the
Christian community," a statement from the organization said.
Feder said for years he has written about incidents of anti-Christian
discrimination in the public square - from the prohibition of creches on
public land to the silencing prayer in the nation's schools.
Don Feder
"What I consider an epidemic of anti-Christian bigotry and persecution is
something that has concerned me for a long time," Feder told WND, noting
that in 1996 he wrote a book entitled "Who's Afraid of the Religious
Right?" which covers what he sees as the left's attack on traditional
Christians.
"Particularly pernicious is the leftist idea that it's legitimate to base
your politics on anything except religion," he said. "You can say that my
politics are based on the views of Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or Jane Fonda Ö
and that's OK, but as soon as you say your worldview is based on the Bible,
that's considered an illegitimate basis for embracing certain political
views."
Feder says about a year ago he decided there should be a distinctly Jewish
organization dealing with anti-Christian prejudice, which he considers a
"political pogrom."
"If a Jewish organization complains about these things," he explained, "no
one can accuse us of self-interest, because we're not Christians; we're
Jews."
Added Feder: "The fate of America hinges on whether or not Christians - I
mean authentic Christians - succeed in the political arena."
Feder credits Ted Baehr, founder of MovieGuide, with helping to get the
organization off the ground.
Speaking at a press conference announcing the new group were syndicated
columnist Mona Charen, Barry Farber, longtime New York City talk-show host,
and two rabbis - Joshua Haberman and Rabbi Yehuda Levin.
Others involved with the group include: David Horowitz (Center for the
Study of Popular Culture), Morton Klein (Zionist Organization of America),
Herb London (Hudson Institute), Bruce Herschensohn (professor, Pepperdine
University), Rabbi Daniel Lapin (Toward Tradition), syndicated talk-show
host Michael Medved, Rabbi Jacob Neusner (professor, Bard College) and
comedian Jackie Mason.
Drawing a connection between his faith and Christianity, Feder said,
"Christian morality comes from the Jewish Bible, hence the expression
'Judeo-Christian ethic.'"
The group, therefore, "is also standing up for the morality of the Torah."
Said Feder: "By maintaining their loyalty to the eternal values revealed at
Sinai, Christians have become pariahs in the eyes of the establishment, but
heroes in our eyes."
"Jews and Christians serve God differently. But our morality is the same,"
states promotional material for the group.
Feder says his group is in the process of setting up a website and will
work to educate Americans "on the toxic nature of what has been called the
last acceptable form or prejudice."
The organization's founder ridiculed the notion that religious Americans
want the nation ruled by a theocracy.
"It's just absurd," Feder said. "If what the left is talking about
constitutes a theocracy, then America was a theocracy in 1961.
"American had school prayer, in many states there was Bible reading in the
schools, public display of religious symbols, abortion was outlawed except
in rare instances, if anyone talked about same-sex marriage they would have
been met with derisive laughter," he noted. "I was alive in 1961; if we
were a theocracy then, somehow I missed it."
Feder's latest book, "The Tattered Flag: The Fight for America in the 21st
Century," will be released this year.
© 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Strom is a news editor for WorldNetDaily.com.
------------------------------------------------------------------
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www.afo.net
Mission America
www.missionamerica.com
Subject: New Jewish Group To Fight Anti-Christian Bias
To view the entire article, visit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43987
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jewish group fights anti-Christian bias
By Ron Strom
------------------------------------------------------------------
A longtime columnist and author has birthed a new organization made up of
Jews who are committed to battling anti-Christian bias and discrimination
in the culture.
Don Feder, a Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist for 19 years, is
president of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, or JAACD.
Members of the group's advisory board include rabbis, commentators,
academics, authors, activists, Zionist leaders and an entertainer.
"Members span the spectrum from Orthodox to secular, but are united in
their determination to support our beleaguered brothers and sisters in the
Christian community," a statement from the organization said.
Feder said for years he has written about incidents of anti-Christian
discrimination in the public square - from the prohibition of creches on
public land to the silencing prayer in the nation's schools.
Don Feder
"What I consider an epidemic of anti-Christian bigotry and persecution is
something that has concerned me for a long time," Feder told WND, noting
that in 1996 he wrote a book entitled "Who's Afraid of the Religious
Right?" which covers what he sees as the left's attack on traditional
Christians.
"Particularly pernicious is the leftist idea that it's legitimate to base
your politics on anything except religion," he said. "You can say that my
politics are based on the views of Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or Jane Fonda Ö
and that's OK, but as soon as you say your worldview is based on the Bible,
that's considered an illegitimate basis for embracing certain political
views."
Feder says about a year ago he decided there should be a distinctly Jewish
organization dealing with anti-Christian prejudice, which he considers a
"political pogrom."
"If a Jewish organization complains about these things," he explained, "no
one can accuse us of self-interest, because we're not Christians; we're
Jews."
Added Feder: "The fate of America hinges on whether or not Christians - I
mean authentic Christians - succeed in the political arena."
Feder credits Ted Baehr, founder of MovieGuide, with helping to get the
organization off the ground.
Speaking at a press conference announcing the new group were syndicated
columnist Mona Charen, Barry Farber, longtime New York City talk-show host,
and two rabbis - Joshua Haberman and Rabbi Yehuda Levin.
Others involved with the group include: David Horowitz (Center for the
Study of Popular Culture), Morton Klein (Zionist Organization of America),
Herb London (Hudson Institute), Bruce Herschensohn (professor, Pepperdine
University), Rabbi Daniel Lapin (Toward Tradition), syndicated talk-show
host Michael Medved, Rabbi Jacob Neusner (professor, Bard College) and
comedian Jackie Mason.
Drawing a connection between his faith and Christianity, Feder said,
"Christian morality comes from the Jewish Bible, hence the expression
'Judeo-Christian ethic.'"
The group, therefore, "is also standing up for the morality of the Torah."
Said Feder: "By maintaining their loyalty to the eternal values revealed at
Sinai, Christians have become pariahs in the eyes of the establishment, but
heroes in our eyes."
"Jews and Christians serve God differently. But our morality is the same,"
states promotional material for the group.
Feder says his group is in the process of setting up a website and will
work to educate Americans "on the toxic nature of what has been called the
last acceptable form or prejudice."
The organization's founder ridiculed the notion that religious Americans
want the nation ruled by a theocracy.
"It's just absurd," Feder said. "If what the left is talking about
constitutes a theocracy, then America was a theocracy in 1961.
"American had school prayer, in many states there was Bible reading in the
schools, public display of religious symbols, abortion was outlawed except
in rare instances, if anyone talked about same-sex marriage they would have
been met with derisive laughter," he noted. "I was alive in 1961; if we
were a theocracy then, somehow I missed it."
Feder's latest book, "The Tattered Flag: The Fight for America in the 21st
Century," will be released this year.
© 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Strom is a news editor for WorldNetDaily.com.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Mail service for Mission America provided by American Family Online
www.afo.net
Mission America
www.missionamerica.com
Of Popes and Condoms
Rev Ron Ashford
Ap 2005
Gosh, I remember, in days of yore, how The Pill was promoted as 98.5%
effective while condoms were only 70% effective in preventing preggies
(over a year's use by a married couple).
Hooray for efficiency ! ! !
Amazing how The Condom, lately, has become so effective in stopping a virus
many times smaller than a sperm.
Wonders never cease ! ! !
"Virtue by Latex"
"Better living through Chemistry"
Ron
Rev Ron Ashford
Ap 2005
Gosh, I remember, in days of yore, how The Pill was promoted as 98.5%
effective while condoms were only 70% effective in preventing preggies
(over a year's use by a married couple).
Hooray for efficiency ! ! !
Amazing how The Condom, lately, has become so effective in stopping a virus
many times smaller than a sperm.
Wonders never cease ! ! !
"Virtue by Latex"
"Better living through Chemistry"
Ron
http://www.mitchellrepublic.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=9&ArticleID=12696
New pope represents the wrath of God
Monday, April 25, 2005
By Bill O'Reilly, Syndicated Columnist
The elevation of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to head the Roman Catholic
Church is a clear and concise message from the College of Cardinals: "We
are royally teed off."
Everybody knows that the new pontiff is a tough guy who will not only throw
the moneychangers out of the temple, he'll kick them in the behind as they
leave the building. Pope Benedict believes strongly in good and evil, and
heís not shy about pointing fingers. His letter to American bishops about
politicians and abortion cost John Kerry dearly in the last election.
The cardinals, of course, perfectly understand that Benedict is not exactly
a cuddly guy and will not be "reaching out," as they say in California.
But his hard-line theological approach appeals to church elders who have
had enough.
In the past three decades, church attendance in the USA and Western Europe
has dropped through the floor. Just 25 percent of American Catholics attend
mass weekly, and the number is in the single digits in longstanding
Catholic countries like France. Secularism now rules the western world,
and there are not enough priests to serve the remaining faithful. How do
you say things are not good in Latin?
In the face of this spiritual decline, the Catholic Church has decided to
make a stand. It will not compromise, and it will not pander. You either
toe the line or hit the bricks. Up to you.
As a lifelong Catholic, I don't like this approach, but I understand it.
The West is now besieged by forces that want to wipe spirituality
completely out of the public square. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) is the point organization in this effort. It supports all abortion
on demand, including late-term, no parental consent for minors having
abortions, euthanasia with consent, gay marriage and the free speech rights
of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which has posted
instructions on how to rape children on its website.
The ACLU opposes public funding for the Boy Scouts because their oath
mentions God, the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, public displays
of the baby Jesus at Christmas and any restraint on Internet pornography in
public libraries.
For the most part, the western media sympathizes with the ACLU and promotes
its point of view. Thus, the secular message is a constant in our society -
the hits just keep on coming.
And where is the opposing point of view? Well, there are a few media
outlets that give traditionalists a fair shake, but very few.
So the Catholic cardinals feel isolated and surrounded. They can preach to
the choir on Sunday but get battered by the news and entertainment media
the rest of the week. A strong papal voice countering that situation is
soothing. And thatís why Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.
I believe organized religion can be a champion of human rights and provide
resistance to secular societies, which, if they progress much further, will
never be able to defeat the fanatical Islamic fundamentalists. The more
permissive the western world becomes, the more it rejects discipline and
avoids confronting evil, the greater the danger to freedom will be.
Pope Benedict is facing a rapidly changing world, and perhaps he will be a
strong and persuasive shepherd against evil. The danger is that he will be
so rigid that he will erode the spiritual core even further, thereby
helping the secularists.
But the new pope may have an epiphany and realize good people will rally
against evil if the case of clear and present danger is made rationally and
with compassion. I am praying that happens.
The other side is hoping it will not.
New pope represents the wrath of God
Monday, April 25, 2005
By Bill O'Reilly, Syndicated Columnist
The elevation of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to head the Roman Catholic
Church is a clear and concise message from the College of Cardinals: "We
are royally teed off."
Everybody knows that the new pontiff is a tough guy who will not only throw
the moneychangers out of the temple, he'll kick them in the behind as they
leave the building. Pope Benedict believes strongly in good and evil, and
heís not shy about pointing fingers. His letter to American bishops about
politicians and abortion cost John Kerry dearly in the last election.
The cardinals, of course, perfectly understand that Benedict is not exactly
a cuddly guy and will not be "reaching out," as they say in California.
But his hard-line theological approach appeals to church elders who have
had enough.
In the past three decades, church attendance in the USA and Western Europe
has dropped through the floor. Just 25 percent of American Catholics attend
mass weekly, and the number is in the single digits in longstanding
Catholic countries like France. Secularism now rules the western world,
and there are not enough priests to serve the remaining faithful. How do
you say things are not good in Latin?
In the face of this spiritual decline, the Catholic Church has decided to
make a stand. It will not compromise, and it will not pander. You either
toe the line or hit the bricks. Up to you.
As a lifelong Catholic, I don't like this approach, but I understand it.
The West is now besieged by forces that want to wipe spirituality
completely out of the public square. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) is the point organization in this effort. It supports all abortion
on demand, including late-term, no parental consent for minors having
abortions, euthanasia with consent, gay marriage and the free speech rights
of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which has posted
instructions on how to rape children on its website.
The ACLU opposes public funding for the Boy Scouts because their oath
mentions God, the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, public displays
of the baby Jesus at Christmas and any restraint on Internet pornography in
public libraries.
For the most part, the western media sympathizes with the ACLU and promotes
its point of view. Thus, the secular message is a constant in our society -
the hits just keep on coming.
And where is the opposing point of view? Well, there are a few media
outlets that give traditionalists a fair shake, but very few.
So the Catholic cardinals feel isolated and surrounded. They can preach to
the choir on Sunday but get battered by the news and entertainment media
the rest of the week. A strong papal voice countering that situation is
soothing. And thatís why Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.
I believe organized religion can be a champion of human rights and provide
resistance to secular societies, which, if they progress much further, will
never be able to defeat the fanatical Islamic fundamentalists. The more
permissive the western world becomes, the more it rejects discipline and
avoids confronting evil, the greater the danger to freedom will be.
Pope Benedict is facing a rapidly changing world, and perhaps he will be a
strong and persuasive shepherd against evil. The danger is that he will be
so rigid that he will erode the spiritual core even further, thereby
helping the secularists.
But the new pope may have an epiphany and realize good people will rally
against evil if the case of clear and present danger is made rationally and
with compassion. I am praying that happens.
The other side is hoping it will not.
04/23/05
EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
COMMENTARY:
REMEMBERING JOHN PAUL I
AS THE "GRAND INQUISITOR"
BECOMES POPE BENEDICT XVI
Emerging from the wisps of white smoke and the toll of bells, German
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger --- "the Grand Inquisitor" --- has become the
265th Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church --- Pope Benedict XVI.
Among some Catholics the man who has been Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, responsible for enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, or
as his online fan club has claimed --- "putting the smackdown on heresy
since 1981" --- there is much joy.
They have a 78-year old Pope who while a cardinal admonished Latin
Americans for supporting "liberation theology" due to its "Marxist
leanings;" who has denounced any efforts to rewrite Scripture in gender
inclusive language; who has declared rock music as a "vehicle of
anti-religion;" who has dismissed any "feminist" meaning in the Bible; who
has called Buddhism a religion for the self-indulgent, and who believes
priests should be barred from counseling pregnant teenagers on their
options.
In addition the man who was ordained a priest in June, 1951 --- after being
drafted in 1943 as an assistant to a Nazi anti-aircraft unit and then
deserting the German army in May, 1945 --- forbade the American theologian
Rev. Charles Curran and the popular German theologian Rev. Hans Kung from
teaching because they "encouraged dissent."
He also has indicated that Turkey's bid to join the European Union
conflicts with Europe's "Christian roots."
For other Catholics throughout the world, including this editor, we can
only continue to trust the future of our Church to the Holy Spirit; taking
a certain reassurance at the same time in the cautionary thought "it is
wrong to say that the Holy Spirit elects the pope because there have been
popes the Holy Spirit would never elect."
The thought comes from none other than a German bishop by the name of
Joseph Ratzinger.
It was in the days between the death of Pope John Paul II and the election
of Ratzinger that the assembled cardinals held several meetings prior to
their conclave discussing Church matters, two of those days being devoted
to the Church's financial situation.
Ironically, within hours after their discussions it was announced that
murder charges had been filed by Italian authorities against four
individuals accused in the 1982 death of "God's banker" --- Roberto Calvi.
The Associated Press's Maria Sanminiatelli explains:
"Calvi, who had been the president of Banco Ambrosiano, was dubbed `God's
banker' because of his ties with the Vatican's bank and its former top
official, the American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Calvi's body was found
under London's Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, with a falsified
passport and thousands of dollars in various currencies.
"His death came amid the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, in which the
Vatican's bank held a significant stake. The collapse was Italy's biggest
postwar banking scandal," she continues noting that initially Calvi's death
was called a suicide, but in July 2003, "Italian prosecutors issued a
report concluding that Calvi was killed."
What makes the revival of this story interesting is that it adds ever more
credence to the three-year investigation by the respected crime writer
David Yallop's detailed and meticulously documented 1984 book In God's
Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (Bantam Books,
N.Y.)
Throughout the extensive and often repetitive media coverage of Pope John
Paul II's recent death and burial his immediate predecessor's name was only
occasionally noted, while the circumstances of his mysterious death after
serving only 33 days as Supreme Pontiff of the Church was never discussed
in any authoritative detail.
Yet, as Yallop reveals, John Paul I had in that short time decided on
startling changes that would affect the doctrine, finances and hierarchy of
the Roman Catholic Church. His changes, however, would be opposed by many
both inside and outside the Vatican, among them six powerful men, including
Bishop Marcinkus and Chicago Cardinal John Cody, "who knew the Pope's
decisions could mean the end of their careers, if not their lives. Unless
of course, they acted first."
Thus on the morning of September 29, 1978 John Paul I was found dead. No
official death certificate has ever been issued and no autopsy was
performed. Although his death (murder?) occurred sometime between 9:30 PM
on the 28th and 4:30 AM on the 29th, it was not announced to the world by
Vatican Radio until 7:27 AM.
Later the Vatican would authorize an investigation of Yallop's charges ---
published in a book A Thief in the Night --- which dismissed any idea of
murder. Now with the October trial of the four accused in the 1982 murder
of "God's banker" we may see a reopening of the whole ugly scandal,
especially since one of the four, according to Yallop, made extensive tape
recordings.
At the same time, hopefully, a rereading of Yallop's book and a
re-examination of its charges will not only lead the Church's faithful to
call for greater Vatican accountability, but also for a call that justice
not only be done, but be seen to be done.
Clearly since the untimely death of Pope John XXIII the Roman Church, save
for the aforementioned 33-day reign of John Paul I, has moved from
*aggiornamento* to entrenchment, from collegiality to centralization, from
progressive to regressive, from trust in the Holy Spirit to what religious
scholar Gary Wills has termed "structures of deceit" in defense of its
doctrines.
In that process the once self-proclaimed Universal Church has seen a mass
defection of its laity and clergy, outrageous harm visited upon its young,
an impersonal intolerance for the every-day problems of its flock, and a
theological polarization in doctrinal issues symbolized in its leader Pope
Benedict XVI.
As David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio journalist and author of The Coming
Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism
(Harper: San Francisco, 2003) observes:
"If he continues as pope the way he was as a cardinal we will see a
polarized church. He has said himself that he wanted a smaller, but purer
church."
GROUNDSWELL SWEPT
RATZINGER INTO OFFICE
SEBASTAIN ROTELLA, RICHARD BOUDREAUX, GERALDINE BAUM
Los Angeles Times
April 21, 2005
Although the conclave officially began when the ornate doors of the Sistine
Chapel closed Monday, the election of Pope Benedict XVI less than 24 hours
later was virtually decided before the balloting began.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger arrived with a solid base of votes that staved
off the emergence of any real challenger, culminating a juggernaut of a
campaign months in the making, cardinals and Vatican-watchers said
Wednesday.
As Ratzinger gathered momentum during the conclave, some holdouts changed
their votes "for the unity of the church," British Cardinal Cormac
Murphy-O'Connor said. The fourth ballot resulted in victory Tuesday
afternoon, a speedy outcome that seemed to awe the new pope.
"When the majority of 77 or 78 was reached, there was a gasp,"
Murphy-O'Connor said. "Everyone clapped. He had his head down. He must have
said a prayer. I didn't see his face. He must have been aware this could
happen, but when it does, it is a very special moment."
After the traditional burning of ballots and the pope's triumphant balcony
appearance Tuesday, Benedict XVI invited the cardinals back to a hasty
celebratory dinner. Caught off-guard, 20 nuns at the cardinals' Vatican
residence improvised a repast of soup, beans, cold cuts, ice cream and
Champagne.
Ratzinger's career had been building toward that night of pomp and joy. He
accumulated clout during two decades as the chief of the Vatican's
doctrinal watchdog office and, more recently, as dean of the College of
Cardinals. During the waning years of Pope John Paul II, he essentially ran
the church. He enjoyed unique access to an increasingly infirm pontiff who
helped pave his path to succeeding him.
The German cardinal drew increasing speculation as a papabile, or papal
candidate, late last year. The groundswell came partly from quiet promotion
by powerful conservative movements such as Opus Dei and Communion and
Liberation, an organization that is strong among the Italian political and
business elite.
"Ratzinger put nothing 'on sale' in order to be elected pope," Sandro
Magister, a veteran Vatican watcher, wrote in an online column Wednesday.
"The votes and consensus landed on him one after the other, month after
month, scrutiny after scrutiny, attracted only by his agenda, hard as a
diamond."
A telltale sign of his ascent took place at the funeral of Msgr. Luigi
Giussani, the founder of Communion and Liberation. The Mass in Milan's
Duomo cathedral on Feb. 24 drew Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
and other notables.
Representing the ailing pope, Ratzinger presided over the funeral Mass
instead of Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, against the
expectations of some. Ratzinger's homily brought enthusiastic applause. The
audience responded to remarks by Tettamanzi, a rival candidate for pope,
with silence.
On April 8, Ratzinger stepped into the international limelight at another
funeral, that of John Paul II. His eloquent homily won praise. His
dominance of subsequent assemblies of cardinals added to a sense of
momentum going into the conclave.
After the 115 cardinals sequestered themselves Sunday at the hotel-like St.
Martha residence, there was a lot of "walking around and talking," Cardinal
Murphy-O'Connor said. John Paul had named all but two of the cardinals in
the conclave, and all were junior to Ratzinger.
At a Mass on Monday morning, Ratzinger delivered a broadside televised
around the world: a homily denouncing moral relativism and celebrating
Christian identity.
He spoke with the stern confidence of a candidate on the verge of victory.
"He says the homily and is applauded by the whole church," said Cardinal
Francisco Javier Errazuriz of Chile. "There were many signs, very clear
signs, that he appeared as the first choice."
Errazuriz was one of more than a dozen cardinals who spoke to The Times on
Wednesday. They provided some details about the ceremony and drama of the
conclave but, because of a secrecy oath, declined to reveal vote breakdowns
or name vote-getters other than the winner. Some information about those
topics came from interviews and accounts of Vatican specialists who had
talked to cardinals.
The conclave disproved the dictum that front-runners do not become pope. It
was the first papal election subjected to the 24-hour barrage of the
21st-century media machine. The coverage may have affected some cardinals;
several noted Wednesday that the press had anointed Ratzinger as the man to
beat.
"The newspapers were telling us that Cardinal Ratzinger was a favorite,"
said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington during a tongue-in-cheek
exchange with reporters. "The Holy Spirit may even speak through the
newspapers."
The first vote took place Monday afternoon. Vatican-watchers estimated that
Ratzinger came close to 50 votes. Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Sodano
and other Italian cardinals in the Curia won votes from small blocs
designed to make them power-brokers, Luigi Accattoli of Corriere della Sera
newspaper said.
But an anticipated struggle between moderate cardinals and the
pro-Ratzinger forces never materialized. The moderates included Italians,
other Europeans and Americans who went into the conclave allied with
Tettamanzi and his predecessor as archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria
Martini, according to several accounts.
Several cardinals said voters were swayed by Ratzinger's intellect and a
sense that his closeness to the late pope made him a logical successor.
"The cardinals knew that he was so close to John Paul, that he was John
Paul's companion and accompanied him in all his work," said Cardinal Dario
Castrillon Hoyos of Colombia, who has known Ratzinger since the 1950s, when
Castrillon Hoyos was living in Germany.
Cardinals described the atmosphere of the vote as more like a spiritual
retreat than a political event. They recalled the wonder and solemnity of
an experience played out beneath Michelangelo's majestic fresco of the Last
Judgment.
The process was stately and laborious. The prelates, in ceremonial robes,
sat at 12 tables arranged in four rows, two rows on each side of the
chapel. They wrote out their votes by hand. The cardinals, many elderly,
rose, walked to silver, gold and bronze-plated urns, raised their ballots
and swore a special oath before depositing their votes.
"You take Christ as your witness that you will pick the best man, and then
you look up at the 'Last Judgment,' at all those people going to heaven and
all those going to hell," Errazuriz recalled. "I remember thinking, 'At
least in that hell there aren't ferocious flames.' And 115 people do that,
one right after the other, each with a very personal awareness that he is
standing alone before God."
"It's notable that in these circumstances, some cardinals change their
votes from one ballot to the next," he added. "It's a matter of reflection.
There were many, many hours of prayer."
The ballots were examined by three scrutineers, who were chosen at random.
Each vote was announced and all present wrote it down. With no winner
Monday evening, the cardinals had a light dinner and retired early.
Ratzinger looked relaxed and in control at breakfast Tuesday morning,
addressing cardinals at his table by name and in their diverse languages,
said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles.
It became clear during the voting Tuesday that Ratzinger had support from
every region of the world.
"He had a consensus because firstly, he is someone capable of authority and
always guided by truths," said Cardinal Jozef Glemp of Poland. "He was the
dean of the College of Cardinals and he had reasons to become known…. He
inspired admiration."
Recent years had brought predictions that some cardinals would push for a
precedent-making pope from Latin America, where 40% of all Roman Catholics
live. But "there was a significant Latin American vote for Ratzinger from
the very beginning," said Alejandro Bermudez of Peru, the editor of
Lima-based ACI Prensa.
Most of the region's 20 cardinals were satisfied that John Paul II had
placed Latin Americans in powerful bastions of a bureaucracy once dominated
by Italians and saw Ratzinger as a status quo leader who would prevent an
Italian resurgence, Bermudez said.
"The Latin Americans do not feel neglected," he said. "Having a Latin
American pope was simply not a priority for the Latin American cardinals
themselves."
The Latin Americans' conquest of turf in Vatican City also meant that many
had little interest in decentralization, a priority of U.S. and Central
European moderates, he said.
The remnants of resistance to Ratzinger faded during the two ballots
Tuesday morning. Glemp, the Polish cardinal, said the consensus resulted
from patient discussion.
"Calmly, calmly, without propaganda, we talked and two-thirds thought he
was the best," Glemp said.
The shift in allegiance to Ratzinger included prominent members of the
reformist camp aligned with Martini, according to several accounts. Marco
Politi, the Vatican correspondent for the Rome daily La Repubblica,
reported that Martini sealed the outcome when he acquiesced.
At midday Tuesday, "Ratzinger's position had become so strong that it was
up to the other electors --- if they did not want to give an impression of
great disarray, disastrous for the church's international image --- to take
a step to give their votes to the most prestigious, and finally most
unifying, candidate," Politi wrote. "That's what happened with the blessing
of Martini."
After the decisive ballot Tuesday afternoon, the cardinals applauded
Ratzinger. Sodano, the secretary of state, then asked the ritualistic
question: "Do you accept your canonical election as supreme pontiff?"
"Yes, I accept," Ratzinger responded.
Ratzinger then told Sodano he had chosen the name Benedict XVI. Cardinal
Joachim Meisner of Germany said the new pope looked "a little forlorn" as
he headed into the chapel's Room of Tears, a name that refers to popes who
have wept as they donned white vestments.
Meisner himself did not remain dry-eyed.
"For me it was a miracle," he told journalists Wednesday. "I burst out
crying."
Amid the emotion and commotion, the new pope remembered that Cardinal
Justin Rigali of Philadelphia turned 70 that day and took a moment to wish
him a happy birthday.
"With all the things he had to think about, he had a very human touch,"
Rigali said.
Ratzinger invited his former peers to join him for a "convivial" dinner at
St. Martha, Murphy-O'Connor said, describing it as a light-hearted, festive
gathering.
"In he comes, all dressed up," Murphy-O'Connor said. "I often wondered what
he felt, really. So anyway, we gave him a great clap. We had a very
pleasant dinner with some Champagne to drink a toast. Then we tried some
songs. It was very difficult when you have about a hundred languages to get
one song…. And then he went to rest."
*
Times staff writers Maria De Cristofaro, Larry B. Stammer, Janet Stobart
and Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.
CARDINALS OFFER NEW VIEW
OF BENEDICT XVI: STILL AN
ENFORCER? U.S PRELATES
PLAY DOWN STERN IMAGE
DON LATTIN
San Francisco Chronicle
April 21, 2005
America's Roman Catholic cardinals began the job of selling Pope Benedict
XVI to the nation's 67 million-member church Wednesday, presenting a
gentler version of conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Seven of the nation's 11 voting cardinals said in Rome that the new pope
does not deserve his reputation as a stone-faced enforcer of rigid
orthodoxy.
"We have to be careful not to caricaturize the Holy Father," said Los
Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, the only California church leader among the
115 cardinals who elected the 78-year-old Ratzinger on Tuesday. "He has so
many dimensions. We have to get to know him.''
In remarks Wednesday in the Sistine Chapel, Benedict also tried to reassure
Catholics and non-Catholics.
In a message read in Latin to cardinals gathered for the first Mass
celebrated by the new pope, Benedict said two of his priorities will be the
unification of Christianity and the continuation of an open and sincere
dialogue with other religions.
He also pledged to continue the work of the Second Vatican Council, the
1962-65 reforms that opened the church up to the modern world.
"I too ... want to affirm with decisive willingness to follow in the
commitment of carrying out the Second Vatican Council, in the wake of my
predecessors and in faithful continuity with the 2,000-year-old tradition
of the church," Benedict said.
Until his election as pontiff, Ratzinger of Germany was widely known as the
Vatican's keeper of Catholic orthodoxy. Some critics called him the "panzer
cardinal." As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he
reined in dissident theologians and did not countenance proposals for
ordaining married men, admitting women to the priesthood or diluting the
church's teaching against homosexual acts.
As a result, liberal-minded Catholics --- many from the United States ---
have concerns about the coming papacy.
"Most Americans were looking for more of a centrist," said the Rev. Ken
Doyle, chancellor of the Diocese of Albany, New York., and the former Rome
bureau chief for Catholic News Service.
At the same time, Doyle said, he wouldn't be surprised if Benedict
surprises his critics.
During Vatican II, Ratzinger worked as a theological consultant to German
Cardinal Joseph Frings, a leading progressive voice in the early 1960s.
"One thing to remember is the job makes the man," Doyle said. "For 23
years, he was the watchdog of orthodoxy. Now he's moved into a broader role
--- to be the face of Christ to the world.''
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., one of the U.S. cardinals
speaking at a Wednesday press conference at North American College in Rome,
said the popular conception of the new pope is a misconception.
"There is this vision of the Holy Father as not a person of dialogue or
shared vision," McCarrick said. "But his presumed persona is not true. I
believe you will find in the papacy of Benedict XVI a good deal of
consultation, a good deal of collegiality."
All the members of the College of Cardinals take an oath of secrecy to say
nothing about the balloting in the conclave.
Gerard O'Connell, a Vatican analyst who works for the Union of Catholic
Asian News, thinks Ratzinger went into the conclave with 35-40 votes, just
half needed for election.
"Those who wanted a different style of leadership did not seem to be able
to coalesce around one candidate," he said.
O'Connell and other observers say the massive outpouring of public support
in the days leading up to John Paul's funeral helped Ratzinger.
"Quite a number of cardinals thought that after a giant, John Paul II, they
needed someone of stature who would guarantee continuity, and who was also
a strong person. They saw that he (Ratzinger) personified that," he said.
Another veteran Vatican analyst, John Allen, the Rome correspondent for the
National Catholic Reporter, said the speed of the conclave -- four ballots
in less than 24 hours to elect the new pope -- indicates that "the choice
was between Ratzinger and everybody else.''
"Those uncomfortable with Ratzinger had a hard time agreeing on an
alternative,'' he said.
The theme of Benedict's first day as pope was clearly to sound a
conciliatory note in the face of critics and a badly divided church.
Wearing the snow-white cassock and skullcap reserved for the pope, Benedict
left the Vatican for the first time as pontiff and spent a couple of hours
at his nearby apartment.
Later, back at the Vatican, Benedict walked through the marble halls of the
Apostolic Palace and to the papal apartment where he will now live. It was
sealed closed with red ribbon after John Paul's death and was reopened
Wednesday for its new occupant.
Vatican television showed him touring the apartment, then sitting at an
immaculate desk and signing a document.
He also visited his former staff at the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith. He ate lunch with members of the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy.
On Friday he will visit again with all the cardinals in Rome. Then on
Saturday, he will follow the example of his two predecessors and hold a
news conference, his first since being named the 265th leader of the Roman
Catholic Church.
The encounter, which was announced Wednesday by the Vatican, is expected to
be held in the Vatican press office in an auditorium outfitted with a live
television feed. If history is any guide, Benedict will make an
introductory statement and take questions.
Both John Paul I and John Paul II had similar news conferences soon after
their elections.
Angela Frucci of the Chronicle Foreign Service and Chronicle news services
contributed to this report.
CHOICE ACCENTUATES THE DIVIDE:
CONSERVATIVES ARE GENERALLY
ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT OUTCOME
SUDARSAN RAGHAVEN
Washington Post
April 20, 2005
As bells rang across Catholic University yesterday to signal Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger's election as pope, student Mary DeFusco rejoiced. As
Bendedict XVI, he would carry forward the conservatism that is the bedrock
of the Catholic Church, she said.
"Pope John Paul II would have been happy with this choice," said DeFusco,
19, a freshman from Towson, Maryland "I don't want things to change."
Her friend Stephen Carville, seated next to her on a bench on the Northeast
Washington campus, disagreed. He wanted a pope who would reconsider the
Vatican's stance on issues such as stem cell research, homosexuality and
condom use, and he did not expect Ratzinger to take that course.
"His ideology disagrees with mine," said Carville, 20, a freshman from
Baton Rouge, Louisiana "It may move the church in the wrong direction for
the 21st century."
Across the nation and the region, Catholics reacted with strong emotions to
the selection of Ratzinger. Many conservative Catholics, on the one hand,
welcomed the news, saying he would stand firm on moral issues while
bringing stability to the church. Many liberal Catholics, on the other
hand, said they were disappointed by the election of the German cardinal,
who has been called "God's Rottweiler" because of his statements supporting
rigorous enforcement of Catholic doctrine.
Jerry Hicks, 62, of Glen Burnie was in his car making a Meals on Wheels
delivery when he heard on the radio that a pontiff had been selected. The
choice of Ratizinger pleased him greatly.
"I've read some of his books. I own two of them," said Hicks, who attends
St. Alphonsus Church in Baltimore, where the traditional Latin mass is
still celebrated. "The reason why I like him so much is he's very orthodox,
very traditional."
He added, "I'm sure it will alienate anybody who wants big changes."
At St. Francis Xavier Church in New York, which welcomes gays, Ivy Reyes
said she hoped Ratzinger, despite his conservatism, would move toward
modernizing church policies on social issues. "I'm a Catholic, but I still
believe in stem cell research," said Reyes, 25, who had ducked out of her
job to offer a prayer for the new pope. "I'm hoping he can find a balance
with the science."
After the news broke that the cardinals had reached a decision, Catholics
around the region waited with anticipation to learn who he was.
Monsignor W. Ronald Jameson, rector of the Cathedral of St. Matthew in
downtown Washington, fiddled with the dials of his transistor radio to get
better reception as he stood outside the cathedral after the noon Mass.
"It's Ratzinger!" he said, as soon as he heard the name of the new pope.
"It's Cardinal Ratzinger."
As he announced the news to people leaving the cathedral, Jameson said:
"It's a time of celebration. We have a new leader not just for the church
but also for the whole world."
In Rockne, Texas, the predominantly German American congregation of Sacred
Heart Church was "overwhelmed with joy" said the pastor, the Rev. Krzysztof
Bugno. "We have our German pope," Bugno said.
Others, however, expressed frustration that a cardinal from Africa, Latin
America or Asia wasn't chosen at a time when the church is growing fastest
in the developing world.
Clement Odigwe, 55, of Oxon Hill, a native of Nigeria,said he had been
glued to the television ever since Pope John Paul II died, praying for the
election of Cardinal Frances Arinze, a Nigerian.
Now, he said, his prayer is for Pope Benedict to have a heart for Africa.
In Arlington, Susan Hoefling, 45, said she thought Arinze was better suited
to tackle issues in developing countries, including poverty and the
defection of some Catholics to other faiths. Hoefling, who was raised in
Nigeria, said a recent trip to Zimbabwe had convinced her that the new pope
must assist in the fight against AIDS.
"We need to look at the issues in Africa rather than avoid them and just
focus on Europe and the Middle East," Hoefling said.
She said she hoped Pope Benedict also would consider bringing women into
the priesthood to help stem a shortage of priests and nuns. But she said
she worried he would not go far enough.
In Miami, where some Catholic churches offer as many masses in Spanish and
Portuguese as English, continuity seemed to trump nationality. Hopes for a
Latin American pope were subsumed by a sense of relief that Ratzinger is
likely to follow John Paul's conservative model.
"We were praying that it not be someone who is too liberal," said Lidia Rio
Cardenas after the noon mass at Gezu Catholic Church in downtown Miami.
And outside Sacred Heart Church in the District's Mount Pleasant
neighborhood, Colombian immigrant Emerita Lopez was happy with the choice.
"People say he's very good . . . My friend told me he was always with the
pope and has the same ideas as the pope," said Lopez, 76, a teacher's aide
at Sacred Heart School.
Manuel Ramos, 48, a painter from El Salvador who worships at Sacred Heart,
said that it would have been nice to have a Latin American pope but that
"the Latin Americans were too young. He had to be old, over 70."
Several Jewish leaders welcomed the election of Ratzinger, who has revealed
in a memoir that he served against his will in Adolf Hitler's Nazi youth
movement and later was drafted into a Nazi antiaircraft unit that protected
a BMW plant.
"In Judaism, accepting repentance is a high value," said David L.
Bernstein, Washington area director of the American Jewish Committee. "And
this pope has been in a historic process of reconciliation, and we must
accept his ultimate intention to become a friend of the Jewish people."
At the Church of the Resurrection outside Ellicott City, the Rev. Ty
Hullinger, associate pastor, said he expects to hear criticism of the new
pope from some in his parish. "What I tell people is to be patient, give
him a chance," said Hullinger, who as a Baltimore seminary student met
Ratzinger on a trip to Rome in 2002. "I know the man I met. He seemed to be
a very humble, very gentle, a very compassionate man."
Hullinger said Pope Benedict will have to meet expectations established by
his predecessor.
"I think we're looking for a pope who would be open to the world in the way
John Paul II was, the openness to different faiths," he said. "I don't see
him in any way turning back from that course."
Contributing to this report were staff writers Bill Broadway, Karin
Brulliard, Susan DeFord, Petula Dvorak, Hamil R. Harris, Susan Kinzie, Mary
Otto and Mary Beth Sheridan in Washington; staff writer Manuel Roig-Franzia
in Miami; and special correspondents Michelle Garcia in New York, Kari
Lydersen in Chicago and Caroline Keating in Austin.
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
COMMENTARY:
REMEMBERING JOHN PAUL I
AS THE "GRAND INQUISITOR"
BECOMES POPE BENEDICT XVI
Emerging from the wisps of white smoke and the toll of bells, German
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger --- "the Grand Inquisitor" --- has become the
265th Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church --- Pope Benedict XVI.
Among some Catholics the man who has been Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, responsible for enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, or
as his online fan club has claimed --- "putting the smackdown on heresy
since 1981" --- there is much joy.
They have a 78-year old Pope who while a cardinal admonished Latin
Americans for supporting "liberation theology" due to its "Marxist
leanings;" who has denounced any efforts to rewrite Scripture in gender
inclusive language; who has declared rock music as a "vehicle of
anti-religion;" who has dismissed any "feminist" meaning in the Bible; who
has called Buddhism a religion for the self-indulgent, and who believes
priests should be barred from counseling pregnant teenagers on their
options.
In addition the man who was ordained a priest in June, 1951 --- after being
drafted in 1943 as an assistant to a Nazi anti-aircraft unit and then
deserting the German army in May, 1945 --- forbade the American theologian
Rev. Charles Curran and the popular German theologian Rev. Hans Kung from
teaching because they "encouraged dissent."
He also has indicated that Turkey's bid to join the European Union
conflicts with Europe's "Christian roots."
For other Catholics throughout the world, including this editor, we can
only continue to trust the future of our Church to the Holy Spirit; taking
a certain reassurance at the same time in the cautionary thought "it is
wrong to say that the Holy Spirit elects the pope because there have been
popes the Holy Spirit would never elect."
The thought comes from none other than a German bishop by the name of
Joseph Ratzinger.
It was in the days between the death of Pope John Paul II and the election
of Ratzinger that the assembled cardinals held several meetings prior to
their conclave discussing Church matters, two of those days being devoted
to the Church's financial situation.
Ironically, within hours after their discussions it was announced that
murder charges had been filed by Italian authorities against four
individuals accused in the 1982 death of "God's banker" --- Roberto Calvi.
The Associated Press's Maria Sanminiatelli explains:
"Calvi, who had been the president of Banco Ambrosiano, was dubbed `God's
banker' because of his ties with the Vatican's bank and its former top
official, the American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Calvi's body was found
under London's Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, with a falsified
passport and thousands of dollars in various currencies.
"His death came amid the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, in which the
Vatican's bank held a significant stake. The collapse was Italy's biggest
postwar banking scandal," she continues noting that initially Calvi's death
was called a suicide, but in July 2003, "Italian prosecutors issued a
report concluding that Calvi was killed."
What makes the revival of this story interesting is that it adds ever more
credence to the three-year investigation by the respected crime writer
David Yallop's detailed and meticulously documented 1984 book In God's
Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (Bantam Books,
N.Y.)
Throughout the extensive and often repetitive media coverage of Pope John
Paul II's recent death and burial his immediate predecessor's name was only
occasionally noted, while the circumstances of his mysterious death after
serving only 33 days as Supreme Pontiff of the Church was never discussed
in any authoritative detail.
Yet, as Yallop reveals, John Paul I had in that short time decided on
startling changes that would affect the doctrine, finances and hierarchy of
the Roman Catholic Church. His changes, however, would be opposed by many
both inside and outside the Vatican, among them six powerful men, including
Bishop Marcinkus and Chicago Cardinal John Cody, "who knew the Pope's
decisions could mean the end of their careers, if not their lives. Unless
of course, they acted first."
Thus on the morning of September 29, 1978 John Paul I was found dead. No
official death certificate has ever been issued and no autopsy was
performed. Although his death (murder?) occurred sometime between 9:30 PM
on the 28th and 4:30 AM on the 29th, it was not announced to the world by
Vatican Radio until 7:27 AM.
Later the Vatican would authorize an investigation of Yallop's charges ---
published in a book A Thief in the Night --- which dismissed any idea of
murder. Now with the October trial of the four accused in the 1982 murder
of "God's banker" we may see a reopening of the whole ugly scandal,
especially since one of the four, according to Yallop, made extensive tape
recordings.
At the same time, hopefully, a rereading of Yallop's book and a
re-examination of its charges will not only lead the Church's faithful to
call for greater Vatican accountability, but also for a call that justice
not only be done, but be seen to be done.
Clearly since the untimely death of Pope John XXIII the Roman Church, save
for the aforementioned 33-day reign of John Paul I, has moved from
*aggiornamento* to entrenchment, from collegiality to centralization, from
progressive to regressive, from trust in the Holy Spirit to what religious
scholar Gary Wills has termed "structures of deceit" in defense of its
doctrines.
In that process the once self-proclaimed Universal Church has seen a mass
defection of its laity and clergy, outrageous harm visited upon its young,
an impersonal intolerance for the every-day problems of its flock, and a
theological polarization in doctrinal issues symbolized in its leader Pope
Benedict XVI.
As David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio journalist and author of The Coming
Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism
(Harper: San Francisco, 2003) observes:
"If he continues as pope the way he was as a cardinal we will see a
polarized church. He has said himself that he wanted a smaller, but purer
church."
GROUNDSWELL SWEPT
RATZINGER INTO OFFICE
SEBASTAIN ROTELLA, RICHARD BOUDREAUX, GERALDINE BAUM
Los Angeles Times
April 21, 2005
Although the conclave officially began when the ornate doors of the Sistine
Chapel closed Monday, the election of Pope Benedict XVI less than 24 hours
later was virtually decided before the balloting began.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger arrived with a solid base of votes that staved
off the emergence of any real challenger, culminating a juggernaut of a
campaign months in the making, cardinals and Vatican-watchers said
Wednesday.
As Ratzinger gathered momentum during the conclave, some holdouts changed
their votes "for the unity of the church," British Cardinal Cormac
Murphy-O'Connor said. The fourth ballot resulted in victory Tuesday
afternoon, a speedy outcome that seemed to awe the new pope.
"When the majority of 77 or 78 was reached, there was a gasp,"
Murphy-O'Connor said. "Everyone clapped. He had his head down. He must have
said a prayer. I didn't see his face. He must have been aware this could
happen, but when it does, it is a very special moment."
After the traditional burning of ballots and the pope's triumphant balcony
appearance Tuesday, Benedict XVI invited the cardinals back to a hasty
celebratory dinner. Caught off-guard, 20 nuns at the cardinals' Vatican
residence improvised a repast of soup, beans, cold cuts, ice cream and
Champagne.
Ratzinger's career had been building toward that night of pomp and joy. He
accumulated clout during two decades as the chief of the Vatican's
doctrinal watchdog office and, more recently, as dean of the College of
Cardinals. During the waning years of Pope John Paul II, he essentially ran
the church. He enjoyed unique access to an increasingly infirm pontiff who
helped pave his path to succeeding him.
The German cardinal drew increasing speculation as a papabile, or papal
candidate, late last year. The groundswell came partly from quiet promotion
by powerful conservative movements such as Opus Dei and Communion and
Liberation, an organization that is strong among the Italian political and
business elite.
"Ratzinger put nothing 'on sale' in order to be elected pope," Sandro
Magister, a veteran Vatican watcher, wrote in an online column Wednesday.
"The votes and consensus landed on him one after the other, month after
month, scrutiny after scrutiny, attracted only by his agenda, hard as a
diamond."
A telltale sign of his ascent took place at the funeral of Msgr. Luigi
Giussani, the founder of Communion and Liberation. The Mass in Milan's
Duomo cathedral on Feb. 24 drew Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
and other notables.
Representing the ailing pope, Ratzinger presided over the funeral Mass
instead of Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, against the
expectations of some. Ratzinger's homily brought enthusiastic applause. The
audience responded to remarks by Tettamanzi, a rival candidate for pope,
with silence.
On April 8, Ratzinger stepped into the international limelight at another
funeral, that of John Paul II. His eloquent homily won praise. His
dominance of subsequent assemblies of cardinals added to a sense of
momentum going into the conclave.
After the 115 cardinals sequestered themselves Sunday at the hotel-like St.
Martha residence, there was a lot of "walking around and talking," Cardinal
Murphy-O'Connor said. John Paul had named all but two of the cardinals in
the conclave, and all were junior to Ratzinger.
At a Mass on Monday morning, Ratzinger delivered a broadside televised
around the world: a homily denouncing moral relativism and celebrating
Christian identity.
He spoke with the stern confidence of a candidate on the verge of victory.
"He says the homily and is applauded by the whole church," said Cardinal
Francisco Javier Errazuriz of Chile. "There were many signs, very clear
signs, that he appeared as the first choice."
Errazuriz was one of more than a dozen cardinals who spoke to The Times on
Wednesday. They provided some details about the ceremony and drama of the
conclave but, because of a secrecy oath, declined to reveal vote breakdowns
or name vote-getters other than the winner. Some information about those
topics came from interviews and accounts of Vatican specialists who had
talked to cardinals.
The conclave disproved the dictum that front-runners do not become pope. It
was the first papal election subjected to the 24-hour barrage of the
21st-century media machine. The coverage may have affected some cardinals;
several noted Wednesday that the press had anointed Ratzinger as the man to
beat.
"The newspapers were telling us that Cardinal Ratzinger was a favorite,"
said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington during a tongue-in-cheek
exchange with reporters. "The Holy Spirit may even speak through the
newspapers."
The first vote took place Monday afternoon. Vatican-watchers estimated that
Ratzinger came close to 50 votes. Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Sodano
and other Italian cardinals in the Curia won votes from small blocs
designed to make them power-brokers, Luigi Accattoli of Corriere della Sera
newspaper said.
But an anticipated struggle between moderate cardinals and the
pro-Ratzinger forces never materialized. The moderates included Italians,
other Europeans and Americans who went into the conclave allied with
Tettamanzi and his predecessor as archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria
Martini, according to several accounts.
Several cardinals said voters were swayed by Ratzinger's intellect and a
sense that his closeness to the late pope made him a logical successor.
"The cardinals knew that he was so close to John Paul, that he was John
Paul's companion and accompanied him in all his work," said Cardinal Dario
Castrillon Hoyos of Colombia, who has known Ratzinger since the 1950s, when
Castrillon Hoyos was living in Germany.
Cardinals described the atmosphere of the vote as more like a spiritual
retreat than a political event. They recalled the wonder and solemnity of
an experience played out beneath Michelangelo's majestic fresco of the Last
Judgment.
The process was stately and laborious. The prelates, in ceremonial robes,
sat at 12 tables arranged in four rows, two rows on each side of the
chapel. They wrote out their votes by hand. The cardinals, many elderly,
rose, walked to silver, gold and bronze-plated urns, raised their ballots
and swore a special oath before depositing their votes.
"You take Christ as your witness that you will pick the best man, and then
you look up at the 'Last Judgment,' at all those people going to heaven and
all those going to hell," Errazuriz recalled. "I remember thinking, 'At
least in that hell there aren't ferocious flames.' And 115 people do that,
one right after the other, each with a very personal awareness that he is
standing alone before God."
"It's notable that in these circumstances, some cardinals change their
votes from one ballot to the next," he added. "It's a matter of reflection.
There were many, many hours of prayer."
The ballots were examined by three scrutineers, who were chosen at random.
Each vote was announced and all present wrote it down. With no winner
Monday evening, the cardinals had a light dinner and retired early.
Ratzinger looked relaxed and in control at breakfast Tuesday morning,
addressing cardinals at his table by name and in their diverse languages,
said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles.
It became clear during the voting Tuesday that Ratzinger had support from
every region of the world.
"He had a consensus because firstly, he is someone capable of authority and
always guided by truths," said Cardinal Jozef Glemp of Poland. "He was the
dean of the College of Cardinals and he had reasons to become known…. He
inspired admiration."
Recent years had brought predictions that some cardinals would push for a
precedent-making pope from Latin America, where 40% of all Roman Catholics
live. But "there was a significant Latin American vote for Ratzinger from
the very beginning," said Alejandro Bermudez of Peru, the editor of
Lima-based ACI Prensa.
Most of the region's 20 cardinals were satisfied that John Paul II had
placed Latin Americans in powerful bastions of a bureaucracy once dominated
by Italians and saw Ratzinger as a status quo leader who would prevent an
Italian resurgence, Bermudez said.
"The Latin Americans do not feel neglected," he said. "Having a Latin
American pope was simply not a priority for the Latin American cardinals
themselves."
The Latin Americans' conquest of turf in Vatican City also meant that many
had little interest in decentralization, a priority of U.S. and Central
European moderates, he said.
The remnants of resistance to Ratzinger faded during the two ballots
Tuesday morning. Glemp, the Polish cardinal, said the consensus resulted
from patient discussion.
"Calmly, calmly, without propaganda, we talked and two-thirds thought he
was the best," Glemp said.
The shift in allegiance to Ratzinger included prominent members of the
reformist camp aligned with Martini, according to several accounts. Marco
Politi, the Vatican correspondent for the Rome daily La Repubblica,
reported that Martini sealed the outcome when he acquiesced.
At midday Tuesday, "Ratzinger's position had become so strong that it was
up to the other electors --- if they did not want to give an impression of
great disarray, disastrous for the church's international image --- to take
a step to give their votes to the most prestigious, and finally most
unifying, candidate," Politi wrote. "That's what happened with the blessing
of Martini."
After the decisive ballot Tuesday afternoon, the cardinals applauded
Ratzinger. Sodano, the secretary of state, then asked the ritualistic
question: "Do you accept your canonical election as supreme pontiff?"
"Yes, I accept," Ratzinger responded.
Ratzinger then told Sodano he had chosen the name Benedict XVI. Cardinal
Joachim Meisner of Germany said the new pope looked "a little forlorn" as
he headed into the chapel's Room of Tears, a name that refers to popes who
have wept as they donned white vestments.
Meisner himself did not remain dry-eyed.
"For me it was a miracle," he told journalists Wednesday. "I burst out
crying."
Amid the emotion and commotion, the new pope remembered that Cardinal
Justin Rigali of Philadelphia turned 70 that day and took a moment to wish
him a happy birthday.
"With all the things he had to think about, he had a very human touch,"
Rigali said.
Ratzinger invited his former peers to join him for a "convivial" dinner at
St. Martha, Murphy-O'Connor said, describing it as a light-hearted, festive
gathering.
"In he comes, all dressed up," Murphy-O'Connor said. "I often wondered what
he felt, really. So anyway, we gave him a great clap. We had a very
pleasant dinner with some Champagne to drink a toast. Then we tried some
songs. It was very difficult when you have about a hundred languages to get
one song…. And then he went to rest."
*
Times staff writers Maria De Cristofaro, Larry B. Stammer, Janet Stobart
and Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.
CARDINALS OFFER NEW VIEW
OF BENEDICT XVI: STILL AN
ENFORCER? U.S PRELATES
PLAY DOWN STERN IMAGE
DON LATTIN
San Francisco Chronicle
April 21, 2005
America's Roman Catholic cardinals began the job of selling Pope Benedict
XVI to the nation's 67 million-member church Wednesday, presenting a
gentler version of conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Seven of the nation's 11 voting cardinals said in Rome that the new pope
does not deserve his reputation as a stone-faced enforcer of rigid
orthodoxy.
"We have to be careful not to caricaturize the Holy Father," said Los
Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, the only California church leader among the
115 cardinals who elected the 78-year-old Ratzinger on Tuesday. "He has so
many dimensions. We have to get to know him.''
In remarks Wednesday in the Sistine Chapel, Benedict also tried to reassure
Catholics and non-Catholics.
In a message read in Latin to cardinals gathered for the first Mass
celebrated by the new pope, Benedict said two of his priorities will be the
unification of Christianity and the continuation of an open and sincere
dialogue with other religions.
He also pledged to continue the work of the Second Vatican Council, the
1962-65 reforms that opened the church up to the modern world.
"I too ... want to affirm with decisive willingness to follow in the
commitment of carrying out the Second Vatican Council, in the wake of my
predecessors and in faithful continuity with the 2,000-year-old tradition
of the church," Benedict said.
Until his election as pontiff, Ratzinger of Germany was widely known as the
Vatican's keeper of Catholic orthodoxy. Some critics called him the "panzer
cardinal." As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he
reined in dissident theologians and did not countenance proposals for
ordaining married men, admitting women to the priesthood or diluting the
church's teaching against homosexual acts.
As a result, liberal-minded Catholics --- many from the United States ---
have concerns about the coming papacy.
"Most Americans were looking for more of a centrist," said the Rev. Ken
Doyle, chancellor of the Diocese of Albany, New York., and the former Rome
bureau chief for Catholic News Service.
At the same time, Doyle said, he wouldn't be surprised if Benedict
surprises his critics.
During Vatican II, Ratzinger worked as a theological consultant to German
Cardinal Joseph Frings, a leading progressive voice in the early 1960s.
"One thing to remember is the job makes the man," Doyle said. "For 23
years, he was the watchdog of orthodoxy. Now he's moved into a broader role
--- to be the face of Christ to the world.''
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., one of the U.S. cardinals
speaking at a Wednesday press conference at North American College in Rome,
said the popular conception of the new pope is a misconception.
"There is this vision of the Holy Father as not a person of dialogue or
shared vision," McCarrick said. "But his presumed persona is not true. I
believe you will find in the papacy of Benedict XVI a good deal of
consultation, a good deal of collegiality."
All the members of the College of Cardinals take an oath of secrecy to say
nothing about the balloting in the conclave.
Gerard O'Connell, a Vatican analyst who works for the Union of Catholic
Asian News, thinks Ratzinger went into the conclave with 35-40 votes, just
half needed for election.
"Those who wanted a different style of leadership did not seem to be able
to coalesce around one candidate," he said.
O'Connell and other observers say the massive outpouring of public support
in the days leading up to John Paul's funeral helped Ratzinger.
"Quite a number of cardinals thought that after a giant, John Paul II, they
needed someone of stature who would guarantee continuity, and who was also
a strong person. They saw that he (Ratzinger) personified that," he said.
Another veteran Vatican analyst, John Allen, the Rome correspondent for the
National Catholic Reporter, said the speed of the conclave -- four ballots
in less than 24 hours to elect the new pope -- indicates that "the choice
was between Ratzinger and everybody else.''
"Those uncomfortable with Ratzinger had a hard time agreeing on an
alternative,'' he said.
The theme of Benedict's first day as pope was clearly to sound a
conciliatory note in the face of critics and a badly divided church.
Wearing the snow-white cassock and skullcap reserved for the pope, Benedict
left the Vatican for the first time as pontiff and spent a couple of hours
at his nearby apartment.
Later, back at the Vatican, Benedict walked through the marble halls of the
Apostolic Palace and to the papal apartment where he will now live. It was
sealed closed with red ribbon after John Paul's death and was reopened
Wednesday for its new occupant.
Vatican television showed him touring the apartment, then sitting at an
immaculate desk and signing a document.
He also visited his former staff at the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith. He ate lunch with members of the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy.
On Friday he will visit again with all the cardinals in Rome. Then on
Saturday, he will follow the example of his two predecessors and hold a
news conference, his first since being named the 265th leader of the Roman
Catholic Church.
The encounter, which was announced Wednesday by the Vatican, is expected to
be held in the Vatican press office in an auditorium outfitted with a live
television feed. If history is any guide, Benedict will make an
introductory statement and take questions.
Both John Paul I and John Paul II had similar news conferences soon after
their elections.
Angela Frucci of the Chronicle Foreign Service and Chronicle news services
contributed to this report.
CHOICE ACCENTUATES THE DIVIDE:
CONSERVATIVES ARE GENERALLY
ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT OUTCOME
SUDARSAN RAGHAVEN
Washington Post
April 20, 2005
As bells rang across Catholic University yesterday to signal Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger's election as pope, student Mary DeFusco rejoiced. As
Bendedict XVI, he would carry forward the conservatism that is the bedrock
of the Catholic Church, she said.
"Pope John Paul II would have been happy with this choice," said DeFusco,
19, a freshman from Towson, Maryland "I don't want things to change."
Her friend Stephen Carville, seated next to her on a bench on the Northeast
Washington campus, disagreed. He wanted a pope who would reconsider the
Vatican's stance on issues such as stem cell research, homosexuality and
condom use, and he did not expect Ratzinger to take that course.
"His ideology disagrees with mine," said Carville, 20, a freshman from
Baton Rouge, Louisiana "It may move the church in the wrong direction for
the 21st century."
Across the nation and the region, Catholics reacted with strong emotions to
the selection of Ratzinger. Many conservative Catholics, on the one hand,
welcomed the news, saying he would stand firm on moral issues while
bringing stability to the church. Many liberal Catholics, on the other
hand, said they were disappointed by the election of the German cardinal,
who has been called "God's Rottweiler" because of his statements supporting
rigorous enforcement of Catholic doctrine.
Jerry Hicks, 62, of Glen Burnie was in his car making a Meals on Wheels
delivery when he heard on the radio that a pontiff had been selected. The
choice of Ratizinger pleased him greatly.
"I've read some of his books. I own two of them," said Hicks, who attends
St. Alphonsus Church in Baltimore, where the traditional Latin mass is
still celebrated. "The reason why I like him so much is he's very orthodox,
very traditional."
He added, "I'm sure it will alienate anybody who wants big changes."
At St. Francis Xavier Church in New York, which welcomes gays, Ivy Reyes
said she hoped Ratzinger, despite his conservatism, would move toward
modernizing church policies on social issues. "I'm a Catholic, but I still
believe in stem cell research," said Reyes, 25, who had ducked out of her
job to offer a prayer for the new pope. "I'm hoping he can find a balance
with the science."
After the news broke that the cardinals had reached a decision, Catholics
around the region waited with anticipation to learn who he was.
Monsignor W. Ronald Jameson, rector of the Cathedral of St. Matthew in
downtown Washington, fiddled with the dials of his transistor radio to get
better reception as he stood outside the cathedral after the noon Mass.
"It's Ratzinger!" he said, as soon as he heard the name of the new pope.
"It's Cardinal Ratzinger."
As he announced the news to people leaving the cathedral, Jameson said:
"It's a time of celebration. We have a new leader not just for the church
but also for the whole world."
In Rockne, Texas, the predominantly German American congregation of Sacred
Heart Church was "overwhelmed with joy" said the pastor, the Rev. Krzysztof
Bugno. "We have our German pope," Bugno said.
Others, however, expressed frustration that a cardinal from Africa, Latin
America or Asia wasn't chosen at a time when the church is growing fastest
in the developing world.
Clement Odigwe, 55, of Oxon Hill, a native of Nigeria,said he had been
glued to the television ever since Pope John Paul II died, praying for the
election of Cardinal Frances Arinze, a Nigerian.
Now, he said, his prayer is for Pope Benedict to have a heart for Africa.
In Arlington, Susan Hoefling, 45, said she thought Arinze was better suited
to tackle issues in developing countries, including poverty and the
defection of some Catholics to other faiths. Hoefling, who was raised in
Nigeria, said a recent trip to Zimbabwe had convinced her that the new pope
must assist in the fight against AIDS.
"We need to look at the issues in Africa rather than avoid them and just
focus on Europe and the Middle East," Hoefling said.
She said she hoped Pope Benedict also would consider bringing women into
the priesthood to help stem a shortage of priests and nuns. But she said
she worried he would not go far enough.
In Miami, where some Catholic churches offer as many masses in Spanish and
Portuguese as English, continuity seemed to trump nationality. Hopes for a
Latin American pope were subsumed by a sense of relief that Ratzinger is
likely to follow John Paul's conservative model.
"We were praying that it not be someone who is too liberal," said Lidia Rio
Cardenas after the noon mass at Gezu Catholic Church in downtown Miami.
And outside Sacred Heart Church in the District's Mount Pleasant
neighborhood, Colombian immigrant Emerita Lopez was happy with the choice.
"People say he's very good . . . My friend told me he was always with the
pope and has the same ideas as the pope," said Lopez, 76, a teacher's aide
at Sacred Heart School.
Manuel Ramos, 48, a painter from El Salvador who worships at Sacred Heart,
said that it would have been nice to have a Latin American pope but that
"the Latin Americans were too young. He had to be old, over 70."
Several Jewish leaders welcomed the election of Ratzinger, who has revealed
in a memoir that he served against his will in Adolf Hitler's Nazi youth
movement and later was drafted into a Nazi antiaircraft unit that protected
a BMW plant.
"In Judaism, accepting repentance is a high value," said David L.
Bernstein, Washington area director of the American Jewish Committee. "And
this pope has been in a historic process of reconciliation, and we must
accept his ultimate intention to become a friend of the Jewish people."
At the Church of the Resurrection outside Ellicott City, the Rev. Ty
Hullinger, associate pastor, said he expects to hear criticism of the new
pope from some in his parish. "What I tell people is to be patient, give
him a chance," said Hullinger, who as a Baltimore seminary student met
Ratzinger on a trip to Rome in 2002. "I know the man I met. He seemed to be
a very humble, very gentle, a very compassionate man."
Hullinger said Pope Benedict will have to meet expectations established by
his predecessor.
"I think we're looking for a pope who would be open to the world in the way
John Paul II was, the openness to different faiths," he said. "I don't see
him in any way turning back from that course."
Contributing to this report were staff writers Bill Broadway, Karin
Brulliard, Susan DeFord, Petula Dvorak, Hamil R. Harris, Susan Kinzie, Mary
Otto and Mary Beth Sheridan in Washington; staff writer Manuel Roig-Franzia
in Miami; and special correspondents Michelle Garcia in New York, Kari
Lydersen in Chicago and Caroline Keating in Austin.
IS THE END IN SIGHT FOR ECUSA'S ORTHODOX?
By David W. Virtue
April 21, 2005
It is now obvious to even the most simple-minded that orthodox
priests caught in revisionist dioceses have no future. Their day is
done. Sooner or later, like Jews in death camps, their number will be
called and they will be marched into oblivion.
Six priests in the Diocese of Connecticut learned that bitter lesson
this week despite some 23 bishops active and retired who appealed to
Bishop Andrew Smith not to inhibit and depose them. At the end their
appeals fell on deaf ears.
The six will go. How they will go has now been determined -
inhibition and deposition - what they will do is uncertain. Will they
take their people to the AMIA or come under an overseas primate, or
will they simply resign and look for different work we do not, as
yet, know. But as Episcopal priests they are finished unless by some
miracle they are picked up by an orthodox bishop. But such jobs are
few and far between.
In a very real sense it doesn't matter. What happened to them has
been going on in dioceses like Los Angeles, Kentucky, Newark, Long
Island, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Central Pennsylvania and Florida to
name but a few.
And the story is nearly always the same. The priest offers up that he
cannot support a bishop who openly supports the consecration of a
homoerotic bishop to the episcopacy and seeks alternative episcopal
oversight.
The bishop fires back that he will give them DEPO in exchange for a
pledge of loyalty, more money and ultimate control over whom that
"delegated" bishop is and still maintain his right to visit whenever he
wants. DEPO is a farce that has yet to work in one single instance
and it is why the Archbishop of Canterbury offered up a panel of
reference in Ireland earlier this year, another idea that has yet to
see the light of day.
The priest(s) object to the bishop's demands for absolute obedience
and undying fealty and the fight is on.
The bishop offers up a lot of gracious-speak language in high-sounding
letters to the priests and the diocese to say he demands
their loyalty or he has no option but to take ecclesiastical action.
Lawyers are brought in and Canon Ten is invoked and the bishops' chew
up these priests and spit them out - all done with the tacit approval
of Frank Griswold who thinks the orthodox are working in league with
the Father of Lies anyway and the bishop destroys yet another group
of godly priests whose only desire was to preach the unsearchable
riches of Christ.
But here a ray of light shines. An attorney I spoke with says they
don't have "to go". They can, as did David Moyer did, go to the civil
courts. Canon 10 is being misused to deny the six priests the trial
to which they are entitled. Furthermore the validity of the Denis
Canon is in dispute, one can see that in the decision in California.
The civil court alternative can work. It is through discovery that
the false and fraudulent activities of revisionist bishops can be
uncovered.
But it is still death by a thousand cuts.
And the truth is there is nothing to stop this ecclesiastical carnage
until every single orthodox priest in 80 percent of the dioceses of
the Episcopal Church are finally broken and destroyed. Network leader
and Episcopal Bishop Bob Duncan has publicly declared that to be the
case and he has admitted that the Network can do nothing to save
them. So suffer he says; it is our lot. Sadly the six priests will
get no help from orthodox bishops other than statements.
The only orthodox survivors, in the future, will be found in orthodox
dioceses where the bishop still believes the historic faith, but even
there the orthodox should never look to any future General Convention to
offer them anything. That too is a lost cause. That day is done.
The fence sitters, revisionists, and pansexualists have won the day.
It is their show. They deserve to own a church in free fall.
Of course the victories won by these revisionist bishops come at a
price. A lot of the victory is pyrrhic.
These godless bishops lose not only godly clergy who have the ability
to make churches grow; they also lose huge numbers of dues paying
godly laity. By VirtueOnline's estimate, the recent losses in New
Hampshire, Kentucky, Alabama, Atlanta, North Carolina, Los Angeles,
Long Island, Pennsylvania, Central Pa. and Connecticut the figure is
well over 12,000 laity and that does not include the ongoing fallout
in the months ahead with increasingly disillusioned laity brought on
by bad publicity in the secular media and much more. They are lost
forever and will never be replaced.
The Anglican Mission in America will probably pick up the best of
them, some will come under an overseas primate, others will flee to
orthodox denominations with many simply dropping out fed up with the
whole business of church.
The bishop gets to keep largely empty properties which he must either
close down or put a priest in charge and hope that it can rebuild.
For the most part this is whistling Dixie.
But orthodox dioceses should not get cocky that they are immune from
the inroads of revisionism in their dioceses. Many have very slim
margins of orthodox priests, and a virulent move by a group of
revisionist priests can easily tip the balance where new bishops are
sought. A case in point is the Diocese of San Diego - once orthodox
under Gethin Hughes now gone liberal. Another diocese in point is the
Diocese of Florida. John Howard came in with great promise to replace
Steve Jecko, now he has all but sold out to the other side. That
diocese will, in time, bite the dust with a number of orthodox
priests already weighing their future.
Fence sitting bishops like Don Wimberly of Texas claim to be orthodox
but he ordains a gay deacon and you know it is only a matter of time
before his rollover is complete.
One organization that is making life hell for orthodox bishops is the Via
Media. They claim to speak for the diverse middle, read dead, white
Episcopalians who do whatever their priest and bishop tells
them but have no clue how they are being undermined and seduced. They
have never heard a clear distinct gospel proclamation and they are
easy prey for words like "inclusion," "diversity", and the smooth
talk of people like V. Gene Robinson. Via Media has the blessing of
Griswold and they are worming their way like a cancer into one
orthodox diocese after another.
In the Diocese of Pittsburgh Bob Duncan faces a lawsuit from this
gang with a black priest Harold Lewis leading the charge.
Add the sodomite organization Integrity with Via Media as the
controlling agent, arm them with a group of angry lesbian women
priests and disgruntled divorcees, salt them with an outspoken, whiny
homosexual priest or two and you have a cancer that is, in time,
unstoppable.
Dioceses that still have the ability to withstand the revisionist Via
Media onslaught include the dioceses of san Joaquin, Quincy, Ft.
Worth, Central Florida and South Carolina to name but a handful, but
the figure is not large and you can count them all on two hands. A
slight misstep by an orthodox bishop, or if his priests start to roll
over to the seductive siren call of inclusion steadily being advanced
by Louie Crew and the House of Bishops/Deputies list and the tilt
could prove fatal. Now add to the mix the constant bashing and
needling of orthodox groups by the Dallas flatfoot Jack Taylor and
the wear and tear begins to take effect. In time disillusionment sets
in and priests take early retirement, their replacement is often a
liberal posing as a conservative or a conservative gone over to the
other side, and like dominoes the diocese begins to fall.
It's only a matter of time, and time is fast running out, just ask
the "Connecticut Six" whose lives and ministries are on the verge of
being destroyed.
Hitler took six years to destroy six million Jews, The Episcopal
Church, over 40 years has quietly destroyed hundreds of godly priests
and with them tens of thousands of godly Episcopalians with the
spiritual cyanide of pansexuality and inclusion. Now the pace is
simply quickening, the end is just the same; is there is no eye to
pity and no arm to save?
From within the church the answer sadly is no. It is now up to the courts.
By David W. Virtue
April 21, 2005
It is now obvious to even the most simple-minded that orthodox
priests caught in revisionist dioceses have no future. Their day is
done. Sooner or later, like Jews in death camps, their number will be
called and they will be marched into oblivion.
Six priests in the Diocese of Connecticut learned that bitter lesson
this week despite some 23 bishops active and retired who appealed to
Bishop Andrew Smith not to inhibit and depose them. At the end their
appeals fell on deaf ears.
The six will go. How they will go has now been determined -
inhibition and deposition - what they will do is uncertain. Will they
take their people to the AMIA or come under an overseas primate, or
will they simply resign and look for different work we do not, as
yet, know. But as Episcopal priests they are finished unless by some
miracle they are picked up by an orthodox bishop. But such jobs are
few and far between.
In a very real sense it doesn't matter. What happened to them has
been going on in dioceses like Los Angeles, Kentucky, Newark, Long
Island, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Central Pennsylvania and Florida to
name but a few.
And the story is nearly always the same. The priest offers up that he
cannot support a bishop who openly supports the consecration of a
homoerotic bishop to the episcopacy and seeks alternative episcopal
oversight.
The bishop fires back that he will give them DEPO in exchange for a
pledge of loyalty, more money and ultimate control over whom that
"delegated" bishop is and still maintain his right to visit whenever he
wants. DEPO is a farce that has yet to work in one single instance
and it is why the Archbishop of Canterbury offered up a panel of
reference in Ireland earlier this year, another idea that has yet to
see the light of day.
The priest(s) object to the bishop's demands for absolute obedience
and undying fealty and the fight is on.
The bishop offers up a lot of gracious-speak language in high-sounding
letters to the priests and the diocese to say he demands
their loyalty or he has no option but to take ecclesiastical action.
Lawyers are brought in and Canon Ten is invoked and the bishops' chew
up these priests and spit them out - all done with the tacit approval
of Frank Griswold who thinks the orthodox are working in league with
the Father of Lies anyway and the bishop destroys yet another group
of godly priests whose only desire was to preach the unsearchable
riches of Christ.
But here a ray of light shines. An attorney I spoke with says they
don't have "to go". They can, as did David Moyer did, go to the civil
courts. Canon 10 is being misused to deny the six priests the trial
to which they are entitled. Furthermore the validity of the Denis
Canon is in dispute, one can see that in the decision in California.
The civil court alternative can work. It is through discovery that
the false and fraudulent activities of revisionist bishops can be
uncovered.
But it is still death by a thousand cuts.
And the truth is there is nothing to stop this ecclesiastical carnage
until every single orthodox priest in 80 percent of the dioceses of
the Episcopal Church are finally broken and destroyed. Network leader
and Episcopal Bishop Bob Duncan has publicly declared that to be the
case and he has admitted that the Network can do nothing to save
them. So suffer he says; it is our lot. Sadly the six priests will
get no help from orthodox bishops other than statements.
The only orthodox survivors, in the future, will be found in orthodox
dioceses where the bishop still believes the historic faith, but even
there the orthodox should never look to any future General Convention to
offer them anything. That too is a lost cause. That day is done.
The fence sitters, revisionists, and pansexualists have won the day.
It is their show. They deserve to own a church in free fall.
Of course the victories won by these revisionist bishops come at a
price. A lot of the victory is pyrrhic.
These godless bishops lose not only godly clergy who have the ability
to make churches grow; they also lose huge numbers of dues paying
godly laity. By VirtueOnline's estimate, the recent losses in New
Hampshire, Kentucky, Alabama, Atlanta, North Carolina, Los Angeles,
Long Island, Pennsylvania, Central Pa. and Connecticut the figure is
well over 12,000 laity and that does not include the ongoing fallout
in the months ahead with increasingly disillusioned laity brought on
by bad publicity in the secular media and much more. They are lost
forever and will never be replaced.
The Anglican Mission in America will probably pick up the best of
them, some will come under an overseas primate, others will flee to
orthodox denominations with many simply dropping out fed up with the
whole business of church.
The bishop gets to keep largely empty properties which he must either
close down or put a priest in charge and hope that it can rebuild.
For the most part this is whistling Dixie.
But orthodox dioceses should not get cocky that they are immune from
the inroads of revisionism in their dioceses. Many have very slim
margins of orthodox priests, and a virulent move by a group of
revisionist priests can easily tip the balance where new bishops are
sought. A case in point is the Diocese of San Diego - once orthodox
under Gethin Hughes now gone liberal. Another diocese in point is the
Diocese of Florida. John Howard came in with great promise to replace
Steve Jecko, now he has all but sold out to the other side. That
diocese will, in time, bite the dust with a number of orthodox
priests already weighing their future.
Fence sitting bishops like Don Wimberly of Texas claim to be orthodox
but he ordains a gay deacon and you know it is only a matter of time
before his rollover is complete.
One organization that is making life hell for orthodox bishops is the Via
Media. They claim to speak for the diverse middle, read dead, white
Episcopalians who do whatever their priest and bishop tells
them but have no clue how they are being undermined and seduced. They
have never heard a clear distinct gospel proclamation and they are
easy prey for words like "inclusion," "diversity", and the smooth
talk of people like V. Gene Robinson. Via Media has the blessing of
Griswold and they are worming their way like a cancer into one
orthodox diocese after another.
In the Diocese of Pittsburgh Bob Duncan faces a lawsuit from this
gang with a black priest Harold Lewis leading the charge.
Add the sodomite organization Integrity with Via Media as the
controlling agent, arm them with a group of angry lesbian women
priests and disgruntled divorcees, salt them with an outspoken, whiny
homosexual priest or two and you have a cancer that is, in time,
unstoppable.
Dioceses that still have the ability to withstand the revisionist Via
Media onslaught include the dioceses of san Joaquin, Quincy, Ft.
Worth, Central Florida and South Carolina to name but a handful, but
the figure is not large and you can count them all on two hands. A
slight misstep by an orthodox bishop, or if his priests start to roll
over to the seductive siren call of inclusion steadily being advanced
by Louie Crew and the House of Bishops/Deputies list and the tilt
could prove fatal. Now add to the mix the constant bashing and
needling of orthodox groups by the Dallas flatfoot Jack Taylor and
the wear and tear begins to take effect. In time disillusionment sets
in and priests take early retirement, their replacement is often a
liberal posing as a conservative or a conservative gone over to the
other side, and like dominoes the diocese begins to fall.
It's only a matter of time, and time is fast running out, just ask
the "Connecticut Six" whose lives and ministries are on the verge of
being destroyed.
Hitler took six years to destroy six million Jews, The Episcopal
Church, over 40 years has quietly destroyed hundreds of godly priests
and with them tens of thousands of godly Episcopalians with the
spiritual cyanide of pansexuality and inclusion. Now the pace is
simply quickening, the end is just the same; is there is no eye to
pity and no arm to save?
From within the church the answer sadly is no. It is now up to the courts.
These reports are embarrassing for Anglicans. Nevertheless I
circulate them ; the accelerating white-anting of the church by secular
political ideologies and militant perversions will not be reversed unless
people know what is going down.
R
Gay Bishop Robinson Ignites Furious Response after Jesus Comments
April 21, 2005
Daniel Blake
daniel@christiantoday.com
The bishop whose consecration sparked a near schism throughout the
worldwide Anglican Communion has made comments that have outraged
conservatives around the world. Though the Communion is trying its utmost
to ensure a complete split of the denomination does not occur, in a recent
address, Bishop Gene Robinson has been interpreted by some as suggesting
that Jesus might have been homosexual.
The first openly gay Anglican Bishop, from the New Hampshire diocese, and
of the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECU) has seemingly made
comments that have angered and upset a huge proportion of the Anglican
Communion.
He commented that Jesus was an unmarried, "non-traditional man" who did not
uphold family values, "travelled with a bunch of men" and enjoyed an
especially close relationship with one of his disciples.
The comments came at a recent address at the Christ Church of Hamilton and
Wenham in Massachusetts, USA and was entitled "Homosexuality and the Body
of Christ: Is There a New Way?"
A question was raised to Robinson regarding how the acceptance of
homosexuality could be squared with the scriptural emphasis on the
redemption of sins. The Bishop replied in a way that will have
disillusioned many other clergymen: "Interestingly enough, in the day of
traditional family values, this man that we follow was single, as far as we
know, travelled with a bunch of men, had a disciple who was known as 'the
one whom Jesus loved' and said my family is not my mother and father, my
family is those who do the will of God. None of us likes those harsh
words. That's who Jesus is, that's who he was at heart, in his earthly
life."
A spokesperson for the evangelical Anglican organisation Anglican
Mainstream, Canon Chris Sugden was reported by the Telegraph newspaper as
saying, "He's really selective in what he's addressing. He makes no
mention of Jesus' teaching on marriage, for instance. And he does not
acknowledge that nowhere in the text or in ancient literature is there any
suggestion of any form of sexual impropriety among Jesus or the disciples.
Jesus broke the cultural traditions of the time and has women mixing with
men in public and having them teaching. Those of us who put scripture as a
priority are called on to obey the scripture even when that is in conflict
with our culture.
"Bishop Robinson is saying that the culture has moved in his direction and
that it's all becoming accepted, so he's looking for ways to interpret
scripture to support that instead of realising that scripture asks us to do
the unpopular thing and stand against the prevailing culture."
However, a spokesperson for Bishop Robinson, Mike Barwell said, "Jesus was
a non-traditional person who broke all the rules, and hung out with all the
wrong people. Anything else that people infer from the Bishop's comments
is all speculation."
======
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43618
Sunday, April 3, 2005
TESTING THE FAITH
Rev. Gene Robinson:
Jesus 'might be 'gay''
1st openly 'out' Anglican bishop sparks outrage with queer idea
WorldNetDaily.com
Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual bishop of his denomination, has angered traditionalist Anglicans by suggesting that Jesus Christ might have been homosexual.
Robinson, who left his wife - and mother of his two daughters - to cohabit with his male lover, Mark, made his inflammatory remarks during an address titled, "Homosexuality and the Body of Christ: Is There a New Way?" at Christ Church of Hamilton and Wenham, Massachusetts. The bishop was asked by a congregant how Christians could both accept homosexuality and the Bible's emphasis on redemption for sins.
"Interestingly enough, in this day of traditional family values," answered Robinson, "this man that we follow was single, as far as we know, traveled with a bunch of men, had a disciple who was known as 'the one whom Jesus loved' and said my family is not my mother and father, my family is those who do the will of God. None of us likes those harsh words. That's who Jesus is, that's who he was at heart, in his earthly life.
"Those who would posit the nuclear family as the be all and end all of God's creation probably don't find that much in the gospels to support it," he concluded.
"Rubbish," responds David Virtue who operates VirtueOnline, a website that bills itself as "the voice for global orthodox Anglicanism." "It is appalling deconstructionism from the liberal lobby which will spin even the remotest thing to turn it into a hint that Biblical figures are gay," says Virtue. "It is so
utterly preposterous to imply that Jesus' relationship with John was homo-erotic, but twisting the truth is the only way these people can get scriptural justification for their lifestyles. Can you imagine Calvin, Luther or Erasmus saying something like this? It is a wonder that thunder and lightning bolts don't strike Bishop Robinson down."
Canon Chris Sugden, spokesman for the traditionalist organization, Anglican Mainstream, also disputes Robinson's use of scripture and the implications he draws from them. "He's really selective in what he's addressing," says Sugden. "He makes no mention of Jesus' teaching on marriage, for instance. And he does not acknowledge that nowhere in the text or in ancient literature is there any suggestion of any form of sexual impropriety among Jesus or the disciples. Jesus broke the cultural traditions of the time and has women mixing with men in public and having them teaching. Those of us who put scripture as a priority are called on to obey the scripture even when that is in conflict with our culture. Bishop Robinson is saying that the culture has moved in his direction and that it's all becoming accepted, so he's looking for ways to interpret scripture to support that instead of realizing that scripture asks us to do the unpopular thing and stand against the prevailing culture."
Robinson's 2003 consecration created a schism in the Anglican church between liberals and traditionalists, causing some to suggest he should be "struck down by thunder and lightning bolts." In some cases, traditional congregations have sought to shift their affiliation with the worldwide Anglican communion from liberal American bishops to bishops in Africa where a conservative understanding of Biblical morality still dominates. Robinson, however remains undaunted by the criticism, saying he has reconciled his homosexuality and his faith. "God's light and God's life ooze over me like warm butter," he declares.
circulate them ; the accelerating white-anting of the church by secular
political ideologies and militant perversions will not be reversed unless
people know what is going down.
R
Gay Bishop Robinson Ignites Furious Response after Jesus Comments
April 21, 2005
Daniel Blake
daniel@christiantoday.com
The bishop whose consecration sparked a near schism throughout the
worldwide Anglican Communion has made comments that have outraged
conservatives around the world. Though the Communion is trying its utmost
to ensure a complete split of the denomination does not occur, in a recent
address, Bishop Gene Robinson has been interpreted by some as suggesting
that Jesus might have been homosexual.
The first openly gay Anglican Bishop, from the New Hampshire diocese, and
of the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECU) has seemingly made
comments that have angered and upset a huge proportion of the Anglican
Communion.
He commented that Jesus was an unmarried, "non-traditional man" who did not
uphold family values, "travelled with a bunch of men" and enjoyed an
especially close relationship with one of his disciples.
The comments came at a recent address at the Christ Church of Hamilton and
Wenham in Massachusetts, USA and was entitled "Homosexuality and the Body
of Christ: Is There a New Way?"
A question was raised to Robinson regarding how the acceptance of
homosexuality could be squared with the scriptural emphasis on the
redemption of sins. The Bishop replied in a way that will have
disillusioned many other clergymen: "Interestingly enough, in the day of
traditional family values, this man that we follow was single, as far as we
know, travelled with a bunch of men, had a disciple who was known as 'the
one whom Jesus loved' and said my family is not my mother and father, my
family is those who do the will of God. None of us likes those harsh
words. That's who Jesus is, that's who he was at heart, in his earthly
life."
A spokesperson for the evangelical Anglican organisation Anglican
Mainstream, Canon Chris Sugden was reported by the Telegraph newspaper as
saying, "He's really selective in what he's addressing. He makes no
mention of Jesus' teaching on marriage, for instance. And he does not
acknowledge that nowhere in the text or in ancient literature is there any
suggestion of any form of sexual impropriety among Jesus or the disciples.
Jesus broke the cultural traditions of the time and has women mixing with
men in public and having them teaching. Those of us who put scripture as a
priority are called on to obey the scripture even when that is in conflict
with our culture.
"Bishop Robinson is saying that the culture has moved in his direction and
that it's all becoming accepted, so he's looking for ways to interpret
scripture to support that instead of realising that scripture asks us to do
the unpopular thing and stand against the prevailing culture."
However, a spokesperson for Bishop Robinson, Mike Barwell said, "Jesus was
a non-traditional person who broke all the rules, and hung out with all the
wrong people. Anything else that people infer from the Bishop's comments
is all speculation."
======
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43618
Sunday, April 3, 2005
TESTING THE FAITH
Rev. Gene Robinson:
Jesus 'might be 'gay''
1st openly 'out' Anglican bishop sparks outrage with queer idea
WorldNetDaily.com
Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual bishop of his denomination, has angered traditionalist Anglicans by suggesting that Jesus Christ might have been homosexual.
Robinson, who left his wife - and mother of his two daughters - to cohabit with his male lover, Mark, made his inflammatory remarks during an address titled, "Homosexuality and the Body of Christ: Is There a New Way?" at Christ Church of Hamilton and Wenham, Massachusetts. The bishop was asked by a congregant how Christians could both accept homosexuality and the Bible's emphasis on redemption for sins.
"Interestingly enough, in this day of traditional family values," answered Robinson, "this man that we follow was single, as far as we know, traveled with a bunch of men, had a disciple who was known as 'the one whom Jesus loved' and said my family is not my mother and father, my family is those who do the will of God. None of us likes those harsh words. That's who Jesus is, that's who he was at heart, in his earthly life.
"Those who would posit the nuclear family as the be all and end all of God's creation probably don't find that much in the gospels to support it," he concluded.
"Rubbish," responds David Virtue who operates VirtueOnline, a website that bills itself as "the voice for global orthodox Anglicanism." "It is appalling deconstructionism from the liberal lobby which will spin even the remotest thing to turn it into a hint that Biblical figures are gay," says Virtue. "It is so
utterly preposterous to imply that Jesus' relationship with John was homo-erotic, but twisting the truth is the only way these people can get scriptural justification for their lifestyles. Can you imagine Calvin, Luther or Erasmus saying something like this? It is a wonder that thunder and lightning bolts don't strike Bishop Robinson down."
Canon Chris Sugden, spokesman for the traditionalist organization, Anglican Mainstream, also disputes Robinson's use of scripture and the implications he draws from them. "He's really selective in what he's addressing," says Sugden. "He makes no mention of Jesus' teaching on marriage, for instance. And he does not acknowledge that nowhere in the text or in ancient literature is there any suggestion of any form of sexual impropriety among Jesus or the disciples. Jesus broke the cultural traditions of the time and has women mixing with men in public and having them teaching. Those of us who put scripture as a priority are called on to obey the scripture even when that is in conflict with our culture. Bishop Robinson is saying that the culture has moved in his direction and that it's all becoming accepted, so he's looking for ways to interpret scripture to support that instead of realizing that scripture asks us to do the unpopular thing and stand against the prevailing culture."
Robinson's 2003 consecration created a schism in the Anglican church between liberals and traditionalists, causing some to suggest he should be "struck down by thunder and lightning bolts." In some cases, traditional congregations have sought to shift their affiliation with the worldwide Anglican communion from liberal American bishops to bishops in Africa where a conservative understanding of Biblical morality still dominates. Robinson, however remains undaunted by the criticism, saying he has reconciled his homosexuality and his faith. "God's light and God's life ooze over me like warm butter," he declares.
The late John Paul II:
"One must be realistic and acknowledge with a deep and pained
sentiment that a great part of today's Christians feel lost,
confused, perplexed, and even disillusioned: ideas contradicting the
revealed and unchanging Truth have been spread far and wide; outright
heresies in the dogmatic and moral fields have been disseminated,
creating doubt, confusion, and rebellion; even the liturgy has been
altered. Immersed in intellectual and moral "relativism" and
therefore in permissiveness, Christians are tempted by atheism,
agnosticism, a vaguely moralistic illuminism, a sociological
Christianity, without defined dogmas and without objective morality."
- Allocution of Feb. 6, 1981, to religious and priests participating
in the First Italian National Congress on Missions to the People for
the 80s,
L'Osservatore Romano, Feb. 7 1981.
At this rate we can expect even better moral leadership from his successor,
who by extrapolation will call himself John Paul Ringo I.
R
"One must be realistic and acknowledge with a deep and pained
sentiment that a great part of today's Christians feel lost,
confused, perplexed, and even disillusioned: ideas contradicting the
revealed and unchanging Truth have been spread far and wide; outright
heresies in the dogmatic and moral fields have been disseminated,
creating doubt, confusion, and rebellion; even the liturgy has been
altered. Immersed in intellectual and moral "relativism" and
therefore in permissiveness, Christians are tempted by atheism,
agnosticism, a vaguely moralistic illuminism, a sociological
Christianity, without defined dogmas and without objective morality."
- Allocution of Feb. 6, 1981, to religious and priests participating
in the First Italian National Congress on Missions to the People for
the 80s,
L'Osservatore Romano, Feb. 7 1981.
At this rate we can expect even better moral leadership from his successor,
who by extrapolation will call himself John Paul Ringo I.
R
The Evangelical Scandal
Ron Sider says the movement is riddled with hypocrisy, and that it's time for serious change.
Interview by Stan Guthrie | posted 04/13/2005
Ron Sider has been a burr in the ethical saddle of the evangelical world for decades. His 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, took fellow believers to task for materialism in the face of desperate global needs. Sider, who is professor of theology, holistic ministry, and public policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has just released a new jeremiad: The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker Books, 2005). In it, Sider plays off Mark Noll's critique of American evangelicalism's anti-intellectualism in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Sider says the current crisis encompasses both mind and heart. Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today's senior associate news editor, interviewed Sider.
What troubles you the most about evangelicals today?
The heart of the matter is the scandalous failure to live what we preach. The tragedy is that poll after poll by Gallup and Barna show that evangelicals live just like the world. Contrast that with what the New Testament says about what happens when people come to living faith in Christ. There's supposed to be radical transformation in the power of the Holy Spirit. The disconnect between our biblical beliefs and our practice is just, I think, heart-rending.
I'm a deeply committed evangelical. I've been committed to evangelical beliefs and to renewing the evangelical church all of my life. And the stats just break my heart. They make me weep. And somehow we must face that reality and change it.
You have often spoken about evangelical failures in society, for example, in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. This latest critique covers not only social justice issues but also issues of personal morality. Was that intentional?
I've always been concerned with a whole range of biblical things. My commitment is to be biblically faithful, not to pick out one issue. But a good bit of my writing has dealt with the social issues that have called evangelicals to be more engaged, for example, with questions of poverty here and abroad. But you're right. This book is talking about a range of things that we evangelicals all agree are biblical demands.
Evangelical Christians and born-again Christians get divorced just as often, if not a little more, than the general population. And Barna has discovered that 90 percent of the born-again Christians who are divorced got divorced after they accepted Christ. On sexual promiscuity, we're probably doing a little better than the general population. Josh McDowell has estimated that maybe our evangelical youth are 10 percent better, Lord help us.
So at least it's a measurable difference.
Well it is measurable, although there's not so much hard [data] on that question as with some of the others. John Green, one of the best evangelical pollsters, says that about a third of all evangelicals say that premarital sex is okay. And about 15 percent say that adultery is okay.
Take the issue of racism. A Gallup study discovered that when they asked the question, "Do you object if a black neighbor moves in next door?" the least prejudiced were Catholics and non-evangelicals. The next group, in terms of prejudice, was mainline Protestants. Evangelicals and Southern Baptists were the worst.
Several studies find that physical and sexual abuse in theologically conservative homes is about the same as elsewhere. A large study of the Christian Reformed Church, a member of the nae, discovered that the frequency of physical and sexual abuse in this evangelical denomination was about the same as in the general population. One recent study, though, suggests that evangelical men who attend church regularly are less likely than the general population to commit domestic violence.
Materialism continues to be an incredible scandal. The average church member [from across the denominations] today gives about 2.6 percent of his or her incomeóa quarter of a titheóto the church. Evangelicals used to be quite a lot better [in giving] than mainline denominations. But their giving has declined every year for several decades, and they're now getting very close to the norm. The average evangelical giving is about 4.2 percentóabout two-fifths of a tithe.
Six percent of the "born-again" people tithe; nine percent of evangelicals do. Our income has gone up fabulously over the last 30-plus years. The average household income now in the U.S. is $42,000-plus. If the average American Christian tithed, we'd have another $143 billion.
In an era in which people holding to traditional values appear to be returning to center stage in politics, your book says that all is not well with our day-to-day choices in the private realm. In effect, you're accusing evangelicals of hypocrisy. Is that a fair conclusion?
I'm not doing that gladly. I'm doing that with tears in my eyes. We have to face the reality. It strikes me as being incredibly tragic and, yes, hypocritical for the evidence to show that precisely at a time when evangelicals have more political power to raise the issue of moral values in this society than they've had in a long time, the hard statistics on their own living show that they don't live what they're talking about. And sure, I'm afraid that's hypocrisy. So we have to set our own house in order before we're going to have either any integrity or any effectiveness in terms of helping the larger society recover wholesome two-parent families.
Has there ever been a time when the typical church has lived out the faith much better than now? Some might argue that this is just the nature of a sinful church before the Second Coming.
We don't have polling data from the 1860s or the 1700s, so it's hard to answer that question with precision. But as we look back over church history, we see that there has been ebb and flow, and that at times the church was especially unfaithful and full of disobedience and hypocrisy. At other times there was powerful renewal, and large groups of Christians were wonderfully transformed. There are stories from the Welsh Revival in which the prisons were essentially empty and not too many people went to pubs because there had been a radical transformation of large numbers of people.
To what historical era would you compare our own time?
If the question is evangelical obedience, then we're certainly not in a time of revival.
How do we turn the ship around?
We need to rethink our theology. We need to ask, "Are we really biblical?" Cheap grace is right at the core of the problem. Cheap grace results when we reduce the gospel to forgiveness of sins only; when we limit salvation to personal fire insurance against hell; when we misunderstand persons as primarily souls; when we at best grasp only half of what the Bible says about sin; when we embrace the individualism and materialism and relativism of our current culture. We also lack a biblical understanding and practice of the church.
I would think that evangelicals would want to get biblical and define the gospel the way Jesus didówhich is that it's the Good News of the kingdom. Then we see that it means that the way to get into this kingdom is through unconditional grace because Jesus died for us. But it also means there's now a new kingdom community of Jesus' disciples, and that embracing Jesus means not just getting fire insurance so that one doesn't go to hell, but it means embracing Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. And it means beginning to live as a part of his new community where everything is being transformed.
You're pinning at least a good chunk of the blame on American individualism.
There's no question that that's at the core of it. We tend to reduce salvation to just forgiveness of sins. And in the New Testament, salvation means that, thank God, but it also means the new transformed life that's possible in the power of the Spirit. And it means the new communal existence of the body of believers.
One of my favorite examples is the story of Zacchaeus. He is involved in social sin as a wicked tax collector. When he comes to Jesus, he gives away half his goods and pays back everything that he's taken wrongly. Jesus says at the end of the story, "Today salvation has come to this house." There's not a word in the text about forgiveness of sins. Now, I'm sure Jesus forgave the rascal's sins; he clearly needed it. But what the text talks about is the new transformed economic relationships that happen when Zacchaeus comes to Jesus.
Salvation is a lot more than just a new right relationship with God through forgiveness of sins. It's a new, transformed lifestyle that you can see visible in the body of believers.
Obviously to be a disciple means there's discipline. Do you see the neglect of church discipline in our day as a factor in this moral crisis?
It's part of the larger question of recovering the New Testament understanding of the church. This culture is radically individualistic and relativistic. Whatever feels right for me is right for me; whatever feels right to you is right for you. That's the dominant value. It's considered outrageous for somebody to say somebody else is wrong.
But historic biblical faith understood the church as a new community. The basic New Testament images of the church are of the body of Christ, the people of God, and the family of God. All these stress the fact that we're talking about a new communityóa new, visible social order. That new community in the New Testament was living so differently from the world that people would say, "Wow, what's going on here?" Jews were accepting Gentiles. The rich were accepting the poor and sharing with the poor. Men were accepting women as equals. It just astonished people because the church was so different from the world. It was countercultural.
Furthermore, [the New Testament church] understood that being a member of the body of Christ meant that you were accountable to each other. If one suffered, you all suffered. If one rejoiced, you all rejoiced. There was dramatic economic sharing in the New Testament, and there was church discipline. Jesus talked explicitly about church discipline in Matthew 18. Paul clearly had his churches live that out. All of the great traditions at the core of American evangelicalism, whether the Reformed tradition, the Wesleyan Methodist tradition, or the Anabaptist tradition, understood church discipline when they were strong and thriving. But very few evangelical churches these days have any serious appropriation and practice of church discipline.
Isn't that at least in part because church discipline has been abused or become legalistic and mean-spirited?
Sure, that's a part of it. But we don't give up on marriage just because a lot of people have messed it up so badly. And we shouldn't give up on church discipline just because we've so often done it in a legalistic way. We have to recover the New Testament understanding. John Wesley put it wonderfully when he said church discipline is watching over one another in love.
Today, when so many congregations are abandoning biblical truth, you say in the book that all congregations need to be connected to a denomination. Are you serious?
Absolutely. It's simply wrong for a local congregation to have no accountability to a larger body. Now I'm not saying it has to be one of the current denominations. There can be new structures of accountability. Any congregations that feel they must break away from older denominations that are no longer faithful theologically or in terms of moral practice should be a part of some new denominational, organizational structure so they're not isolated lone rangers.
They need to have a larger structure of accountability. It is flatly unbiblical and heretical for an individual congregation to say, "We'll just be by ourselves and not be accountable to anybody."
What is the church doing right?
The small-group movement is a hopeful sign. One of the most important ways we develop mutual accountability in the local congregation is through small groups. It's almost impossible to follow Jesus either in [matters of] sex and marriage or in money and helping the poor by yourself. You need the strong support of brothers and sisters. While the whole congregation should be like that, we need small groups to struggle with the specifics and talk about our struggles and get encouragement and prayer support. I wish every person in all of our churches with more than 50 members were in a small group.
What other things are contemporary evangelicals doing well?
Over the last 30 years, we've made significant progress in understanding that the mission of the church is both to do evangelism and to do social ministry. There's also growing understanding that we can't have a one-issue agenda as we get involved in public life. The recent National Association of Evangelicals declaration, "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," explicitly rejects one-issue politics and says faithful evangelical political engagement will be based on a biblically balanced agenda. That means, yes, by all means, a concern with the sanctity of human life and with the renewal of the family. But it will also mean a concern for justice for the poor. It will mean concern for creation care, for human rights, and for peacemaking. We simply can't allow right-wing or left-wing politics to provide the political agenda.
What areas are you personally working on?
Over the years I've needed to continue to work at making sure that my personal spiritual life is solid in terms of time for prayer and devotions regularly. That continues to be an ongoing challenge. I really, passionately want every corner of my life to be submitted to Jesus Christ and biblical truth. Living that out in terms of my money continues to be a challenge. Nothing is easy. But if we make that our resolve and ask the Spirit to transform us, I think wonderful things can happen.
Are you hopeful about the matters that you've written about? Or are you ready to give up?
I'm personally, by nature, something of an optimist. That may not come through clearly in this book, but I think it's true. I'm genuinely enthusiastic by the renewal of the evangelical world in the last 50 years. It's been a tremendous movement of change and growth since Carl Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. There has been fabulous growth of evangelical colleges and seminaries, evangelical scholarship, evangelical churches. I pointed to the way that we've grown, I think, in understanding the mission of the church as being both evangelism and social ministry.
We've grown certainly in the number of evangelical agencies working with the poor. Fifty years ago World Vision was a Korean orphan's choir. Now it's a huge agency, and there are dozens of other evangelical multi-million-dollar relief-and-development agencies.
On some days I'm discouraged, and other days I think, Wow, the next few decades could be just fabulous. But what I'm sure about is that we won't get close to the promise and the fulfillment of what's possible unless we face head-on the scandalous way that we're currently not living what we're preaching.
Is it going to be the end of the evangelical movement if we don't do something about these problems?
The Lord doesn't take hypocrisy and disobedience lightly. He punishes, and there's an inevitable kind of decline that sets in if you are hypocritical and don't practice what you preach. It won't happen instantly; our institutions are strong. But over a period of time it certainly will mean major decline.
I find it incredibly ironic that in the last few months, the importance of political life nurturing moral values and wholesome families and so on is center stage. And then you have this astonishing data that evangelicals live just like the world in terms of divorce. And it's incredibly ironic that one of the issuesóand one I agree vigorously withóis concerned with how public life affects marriage. I'm in favor of the marriage amendment. But at precisely a point in time when our political rhetoric as evangelicals has focused on that, we have to face the fact that we're not any different from the world. And that's just incredible hypocrisy and it undercuts our message to the larger society in a terrible way.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.
Ron Sider says the movement is riddled with hypocrisy, and that it's time for serious change.
Interview by Stan Guthrie | posted 04/13/2005
Ron Sider has been a burr in the ethical saddle of the evangelical world for decades. His 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, took fellow believers to task for materialism in the face of desperate global needs. Sider, who is professor of theology, holistic ministry, and public policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has just released a new jeremiad: The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker Books, 2005). In it, Sider plays off Mark Noll's critique of American evangelicalism's anti-intellectualism in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Sider says the current crisis encompasses both mind and heart. Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today's senior associate news editor, interviewed Sider.
What troubles you the most about evangelicals today?
The heart of the matter is the scandalous failure to live what we preach. The tragedy is that poll after poll by Gallup and Barna show that evangelicals live just like the world. Contrast that with what the New Testament says about what happens when people come to living faith in Christ. There's supposed to be radical transformation in the power of the Holy Spirit. The disconnect between our biblical beliefs and our practice is just, I think, heart-rending.
I'm a deeply committed evangelical. I've been committed to evangelical beliefs and to renewing the evangelical church all of my life. And the stats just break my heart. They make me weep. And somehow we must face that reality and change it.
You have often spoken about evangelical failures in society, for example, in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. This latest critique covers not only social justice issues but also issues of personal morality. Was that intentional?
I've always been concerned with a whole range of biblical things. My commitment is to be biblically faithful, not to pick out one issue. But a good bit of my writing has dealt with the social issues that have called evangelicals to be more engaged, for example, with questions of poverty here and abroad. But you're right. This book is talking about a range of things that we evangelicals all agree are biblical demands.
Evangelical Christians and born-again Christians get divorced just as often, if not a little more, than the general population. And Barna has discovered that 90 percent of the born-again Christians who are divorced got divorced after they accepted Christ. On sexual promiscuity, we're probably doing a little better than the general population. Josh McDowell has estimated that maybe our evangelical youth are 10 percent better, Lord help us.
So at least it's a measurable difference.
Well it is measurable, although there's not so much hard [data] on that question as with some of the others. John Green, one of the best evangelical pollsters, says that about a third of all evangelicals say that premarital sex is okay. And about 15 percent say that adultery is okay.
Take the issue of racism. A Gallup study discovered that when they asked the question, "Do you object if a black neighbor moves in next door?" the least prejudiced were Catholics and non-evangelicals. The next group, in terms of prejudice, was mainline Protestants. Evangelicals and Southern Baptists were the worst.
Several studies find that physical and sexual abuse in theologically conservative homes is about the same as elsewhere. A large study of the Christian Reformed Church, a member of the nae, discovered that the frequency of physical and sexual abuse in this evangelical denomination was about the same as in the general population. One recent study, though, suggests that evangelical men who attend church regularly are less likely than the general population to commit domestic violence.
Materialism continues to be an incredible scandal. The average church member [from across the denominations] today gives about 2.6 percent of his or her incomeóa quarter of a titheóto the church. Evangelicals used to be quite a lot better [in giving] than mainline denominations. But their giving has declined every year for several decades, and they're now getting very close to the norm. The average evangelical giving is about 4.2 percentóabout two-fifths of a tithe.
Six percent of the "born-again" people tithe; nine percent of evangelicals do. Our income has gone up fabulously over the last 30-plus years. The average household income now in the U.S. is $42,000-plus. If the average American Christian tithed, we'd have another $143 billion.
In an era in which people holding to traditional values appear to be returning to center stage in politics, your book says that all is not well with our day-to-day choices in the private realm. In effect, you're accusing evangelicals of hypocrisy. Is that a fair conclusion?
I'm not doing that gladly. I'm doing that with tears in my eyes. We have to face the reality. It strikes me as being incredibly tragic and, yes, hypocritical for the evidence to show that precisely at a time when evangelicals have more political power to raise the issue of moral values in this society than they've had in a long time, the hard statistics on their own living show that they don't live what they're talking about. And sure, I'm afraid that's hypocrisy. So we have to set our own house in order before we're going to have either any integrity or any effectiveness in terms of helping the larger society recover wholesome two-parent families.
Has there ever been a time when the typical church has lived out the faith much better than now? Some might argue that this is just the nature of a sinful church before the Second Coming.
We don't have polling data from the 1860s or the 1700s, so it's hard to answer that question with precision. But as we look back over church history, we see that there has been ebb and flow, and that at times the church was especially unfaithful and full of disobedience and hypocrisy. At other times there was powerful renewal, and large groups of Christians were wonderfully transformed. There are stories from the Welsh Revival in which the prisons were essentially empty and not too many people went to pubs because there had been a radical transformation of large numbers of people.
To what historical era would you compare our own time?
If the question is evangelical obedience, then we're certainly not in a time of revival.
How do we turn the ship around?
We need to rethink our theology. We need to ask, "Are we really biblical?" Cheap grace is right at the core of the problem. Cheap grace results when we reduce the gospel to forgiveness of sins only; when we limit salvation to personal fire insurance against hell; when we misunderstand persons as primarily souls; when we at best grasp only half of what the Bible says about sin; when we embrace the individualism and materialism and relativism of our current culture. We also lack a biblical understanding and practice of the church.
I would think that evangelicals would want to get biblical and define the gospel the way Jesus didówhich is that it's the Good News of the kingdom. Then we see that it means that the way to get into this kingdom is through unconditional grace because Jesus died for us. But it also means there's now a new kingdom community of Jesus' disciples, and that embracing Jesus means not just getting fire insurance so that one doesn't go to hell, but it means embracing Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. And it means beginning to live as a part of his new community where everything is being transformed.
You're pinning at least a good chunk of the blame on American individualism.
There's no question that that's at the core of it. We tend to reduce salvation to just forgiveness of sins. And in the New Testament, salvation means that, thank God, but it also means the new transformed life that's possible in the power of the Spirit. And it means the new communal existence of the body of believers.
One of my favorite examples is the story of Zacchaeus. He is involved in social sin as a wicked tax collector. When he comes to Jesus, he gives away half his goods and pays back everything that he's taken wrongly. Jesus says at the end of the story, "Today salvation has come to this house." There's not a word in the text about forgiveness of sins. Now, I'm sure Jesus forgave the rascal's sins; he clearly needed it. But what the text talks about is the new transformed economic relationships that happen when Zacchaeus comes to Jesus.
Salvation is a lot more than just a new right relationship with God through forgiveness of sins. It's a new, transformed lifestyle that you can see visible in the body of believers.
Obviously to be a disciple means there's discipline. Do you see the neglect of church discipline in our day as a factor in this moral crisis?
It's part of the larger question of recovering the New Testament understanding of the church. This culture is radically individualistic and relativistic. Whatever feels right for me is right for me; whatever feels right to you is right for you. That's the dominant value. It's considered outrageous for somebody to say somebody else is wrong.
But historic biblical faith understood the church as a new community. The basic New Testament images of the church are of the body of Christ, the people of God, and the family of God. All these stress the fact that we're talking about a new communityóa new, visible social order. That new community in the New Testament was living so differently from the world that people would say, "Wow, what's going on here?" Jews were accepting Gentiles. The rich were accepting the poor and sharing with the poor. Men were accepting women as equals. It just astonished people because the church was so different from the world. It was countercultural.
Furthermore, [the New Testament church] understood that being a member of the body of Christ meant that you were accountable to each other. If one suffered, you all suffered. If one rejoiced, you all rejoiced. There was dramatic economic sharing in the New Testament, and there was church discipline. Jesus talked explicitly about church discipline in Matthew 18. Paul clearly had his churches live that out. All of the great traditions at the core of American evangelicalism, whether the Reformed tradition, the Wesleyan Methodist tradition, or the Anabaptist tradition, understood church discipline when they were strong and thriving. But very few evangelical churches these days have any serious appropriation and practice of church discipline.
Isn't that at least in part because church discipline has been abused or become legalistic and mean-spirited?
Sure, that's a part of it. But we don't give up on marriage just because a lot of people have messed it up so badly. And we shouldn't give up on church discipline just because we've so often done it in a legalistic way. We have to recover the New Testament understanding. John Wesley put it wonderfully when he said church discipline is watching over one another in love.
Today, when so many congregations are abandoning biblical truth, you say in the book that all congregations need to be connected to a denomination. Are you serious?
Absolutely. It's simply wrong for a local congregation to have no accountability to a larger body. Now I'm not saying it has to be one of the current denominations. There can be new structures of accountability. Any congregations that feel they must break away from older denominations that are no longer faithful theologically or in terms of moral practice should be a part of some new denominational, organizational structure so they're not isolated lone rangers.
They need to have a larger structure of accountability. It is flatly unbiblical and heretical for an individual congregation to say, "We'll just be by ourselves and not be accountable to anybody."
What is the church doing right?
The small-group movement is a hopeful sign. One of the most important ways we develop mutual accountability in the local congregation is through small groups. It's almost impossible to follow Jesus either in [matters of] sex and marriage or in money and helping the poor by yourself. You need the strong support of brothers and sisters. While the whole congregation should be like that, we need small groups to struggle with the specifics and talk about our struggles and get encouragement and prayer support. I wish every person in all of our churches with more than 50 members were in a small group.
What other things are contemporary evangelicals doing well?
Over the last 30 years, we've made significant progress in understanding that the mission of the church is both to do evangelism and to do social ministry. There's also growing understanding that we can't have a one-issue agenda as we get involved in public life. The recent National Association of Evangelicals declaration, "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," explicitly rejects one-issue politics and says faithful evangelical political engagement will be based on a biblically balanced agenda. That means, yes, by all means, a concern with the sanctity of human life and with the renewal of the family. But it will also mean a concern for justice for the poor. It will mean concern for creation care, for human rights, and for peacemaking. We simply can't allow right-wing or left-wing politics to provide the political agenda.
What areas are you personally working on?
Over the years I've needed to continue to work at making sure that my personal spiritual life is solid in terms of time for prayer and devotions regularly. That continues to be an ongoing challenge. I really, passionately want every corner of my life to be submitted to Jesus Christ and biblical truth. Living that out in terms of my money continues to be a challenge. Nothing is easy. But if we make that our resolve and ask the Spirit to transform us, I think wonderful things can happen.
Are you hopeful about the matters that you've written about? Or are you ready to give up?
I'm personally, by nature, something of an optimist. That may not come through clearly in this book, but I think it's true. I'm genuinely enthusiastic by the renewal of the evangelical world in the last 50 years. It's been a tremendous movement of change and growth since Carl Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. There has been fabulous growth of evangelical colleges and seminaries, evangelical scholarship, evangelical churches. I pointed to the way that we've grown, I think, in understanding the mission of the church as being both evangelism and social ministry.
We've grown certainly in the number of evangelical agencies working with the poor. Fifty years ago World Vision was a Korean orphan's choir. Now it's a huge agency, and there are dozens of other evangelical multi-million-dollar relief-and-development agencies.
On some days I'm discouraged, and other days I think, Wow, the next few decades could be just fabulous. But what I'm sure about is that we won't get close to the promise and the fulfillment of what's possible unless we face head-on the scandalous way that we're currently not living what we're preaching.
Is it going to be the end of the evangelical movement if we don't do something about these problems?
The Lord doesn't take hypocrisy and disobedience lightly. He punishes, and there's an inevitable kind of decline that sets in if you are hypocritical and don't practice what you preach. It won't happen instantly; our institutions are strong. But over a period of time it certainly will mean major decline.
I find it incredibly ironic that in the last few months, the importance of political life nurturing moral values and wholesome families and so on is center stage. And then you have this astonishing data that evangelicals live just like the world in terms of divorce. And it's incredibly ironic that one of the issuesóand one I agree vigorously withóis concerned with how public life affects marriage. I'm in favor of the marriage amendment. But at precisely a point in time when our political rhetoric as evangelicals has focused on that, we have to face the fact that we're not any different from the world. And that's just incredible hypocrisy and it undercuts our message to the larger society in a terrible way.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.
CRISIS IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
HANS KUNG
Spiegel Online
Outwardly Pope John Paul II, who has been actively involved in battling war
and suppression, is a beacon of hope for those who long for freedom.
Internally, however, his anti-reformist tenure has plunged the Roman
Catholic church into an epochal credibility crisis. Don't be fooled by the
crowds: Millions have left the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II's
leadership. . .
In my view, Karol Wojtyla is not the greatest, but certainly the most
contradictory, pope of the 20th century. A pope of many great gifts and
many wrong decisions. To summarize his tenure and reduce it to a common
denominator: His "foreign policy" demands conversion, reform and dialogue
from the rest of the world. But this is sharply contradicted by his
"domestic policy," which is oriented toward the restoration of the
pre-council status quo, obstructing reform, denying dialogue within the
church, and absolute Roman dominance.
This inconsistency is evident in many areas. While expressly acknowledging
the positive sides of this pontificate, which, incidentally, have received
plenty of official emphasis, I would like to focus on the most glaring
contradictions:
HUMAN RIGHTS: Outwardly, John Paul II supports human rights, while inwardly
withholding them from bishops, theologians and especially women. . .
THE ROLE OF WOMEN: The great worshiper of the Virgin Mary preaches a noble
concept of womanhood, but at the same time forbids women from practising
birth control and bars them from ordination. . .
SEXUAL MORALS: This pope, while preaching against mass poverty and suffering
in the world, makes himself partially responsible for this suffering as a
result of his attitudes toward birth control and explosive population
growth. . .
CELIBACY AMONG PRIESTS: By propagating the traditional image of the
celibate male priest, Karol Wojtyla bears the principal responsibility for
the catastrophic dearth of priests, the collapse of spiritual welfare in
many countries, and the many pedophilia scandals the church is no longer
able to cover up. . .
ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT: The pope likes to be seen as a spokesman for the
ecumenical movement. At the same time, however, he has weighed heavily on
the Vatican's relations with orthodox and reform churches, and has refused
to recognize their ecclesiastical offices and Communion services. . .
PERSONNEL POLICY: As a suffragan bishop and later as archbishop of Krakow,
Karol Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council. But as pope, he
disregarded the collegiality which had been agreed to there and instead
celebrated the triumph of his papacy at the cost of the bishops. . .
CLERICALISM: The Polish pope comes across as a deeply religious
representative of a Christian Europe, but his triumphant appearances and
his reactionary policies unintentionally promote hostility to the church
and even an aversion to Christianity. . .
NEW BLOOD IN THE CHURCH: As a charismatic communicator and media star, this
pope is especially effective among young people, even as he grows older.
But he achieves this by drawing in large part on the conservative "new
movements" of Italian origin, the "Opus Dei" movement that originated in
Spain, and an uncritical public loyal to the pope. All of this is
symptomatic of the pope's approach to dealing with the lay public and his
inability to converse with his critics. . .
SINS OF THE PAST: Despite the fact that in 2000 he forced himself through a
public confession of the church's historical transgressions, John Paul II
has drawn almost no practical consequences from it. . . The pope never
commented on the Curia's dealings with the Mafia, and in fact contributed
more to covering up than uncovering scandals and criminal behavior. The
Vatican has also been extremely slow to prosecute pedophilia scandals
involving Catholic clergy. . .
Contrary to all intentions conveyed in the Second Vatican Council, the
medieval Roman system, a power apparatus with totalitarian features, was
restored through clever and ruthless personnel and academic policies.
Bishops were brought into line, pastors overloaded, theologians muzzled,
the laity deprived of their rights, women discriminated against, national
synods and churchgoers' requests ignored, along with sex scandals,
prohibitions on discussion, liturgical spoon-feeding, a ban on sermons by
lay theologians, incitement to denunciation, prevention of Holy Communion
--- "the world" can hardly be blamed for all of this.
The upshot is that the Catholic church has completely lost the enormous
credibility it once enjoyed under the papacy of John XXIII and in the wake
of the Second Vatican Council.
[Hans Kung is a Catholic theologian. Küng has been embroiled in an ongoing
feud with church authorities for decades. As a result of his critical
inquiries on the papacy, the Vatican withdrew his church authority to teach
in 1979. Nevertheless, Küng, 75, is still a priest and, until his
retirement in 1995, taught ecumenical theology at the University of
Tübingen. This was written during his last days]
HANS KUNG
Spiegel Online
Outwardly Pope John Paul II, who has been actively involved in battling war
and suppression, is a beacon of hope for those who long for freedom.
Internally, however, his anti-reformist tenure has plunged the Roman
Catholic church into an epochal credibility crisis. Don't be fooled by the
crowds: Millions have left the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II's
leadership. . .
In my view, Karol Wojtyla is not the greatest, but certainly the most
contradictory, pope of the 20th century. A pope of many great gifts and
many wrong decisions. To summarize his tenure and reduce it to a common
denominator: His "foreign policy" demands conversion, reform and dialogue
from the rest of the world. But this is sharply contradicted by his
"domestic policy," which is oriented toward the restoration of the
pre-council status quo, obstructing reform, denying dialogue within the
church, and absolute Roman dominance.
This inconsistency is evident in many areas. While expressly acknowledging
the positive sides of this pontificate, which, incidentally, have received
plenty of official emphasis, I would like to focus on the most glaring
contradictions:
HUMAN RIGHTS: Outwardly, John Paul II supports human rights, while inwardly
withholding them from bishops, theologians and especially women. . .
THE ROLE OF WOMEN: The great worshiper of the Virgin Mary preaches a noble
concept of womanhood, but at the same time forbids women from practising
birth control and bars them from ordination. . .
SEXUAL MORALS: This pope, while preaching against mass poverty and suffering
in the world, makes himself partially responsible for this suffering as a
result of his attitudes toward birth control and explosive population
growth. . .
CELIBACY AMONG PRIESTS: By propagating the traditional image of the
celibate male priest, Karol Wojtyla bears the principal responsibility for
the catastrophic dearth of priests, the collapse of spiritual welfare in
many countries, and the many pedophilia scandals the church is no longer
able to cover up. . .
ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT: The pope likes to be seen as a spokesman for the
ecumenical movement. At the same time, however, he has weighed heavily on
the Vatican's relations with orthodox and reform churches, and has refused
to recognize their ecclesiastical offices and Communion services. . .
PERSONNEL POLICY: As a suffragan bishop and later as archbishop of Krakow,
Karol Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council. But as pope, he
disregarded the collegiality which had been agreed to there and instead
celebrated the triumph of his papacy at the cost of the bishops. . .
CLERICALISM: The Polish pope comes across as a deeply religious
representative of a Christian Europe, but his triumphant appearances and
his reactionary policies unintentionally promote hostility to the church
and even an aversion to Christianity. . .
NEW BLOOD IN THE CHURCH: As a charismatic communicator and media star, this
pope is especially effective among young people, even as he grows older.
But he achieves this by drawing in large part on the conservative "new
movements" of Italian origin, the "Opus Dei" movement that originated in
Spain, and an uncritical public loyal to the pope. All of this is
symptomatic of the pope's approach to dealing with the lay public and his
inability to converse with his critics. . .
SINS OF THE PAST: Despite the fact that in 2000 he forced himself through a
public confession of the church's historical transgressions, John Paul II
has drawn almost no practical consequences from it. . . The pope never
commented on the Curia's dealings with the Mafia, and in fact contributed
more to covering up than uncovering scandals and criminal behavior. The
Vatican has also been extremely slow to prosecute pedophilia scandals
involving Catholic clergy. . .
Contrary to all intentions conveyed in the Second Vatican Council, the
medieval Roman system, a power apparatus with totalitarian features, was
restored through clever and ruthless personnel and academic policies.
Bishops were brought into line, pastors overloaded, theologians muzzled,
the laity deprived of their rights, women discriminated against, national
synods and churchgoers' requests ignored, along with sex scandals,
prohibitions on discussion, liturgical spoon-feeding, a ban on sermons by
lay theologians, incitement to denunciation, prevention of Holy Communion
--- "the world" can hardly be blamed for all of this.
The upshot is that the Catholic church has completely lost the enormous
credibility it once enjoyed under the papacy of John XXIII and in the wake
of the Second Vatican Council.
[Hans Kung is a Catholic theologian. Küng has been embroiled in an ongoing
feud with church authorities for decades. As a result of his critical
inquiries on the papacy, the Vatican withdrew his church authority to teach
in 1979. Nevertheless, Küng, 75, is still a priest and, until his
retirement in 1995, taught ecumenical theology at the University of
Tübingen. This was written during his last days]
04/10/05
fw from www.religionwatch.ca
>In January of this year Professor James A. Beverley did an extensive
>interview with Flew at his home in Reading, England. The interview formed
>the basis for an article about Flew in the April issue of
>Christianity Today magazine.
>
>During his Ph.D. course work in 1985 Professor Beverley studied with Flew
>and has been in regular contact with him in the last two decades.
{pic of the two together}
> This interview explores Flew's change of mind about God and also gets
>Flew's opinions about Islam, Marxism, the resurrection of Jesus, life
>after death, and the case for deism.
[For most of these you'll have to sock Beverley $6 + p&h. ]
> The tape provides both direct quotes from the interview along with
>commentary from Professor Beverley about the background to all the issues
>covered in the wide-ranging conversation.
RM comments:
Flew was a leading atheist. But now we're told he "has agnosticsworried".
For those who see large scope for natl theol, Flew's sojourn in the
no-man's-land of deism should prove a period of useful progress. Temple
said "deism is dead and needs no reviving". Flew himself casting around
for interest in a rather arid environment will find some interest in modern
natl theol, and might even write a good review of Broom 'How Blind Is the
Watchmaker?', which makes no resort to revelation. Such review in one or
more jnls lately dominated by Ryle, Ayer, S Blackburn etc could establish a
beachhead for natl theol such as Dawkins, Wolpert etc have avoided so far.
Antony's deistic interest in the Creator(s) some of whose
properties are glimpsed by natl theol will ripen into new respect for Wm
Temple. Let's do what we can to put him in touch with that strand of natl
theol blacked out by the IDT which, worryingly, Flew mentions respectfully.
Ranking Alvin Plantinga 'dean of Christian philosophers' will get
Don Nield going; but, if that is dubious - now that Temple is dead, who are
the top few Christian philosophers?
NB. a slightly discouraging note from interviewer Beverley's
www.ReligionWatch.ca:
>Abandoning Atheism - Flew Interview
>
>Antony Flew, one of the world's leading philosophers, becomes a theist.
>Hear for yourself his reasons for abandoning atheism.
The main point of Beverley's CT article is that Flew has become a
deist. In abandoning atheism he has explicitly not gone as far as theism.
Bev knows the difference between deist and theist. Looks as if someone on
his mailorder staff is trying to confuse with a conflation comparable to
the classic 'evolution *or* creation'. Such language-tampering works
widespread confusion of a demonic quality.
* * *
If we were better organized we'd have made more of Mort in this
multimedia world. The actual talent in NZ for natl theol is at least as
good as any elsewhere. How can we make the most of Flew's progress - and
encourage him to keep looking over the horizon from no-man's-land to the
sunny uplands of theism?
R
The following article is located at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/004/29.80.html
Thinking Straighter
Why the world's most famous atheist now believes in God.
by James A. Beverley | posted 04/08/2005 09:00 a.m.
Antony Flew, one of the world's leading philosophers, has changed his mind about God. And he has agnostics worried.
Some are mystified and others are angry. Typical of many responses is this one skeptical blogger: "Sounds to me like an old man, confronted by the end of life, making one final desperate attempt at salvation." Richard Carrier of The Secular Web even accuses him of "willfully sloppy scholarship."
His pedigree in philosophy explains the recent media frenzy and controversy. Raised in a Christian home and son of a famous Methodist minister, Flew became an atheist at age 15. A student of Gilbert Ryle's at Oxford, Flew won the prestigious John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy. He has written 26 books, many of them classics like God and Philosophy and How to Think Straight. A 1949 lecture given to C. S. Lewis's Oxford Socratic Club became one of the most widely published essays in philosophy. The Times Literary Supplement said Flew fomented a change in both the theological and philosophical worlds.
Flew taught at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, Reading, and has lectured in North America, Australia, Africa, South America, and Asia. The Times of London referred to him as "one of the most renowned atheists of the past half-century, whose papers and lectures have formed the bedrock of unbelief for many adherents."
Last summer he hinted at his abandonment of naturalism in a letter to Philosophy Now. Rumors began circulating on the internet about Flew's inclinations towards belief in God, and then Richard Ostling broke the story in early December for the Associated Press. According to Craig Hazen, associate professor of comparative religions and apologetics at Biola, the school received more than 35,000 hits on their site that contains Flew's interview for Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. At his home in Reading, west of London, Flew told me: "I have been simply amazed by the attention given to my change of mind." So what exactly is the reason for and nature of his "change of mind"?
Jeffersonian Deist
Flew has had to assure former students that he does not now believe in revealed religion. "Even one of my daughters asked if this meant we were going to say grace at meals," he said. "The answer is no."
Flew is also quick to point out that he is not a Christian. "I have become a deist like Thomas Jefferson." He cites his affinity with Einstein who believed in "an Intelligence that produced the integrative complexity of creation." To make things perfectly clear, he told me: "I understand why Christians are excited, but if they think I am going to become a convert to Christ in the near future, they are very much mistaken."
"Are you Paul on the road to Damascus?" I asked him.
"Certainly not."
Comedian Jay Leno suggested a motive for the change on The Tonight Show: "Of course he believes in God now. He's 81 years old." It's something many agnostics have said more seriously. However, Flew is not worried about impending death or post-mortem salvation. "I don't want a future life. I have never wanted a future life," he told me. He assured the reporter for The Times: "I want to be dead when I'm dead and that's an end to it." He even ended an interview with the Humanist Network News by stating: "Goodbye. We shall never meet again."
Flew's U-turn on God lies in a far more significant reality. It is about evidence. "Since the beginning of my philosophical life I have followed the policy of Plato's Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads." I asked him if it was tough to change his mind. "No. It was not hard. I've always engaged in inquiry. If I am shown to have been wrong, well, okay, so I was wrong."
The Impact of Evangelical Scholars
Actually, Flew has been rethinking the arguments for a Designer for several years. When I saw him in London in the spring of 2003, he told me he was still an atheist but was impressed by Intelligent Design theorists. By early 2004 he had made the move to deism. Surprisingly, he gives first place to Aristotle in having the most significant impact on him. "I was not a specialist on Aristotle, so I was reading parts of his philosophy for the first time." He was aided in this by The Rediscovery of Wisdom, a work on Aristotle by David Conway, one of Flew's former students.
Flew also cites the influence of Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist, and Roy Abraham Varghese, author of The Wonder of the World and an Eastern Rite Catholic. Flew appeared with both scientists at a New York symposium last May where he acknowledged his changed conviction about the necessity for a Creator. In the broader picture, both Varghese and Schroeder, author of The Hidden Face of God, argue from the fine-tuning of the universe that it is impossible to explain the origin of life without God. This forms the substance of what led Flew to move away from Darwinian naturalism.
I studied with Flew in 1985 in Toronto, and he told me then about the positive impression he had of emerging evangelical scholarship. That year Varghese had arranged a Dallas conference on God, and included atheists, like Flew, and theists. That same year Flew had his first debate with historian Gary Habermas of Liberty University on the resurrection of Jesus, recorded in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? They have debated twice since on the same topic.
Flew has also debated Terry Miethe, who holds doctorates in both philosophy and religion, on the existence of God, and he has been involved in philosophical exchanges with J. P. Moreland, another well-known Christian philosopher. In 1998 he had a major debate in Madison, Wisconsin, with William Lane Craig, research professor at Talbot, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the famous BBC debate between Bertrand Russell and F. C. Copleston, the brilliant Catholic philosopher.
In Reading, I asked Flew more explicitly about the impact of these and other scholars. "Who amazes you the most of the defenders of Christian theism?"
He replied, "I would have to put Alvin Plantinga pretty high," and he also complimented Miethe, Moreland, and Craig for their philosophical skills. He regards Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosophy of religion professor, as the leading figure in the United Kingdom. "There is really no competition to him." He said that Habermas has made "the most impressive case for Christian theism on the basis of New Testament writings."
These Christian philosophers have uniform respect for Flew as a person and as a thinker. Craig spoke of him as "an enduring figure in positivistic philosophy" and was "rather surprised by his giving up his atheistic views." He, Miethe, and Habermas have found Flew to be a perfect gentleman both in public debate and private conversations. Swinburne says Flew has always been a tough thinker, though less dogmatic as the years went by. Plantinga, the founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, said that Flew's change is "a tribute to his open-mindedness as well as an indication of the strength of current broadly scientific arguments against atheism."
What Holds Him Back from Christianity?
Flew's preference for deism and continued dislike of alleged revelation emerge from two deep impulses in his philosophy. First, Flew has an almost unshakable view against the supernatural, a view that he learned chiefly from David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Flew, a leading authority on Hume, wrote the classic essay on miracles in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What is rather surprising in Flew's dogmatism is that he believes Hume did not and could not prove that miracles are, strictly speaking, impossible. "If this is the case, why not be open to God's possible intervention?" I asked. He replied by saying that the laws of nature are so well established that testimonies about miracles are easy for him to ignore. He is not impressed by people who hear regularly from God. He did concede, reluctantly and after considerable discussion, that God could, in principle, puncture his bias against the supernatural.
Of more significance, Flew detests any notion that a loving God would send any of his creatures to eternal flames. He cannot fathom how intelligent Christians can believe this doctrine. He even said in his debate with Terry Miethe that he has entertained the thought that the Creator should punish, though not endlessly, only those who defend the notion of eternal torment. On this matter, Flew is willing to entertain fresh approaches to divine justice. In fact, he had just obtained Lewis's book The Great Divorce in order to assess Lewis's unique interpretation on the topic of judgment.
When I asked Flew about his broader case for deism, he asked rhetorically: "Why should God be concerned about what his creatures think about him anymore than he should be directly concerned with their conduct?" I reminded him of biblical verses that also ask rhetorically: "He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?" (Ps. 94:9) It seems incredible to argue that any human cares more about the world than God does. "Is the Creator really morally clueless?" I asked. Flew responded to what he called this "interesting argument" with openness. Moreland, who teaches at Biola, says he hopes that Flew "will become even more curious about whether or not God has ever made himself clearly known to humanity."
Unlike many other modern philosophers, Flew has a high regard for the person of Jesus. Early in the interview, he stated rather abruptly: "There's absolutely no good reason for believing in Islam, whereas in Christianity you have the charismatic figure of Jesus, the defining example of what is meant by charismatic." By charismatic, he means dynamic and impressive. He dismissed views that Jesus never existed as "ridiculous."
Later I asked, "Are you basically impressed with Jesus?"
"Oh yes. He is a defining instance of a charismatic figure, perplexing in many ways, of course." Beyond this, Flew remains agnostic about orthodox views of Jesus, though he has made some very positive remarks about the case for the Resurrection. In the journal Philosophia Christi he states: "The evidence for the Resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion." No, he still does not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. However, he told me, the case for an empty tomb is "considerably better than I thought previously."
Plantinga, the dean of Christian philosophers, told me that the radical change in Christian scholarship over Flew's career has been remarkable. When Flew originally attacked theism more than 50 years ago, there were few Christians working in philosophy. Now there are a large and growing number of scholars committed to intellectual defense of the gospel. It is, of course, no small matter that one of the world's leading philosophers has moved somewhat closer to the side of the angels.
James A. Beverley is professor of Christian apologetics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. For more information on the interview with Flew, see Beverley's website at www.religionwatch. ca.
ChristianityToday.com Copyright © 1994–2002 Christianity Today International
>In January of this year Professor James A. Beverley did an extensive
>interview with Flew at his home in Reading, England. The interview formed
>the basis for an article about Flew in the April issue of
>Christianity Today magazine.
>
>During his Ph.D. course work in 1985 Professor Beverley studied with Flew
>and has been in regular contact with him in the last two decades.
{pic of the two together}
> This interview explores Flew's change of mind about God and also gets
>Flew's opinions about Islam, Marxism, the resurrection of Jesus, life
>after death, and the case for deism.
[For most of these you'll have to sock Beverley $6 + p&h. ]
> The tape provides both direct quotes from the interview along with
>commentary from Professor Beverley about the background to all the issues
>covered in the wide-ranging conversation.
RM comments:
Flew was a leading atheist. But now we're told he "has agnosticsworried".
For those who see large scope for natl theol, Flew's sojourn in the
no-man's-land of deism should prove a period of useful progress. Temple
said "deism is dead and needs no reviving". Flew himself casting around
for interest in a rather arid environment will find some interest in modern
natl theol, and might even write a good review of Broom 'How Blind Is the
Watchmaker?', which makes no resort to revelation. Such review in one or
more jnls lately dominated by Ryle, Ayer, S Blackburn etc could establish a
beachhead for natl theol such as Dawkins, Wolpert etc have avoided so far.
Antony's deistic interest in the Creator(s) some of whose
properties are glimpsed by natl theol will ripen into new respect for Wm
Temple. Let's do what we can to put him in touch with that strand of natl
theol blacked out by the IDT which, worryingly, Flew mentions respectfully.
Ranking Alvin Plantinga 'dean of Christian philosophers' will get
Don Nield going; but, if that is dubious - now that Temple is dead, who are
the top few Christian philosophers?
NB. a slightly discouraging note from interviewer Beverley's
www.ReligionWatch.ca:
>Abandoning Atheism - Flew Interview
>
>Antony Flew, one of the world's leading philosophers, becomes a theist.
>Hear for yourself his reasons for abandoning atheism.
The main point of Beverley's CT article is that Flew has become a
deist. In abandoning atheism he has explicitly not gone as far as theism.
Bev knows the difference between deist and theist. Looks as if someone on
his mailorder staff is trying to confuse with a conflation comparable to
the classic 'evolution *or* creation'. Such language-tampering works
widespread confusion of a demonic quality.
* * *
If we were better organized we'd have made more of Mort in this
multimedia world. The actual talent in NZ for natl theol is at least as
good as any elsewhere. How can we make the most of Flew's progress - and
encourage him to keep looking over the horizon from no-man's-land to the
sunny uplands of theism?
R
The following article is located at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/004/29.80.html
Thinking Straighter
Why the world's most famous atheist now believes in God.
by James A. Beverley | posted 04/08/2005 09:00 a.m.
Antony Flew, one of the world's leading philosophers, has changed his mind about God. And he has agnostics worried.
Some are mystified and others are angry. Typical of many responses is this one skeptical blogger: "Sounds to me like an old man, confronted by the end of life, making one final desperate attempt at salvation." Richard Carrier of The Secular Web even accuses him of "willfully sloppy scholarship."
His pedigree in philosophy explains the recent media frenzy and controversy. Raised in a Christian home and son of a famous Methodist minister, Flew became an atheist at age 15. A student of Gilbert Ryle's at Oxford, Flew won the prestigious John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy. He has written 26 books, many of them classics like God and Philosophy and How to Think Straight. A 1949 lecture given to C. S. Lewis's Oxford Socratic Club became one of the most widely published essays in philosophy. The Times Literary Supplement said Flew fomented a change in both the theological and philosophical worlds.
Flew taught at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, Reading, and has lectured in North America, Australia, Africa, South America, and Asia. The Times of London referred to him as "one of the most renowned atheists of the past half-century, whose papers and lectures have formed the bedrock of unbelief for many adherents."
Last summer he hinted at his abandonment of naturalism in a letter to Philosophy Now. Rumors began circulating on the internet about Flew's inclinations towards belief in God, and then Richard Ostling broke the story in early December for the Associated Press. According to Craig Hazen, associate professor of comparative religions and apologetics at Biola, the school received more than 35,000 hits on their site that contains Flew's interview for Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. At his home in Reading, west of London, Flew told me: "I have been simply amazed by the attention given to my change of mind." So what exactly is the reason for and nature of his "change of mind"?
Jeffersonian Deist
Flew has had to assure former students that he does not now believe in revealed religion. "Even one of my daughters asked if this meant we were going to say grace at meals," he said. "The answer is no."
Flew is also quick to point out that he is not a Christian. "I have become a deist like Thomas Jefferson." He cites his affinity with Einstein who believed in "an Intelligence that produced the integrative complexity of creation." To make things perfectly clear, he told me: "I understand why Christians are excited, but if they think I am going to become a convert to Christ in the near future, they are very much mistaken."
"Are you Paul on the road to Damascus?" I asked him.
"Certainly not."
Comedian Jay Leno suggested a motive for the change on The Tonight Show: "Of course he believes in God now. He's 81 years old." It's something many agnostics have said more seriously. However, Flew is not worried about impending death or post-mortem salvation. "I don't want a future life. I have never wanted a future life," he told me. He assured the reporter for The Times: "I want to be dead when I'm dead and that's an end to it." He even ended an interview with the Humanist Network News by stating: "Goodbye. We shall never meet again."
Flew's U-turn on God lies in a far more significant reality. It is about evidence. "Since the beginning of my philosophical life I have followed the policy of Plato's Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads." I asked him if it was tough to change his mind. "No. It was not hard. I've always engaged in inquiry. If I am shown to have been wrong, well, okay, so I was wrong."
The Impact of Evangelical Scholars
Actually, Flew has been rethinking the arguments for a Designer for several years. When I saw him in London in the spring of 2003, he told me he was still an atheist but was impressed by Intelligent Design theorists. By early 2004 he had made the move to deism. Surprisingly, he gives first place to Aristotle in having the most significant impact on him. "I was not a specialist on Aristotle, so I was reading parts of his philosophy for the first time." He was aided in this by The Rediscovery of Wisdom, a work on Aristotle by David Conway, one of Flew's former students.
Flew also cites the influence of Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist, and Roy Abraham Varghese, author of The Wonder of the World and an Eastern Rite Catholic. Flew appeared with both scientists at a New York symposium last May where he acknowledged his changed conviction about the necessity for a Creator. In the broader picture, both Varghese and Schroeder, author of The Hidden Face of God, argue from the fine-tuning of the universe that it is impossible to explain the origin of life without God. This forms the substance of what led Flew to move away from Darwinian naturalism.
I studied with Flew in 1985 in Toronto, and he told me then about the positive impression he had of emerging evangelical scholarship. That year Varghese had arranged a Dallas conference on God, and included atheists, like Flew, and theists. That same year Flew had his first debate with historian Gary Habermas of Liberty University on the resurrection of Jesus, recorded in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? They have debated twice since on the same topic.
Flew has also debated Terry Miethe, who holds doctorates in both philosophy and religion, on the existence of God, and he has been involved in philosophical exchanges with J. P. Moreland, another well-known Christian philosopher. In 1998 he had a major debate in Madison, Wisconsin, with William Lane Craig, research professor at Talbot, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the famous BBC debate between Bertrand Russell and F. C. Copleston, the brilliant Catholic philosopher.
In Reading, I asked Flew more explicitly about the impact of these and other scholars. "Who amazes you the most of the defenders of Christian theism?"
He replied, "I would have to put Alvin Plantinga pretty high," and he also complimented Miethe, Moreland, and Craig for their philosophical skills. He regards Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosophy of religion professor, as the leading figure in the United Kingdom. "There is really no competition to him." He said that Habermas has made "the most impressive case for Christian theism on the basis of New Testament writings."
These Christian philosophers have uniform respect for Flew as a person and as a thinker. Craig spoke of him as "an enduring figure in positivistic philosophy" and was "rather surprised by his giving up his atheistic views." He, Miethe, and Habermas have found Flew to be a perfect gentleman both in public debate and private conversations. Swinburne says Flew has always been a tough thinker, though less dogmatic as the years went by. Plantinga, the founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, said that Flew's change is "a tribute to his open-mindedness as well as an indication of the strength of current broadly scientific arguments against atheism."
What Holds Him Back from Christianity?
Flew's preference for deism and continued dislike of alleged revelation emerge from two deep impulses in his philosophy. First, Flew has an almost unshakable view against the supernatural, a view that he learned chiefly from David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Flew, a leading authority on Hume, wrote the classic essay on miracles in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What is rather surprising in Flew's dogmatism is that he believes Hume did not and could not prove that miracles are, strictly speaking, impossible. "If this is the case, why not be open to God's possible intervention?" I asked. He replied by saying that the laws of nature are so well established that testimonies about miracles are easy for him to ignore. He is not impressed by people who hear regularly from God. He did concede, reluctantly and after considerable discussion, that God could, in principle, puncture his bias against the supernatural.
Of more significance, Flew detests any notion that a loving God would send any of his creatures to eternal flames. He cannot fathom how intelligent Christians can believe this doctrine. He even said in his debate with Terry Miethe that he has entertained the thought that the Creator should punish, though not endlessly, only those who defend the notion of eternal torment. On this matter, Flew is willing to entertain fresh approaches to divine justice. In fact, he had just obtained Lewis's book The Great Divorce in order to assess Lewis's unique interpretation on the topic of judgment.
When I asked Flew about his broader case for deism, he asked rhetorically: "Why should God be concerned about what his creatures think about him anymore than he should be directly concerned with their conduct?" I reminded him of biblical verses that also ask rhetorically: "He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?" (Ps. 94:9) It seems incredible to argue that any human cares more about the world than God does. "Is the Creator really morally clueless?" I asked. Flew responded to what he called this "interesting argument" with openness. Moreland, who teaches at Biola, says he hopes that Flew "will become even more curious about whether or not God has ever made himself clearly known to humanity."
Unlike many other modern philosophers, Flew has a high regard for the person of Jesus. Early in the interview, he stated rather abruptly: "There's absolutely no good reason for believing in Islam, whereas in Christianity you have the charismatic figure of Jesus, the defining example of what is meant by charismatic." By charismatic, he means dynamic and impressive. He dismissed views that Jesus never existed as "ridiculous."
Later I asked, "Are you basically impressed with Jesus?"
"Oh yes. He is a defining instance of a charismatic figure, perplexing in many ways, of course." Beyond this, Flew remains agnostic about orthodox views of Jesus, though he has made some very positive remarks about the case for the Resurrection. In the journal Philosophia Christi he states: "The evidence for the Resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion." No, he still does not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. However, he told me, the case for an empty tomb is "considerably better than I thought previously."
Plantinga, the dean of Christian philosophers, told me that the radical change in Christian scholarship over Flew's career has been remarkable. When Flew originally attacked theism more than 50 years ago, there were few Christians working in philosophy. Now there are a large and growing number of scholars committed to intellectual defense of the gospel. It is, of course, no small matter that one of the world's leading philosophers has moved somewhat closer to the side of the angels.
James A. Beverley is professor of Christian apologetics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. For more information on the interview with Flew, see Beverley's website at www.religionwatch. ca.
ChristianityToday.com Copyright © 1994–2002 Christianity Today International
http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-1/537/537_08_Evolution.shtml
>What's at stake in...
>The battle over evolution
>
>April 1, 2005 | Page 8
>
>DAVID WHITEHOUSE explains what's important about the theory of evolution.
and R Mann inserts comments
>POLITICIANS IN 19 states are trying to force biology teachers to sow
>doubts about the theory of evolution. Doubts are all they can manage for
>now, since the alternative view--"creation science," which has also been
>repackaged as something called "intelligent design theory"--finds little
>support among people who actually study living things.
"Creation science", a term now largely supplanted by "creationism",
holds that all spp were created at once, in a completed creation. In the
most extreme version, Young Earth Creationism (e.g Answers® in Genesis
Inc.), there were 6 literal days of creation, less than 10,000 y ago. In
the less extreme Old Earth Creationism, e.g Hugh Ross's 'Reasons to
Believe' of S. Calif, the 'days' of creation are held to be much longer,
but evolution is still denied.
IDT is a loosely (if not furtively) connected newer sect, asserting
far less - stuck on Paley's 1802 point that the complex machinery so
evident in organisms cannot have resulted from chance but must have been
designed. Its leaders Dembski, Behe stand pat on this one point, as if
waiting for rabid materialists like Dawkins, Wolpert, S Weinberg to admit
it; they will evidently wait till hell freezes over, so defective is the
reasoning of those aggressive atheists. IDT is an aggressive sect more or
less led by polemical rtd Berkeley law prof Phil Johnson. Their 'wedge' is
being driven in with intent - mistaken, in my view - to overthrow the
methodological materialism of scientific method.
IDT is sometimes called a stalking horse for "creationism". I
suspect that's its main role.
Theistic evolutionists e.g Broom, Nield, Sheldrake and myself,
carry on the thread never referenced by Dembski - J E Morton, Wm Temple,
Sir Alister Hardy, etc. traceable back to Aristotle. This line of
scholarship propounds creation - as distinct from materialism - but
fully acknowledges that billions-of-years evolution is real and has indeed
been the 'how' of creation. But we then go further and insist that 'why'
must also be asked.
>Virtually all biologists believe that material processes, not divine
>intervention, account for the origin of life from inanimate matter --and
>for the adaptive "fit" between organisms and their environments.
That is a typical example of wishful thinking by materialists.
What fraction of biologists are anti-materialism (like Broom, Morton,
Sheldrake, myself, etc)? So many Yank biologists must be Christians that I
don't see how the stats could be as Whitehouse claims - "virtually all
biologists believe ... ". He is making this up, isn't he?
>As a result, courts have ruled since 1968 that mandating creation
>"science" in public schools is an unlawful imposition of a religious view.
I have previously pointed out the ludicrous exaggeration &
falsehood entailed in these court rulings. What the USA Constitution
prohibits is *establishment* of any religion, which is vastly more than the
mere discussing of theology in schools which so threatens the insecure
atheist.
>Faced with these setbacks, creationists now propose teaching the
>"controversy" over evolution as a matter of free speech. This new
>strategy resembles the tobacco companies' four-decade attempt to convince
>people that there was a "controversy" over the connection between smoking
>and disease.
This is a misleading analogy. There exists no significant
controversy over the causation of diseases by smoking. There exists
long-standing, unresolved, highly respectable controversy over the
Darwinist notion that evolution can be explained by random mutation
followed by selecting out the less fit mutants. Broom & I, for example,
call (neo)Darwinism the biggest con-trick in intellectual history.
Megatime is no substitute for purpose in the creation of coordinated
ecology. All 4 causes, not just material and efficient causes, are needed
to explain evolution.
>As with the corporate-sponsored tobacco "researchers," creationists have
>a hidden motive for pushing discredited ideas. The companies were after
>profits--and the creationists are pushing a conservative social agenda.
It is difficult to ascertain the social agenda of the
"creationists", let alone the much more diplomatic if not downright coy
IDTers. I doubt they have any tight agenda. Their leaders probably look
no further ahead than their own totalitarian power over their duped,
mind-buggered followers chanting "the first 3 chapters of the Bible, and
plus you get your Noah story, are literally true" - a statement that
cannot be genuinely believed by any informed person. Phil Johnson fiercely
protects them, and refuses to tell me how old he thinks the Earth is.
>THE ATTRACTION of creationism for conservatives is that it presents a
>static, unchanging view of nature--a view they use to justify the social
>status quo.
I have noticed them doing little of that, at least overtly. Mind
you, I'm in an export market, far from the wellsprings of Orange County
Calif and Lubbock, Tex. And one has now to add Seattle, Wash, a channel
for funding by Rev Sun Myung Moon thru Wells in the Discovery Inst, where
Dembski is also affiliated. 'Teach the controversy' they intone - yet
Dembski refuses to put anything from me on his well-funded www.iscid.org.
It does look as if IDT is Creaionism Lite, but the links are few &
lo-profile.
>A God that produces an unchanging natural order would, of course, produce
>a similarly "perfect" social order and prescribe the proper function of
>everything in both.
"Creationists" are a variety of fundamentalist Christian. They
believe little more than anyone else that a perfect social order has been
produced. They do of course, like all theists, believe that the Creator
has let us know how he wants us to live.
Theists could not possibly desire the social status quo. They
deplore its many depravities and work in various ways to improve society.
>Creationists claim that their God prescribes a social structure in which
>some people must be subordinate to others--just as humans must obey God.
>Further, the nuclear family--with a man in command--is supposed to be the
>eternal social unit for rearing children. The creationists also say that
>God created sex only for reproduction. That way, they can condemn
>abortion and gay sexuality without having to make a real argument.
These social attitudes don't come along as part of the
"creationist" package. There would be many "creationists" who aren't
particularly concerned let alone bigotted about homosexuality. To the
extent that they oppose PC ideologies, their reasons will be essentially
unrelated to their wonky beliefs against evolution.
>Unfortunately for the creationists, 150 years of investigation has
>strengthened Charles Darwin's arguments that species change--and even
>change into new species.
>
>As Darwin pointed out, the resemblance of fossils to today's species
>indicates that some species give rise to changed versions of themselves.
>Genetic and other physical similarities between species indicate how
>closely related they are to each other. Human genes, for example, are 99
>percent the same as a chimpanzee's.
If Whitehouse means to imply that these facts prove common descent,
I'll point out they don't quite do so.
>The geographic locations of different species confirm these judgments.
That is a very disputable claim. Biogeography contains many
unsolved puzzles.
>Related species, even ones that are adapted to different ways of life,
>tend to be found in adjoining areas--as we should expect if they have a
>common ancestor.
>
>For these and a thousand other observations, creationists have only
>twisted explanations.
They ignore as many of them as they can get away with - the vast
majority of the evidence.
This is one of the several ways in which they are dishonest.
>Lacking support from the evidence, creation "science" is propped up by
>political-religious fervor--and by the money that flows to those who
>promise to make backward views seem respectable.
correct
>IF CREATIONISM lends support to the political right, does evolution
>confirm left-wing ideas? Lots of people have thought so.
But they are deluding themselves. In fact, as well as in theory,
evolution is consistent with both right- and left-wing beliefs. The
question of how the millions of spp came to be (9/10 now extinct) at
successive times over 4 By has little to do with the left-right spectrum
which so concerned Churchill, Stalin, etc during C20 but is now scarcely
visible in the fog of PR, PC, etc: state ownership v. capitalism.
Public ownership for the purpose of democratic control of major
utilities, especially natural monopolies, was endorsed by all significant
political parties in New Zealand, 1950-75. There was ample scope for
corporate enterprise, some of which was NZ-owned. And producers'
cooperatives developed - e.g the NZ Dairy Board was the largest
international trader of dairy products.
The Yugoslav experiment was perhaps the least unpleasant version of
communism - family firms could employ a half-dozen non-family. Across at
the far end of the R-L spectrum loom the state terrorist nightmares of
Lenin, Mao, Hoxha, Kim ... And around the R extreme of this still
significant spectrum, the nominees are ... ? new Russia? USA? typical
USA puppet regimes in Latin Amer ...
I contend that the L-R spectrum is today
* still important
* proven by expt to be needlessly nasty at both extremes
* proven to be at about the right point in mixed economies, New Zealand &
Australia 1950-75
If so, theorising in favour of one extreme or the other is
unrealistic, evasive, and bloody tiresome.
> If nature has a history, they've reasoned, then human relations can
>change, too. What's more, if the changes in nature come from processes
>that are internal to nature itself--and not from an outside force, like
>God--then changes in society may be possible through the actions of humans
>themselves. In other words, humans created oppressive institutions, and
>humans could change them.
It is a misleading caricature to make out that even fundamentalists
such as "creationists" deny the possibility of changing human relations.
Christ preached radical changes such as have not yet been fully
implemented, and his followers today are anything but frozen but are still
toiling for change. The Amish etc may be the nearest to an exception. But
typical theistic evolutionists are also eager for social change.
>Ideas like these--including some of the first scientific ideas of
>biological evolution--inspired many leaders of the French Revolution of
>1789, 60 years before Darwin published his theory. Some favored a
>thoroughly materialist outlook, dispensing with talk of gods and spirits
>in order to seek a natural understanding of everything.
Only in an ill-educated society could a materialist try on that
nightmare of state terror as an example of progress.
...
>Although Darwinism and Marxism are compatible and even kindred theories,
>the truth of Darwinism doesn't come close to proving that socialist
>revolution could work. Certainties belong to those who have a pipeline to
>an "absolute" authority. Materialists, however, have to prove their ideas
>in practice.
- and have so utterly failed to do so that materialism should be
by now disreputable. However, its current vigorous advocates e.g Dawkins,
Wolpert, S Weinberg, etc get far more publicity than theistic evolutionists
who represent the mainstream of scholarship.
R
>What's at stake in...
>The battle over evolution
>
>April 1, 2005 | Page 8
>
>DAVID WHITEHOUSE explains what's important about the theory of evolution.
and R Mann inserts comments
>POLITICIANS IN 19 states are trying to force biology teachers to sow
>doubts about the theory of evolution. Doubts are all they can manage for
>now, since the alternative view--"creation science," which has also been
>repackaged as something called "intelligent design theory"--finds little
>support among people who actually study living things.
"Creation science", a term now largely supplanted by "creationism",
holds that all spp were created at once, in a completed creation. In the
most extreme version, Young Earth Creationism (e.g Answers® in Genesis
Inc.), there were 6 literal days of creation, less than 10,000 y ago. In
the less extreme Old Earth Creationism, e.g Hugh Ross's 'Reasons to
Believe' of S. Calif, the 'days' of creation are held to be much longer,
but evolution is still denied.
IDT is a loosely (if not furtively) connected newer sect, asserting
far less - stuck on Paley's 1802 point that the complex machinery so
evident in organisms cannot have resulted from chance but must have been
designed. Its leaders Dembski, Behe stand pat on this one point, as if
waiting for rabid materialists like Dawkins, Wolpert, S Weinberg to admit
it; they will evidently wait till hell freezes over, so defective is the
reasoning of those aggressive atheists. IDT is an aggressive sect more or
less led by polemical rtd Berkeley law prof Phil Johnson. Their 'wedge' is
being driven in with intent - mistaken, in my view - to overthrow the
methodological materialism of scientific method.
IDT is sometimes called a stalking horse for "creationism". I
suspect that's its main role.
Theistic evolutionists e.g Broom, Nield, Sheldrake and myself,
carry on the thread never referenced by Dembski - J E Morton, Wm Temple,
Sir Alister Hardy, etc. traceable back to Aristotle. This line of
scholarship propounds creation - as distinct from materialism - but
fully acknowledges that billions-of-years evolution is real and has indeed
been the 'how' of creation. But we then go further and insist that 'why'
must also be asked.
>Virtually all biologists believe that material processes, not divine
>intervention, account for the origin of life from inanimate matter --and
>for the adaptive "fit" between organisms and their environments.
That is a typical example of wishful thinking by materialists.
What fraction of biologists are anti-materialism (like Broom, Morton,
Sheldrake, myself, etc)? So many Yank biologists must be Christians that I
don't see how the stats could be as Whitehouse claims - "virtually all
biologists believe ... ". He is making this up, isn't he?
>As a result, courts have ruled since 1968 that mandating creation
>"science" in public schools is an unlawful imposition of a religious view.
I have previously pointed out the ludicrous exaggeration &
falsehood entailed in these court rulings. What the USA Constitution
prohibits is *establishment* of any religion, which is vastly more than the
mere discussing of theology in schools which so threatens the insecure
atheist.
>Faced with these setbacks, creationists now propose teaching the
>"controversy" over evolution as a matter of free speech. This new
>strategy resembles the tobacco companies' four-decade attempt to convince
>people that there was a "controversy" over the connection between smoking
>and disease.
This is a misleading analogy. There exists no significant
controversy over the causation of diseases by smoking. There exists
long-standing, unresolved, highly respectable controversy over the
Darwinist notion that evolution can be explained by random mutation
followed by selecting out the less fit mutants. Broom & I, for example,
call (neo)Darwinism the biggest con-trick in intellectual history.
Megatime is no substitute for purpose in the creation of coordinated
ecology. All 4 causes, not just material and efficient causes, are needed
to explain evolution.
>As with the corporate-sponsored tobacco "researchers," creationists have
>a hidden motive for pushing discredited ideas. The companies were after
>profits--and the creationists are pushing a conservative social agenda.
It is difficult to ascertain the social agenda of the
"creationists", let alone the much more diplomatic if not downright coy
IDTers. I doubt they have any tight agenda. Their leaders probably look
no further ahead than their own totalitarian power over their duped,
mind-buggered followers chanting "the first 3 chapters of the Bible, and
plus you get your Noah story, are literally true" - a statement that
cannot be genuinely believed by any informed person. Phil Johnson fiercely
protects them, and refuses to tell me how old he thinks the Earth is.
>THE ATTRACTION of creationism for conservatives is that it presents a
>static, unchanging view of nature--a view they use to justify the social
>status quo.
I have noticed them doing little of that, at least overtly. Mind
you, I'm in an export market, far from the wellsprings of Orange County
Calif and Lubbock, Tex. And one has now to add Seattle, Wash, a channel
for funding by Rev Sun Myung Moon thru Wells in the Discovery Inst, where
Dembski is also affiliated. 'Teach the controversy' they intone - yet
Dembski refuses to put anything from me on his well-funded www.iscid.org.
It does look as if IDT is Creaionism Lite, but the links are few &
lo-profile.
>A God that produces an unchanging natural order would, of course, produce
>a similarly "perfect" social order and prescribe the proper function of
>everything in both.
"Creationists" are a variety of fundamentalist Christian. They
believe little more than anyone else that a perfect social order has been
produced. They do of course, like all theists, believe that the Creator
has let us know how he wants us to live.
Theists could not possibly desire the social status quo. They
deplore its many depravities and work in various ways to improve society.
>Creationists claim that their God prescribes a social structure in which
>some people must be subordinate to others--just as humans must obey God.
>Further, the nuclear family--with a man in command--is supposed to be the
>eternal social unit for rearing children. The creationists also say that
>God created sex only for reproduction. That way, they can condemn
>abortion and gay sexuality without having to make a real argument.
These social attitudes don't come along as part of the
"creationist" package. There would be many "creationists" who aren't
particularly concerned let alone bigotted about homosexuality. To the
extent that they oppose PC ideologies, their reasons will be essentially
unrelated to their wonky beliefs against evolution.
>Unfortunately for the creationists, 150 years of investigation has
>strengthened Charles Darwin's arguments that species change--and even
>change into new species.
>
>As Darwin pointed out, the resemblance of fossils to today's species
>indicates that some species give rise to changed versions of themselves.
>Genetic and other physical similarities between species indicate how
>closely related they are to each other. Human genes, for example, are 99
>percent the same as a chimpanzee's.
If Whitehouse means to imply that these facts prove common descent,
I'll point out they don't quite do so.
>The geographic locations of different species confirm these judgments.
That is a very disputable claim. Biogeography contains many
unsolved puzzles.
>Related species, even ones that are adapted to different ways of life,
>tend to be found in adjoining areas--as we should expect if they have a
>common ancestor.
>
>For these and a thousand other observations, creationists have only
>twisted explanations.
They ignore as many of them as they can get away with - the vast
majority of the evidence.
This is one of the several ways in which they are dishonest.
>Lacking support from the evidence, creation "science" is propped up by
>political-religious fervor--and by the money that flows to those who
>promise to make backward views seem respectable.
correct
>IF CREATIONISM lends support to the political right, does evolution
>confirm left-wing ideas? Lots of people have thought so.
But they are deluding themselves. In fact, as well as in theory,
evolution is consistent with both right- and left-wing beliefs. The
question of how the millions of spp came to be (9/10 now extinct) at
successive times over 4 By has little to do with the left-right spectrum
which so concerned Churchill, Stalin, etc during C20 but is now scarcely
visible in the fog of PR, PC, etc: state ownership v. capitalism.
Public ownership for the purpose of democratic control of major
utilities, especially natural monopolies, was endorsed by all significant
political parties in New Zealand, 1950-75. There was ample scope for
corporate enterprise, some of which was NZ-owned. And producers'
cooperatives developed - e.g the NZ Dairy Board was the largest
international trader of dairy products.
The Yugoslav experiment was perhaps the least unpleasant version of
communism - family firms could employ a half-dozen non-family. Across at
the far end of the R-L spectrum loom the state terrorist nightmares of
Lenin, Mao, Hoxha, Kim ... And around the R extreme of this still
significant spectrum, the nominees are ... ? new Russia? USA? typical
USA puppet regimes in Latin Amer ...
I contend that the L-R spectrum is today
* still important
* proven by expt to be needlessly nasty at both extremes
* proven to be at about the right point in mixed economies, New Zealand &
Australia 1950-75
If so, theorising in favour of one extreme or the other is
unrealistic, evasive, and bloody tiresome.
> If nature has a history, they've reasoned, then human relations can
>change, too. What's more, if the changes in nature come from processes
>that are internal to nature itself--and not from an outside force, like
>God--then changes in society may be possible through the actions of humans
>themselves. In other words, humans created oppressive institutions, and
>humans could change them.
It is a misleading caricature to make out that even fundamentalists
such as "creationists" deny the possibility of changing human relations.
Christ preached radical changes such as have not yet been fully
implemented, and his followers today are anything but frozen but are still
toiling for change. The Amish etc may be the nearest to an exception. But
typical theistic evolutionists are also eager for social change.
>Ideas like these--including some of the first scientific ideas of
>biological evolution--inspired many leaders of the French Revolution of
>1789, 60 years before Darwin published his theory. Some favored a
>thoroughly materialist outlook, dispensing with talk of gods and spirits
>in order to seek a natural understanding of everything.
Only in an ill-educated society could a materialist try on that
nightmare of state terror as an example of progress.
...
>Although Darwinism and Marxism are compatible and even kindred theories,
>the truth of Darwinism doesn't come close to proving that socialist
>revolution could work. Certainties belong to those who have a pipeline to
>an "absolute" authority. Materialists, however, have to prove their ideas
>in practice.
- and have so utterly failed to do so that materialism should be
by now disreputable. However, its current vigorous advocates e.g Dawkins,
Wolpert, S Weinberg, etc get far more publicity than theistic evolutionists
who represent the mainstream of scholarship.
R
LOOSE CANON
On reading an article in a recent Church magazine, I was reminded that at
an annual conference a Bishop reaffirmed marriage "as a covenant between a
man and a woman that derives from a biblical theology of life-long
intention, mutuality, sexuality, faithfulness, respect and
interdependence. It offers hope and security in the process of procreation
and stability in the nurturing of children, whose rights need protection
just as much as any other human rights under the law of the land".
The author judges such a statement as being unremarkable in the history of
the Church. What was remarkable however, was that several members at the
conference regarded the inclusion of the statement as being "unfortunate".
He goes on to say that it is indeed a strange state of affairs when a
bishop is obliged to defend himself within his own diocese for his comment
that marriage is a good thing.
I suspect that the embarrassment of the members to such a strong statement
lies in a growing desire by some people to make the Church "relevant" to
the community. This has often been described as the skill required to
"sell" what the Church has to offer to the world so that people are
attracted to it.
The Church has always tried to open its arms to people in need. Quite
often that translates to physical need and this is where the City Missions
of our country do such a wonderful job. But more and more frequently
people come because they have an inner or spiritual need. Jesus was
frequently criticised because he showed compassion and care of those in his
community who were, to quote a cliché, "marginalised", those who were not
respectable and people who were generally unlovely or even repulsive.
I am led to the conclusion that the objections to the Bishop's words were
not because they were wrong in themselves but that making strong
statements about marriage makes those who choose to live in any other
relationship feel uncomfortable. The reaction is that the Church needs to
avoid giving offence to such people, especially when the Government of the
land, far from making make any criticism of their lifestyle, are completely
neutral about their choice despite the enormous cost to this country in
social breakdown.
I hope that most people will see that taken to its logical conclusion the
Church might muzzle itself on every occasion in its care to avoid a cause
for embarrassment or where people could be offended. Some people are
never offended. I am reminded of the Church joke where a man who arrived
for a service soaked in a rainstorm, thanked the Vicar afterwards for
preaching on the ten commandments, saying that when he got to the seventh
commandment he recalled where he had left his umbrella.
There is a popular myth that Jesus was "understanding" about sin. His
meeting with people who needed his love and forgiveness found his
compassion overwhelming mainly because he refused to judge them relying
instead on the impact of his words and the beauty of his presence to call
out the medicine of repentance from within them.
A far better pen than mine has written, "We need to be very careful that
we do not find ourselves praying to another God, one whose prevailing
character is to pat us on the back and reacting to our petitions in the
granting all of our earthly desires. Do we pray to a quite extraordinary
God who while he expresses his own love in agony and self sacrifice,
chooses that his children should express theirs in a continuous round of
self-fulfilment ? Did we pray perhaps to that truly incomprehensible God
who chooses for his sinless Son the way of suffering and grants to his
sinful sons and daughters the realisation of all their earthly dreams?"
(Harry Blamires)
It is important that we should pray to the Christian God and not a God of
our own devising.
*********
THE REV. CANON G.J.J.A. HADLOW
25 Ann Street,
Utuhina,
Rotorua 3201,
NEW ZEALAND
Telephone (07) 348 9894
e-mail: ghadlow@clear.net.nz
*********
On reading an article in a recent Church magazine, I was reminded that at
an annual conference a Bishop reaffirmed marriage "as a covenant between a
man and a woman that derives from a biblical theology of life-long
intention, mutuality, sexuality, faithfulness, respect and
interdependence. It offers hope and security in the process of procreation
and stability in the nurturing of children, whose rights need protection
just as much as any other human rights under the law of the land".
The author judges such a statement as being unremarkable in the history of
the Church. What was remarkable however, was that several members at the
conference regarded the inclusion of the statement as being "unfortunate".
He goes on to say that it is indeed a strange state of affairs when a
bishop is obliged to defend himself within his own diocese for his comment
that marriage is a good thing.
I suspect that the embarrassment of the members to such a strong statement
lies in a growing desire by some people to make the Church "relevant" to
the community. This has often been described as the skill required to
"sell" what the Church has to offer to the world so that people are
attracted to it.
The Church has always tried to open its arms to people in need. Quite
often that translates to physical need and this is where the City Missions
of our country do such a wonderful job. But more and more frequently
people come because they have an inner or spiritual need. Jesus was
frequently criticised because he showed compassion and care of those in his
community who were, to quote a cliché, "marginalised", those who were not
respectable and people who were generally unlovely or even repulsive.
I am led to the conclusion that the objections to the Bishop's words were
not because they were wrong in themselves but that making strong
statements about marriage makes those who choose to live in any other
relationship feel uncomfortable. The reaction is that the Church needs to
avoid giving offence to such people, especially when the Government of the
land, far from making make any criticism of their lifestyle, are completely
neutral about their choice despite the enormous cost to this country in
social breakdown.
I hope that most people will see that taken to its logical conclusion the
Church might muzzle itself on every occasion in its care to avoid a cause
for embarrassment or where people could be offended. Some people are
never offended. I am reminded of the Church joke where a man who arrived
for a service soaked in a rainstorm, thanked the Vicar afterwards for
preaching on the ten commandments, saying that when he got to the seventh
commandment he recalled where he had left his umbrella.
There is a popular myth that Jesus was "understanding" about sin. His
meeting with people who needed his love and forgiveness found his
compassion overwhelming mainly because he refused to judge them relying
instead on the impact of his words and the beauty of his presence to call
out the medicine of repentance from within them.
A far better pen than mine has written, "We need to be very careful that
we do not find ourselves praying to another God, one whose prevailing
character is to pat us on the back and reacting to our petitions in the
granting all of our earthly desires. Do we pray to a quite extraordinary
God who while he expresses his own love in agony and self sacrifice,
chooses that his children should express theirs in a continuous round of
self-fulfilment ? Did we pray perhaps to that truly incomprehensible God
who chooses for his sinless Son the way of suffering and grants to his
sinful sons and daughters the realisation of all their earthly dreams?"
(Harry Blamires)
It is important that we should pray to the Christian God and not a God of
our own devising.
*********
THE REV. CANON G.J.J.A. HADLOW
25 Ann Street,
Utuhina,
Rotorua 3201,
NEW ZEALAND
Telephone (07) 348 9894
e-mail: ghadlow@clear.net.nz
*********
03/27/05
SA Perspectives: Okay, We Give Up
Scientific American April 2005
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers
told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics
don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of
such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We
resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that
the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific
Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and
all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say:
you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so called evolution has been
hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue
that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the
theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the
unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific
ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.
Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for
scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs
lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon?
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their
radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal
articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of
evidence.
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists
by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God
designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists
think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed
life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells.
That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged
down in details.
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers
to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit
theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or
facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that
scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or
best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest
groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists
is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would
be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice
of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place
for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how
science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to
building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will
waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security,
you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the
administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the
dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades,
that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science
either - so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is
slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and
balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science.
And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Okay, We Give Up
MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
Scientific American April 2005
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers
told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics
don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of
such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We
resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that
the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific
Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and
all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say:
you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so called evolution has been
hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue
that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the
theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the
unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific
ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.
Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for
scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs
lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon?
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their
radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal
articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of
evidence.
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists
by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God
designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists
think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed
life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells.
That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged
down in details.
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers
to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit
theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or
facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that
scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or
best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest
groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists
is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would
be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice
of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place
for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how
science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to
building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will
waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security,
you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the
administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the
dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades,
that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science
either - so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is
slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and
balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science.
And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Okay, We Give Up
MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
No. 18 Easter 2005
p. 3
Several pages of _Anglican Taonga_ have been lately given over to inveighings
(e.g. by Bishop Bluck)
[this bit in brackets censored]
against supposed victimisation of homosexuals within the Anglican church.
I suggest this is almost a non-issue. I have not been aware of
even a single example. The homosexuals I know in our church are fully
welcome and treated as full members.
To go on about this alleged victimisation is a decoy from the live
issues of the day regarding homosexuality among Anglicans: whether to
ordain known homosexuals, and whether to 'bless' civil unions. Let us have
some well-informed articles on these actual debates.
yrs etc
Robert Mann
Remuera
p. 3
Several pages of _Anglican Taonga_ have been lately given over to inveighings
(e.g. by Bishop Bluck)
[this bit in brackets censored]
against supposed victimisation of homosexuals within the Anglican church.
I suggest this is almost a non-issue. I have not been aware of
even a single example. The homosexuals I know in our church are fully
welcome and treated as full members.
To go on about this alleged victimisation is a decoy from the live
issues of the day regarding homosexuality among Anglicans: whether to
ordain known homosexuals, and whether to 'bless' civil unions. Let us have
some well-informed articles on these actual debates.
yrs etc
Robert Mann
Remuera
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1530.html
'The Donkey'
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
-- G. K. Chesterton
'The Donkey'
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
-- G. K. Chesterton
NYT: Pressure being put on a lot of the public institutions by the fundamentalists [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 04:16:41 PM
NYT March 19, 2005
The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.
Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to
show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of
the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that
contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.
The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the
industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because
only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the
decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a
producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.
People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say
that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the
distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage", which depicts
the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to
clusters of galaxies; "Galapagos", about the islands where Darwin theorized
about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea", an underwater epic about
the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from
vents in the ocean floor.
"Volcanoes", released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science
Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen
science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers
oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. He said theater
officials rejected the film because of its brief references to evolution,
in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the
undersea vents.
Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science
and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing
it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax
theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while
some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I
really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I
don't agree with their presentation of human existence."
On other criteria, like narration and music, the film did not score as well
as other films, Ms. Murray said, and over all, it did not receive high
marks, so she recommended that the museum pass.
"If it's not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy,"
she said, "from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation" to
show it.
In interviews, officials at other Imax theaters said they had similarly
decided against the film for fear of offending some audiences.
"We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public," said
Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a
commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium. Her theater had not
ruled out ever showing "Volcanoes", Ms. Buzzelli said, "but being in the
Bible Belt, the movie does have a lot to do with evolution, and we weigh
that carefully."
Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of
Montreal, whose company made the film, said officials at other theaters
told him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it
had "evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian
community" or because "the evolution stuff is a problem."
Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the
financing of "Volcanoes", said he understood that theaters must be
responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that
a science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate
documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution.
"It's very alarming," he said, "all of this pressure being put on a lot of
the public institutions by the fundamentalists."
The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.
Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to
show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of
the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that
contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.
The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the
industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because
only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the
decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a
producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.
People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say
that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the
distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage", which depicts
the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to
clusters of galaxies; "Galapagos", about the islands where Darwin theorized
about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea", an underwater epic about
the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from
vents in the ocean floor.
"Volcanoes", released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science
Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen
science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers
oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. He said theater
officials rejected the film because of its brief references to evolution,
in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the
undersea vents.
Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science
and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing
it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax
theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while
some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I
really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I
don't agree with their presentation of human existence."
On other criteria, like narration and music, the film did not score as well
as other films, Ms. Murray said, and over all, it did not receive high
marks, so she recommended that the museum pass.
"If it's not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy,"
she said, "from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation" to
show it.
In interviews, officials at other Imax theaters said they had similarly
decided against the film for fear of offending some audiences.
"We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public," said
Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a
commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium. Her theater had not
ruled out ever showing "Volcanoes", Ms. Buzzelli said, "but being in the
Bible Belt, the movie does have a lot to do with evolution, and we weigh
that carefully."
Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of
Montreal, whose company made the film, said officials at other theaters
told him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it
had "evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian
community" or because "the evolution stuff is a problem."
Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the
financing of "Volcanoes", said he understood that theaters must be
responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that
a science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate
documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution.
"It's very alarming," he said, "all of this pressure being put on a lot of
the public institutions by the fundamentalists."
03/12/05
UNITED KINGDOM
10 March 2005
BRITISH CONVERTS FROM ISLAM: CHRISTIAN LEADERS MUST SPEAK OUT
Some 3,000 Christians in the UK are in danger because they have chosen
to convert from Islam. Some are being actively harassed and
persecuted, but many church leaders seem more interested in defending
their attackers than in standing up for the rights of the converts.
Nissar Hussain, a Christian from Bradford, has suffered three years of
harassment, amounting effectively to persecution, from the local
Muslims in his neighbourhood. His car has been torched and rammed,
bricks have been thrown through his window on many occasions, there
have been threats to burn the house down, and much else besides. Mr
Hussain and his wife were originally Muslims, and this is the reason
for the treatment they are getting.
Though this may seem shocking, it should not be a surprise. From its
inception, Islam has rigorously sought to prevent its adherents from
choosing any other faith. Such apostates are regarded as traitors and
- according to shari'a (Islamic law) - should be executed.
There are many thousands of former Muslims, in scores of countries
around the world, who are suffering for their decision to follow
Christ. In countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan the law of
the land specifies the death sentence for apostates from Islam, though
this is only rarely practised. What is more common is for those who
have left Islam to be persecuted in a multitude of other ways,
including imprisonment and torture. In countries where there is no law
against conversion, other laws may be used as a pretext, or
ìaccidentsî may be arranged. In addition, zealous individual Muslims
may take it on themselves to kill a convert. Those converts who do not
lose their lives may lose their spouse (through divorce), children,
inheritance, home and job.
As the case of Mr and Mrs Hussain shows, living in Britain does not
ensure full protection from persecution. Where a convert is the only
non-Muslim in their family, difficulties can be even more severe.
Converts from Islam in this country, especially young women, have been
rejected by their family and sometimes brutally assaulted; some have
been threatened with death [1].
NUMBERS AT RISK IN THE UK
The number of individuals at risk in the UK is substantial. It is
conservatively estimated that there are 1,500 to 2,000 Iranians,
approaching 1,000 Arabs, and some 150 Pakistanis and others living in
this country who have left Islam to become Christians. In round
figures there are 3,000 KNOWN converts, but there may also be many
more who are isolated from the various networks, and thus omitted from
the figures.
These converts face not only the possibility of hostility and
aggression from individuals within the Muslim community in Britain,
but also some are asylum-seekers who have fled much graver dangers in
their countries of origin. If such individuals are refused asylum and
sent home, they could face imprisonment, torture or death.
A number of senior British Muslims have recently acknowledged the
injustice of the Islamic apostasy law and the serious breach of human
rights and religious liberty which it entails, both in theory and in
practice in the modern world.
CHRISTIAN LEADERS MUST SPEAK OUT
It is essential that Christian leaders in the UK should affirm the
rights of those who have converted to Christianity from Islam. Sadly
such converts can often be marginalised by those to whom they turn for
help. Having been rejected by their own community, they find that the
Christian community fails to take their situation seriously. Three
years ago, when Mr Hussain was first attacked, most church leaders who
heard of his situation did nothing. As further attacks occurred, they
still seemed barely interested. Now that the plight of the Hussain
family has hit the national press, church leaders seem to be chiefly
concerned to absolve from blame the perpetrators of these crimes. Even
some in Bradford itself have sought to deny the link with Islam and
have attributed this sustained and vicious campaign to the pranks of
youngsters.
For Christian leadership to downplay the sufferings of converts is a
betrayal of those who have risked everything for Christ. But if
British Christian leaders were to stand up for converts, it could even
bring about change within Islam itself.
PRAYER ITEMS
* Please pray for the protection of all Christians in the UK who have
come from a Muslim background. Pray that they may also have peace in
their hearts and not give way to fear. Pray that their faithfulness to
Christ, despite great loss, pain and harassment, may speak powerfully
to others.
* Pray that British Church leaders may act with integrity and courage
to care for converts from Islam and to defend their rights and
freedoms.
* Pray that Muslim leaders will act to change the traditional apostasy
law within Islam and to allow Muslims freedom to choose their own
faith without fear of punishment.
LINKS
[1] - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1470584,00.html
BARNABAS FUND E-MAIL NEWS SERVICE
Barnabas Fundís e-mail news service provides the media and our supporters
with urgent news briefs concerning suffering Christians around the world.
If you would like to receive news briefs from the Barnabas Fund please
contact us with your name, postal and e-mail addresses.
Further details, quotes and photos on this and other stories may be available
for news editors on request.
Barnabas Fund works to support Christian communities mainly, but not
exclusively, in the Islamic world where they are facing poverty and
persecution.
Barnabas Fund, The Old Rectory, River Street, PEWSEY, Wiltshire, SN9 5DB, UK.
Tel: +44(0)1672 564938, Fax: +44(0)1672 565030, E-mail: info@barnabasfund.org
Web: www.barnabasfund.org
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10 March 2005
BRITISH CONVERTS FROM ISLAM: CHRISTIAN LEADERS MUST SPEAK OUT
Some 3,000 Christians in the UK are in danger because they have chosen
to convert from Islam. Some are being actively harassed and
persecuted, but many church leaders seem more interested in defending
their attackers than in standing up for the rights of the converts.
Nissar Hussain, a Christian from Bradford, has suffered three years of
harassment, amounting effectively to persecution, from the local
Muslims in his neighbourhood. His car has been torched and rammed,
bricks have been thrown through his window on many occasions, there
have been threats to burn the house down, and much else besides. Mr
Hussain and his wife were originally Muslims, and this is the reason
for the treatment they are getting.
Though this may seem shocking, it should not be a surprise. From its
inception, Islam has rigorously sought to prevent its adherents from
choosing any other faith. Such apostates are regarded as traitors and
- according to shari'a (Islamic law) - should be executed.
There are many thousands of former Muslims, in scores of countries
around the world, who are suffering for their decision to follow
Christ. In countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan the law of
the land specifies the death sentence for apostates from Islam, though
this is only rarely practised. What is more common is for those who
have left Islam to be persecuted in a multitude of other ways,
including imprisonment and torture. In countries where there is no law
against conversion, other laws may be used as a pretext, or
ìaccidentsî may be arranged. In addition, zealous individual Muslims
may take it on themselves to kill a convert. Those converts who do not
lose their lives may lose their spouse (through divorce), children,
inheritance, home and job.
As the case of Mr and Mrs Hussain shows, living in Britain does not
ensure full protection from persecution. Where a convert is the only
non-Muslim in their family, difficulties can be even more severe.
Converts from Islam in this country, especially young women, have been
rejected by their family and sometimes brutally assaulted; some have
been threatened with death [1].
NUMBERS AT RISK IN THE UK
The number of individuals at risk in the UK is substantial. It is
conservatively estimated that there are 1,500 to 2,000 Iranians,
approaching 1,000 Arabs, and some 150 Pakistanis and others living in
this country who have left Islam to become Christians. In round
figures there are 3,000 KNOWN converts, but there may also be many
more who are isolated from the various networks, and thus omitted from
the figures.
These converts face not only the possibility of hostility and
aggression from individuals within the Muslim community in Britain,
but also some are asylum-seekers who have fled much graver dangers in
their countries of origin. If such individuals are refused asylum and
sent home, they could face imprisonment, torture or death.
A number of senior British Muslims have recently acknowledged the
injustice of the Islamic apostasy law and the serious breach of human
rights and religious liberty which it entails, both in theory and in
practice in the modern world.
CHRISTIAN LEADERS MUST SPEAK OUT
It is essential that Christian leaders in the UK should affirm the
rights of those who have converted to Christianity from Islam. Sadly
such converts can often be marginalised by those to whom they turn for
help. Having been rejected by their own community, they find that the
Christian community fails to take their situation seriously. Three
years ago, when Mr Hussain was first attacked, most church leaders who
heard of his situation did nothing. As further attacks occurred, they
still seemed barely interested. Now that the plight of the Hussain
family has hit the national press, church leaders seem to be chiefly
concerned to absolve from blame the perpetrators of these crimes. Even
some in Bradford itself have sought to deny the link with Islam and
have attributed this sustained and vicious campaign to the pranks of
youngsters.
For Christian leadership to downplay the sufferings of converts is a
betrayal of those who have risked everything for Christ. But if
British Christian leaders were to stand up for converts, it could even
bring about change within Islam itself.
PRAYER ITEMS
* Please pray for the protection of all Christians in the UK who have
come from a Muslim background. Pray that they may also have peace in
their hearts and not give way to fear. Pray that their faithfulness to
Christ, despite great loss, pain and harassment, may speak powerfully
to others.
* Pray that British Church leaders may act with integrity and courage
to care for converts from Islam and to defend their rights and
freedoms.
* Pray that Muslim leaders will act to change the traditional apostasy
law within Islam and to allow Muslims freedom to choose their own
faith without fear of punishment.
LINKS
[1] - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1470584,00.html
BARNABAS FUND E-MAIL NEWS SERVICE
Barnabas Fundís e-mail news service provides the media and our supporters
with urgent news briefs concerning suffering Christians around the world.
If you would like to receive news briefs from the Barnabas Fund please
contact us with your name, postal and e-mail addresses.
Further details, quotes and photos on this and other stories may be available
for news editors on request.
Barnabas Fund works to support Christian communities mainly, but not
exclusively, in the Islamic world where they are facing poverty and
persecution.
Barnabas Fund, The Old Rectory, River Street, PEWSEY, Wiltshire, SN9 5DB, UK.
Tel: +44(0)1672 564938, Fax: +44(0)1672 565030, E-mail: info@barnabasfund.org
Web: www.barnabasfund.org
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Pope Calls Homosexual Marriage Part of 'Ideology of Evil' [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 09:19:13 PM
"Pope Calls Gay Marriage Part of 'Ideology of Evil'" February 22, 2005
ROME - Homosexual marriages are part of "a new ideology of evil" that is
insidiously threatening society, Pope John Paul says in a new book
published Tuesday.
Read more...
http ://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20050222/ts_nm/pope_book_dc
ROME - Homosexual marriages are part of "a new ideology of evil" that is
insidiously threatening society, Pope John Paul says in a new book
published Tuesday.
Read more...
http ://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20050222/ts_nm/pope_book_dc
The report they're understandably getting (according to this
article) tired of should be named after its chmn, (Abp) Eames. I didn't
notice how the name of the royal family got appropriated for it, but I urge
that it not be so called.
It may not be widely known that of the 17 Eames Commission members,
2 were NZers - Abp Paterson + Ms J Plane te Paa. They admitted to their
mtg in the Ak cathedral after the Report that no support for their
'position' had been found in any of the submissions to the Commission, nor
in any of the supplementary submissions they'd then solicited.
R
The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/107/52.0.html
CHRISTIAN HISTORY CORNER
Still Fighting Over Nicaea
The Anglican Communion dusts off and debates some of the Council of Nicaea's forgotten canons.
By Ted Olsen | posted 02/18/2005 09:30 a.m.
The 38 provincial heads of the Anglican Communion meet next week in Northern Ireland for "careful study of the Windsor Report," the recommendations issued last October on the future of Anglican unity amid deep divisions over theology, ethics, and practice. Anglicans and religion journalists, however, are getting tired. The resolution of each meeting of Anglican leaders seems to be, "just wait until the next meeting." Though some orthodox and conservative Anglicans are hopeful that leaders from southern provinces, especially in Africa, will stand firmly against North American theological liberalism and sexual libertinism, few are expecting anything decisive. This isn't being billed as the Anglican Council of Nicaea.
Not that the Council of Nicaea was as decisive as it is usually billed, either. It took almost 60 years for Nicaea's influence to solidify. In the meantime, the main heresy condemned at the council, Arianism, became ascendant and almost triumphed over orthodoxy. Even the Nicene Creed recited today wasn't really adopted until 381, 56 years after the council ended.
The Council of Nicaea was not, as Da Vinci Code novelist Dan Brown has convinced scores of readers, the place where the church made up the ideas of Jesus' divinity and the infallibility of Scripture, but it still stands as one of the biggest moments in church history (which is why Christian History & Biography has devoted its next issue to the council; click here if you don't already subscribe).
A few Anglican leaders have made a habit of systematically denying each line of the Nicene Creed, but most Anglicans revere the council as authoritative. So it was no throwaway comment when the Windsor Report made direct reference to the council's canons (rules or standards) in issuing its evaluation. But the Lambeth Commission on Communion, which issued the Windsor Report, didn't invoke Nicaea to talk about heretical priests and bishops in the West. Instead, the canons appeared in a discussion of how some orthodox parishes have responded to their own apostate leaders by seeking outside oversight:
Some Archbishops from elsewhere in the Communion have, both by taking initiatives, and by responding to invitations from clergy purporting to place themselves under their jurisdictions, entered parts of the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada and exercised episcopal functions without the consent of the relevant diocesan bishop. This goes not only against traditional and often-repeated Anglican practice … but also against some of the longest-standing regulations of the early undivided church (Canon 8 of Nicaea). These actions are not purely reactions to recent events, though that has been their main character. In some cases they build on earlier attempts at unilateral action against bishops whose theology and/or practice was perceived to be out of line with traditional Anglican and Christian teaching, or even to set up would-be "orthodox" structures or "mission churches" for their own sake, e.g. the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA).
Conservatives were aghast that the Lambeth Commission treated orthodox leaders offering "alternative oversight" as akin to blessing same-sex unions and ordaining actively homosexual bishops in terms of disrupting church unity. But even the evangelicals on the commission stood by the claim.
Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright, whose orthodox credentials are impeccable, told Christianity Today: The important thing to say is that border crossings are disruptive. Not only are they against the spirit and the letter of Anglican formularies, they are against one of the decrees of the Council of Nicaea, as we point out. And I think not a lot of people know this, but it's important to say this was a question that the early fathers faced at the same time as they were hammering out the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, and that they gave it their time to say people should not do this because that's not how episcopacy works.
Now, of course it's open to people to come back and say episcopacy has broken down because of this and this. But then the critical thing, and this is where it is very similar, is that we have mechanisms— they demand patience, of course, which many of us don't have in great supply.
The problem with the Windsor Report's reference to the canons of Nicaea, some conservatives have responded, is that it focuses on the wrong heretics. The Arians, who denied the full divinity of Christ, were spotlighted at the Council of Nicaea, and most of the council's work focused on accurately defining Jesus' nature. But the 20 canons adopted, in addition to setting the date of Easter and regulating aspects of church life, deal with two other heretical groups.
The first are the Cathari, or Novatians. (This is the group referenced in the eighth canon, which the Windsor Report references.) While condemned as heretics, followers of Novatian were doctrinally orthodox. Novatian, in fact, had written one of the church's important works on the Trinity. This, then, was a group that could say the Nicene Creed with pride.
Indeed, pride was the issue: Novatians were outraged at how easily those who had lapsed under persecution had been received back into the church once the pressure lifted. They were also upset with lax church attitudes toward the twice-married. The solution, as they saw it, was to appoint rival bishops to "compromised" sees, which earned them a reputation as schismatics condemned by the rest of the church. At Nicaea, the Novatian bishop Acesius was personally criticized by Emperor
Constantine, who had been more conciliatory with those who denied orthodox theology. If a Novatian wanted to return to the church's good graces, the Council of Nicaea ruled, all they had to do was to "profess in writing that they will observe and follow the dogmas of the Catholic and Apostolic Church." Novatian priests could stay priests. Novatian bishops had to be under the local orthodox bishop, but in many cases didn't even have to step down in rank (whether a Novatian bishop retained the title of bishop or became a priest was up to the local orthodox bishop). It's important that the ex-Novatian "be evidently seen to be of the clergy," the Council decided, so long as "there may not be two bishops in the city."
Canon 8, however was markedly different from the other one dealing with heretics: Canon 19, which addressed the Paulianists. These followed the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who was known both for heresy and an opulent lifestyle. He expressly rejected the deity of Christ, whom he considered an "ordinary man" inspired by the Word of God.
A Paulianist returning to orthodoxy had to do much more than simply offer a letter professing fealty to the church. "They must by all means be rebaptized," the council declared. Even clergy "found blameless and without reproach" had to go through ordination again. Clergy found unfit were deposed.
Deaconesses were laicized. In short, they held a place between heretic and unbeliever. The church may have welcomed repentant Paulianists, but it was with a reluctant handshake, not with open arms.
So the question for today is applicability. Many orthodox Anglicans in the West see the Episcopal Church (USA) not just as wayward, but as apostate. Bishops who deny the authority of Scripture and declare that God has changed his mind on matters of sexual ethics, they say, are heretics, not just schismatics. The repentance of the Paulianists is in order, not the assurances of the Novatians.
Anglican liberals may find parallels between Novatian rigors on remarriage and today's conservative emphasis on sexual ethics, but that doesn't mean that the Anglican Mission in America or other groups offering "alternative oversight" are schismatics, let alone heretics.
The Windsor Report misses the real lessons of Nicaea, says Robert J. Sanders, associate rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida, in an online commentary. He writes, "What does Nicaea teach us? It teaches us that believers need to come under the oversight of bishops, that they cannot receive from heretical bishops, and therefore, orthodox bishops must officiate in dioceses headed by heretical bishops."
The 49-page Windsor Report has enough mystery and controversy in it to keep the Primates busy during their meeting. There's a good chance that a parenthetical aside referencing the Council of Nicaea won't even come up. But one hopes that some lessons of Nicaea won't be lost on the Anglican Communion. In 325, church leaders were willing to die to see that orthodox doctrine was upheld. It didn't come to that: Instead, orthodox Christians, despite "winning" at Nicaea, had to face decades of uncertainty and apparent defeat before the church got its act together. Boldness and patience will likely be needed again among Anglicans.
Ted Olsen is online managing editor for Christianity Today. More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.
article) tired of should be named after its chmn, (Abp) Eames. I didn't
notice how the name of the royal family got appropriated for it, but I urge
that it not be so called.
It may not be widely known that of the 17 Eames Commission members,
2 were NZers - Abp Paterson + Ms J Plane te Paa. They admitted to their
mtg in the Ak cathedral after the Report that no support for their
'position' had been found in any of the submissions to the Commission, nor
in any of the supplementary submissions they'd then solicited.
R
The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/107/52.0.html
CHRISTIAN HISTORY CORNER
Still Fighting Over Nicaea
The Anglican Communion dusts off and debates some of the Council of Nicaea's forgotten canons.
By Ted Olsen | posted 02/18/2005 09:30 a.m.
The 38 provincial heads of the Anglican Communion meet next week in Northern Ireland for "careful study of the Windsor Report," the recommendations issued last October on the future of Anglican unity amid deep divisions over theology, ethics, and practice. Anglicans and religion journalists, however, are getting tired. The resolution of each meeting of Anglican leaders seems to be, "just wait until the next meeting." Though some orthodox and conservative Anglicans are hopeful that leaders from southern provinces, especially in Africa, will stand firmly against North American theological liberalism and sexual libertinism, few are expecting anything decisive. This isn't being billed as the Anglican Council of Nicaea.
Not that the Council of Nicaea was as decisive as it is usually billed, either. It took almost 60 years for Nicaea's influence to solidify. In the meantime, the main heresy condemned at the council, Arianism, became ascendant and almost triumphed over orthodoxy. Even the Nicene Creed recited today wasn't really adopted until 381, 56 years after the council ended.
The Council of Nicaea was not, as Da Vinci Code novelist Dan Brown has convinced scores of readers, the place where the church made up the ideas of Jesus' divinity and the infallibility of Scripture, but it still stands as one of the biggest moments in church history (which is why Christian History & Biography has devoted its next issue to the council; click here if you don't already subscribe).
A few Anglican leaders have made a habit of systematically denying each line of the Nicene Creed, but most Anglicans revere the council as authoritative. So it was no throwaway comment when the Windsor Report made direct reference to the council's canons (rules or standards) in issuing its evaluation. But the Lambeth Commission on Communion, which issued the Windsor Report, didn't invoke Nicaea to talk about heretical priests and bishops in the West. Instead, the canons appeared in a discussion of how some orthodox parishes have responded to their own apostate leaders by seeking outside oversight:
Some Archbishops from elsewhere in the Communion have, both by taking initiatives, and by responding to invitations from clergy purporting to place themselves under their jurisdictions, entered parts of the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada and exercised episcopal functions without the consent of the relevant diocesan bishop. This goes not only against traditional and often-repeated Anglican practice … but also against some of the longest-standing regulations of the early undivided church (Canon 8 of Nicaea). These actions are not purely reactions to recent events, though that has been their main character. In some cases they build on earlier attempts at unilateral action against bishops whose theology and/or practice was perceived to be out of line with traditional Anglican and Christian teaching, or even to set up would-be "orthodox" structures or "mission churches" for their own sake, e.g. the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA).
Conservatives were aghast that the Lambeth Commission treated orthodox leaders offering "alternative oversight" as akin to blessing same-sex unions and ordaining actively homosexual bishops in terms of disrupting church unity. But even the evangelicals on the commission stood by the claim.
Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright, whose orthodox credentials are impeccable, told Christianity Today: The important thing to say is that border crossings are disruptive. Not only are they against the spirit and the letter of Anglican formularies, they are against one of the decrees of the Council of Nicaea, as we point out. And I think not a lot of people know this, but it's important to say this was a question that the early fathers faced at the same time as they were hammering out the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, and that they gave it their time to say people should not do this because that's not how episcopacy works.
Now, of course it's open to people to come back and say episcopacy has broken down because of this and this. But then the critical thing, and this is where it is very similar, is that we have mechanisms— they demand patience, of course, which many of us don't have in great supply.
The problem with the Windsor Report's reference to the canons of Nicaea, some conservatives have responded, is that it focuses on the wrong heretics. The Arians, who denied the full divinity of Christ, were spotlighted at the Council of Nicaea, and most of the council's work focused on accurately defining Jesus' nature. But the 20 canons adopted, in addition to setting the date of Easter and regulating aspects of church life, deal with two other heretical groups.
The first are the Cathari, or Novatians. (This is the group referenced in the eighth canon, which the Windsor Report references.) While condemned as heretics, followers of Novatian were doctrinally orthodox. Novatian, in fact, had written one of the church's important works on the Trinity. This, then, was a group that could say the Nicene Creed with pride.
Indeed, pride was the issue: Novatians were outraged at how easily those who had lapsed under persecution had been received back into the church once the pressure lifted. They were also upset with lax church attitudes toward the twice-married. The solution, as they saw it, was to appoint rival bishops to "compromised" sees, which earned them a reputation as schismatics condemned by the rest of the church. At Nicaea, the Novatian bishop Acesius was personally criticized by Emperor
Constantine, who had been more conciliatory with those who denied orthodox theology. If a Novatian wanted to return to the church's good graces, the Council of Nicaea ruled, all they had to do was to "profess in writing that they will observe and follow the dogmas of the Catholic and Apostolic Church." Novatian priests could stay priests. Novatian bishops had to be under the local orthodox bishop, but in many cases didn't even have to step down in rank (whether a Novatian bishop retained the title of bishop or became a priest was up to the local orthodox bishop). It's important that the ex-Novatian "be evidently seen to be of the clergy," the Council decided, so long as "there may not be two bishops in the city."
Canon 8, however was markedly different from the other one dealing with heretics: Canon 19, which addressed the Paulianists. These followed the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who was known both for heresy and an opulent lifestyle. He expressly rejected the deity of Christ, whom he considered an "ordinary man" inspired by the Word of God.
A Paulianist returning to orthodoxy had to do much more than simply offer a letter professing fealty to the church. "They must by all means be rebaptized," the council declared. Even clergy "found blameless and without reproach" had to go through ordination again. Clergy found unfit were deposed.
Deaconesses were laicized. In short, they held a place between heretic and unbeliever. The church may have welcomed repentant Paulianists, but it was with a reluctant handshake, not with open arms.
So the question for today is applicability. Many orthodox Anglicans in the West see the Episcopal Church (USA) not just as wayward, but as apostate. Bishops who deny the authority of Scripture and declare that God has changed his mind on matters of sexual ethics, they say, are heretics, not just schismatics. The repentance of the Paulianists is in order, not the assurances of the Novatians.
Anglican liberals may find parallels between Novatian rigors on remarriage and today's conservative emphasis on sexual ethics, but that doesn't mean that the Anglican Mission in America or other groups offering "alternative oversight" are schismatics, let alone heretics.
The Windsor Report misses the real lessons of Nicaea, says Robert J. Sanders, associate rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida, in an online commentary. He writes, "What does Nicaea teach us? It teaches us that believers need to come under the oversight of bishops, that they cannot receive from heretical bishops, and therefore, orthodox bishops must officiate in dioceses headed by heretical bishops."
The 49-page Windsor Report has enough mystery and controversy in it to keep the Primates busy during their meeting. There's a good chance that a parenthetical aside referencing the Council of Nicaea won't even come up. But one hopes that some lessons of Nicaea won't be lost on the Anglican Communion. In 325, church leaders were willing to die to see that orthodox doctrine was upheld. It didn't come to that: Instead, orthodox Christians, despite "winning" at Nicaea, had to face decades of uncertainty and apparent defeat before the church got its act together. Boldness and patience will likely be needed again among Anglicans.
Ted Olsen is online managing editor for Christianity Today. More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.
Gilbert K Chesterton 'Orthodoxy' 1908 ; Hodder & Stoughton 1996 pbk
'recommended by Philip Yancey' 240 pp.
Written a century ago as an explicit, vigorous reaction
against Modernism - a movement within the Roman Catholic church for more
adaption to social trends - this highly stimulating book addresses more
keenly than almost anything recent the problems generated by scientism
today (as manifested in e.g the gene-jiggering fad). The passage quoted
below might be very helpful to confused relativists, even offering a way
forward for hopelessly confused postmodernists.
G K devotes chapter 2 to madness, characterising its general nature
as excess narrow logic. Near the end of this insightful chapter he says
(pp. 30-31) it is possible to give a general answer ...
" ... touching what in actual human history keeps men sane.
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health;
when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always
been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has
permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot on earth and the other
in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but
(unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always
cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that
seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the
contradiction along with them. His spiritual insight is stereoscopic,
like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet ses
all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a
thing as fate, but such a thing a free will also. Thus he believed that
chiuldren were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheles ought to be
obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young
and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of aparent
contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The
whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by
the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make
everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic
allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The
determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that
he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free
will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the
housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of
dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with
abounding natural health."
By now, the U of Oxford has allowed one of the original Megasoft
profiteers to endow a chair in The Public Understanding of Science for an
aggressive materialist (R Dawkins) who denies 2 of the 4 categories of
cause, ascribes such properties as intentionality to mere molecules e.g
DNA, and asserts that (neo)Darwinism makes it possible for an atheist to be
intellectually satisfied. Wolpert (London), S Weinberg (Texas), and P
Atkins (also Oxon - chemistry) are similar radically crude overconfident
materialists - all, like Dawkins, scientists by training but purporting
to simplify philosophy radically so as to obviate Formal Cause and Final
Cause. Determinism - attacked in a preliminary remark by G K above -
is boldly asserted by these confident New Fisofolers.
The fact that we have little if any idea, scientifically, of how
free will interfaces with the brain, let alone the external world, is no
excuse to ignore its primacy. It is the surest fact, apart from
"Descartes' fact" - surer than anything of the external world including
all science.
M I T cognitive expert Prof S Pinker says every mental process is
now known to have a physical correlate. This is a huge exaggeration beyond
what is actually known. He also says that, given such mapping of thoughts
to electrical &/or biochemical processes in the brain, we have no need of
the 'ghost in the machine'. His logic is faulty. Even if it were true
that all mental processes had been correlated with scientific measurements,
that correlation would not illuminate the question of whether there is a
person - roughly, that which departs at death - choosing to think this
way or that and causing the brain processes.
Your determinist will then say the belief in free will is a
delusion, a predetermined state of mind. I reply that its status is surer
than anything in the science which gave rise to the determinist mind-set in
e.g. Laplace - please, not Newton! - and Oxford physiology prof.
Colin Blakemore, and Pinker, who say each human is a computer programmed
for the mere delusion that s/he has free will.
A world in which determinism is respectable is a world in which
science, let alone morality, can make little headway. I believe G K
Chesterton could be very helpful in the counterattack on this bullshit.
R
'recommended by Philip Yancey' 240 pp.
Written a century ago as an explicit, vigorous reaction
against Modernism - a movement within the Roman Catholic church for more
adaption to social trends - this highly stimulating book addresses more
keenly than almost anything recent the problems generated by scientism
today (as manifested in e.g the gene-jiggering fad). The passage quoted
below might be very helpful to confused relativists, even offering a way
forward for hopelessly confused postmodernists.
G K devotes chapter 2 to madness, characterising its general nature
as excess narrow logic. Near the end of this insightful chapter he says
(pp. 30-31) it is possible to give a general answer ...
" ... touching what in actual human history keeps men sane.
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health;
when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always
been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has
permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot on earth and the other
in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but
(unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always
cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that
seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the
contradiction along with them. His spiritual insight is stereoscopic,
like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet ses
all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a
thing as fate, but such a thing a free will also. Thus he believed that
chiuldren were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheles ought to be
obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young
and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of aparent
contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The
whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by
the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make
everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic
allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The
determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that
he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free
will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the
housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of
dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with
abounding natural health."
By now, the U of Oxford has allowed one of the original Megasoft
profiteers to endow a chair in The Public Understanding of Science for an
aggressive materialist (R Dawkins) who denies 2 of the 4 categories of
cause, ascribes such properties as intentionality to mere molecules e.g
DNA, and asserts that (neo)Darwinism makes it possible for an atheist to be
intellectually satisfied. Wolpert (London), S Weinberg (Texas), and P
Atkins (also Oxon - chemistry) are similar radically crude overconfident
materialists - all, like Dawkins, scientists by training but purporting
to simplify philosophy radically so as to obviate Formal Cause and Final
Cause. Determinism - attacked in a preliminary remark by G K above -
is boldly asserted by these confident New Fisofolers.
The fact that we have little if any idea, scientifically, of how
free will interfaces with the brain, let alone the external world, is no
excuse to ignore its primacy. It is the surest fact, apart from
"Descartes' fact" - surer than anything of the external world including
all science.
M I T cognitive expert Prof S Pinker says every mental process is
now known to have a physical correlate. This is a huge exaggeration beyond
what is actually known. He also says that, given such mapping of thoughts
to electrical &/or biochemical processes in the brain, we have no need of
the 'ghost in the machine'. His logic is faulty. Even if it were true
that all mental processes had been correlated with scientific measurements,
that correlation would not illuminate the question of whether there is a
person - roughly, that which departs at death - choosing to think this
way or that and causing the brain processes.
Your determinist will then say the belief in free will is a
delusion, a predetermined state of mind. I reply that its status is surer
than anything in the science which gave rise to the determinist mind-set in
e.g. Laplace - please, not Newton! - and Oxford physiology prof.
Colin Blakemore, and Pinker, who say each human is a computer programmed
for the mere delusion that s/he has free will.
A world in which determinism is respectable is a world in which
science, let alone morality, can make little headway. I believe G K
Chesterton could be very helpful in the counterattack on this bullshit.
R
02/12/05
Archbishop tells Church to help save the planet with green policies [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 08:08:37 PM
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=607235&host=3&dir=58
Archbishop tells Church to help save the planet with green policies
By Robert Verkaik
03 February 2005
The Church of England is embarking on a green revolution, rolling out an
eco-friendly policy under which organic bread and wine will be served for
Holy Communion, clergy will recycle waste products and fair trade products
will be sold at fêtes.
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will set out his vision of
a greener world at a meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England
later this month that will challenge Britain to tackle global warming.
In a discussion document being circulated among Synod members, the Church of
England says that the world's climate is close to a "tipping point". The
Church warns: "The sudden changes that would occur in weather systems, the
fertility of the soil, the water and the world of living creatures if this
tipping point were reached could be devastating." It points out that even if
"ecological devastation" is not on the horizon "it has to be realised that
growth without limit has to be curtailed".
The report, entitled Sharing God's Planet, argues:
"Furthermore, the injustices spawned by massive growth already exist.
Two-thirds of the world does not have enough to eat while the other third is
trying to lose weight."
Dr Williams will introduce the report that also backs the widespread claim
that industrialisation has damaged the environment by global warming. He
recommends that Christians adopt "sustainable consumption", recognising
their duty "to celebrate and care for every part of God's creation".
The Synod will debate the issue on 17 February, the day after the Kyoto
protocol to reduce greenhouse gases comes into force. The Church is critical
of countries such as the United States which have dragged their feet over
the protocol.
In a second discussion document on the environmental debate, the Synod is
asked to recognise that Kyoto is not enough. "It has taken far too long to
be ratified as each country fights for its own
interests (the US is notable among countries which have declined to
sign); its targets fall very far short of what is necessary."
At the same time, Christians will be asked to praise the work of the Body
Shop which is described as a "brave exception" for getting people to
consider the ethics of their shopping choices.
The Synod will also be asked to support the principle of introducing a
system of quotas for CO2 emissions that take account of a country's size of
population rather than its industrial strength.
But the Church of England will begin its own campaign by introducing
eco-friendly policies in its churches. Among practical ideas for local
churches are schemes such as recycling, car pooling and selling fairly
traded products at church fêtes. Clergy will also be encouraged to use
natural materials in worship such as organic bread and wine. In his foreword
to Sharing God's Planet, Dr Williams calls on each parish to undertake an
"ecological audit". He adds: "Such local internal responses are vital if our
voice as a church is to have integrity."
The Synod has not debated the environment since 1992 and the only other
debate took place in 1986. The discussion document adds: "A Synod debate on
the environment is timely. There is increasing awareness of the urgent need
to address the developing ecological crisis. It is politically opportune as
one of the Government's declared priorities for its current presidency of
the G8 is climate change and that concern will be carried into its
priorities for its chairing of the European Union.
P.S. The Archbishop's full report and a briefing for an associated Synod
motion may be had from
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/feb05.html.
but beware, the report is 72 pages and the briefing 15.
Archbishop tells Church to help save the planet with green policies
By Robert Verkaik
03 February 2005
The Church of England is embarking on a green revolution, rolling out an
eco-friendly policy under which organic bread and wine will be served for
Holy Communion, clergy will recycle waste products and fair trade products
will be sold at fêtes.
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will set out his vision of
a greener world at a meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England
later this month that will challenge Britain to tackle global warming.
In a discussion document being circulated among Synod members, the Church of
England says that the world's climate is close to a "tipping point". The
Church warns: "The sudden changes that would occur in weather systems, the
fertility of the soil, the water and the world of living creatures if this
tipping point were reached could be devastating." It points out that even if
"ecological devastation" is not on the horizon "it has to be realised that
growth without limit has to be curtailed".
The report, entitled Sharing God's Planet, argues:
"Furthermore, the injustices spawned by massive growth already exist.
Two-thirds of the world does not have enough to eat while the other third is
trying to lose weight."
Dr Williams will introduce the report that also backs the widespread claim
that industrialisation has damaged the environment by global warming. He
recommends that Christians adopt "sustainable consumption", recognising
their duty "to celebrate and care for every part of God's creation".
The Synod will debate the issue on 17 February, the day after the Kyoto
protocol to reduce greenhouse gases comes into force. The Church is critical
of countries such as the United States which have dragged their feet over
the protocol.
In a second discussion document on the environmental debate, the Synod is
asked to recognise that Kyoto is not enough. "It has taken far too long to
be ratified as each country fights for its own
interests (the US is notable among countries which have declined to
sign); its targets fall very far short of what is necessary."
At the same time, Christians will be asked to praise the work of the Body
Shop which is described as a "brave exception" for getting people to
consider the ethics of their shopping choices.
The Synod will also be asked to support the principle of introducing a
system of quotas for CO2 emissions that take account of a country's size of
population rather than its industrial strength.
But the Church of England will begin its own campaign by introducing
eco-friendly policies in its churches. Among practical ideas for local
churches are schemes such as recycling, car pooling and selling fairly
traded products at church fêtes. Clergy will also be encouraged to use
natural materials in worship such as organic bread and wine. In his foreword
to Sharing God's Planet, Dr Williams calls on each parish to undertake an
"ecological audit". He adds: "Such local internal responses are vital if our
voice as a church is to have integrity."
The Synod has not debated the environment since 1992 and the only other
debate took place in 1986. The discussion document adds: "A Synod debate on
the environment is timely. There is increasing awareness of the urgent need
to address the developing ecological crisis. It is politically opportune as
one of the Government's declared priorities for its current presidency of
the G8 is climate change and that concern will be carried into its
priorities for its chairing of the European Union.
P.S. The Archbishop's full report and a briefing for an associated Synod
motion may be had from
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/feb05.html.
but beware, the report is 72 pages and the briefing 15.
You can safely assume max play will be made of the alleged
similarity to these unique royal ceremonies of NZ's new 'civil union'
same-sex ceremony, which homX clergy and allies will be wanting to bless.
Canon Bob Lowe sure started some trouble!
Any denomination that could promote the most intelligent man in
England (according to G B Shaw!) to no. 2 and soon to top
professional/political rank - the great Wm Temple - is worth saving
from the passive-aggressive PC invasion against which I have increasingly
inveighed. In the dioceses of Auckland and Waiapu, few if any arenas have
been permitted for genuine discussion of the disputes & disturbances raised
by the militant homosexualist movement.
Fanatics have been ordained recently who, as soon as you try to
discuss whether to ordain known homosexuals, or whether to 'bless' civil
unions, promptly insult you and may even intone "May God have mercy on your
soul". This is a new, relatively gentle variety of totalitarianism -
but make no mistake, it is totalitarian.
R
>Thursday 10 February 2005
>
>The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has welcomed the
>announcement that HRH Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles
>are to marry.
>
>In a statement from Lambeth Palace, Dr Williams said:
>
>"I am pleased that Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles
>have decided to take this important step. I hope and pray that it will
>prove a source of comfort and strength to them and to those who are
>closest to them."
>
>Dr Williams has accepted an invitation to preside at a service of
>prayer and dedication following the civil ceremony. Dr Williams said:
>"These arrangements have my strong support and are consistent with
>Church of England guidelines concerning remarriage which the Prince of
>Wales fully accepts as a committed Anglican and as prospective Supreme
>Governor of the Church of England."
similarity to these unique royal ceremonies of NZ's new 'civil union'
same-sex ceremony, which homX clergy and allies will be wanting to bless.
Canon Bob Lowe sure started some trouble!
Any denomination that could promote the most intelligent man in
England (according to G B Shaw!) to no. 2 and soon to top
professional/political rank - the great Wm Temple - is worth saving
from the passive-aggressive PC invasion against which I have increasingly
inveighed. In the dioceses of Auckland and Waiapu, few if any arenas have
been permitted for genuine discussion of the disputes & disturbances raised
by the militant homosexualist movement.
Fanatics have been ordained recently who, as soon as you try to
discuss whether to ordain known homosexuals, or whether to 'bless' civil
unions, promptly insult you and may even intone "May God have mercy on your
soul". This is a new, relatively gentle variety of totalitarianism -
but make no mistake, it is totalitarian.
R
>Thursday 10 February 2005
>
>The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has welcomed the
>announcement that HRH Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles
>are to marry.
>
>In a statement from Lambeth Palace, Dr Williams said:
>
>"I am pleased that Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles
>have decided to take this important step. I hope and pray that it will
>prove a source of comfort and strength to them and to those who are
>closest to them."
>
>Dr Williams has accepted an invitation to preside at a service of
>prayer and dedication following the civil ceremony. Dr Williams said:
>"These arrangements have my strong support and are consistent with
>Church of England guidelines concerning remarriage which the Prince of
>Wales fully accepts as a committed Anglican and as prospective Supreme
>Governor of the Church of England."
02/06/05
Tomorrow, 6th February, is Accession Day. The Book of Common Prayer
contains the following prayers which might be useful for devotions on the
day:
O GOD, who providest for thy people by thy power, and rulest over them in
love: Vouchsafe so to bless thy Servant our Queen, that under her this
nation may be wisely governed, and thy Church may serve thee in all godly
quietness; and grant that she being devoted to thee with her whole heart,
and persevering in good works unto the end, may, by thy guidance, come to
thine everlasting kingdom; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who
liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy ghost, ever one God, world
without end. Amen.
O LORD our God, who upholdest and governest all things by the word of thy
power: Receive our humble prayers for our Sovereign Lady ELIZABETH, as on
this day, set over us by thy grace and providence to be our Queen; and,
together with her, bless, we beseech thee, Philip Duke of Edinburgh,
Charles Prince of Wales, and all the Royal Family; that they, ever trusting
in thy goodness, protected by thy power, and crowned with thy gracious and
endless favour, may long continue before thee in peace and safety, joy and
honour, and after death may obtain everlasting life and glory, by the
merits and mediation of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who with thee and the
Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth ever one God, world without end. Amen.
ALMIGHTY God, who rulest over all the kingdoms of the world, and dost order
them according to thy good pleasure: We yield thee unfeigned thanks, for
that thou wast pleased, as on this day, to set thy Servant our Sovereign
Lady, Queen ELIZABETH, upon the Throne of this Realm. Let thy wisdom be
her guide, and let thine arm strengthen her; let truth and justice,
holiness and righteousness, peace and charity, abound in her days; direct
all her counsels and endeavours to thy glory, and the welfare of her
subjects; give us grace to obey her cheerfully for conscience sake, and let
her always possess the hearts of her people; let her reign be long and
prosperous, and crown her with everlasting life in the world to come;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
contains the following prayers which might be useful for devotions on the
day:
O GOD, who providest for thy people by thy power, and rulest over them in
love: Vouchsafe so to bless thy Servant our Queen, that under her this
nation may be wisely governed, and thy Church may serve thee in all godly
quietness; and grant that she being devoted to thee with her whole heart,
and persevering in good works unto the end, may, by thy guidance, come to
thine everlasting kingdom; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who
liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy ghost, ever one God, world
without end. Amen.
O LORD our God, who upholdest and governest all things by the word of thy
power: Receive our humble prayers for our Sovereign Lady ELIZABETH, as on
this day, set over us by thy grace and providence to be our Queen; and,
together with her, bless, we beseech thee, Philip Duke of Edinburgh,
Charles Prince of Wales, and all the Royal Family; that they, ever trusting
in thy goodness, protected by thy power, and crowned with thy gracious and
endless favour, may long continue before thee in peace and safety, joy and
honour, and after death may obtain everlasting life and glory, by the
merits and mediation of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who with thee and the
Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth ever one God, world without end. Amen.
ALMIGHTY God, who rulest over all the kingdoms of the world, and dost order
them according to thy good pleasure: We yield thee unfeigned thanks, for
that thou wast pleased, as on this day, to set thy Servant our Sovereign
Lady, Queen ELIZABETH, upon the Throne of this Realm. Let thy wisdom be
her guide, and let thine arm strengthen her; let truth and justice,
holiness and righteousness, peace and charity, abound in her days; direct
all her counsels and endeavours to thy glory, and the welfare of her
subjects; give us grace to obey her cheerfully for conscience sake, and let
her always possess the hearts of her people; let her reign be long and
prosperous, and crown her with everlasting life in the world to come;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2005/001/3.8.html
The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience
Why don't Christians live what they preach?
By Ronald J. Sider
Once upon a time there was a great religion that over the centuries had spread all over the world. But in those lands where it had existed for the longest time, its adherents slowly grew complacent, lukewarm, and skeptical. Indeed, many of the leaders of its oldest groups even publicly rejected some of the religion's most basic beliefs.
In response, a renewal movement emerged, passionately championing the historic claims of the old religion and eagerly inviting unbelievers everywhere to embrace the ancient faith. Rejecting the skepticism of leaders who no longer believed in a God who works miracles, members of the renewal movement vigorously argued that their God not only had performed miraculous deeds in the past but still miraculously transforms all who believe. Indeed, a radical, miraculous "new birth" that began a lifetime of sweeping moral renewal and transformation was at the center of their preaching. Over time, the renewal movement flourished to the point of becoming one of the most influential wings of the whole religion.
Not surprisingly, the movement's numbers translated into political influence. And the renewal movement was so confident of its beliefs and claims that it persuaded the nation's top political leader to have the government work more closely with religious social service organizations to solve the nation's horrendous social problems. Members of the renewal movement knew that miraculous moral transformation of character frequently happened when broken persons embraced the great religion. They also lobbied politicians to strengthen the traditional definition of marriage because their ancient texts taught that a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman was at the center of the Creator's design for the family.
Then the pollsters started conducting scientific polls of the general population. In spite of the renewal movement's proud claims to miraculous transformation, the polls showed that members of the movement divorced their spouses just as often as their secular neighbors. They beat their wives as often as their neighbors. They were almost as materialistic and even more racist than their pagan friends. The hard-core skeptics smiled in cynical amusement at this blatant hypocrisy. The general population was puzzled and disgusted. Many of the renewal movement's leaders simply stepped up the tempo of their now enormously successful, highly sophisticated promotional programs. Others wept.
This, alas, is roughly the situation of Western or at least American evangelicalism today.
Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity. By their daily activity, most "Christians" regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex, and self-fulfillment.
The findings in numerous national polls conducted by highly respected pollsters like The Gallup Organization and The Barna Group are simply shocking. "Gallup and Barna," laments evangelical theologian Michael Horton, "hand us survey after survey demonstrating that evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general."1 Divorce is more common among "born-again" Christians than in the general American population. Only 6 percent of evangelicals tithe. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Josh McDowell has pointed out that the sexual promiscuity of evangelical youth is only a little less outrageous than that of their nonevangelical peers.
Alan Wolfe, famous contemporary scholar and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, has just published a penetrating study of American religious life. Evangelicals figure prominently in his book. His evaluation? Today's evangelicalism, Wolfe says, exhibits "so strong a desire to copy the culture of hotel chains and popular music that it loses what religious distinctiveness it once had."2 Wolfe argues, "The truth is there is increasingly little difference between an essentially secular activity like the popular entertainment industry and the bring-'em-in-at-any-cost efforts of evangelical megachurches."3
It is not surprising that George Barna concludes, "Every day, the church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change."4 We have very little time, he believes, to reverse these trends. African Christian and famous missions scholar Professor Lamin Sanneh told Christianity Today recently that "the cultural captivity of Christianity in the West is nearly complete, and with the religion tamed, it is open season on the West's Christian heritage. I worry about a West without a moral center facing a politically resurgent Islam."5
Our first concern, of course, must be internal integrity, not external danger. What a tragedy for evangelicals to declare proudly that personal conversion and new birth in Christ are at the center of their faith and then to defy biblical moral standards by living almost as sinfully as their pagan neighbors.
Graham Cyster, a Christian whom I know from South Africa, recently told me a painful story about a personal experience two decades ago when he was struggling against apartheid as a young South African evangelical. One night, he was smuggled into an underground Communist cell of young people fighting apartheid. "Tell us about the gospel of Jesus Christ," they asked, half hoping for an alternative to the violent communist strategy they were embracing.
Graham gave a clear, powerful presentation of the gospel, showing how personal faith in Christ wonderfully transforms persons and creates one new body of believers where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, rich nor poor, black nor white. The youth were fascinated. One seventeen-year-old exclaimed, "That is wonderful! Show me where I can see that happening." Graham's face fell as he sadly responded that he could not think of anywhere South African Christians were truly living out the message of the gospel. "Then the whole thing is a piece of sh—," the youth angrily retorted. Within a month he left the country to join the armed struggle against apartheid—and eventually giving his life for his beliefs.
The young man was right. If Christians do not live what they preach, the whole thing is a farce. "American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century," Barna concludes, "because Jesus' modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus."6 This scandalous behavior mocks Christ, undermines evangelism, and destroys Christian credibility.
If vital Christian faith is to survive, we must understand the depth of the crisis, discover why it has happened, and develop obedient, faithful correctives. My prayer is that just as Mark Noll's book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind did much to strengthen evangelical thinking, so a forthright acknowledgment of this sorry state of affairs will renew evangelical resolve to live what we preach.
The Depth of the Scandal
How bad are things? What is the depth of the scandal? Unless we face these questions with ruthless honesty, we can never hope to correct the problem.
Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage, or neglect of a biblical worldview, the polling data point to widespread, blatant disobedience of clear biblical moral demands on the part of people who allegedly are evangelical, born-again Christians. The statistics are devastating.
• Divorce
In a 1999 national survey, George Barna found that the percentage of born-again Christians who had experienced divorce was slightly higher (26 percent) than that of non-Christians (22 percent).7 In Barna's polls since the mid-1990s, that number has remained about the same.8 In August 2001, a new poll found that the divorce rate was about the same for born-again Christians and the population as a whole; 33 percent of all born-again Christians had been divorced compared with 34 percent of non-born-again Americans—a statistically insignificant difference. Barna also found in one study that 90 percent of all divorced born-again folk divorced after they accepted Christ.9
Barna makes a distinction between born-again Christians and evangelicals. Barna classifies as born-again all who say "they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today" and who also indicate that they "believe that when they die they will go to heaven because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior."10 In Barna's polls anywhere from 35 to 43 percent of the total U.S. population meet these criteria for being born-again.
Barna limits the term "evangelical" to a much smaller group—just 7 to 8 percent of the total U.S. population. In addition to meeting the criteria for being born-again, evangelicals must agree with several other things such as the following: Jesus lived a sinless life; eternal salvation is only through grace, not works; Christians have a personal responsibility to evangelize non-Christians; Satan exists. Obviously this definition identifies a much more theologically biblical, orthodox group of Christians.
What is the divorce rate among evangelicals? According to a 1999 poll by Barna, exactly the same as the national average! According to that poll, 25 percent of evangelicals—just like 25 percent of the total population—have gone through a divorce.11 Does it make no difference to evangelicals that their Lord and Savior explicitly, clearly, repeatedly condemned divorce?
"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
Matthew 19:4–6 (NRSV)
Professor Brad Wilcox is a Princeton-trained, Christian sociologist who specializes in family issues. Wilcox has studied two sets of national data: The General Social Survey and The National Survey of Families and Households. The result? "Compared with the rest of the population, conservative Protestants are more likely to divorce." He also points out the divorce rates are higher in the southern U.S., where conservative Protestants make up a higher percentage of the population than elsewhere in the country.12
A story in the New York Times in 2001 underlined Wilcox's findings about the unusually high divorce rates in the South. In many parts of the Bible Belt, the divorce rate was discovered to be "roughly 50 percent above the national average" (italics mine).13 Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma pointed out the irony that these unusually high divorce rates exist in his state, where 70 percent of the people go to church once a week or more. "These divorce rates," Gov. Keating concluded, "are a scalding indictment of what isn't being said behind the pulpit."
• Materialism and the Poor
John and Sylvia Ronsvalle have been carefully analyzing the giving patterns of American Christians for well over a decade. Their annual The State of Christian Giving is the most accurate report for learning how much Christians in the richest nation in human history actually give. In their most recent edition, they provide detailed information about per-member giving patterns of U.S. church members from 1968 to 2001. Over those thirty-plus years, of course, the average income of U.S. Christians has increased enormously. But that did not carry over into their giving. The report showed that the richer we become, the less we give in proportion to our incomes.
In 1968, the average church member gave 3.1 percent of their income—less than a third of a tithe. That figure dropped every year through 1990 and then recovered slightly to 2.66 percent—about one quarter of a tithe.14
Even more interesting is what has happened to evangelical giving. The Ronsvalles compare the giving in seven typical mainline denominations (affiliated with the National Council of Churches) with the giving in eight evangelical denominations (with membership in the National Association of Evangelicals). In 1968 the eight evangelical denominations gave considerably more than the seven mainline denominations. While the mainline denominational members gave 3.3 percent of their income, evangelicals gave 6.15 percent. While this is significantly more, the evangelicals on average still gave less than two-thirds of a tithe. By 1985 mainline folk had dropped their giving to 2.85 percent of their income and evangelicals to 4.74 percent. By 2001, mainline members had recovered slightly to 3.17 percent, but evangelical giving kept dropping and was at a mere 4.27 percent.15
As we got richer and richer, evangelicals chose to spend more and more on themselves and give a smaller and smaller percentage to the church. Today, on average, evangelicals in the U.S. give about two-fifths of a tithe.
In 2002, Barna discovered that only 6 percent of born-again adults tithed—a 50 percent decline from 2000, when 12 percent did. And in 2002, just 9 percent of Barna's narrow class of evangelicals tithed.16
One can see a related problem in another area. Examine the public agenda of prominent evangelical political movements and coalitions. Virtually never does justice for the poor appear as an area of significant concern and effort.
American Christians live in the richest nation on earth and enjoy an average household income of $42,409.17 The World Bank reports that 1.2 billion of the world's poorest people try to survive on just one dollar a day. At least one billion people have never heard the gospel. The Ronsvalles point out that if American Christians just tithed, they would have another $143 billion available to empower the poor and spread the gospel.18 Studies by the United Nations suggest that just an additional $70–$80 billion a year would be enough to provide access to essential services like basic health care and education for all the poor of the earth.19 If they did no more than tithe, American Christians would have the private dollars to foot this entire bill and still have $60–$70 billion more to do evangelism around the world.
As evangelicals we claim to embrace the Bible as our final authority. One of the most common themes in the Scriptures is that God and his faithful people have a special concern for the poor. Why this blatant contradiction between belief and practice?
In the late 1970s, I attended a national conference of evangelical leaders. My small group, as I recall, included prominent persons like Carl Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today; Hudson Armerding, the president of Wheaton College; and Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth with a Mission. Several times in our small group, different persons referred to the issue of a simple lifestyle, urging its importance. Finally, Loren Cunningham said something like the following: "Yes, I think the evangelical community is ready to live more simply—if we evangelical leaders will model it." That ended the discussion. There were no further recommendations to live more simply!
• Sexual Disobedience
A story in the New York Times reported that, according to census data, in the 1990s the number of unmarried couples living together jumped a lot more in the Bible Belt (where a higher percentage of the total population are evangelicals) than in the nation as a whole. Nationwide, the increase was 72 percent. But in Oklahoma it was 97 percent, in Arkansas 125 percent, and in Tennessee 123 percent.20
Popular evangelical speaker Josh McDowell has been observing and speaking to evangelical youth for several decades. I remember him saying years ago that evangelical youth are only about 10 percent less likely to engage in premarital sex than nonevangelicals.
True Love Waits, a program sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention, is one of the most famous evangelical efforts to reduce premarital sexual activity among our youth. Since 1993, about 2.4 million young people have signed a pledge to wait until marriage to engage in sexual intercourse. Are these young evangelicals keeping their pledges? In March 2004, researchers from Columbia University and Yale University reported on their findings. For seven years they studied 12 thousand teenagers who took the pledge. Sadly, they found that 88 percent of these pledgers reported having sexual intercourse before marriage; just 12 percent kept their promise. The researchers also found that the rates for having sexually transmitted diseases "were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not."21
Barna found from a 2001 poll that cohabitation—living with a member of the opposite sex without marriage—is only a little better among born-again adults than the general public. Nationally, 33 percent of all adults have lived with a member of the opposite sex without being married. The rate is 25 percent for born-again folk.22
Professor John C. Green is an evangelical political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. Green is one of the best statisticians in his field and has studied how Americans feel about morals and ethics using several national surveys. He divides those he labels evangelicals into two categories: traditional evangelicals (who have higher church attendance, a higher view of biblical authority, etc.) and nontraditional evangelicals.23 What are their attitudes on premarital and extramarital sex? Fully 26 percent of traditional evangelicals do not think premarital sex is wrong, and 46 percent of nontraditional evangelicals say it is morally okay.24
And extramarital sex? Of traditional evangelicals, 13 percent say it is okay for married persons to have sex with someone other than one's spouse. And 19 percent of nontraditional evangelicals say adultery is morally acceptable.25 Fortunately, Green finds that evangelicals fare better than mainline Protestant and Catholic Christians on these issues, but the number of evangelicals that blatantly reject biblical sexual norms is astonishing.
What about pornography? Citing a recent survey in Leadership magazine, Steve Gallagher says, "Tragically, the percentage of Christian men involved [in pornography] is not much different that that of the unsaved."26
• Racism
In 1989 George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli published the results of a survey to determine which groups in the U.S. were least and most likely to object to having black neighbors—surely a good measure of racism. Catholics and nonevangelical Christians ranked least likely to object to black neighbors; 11 percent objected. Mainline Protestants came next at 16 percent. At 17 percent, Baptists and evangelicals were among the most likely groups to object to black neighbors, and 20 percent of Southern Baptists objected to black neighbors.27
It is common knowledge that during the Civil Rights movement, when mainline Protestants and Jews joined African Americans in their historic struggle for freedom and equality, evangelical leaders were almost entirely absent. Some opposed the movement; others said nothing. When Frank Gaebelein, then a coeditor of Christianity Today, not only covered Martin Luther King's March on Selma but also endorsed and joined the movement, he experienced opposition and hostility from other evangelical leaders.28 My own school, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, was founded in 1925 as an evangelical alternative to theological liberalism in American Baptist circles. But racism was part of our early history. We always accepted African Americans as students but refused to allow African American men to sleep overnight on campus. One African American student, who much later was elected to the seminary's board of trustees, had to sleep five miles away at Thirtieth Street Train Station. Thank God for Cuthbert Rutenber, who helped the seminary abandon its racist policies in about 1950.
More recently, evangelicals have taken several important steps to confess past racism and call for change. Coach Bill McCartney, the founder of the national evangelical men's movement called Promise Keepers, was one of the outstanding evangelical leaders in this change. McCartney went on a national speaking tour, regularly calling evangelicals to racial reconciliation. In his book Sold Out, McCartney recalls what happened. When he finished speaking, he reports, "There was no response—nothing. . . . In city after city, in church after church, it was the same story—wild enthusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue-like chill as I stepped away from the microphone."29 McCartney thinks a major reason attendance dropped dramatically in Promise Keepers' stadium events was their stand on racial reconciliation.
Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith have written a crucial book, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, exploring ongoing racial attitudes in the evangelical world. Their conclusion? "White evangelicalism likely does more to perpetuate the racialized society than to reduce it."30 White conservative Protestants are more than twice as likely as other whites to blame lack of equality (e.g., income) between blacks and whites on a lack of black motivation rather than discrimination. Conservative Protestants are six times more likely to cite lack of motivation than unequal access to education!31
Evangelicals may have some good biblical theology about the body of Christ, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, black nor white. But if they do not work out this theology in practice, such that white evangelicals welcome black neighbors and work to end racist structures, then, as was made clear by the young South African Communist, the whole thing stinks.
To say there is a crisis of disobedience in the evangelical world today is to dangerously understate the problem. Born-again Christians divorce at about the same rate as everyone else. Self-centered materialism is seducing evangelicals and rapidly destroying our earlier, slightly more generous giving. Only 6 percent of born-again Christians tithe. Born-again Christians justify and engage in sexual promiscuity (both premarital sex and adultery) at astonishing rates. Racism and perhaps physical abuse of wives seems to be worse in evangelical circles than elsewhere. This is scandalous behavior for people who claim to be born-again by the Holy Spirit and to enjoy the very presence of the Risen Lord in their lives.
In light of the foregoing statistics, it is not surprising that born-again Christians spend seven times more hours each week in front of their televisions than they spend in Bible reading, prayer, and worship.32 Only 9 percent of born-again adults and 2 percent of born-again teenagers have a biblical worldview.33
Perhaps it is not surprising either that non-Christians have a very negative view of evangelicals. In a recent poll, Barna asked non-Christians about their attitudes toward different groups of Christians. Only 44 percent have a positive view of Christian clergy. Just 32 percent have a positive view of born-again Christians. And a mere 22 percent have a positive view of evangelicals.34
Evangelicals rightly rejected theological liberalism because it denied the miraculous. In response, we insisted that miracle was central to biblical faith at numerous points including the supernatural moral transformation of broken sinners. Now our very lifestyle as evangelicals is a ringing practical denial of the miraculous in our lives. Satan must laugh in sneerful derision. God's people can only weep.
Rays of Hope
No biblical passage speaks as powerfully to our situation as the message to the church at Laodicea. Like the American church today, the Laodicean church was rich, self-confident—and lukewarm.
The city of Laodicea (in Asia Minor, now Turkey) was famous in the first century. It was a major banking center and proud of its wealth. The city was especially famous for its wool exports and a highly regarded eye salve.35 Apparently the Laodicean church shared their fellow citizens' sense of wealthy self-confidence. But knowing they were half-hearted, lukewarm Christians, the Lord said to them,
I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, "I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing." But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. —Revelation 3:14–20
This passage could just as well have been written to contemporary American evangelicals. Enormously wealthy, and proud of it, we think that most things are going well in spite of our blatant disobedience. But our Lord's word to us is simple: Repent!
Evangelicals have used the image of Christ knocking at the heart's door as a symbol of our vigorous evangelistic programs. But in truth, it is we, by our behavior, who have excluded him from our hearts and lives. He stands at the doors of our hearts, begging us to welcome his total Lordship.
Weeping and repentance are the only faithful responses to the sweeping, scandalous disobedience in the evangelical world today. We have defied the Lord we claim to worship. We have disgraced his holy name by our unholy lives. Yes, we believe he is the Savior. We are Christians, not pagans. But our beliefs are not strong enough to produce righteous lifestyles. We want Jesus and mammon. Unless we repent, our Lord intends to spit us out.
Biblical repentance is more than a brief liturgical phrase or a hasty superficial tear. It is a deep, heartfelt sorrow for offending the Holy Sovereign of the universe and a strong inner resolve to embrace the conversion—the complete reversal of direction—that our forgiving Savior longs to bestow. We cannot manufacture this radical change using our own strength. But we can beg our Holy God not only to forgive but also to change us. Daily, we can pray to the Lord to transform us more and more into the very likeness of Jesus.
Anguished, persistent prayer for revival must become more central in evangelical life. It is true that for a couple of decades, there have been major prayer movements in the evangelical world. But our behavior has not become more holy. The revival tarries. Richard Lovelace has said that we cannot close "the sanctification gap" until "the same fear and trembling, the same prayer to be endued with power from on high that characterized the first apostles" becomes a part of our lives.36 Please God, may that happen.
Facing the depth of the scandal could easily provoke despair. Thank God, belief in the gospel warrants a more hopeful response. At the heart of evangelical belief is the glorious biblical truth that new birth, radical transformation, is possible at any moment. We have regularly promised even the most wretched, most broken sinners that the Lord stands ready to forgive and change them if they will only open their hearts to him. Again and again, we know from our own history, the Savior has done just that. Criminals, adulterers, and murderers have been radically transformed into new persons in Christ Jesus. That is the perennial promise of the gospel.
That is precisely the promise which we must claim for ourselves. The Savior longs to forgive even scandalously unfaithful contemporary evangelicals if we will just repent.
And pray. We need to pray mightily for a sweeping movement of revival. The history of evangelical awakenings in the last three centuries shows that again and again God has responded with powerful movements of revival in the church when God's people united in intense, sustained periods of prayer.37
The incredible promises Jesus attached to his words about prayer strengthen our hope. If we pray for revival and sanctification, the Lord of the universe pledges to hear us. Listen to his reassuring promise:
Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. —Mark 11:24
I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, "Move from here to there" and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. —Matthew 17:20–21
If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. —John 15:7
Does anyone doubt that our Lord longs to answer our pleas for revival? And sanctifying power?
As we pray, we need to remember an important condition that Christ attached to these promises. We must obey. John 15:7 says that Jesus will hear our prayers if we abide in him and his words abide in us. We must make every effort to embrace the righteous way of life that the New Testament commands and promises is possible.
Obedience means unconditional submission to Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. It means abandoning our one-sided, unbiblical conceptions of sin, the gospel, salvation, and conversion, and returning to the full-blown biblical understanding of these glorious truths. It means recovering the biblical reality of the church as community. It means living the truth that orthodoxy and orthopraxis—right theology and right behavior—are equally important.
If we do that, I believe we dare hope and expect that a longing for holiness will sweep through our churches. Our sexual practices will reflect biblical standards much more faithfully. Joyful, lifelong fidelity will make our homes and marriages powerful signs of an attractive alternative to today's brokenness and agony. Biblical Christians will lead the way in more vigorous efforts to reduce dramatically domestic abuse, racism, materialism, and poverty.
Could that really happen? The promise of the gospel is that it can and does—whenever people truly surrender to the biblical Christ. Fortunately, there are even some rays of hope in some of the polling data. When pollsters make careful distinctions between nominal Christians and devout believers, there is evidence that deeply committed Christians do live differently.
In 1992, George Gallup Jr. and Timothy Jones published a book called The Saints Among Us. They used a 12-question survey to identify what they called "heroic and faithful individual" Christians. Some of the questions identified people who believed in the full authority of the Bible and practiced evangelism. But others identified costly behavior: "I do things I don't want to do because I believe it is the will of God" and "I put my religious beliefs into practice in my relations with all people regardless of their backgrounds." They labeled "saints" those who agreed with every question. And they called "super-saints" those who agreed strongly with every question.38
The good news is that the "saints" lived differently. Only 42 percent of the strongly uncommitted spent "a good deal of time" helping people in need, but 73 percent of the "saints" and 85 percent of the "super-saints" did.39 Only 63 percent of the spiritually uncommitted reported that they would not object to having a neighbor of a different race. But 84 percent of the "saints" and 93 percent of the "super-saints" said they would not object.40 Interestingly, a disproportionate share of the saints were women, African Americans, and persons earning less than $25,000 per year.
Sociologist Christian Smith's study comparing the attitudes and behavior of evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline, liberal, and Catholic Christians as well as those of the "non-religious" found that over the previous two years, evangelicals were more than three times more likely to have given "a lot" of money to help the poor and the needy than the non-religious.41 In fact, evangelicals scored higher than any other Christian group. Of all evangelicals, 29 percent gave a lot. But only 23 percent of fundamentalists, 22 percent of mainline churches, 25 percent of liberals, 22 percent of Catholics, and 9 percent of the non-religious gave a lot. Even so, only 29 percent of the evangelicals gave a lot. That means 71 percent of evangelicals did not!
A Pew Center poll in 2001 supported Smith's findings. In this survey, those with a high religious commitment were a little more than three times as likely as those with a low religious commitmentto have volunteered to help poor, sick, and elderly people in the last month (35 percent vs. 11 percent).42 But again only one third (35 percent) of the highly religiously committed had volunteered. Sixty-five percent had not. Another question in the same poll found that those who were "heavily involved in activities at their church or house of worship" were almost four times more likely to volunteer to help the poor, sick, and homeless in settings outside church than were those of low religious commitment (44 percent vs. 12 percent).43
George Barna has developed a set of criteria to identify people with a "biblical worldview." These people believe that "the Bible is the moral standard" and also think that "absolute moral truths exist and are conveyed through the Bible." In addition, they agree with all six of the following additional beliefs: God is the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator who still rules the universe; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; Satan is a real, living entity; salvation is a free gift, not something we can earn; every Christian has a personal responsibility to evangelize; and the Bible is totally accurate in all it teaches.
Barna's criteria for identifying people with a biblical worldview are not identical to his criteria for identifying evangelicals. Barna's "born-again" category is much broader; about 40 percent of the total population are born-again, but only 7–8 percent are evangelicals. Using his definition of those with a biblical worldview, Barna has discovered that only 9 percent of all born-again adults have a biblical worldview and only 2 percent of born-again teenagers.44 That is the bad news.
The good news is that the small circle of people with a biblical worldview demonstrate genuinely different behavior. They are nine times more likely than all the others to avoid "adult-only" material on the Internet. They are four times more likely than other Christians to boycott objectionable companies and products and twice as likely to choose intentionally not to watch a movie specifically because of its bad content. They are three times more likely than other adults not to use tobacco products and twice as likely to volunteer time to help needy people.45 Forty-nine percent of all born-again Christians with a biblical worldview have volunteered more than an hour in the previous week to an organization serving the poor, whereas only 29 percent of born-again Christians without a biblical worldview and only 22 percent of non-born-again Christians had done so.46
In a 2000 poll Barna discovered that evangelicals are five times less likely than adults generally to report that their "career comes first."47 And there is accumulating evidence that theologically conservative Protestant men who attend church regularly have lower rates of domestic abuse than others.48
Not surprisingly, this better behavior is closely correlated with higher religious activity. Those with a biblical worldview are almost twice as likely as other Christians to read the Bible each week.49 Nationwide, only 19 percent of adults attend Sunday school each week, but 33 percent of all born-again adults do. And the figure jumps to 60 percent for evangelicals.50 While only 17 percent of all adults attend a small group for prayer and Bible study each week, 30 percent of born-again Christians do. And 55 percent of all evangelicals do.51
Other pollsters have discovered a similar correlation between evangelical faith and religious activity. Christian Smith found that evangelicals were much more likely to attend church each week or share the gospel than other Christians.52 The same pattern emerged in a study in 2001 by the Pew Research Center.53
These statistics offer some substantial hope. People with a biblical worldview, and this category largely overlaps with that of evangelical, do exhibit better moral behavior at several points. We cannot be satisfied with studies that show that only 29 percent of all evangelicals gave a lot to help the poor and needy. But that is at least a lot better than the statistics for the non-religious, where only 9 percent do a lot to help the poor. When we can distinguish nominal Christians from deeply committed, theologically orthodox Christians, it is clear that genuine Christianity does lead to better behavior, at least in some areas.
Barna's findings on the different behavior of Christians with a biblical worldview underline the importance of theology. Biblical orthodoxy does matter. One important way to end the scandal of contemporary Christian behavior is to work and pray fervently for the growth of orthodox theological belief in our churches.
Barna reports one final finding that offers additional hope. He discovered that even though 91 percent of all born-again Christians lacked a biblical worldview, they were nonetheless open, even desirous, of spiritual growth. Eighty percent of all born-again Christians said that having a "deep, personal commitment to the Christian faith is a top priority for their future."54 And nine out of ten Christians of every stripe said that if their churches specified things they should personally do to grow spiritually, they would at least listen to the advice and follow most of the recommendations.55 That suggests a lot of openness to more solid biblical discipling.
Things are not quite as hopeless as they first appeared. Biblical faith makes a substantial (though not enough) difference in the lives of deeply committed Christians. Most nominal Christians seem open to spiritual growth.
More importantly, the gospel is true! The carpenter from Nazareth burst from the tomb and now reigns as the Lord of the universe. His promise to transform into his very own likeness all who truly believe in him still stands. The Holy Spirit is still alive and powerful today, radically remaking broken people who unconditionally open their hearts and lives to his mighty presence.
At any time in history, no matter how bad the current mess, no matter how unfaithful the contemporary church, God stands ready to keep his promises. God is eager to do the same mighty deeds today that he has done in the past. All we must do is trust and obey.
The Lord we claim to love and worship stands at the door and knocks. He longs to be truly invited in. We cannot invite only half of him. But if today we dare to embrace and surrender to the full biblical Christ, he will perform mighty deeds that transcend what we dare ask or imagine. He will turn our weeping into joy. He will end the scandal of blatant disobedience in the people who call on his name.
Ronald J. Sider is professor of theology, holistic ministry, and public policy and director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also president of Evangelicals for Social Action. This article is excerpted from his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker). Copyright 2004 by Ronald J. Sider. Used by permission of Baker Books.
1. Michael Horton, "Beyond Culture Wars," Modern Reformation (May-June 1993), p. 3.
2. Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion (Free Press, 2003), p. 257.
3. Ibid., p. 212.
4. Tim Stafford, "The Third Coming of George Barna," Christianity Today, August 8, 2002, p. 34.
5. Christianity Today, October 2003, p. 112.
6. George Barna, Think Like Jesus (Integrity, 2003), p. 40.
7. George Barna, "Family," 2000. Available from Barna Research Online, http://216.87.179/cgi-bin/pagecategory.asp?categoryid=20. See also George Barna and Mark Hatch, Boiling Point: It Only Takes One Degree (Regal, 2001), p. 42.
8. "The statistic has been quite consistent since the mid-90's." Barna and Hatch, Boiling Point, p. 42n29.
9. The Barna Group, The Barna Update, "Born Again Adults Less Likely to Co-Habit, Just As Likely to Divorce," August 6, 2001, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=95.
10. The Barna Group, The Barna Update, "Annual Study Reveals America is Spiritually Stagnant," March 5, 2001, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=84.
11. The Barna Group, Evangelical Christians, http://www.barna.org.
12. W. Bradford Wilcox, "Conservative Protestants and the Family," in A Public Faith: Evangelicals and Civic Engagment, ed. Michael Cromartie (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 63.
13. New York Times, May 21, 2001, A14.
14. John L. and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving Through 2001 (Empty Tomb, 2003), p. 12.
15. Ibid., p. 25.
16. The Barna Group, "Stewardship," http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=Topic&TopicID=36.
17. Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Robert Cleveland, and Bruce H. Webster Jr., U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-221, Income in the United States: 2002, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2003, available as PDF at http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-221.pdf.
18. Ronsvalle, State of Church Giving, p. 52.
19. Carol Bellamy, The State of the World's Children 2001 (UNICEF, 2003), p. 81.
20. New York Times, May 21, 2001, A14.
21. Lawrence K. Altman, "Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept," New York Times, March 10, 2004, A20.
22. The Barna Group, The Barna Update, "Born Again Adults Less Likely to Co-Habit, Just As Likely to Divorce," August 6, 2001, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=95.
23. John C. Green, "Religion and Politics in the 1990s: Confrontations and Coalitions," in Religion and American Politics: The 2000 Election in Context, ed. Mark Silk (Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College, Hartford, 2000), p. 21, available as PDF at http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/religame.pdf.
24. Ibid., p. 26.
25. Ibid.
26. Steve Gallagher, "Devastated by Internet Porn," Pure Life Ministries, December 15, 2000, http://www.purelifeministries.org/mensarticle1.htm.
27. George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli, The People's Religion (Macmillan, 1989), p. 188.
28. Personal conversation with Frank Gaebelein's daughter.
29. Bill McCartney with David Halbrook, Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference (Word, 1997).
30. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 170.
31. Michael Emerson, "Faith That Separates: Evangelicals and Black-White Race Relations," in A Public Faith (see note 6), p. 196.
32. Barna and Hatch, Boiling Point, p. 140.
33. Barna, Think Like Jesus, p. 23.
34. See Sally Morgenthaler's foreword to Jonny Baker, Doug Gay, and Jenny Brown, Alternative Worship: Resources from and for the Emerging Church (Baker, 2004).
35. See Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (InterVarsity, 1993), p. 775.
36. Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal (InterVarsity, 1979), p. 237.
37. See, for example, J. Edwin Orr, The Eager Feet: Evangelical Awakenings, 1790–1830 (Moody, 1975), especially pp. 191–200.
38. George H. Gallup Jr. and Timothy Jones, The Saints Among Us (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 1992).
39. Ibid., pp. 63–64.
40. Ibid., p. 41.
41. Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Univ. of Chicago Press, 199, pp. 41–42.
42. Pew Research Center, American Views on Religion, Politics and Public Policy (2001), pp. 2–3; see also somewhat parallel results in Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 51.
43. Pew Research Center, American Views on Religion, Politics and Public Policy (2001), part IV, p. 5.
44. Barna, Think Like Jesus, p. 23.
45. Ibid., p. 24.
46. Ibid., p. 28.
47. The research archive on "Evangelical Christians" at Here Barna reports that evangelicals are just as likely as the general population to be divorced. But in his 2002 report (State of the Church 2002, p. 94), Barna reported that evangelicals are "less likely to have experienced a divorce than any other of the faith segments." It is not clear how these different data fit together.
48. See W. Bradford Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004).
49. Barna, State of the Church 2002, p. 25.
50. George Barna, "Ministry Involvement," Online, 2001 (accessed March 11, 2001).
51. George Barna, Faith Commitment Online, Barna Research Group, 2001 (accessed March 11, 2001).
52. Smith, American Evangelicalism, pp. 34, 40.
53. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, American Views on Religion, Politics and Public Policy (Pew Research Center, 2001), part IV.
54. George Barna, Growing True Disciples (Issachar Resources, 2000), p. 32.
55. Ibid., p. 41.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience
Why don't Christians live what they preach?
By Ronald J. Sider
Once upon a time there was a great religion that over the centuries had spread all over the world. But in those lands where it had existed for the longest time, its adherents slowly grew complacent, lukewarm, and skeptical. Indeed, many of the leaders of its oldest groups even publicly rejected some of the religion's most basic beliefs.
In response, a renewal movement emerged, passionately championing the historic claims of the old religion and eagerly inviting unbelievers everywhere to embrace the ancient faith. Rejecting the skepticism of leaders who no longer believed in a God who works miracles, members of the renewal movement vigorously argued that their God not only had performed miraculous deeds in the past but still miraculously transforms all who believe. Indeed, a radical, miraculous "new birth" that began a lifetime of sweeping moral renewal and transformation was at the center of their preaching. Over time, the renewal movement flourished to the point of becoming one of the most influential wings of the whole religion.
Not surprisingly, the movement's numbers translated into political influence. And the renewal movement was so confident of its beliefs and claims that it persuaded the nation's top political leader to have the government work more closely with religious social service organizations to solve the nation's horrendous social problems. Members of the renewal movement knew that miraculous moral transformation of character frequently happened when broken persons embraced the great religion. They also lobbied politicians to strengthen the traditional definition of marriage because their ancient texts taught that a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman was at the center of the Creator's design for the family.
Then the pollsters started conducting scientific polls of the general population. In spite of the renewal movement's proud claims to miraculous transformation, the polls showed that members of the movement divorced their spouses just as often as their secular neighbors. They beat their wives as often as their neighbors. They were almost as materialistic and even more racist than their pagan friends. The hard-core skeptics smiled in cynical amusement at this blatant hypocrisy. The general population was puzzled and disgusted. Many of the renewal movement's leaders simply stepped up the tempo of their now enormously successful, highly sophisticated promotional programs. Others wept.
This, alas, is roughly the situation of Western or at least American evangelicalism today.
Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity. By their daily activity, most "Christians" regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex, and self-fulfillment.
The findings in numerous national polls conducted by highly respected pollsters like The Gallup Organization and The Barna Group are simply shocking. "Gallup and Barna," laments evangelical theologian Michael Horton, "hand us survey after survey demonstrating that evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general."1 Divorce is more common among "born-again" Christians than in the general American population. Only 6 percent of evangelicals tithe. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Josh McDowell has pointed out that the sexual promiscuity of evangelical youth is only a little less outrageous than that of their nonevangelical peers.
Alan Wolfe, famous contemporary scholar and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, has just published a penetrating study of American religious life. Evangelicals figure prominently in his book. His evaluation? Today's evangelicalism, Wolfe says, exhibits "so strong a desire to copy the culture of hotel chains and popular music that it loses what religious distinctiveness it once had."2 Wolfe argues, "The truth is there is increasingly little difference between an essentially secular activity like the popular entertainment industry and the bring-'em-in-at-any-cost efforts of evangelical megachurches."3
It is not surprising that George Barna concludes, "Every day, the church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change."4 We have very little time, he believes, to reverse these trends. African Christian and famous missions scholar Professor Lamin Sanneh told Christianity Today recently that "the cultural captivity of Christianity in the West is nearly complete, and with the religion tamed, it is open season on the West's Christian heritage. I worry about a West without a moral center facing a politically resurgent Islam."5
Our first concern, of course, must be internal integrity, not external danger. What a tragedy for evangelicals to declare proudly that personal conversion and new birth in Christ are at the center of their faith and then to defy biblical moral standards by living almost as sinfully as their pagan neighbors.
Graham Cyster, a Christian whom I know from South Africa, recently told me a painful story about a personal experience two decades ago when he was struggling against apartheid as a young South African evangelical. One night, he was smuggled into an underground Communist cell of young people fighting apartheid. "Tell us about the gospel of Jesus Christ," they asked, half hoping for an alternative to the violent communist strategy they were embracing.
Graham gave a clear, powerful presentation of the gospel, showing how personal faith in Christ wonderfully transforms persons and creates one new body of believers where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, rich nor poor, black nor white. The youth were fascinated. One seventeen-year-old exclaimed, "That is wonderful! Show me where I can see that happening." Graham's face fell as he sadly responded that he could not think of anywhere South African Christians were truly living out the message of the gospel. "Then the whole thing is a piece of sh—," the youth angrily retorted. Within a month he left the country to join the armed struggle against apartheid—and eventually giving his life for his beliefs.
The young man was right. If Christians do not live what they preach, the whole thing is a farce. "American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century," Barna concludes, "because Jesus' modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus."6 This scandalous behavior mocks Christ, undermines evangelism, and destroys Christian credibility.
If vital Christian faith is to survive, we must understand the depth of the crisis, discover why it has happened, and develop obedient, faithful correctives. My prayer is that just as Mark Noll's book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind did much to strengthen evangelical thinking, so a forthright acknowledgment of this sorry state of affairs will renew evangelical resolve to live what we preach.
The Depth of the Scandal
How bad are things? What is the depth of the scandal? Unless we face these questions with ruthless honesty, we can never hope to correct the problem.
Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage, or neglect of a biblical worldview, the polling data point to widespread, blatant disobedience of clear biblical moral demands on the part of people who allegedly are evangelical, born-again Christians. The statistics are devastating.
• Divorce
In a 1999 national survey, George Barna found that the percentage of born-again Christians who had experienced divorce was slightly higher (26 percent) than that of non-Christians (22 percent).7 In Barna's polls since the mid-1990s, that number has remained about the same.8 In August 2001, a new poll found that the divorce rate was about the same for born-again Christians and the population as a whole; 33 percent of all born-again Christians had been divorced compared with 34 percent of non-born-again Americans—a statistically insignificant difference. Barna also found in one study that 90 percent of all divorced born-again folk divorced after they accepted Christ.9
Barna makes a distinction between born-again Christians and evangelicals. Barna classifies as born-again all who say "they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today" and who also indicate that they "believe that when they die they will go to heaven because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior."10 In Barna's polls anywhere from 35 to 43 percent of the total U.S. population meet these criteria for being born-again.
Barna limits the term "evangelical" to a much smaller group—just 7 to 8 percent of the total U.S. population. In addition to meeting the criteria for being born-again, evangelicals must agree with several other things such as the following: Jesus lived a sinless life; eternal salvation is only through grace, not works; Christians have a personal responsibility to evangelize non-Christians; Satan exists. Obviously this definition identifies a much more theologically biblical, orthodox group of Christians.
What is the divorce rate among evangelicals? According to a 1999 poll by Barna, exactly the same as the national average! According to that poll, 25 percent of evangelicals—just like 25 percent of the total population—have gone through a divorce.11 Does it make no difference to evangelicals that their Lord and Savior explicitly, clearly, repeatedly condemned divorce?
"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
Matthew 19:4–6 (NRSV)
Professor Brad Wilcox is a Princeton-trained, Christian sociologist who specializes in family issues. Wilcox has studied two sets of national data: The General Social Survey and The National Survey of Families and Households. The result? "Compared with the rest of the population, conservative Protestants are more likely to divorce." He also points out the divorce rates are higher in the southern U.S., where conservative Protestants make up a higher percentage of the population than elsewhere in the country.12
A story in the New York Times in 2001 underlined Wilcox's findings about the unusually high divorce rates in the South. In many parts of the Bible Belt, the divorce rate was discovered to be "roughly 50 percent above the national average" (italics mine).13 Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma pointed out the irony that these unusually high divorce rates exist in his state, where 70 percent of the people go to church once a week or more. "These divorce rates," Gov. Keating concluded, "are a scalding indictment of what isn't being said behind the pulpit."
• Materialism and the Poor
John and Sylvia Ronsvalle have been carefully analyzing the giving patterns of American Christians for well over a decade. Their annual The State of Christian Giving is the most accurate report for learning how much Christians in the richest nation in human history actually give. In their most recent edition, they provide detailed information about per-member giving patterns of U.S. church members from 1968 to 2001. Over those thirty-plus years, of course, the average income of U.S. Christians has increased enormously. But that did not carry over into their giving. The report showed that the richer we become, the less we give in proportion to our incomes.
In 1968, the average church member gave 3.1 percent of their income—less than a third of a tithe. That figure dropped every year through 1990 and then recovered slightly to 2.66 percent—about one quarter of a tithe.14
Even more interesting is what has happened to evangelical giving. The Ronsvalles compare the giving in seven typical mainline denominations (affiliated with the National Council of Churches) with the giving in eight evangelical denominations (with membership in the National Association of Evangelicals). In 1968 the eight evangelical denominations gave considerably more than the seven mainline denominations. While the mainline denominational members gave 3.3 percent of their income, evangelicals gave 6.15 percent. While this is significantly more, the evangelicals on average still gave less than two-thirds of a tithe. By 1985 mainline folk had dropped their giving to 2.85 percent of their income and evangelicals to 4.74 percent. By 2001, mainline members had recovered slightly to 3.17 percent, but evangelical giving kept dropping and was at a mere 4.27 percent.15
As we got richer and richer, evangelicals chose to spend more and more on themselves and give a smaller and smaller percentage to the church. Today, on average, evangelicals in the U.S. give about two-fifths of a tithe.
In 2002, Barna discovered that only 6 percent of born-again adults tithed—a 50 percent decline from 2000, when 12 percent did. And in 2002, just 9 percent of Barna's narrow class of evangelicals tithed.16
One can see a related problem in another area. Examine the public agenda of prominent evangelical political movements and coalitions. Virtually never does justice for the poor appear as an area of significant concern and effort.
American Christians live in the richest nation on earth and enjoy an average household income of $42,409.17 The World Bank reports that 1.2 billion of the world's poorest people try to survive on just one dollar a day. At least one billion people have never heard the gospel. The Ronsvalles point out that if American Christians just tithed, they would have another $143 billion available to empower the poor and spread the gospel.18 Studies by the United Nations suggest that just an additional $70–$80 billion a year would be enough to provide access to essential services like basic health care and education for all the poor of the earth.19 If they did no more than tithe, American Christians would have the private dollars to foot this entire bill and still have $60–$70 billion more to do evangelism around the world.
As evangelicals we claim to embrace the Bible as our final authority. One of the most common themes in the Scriptures is that God and his faithful people have a special concern for the poor. Why this blatant contradiction between belief and practice?
In the late 1970s, I attended a national conference of evangelical leaders. My small group, as I recall, included prominent persons like Carl Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today; Hudson Armerding, the president of Wheaton College; and Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth with a Mission. Several times in our small group, different persons referred to the issue of a simple lifestyle, urging its importance. Finally, Loren Cunningham said something like the following: "Yes, I think the evangelical community is ready to live more simply—if we evangelical leaders will model it." That ended the discussion. There were no further recommendations to live more simply!
• Sexual Disobedience
A story in the New York Times reported that, according to census data, in the 1990s the number of unmarried couples living together jumped a lot more in the Bible Belt (where a higher percentage of the total population are evangelicals) than in the nation as a whole. Nationwide, the increase was 72 percent. But in Oklahoma it was 97 percent, in Arkansas 125 percent, and in Tennessee 123 percent.20
Popular evangelical speaker Josh McDowell has been observing and speaking to evangelical youth for several decades. I remember him saying years ago that evangelical youth are only about 10 percent less likely to engage in premarital sex than nonevangelicals.
True Love Waits, a program sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention, is one of the most famous evangelical efforts to reduce premarital sexual activity among our youth. Since 1993, about 2.4 million young people have signed a pledge to wait until marriage to engage in sexual intercourse. Are these young evangelicals keeping their pledges? In March 2004, researchers from Columbia University and Yale University reported on their findings. For seven years they studied 12 thousand teenagers who took the pledge. Sadly, they found that 88 percent of these pledgers reported having sexual intercourse before marriage; just 12 percent kept their promise. The researchers also found that the rates for having sexually transmitted diseases "were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not."21
Barna found from a 2001 poll that cohabitation—living with a member of the opposite sex without marriage—is only a little better among born-again adults than the general public. Nationally, 33 percent of all adults have lived with a member of the opposite sex without being married. The rate is 25 percent for born-again folk.22
Professor John C. Green is an evangelical political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. Green is one of the best statisticians in his field and has studied how Americans feel about morals and ethics using several national surveys. He divides those he labels evangelicals into two categories: traditional evangelicals (who have higher church attendance, a higher view of biblical authority, etc.) and nontraditional evangelicals.23 What are their attitudes on premarital and extramarital sex? Fully 26 percent of traditional evangelicals do not think premarital sex is wrong, and 46 percent of nontraditional evangelicals say it is morally okay.24
And extramarital sex? Of traditional evangelicals, 13 percent say it is okay for married persons to have sex with someone other than one's spouse. And 19 percent of nontraditional evangelicals say adultery is morally acceptable.25 Fortunately, Green finds that evangelicals fare better than mainline Protestant and Catholic Christians on these issues, but the number of evangelicals that blatantly reject biblical sexual norms is astonishing.
What about pornography? Citing a recent survey in Leadership magazine, Steve Gallagher says, "Tragically, the percentage of Christian men involved [in pornography] is not much different that that of the unsaved."26
• Racism
In 1989 George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli published the results of a survey to determine which groups in the U.S. were least and most likely to object to having black neighbors—surely a good measure of racism. Catholics and nonevangelical Christians ranked least likely to object to black neighbors; 11 percent objected. Mainline Protestants came next at 16 percent. At 17 percent, Baptists and evangelicals were among the most likely groups to object to black neighbors, and 20 percent of Southern Baptists objected to black neighbors.27
It is common knowledge that during the Civil Rights movement, when mainline Protestants and Jews joined African Americans in their historic struggle for freedom and equality, evangelical leaders were almost entirely absent. Some opposed the movement; others said nothing. When Frank Gaebelein, then a coeditor of Christianity Today, not only covered Martin Luther King's March on Selma but also endorsed and joined the movement, he experienced opposition and hostility from other evangelical leaders.28 My own school, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, was founded in 1925 as an evangelical alternative to theological liberalism in American Baptist circles. But racism was part of our early history. We always accepted African Americans as students but refused to allow African American men to sleep overnight on campus. One African American student, who much later was elected to the seminary's board of trustees, had to sleep five miles away at Thirtieth Street Train Station. Thank God for Cuthbert Rutenber, who helped the seminary abandon its racist policies in about 1950.
More recently, evangelicals have taken several important steps to confess past racism and call for change. Coach Bill McCartney, the founder of the national evangelical men's movement called Promise Keepers, was one of the outstanding evangelical leaders in this change. McCartney went on a national speaking tour, regularly calling evangelicals to racial reconciliation. In his book Sold Out, McCartney recalls what happened. When he finished speaking, he reports, "There was no response—nothing. . . . In city after city, in church after church, it was the same story—wild enthusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue-like chill as I stepped away from the microphone."29 McCartney thinks a major reason attendance dropped dramatically in Promise Keepers' stadium events was their stand on racial reconciliation.
Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith have written a crucial book, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, exploring ongoing racial attitudes in the evangelical world. Their conclusion? "White evangelicalism likely does more to perpetuate the racialized society than to reduce it."30 White conservative Protestants are more than twice as likely as other whites to blame lack of equality (e.g., income) between blacks and whites on a lack of black motivation rather than discrimination. Conservative Protestants are six times more likely to cite lack of motivation than unequal access to education!31
Evangelicals may have some good biblical theology about the body of Christ, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, black nor white. But if they do not work out this theology in practice, such that white evangelicals welcome black neighbors and work to end racist structures, then, as was made clear by the young South African Communist, the whole thing stinks.
To say there is a crisis of disobedience in the evangelical world today is to dangerously understate the problem. Born-again Christians divorce at about the same rate as everyone else. Self-centered materialism is seducing evangelicals and rapidly destroying our earlier, slightly more generous giving. Only 6 percent of born-again Christians tithe. Born-again Christians justify and engage in sexual promiscuity (both premarital sex and adultery) at astonishing rates. Racism and perhaps physical abuse of wives seems to be worse in evangelical circles than elsewhere. This is scandalous behavior for people who claim to be born-again by the Holy Spirit and to enjoy the very presence of the Risen Lord in their lives.
In light of the foregoing statistics, it is not surprising that born-again Christians spend seven times more hours each week in front of their televisions than they spend in Bible reading, prayer, and worship.32 Only 9 percent of born-again adults and 2 percent of born-again teenagers have a biblical worldview.33
Perhaps it is not surprising either that non-Christians have a very negative view of evangelicals. In a recent poll, Barna asked non-Christians about their attitudes toward different groups of Christians. Only 44 percent have a positive view of Christian clergy. Just 32 percent have a positive view of born-again Christians. And a mere 22 percent have a positive view of evangelicals.34
Evangelicals rightly rejected theological liberalism because it denied the miraculous. In response, we insisted that miracle was central to biblical faith at numerous points including the supernatural moral transformation of broken sinners. Now our very lifestyle as evangelicals is a ringing practical denial of the miraculous in our lives. Satan must laugh in sneerful derision. God's people can only weep.
Rays of Hope
No biblical passage speaks as powerfully to our situation as the message to the church at Laodicea. Like the American church today, the Laodicean church was rich, self-confident—and lukewarm.
The city of Laodicea (in Asia Minor, now Turkey) was famous in the first century. It was a major banking center and proud of its wealth. The city was especially famous for its wool exports and a highly regarded eye salve.35 Apparently the Laodicean church shared their fellow citizens' sense of wealthy self-confidence. But knowing they were half-hearted, lukewarm Christians, the Lord said to them,
I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, "I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing." But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. —Revelation 3:14–20
This passage could just as well have been written to contemporary American evangelicals. Enormously wealthy, and proud of it, we think that most things are going well in spite of our blatant disobedience. But our Lord's word to us is simple: Repent!
Evangelicals have used the image of Christ knocking at the heart's door as a symbol of our vigorous evangelistic programs. But in truth, it is we, by our behavior, who have excluded him from our hearts and lives. He stands at the doors of our hearts, begging us to welcome his total Lordship.
Weeping and repentance are the only faithful responses to the sweeping, scandalous disobedience in the evangelical world today. We have defied the Lord we claim to worship. We have disgraced his holy name by our unholy lives. Yes, we believe he is the Savior. We are Christians, not pagans. But our beliefs are not strong enough to produce righteous lifestyles. We want Jesus and mammon. Unless we repent, our Lord intends to spit us out.
Biblical repentance is more than a brief liturgical phrase or a hasty superficial tear. It is a deep, heartfelt sorrow for offending the Holy Sovereign of the universe and a strong inner resolve to embrace the conversion—the complete reversal of direction—that our forgiving Savior longs to bestow. We cannot manufacture this radical change using our own strength. But we can beg our Holy God not only to forgive but also to change us. Daily, we can pray to the Lord to transform us more and more into the very likeness of Jesus.
Anguished, persistent prayer for revival must become more central in evangelical life. It is true that for a couple of decades, there have been major prayer movements in the evangelical world. But our behavior has not become more holy. The revival tarries. Richard Lovelace has said that we cannot close "the sanctification gap" until "the same fear and trembling, the same prayer to be endued with power from on high that characterized the first apostles" becomes a part of our lives.36 Please God, may that happen.
Facing the depth of the scandal could easily provoke despair. Thank God, belief in the gospel warrants a more hopeful response. At the heart of evangelical belief is the glorious biblical truth that new birth, radical transformation, is possible at any moment. We have regularly promised even the most wretched, most broken sinners that the Lord stands ready to forgive and change them if they will only open their hearts to him. Again and again, we know from our own history, the Savior has done just that. Criminals, adulterers, and murderers have been radically transformed into new persons in Christ Jesus. That is the perennial promise of the gospel.
That is precisely the promise which we must claim for ourselves. The Savior longs to forgive even scandalously unfaithful contemporary evangelicals if we will just repent.
And pray. We need to pray mightily for a sweeping movement of revival. The history of evangelical awakenings in the last three centuries shows that again and again God has responded with powerful movements of revival in the church when God's people united in intense, sustained periods of prayer.37
The incredible promises Jesus attached to his words about prayer strengthen our hope. If we pray for revival and sanctification, the Lord of the universe pledges to hear us. Listen to his reassuring promise:
Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. —Mark 11:24
I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, "Move from here to there" and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. —Matthew 17:20–21
If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. —John 15:7
Does anyone doubt that our Lord longs to answer our pleas for revival? And sanctifying power?
As we pray, we need to remember an important condition that Christ attached to these promises. We must obey. John 15:7 says that Jesus will hear our prayers if we abide in him and his words abide in us. We must make every effort to embrace the righteous way of life that the New Testament commands and promises is possible.
Obedience means unconditional submission to Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. It means abandoning our one-sided, unbiblical conceptions of sin, the gospel, salvation, and conversion, and returning to the full-blown biblical understanding of these glorious truths. It means recovering the biblical reality of the church as community. It means living the truth that orthodoxy and orthopraxis—right theology and right behavior—are equally important.
If we do that, I believe we dare hope and expect that a longing for holiness will sweep through our churches. Our sexual practices will reflect biblical standards much more faithfully. Joyful, lifelong fidelity will make our homes and marriages powerful signs of an attractive alternative to today's brokenness and agony. Biblical Christians will lead the way in more vigorous efforts to reduce dramatically domestic abuse, racism, materialism, and poverty.
Could that really happen? The promise of the gospel is that it can and does—whenever people truly surrender to the biblical Christ. Fortunately, there are even some rays of hope in some of the polling data. When pollsters make careful distinctions between nominal Christians and devout believers, there is evidence that deeply committed Christians do live differently.
In 1992, George Gallup Jr. and Timothy Jones published a book called The Saints Among Us. They used a 12-question survey to identify what they called "heroic and faithful individual" Christians. Some of the questions identified people who believed in the full authority of the Bible and practiced evangelism. But others identified costly behavior: "I do things I don't want to do because I believe it is the will of God" and "I put my religious beliefs into practice in my relations with all people regardless of their backgrounds." They labeled "saints" those who agreed with every question. And they called "super-saints" those who agreed strongly with every question.38
The good news is that the "saints" lived differently. Only 42 percent of the strongly uncommitted spent "a good deal of time" helping people in need, but 73 percent of the "saints" and 85 percent of the "super-saints" did.39 Only 63 percent of the spiritually uncommitted reported that they would not object to having a neighbor of a different race. But 84 percent of the "saints" and 93 percent of the "super-saints" said they would not object.40 Interestingly, a disproportionate share of the saints were women, African Americans, and persons earning less than $25,000 per year.
Sociologist Christian Smith's study comparing the attitudes and behavior of evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline, liberal, and Catholic Christians as well as those of the "non-religious" found that over the previous two years, evangelicals were more than three times more likely to have given "a lot" of money to help the poor and the needy than the non-religious.41 In fact, evangelicals scored higher than any other Christian group. Of all evangelicals, 29 percent gave a lot. But only 23 percent of fundamentalists, 22 percent of mainline churches, 25 percent of liberals, 22 percent of Catholics, and 9 percent of the non-religious gave a lot. Even so, only 29 percent of the evangelicals gave a lot. That means 71 percent of evangelicals did not!
A Pew Center poll in 2001 supported Smith's findings. In this survey, those with a high religious commitment were a little more than three times as likely as those with a low religious commitmentto have volunteered to help poor, sick, and elderly people in the last month (35 percent vs. 11 percent).42 But again only one third (35 percent) of the highly religiously committed had volunteered. Sixty-five percent had not. Another question in the same poll found that those who were "heavily involved in activities at their church or house of worship" were almost four times more likely to volunteer to help the poor, sick, and homeless in settings outside church than were those of low religious commitment (44 percent vs. 12 percent).43
George Barna has developed a set of criteria to identify people with a "biblical worldview." These people believe that "the Bible is the moral standard" and also think that "absolute moral truths exist and are conveyed through the Bible." In addition, they agree with all six of the following additional beliefs: God is the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator who still rules the universe; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; Satan is a real, living entity; salvation is a free gift, not something we can earn; every Christian has a personal responsibility to evangelize; and the Bible is totally accurate in all it teaches.
Barna's criteria for identifying people with a biblical worldview are not identical to his criteria for identifying evangelicals. Barna's "born-again" category is much broader; about 40 percent of the total population are born-again, but only 7–8 percent are evangelicals. Using his definition of those with a biblical worldview, Barna has discovered that only 9 percent of all born-again adults have a biblical worldview and only 2 percent of born-again teenagers.44 That is the bad news.
The good news is that the small circle of people with a biblical worldview demonstrate genuinely different behavior. They are nine times more likely than all the others to avoid "adult-only" material on the Internet. They are four times more likely than other Christians to boycott objectionable companies and products and twice as likely to choose intentionally not to watch a movie specifically because of its bad content. They are three times more likely than other adults not to use tobacco products and twice as likely to volunteer time to help needy people.45 Forty-nine percent of all born-again Christians with a biblical worldview have volunteered more than an hour in the previous week to an organization serving the poor, whereas only 29 percent of born-again Christians without a biblical worldview and only 22 percent of non-born-again Christians had done so.46
In a 2000 poll Barna discovered that evangelicals are five times less likely than adults generally to report that their "career comes first."47 And there is accumulating evidence that theologically conservative Protestant men who attend church regularly have lower rates of domestic abuse than others.48
Not surprisingly, this better behavior is closely correlated with higher religious activity. Those with a biblical worldview are almost twice as likely as other Christians to read the Bible each week.49 Nationwide, only 19 percent of adults attend Sunday school each week, but 33 percent of all born-again adults do. And the figure jumps to 60 percent for evangelicals.50 While only 17 percent of all adults attend a small group for prayer and Bible study each week, 30 percent of born-again Christians do. And 55 percent of all evangelicals do.51
Other pollsters have discovered a similar correlation between evangelical faith and religious activity. Christian Smith found that evangelicals were much more likely to attend church each week or share the gospel than other Christians.52 The same pattern emerged in a study in 2001 by the Pew Research Center.53
These statistics offer some substantial hope. People with a biblical worldview, and this category largely overlaps with that of evangelical, do exhibit better moral behavior at several points. We cannot be satisfied with studies that show that only 29 percent of all evangelicals gave a lot to help the poor and needy. But that is at least a lot better than the statistics for the non-religious, where only 9 percent do a lot to help the poor. When we can distinguish nominal Christians from deeply committed, theologically orthodox Christians, it is clear that genuine Christianity does lead to better behavior, at least in some areas.
Barna's findings on the different behavior of Christians with a biblical worldview underline the importance of theology. Biblical orthodoxy does matter. One important way to end the scandal of contemporary Christian behavior is to work and pray fervently for the growth of orthodox theological belief in our churches.
Barna reports one final finding that offers additional hope. He discovered that even though 91 percent of all born-again Christians lacked a biblical worldview, they were nonetheless open, even desirous, of spiritual growth. Eighty percent of all born-again Christians said that having a "deep, personal commitment to the Christian faith is a top priority for their future."54 And nine out of ten Christians of every stripe said that if their churches specified things they should personally do to grow spiritually, they would at least listen to the advice and follow most of the recommendations.55 That suggests a lot of openness to more solid biblical discipling.
Things are not quite as hopeless as they first appeared. Biblical faith makes a substantial (though not enough) difference in the lives of deeply committed Christians. Most nominal Christians seem open to spiritual growth.
More importantly, the gospel is true! The carpenter from Nazareth burst from the tomb and now reigns as the Lord of the universe. His promise to transform into his very own likeness all who truly believe in him still stands. The Holy Spirit is still alive and powerful today, radically remaking broken people who unconditionally open their hearts and lives to his mighty presence.
At any time in history, no matter how bad the current mess, no matter how unfaithful the contemporary church, God stands ready to keep his promises. God is eager to do the same mighty deeds today that he has done in the past. All we must do is trust and obey.
The Lord we claim to love and worship stands at the door and knocks. He longs to be truly invited in. We cannot invite only half of him. But if today we dare to embrace and surrender to the full biblical Christ, he will perform mighty deeds that transcend what we dare ask or imagine. He will turn our weeping into joy. He will end the scandal of blatant disobedience in the people who call on his name.
Ronald J. Sider is professor of theology, holistic ministry, and public policy and director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also president of Evangelicals for Social Action. This article is excerpted from his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker). Copyright 2004 by Ronald J. Sider. Used by permission of Baker Books.
1. Michael Horton, "Beyond Culture Wars," Modern Reformation (May-June 1993), p. 3.
2. Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion (Free Press, 2003), p. 257.
3. Ibid., p. 212.
4. Tim Stafford, "The Third Coming of George Barna," Christianity Today, August 8, 2002, p. 34.
5. Christianity Today, October 2003, p. 112.
6. George Barna, Think Like Jesus (Integrity, 2003), p. 40.
7. George Barna, "Family," 2000. Available from Barna Research Online, http://216.87.179/cgi-bin/pagecategory.asp?categoryid=20. See also George Barna and Mark Hatch, Boiling Point: It Only Takes One Degree (Regal, 2001), p. 42.
8. "The statistic has been quite consistent since the mid-90's." Barna and Hatch, Boiling Point, p. 42n29.
9. The Barna Group, The Barna Update, "Born Again Adults Less Likely to Co-Habit, Just As Likely to Divorce," August 6, 2001, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=95.
10. The Barna Group, The Barna Update, "Annual Study Reveals America is Spiritually Stagnant," March 5, 2001, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=84.
11. The Barna Group, Evangelical Christians, http://www.barna.org.
12. W. Bradford Wilcox, "Conservative Protestants and the Family," in A Public Faith: Evangelicals and Civic Engagment, ed. Michael Cromartie (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 63.
13. New York Times, May 21, 2001, A14.
14. John L. and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving Through 2001 (Empty Tomb, 2003), p. 12.
15. Ibid., p. 25.
16. The Barna Group, "Stewardship," http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=Topic&TopicID=36.
17. Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Robert Cleveland, and Bruce H. Webster Jr., U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-221, Income in the United States: 2002, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2003, available as PDF at http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-221.pdf.
18. Ronsvalle, State of Church Giving, p. 52.
19. Carol Bellamy, The State of the World's Children 2001 (UNICEF, 2003), p. 81.
20. New York Times, May 21, 2001, A14.
21. Lawrence K. Altman, "Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept," New York Times, March 10, 2004, A20.
22. The Barna Group, The Barna Update, "Born Again Adults Less Likely to Co-Habit, Just As Likely to Divorce," August 6, 2001, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=95.
23. John C. Green, "Religion and Politics in the 1990s: Confrontations and Coalitions," in Religion and American Politics: The 2000 Election in Context, ed. Mark Silk (Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College, Hartford, 2000), p. 21, available as PDF at http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/religame.pdf.
24. Ibid., p. 26.
25. Ibid.
26. Steve Gallagher, "Devastated by Internet Porn," Pure Life Ministries, December 15, 2000, http://www.purelifeministries.org/mensarticle1.htm.
27. George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli, The People's Religion (Macmillan, 1989), p. 188.
28. Personal conversation with Frank Gaebelein's daughter.
29. Bill McCartney with David Halbrook, Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference (Word, 1997).
30. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 170.
31. Michael Emerson, "Faith That Separates: Evangelicals and Black-White Race Relations," in A Public Faith (see note 6), p. 196.
32. Barna and Hatch, Boiling Point, p. 140.
33. Barna, Think Like Jesus, p. 23.
34. See Sally Morgenthaler's foreword to Jonny Baker, Doug Gay, and Jenny Brown, Alternative Worship: Resources from and for the Emerging Church (Baker, 2004).
35. See Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (InterVarsity, 1993), p. 775.
36. Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal (InterVarsity, 1979), p. 237.
37. See, for example, J. Edwin Orr, The Eager Feet: Evangelical Awakenings, 1790–1830 (Moody, 1975), especially pp. 191–200.
38. George H. Gallup Jr. and Timothy Jones, The Saints Among Us (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 1992).
39. Ibid., pp. 63–64.
40. Ibid., p. 41.
41. Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Univ. of Chicago Press, 199
, pp. 41–42.42. Pew Research Center, American Views on Religion, Politics and Public Policy (2001), pp. 2–3; see also somewhat parallel results in Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 51.
43. Pew Research Center, American Views on Religion, Politics and Public Policy (2001), part IV, p. 5.
44. Barna, Think Like Jesus, p. 23.
45. Ibid., p. 24.
46. Ibid., p. 28.
47. The research archive on "Evangelical Christians" at Here Barna reports that evangelicals are just as likely as the general population to be divorced. But in his 2002 report (State of the Church 2002, p. 94), Barna reported that evangelicals are "less likely to have experienced a divorce than any other of the faith segments." It is not clear how these different data fit together.
48. See W. Bradford Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004).
49. Barna, State of the Church 2002, p. 25.
50. George Barna, "Ministry Involvement," Online, 2001 (accessed March 11, 2001).
51. George Barna, Faith Commitment Online, Barna Research Group, 2001 (accessed March 11, 2001).
52. Smith, American Evangelicalism, pp. 34, 40.
53. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, American Views on Religion, Politics and Public Policy (Pew Research Center, 2001), part IV.
54. George Barna, Growing True Disciples (Issachar Resources, 2000), p. 32.
55. Ibid., p. 41.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
www.ChristianityToday.com
Copyright © 1994–2002 Christianity Today International
01/29/05
How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 12:29:55 PM
This article is obviously biased, in a rather nasty way;
nevertheless, it contains useful info.
R
Survival of the Slickest
How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message
By Chris Mooney
Issue Date: 12.2.02
It must take
guts to be a "young-Earth" creationist. After all, imagine rejecting
virtually all of modern science based on a literal interpretation of
Genesis. Imagine opening yourself up to ridicule by insisting that Adam
and Eve lived alongside the dinosaurs, Dinotopia-style, and that Noah
crammed brontosauruses onto the Ark -- necessary inferences if you think
the Bible is true and that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago.
Sure, these
views are way outside the scientiÞc mainstream (though polls suggest nearly
half of Americans may hold them). But young-Earth creationism is so rigid
in its adherence to religious doctrine that there's almost a kind of
perverse integrity to it.
Unfortunately,
it's hard to say the same for the much more polished -- and less openly
religious -- group of anti- evolutionists who have recently upstaged
young-Earthers in the public eye. These "Intelligent Design" (ID)
theorists, as they call themselves, are epitomized by Stephen C. Meyer, an
anti-Darwinian philosopher who made the following appeal to The American
Prospect: "People with liberal credentials ought to understand what we're
up against. This is an entrenched establishment."
ID theorists
posit that living things, due to their organizational complexity and
magniÞcent design, simply must be the creations of some form of
intelligence. Where evolutionary biologists see species evolving through a
blind process of natural selection acting over millions of years, ID
theorists assert that life as we know it simply could not have arisen in
such a manner. Furthermore, they claim that this is a scientiÞc
observation. ID advocates don't always articulate precisely what sort of
intelligence they think should stand in lieu of evolution on textbook
pages, but God -- defined in a very nebulous way -- generally outpolls
extraterrestrials as the leading candidate.
ID's home base
is the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's conservative Discovery
Institute. Meyer directs the center; former Reagan adviser Bruce Chapman
heads the larger institute, with input from the Christian supply-sider and
former American Spectator owner George Gilder (also a Discovery senior
fellow). From this perch, the ID crowd has pushed a "teach the
controversy" approach to evolution that closely inþuenced the Ohio State
Board of Education's recently proposed science standards, which would
require students to learn how scientists "continue to investigate and
critically analyze" aspects of Darwin's theory.
This language
may seem innocuous enough, but it clearly allows teachers room to bring up
ID if they choose. Moreover, the proposal is insidious because the
standards don't ask for the critical analysis of any other bedrock
scientiÞc theories, such as plate tectonics or quantum mechanics. Unless
there's a shift in the political winds, however, Ohio will Þnalize the
troubling new standards in December.
If that happens,
it won't be a surprise to Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, a
leading Darwin defender. The Discovery Institute, Miller says, has been
"the most effective group in the last Þve years in advancing the
anti-evolution agenda." It awards fellowships, publishes books, holds
conferences and gets into speciÞc local school-board Þghts, as in Ohio.
Yet, to borrow language from the Book of Proverbs (via Inherit the Wind),
the Center for Science and Culture may be troubling its own house. By
rejecting a crucial tenet of modern science, ID would seem inimical to
other Discovery Institute initiatives with a large scientiÞc and
technological component, such as a regional transportation project for the
PaciÞc Northwest called "Cascadia."
"Gilder and the
Discovery Institute more generally embody the intellectual crisis of a
certain strain of contemporary conservatism," explains Nick Gillespie,
editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason. Though they have "one
foot in the Enlightenment," Gillespie says, they're unwilling to cop to the
conclusion that "God is dead, or, same thing, no longer the center of the
universe."
Granted, Meyer
would say that it's unfair to discredit ID theorists by citing their
religious motives rather than by refuting their arguments. "Darwinian
theory has grave evidential problems, and in response to that we're getting
a lot of this line of questioning," he complains. But the motives of one of
Discovery's other key fellow -- Jonathan Wells, a UniÞcation Church member
who says that he decided to "devote my life to destroying Darwinism" at
the behest of the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon -- suggest a clear link between at
least one religious sect and ID.
The history of
ID at the Discovery Institute also shows the strong inþuence of some more
mainstream religions. Darwin on Trial author Philip Johnson, a retired
University of California, Berkeley law professor and born-again Christian,
helped prompt the founding of the Center for Science and Culture with a
1995 conference titled "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of
Culture." Until this August, the center was called the Center for the
Renewal of Science and Culture, with obvious culture-war connotations. The
bulk of its roughly $1-million-a-year funding comes from evangelical
Christian foundations including Fieldstead & Co., whose owner, Howard F.
Ahmanson Jr., has long-standing ties to the theocratic Christian
Reconstructionist movement.
The starkest
evidence yet of the center's religious bent, however, is its audience.
Consider Johnson's speaking schedule for the fall of 2002: Every event was
set to take place at a church or was otherwise religiously related. Even
an apparent exception -- Johnson's appearance at Texas' Foundation for
Thought and Ethics in late November -- proves the rule. The foundation
produces pro-ID school textbooks such as Of Pandas and People. Its
academic editor is William Dembski, a Discovery fellow and author of The
Design Inference, who has written, "Christ transforms the world and
pervades the scientist's domain of inquiry."
In fact, the
textbook project, like Ohio, represents a turnaround for Discovery. In the
early- and mid-1990s, Dembski and Johnson disdained the creationist
strategy of trying to slip their ideas into the public schools. As
Dembski wrote in 1996, intelligent-design theorists should "aim to convince
the intellectual elite and let the school curricula take care of
themselves." But now that Discovery has gone after young minds, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science has fought back with a
resolution stating, "The ID movement has failed to offer credible
scientiÞc evidence to support their claim that ID undermines the currently
scientiÞcally accepted theory of evolution."
Indeed,
according to Lawrence Krauss, a Case Western Reserve University physicist
who has contested Meyer and others during the Ohio debates, a recent survey
of more than 10 million science articles published in the past 12 years
shows just 88 references to "intelligent design," the vast bulk of which
appear in engineering journals. None reported favorably on ID theory,
according to Krauss.
Meyer's response
to this is predictable: crying persecution. "We are producing scientiÞc
articles. The question is whether or not peer-reviewed journals that are
Darwinian in perspective would accept them under any circumstances," he
says, adding that Discovery will soon® start publishing its own journals.
This wasn't how
the institute originally planned to work, notes Barbara Forrest, a
philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University who has co-authored a
forthcoming book on the ID movement. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The
Wedge of Intelligent Design, to be published next year, cites a widely
circulated 1998 internal memo laying out Discovery's ambitious plan to
"drive a wedge" into the heart of "scientiÞc materialism," thereby
divorcing science from its purely observational and naturalistic
methodology and reversing the deleterious effects of evolution on Western
culture. (Meyer complains that the document "was stolen from our ofÞces
and placed on the Web without permission.") Forrest notes that a central
item on this agenda -- proving intelligent design by conducting actual
scientiÞc research -- has clearly not been achieved.
If ID theorists
are now behaving more like old-school creationists -- giving up on the
mainstream, targeting schools and students -- creationists may beneÞt by
the comparison. After all, if you gave young-Earthers a classroom, they
would teach something: dinosaurs on the Ark, how the biblical þood laid
down the entire fossil record and so on. ID theorists, on the other hand,
critique evolution but have few ideas with which to replace it. They have
no ofÞcial stance on the age of the earth, much less on whom the "designer"
is. "A historical narrative will start to þow out of this as we start to
apply design detection to the history of life," asserts Meyer. No doubt
studious Ohio high schoolers will help speed the process along.
Chris Mooney
nevertheless, it contains useful info.
R
Survival of the Slickest
How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message
By Chris Mooney
Issue Date: 12.2.02
It must take
guts to be a "young-Earth" creationist. After all, imagine rejecting
virtually all of modern science based on a literal interpretation of
Genesis. Imagine opening yourself up to ridicule by insisting that Adam
and Eve lived alongside the dinosaurs, Dinotopia-style, and that Noah
crammed brontosauruses onto the Ark -- necessary inferences if you think
the Bible is true and that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago.
Sure, these
views are way outside the scientiÞc mainstream (though polls suggest nearly
half of Americans may hold them). But young-Earth creationism is so rigid
in its adherence to religious doctrine that there's almost a kind of
perverse integrity to it.
Unfortunately,
it's hard to say the same for the much more polished -- and less openly
religious -- group of anti- evolutionists who have recently upstaged
young-Earthers in the public eye. These "Intelligent Design" (ID)
theorists, as they call themselves, are epitomized by Stephen C. Meyer, an
anti-Darwinian philosopher who made the following appeal to The American
Prospect: "People with liberal credentials ought to understand what we're
up against. This is an entrenched establishment."
ID theorists
posit that living things, due to their organizational complexity and
magniÞcent design, simply must be the creations of some form of
intelligence. Where evolutionary biologists see species evolving through a
blind process of natural selection acting over millions of years, ID
theorists assert that life as we know it simply could not have arisen in
such a manner. Furthermore, they claim that this is a scientiÞc
observation. ID advocates don't always articulate precisely what sort of
intelligence they think should stand in lieu of evolution on textbook
pages, but God -- defined in a very nebulous way -- generally outpolls
extraterrestrials as the leading candidate.
ID's home base
is the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's conservative Discovery
Institute. Meyer directs the center; former Reagan adviser Bruce Chapman
heads the larger institute, with input from the Christian supply-sider and
former American Spectator owner George Gilder (also a Discovery senior
fellow). From this perch, the ID crowd has pushed a "teach the
controversy" approach to evolution that closely inþuenced the Ohio State
Board of Education's recently proposed science standards, which would
require students to learn how scientists "continue to investigate and
critically analyze" aspects of Darwin's theory.
This language
may seem innocuous enough, but it clearly allows teachers room to bring up
ID if they choose. Moreover, the proposal is insidious because the
standards don't ask for the critical analysis of any other bedrock
scientiÞc theories, such as plate tectonics or quantum mechanics. Unless
there's a shift in the political winds, however, Ohio will Þnalize the
troubling new standards in December.
If that happens,
it won't be a surprise to Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, a
leading Darwin defender. The Discovery Institute, Miller says, has been
"the most effective group in the last Þve years in advancing the
anti-evolution agenda." It awards fellowships, publishes books, holds
conferences and gets into speciÞc local school-board Þghts, as in Ohio.
Yet, to borrow language from the Book of Proverbs (via Inherit the Wind),
the Center for Science and Culture may be troubling its own house. By
rejecting a crucial tenet of modern science, ID would seem inimical to
other Discovery Institute initiatives with a large scientiÞc and
technological component, such as a regional transportation project for the
PaciÞc Northwest called "Cascadia."
"Gilder and the
Discovery Institute more generally embody the intellectual crisis of a
certain strain of contemporary conservatism," explains Nick Gillespie,
editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason. Though they have "one
foot in the Enlightenment," Gillespie says, they're unwilling to cop to the
conclusion that "God is dead, or, same thing, no longer the center of the
universe."
Granted, Meyer
would say that it's unfair to discredit ID theorists by citing their
religious motives rather than by refuting their arguments. "Darwinian
theory has grave evidential problems, and in response to that we're getting
a lot of this line of questioning," he complains. But the motives of one of
Discovery's other key fellow -- Jonathan Wells, a UniÞcation Church member
who says that he decided to "devote my life to destroying Darwinism" at
the behest of the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon -- suggest a clear link between at
least one religious sect and ID.
The history of
ID at the Discovery Institute also shows the strong inþuence of some more
mainstream religions. Darwin on Trial author Philip Johnson, a retired
University of California, Berkeley law professor and born-again Christian,
helped prompt the founding of the Center for Science and Culture with a
1995 conference titled "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of
Culture." Until this August, the center was called the Center for the
Renewal of Science and Culture, with obvious culture-war connotations. The
bulk of its roughly $1-million-a-year funding comes from evangelical
Christian foundations including Fieldstead & Co., whose owner, Howard F.
Ahmanson Jr., has long-standing ties to the theocratic Christian
Reconstructionist movement.
The starkest
evidence yet of the center's religious bent, however, is its audience.
Consider Johnson's speaking schedule for the fall of 2002: Every event was
set to take place at a church or was otherwise religiously related. Even
an apparent exception -- Johnson's appearance at Texas' Foundation for
Thought and Ethics in late November -- proves the rule. The foundation
produces pro-ID school textbooks such as Of Pandas and People. Its
academic editor is William Dembski, a Discovery fellow and author of The
Design Inference, who has written, "Christ transforms the world and
pervades the scientist's domain of inquiry."
In fact, the
textbook project, like Ohio, represents a turnaround for Discovery. In the
early- and mid-1990s, Dembski and Johnson disdained the creationist
strategy of trying to slip their ideas into the public schools. As
Dembski wrote in 1996, intelligent-design theorists should "aim to convince
the intellectual elite and let the school curricula take care of
themselves." But now that Discovery has gone after young minds, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science has fought back with a
resolution stating, "The ID movement has failed to offer credible
scientiÞc evidence to support their claim that ID undermines the currently
scientiÞcally accepted theory of evolution."
Indeed,
according to Lawrence Krauss, a Case Western Reserve University physicist
who has contested Meyer and others during the Ohio debates, a recent survey
of more than 10 million science articles published in the past 12 years
shows just 88 references to "intelligent design," the vast bulk of which
appear in engineering journals. None reported favorably on ID theory,
according to Krauss.
Meyer's response
to this is predictable: crying persecution. "We are producing scientiÞc
articles. The question is whether or not peer-reviewed journals that are
Darwinian in perspective would accept them under any circumstances," he
says, adding that Discovery will soon® start publishing its own journals.
This wasn't how
the institute originally planned to work, notes Barbara Forrest, a
philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University who has co-authored a
forthcoming book on the ID movement. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The
Wedge of Intelligent Design, to be published next year, cites a widely
circulated 1998 internal memo laying out Discovery's ambitious plan to
"drive a wedge" into the heart of "scientiÞc materialism," thereby
divorcing science from its purely observational and naturalistic
methodology and reversing the deleterious effects of evolution on Western
culture. (Meyer complains that the document "was stolen from our ofÞces
and placed on the Web without permission.") Forrest notes that a central
item on this agenda -- proving intelligent design by conducting actual
scientiÞc research -- has clearly not been achieved.
If ID theorists
are now behaving more like old-school creationists -- giving up on the
mainstream, targeting schools and students -- creationists may beneÞt by
the comparison. After all, if you gave young-Earthers a classroom, they
would teach something: dinosaurs on the Ark, how the biblical þood laid
down the entire fossil record and so on. ID theorists, on the other hand,
critique evolution but have few ideas with which to replace it. They have
no ofÞcial stance on the age of the earth, much less on whom the "designer"
is. "A historical narrative will start to þow out of this as we start to
apply design detection to the history of life," asserts Meyer. No doubt
studious Ohio high schoolers will help speed the process along.
Chris Mooney
I copy below one of my bulls on IDT®. My colleague Prof Nield has
remorselessly nailed multiple dishonesties - see attached - and I a few
too (also attached) in Creationism® and less often in IDT.
My inference is that IDT gets heavy funding from the "creationist"
fanatics, mainly via Jonathan Wells. Quasi-coordinator Philip Johnson is
in my direct experience evasive & nasty.
=====
Some allies of creationism® have complained to me that I've been
devoting too much time to cricising that sect. I take this compliment
kindly, and am suggesting we redouble our efforts to extirpate
creationism®.
IDT is more subtle, but I present some evidence that this tendency
too is not straight.
CREATIONISM & IDT
L R B Mann
Oct 2003; rev Jan 2005
Can you imagine what offence is achieved on scientists who are
Christians by the persistent lying of "creationism"? The fanatics make
aggressive insolent public attacks on evolution, insisting on the moronic,
indeed demonic axiom " EITHER the book of scripture OR the book of
nature". Indeed these demonic agents promulgate fanatically the idea that
to read the book of nature honestly is to contradict, even to insult, the
book of scripture. Devout scholars such as John Morton are in effect
called liars or fools for their reading the book of nature; and the
fanatics who do so misrepresent science with a persistent wickedness that
is particularly offensive to one brought up in science.
This sectarian tendency, intellectually headquartered near
Disneyland and bankrolled out of (so far as I've traced it) Lubbock, Tex.,
is more active in NZ than ever; DayStar® carried an advertorial 'interview'
of which the leading fanatic then has the cheek to complain in the next
issue; a large colour advertisement is placed near the advertorial
interview. This is a form of corruption I've seen before with other
editors.
IDT is an ally of Creationism®, franchised into NZ by Focus on the
Family.
IDT is only a small part of natl theol, and is being blown far out
of proportion by huge funding linked quietly to "creationist" fanatics thru
Johnson & Wells. It relies basically on lack of knowledge - e.g lack of
any current explanation how the bacterial flagellum could have evolved in a
Darwinian, Steve Jones fashion. This is 'God of the gaps' reasoning,
dangerous because the gap may be filled tomorrow by new facts &/or
reasoning. Why not reason more directly from the macroscopic observables
of ecology? A child can see, without education or instruments, that
ecology is wonderfully planned. I believe microstructures needing
instruments & theory to imagine - e.g the bacterial flagellum, or a DNA
secondary structure - are inferior as main examples of Paley timepieces.
They're not wrong, but they are to a degree obscurantist.
At an early age Morton's "claret cameo" should be intelligible; all
4 causes are needed in biology, not just the 2 with which Dawkins tries to
make out biology can be explained.
It is murky - annoyingly, and I suppose deliberately - but we
have to read the picture as best we can. As H Turner said, creationism is
a waste of time; and I would add that IDT is at best a drag, pedantically
OK but not worth much time. I infer from the glimpses that have come my
way that they're connected, organisationally and to a degree intellectually
thru e.g Wells, to creationism®.
Meanwhile, Sheldrake & Morton, spearhead of the mainstream thrust
thru Temple, are ignored by IDT entrepreneurs.
The IDT site www.iscid.org controllers Sparacio & Dembski have
repeatedly refused to allow me to contribute criticisms. Here is an
example.
==========
"Creationism" is a significant cross-current within Christianity,
distracting efforts from real issues. And it presents to ignorant, lazy
or dishonest outsiders a very misleading image of the logic & honesty of
Christians. A target is thus created, which is nothing better than a
caricature, for atheists to mock.
IDT is essentially Paley 1802 - fine as far as it goes. Broom's
book is the best IDT I know of - and fully acknowledging not only a
billions-of-years biosphere but also evolution. The IDT 'wedge' however
has become to some extent a front for "creationism". Don Nield has argued,
and I agree, that IDT is trying to drive in its wedge at the wrong place.
Full 28 y ago a leading local statistician (later prof.), George
Seber, tried to get me to debate publicly against Duane Gish. The notion
was in some ways attractive, not least because we're both Berkeley Ph.D
biochemists; but I declined, saying I would not dignify his cause by
sharing a stage with him. This reticence, uncharacteristic for me, I have
never regretted.
Much more recently, I gave a talk on Creationism to our local
Christian Academics Group. In moving the vote of thanks, George insisted
on ignoring my main point by expressing hope that there will be tolerance
of Creationism alongside the mainstream position which I had advocated.
My own position is similar to that of our leading emeritus zoology
prof John Morton (see his 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972). Although
generally critical of the Vatican, I think its doctrine on evolution is
hard to fault, and I credit it for the fact that Rome has had little
trouble regarding evolution. On this issue if no others, general Christian
doctrine should learn from the Vatican.
Around 2 decade ago Creationists tried to tamper with school book
holdings in Hamilton N.Z. I have not learned whether this attempt
persisted.
In 1983 I photographed in the Science Museum, Kensington, an
exhibit which asserted the axiom that *either* organisms have evolved
*or* God has created them. This furphy, not normally so clearly
enunciated, seems to me to be not only the fundamental error of the
Creationist® fanaticism but also typical in its illogic of most if not all
fundamentalisms. I suggest the racket common to them is the requirement of
assent to a proposition which is not subtly but flagrantly false. This is
not ancillary or accidental: I believe it is essential, in that once a
person has overtly signalled switching-off of God-given reason in favour of
a pointedly false slogan from the sect leader(s), obedience can be
thereafter required much more generally. This is in the nature of
totalitarian systems' social psychology. "The Slavs are sub-human" is a
prototypical modern example of a blatantly false slogan which you had to
assent to overtly if you were to attain the temporary social security of
the National Socialist Party. "The first 3 chapters of the Bible, plus the
Noah story, must be taken literally" is similar mischief. I don't see why
this racket is not more widely & vigorously condemned. Those who propound
it do not in fact advocate that other parts of the Bible be read literally;
Broom & I point to John the Baptist's hailing "the Lamb of God" - why do
fundamentalists not try to insist that Christ assumed ovine form for that
occasion on the banks of the Jordan?
As a scientist active in natural theology, I support the general
gist of IDT as such but fear that it functions on the edge of a
"creationist" whirlpool.
===========
In defence of the persistent lying of creationism®, I've received
impassioned slogans 'Jesus died for them too', to which I replied "yes -
and for Himmler & Stalin also". A senior Presbyterian minister, Rev Bruce
Nicholls, defends the deceivers by claiming they're not proven liars. Prof
Don Nield has shown in detail that hevi-doodi creationist J Wells has
falsified standard biology texbooks in order to create straw men to knock
down. The version of creation presented by main aggressive creationists H
Morris, D Gish, J Sarfati, Wells, etc relies on falsifying evidence and on
misinterpreting facts grossly, as well as wholesale ignoring of most facts
(because they imply a 10^9 y evolution).
The real issue of the day is how to convert the billions who have
never heard the Good News, as well as the approx 1 billion overdeveloped
who have gone for "Enlightenment"®, Noo Eege, or just nihilism.
Christianity has much to offer the children of atheism & agnosticism,
starting for many educated in science by a careful exposition of all 4
Causes, a review of facts on evolution, and an honest presentation of
natural theology as in Temple, Hardy, Morton & Sheldrake. The USA sects
I've been criticising do little or nothing to meet these needs. Their
conduct is variously devious, dishonest and mind-buggering. They are
distracting lay folk away from what science has to tell them. I'd be
grateful if the USA would cease to export these prdkts - whether deemed
This article was published in the NewZealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth"by
Jonathan Wells
Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science,University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland
All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Iconsof Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolutionis Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000,if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher aboutevolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.
The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (seethe document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life todestroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotionaldescription of which reads:
'In this shocking book,Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in onscientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high schooltextbooks – and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellowbiologists.
The best known "icons of evolution" – from pictures of apes evolvinginto humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on treetrunks – are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution thatare simply untrue.
These icons of evolutionappear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature isfull of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that withoutthese icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowinglymisinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'
With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of thisarticle correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these indetail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promotersof Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominancein the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censordissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should bedisqualified from receiving public funds.
The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of tenrecent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given afailing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests thatowners of textbooks can insert in their books.
There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy,and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of theauthors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accuratelypresented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and hehas put his own particular spin on those facts.
I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers(the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light ofboth what Wells has written and what is actually written in theintroductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely NeilA. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology:Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.
The questions and my answers are:
Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows howlife's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth –- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those inthe experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model wasmade up of … the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancientworld. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actualatmosphere of the early Earth … Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Ureyexperiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including amixture having a very low concentration of O2. Abiotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models,though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acidscommonly found in organisms … The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth,or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clearthat substantial progress has been made.
Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in whichall major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formedinstead of branching from a common ancestor –- thus contradictingthe evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion",which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. Theso-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea ofpunctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of lifeconcept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is notrefuted.
Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry,then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry –- acircular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting fromcommon ancestry is known as homology … Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying thatevolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures thatfunctioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whethersimilarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and thismeans that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.
Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos asevidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known forover a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their earlystages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gillpouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrateembryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identifyanatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structuresare extensively modified in different ways during later development of theorganisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descentwith modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that thedevelopment of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of theevolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists havebeen led astray by their theoretical assumptions.
Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds –- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered theancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch ofthe avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modernbirds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organismscannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.
Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged ontree trunks as evidence for natural selection –- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normallyrest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wellsrefers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authorityon the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of thescientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanismin moths.
Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finchesduring a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection –- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended,and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant justas an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches trackchanges in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes incharacteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-termchanges in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breedingstocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers havepublished more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in thewild.
Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution –- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutantscannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is notevidence for evolution per se.
Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justifymaterialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mereaccident –- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors wereor what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says:"Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a seriesof steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homosapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of thehuman family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across thepage. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with manysplinter groups having traveled down dead ends… " Wells has notpresented an accurate account of what is now known about humanevolution.
Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is ascientific fact –- even though many of its claims are based onmisrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. Theclaims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on amisrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM soas to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.
Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.
The writer is grateful to DrRobert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.
Comments on 'The Search for the Origin of Life' (5 videotapes by John Mackay for 'Creation Research, 36 Enterprise St, Birken Heads, Auckland N.Z.')
Robert Mann
sometime Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry
University of Auckland
The best feature of these lectures is the persistent theme that 'Outside Information' is required for the assembling of the various biological systems considered. This is a very important, generally neglected point, a potent but little-used aspect of the Argument from Design.
However, I find the following types of serious fault in Mackay's lecturing:
* unreliable on many scientific facts
• mis-attributes or mis-states fact or argument, and then knocks it down
• failure to define concepts, notably 'complication', upon which he relies
• illogical at several crucial stages.
I give a few examples of each category of fault. Others could be listed, but these suffice to rule out the tapes from their apparently intended use.
1. Errors of Scientific Fact
"Alanine is the simplest amino acid"
Ala is in fact the simplest chiral a'a, but of course Gly is the simplest a'a.
"Conversion of L-a'as to 50-50 L-D mixtures [racemisation] of amino acids occurs "as soon as you are as dead as you can get"; or anyway racemisation is about 10% complete by the time a tin of sardines reaches you.
This is far from true. Racemisation is, under ordinary conditions, many orders of magnitude slower; it has even been considered as a basis for dating sub-fossils.
Since sugars have carbon chains, they can come as RH or LH.
This is rubbish. Many compounds with carbon chains are incapable of LH or RH forms as they lack the required dissymmetry.
There are no abiotic chiral syntheses.
This has been false for some decades. Handedness (chirality) is created - strictly speaking, amplified - daily in organic chemical labs around the world.
Microsoft makes computers.
This may seem a minor error, and in some ways it is; but it suggests a lack of care for detail, as does the phrase "an interesting phenomena". It does not sound like a good scholar speaking, does it?
Ribosenucleic acid.
Same comment; and one must add that this name, though not strictly incorrect, has not been conventionally used for 4 decades. Mackay appears to have little familiarity with the molecular biology upon which he relies so heavily (and, as I will argue, mistakenly).
2. Mis-attribution
Miller is accused, by paraphrase, of having claimed creation of life.
This is a seriously misleading falsehood. If Miller has ever uttered anything like this, I'm unaware of it (and I've been alongside this field of chemistry for 4 decades, tho' never working in it myself).
The offence is compounded by Mackay's repeatedly saying "Mr Miller" in a way which is purportedly respectful but is actually the opposite because a correct title would of course be Dr or Prof.
Evolutionists say Matter + Energy + Time = Life
This may be a fair paraphrase, but only that. Like so much of Mackay's talk, it is slang.
At this rate I have to wonder, does Crick propound panspermia, and if so are spaceships involved in his version of it? No Crick lover, I nevertheless doubt Mackay's attributions here, and would be imprudent to trust Mackay on them.
3 Failure to Define Concepts
RNA is more complicated than protein . . . DNA is too complicated to have been the primal macromolecule . . . the information in RNA is very much less than the information in DNA.
I do not know on what definitions of information and complication these statements could be true. Insofar as I can ascribe any meaning to them, I consider them false. To talk like this at teenagers is, at best, vague & confusing. That onto which they may appear to cotton is not sufficiently clear concepts to constitute learning. It is, rather, disguised indoctrination.
4 Illogic
The lectures contain several inconclusive arguments presented with dogmatic confidence as if to preclude discussion.
Suppose Miller had claimed to create life, and suppose further that he had in fact not done so; none of that bears on whether real life did in fact evolve. To knock down the "Miller created life" straw man is almost irrelevant if done to imply that life could not have arisen thru a series of natural chemical elaborations. A sneaky dishonesty is in evidence - as all too often with "creation science".
The existence of present-day 'editing' (error correction) in NA syntheses entails impossibility of mutation.
This is just a non sequitur - so silly as to be hard to follow. How desperate do you have to be to offer argument this junky ?
DNA is what makes you you.
This Dawkinsism is stated by Mackay as if true!!
Conclusion
In general I believe that the attempt to refute evolution by discussing molecular biology is doomed. The discussion must proceed on a different level. It's back to Paley, friends!
And I cannot miss this opportunity to point out that evolution is not per se anti-God or anti-religion. Such scientist Christians as J E Morton have pointed out that to describe how organisms evolved, using our God-given senses, brings no conflict with any sensible reading of Scripture. The Vatican is, on this matter, correct.
'Creationism' is a tiresome diversion, and Mackay illustrates how "creation science" is junk.
I conclude that the tapes are unfit for educational use (except as an interesting exhibit of "creation science" for mature scholars studying this wonky phenomenon). I oppose promulgation of these tapes.
****
remorselessly nailed multiple dishonesties - see attached - and I a few
too (also attached) in Creationism® and less often in IDT.
My inference is that IDT gets heavy funding from the "creationist"
fanatics, mainly via Jonathan Wells. Quasi-coordinator Philip Johnson is
in my direct experience evasive & nasty.
=====
Some allies of creationism® have complained to me that I've been
devoting too much time to cricising that sect. I take this compliment
kindly, and am suggesting we redouble our efforts to extirpate
creationism®.
IDT is more subtle, but I present some evidence that this tendency
too is not straight.
CREATIONISM & IDT
L R B Mann
Oct 2003; rev Jan 2005
Can you imagine what offence is achieved on scientists who are
Christians by the persistent lying of "creationism"? The fanatics make
aggressive insolent public attacks on evolution, insisting on the moronic,
indeed demonic axiom " EITHER the book of scripture OR the book of
nature". Indeed these demonic agents promulgate fanatically the idea that
to read the book of nature honestly is to contradict, even to insult, the
book of scripture. Devout scholars such as John Morton are in effect
called liars or fools for their reading the book of nature; and the
fanatics who do so misrepresent science with a persistent wickedness that
is particularly offensive to one brought up in science.
This sectarian tendency, intellectually headquartered near
Disneyland and bankrolled out of (so far as I've traced it) Lubbock, Tex.,
is more active in NZ than ever; DayStar® carried an advertorial 'interview'
of which the leading fanatic then has the cheek to complain in the next
issue; a large colour advertisement is placed near the advertorial
interview. This is a form of corruption I've seen before with other
editors.
IDT is an ally of Creationism®, franchised into NZ by Focus on the
Family.
IDT is only a small part of natl theol, and is being blown far out
of proportion by huge funding linked quietly to "creationist" fanatics thru
Johnson & Wells. It relies basically on lack of knowledge - e.g lack of
any current explanation how the bacterial flagellum could have evolved in a
Darwinian, Steve Jones fashion. This is 'God of the gaps' reasoning,
dangerous because the gap may be filled tomorrow by new facts &/or
reasoning. Why not reason more directly from the macroscopic observables
of ecology? A child can see, without education or instruments, that
ecology is wonderfully planned. I believe microstructures needing
instruments & theory to imagine - e.g the bacterial flagellum, or a DNA
secondary structure - are inferior as main examples of Paley timepieces.
They're not wrong, but they are to a degree obscurantist.
At an early age Morton's "claret cameo" should be intelligible; all
4 causes are needed in biology, not just the 2 with which Dawkins tries to
make out biology can be explained.
It is murky - annoyingly, and I suppose deliberately - but we
have to read the picture as best we can. As H Turner said, creationism is
a waste of time; and I would add that IDT is at best a drag, pedantically
OK but not worth much time. I infer from the glimpses that have come my
way that they're connected, organisationally and to a degree intellectually
thru e.g Wells, to creationism®.
Meanwhile, Sheldrake & Morton, spearhead of the mainstream thrust
thru Temple, are ignored by IDT entrepreneurs.
The IDT site www.iscid.org controllers Sparacio & Dembski have
repeatedly refused to allow me to contribute criticisms. Here is an
example.
==========
"Creationism" is a significant cross-current within Christianity,
distracting efforts from real issues. And it presents to ignorant, lazy
or dishonest outsiders a very misleading image of the logic & honesty of
Christians. A target is thus created, which is nothing better than a
caricature, for atheists to mock.
IDT is essentially Paley 1802 - fine as far as it goes. Broom's
book is the best IDT I know of - and fully acknowledging not only a
billions-of-years biosphere but also evolution. The IDT 'wedge' however
has become to some extent a front for "creationism". Don Nield has argued,
and I agree, that IDT is trying to drive in its wedge at the wrong place.
Full 28 y ago a leading local statistician (later prof.), George
Seber, tried to get me to debate publicly against Duane Gish. The notion
was in some ways attractive, not least because we're both Berkeley Ph.D
biochemists; but I declined, saying I would not dignify his cause by
sharing a stage with him. This reticence, uncharacteristic for me, I have
never regretted.
Much more recently, I gave a talk on Creationism to our local
Christian Academics Group. In moving the vote of thanks, George insisted
on ignoring my main point by expressing hope that there will be tolerance
of Creationism alongside the mainstream position which I had advocated.
My own position is similar to that of our leading emeritus zoology
prof John Morton (see his 'Man, Science and God', Collins 1972). Although
generally critical of the Vatican, I think its doctrine on evolution is
hard to fault, and I credit it for the fact that Rome has had little
trouble regarding evolution. On this issue if no others, general Christian
doctrine should learn from the Vatican.
Around 2 decade ago Creationists tried to tamper with school book
holdings in Hamilton N.Z. I have not learned whether this attempt
persisted.
In 1983 I photographed in the Science Museum, Kensington, an
exhibit which asserted the axiom that *either* organisms have evolved
*or* God has created them. This furphy, not normally so clearly
enunciated, seems to me to be not only the fundamental error of the
Creationist® fanaticism but also typical in its illogic of most if not all
fundamentalisms. I suggest the racket common to them is the requirement of
assent to a proposition which is not subtly but flagrantly false. This is
not ancillary or accidental: I believe it is essential, in that once a
person has overtly signalled switching-off of God-given reason in favour of
a pointedly false slogan from the sect leader(s), obedience can be
thereafter required much more generally. This is in the nature of
totalitarian systems' social psychology. "The Slavs are sub-human" is a
prototypical modern example of a blatantly false slogan which you had to
assent to overtly if you were to attain the temporary social security of
the National Socialist Party. "The first 3 chapters of the Bible, plus the
Noah story, must be taken literally" is similar mischief. I don't see why
this racket is not more widely & vigorously condemned. Those who propound
it do not in fact advocate that other parts of the Bible be read literally;
Broom & I point to John the Baptist's hailing "the Lamb of God" - why do
fundamentalists not try to insist that Christ assumed ovine form for that
occasion on the banks of the Jordan?
As a scientist active in natural theology, I support the general
gist of IDT as such but fear that it functions on the edge of a
"creationist" whirlpool.
===========
In defence of the persistent lying of creationism®, I've received
impassioned slogans 'Jesus died for them too', to which I replied "yes -
and for Himmler & Stalin also". A senior Presbyterian minister, Rev Bruce
Nicholls, defends the deceivers by claiming they're not proven liars. Prof
Don Nield has shown in detail that hevi-doodi creationist J Wells has
falsified standard biology texbooks in order to create straw men to knock
down. The version of creation presented by main aggressive creationists H
Morris, D Gish, J Sarfati, Wells, etc relies on falsifying evidence and on
misinterpreting facts grossly, as well as wholesale ignoring of most facts
(because they imply a 10^9 y evolution).
The real issue of the day is how to convert the billions who have
never heard the Good News, as well as the approx 1 billion overdeveloped
who have gone for "Enlightenment"®, Noo Eege, or just nihilism.
Christianity has much to offer the children of atheism & agnosticism,
starting for many educated in science by a careful exposition of all 4
Causes, a review of facts on evolution, and an honest presentation of
natural theology as in Temple, Hardy, Morton & Sheldrake. The USA sects
I've been criticising do little or nothing to meet these needs. Their
conduct is variously devious, dishonest and mind-buggering. They are
distracting lay folk away from what science has to tell them. I'd be
grateful if the USA would cease to export these prdkts - whether deemed
This article was published in the NewZealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth"by
Jonathan Wells
Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science,University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland
All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Iconsof Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolutionis Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000,if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher aboutevolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.
The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (seethe document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life todestroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotionaldescription of which reads:
'In this shocking book,Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in onscientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high schooltextbooks – and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellowbiologists.
The best known "icons of evolution" – from pictures of apes evolvinginto humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on treetrunks – are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution thatare simply untrue.
These icons of evolutionappear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature isfull of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that withoutthese icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowinglymisinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'
With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of thisarticle correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these indetail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promotersof Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominancein the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censordissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should bedisqualified from receiving public funds.
The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of tenrecent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given afailing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests thatowners of textbooks can insert in their books.
There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy,and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of theauthors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accuratelypresented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and hehas put his own particular spin on those facts.
I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers(the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light ofboth what Wells has written and what is actually written in theintroductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely NeilA. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology:Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.
The questions and my answers are:
Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows howlife's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth –- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those inthe experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model wasmade up of … the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancientworld. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actualatmosphere of the early Earth … Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Ureyexperiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including amixture having a very low concentration of O2. Abiotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models,though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acidscommonly found in organisms … The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth,or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clearthat substantial progress has been made.
Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in whichall major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formedinstead of branching from a common ancestor –- thus contradictingthe evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion",which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. Theso-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea ofpunctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of lifeconcept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is notrefuted.
Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry,then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry –- acircular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting fromcommon ancestry is known as homology … Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying thatevolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures thatfunctioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whethersimilarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and thismeans that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.
Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos asevidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known forover a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their earlystages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gillpouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrateembryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identifyanatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structuresare extensively modified in different ways during later development of theorganisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descentwith modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that thedevelopment of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of theevolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists havebeen led astray by their theoretical assumptions.
Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds –- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered theancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch ofthe avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modernbirds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organismscannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.
Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged ontree trunks as evidence for natural selection –- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normallyrest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wellsrefers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authorityon the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of thescientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanismin moths.
Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finchesduring a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection –- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended,and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant justas an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches trackchanges in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes incharacteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-termchanges in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breedingstocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers havepublished more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in thewild.
Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution –- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutantscannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is notevidence for evolution per se.
Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justifymaterialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mereaccident –- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors wereor what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says:"Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a seriesof steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homosapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of thehuman family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across thepage. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with manysplinter groups having traveled down dead ends… " Wells has notpresented an accurate account of what is now known about humanevolution.
Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is ascientific fact –- even though many of its claims are based onmisrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. Theclaims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on amisrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM soas to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.
Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.
The writer is grateful to DrRobert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.
Comments on 'The Search for the Origin of Life' (5 videotapes by John Mackay for 'Creation Research, 36 Enterprise St, Birken Heads, Auckland N.Z.')
Robert Mann
sometime Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry
University of Auckland
The best feature of these lectures is the persistent theme that 'Outside Information' is required for the assembling of the various biological systems considered. This is a very important, generally neglected point, a potent but little-used aspect of the Argument from Design.
However, I find the following types of serious fault in Mackay's lecturing:
* unreliable on many scientific facts
• mis-attributes or mis-states fact or argument, and then knocks it down
• failure to define concepts, notably 'complication', upon which he relies
• illogical at several crucial stages.
I give a few examples of each category of fault. Others could be listed, but these suffice to rule out the tapes from their apparently intended use.
1. Errors of Scientific Fact
"Alanine is the simplest amino acid"
Ala is in fact the simplest chiral a'a, but of course Gly is the simplest a'a.
"Conversion of L-a'as to 50-50 L-D mixtures [racemisation] of amino acids occurs "as soon as you are as dead as you can get"; or anyway racemisation is about 10% complete by the time a tin of sardines reaches you.
This is far from true. Racemisation is, under ordinary conditions, many orders of magnitude slower; it has even been considered as a basis for dating sub-fossils.
Since sugars have carbon chains, they can come as RH or LH.
This is rubbish. Many compounds with carbon chains are incapable of LH or RH forms as they lack the required dissymmetry.
There are no abiotic chiral syntheses.
This has been false for some decades. Handedness (chirality) is created - strictly speaking, amplified - daily in organic chemical labs around the world.
Microsoft makes computers.
This may seem a minor error, and in some ways it is; but it suggests a lack of care for detail, as does the phrase "an interesting phenomena". It does not sound like a good scholar speaking, does it?
Ribosenucleic acid.
Same comment; and one must add that this name, though not strictly incorrect, has not been conventionally used for 4 decades. Mackay appears to have little familiarity with the molecular biology upon which he relies so heavily (and, as I will argue, mistakenly).
2. Mis-attribution
Miller is accused, by paraphrase, of having claimed creation of life.
This is a seriously misleading falsehood. If Miller has ever uttered anything like this, I'm unaware of it (and I've been alongside this field of chemistry for 4 decades, tho' never working in it myself).
The offence is compounded by Mackay's repeatedly saying "Mr Miller" in a way which is purportedly respectful but is actually the opposite because a correct title would of course be Dr or Prof.
Evolutionists say Matter + Energy + Time = Life
This may be a fair paraphrase, but only that. Like so much of Mackay's talk, it is slang.
At this rate I have to wonder, does Crick propound panspermia, and if so are spaceships involved in his version of it? No Crick lover, I nevertheless doubt Mackay's attributions here, and would be imprudent to trust Mackay on them.
3 Failure to Define Concepts
RNA is more complicated than protein . . . DNA is too complicated to have been the primal macromolecule . . . the information in RNA is very much less than the information in DNA.
I do not know on what definitions of information and complication these statements could be true. Insofar as I can ascribe any meaning to them, I consider them false. To talk like this at teenagers is, at best, vague & confusing. That onto which they may appear to cotton is not sufficiently clear concepts to constitute learning. It is, rather, disguised indoctrination.
4 Illogic
The lectures contain several inconclusive arguments presented with dogmatic confidence as if to preclude discussion.
Suppose Miller had claimed to create life, and suppose further that he had in fact not done so; none of that bears on whether real life did in fact evolve. To knock down the "Miller created life" straw man is almost irrelevant if done to imply that life could not have arisen thru a series of natural chemical elaborations. A sneaky dishonesty is in evidence - as all too often with "creation science".
The existence of present-day 'editing' (error correction) in NA syntheses entails impossibility of mutation.
This is just a non sequitur - so silly as to be hard to follow. How desperate do you have to be to offer argument this junky ?
DNA is what makes you you.
This Dawkinsism is stated by Mackay as if true!!
Conclusion
In general I believe that the attempt to refute evolution by discussing molecular biology is doomed. The discussion must proceed on a different level. It's back to Paley, friends!
And I cannot miss this opportunity to point out that evolution is not per se anti-God or anti-religion. Such scientist Christians as J E Morton have pointed out that to describe how organisms evolved, using our God-given senses, brings no conflict with any sensible reading of Scripture. The Vatican is, on this matter, correct.
'Creationism' is a tiresome diversion, and Mackay illustrates how "creation science" is junk.
I conclude that the tapes are unfit for educational use (except as an interesting exhibit of "creation science" for mature scholars studying this wonky phenomenon). I oppose promulgation of these tapes.
****
IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN A FORM OF NATURAL THEOLOGY? [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 12:15:14 PM
I have asked Wm Dembski to tell me (beyond what he says in the
section copied below) why IDT is not natl theol. I think it clearly is,
and that's OK with me (as a practitioner with Broom of natl theol, and a
fan of Wm Temple who accorded it some status notably in his Gifford
Lectures 'Nature Man & God'). D doesn't reply.
On re-examining his line of talk supposed to prove IDT is not natl
theol, I have been unable to deem it satisfactory: D denies that IDT
conforms to the defn (correctly quoted) of natl theol, but then the
"different" image he tries on for IDT is a mere paraphrase of the defn of
natl theol. Is this any better than double-talk? Is it on the level?
My main ideas on IDT:
IDT is one aspect of Phillip Johnson's 'wedge', arising in
a jurisdiction where Christianity is being forced out of educational
institutions.
The USA constitution forbids *establishment* of any
religion: no religion is permitted legal privileges. This clause has been
misinterpreted more & more outlandishly by anti-religion judges to exclude
prayers, the 10 Commandments, and other glimpses of religion. The
judiciary doing this is dominated by irreligious jews and allied
materialists. {Why doesn't lawyer Johnson organise a court counterattack
on the ludicrous 'no religion' Supreme court misinterpretation? This would
be a far more sensible harnessing of his abilities than his refusing to say
how old the biosphere is.)
{ BTW state-privileged versions of religion manifest a wide
range of sucess & failure e.g a draft spectrum:
Byzantium - Church of England - Church of Scotland - Free Presby - ...
- Hitler's stooge church. }
IDT is largely Creationism-lite. But it is fronted by some
far more reasonable-looking people, e.g Dembski, Behe. (Main man Ph
Johnson is not reasonable but given to heated insolent polemics.)
IDT is peculiarly frozen, harping on the one tiny point as
if nothing more can be discussed until Dawkins etc admit the simple basic
'god of the gaps' IDT point. They'll wait till hell freezes over, judging
by the dogged radical illogic of Dawkins & his ilk. I cannot see the
sense of this frozen strategy.
ID theorists, esp Dembski, persistently ignore the relevent
mainstream philosophers Temple, Hardy, Broom, Morton, Sheldrake. Dembski
refuses to put anything from me on his www.iscid.org. He wishes to erect
an image of scholarship but is not quite straight.
I think the reason D refuses to admit that IDT is natl
theol is that he fears rabid atheists would then ban it from schools. Is
this wise? Is it prudent defensiveness, or unwarrantedly excessive
defeatism? My own preference would be to press on much faster, insisting
on all categories of cause and trying harder to link up with revealed
theology. Science education should be given a philosophical context incl
all categories of cause. I believe this would be far easier to achieve
than what IDT, as a political movement, is attempting.
NZ agents for IDT®, Focus on the Family, are pretty
ruthless in promotion of their multi-million$ video, and get abusive of any
who express misgivings about e.g its failure to mention that evolution has
occurred. They are soft on creationism®. Full-on creationists
AnswersInGenesis® get sympathetic coverage in the 'evangelical' monthly
DayStar®. None of the Ak Sc/Faith group will join me in offering to talk
to church groups about evolution. The extent of cowardice is dismaying,
and puzzling.
I am forced to conclude that NZ is being successfully
invaded by Creationism® and its ally or stalking-horse IDT®. They
represent major diversions from progressive discussion & education on
evolution.
One of the main local agents has a warm relationship with Johnson.
He told me Johnson had shouted him a week's holiday/confab on a S. Pac.
resort island. When I mentioned this to others he realised it might not be
a good look and denied the fact! This exemplifies the 'means to an end'
attitude to truth amongst the fundamentalists but also amongst their less
extreme allies.
R
IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN A FORM OF NATURAL THEOLOGY?
By William A. Dembski
[from his wesbite www.designinference.com]
... the charge that intelligent design is a form of natural theology.
These days within the science-religion community, natural theology tends to
be viewed as a disreputable enterprise that hearkens back to pre-Darwinian
days and is now thoroughly passé. While I regard this judgment as unduly
harsh, I also regard it as irrelevant to intelligent design. Intelligent
design is not a form of natural theology.
...
Is intelligent design a form of natural theology? If intelligent
design were a form of natural theology, then intelligent design should be
looking at certain features of the natural world and therewith drawing
conclusions about some reality that extends beyond the natural world. Is
intelligent design doing that? I submit it is not. The fundamental idea that
animates intelligent design is that events, objects, and structures in the
world can exhibit features that reliably signal the effects of intelligence.
Disciplines as diverse as animal learning and behavior, forensics,
archeology, cryptography, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
thus all fall within intelligent design.
Intelligent design becomes controversial when methods developed in special
sciences (like forensics and archeology) for sifting the effects of
intelligence from natural causes get applied to natural systems where no
reified, evolved, or embodied intelligence is likely to have been involved.
What if the methods for identifying intelligence tell us that Michael Behe's
irreducibly complex biochemical machines are in fact designed? What if
careful analysis of such systems shows that natural causes (like the
Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation) are in
principle incapable of generating such systems? In that case to charge
intelligent design with trading in arguments from ignorance or invoking a
god-of-the-gaps is no longer tenable. In that case gaps in naturalistic
explanations for such systems are not gaps of ignorance about underlying
natural causes but rather gaps in the very structure of physical reality.
section copied below) why IDT is not natl theol. I think it clearly is,
and that's OK with me (as a practitioner with Broom of natl theol, and a
fan of Wm Temple who accorded it some status notably in his Gifford
Lectures 'Nature Man & God'). D doesn't reply.
On re-examining his line of talk supposed to prove IDT is not natl
theol, I have been unable to deem it satisfactory: D denies that IDT
conforms to the defn (correctly quoted) of natl theol, but then the
"different" image he tries on for IDT is a mere paraphrase of the defn of
natl theol. Is this any better than double-talk? Is it on the level?
My main ideas on IDT:
IDT is one aspect of Phillip Johnson's 'wedge', arising in
a jurisdiction where Christianity is being forced out of educational
institutions.
The USA constitution forbids *establishment* of any
religion: no religion is permitted legal privileges. This clause has been
misinterpreted more & more outlandishly by anti-religion judges to exclude
prayers, the 10 Commandments, and other glimpses of religion. The
judiciary doing this is dominated by irreligious jews and allied
materialists. {Why doesn't lawyer Johnson organise a court counterattack
on the ludicrous 'no religion' Supreme court misinterpretation? This would
be a far more sensible harnessing of his abilities than his refusing to say
how old the biosphere is.)
{ BTW state-privileged versions of religion manifest a wide
range of sucess & failure e.g a draft spectrum:
Byzantium - Church of England - Church of Scotland - Free Presby - ...
- Hitler's stooge church. }
IDT is largely Creationism-lite. But it is fronted by some
far more reasonable-looking people, e.g Dembski, Behe. (Main man Ph
Johnson is not reasonable but given to heated insolent polemics.)
IDT is peculiarly frozen, harping on the one tiny point as
if nothing more can be discussed until Dawkins etc admit the simple basic
'god of the gaps' IDT point. They'll wait till hell freezes over, judging
by the dogged radical illogic of Dawkins & his ilk. I cannot see the
sense of this frozen strategy.
ID theorists, esp Dembski, persistently ignore the relevent
mainstream philosophers Temple, Hardy, Broom, Morton, Sheldrake. Dembski
refuses to put anything from me on his www.iscid.org. He wishes to erect
an image of scholarship but is not quite straight.
I think the reason D refuses to admit that IDT is natl
theol is that he fears rabid atheists would then ban it from schools. Is
this wise? Is it prudent defensiveness, or unwarrantedly excessive
defeatism? My own preference would be to press on much faster, insisting
on all categories of cause and trying harder to link up with revealed
theology. Science education should be given a philosophical context incl
all categories of cause. I believe this would be far easier to achieve
than what IDT, as a political movement, is attempting.
NZ agents for IDT®, Focus on the Family, are pretty
ruthless in promotion of their multi-million$ video, and get abusive of any
who express misgivings about e.g its failure to mention that evolution has
occurred. They are soft on creationism®. Full-on creationists
AnswersInGenesis® get sympathetic coverage in the 'evangelical' monthly
DayStar®. None of the Ak Sc/Faith group will join me in offering to talk
to church groups about evolution. The extent of cowardice is dismaying,
and puzzling.
I am forced to conclude that NZ is being successfully
invaded by Creationism® and its ally or stalking-horse IDT®. They
represent major diversions from progressive discussion & education on
evolution.
One of the main local agents has a warm relationship with Johnson.
He told me Johnson had shouted him a week's holiday/confab on a S. Pac.
resort island. When I mentioned this to others he realised it might not be
a good look and denied the fact! This exemplifies the 'means to an end'
attitude to truth amongst the fundamentalists but also amongst their less
extreme allies.
R
IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN A FORM OF NATURAL THEOLOGY?
By William A. Dembski
[from his wesbite www.designinference.com]
... the charge that intelligent design is a form of natural theology.
These days within the science-religion community, natural theology tends to
be viewed as a disreputable enterprise that hearkens back to pre-Darwinian
days and is now thoroughly passé. While I regard this judgment as unduly
harsh, I also regard it as irrelevant to intelligent design. Intelligent
design is not a form of natural theology.
...
Is intelligent design a form of natural theology? If intelligent
design were a form of natural theology, then intelligent design should be
looking at certain features of the natural world and therewith drawing
conclusions about some reality that extends beyond the natural world. Is
intelligent design doing that? I submit it is not. The fundamental idea that
animates intelligent design is that events, objects, and structures in the
world can exhibit features that reliably signal the effects of intelligence.
Disciplines as diverse as animal learning and behavior, forensics,
archeology, cryptography, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
thus all fall within intelligent design.
Intelligent design becomes controversial when methods developed in special
sciences (like forensics and archeology) for sifting the effects of
intelligence from natural causes get applied to natural systems where no
reified, evolved, or embodied intelligence is likely to have been involved.
What if the methods for identifying intelligence tell us that Michael Behe's
irreducibly complex biochemical machines are in fact designed? What if
careful analysis of such systems shows that natural causes (like the
Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation) are in
principle incapable of generating such systems? In that case to charge
intelligent design with trading in arguments from ignorance or invoking a
god-of-the-gaps is no longer tenable. In that case gaps in naturalistic
explanations for such systems are not gaps of ignorance about underlying
natural causes but rather gaps in the very structure of physical reality.
'BEYOND VIETNAM'
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church
April 4, 1967, New York City
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very
delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you
expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by
turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a
great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi
Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation.
And of course it's always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the
last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every
year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to
come to this great church and this great pulpit.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in
deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has
brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent
statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart,
and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time
comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to
Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they
call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner
truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's
policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without
great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's
own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand
seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,
we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must
move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must
speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely
this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of
its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth
patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of
conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising
among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner
being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new
way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called
for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have
questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns,
this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the
war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and
civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your
people?" they ask.
And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their
concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that
the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which
they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of
signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I
believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church --- the church in
Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate --- leads clearly to this
sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved
nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National
Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an
attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a
collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to
make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor
to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the
problem.
While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good
faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the
fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on
both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the
National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I
have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral
vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging
in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle.
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black
and white, through the poverty program.
There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in
Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were
some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that
America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and
to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became
clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their
husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative
to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had
been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to
guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest
Georgia and East Harlem.
So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and
white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that
has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them
in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize
that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be
silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years,
especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate,
rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and
rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my
deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes
most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly
so, "What about Vietnam?"
They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to
solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions
hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own
government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government,
for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I
cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and
thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further
answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of
America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain
rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America
would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way
we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had
written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for
the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If
America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read
"Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes
of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined
that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent,
working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in
1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a
commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for
the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national
allegiances.
But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning
of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship
of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes
marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be
that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men --- for
communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for
white, for revolutionary and conservative?
Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved
his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the
Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I
threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads
from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid
if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all
men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race
or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I
believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering
and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper
than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and
positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the
victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to
understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people
of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of
the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but
simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost
three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to
me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is
made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1954 --- in 1945 rather --- after a
combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution
in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the
American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we
refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its
reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for
independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that
has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic
decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination
and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the
Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that
included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real
land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of
independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their
abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were
meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless
action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and
military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will.
Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at
recolonization.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land
reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there
came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily
divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the
most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants
watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported
their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification
with the North.
The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States
influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came
to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was
overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military
dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need
for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in
support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without
popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received
the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they
languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the
real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land
of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are
rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we
poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must
weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the
precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty
casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So
far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into
the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes,
running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children
degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children
selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as
we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the
Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps
of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be
building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the
village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated
in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political
force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the
peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed
their men.
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid
physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in
the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The
peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such
grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak
for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our
brothers.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those
who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation
Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What
must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we
permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them
into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our
condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can
they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the
North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war?
How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the
murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every
new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their
feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that
the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see
that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest
acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less
than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the
blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware
of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to
allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel
government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free
elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military
junta.
And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to
help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants.
They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace
settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are
frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth
again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it
helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know
his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic
weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and
grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the
opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land,
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of
confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American
intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence
against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the
French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the
willfulness of the colonial armies.
It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at
tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they
controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary
measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to
prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over
a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we
ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of
American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial
military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They
remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even
supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of
thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the
earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed
that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched
as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has
surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an
invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are
doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his
sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful
nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs
on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand
miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last
few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned
about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what
we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process
that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy.
We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a
short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are
really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent
them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely
realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we
create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of
God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose
land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is
being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double
price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the
path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of
our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to
stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one
of them wrote these words, and I quote:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is
curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities
of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring
deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never
again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of
violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop
our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left
with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and
deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of
America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that
we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we
have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation
is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In
order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.
I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do
immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating
ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
* Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
* Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action
will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
* Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in
Laos.
* Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front
has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in
any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
* Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]
Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment
might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who
fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front.
Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We
must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in
this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the
churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government
to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to
raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways
in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out
every creative method of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for
them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative
of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that
this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma
mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American
course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause]
Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their
ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.
[applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We
are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation
is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on
the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade
against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish
to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the
American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if
we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy
and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be
concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand
and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa.
We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies
without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American
life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond
Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him
that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the
past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now
justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need
to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why
American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why
American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against
rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy
come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful
revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." [applause]
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has
taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investments.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We
must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a
thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and
justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are
called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only
an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road
must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and
robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is
more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice
which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast
of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the
seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of
money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with
no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is
not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South
America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that
it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not
just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of
war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of
burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with
orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of
peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be
reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead
the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic
death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit
of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to
keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we
have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against
communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be
defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join
those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United
States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.
These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We
must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive
thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense
against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We
must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty,
insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of
communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against
old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a
frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must
support these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of
communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations
that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have
now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that
only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a
judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on
the revolutions that we initiated.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal
hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and
thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every
mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be
made straight, and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must
now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the
Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an
absolute necessity for the survival of man.
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak
response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I
am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the
supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks
the door which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is
beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one
another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born
of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is
love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is
perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of
the day.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar
of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the
ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.
As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the
saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and
evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love
is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are
confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of
life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination
is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and
dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not
remain at flood --- it ebbs.
We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is
adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled
residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too
late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our
vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new
ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing
world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall
surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time
reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without
morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons
of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the
odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival
as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another
message --- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of
commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and
though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment
of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever `twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet `tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make
the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our
world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the
right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all
over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness
like a mighty stream. [sustained applause]
EDITORS NOTE: From "A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr."
© The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church
April 4, 1967, New York City
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very
delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you
expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by
turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a
great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi
Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation.
And of course it's always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the
last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every
year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to
come to this great church and this great pulpit.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in
deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has
brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent
statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart,
and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time
comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to
Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they
call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner
truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's
policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without
great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's
own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand
seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,
we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must
move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must
speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely
this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of
its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth
patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of
conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising
among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner
being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new
way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called
for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have
questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns,
this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the
war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and
civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your
people?" they ask.
And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their
concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that
the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which
they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of
signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I
believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church --- the church in
Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate --- leads clearly to this
sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved
nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National
Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an
attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a
collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to
make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor
to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the
problem.
While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good
faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the
fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on
both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the
National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I
have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral
vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging
in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle.
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black
and white, through the poverty program.
There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in
Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were
some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that
America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and
to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became
clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their
husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative
to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had
been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to
guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest
Georgia and East Harlem.
So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and
white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that
has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them
in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize
that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be
silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years,
especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate,
rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and
rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my
deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes
most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly
so, "What about Vietnam?"
They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to
solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions
hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own
government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government,
for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I
cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and
thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further
answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of
America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain
rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America
would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way
we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had
written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for
the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If
America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read
"Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes
of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined
that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent,
working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in
1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a
commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for
the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national
allegiances.
But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning
of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship
of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes
marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be
that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men --- for
communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for
white, for revolutionary and conservative?
Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved
his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the
Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I
threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads
from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid
if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all
men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race
or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I
believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering
and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper
than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and
positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the
victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to
understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people
of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of
the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but
simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost
three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to
me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is
made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1954 --- in 1945 rather --- after a
combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution
in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the
American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we
refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its
reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for
independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that
has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic
decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination
and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the
Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that
included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real
land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of
independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their
abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were
meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless
action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and
military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will.
Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at
recolonization.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land
reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there
came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily
divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the
most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants
watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported
their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification
with the North.
The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States
influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came
to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was
overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military
dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need
for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in
support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without
popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received
the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they
languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the
real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land
of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are
rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we
poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must
weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the
precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty
casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So
far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into
the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes,
running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children
degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children
selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as
we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the
Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps
of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be
building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the
village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated
in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political
force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the
peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed
their men.
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid
physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in
the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The
peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such
grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak
for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our
brothers.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those
who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation
Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What
must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we
permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them
into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our
condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can
they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the
North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war?
How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the
murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every
new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their
feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that
the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see
that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest
acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less
than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the
blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware
of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to
allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel
government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free
elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military
junta.
And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to
help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants.
They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace
settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are
frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth
again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it
helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know
his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic
weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and
grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the
opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land,
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of
confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American
intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence
against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the
French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the
willfulness of the colonial armies.
It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at
tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they
controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary
measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to
prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over
a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we
ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of
American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial
military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They
remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even
supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of
thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the
earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed
that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched
as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has
surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an
invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are
doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his
sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful
nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs
on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand
miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last
few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned
about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what
we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process
that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy.
We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a
short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are
really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent
them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely
realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we
create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of
God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose
land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is
being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double
price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the
path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of
our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to
stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one
of them wrote these words, and I quote:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is
curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities
of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring
deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never
again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of
violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop
our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left
with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and
deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of
America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that
we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we
have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation
is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In
order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.
I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do
immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating
ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
* Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
* Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action
will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
* Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in
Laos.
* Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front
has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in
any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
* Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]
Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment
might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who
fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front.
Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We
must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in
this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the
churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government
to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to
raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways
in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out
every creative method of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for
them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative
of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that
this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma
mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American
course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause]
Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their
ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.
[applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We
are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation
is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on
the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade
against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish
to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the
American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if
we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy
and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be
concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand
and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa.
We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies
without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American
life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond
Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him
that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the
past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now
justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need
to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why
American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why
American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against
rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy
come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful
revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." [applause]
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has
taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investments.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We
must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a
thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and
justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are
called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only
an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road
must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and
robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is
more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice
which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast
of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the
seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of
money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with
no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is
not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South
America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that
it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not
just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of
war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of
burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with
orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of
peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be
reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead
the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic
death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit
of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to
keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we
have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against
communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be
defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join
those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United
States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.
These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We
must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive
thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense
against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We
must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty,
insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of
communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against
old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a
frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must
support these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of
communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations
that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have
now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that
only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a
judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on
the revolutions that we initiated.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal
hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and
thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every
mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be
made straight, and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must
now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the
Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an
absolute necessity for the survival of man.
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak
response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I
am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the
supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks
the door which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is
beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one
another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born
of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is
love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is
perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of
the day.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar
of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the
ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.
As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the
saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and
evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love
is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are
confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of
life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination
is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and
dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not
remain at flood --- it ebbs.
We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is
adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled
residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too
late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our
vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new
ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing
world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall
surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time
reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without
morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons
of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the
odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival
as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another
message --- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of
commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and
though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment
of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever `twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet `tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make
the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our
world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the
right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all
over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness
like a mighty stream. [sustained applause]
EDITORS NOTE: From "A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr."
© The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.
01/15/05
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EVOLUTION_STICKERS?SITE=CALOS&SECTION=HOM
E&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Jan 14, 2005
Ga. Evolution Stickers Ordered Removed
By DOUG GROSS
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) -- Since 2002, Dr. Kenneth Miller has been upset that biology
textbooks he has written are slapped with a warning sticker by the time
they appear in suburban Atlanta schools. Evolution, the stickers say, is
"a theory, not a fact."
"What it tells students is that we're certain of everything else in this
book except evolution," said Miller, a professor of biology at Brown
University, who with Joseph S. Levine has authored three texts for high
schoolers.
On Thursday, Miller - along with fellow teachers and scientists - cheered
a federal judge's ruling that ordered the Cobb County school board to
immediately remove the stickers and never again hand them out in any form.
"Obviously, this is quite a victory for good science education," said
Benjamin Z. Freed, an anthropology professor at Atlanta's Emory University
and chairman of Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.
But some parents and religious conservatives decried the ruling as another
in a string of what opponents call activist judges overruling the wishes of
elected officials - often on matters of religion.
"It's another example of how the bench is dictating to people what symbols
they can display, if they can pray or not pray or if they can teach a
particular subject," said Sadie Fields, head of the Georgia chapter of the
Christian Coalition.
The Georgia case is one of several battles waged in recent years
throughout the nation over what role evolution should play in science books.
The school district just north of Atlanta approved the stickers after
more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as
fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life.
During four days of testimony in federal court last November, the school
system defended the warning stickers as a show of tolerance, not religious
activism as some parents claimed. Its attorneys argued the school board
had made a good-faith effort to address questions that inevitably arise
during the teaching of evolution.
The stickers read, "This textbook contains material on evolution.
Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.
This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and
critically considered."
Scientists, several of whom testified in the case, say the sticker
confuses the scientific term "theory" with the word's common usage and
inappropriately combines science with personal religious belief.
"Many of us hold deeply personal religious ideals as well," Freed said.
"But for a science teacher in a public school to introduce religion into a
science class would fall way outside the ideals of any organization of
scientists or science educators."
A group of parents and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the
stickers in court, arguing they violate the Constitution's separation of
church and state.
Jeffrey Selman, whose son was a second-grader in Cobb County schools at
the time, called Thursday's ruling a "shot across the bow" of religious
fundamentalists he says are attempting to introduce their beliefs in the
classroom.
"I got what I wanted; I got the stickers removed," said Selman.
The school board issued a statement saying members are disappointed by
the ruling and are meeting with lawyers to decide whether to appeal. The
Cobb school system has 30 days to appeal.
E&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Jan 14, 2005
Ga. Evolution Stickers Ordered Removed
By DOUG GROSS
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) -- Since 2002, Dr. Kenneth Miller has been upset that biology
textbooks he has written are slapped with a warning sticker by the time
they appear in suburban Atlanta schools. Evolution, the stickers say, is
"a theory, not a fact."
"What it tells students is that we're certain of everything else in this
book except evolution," said Miller, a professor of biology at Brown
University, who with Joseph S. Levine has authored three texts for high
schoolers.
On Thursday, Miller - along with fellow teachers and scientists - cheered
a federal judge's ruling that ordered the Cobb County school board to
immediately remove the stickers and never again hand them out in any form.
"Obviously, this is quite a victory for good science education," said
Benjamin Z. Freed, an anthropology professor at Atlanta's Emory University
and chairman of Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.
But some parents and religious conservatives decried the ruling as another
in a string of what opponents call activist judges overruling the wishes of
elected officials - often on matters of religion.
"It's another example of how the bench is dictating to people what symbols
they can display, if they can pray or not pray or if they can teach a
particular subject," said Sadie Fields, head of the Georgia chapter of the
Christian Coalition.
The Georgia case is one of several battles waged in recent years
throughout the nation over what role evolution should play in science books.
The school district just north of Atlanta approved the stickers after
more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as
fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life.
During four days of testimony in federal court last November, the school
system defended the warning stickers as a show of tolerance, not religious
activism as some parents claimed. Its attorneys argued the school board
had made a good-faith effort to address questions that inevitably arise
during the teaching of evolution.
The stickers read, "This textbook contains material on evolution.
Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.
This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and
critically considered."
Scientists, several of whom testified in the case, say the sticker
confuses the scientific term "theory" with the word's common usage and
inappropriately combines science with personal religious belief.
"Many of us hold deeply personal religious ideals as well," Freed said.
"But for a science teacher in a public school to introduce religion into a
science class would fall way outside the ideals of any organization of
scientists or science educators."
A group of parents and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the
stickers in court, arguing they violate the Constitution's separation of
church and state.
Jeffrey Selman, whose son was a second-grader in Cobb County schools at
the time, called Thursday's ruling a "shot across the bow" of religious
fundamentalists he says are attempting to introduce their beliefs in the
classroom.
"I got what I wanted; I got the stickers removed," said Selman.
The school board issued a statement saying members are disappointed by
the ruling and are meeting with lawyers to decide whether to appeal. The
Cobb school system has 30 days to appeal.
http://www.soulsearch.gen.nz/m_cs_lewis.htm
This site has also some handy quotes from the neglected V F Frankl
masterpiece Man's Search For Meaning (which, with a title like that, is
likely to remain out of print).
R
This site has also some handy quotes from the neglected V F Frankl
masterpiece Man's Search For Meaning (which, with a title like that, is
likely to remain out of print).
R
I'm reminded of Tandoori's main speech in Parlt for the Civil
Unions bill - he defined c.u as a
human right, and counterposed morality against reason.
R
http://www.spiritualhumanism.org/
You can become an ordained member of the Spiritual Humanist clergy for
FREE right now! As a legally ordained clergy member you can legally
perform religious ceremonies and rituals like weddings, funerals,
benedictions, etc.
As Spiritual Humanists we believe that every person has innate right to
make a spiritual connection to the rest of the cosmos. Our premise is
simple:
We can solve the problems of society using a religion based on reason.
We cannot abandon ancient traditions and practices but we can adapt them
to our new understanding of the universe. Religion must be able to adapt
to new knowledge about the universe without rejecting the deep spiritual
connections to human history and the natural world that we are a part
of.
All humans have an inalienable right and duty to practice their own
religious traditions. Spiritual Humanism allows everyone to fuse their
individual religious practices onto the foundation of scientific
humanist inquiry. We accept people from any religious background and
recognize the validity of all peaceful religious practices and behaviors
as being helpful and necessary in developing the spiritual nature of
humanity.
If you agree that Religion must be based on Reason, you can be ordained
right now for free, and be still able to practice your own religious
traditions by simply clicking the button below:
ORDAIN ME (click)
"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as
revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of
reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or
later, such a religion will emerge."
- Carl Sagan
Unions bill - he defined c.u as a
human right, and counterposed morality against reason.
R
http://www.spiritualhumanism.org/
You can become an ordained member of the Spiritual Humanist clergy for
FREE right now! As a legally ordained clergy member you can legally
perform religious ceremonies and rituals like weddings, funerals,
benedictions, etc.
As Spiritual Humanists we believe that every person has innate right to
make a spiritual connection to the rest of the cosmos. Our premise is
simple:
We can solve the problems of society using a religion based on reason.
We cannot abandon ancient traditions and practices but we can adapt them
to our new understanding of the universe. Religion must be able to adapt
to new knowledge about the universe without rejecting the deep spiritual
connections to human history and the natural world that we are a part
of.
All humans have an inalienable right and duty to practice their own
religious traditions. Spiritual Humanism allows everyone to fuse their
individual religious practices onto the foundation of scientific
humanist inquiry. We accept people from any religious background and
recognize the validity of all peaceful religious practices and behaviors
as being helpful and necessary in developing the spiritual nature of
humanity.
If you agree that Religion must be based on Reason, you can be ordained
right now for free, and be still able to practice your own religious
traditions by simply clicking the button below:
ORDAIN ME (click)
"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as
revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of
reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or
later, such a religion will emerge."
- Carl Sagan
Christians Arrested for 'hate crimes' In Philadelphia [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 01:03:21 PM
Mrs Yates MP is "just looking at" creation of similar 'hate crimes'
here, staging hearings of her cttee of Parlt ...
R
=========
PENNSYLVANIA CHRISTIANS FACE 47 YEARS IN PRISON FOR READING THE BIBLE IN PUBLIC
Philadelphia charges Christians with hate crimes, inciting a riot, and
using a deadly weapon.
Bill O'Reilly reported on the situation on Fox News Channel.
What we have been saying has now happened. You cannot quote what the Bible
has to say about homosexuality in public or you will be charged with a
"hate crime." Philadelphia is only the beginning. If we fail to take a
stand here, this "crime" will soon be applied across America.
In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous
miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four
Christians are facing up to 47 years in prison and $90,000 in fines for
preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the
First Amendment.
On October 10, 2004, the four Christians were arrested in Philadelphia.
They are part of Repent America. Along with founder Michael Marcavage,
members of Repent America -- with police approval--were preaching near
Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying
banners with Biblical messages.
When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical
homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident
shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christiansí movement on the
street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians'
messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.
Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to
exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and
jailed the Christians!
They were charged with eight crimes, including three felonies: possession
of instruments of crime (a bullhorn), ethnic intimidation (saying that
homosexuality is a sin), and inciting a riot (reading from the Bible some
passages relating to homosexuality) despite the fact that no riot occurred.
You may think I am exaggerating. I'm not. Our AFA Center for Law and
Policy is representing these four individuals at no cost. We will take
this case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary to get justice.
There is so much more about this case I don't have room for it in this
letter. We have prepared a 25-minute VHS/DVD in which two AFA-CLP attorneys
discuss the case in detail.
Please help us with our expenses in representing these committed
Christians. With your tax-deductible gift of $15, less than the cost of a
cup of coffee once a month for the next year, we will send your choice of
either the VHS or DVD. Watch the VHS/DVD, then share it with your Sunday
school class and church. This VHS/DVD should be required viewing in every
church in America.
Click here
to get your copy of the Philadelphia 4 StoryÝÝ [ This item is Listed below ]
Thanks for caring enough to get involved. We must not allow this travesty
of justice to continue.
Sincerely,
Don
Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman
American Family Association
P.S. Please forward this email to family and friends.
It's Not Gay: This 28-minute video presents a story that few have heard,
allowing former homosexuals the opportunity to tell their own story in
their own words. Along with medical and mental health experts, these
individuals express a clear warning that the sanitized version of
homosexuality being presented to students is not the whole truth.
Spiritual Heritage Tours - Tours of Washington, D.C. and Mount Vernon with
an emphasis on America's Christian heritage, led by AFA president Tim
Wildmon and AFR general manager Marvin Sanders.
www.afa.net
Copyright 2002-2004
American Family Association
107 Parkgate Dr.
Tupelo, MS 38801
1-662-844-5036
All Rights Reserved
The Philadelphia 4 Story SKU: PHILLY4
The Philadelphia 4 Story captures the gravity of a case that involves
eleven Christians who were arrested at a "gay pride" event called "Outfest"
while preaching and sharing Scripture. In efforts to silence the
Christians' message, four of the Christians now face up to 47 years in
prison and the city of Philadelphia has labeled the Bible as hate speech.
The video was recorded during the AFA Report, a radio program hosted by
Don Wildmon. The Philadelphia case is discussed in full detail by two AFA
Center for Law & Policy attorneys.
The Philadelphia 4 Story is the clearest example of anti-Christian bigotry
by city officials in the last century. This video communicates the
magnitude of the underlying issues involved in the Philadelphia case and
why we must fight to protect our First Amendment freedom.
https://store.afa.net/ProductCart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=27
here, staging hearings of her cttee of Parlt ...
R
=========
PENNSYLVANIA CHRISTIANS FACE 47 YEARS IN PRISON FOR READING THE BIBLE IN PUBLIC
Philadelphia charges Christians with hate crimes, inciting a riot, and
using a deadly weapon.
Bill O'Reilly reported on the situation on Fox News Channel.
What we have been saying has now happened. You cannot quote what the Bible
has to say about homosexuality in public or you will be charged with a
"hate crime." Philadelphia is only the beginning. If we fail to take a
stand here, this "crime" will soon be applied across America.
In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous
miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four
Christians are facing up to 47 years in prison and $90,000 in fines for
preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the
First Amendment.
On October 10, 2004, the four Christians were arrested in Philadelphia.
They are part of Repent America. Along with founder Michael Marcavage,
members of Repent America -- with police approval--were preaching near
Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying
banners with Biblical messages.
When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical
homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident
shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christiansí movement on the
street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians'
messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.
Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to
exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and
jailed the Christians!
They were charged with eight crimes, including three felonies: possession
of instruments of crime (a bullhorn), ethnic intimidation (saying that
homosexuality is a sin), and inciting a riot (reading from the Bible some
passages relating to homosexuality) despite the fact that no riot occurred.
You may think I am exaggerating. I'm not. Our AFA Center for Law and
Policy is representing these four individuals at no cost. We will take
this case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary to get justice.
There is so much more about this case I don't have room for it in this
letter. We have prepared a 25-minute VHS/DVD in which two AFA-CLP attorneys
discuss the case in detail.
Please help us with our expenses in representing these committed
Christians. With your tax-deductible gift of $15, less than the cost of a
cup of coffee once a month for the next year, we will send your choice of
either the VHS or DVD. Watch the VHS/DVD, then share it with your Sunday
school class and church. This VHS/DVD should be required viewing in every
church in America.
to get your copy of the Philadelphia 4 StoryÝÝ [ This item is Listed below ]
Thanks for caring enough to get involved. We must not allow this travesty
of justice to continue.
Sincerely,
Don
Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman
American Family Association
P.S. Please forward this email to family and friends.
It's Not Gay: This 28-minute video presents a story that few have heard,
allowing former homosexuals the opportunity to tell their own story in
their own words. Along with medical and mental health experts, these
individuals express a clear warning that the sanitized version of
homosexuality being presented to students is not the whole truth.
Spiritual Heritage Tours - Tours of Washington, D.C. and Mount Vernon with
an emphasis on America's Christian heritage, led by AFA president Tim
Wildmon and AFR general manager Marvin Sanders.
Copyright 2002-2004
American Family Association
107 Parkgate Dr.
Tupelo, MS 38801
1-662-844-5036
All Rights Reserved
The Philadelphia 4 Story SKU: PHILLY4
The Philadelphia 4 Story captures the gravity of a case that involves
eleven Christians who were arrested at a "gay pride" event called "Outfest"
while preaching and sharing Scripture. In efforts to silence the
Christians' message, four of the Christians now face up to 47 years in
prison and the city of Philadelphia has labeled the Bible as hate speech.
The video was recorded during the AFA Report, a radio program hosted by
Don Wildmon. The Philadelphia case is discussed in full detail by two AFA
Center for Law & Policy attorneys.
The Philadelphia 4 Story is the clearest example of anti-Christian bigotry
by city officials in the last century. This video communicates the
magnitude of the underlying issues involved in the Philadelphia case and
why we must fight to protect our First Amendment freedom.
https://store.afa.net/ProductCart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=27
Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 12:40:33 PM
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1312232/posts
Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God
Telegraph ^ | 01/02/05 | Chris Hastings,
Posted on 01/01/2005 4:22:44 PM PST by Pikamax
Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God
By Chris Hastings, Patrick Hennessy and Sean Rayment (Filed:
02/01/2005)
The Asian tsunami disaster should make all Christians question the
existence of God, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes
in The Telegraph today.
In a deeply personal and candid article, he says "it would be wrong" if
faith were not "upset" by the catastrophe which has already claimed more
than 150,000 lives.
Dr Rowan Williams: Prayer provides no 'magical solutions'
Prayer, he admits, provides no "magical solutions" and most of the stock
Christian answers to human suffering do not "go very far in helping us, one
week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us".
Dr Williams, who, as head of the Church of England, represents 70 million
Anglicans around the world, writes: "Every single random, accidental death
is something that should upset a faith bound up in comfort and ready
answers. Faced with the paralysing magnitude of a disaster like this, we
naturally feel
more deeply outraged - and also more deeply helpless."
He adds: "The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering
on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would
be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't."
Dr Williams concludes that, faced with such a terrible challenge to their
faith, Christians must focus on "passionate engagement with the lives that
are left".
His comments came as Tony Blair finally broke his silence on the tragedy,
branding it a "global catastrophe" that would take the world "years" to
deal with. The Prime Minister, who has faced criticism for not cutting
short a family holiday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh, also
insisted that the United Nations should lead the international aid effort.
He praised the "extraordinary generosity" of the British people, whose
donations topped £60 million last night. The Government has thus far
pledged £50 million.
Interviewed by Channel 4 News, Mr Blair said: "At first it seemed a
terrible disaster. But I think as the days have gone on people have
recognised it as a global catastrophe.
"It is not simply the absolute horror of what has happened and how many
people's lives have been touched in different ways, it is also the fact
that the consequences are not just short-term and immediate but long-term
and will require a great deal of work by the international community for
months, if not years, to come.
"We've got millions of people displaced, we've got the potential of disease
coming from this and we've got whole areas of that region that will have to
be rebuilt."
He shrugged off claims that he should have come home to take charge of
Britain's aid effort, adding that he had been in touch "practically hourly"
with Downing Street.
Mr Blair said that one of his key tasks during Britain's year-long
presidency of the G8 group of leading industrial nations, which started
yesterday, was to liaise with other leaders. His faith in the UN seemed
undimmed despite the international rows in the months prior to the war in
Iraq and he dismissed
as a "misunderstanding" claims that President George W. Bush had tried to
snub the organisation by setting up a four-country task force with
Australia, India and Japan.
"When I spoke to President Bush a short time ago he made it very clear that
he wanted the UN to be in the lead and that he sees the work that the US is
doing as very much supportive of that," he said.
Mr Blair's intervention was made as it was disclosed that Gordon Brown, the
Chancellor, would lead Britain's international anti-poverty drive by going
on a three-nation trip to east and southern Africa later this month.
Meanwhile, a 10-man British military reconnaissance team arrived in Sri
Lanka to assess how British Armed Forces could best assist the stricken
country which, with Thailand, Indonesia and southern India, has borne the
brunt of the disaster.
The team will report back to the Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood,
Middlesex, in the next 72 hours. The main focus of Britain's effort is
likely to be directed towards Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Two Royal Navy ships, the frigate Chatham, currently on patrol in the Gulf,
and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel Diligence, already in the Indian
Ocean, are heading for Sri Lanka. A C-17 Globe Master transport aircraft,
which can carry 100,000lbs of cargo, has also been allocated to supply aid.
The Pope in his New Year message yesterday led prayers for victims at St
Peter's Basilica in Rome, and a prayer vigil for victims, survivors and
families was being held at Central Hall, Westminster, last night.
On Wednesday, a nationwide three-minute silence will be observed across
Britain.
Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God
Telegraph ^ | 01/02/05 | Chris Hastings,
Posted on 01/01/2005 4:22:44 PM PST by Pikamax
Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God
By Chris Hastings, Patrick Hennessy and Sean Rayment (Filed:
02/01/2005)
The Asian tsunami disaster should make all Christians question the
existence of God, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes
in The Telegraph today.
In a deeply personal and candid article, he says "it would be wrong" if
faith were not "upset" by the catastrophe which has already claimed more
than 150,000 lives.
Dr Rowan Williams: Prayer provides no 'magical solutions'
Prayer, he admits, provides no "magical solutions" and most of the stock
Christian answers to human suffering do not "go very far in helping us, one
week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us".
Dr Williams, who, as head of the Church of England, represents 70 million
Anglicans around the world, writes: "Every single random, accidental death
is something that should upset a faith bound up in comfort and ready
answers. Faced with the paralysing magnitude of a disaster like this, we
naturally feel
more deeply outraged - and also more deeply helpless."
He adds: "The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering
on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would
be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't."
Dr Williams concludes that, faced with such a terrible challenge to their
faith, Christians must focus on "passionate engagement with the lives that
are left".
His comments came as Tony Blair finally broke his silence on the tragedy,
branding it a "global catastrophe" that would take the world "years" to
deal with. The Prime Minister, who has faced criticism for not cutting
short a family holiday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh, also
insisted that the United Nations should lead the international aid effort.
He praised the "extraordinary generosity" of the British people, whose
donations topped £60 million last night. The Government has thus far
pledged £50 million.
Interviewed by Channel 4 News, Mr Blair said: "At first it seemed a
terrible disaster. But I think as the days have gone on people have
recognised it as a global catastrophe.
"It is not simply the absolute horror of what has happened and how many
people's lives have been touched in different ways, it is also the fact
that the consequences are not just short-term and immediate but long-term
and will require a great deal of work by the international community for
months, if not years, to come.
"We've got millions of people displaced, we've got the potential of disease
coming from this and we've got whole areas of that region that will have to
be rebuilt."
He shrugged off claims that he should have come home to take charge of
Britain's aid effort, adding that he had been in touch "practically hourly"
with Downing Street.
Mr Blair said that one of his key tasks during Britain's year-long
presidency of the G8 group of leading industrial nations, which started
yesterday, was to liaise with other leaders. His faith in the UN seemed
undimmed despite the international rows in the months prior to the war in
Iraq and he dismissed
as a "misunderstanding" claims that President George W. Bush had tried to
snub the organisation by setting up a four-country task force with
Australia, India and Japan.
"When I spoke to President Bush a short time ago he made it very clear that
he wanted the UN to be in the lead and that he sees the work that the US is
doing as very much supportive of that," he said.
Mr Blair's intervention was made as it was disclosed that Gordon Brown, the
Chancellor, would lead Britain's international anti-poverty drive by going
on a three-nation trip to east and southern Africa later this month.
Meanwhile, a 10-man British military reconnaissance team arrived in Sri
Lanka to assess how British Armed Forces could best assist the stricken
country which, with Thailand, Indonesia and southern India, has borne the
brunt of the disaster.
The team will report back to the Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood,
Middlesex, in the next 72 hours. The main focus of Britain's effort is
likely to be directed towards Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Two Royal Navy ships, the frigate Chatham, currently on patrol in the Gulf,
and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel Diligence, already in the Indian
Ocean, are heading for Sri Lanka. A C-17 Globe Master transport aircraft,
which can carry 100,000lbs of cargo, has also been allocated to supply aid.
The Pope in his New Year message yesterday led prayers for victims at St
Peter's Basilica in Rome, and a prayer vigil for victims, survivors and
families was being held at Central Hall, Westminster, last night.
On Wednesday, a nationwide three-minute silence will be observed across
Britain.
Two clergy have responded to my observations on PC in the Anglican
church:-
1.
>I agree with your comments that we must not put any ideology ahead of the
>gospel - that would be a transgression of the first commandment.
2.
>Your diatribe on many issues is not Christian in my opinion - where in the
>scriptures do we read that you may sit in judgement on others?
>My memory is that Jesus specific command was to not judge lest ye also be
>judged (and found wanting by the Lord himself)!
>You are making a fool of yourself and anyone genininely searching for the
>Christ of this Season of Christmas would not be persuaded by your diatribe.
>May God have mercy on your soul.
Response (1) needs no comment. I naturally welcome it.
Response (2) is a very useful instructive exhibit of PC. I
consider its parts deserve comment.
>Your diatribe on many issues is not Christian in my opinion - where in the
>scriptures do we read that you may sit in judgement on others?
Interesting that she implies primacy of the Scriptures!
Considering that PC is generally from secular origins and difficult to
reconcile with scripture, this is a peculiar claim.
I had mentioned that Ms Plane te Paa had admitted there was no
basis - scriptural or other - in the submissions to the Eames
commission for her attitudes on sexual deviance, but this admission
apparently excites no reaction from this Ms Rev. Instead, she implies that
if she can find no scriptural support for what she calls my "sitting in
judgement on others" then my MannGram® is not Christian (about as heavy a
condemnation as could be levelled in this context).
>My memory is that
An interesting extreme humility here - as if the scripture about
to be cited may not be correctly interpreted. Can this pose be genuine?
Does she really think she could be wrong about it?
>Jesus specific command was to not judge lest ye also be
>judged (and found wanting by the Lord himself)!
That's what he said alright - a stern, perennially daunting
warning for those like me who tend to appraise ideologies rather than
pretend they don't exist. Ms Rev is not the first to call me judgemental.
My first answer is that most of what I wrote is about the
ideologies, not about particular persons. I listed a few leading
proponents of those ideologies, partly to assist readers in identifying the
PC Axis by not only abstract ideas but also actual
practitioners/proponents. In this way, anyone not used to seeing the
ideologies as such will be helped to know what I'm referring to. (see
'word cartoon' below)
Secondly: I gave some reasons against those PC ideologies, and
referred readers to some more detailed writings. No counterpart of that
reasoning as been forthcoming from this Ms Rev.
Thirdly, I didn't imply condemnation of anyone. Specific ideas,
and political methods, I did & do condemn; that is not to suggest judgement
(in the sense she means) of any person. I think (after studying the issue
since it arose 3 decade ago) that Bp Randerson is badly wrong regarding
gene-tampering and that he put his name to some grievous falsehoods &
omissions in the report of the Royal Commission on that issue; but I
continue on cordial terms with him. My old schoolmate Ray Nairn is in
little doubt - I hope - about my opinion of his neoRacism; but in
mentioning him & Mitzi as exemplars of PC I do not think, let alone ever
having said to anyone, that he personally stands condemned for it. I am
well aware that only God is to judge each person. And I had not implied
otherwise. Ms Rev has set up a straw man; knocking it down is hardly
useful.
>You are making a fool of yourself
What could lie behind this drastic statement? The only detailed
comments I've so far received (from a respected Anglican lay theologian)
have proceeded on the opposite basis, i.e treating me as not foolish.
> and anyone genininely searching for the
> Christ of this Season of Christmas would not be persuaded by your diatribe.
how could she know this (if it were so)?
>May God have mercy on your soul.
One can only be gratified at such a prayer from a cleric -
normally. But this particular expression of concern looks, in the current
context, more like a condemnation than anything I directed against anyone
in the note to which Ms Rev is so heatedly, irrationally reacting.
For completeness I should perhaps mention that exhibit #1 is also
from a female Anglican priest. (And let me point out I had expressed
nothing about ordination of women.)
I am encouraged - in different ways, of course - by both of
these reactions #1 & #2. I take #2 as evidence that PC ideologues are
unable to defend their attitudes by argument but resort immediately to _ad
hominem_ insults. This conforms with all my previous experience of them.
The only wonder in this case is that we are spared the usual "you are
against women" - the routine insult from supporters of WimminsLib against
any who criticise that ideology.
Commentator #2 has insisted that I not send her any more msgs -
tending to confirm my accusation that PC evades discussion.
R
Appendix:
With luck your imagination will allow you to imagine the following cartoon
(and I continue to solicit graphic realisation by some cartoonist, which I
am not).
FRAMES 1 & 2
A German street, 1934.
Visiting Kiwi student Geoffrey Cox [as recounted in his
memoir; later Sir Geoffrey] recedes into a shop doorway as a well-drilled,
grim, intimidatory Nazi goon-squad parades past. Then Nazi fanatics smash
him to the pavement for failure to make the Fascist salute at this squad.
A German professor looking on remarks furtively to his friend:
"These Nazis are getting out of hand. What are we going to
do about it?"
His cobber draws himself up, aloof, and replies:
"Nazis - what Nazis? I don't know what you're referring
to. Indeed, your use of such an offensive term strongly implies you're
anti-German."
FRAMES 3 & 4
A New Zealand street, 2004.
An incohesive gaggle of grinning feminazis passes. It is
quite a large (if ill-drilled) squad: M Waring, H Clark, H Simpson, Mrs
Yates, J Fitzsimons, Fiddler Bunkum, Tom Pearce's daughter, J Shipley, S
Cartwright, M Wilson, K Poutasi, etc etc. Protective wimp outriders smash
the odd innocent onlooker e.g G H Green, R B Elliott.
Speech balloons above enthusiastic crowd: "Equality! Diversity!
Tolerance! Sensitive Noo Eege!"
A Kiwi professor looking on remarks furtively to his friend:
"These feminazis are getting out of hand. What are we
going to do about it?"
His cobber draws himself up, aloof, and replies:
"Feminazis - what feminazis? I don't know what you're
referring to. Indeed, your use of such an ofensive, opressive term
strongly implies you're anti-female."
church:-
1.
>I agree with your comments that we must not put any ideology ahead of the
>gospel - that would be a transgression of the first commandment.
2.
>Your diatribe on many issues is not Christian in my opinion - where in the
>scriptures do we read that you may sit in judgement on others?
>My memory is that Jesus specific command was to not judge lest ye also be
>judged (and found wanting by the Lord himself)!
>You are making a fool of yourself and anyone genininely searching for the
>Christ of this Season of Christmas would not be persuaded by your diatribe.
>May God have mercy on your soul.
Response (1) needs no comment. I naturally welcome it.
Response (2) is a very useful instructive exhibit of PC. I
consider its parts deserve comment.
>Your diatribe on many issues is not Christian in my opinion - where in the
>scriptures do we read that you may sit in judgement on others?
Interesting that she implies primacy of the Scriptures!
Considering that PC is generally from secular origins and difficult to
reconcile with scripture, this is a peculiar claim.
I had mentioned that Ms Plane te Paa had admitted there was no
basis - scriptural or other - in the submissions to the Eames
commission for her attitudes on sexual deviance, but this admission
apparently excites no reaction from this Ms Rev. Instead, she implies that
if she can find no scriptural support for what she calls my "sitting in
judgement on others" then my MannGram® is not Christian (about as heavy a
condemnation as could be levelled in this context).
>My memory is that
An interesting extreme humility here - as if the scripture about
to be cited may not be correctly interpreted. Can this pose be genuine?
Does she really think she could be wrong about it?
>Jesus specific command was to not judge lest ye also be
>judged (and found wanting by the Lord himself)!
That's what he said alright - a stern, perennially daunting
warning for those like me who tend to appraise ideologies rather than
pretend they don't exist. Ms Rev is not the first to call me judgemental.
My first answer is that most of what I wrote is about the
ideologies, not about particular persons. I listed a few leading
proponents of those ideologies, partly to assist readers in identifying the
PC Axis by not only abstract ideas but also actual
practitioners/proponents. In this way, anyone not used to seeing the
ideologies as such will be helped to know what I'm referring to. (see
'word cartoon' below)
Secondly: I gave some reasons against those PC ideologies, and
referred readers to some more detailed writings. No counterpart of that
reasoning as been forthcoming from this Ms Rev.
Thirdly, I didn't imply condemnation of anyone. Specific ideas,
and political methods, I did & do condemn; that is not to suggest judgement
(in the sense she means) of any person. I think (after studying the issue
since it arose 3 decade ago) that Bp Randerson is badly wrong regarding
gene-tampering and that he put his name to some grievous falsehoods &
omissions in the report of the Royal Commission on that issue; but I
continue on cordial terms with him. My old schoolmate Ray Nairn is in
little doubt - I hope - about my opinion of his neoRacism; but in
mentioning him & Mitzi as exemplars of PC I do not think, let alone ever
having said to anyone, that he personally stands condemned for it. I am
well aware that only God is to judge each person. And I had not implied
otherwise. Ms Rev has set up a straw man; knocking it down is hardly
useful.
>You are making a fool of yourself
What could lie behind this drastic statement? The only detailed
comments I've so far received (from a respected Anglican lay theologian)
have proceeded on the opposite basis, i.e treating me as not foolish.
> and anyone genininely searching for the
> Christ of this Season of Christmas would not be persuaded by your diatribe.
how could she know this (if it were so)?
>May God have mercy on your soul.
One can only be gratified at such a prayer from a cleric -
normally. But this particular expression of concern looks, in the current
context, more like a condemnation than anything I directed against anyone
in the note to which Ms Rev is so heatedly, irrationally reacting.
For completeness I should perhaps mention that exhibit #1 is also
from a female Anglican priest. (And let me point out I had expressed
nothing about ordination of women.)
I am encouraged - in different ways, of course - by both of
these reactions #1 & #2. I take #2 as evidence that PC ideologues are
unable to defend their attitudes by argument but resort immediately to _ad
hominem_ insults. This conforms with all my previous experience of them.
The only wonder in this case is that we are spared the usual "you are
against women" - the routine insult from supporters of WimminsLib against
any who criticise that ideology.
Commentator #2 has insisted that I not send her any more msgs -
tending to confirm my accusation that PC evades discussion.
R
Appendix:
With luck your imagination will allow you to imagine the following cartoon
(and I continue to solicit graphic realisation by some cartoonist, which I
am not).
FRAMES 1 & 2
A German street, 1934.
Visiting Kiwi student Geoffrey Cox [as recounted in his
memoir; later Sir Geoffrey] recedes into a shop doorway as a well-drilled,
grim, intimidatory Nazi goon-squad parades past. Then Nazi fanatics smash
him to the pavement for failure to make the Fascist salute at this squad.
A German professor looking on remarks furtively to his friend:
"These Nazis are getting out of hand. What are we going to
do about it?"
His cobber draws himself up, aloof, and replies:
"Nazis - what Nazis? I don't know what you're referring
to. Indeed, your use of such an offensive term strongly implies you're
anti-German."
FRAMES 3 & 4
A New Zealand street, 2004.
An incohesive gaggle of grinning feminazis passes. It is
quite a large (if ill-drilled) squad: M Waring, H Clark, H Simpson, Mrs
Yates, J Fitzsimons, Fiddler Bunkum, Tom Pearce's daughter, J Shipley, S
Cartwright, M Wilson, K Poutasi, etc etc. Protective wimp outriders smash
the odd innocent onlooker e.g G H Green, R B Elliott.
Speech balloons above enthusiastic crowd: "Equality! Diversity!
Tolerance! Sensitive Noo Eege!"
A Kiwi professor looking on remarks furtively to his friend:
"These feminazis are getting out of hand. What are we
going to do about it?"
His cobber draws himself up, aloof, and replies:
"Feminazis - what feminazis? I don't know what you're
referring to. Indeed, your use of such an ofensive, opressive term
strongly implies you're anti-female."
HOW MORALITY AFFECTS POLITICS:
NOT ENOUGH RELIGION
ROBERT WARREN CROMEY
San Francisco Chronicle
December 21, 2004
We liberals have denigrated religion so much that Christian conservatives
wreaked vengeance in the recent election. I have been a proud member of the
ACLU since my university days in the 1950s. I went along with the idea that
we should keep prayer out of the public schools and prevent the teaching of
the Bible and religion in public high schools and universities under the
guise of separation of church and state.
We now have more than two generations of religiously illiterate university
graduates. The possibility of teaching high-school and college students
critical thinking of the Bible, theology, ethics and religion in general
has been lost to millions of students. William F. Buckley Jr. ridiculed
Yale for de-emphasizing religion in that Ivy League bastion in his 1978
book, God and Man at Yale. Yale was founded to train young men for the
ministry in the Christian Church. If that school abandoned its religious
roots, then secular and state-run schools could safely counter any attempts
to teach any form of religion on the university level.
The Christian conservatives filled the gap with literalistic opinions about
what Scripture says, swallowed whole by intelligent but untutored
believers. Thoughtful teaching about religion was replaced by teaching that
followed a religiously conservative party line --- anti-abortion, anti-
homosexual and pro-creationism. The universities blithely went along,
making fun of the fundamentalists, but not teaching the students any
alternative because they were not interested in the Bible and religion as
subjects worthy of their scientific and technological prejudices.
We waged war on teaching and practicing religion in the public schools on
the flimsy grounds of separation of church and state and the First
Amendment. But there can be no real separation of religion and society. The
president, his Cabinet, the Congress and the courts are full of men and
women who are members of churches and other religious institutions. Their
decisions are influenced in some measure by their religious traditions. The
president has made it abundantly clear he feels inspired by his higher
power when he makes decisions. Like it or not, a huge number of U.S.
citizens say they are members of some religion.
None of them wishes to have an established church like the state churches
of England and Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The Founding Fathers went so far
as to say there will be no establishment of religion. But nothing prohibits
people from expressing their religious beliefs in public, both personally
and politically. Yet liberals have said that there must be a separation of
religion and society, that anything religious is construed as establishing
religion. Thus, liberals in general are seen as anti-religion, and not just
for insisting on separation of church and state.
A further trouble is that the worship of science and technology has
replaced religion in the hearts of the intelligentsia. People put their
faith in these areas in the hope that they will solve our problems. That is
indeed an act of faith, as there can be no evidence that it is true.
We find it absurd that some people believe in the Biblical story of
creation when we smart people know that creation is an evolutionary
process. Of course it is. But how many know what the meaning of the
creation myth really is? Do we know enough about the Old Testament to
understand how this story has influenced literature, art, poetry, music and
religion? How many of us liberal intellectuals know about how the Bible as
a whole is the basis of Western law as well as Western civilization?
We have a great opportunity ahead of us. We must encourage critical
thinking and study of the Bible and religion in schools and universities.
Instead of mocking religion, we must make it a source of serious
consideration and understanding. Members of religions must support leaders
who are intellectually sound and rigorous in their religious teaching. It
is time to beef up our understanding of what we are against by being
informed about what religion is all about.
Robert Warren Cromey is a retired Episcopalian priest who lives in San
Francisco.
NOT ENOUGH RELIGION
ROBERT WARREN CROMEY
San Francisco Chronicle
December 21, 2004
We liberals have denigrated religion so much that Christian conservatives
wreaked vengeance in the recent election. I have been a proud member of the
ACLU since my university days in the 1950s. I went along with the idea that
we should keep prayer out of the public schools and prevent the teaching of
the Bible and religion in public high schools and universities under the
guise of separation of church and state.
We now have more than two generations of religiously illiterate university
graduates. The possibility of teaching high-school and college students
critical thinking of the Bible, theology, ethics and religion in general
has been lost to millions of students. William F. Buckley Jr. ridiculed
Yale for de-emphasizing religion in that Ivy League bastion in his 1978
book, God and Man at Yale. Yale was founded to train young men for the
ministry in the Christian Church. If that school abandoned its religious
roots, then secular and state-run schools could safely counter any attempts
to teach any form of religion on the university level.
The Christian conservatives filled the gap with literalistic opinions about
what Scripture says, swallowed whole by intelligent but untutored
believers. Thoughtful teaching about religion was replaced by teaching that
followed a religiously conservative party line --- anti-abortion, anti-
homosexual and pro-creationism. The universities blithely went along,
making fun of the fundamentalists, but not teaching the students any
alternative because they were not interested in the Bible and religion as
subjects worthy of their scientific and technological prejudices.
We waged war on teaching and practicing religion in the public schools on
the flimsy grounds of separation of church and state and the First
Amendment. But there can be no real separation of religion and society. The
president, his Cabinet, the Congress and the courts are full of men and
women who are members of churches and other religious institutions. Their
decisions are influenced in some measure by their religious traditions. The
president has made it abundantly clear he feels inspired by his higher
power when he makes decisions. Like it or not, a huge number of U.S.
citizens say they are members of some religion.
None of them wishes to have an established church like the state churches
of England and Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The Founding Fathers went so far
as to say there will be no establishment of religion. But nothing prohibits
people from expressing their religious beliefs in public, both personally
and politically. Yet liberals have said that there must be a separation of
religion and society, that anything religious is construed as establishing
religion. Thus, liberals in general are seen as anti-religion, and not just
for insisting on separation of church and state.
A further trouble is that the worship of science and technology has
replaced religion in the hearts of the intelligentsia. People put their
faith in these areas in the hope that they will solve our problems. That is
indeed an act of faith, as there can be no evidence that it is true.
We find it absurd that some people believe in the Biblical story of
creation when we smart people know that creation is an evolutionary
process. Of course it is. But how many know what the meaning of the
creation myth really is? Do we know enough about the Old Testament to
understand how this story has influenced literature, art, poetry, music and
religion? How many of us liberal intellectuals know about how the Bible as
a whole is the basis of Western law as well as Western civilization?
We have a great opportunity ahead of us. We must encourage critical
thinking and study of the Bible and religion in schools and universities.
Instead of mocking religion, we must make it a source of serious
consideration and understanding. Members of religions must support leaders
who are intellectually sound and rigorous in their religious teaching. It
is time to beef up our understanding of what we are against by being
informed about what religion is all about.
Robert Warren Cromey is a retired Episcopalian priest who lives in San
Francisco.
12/26/04
Why anyone should have troubled to crucify the Christ of Liberal
Protestantism has always been a mystery.
- Readings in St John's Gospel part 2 p.xxiv
Protestantism has always been a mystery.
- Readings in St John's Gospel part 2 p.xxiv
It is sheer lack of imagination to suppose that a vista of a
million million years can give more significance than a week or a fortnight
to our moral strivings, if at the end it is all to be as though we have
never been at all.
- Nature, Man & God p.449
million million years can give more significance than a week or a fortnight
to our moral strivings, if at the end it is all to be as though we have
never been at all.
- Nature, Man & God p.449
Humanism consists, roughly speaking, in the acceptance of many
Christian standards of life with a rejection or neglect of the only sources
of power to attain to them.
- The Hope of a New World p.64
Christian standards of life with a rejection or neglect of the only sources
of power to attain to them.
- The Hope of a New World p.64
"God Is With Us": Hitler's Rhetoric and the Lure of "Moral Values"
by Maureen Farrell
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/12/far04041.html
"God does not make cowardly nations free." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
A couple weeks ago, while asserting that the Founding Founders
intended for the U.S. government to be infused with Christianity,
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that the Holocaust was able
to flourish in Germany because of Europe's secular ways. "Did it turn
out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews
were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America?"
Scalia asked a congregation at Manhattan's Shearith Israel synagogue.
"I don't think so."
One might expect regular citizens to be ignorant of history, but
a Supreme Court Justice? Does he imagine that the phrase "Gott mit Uns"
was a German clothier's interpretation of "Got Milk"?
If photographic evidence of the Third Reich's Christian leanings
were not enough, Hitler's own speeches and writings prove, at the very
least, that he presented many of the same faith-based arguments heard
in America today. Religion in the schools? Hitler was for it.
Intellectuals who practiced "anti-Christian, smug individualism"?
According to Hitler, their days were numbered. Divine Providence's role
in shaping Germany's ultimate victory? Who could argue? In other words,
there is enough historical evidence to color Scalia deluded. Writing
for Free Inquiry, John Patrick Michael Murphy explained:
"Hitler's Germany amalgamated state with church. Soldiers of
the vermacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: "Gott mit
uns" (God is with us). His troops were often sprinkled with holy water
by the priests. It was a real Christian country whose citizens were
indoctrinated by both state and church and blindly followed all
authority figures, political and ecclesiastical.
Hitler, like some of the today's politicians and preachers,
politicized "family values." He liked corporeal punishment in home and
school. Jesus prayers became mandatory in all schools under his
administration. While abortion was illegal in pre-Hitler Germany, he
took it to new depths of enforcement, requiring all doctors to report
to the government the circumstances of all miscarriages. He openly
despised homosexuality and criminalized it."
For anyone wanting even more proof, Mein Kampf is chock full of
the Fuhrer's musings on God. ("I believe that I am acting in accordance
with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord," Hitler wrote). But
anti-Semitic rants aside, some of Hitler's religious musings are
interchangeable with Mr. Bush's.
Hitler was raised a Catholic and spoke of his faith in God, yet,
singling out his rants against religion, politicians and pastors
continue to characterize him as a pagan barbarian. Such distortions are
convenient -- particularly in an age where propaganda concerning "moral
values" is readily gobbled up and Christian nation legislation waits in
the wings -- but, to paraphrase the Bible, overlooking the truth will
not make us free.
Scalia, who also cited the Bible to claim that government
"derives its moral authority from God," is hardly alone in his
assertions. Leo Strauss, the philosopher who has influenced
neoconservativism, and by proxy, George Bush's America, felt that
religion, like deception, was crucial to maintaining social order.
Meanwhile, neoconservative kingpin Irving Kristol has argued similar
points -- bragging about how easy it is to fool the public into
accepting the government's actions while arguing that America's
Founding Fathers were wrong to insist on the separation of church and
state. Why? According to Jim Lobe, it's because religion, as Strauss
and his disciples see it, is "absolutely essential in order to impose
moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control."
Saying that neoconservatives believe that secular society is
undesirable "because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and
relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in
turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external
threats," Lobe explained why Kristol and other neocons have "allied
themselves with the Christian Right" and, in some cases, have also
denounced Darwin's theory of evolution. "Neoconservatives are
pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers," Reason
magazine's Ronald Bailey explained, pointing to publications like
Commentary which has espoused the virtues of religious fundamentalism
and has questioned evolutionary science.
(Hitler did the same. The book The German Churches Under Hitler
includes his assertion that secular schools should not be tolerated
while Hitler's Table Talk quotes him questioning the wisdom in teaching
children both creationism and the theory of evolution. "The present
system of teaching in schools permits the following absurdity: at 10
a.m. the pupils attend a lesson in the catechism, at which the creation
of the world is presented to them in accordance with the teachings of
the Bible; and at 11 a.m. they attend a lesson in natural science, at
which they are taught the theory of evolution,"he said. "Yet the two
doctrines are in complete contradiction. As a child, I suffered from
this contradiction, and ran my head against a wall.")
Professor Shadia B. Drury also noted the similarities between the
methods endorsed by Hitler and neoconservatives' favorite philosopher.
She explained:
"Strauss loved America enough to try to save her from the
errors and terrors of Europe. He was convinced that the liberal
democracy of the Weimar Republic led to the rise of the Nazis. That is
a debatable matter. But Strauss did not openly debate this issue or
provide arguments for his position in his writings. I am inclined to
think that it is Strauss's ideas, and not liberal ideas, that invite
the kinds of abuses he wished to avoid. It behooves us to remember that
Hitler had the utmost contempt for parliamentary democracy. He was
impatient with debate and dispute, on the grounds that they were a
waste of time for the great genius who knew instinctively the right
choices and policies that the people need. Hitler had a profound
contempt for the masses - the same contempt that is readily observed in
Strauss and his cohorts. But when force of circumstances made it
necessary to appeal to the masses, Hitler advocated lies, myths, and
illusions as necessary pabulum to placate the people and make them
comply with the will of the Fuhrer. Strauss's political philosophy
advocates the same solution to the problem of the recalcitrant masses.
Anyone who wants to avoid the horrors of the Nazi past is well advised
not to accept Strauss's version of ancient wisdom uncritically. But
this is exactly what Strauss encouraged his students to do."
Although several others, including the legendary Seymour Hersh,
have noted the neoconservatives' belief that deception is essential,
the religious aspect of their philosophy is especially unnerving.
Religion may be the opium of the masses, but when zealots become so
certain of their own righteousness that they ignore their own humanity,
horror is the natural consequence. Islamic extremism offers the most
glaring recent example, and now that Osama bin Laden has been granted
permission to nuke America, the most extreme changes within the U.S.
could very well come from the outside world.
In the meantime, however, for those who have not yet noticed, our
own homegrown zealots -- those who advocate hatred in the name of the
Lord -- have made considerable headway, with gays and lesbians
currently at the center of legislation which, should it pass, will
alter this country forever.
When the Marriage Protection Act passed the House in July, the
New York Times called it "a radical assault on the Constitution. "If it
passes in the Senate, the bill could obliterate the separation of
powers and wipe out Constitutional protections for all minorities,
stripping the courts and possibly paving the way for Christian
nationhood. Other pieces of court stripping legislation bills designed
to topple the wall between church and state are also in play.
This encroaching infusion of church and state, combined with
recent decrees concerning moral values, doesn't resonate with inclusive
tolerance. "When was the last time a Western nation had a leader so
obsessed with God and claiming God was on our side? If you answered
Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, you're correct," Bob Fitrakis wrote.
"Nothing can be more misleading than to categorize Hitler as a barbaric
pagan or Godless totalitarian, like Stalin."
While many of us reserve a soft spot for true Christian
generosity and the warm teachings of Jesus, it's important to remember
that Christianity can be (and has been) distorted for darker purposes.
Whether you're talking about Nazi Germany, the pre-Civil War American
South, or the atmosphere in the U.S. these past few years, whenever
questions of conscience are vigorously denounced, you can bet there is
trouble ahead -- and the hijacking of faith and the manipulation of
religion should always arouse suspicion. Moral values as a mandate?
What better way to foster civil obedience and "One nation Under God"
unity in a time of preventative war, suppressed liberty and sanctioned
torture.
So, yes, despite tales of Hitler's atheism and Germany's
godlessness, the list of Hitler's religious assertions and Nazi
Christian affiliations is long, and before Americans swallow more
WMD-type baloney, it's best to comprehend this history and understand
that no nation, including our own, is immune to faith-based fascism.
Substituting "America" for "Germany," many of Hitler's religious
assertions could have been uttered by Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson --
with Hitler even asserting that God punished Germany for turning away
from Him -- before promising that renewed piety would protect the
Fatherland and make it prosperous and successful once more. "Once the
mercy of God shown upon us, but we were not worthy of His mercy.
Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell, fell as
scarcely any other people heretofore. In this deep misery we again
learned to pray," Hitler said in 1936, sixty-five years before Falwell
and Robertson blamed abortionists and feminists for the tragedies of
Sept. 11.
Hitler's religious phrases could have also come from the lips of
George W. Bush. "Our prayer is: Lord God, let us never hesitate, let us
never play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken
upon us,"Hitler said in March, 1933, sounding much like our president,
who believes that God wants him to liberate the people in Middle East
-- even if he has to torture, maim and kill tens of thousands in the
process. "I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Bob
Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we
have a duty.. . . Going into this period, I was praying for strength to
do the Lord's will. . . ."
Speaking in Berlin in March, 1936, Hitler said something
remarkably similar. "I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty
for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for
Germany," he said, before launching the preventive war heard round the
world.
Both leaders also promised peace while planning for war. "We seek
peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended," Bush
said, in his State of the Union address in Jan. 2003, two months before
launching a preventative war in Iraq. "Never in these long years have
we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace
at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign
foe!"Hitler said in Nuremberg on Sept. 13, 1936.
Yes, many of Hitler's faith-based comments could have come from
George Bush himself, and are undoubtedly the kinds of sentiments many
Americans not only agree with -- but take comfort in. This is not to
say that Bush is Hitler or that religion is evil, but to serve as a
reminder that things are not always what they seem. Christianity was
used to justify everything from the Salem witch trials to slavery in
America, and facilitated group-think in Germany -- when individuality
and questions of conscience were needed the most. These are but a few
of the Fuhrer's assertions:
a.. "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a
school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction
without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all
character training and religion must be derived from faith." (The
German Churches Under Hitler, p.241)
b.. "We must turn all the sentiments of the Volk, all its
thinking, acting, even its beliefs, away from the anti-Christian, smug
individualism of the past, from the egotism and stupid Phariseeism of
personal arrogance, and we must educate the youth in particular in the
spirit of those of Christ's words that we must interpret anew: love one
another; be considerate of your fellow man; remember that each one of
you is not alone a creature of God, but that you are all brothers! This
youth will, with loathing and contempt, abandon those hypocrites who
have Christ on their lips but the devil in their hearts." (Hitler:
Memoirs of a Confidant, page 140)
c.. "It will be the Government's care to maintain honest
cooperation between Church and State; the struggle against
materialistic views and for a real national community is just as much
in the interest of the German nation as in that of the welfare of our
Christian faith." (At the Reichstag, March 23, 1933)
d.. "Without pledging ourselves to any particular Confession
[Protestantism or Catholicism], we have restored to faith its
prerequisites because we were convinced that the people need and
require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the
atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical
declarations: we have stamped it out." (Berlin, Oct. 24, 1933)
e.. "But there is something else I believe, and that is that
there is a God. . . . And this God again has blessed our efforts during
the past 13 years." (Munich, Feb. 24, 1940)
f.. "You [blue-collar workers] represent the most noble of
slogans known to us: "God helps those who help themselves!' (Hitler:
Speeches and Proclamations, Vol. 2, page 1147)
g.. "Fifteen years ago I had nothing save my faith and my will.
Today the Movement is Germany, today this Movement has won the German
nation and formed the Reich. Would that have been possible without the
blessing of the Almighty? Or do they who ruined Germany wish to
maintain that they have had God's blessing? What we are we are, not
against but with the will of Providence. And so long as we are loyal,
honest, and ready to fight, so long as we believe in our great work and
do not capitulate, we shall also in the future have the blessing of
Providence." (Rosenheim, Aug. 11, 1935)
h.. "My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior
as a fighter. . . As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be
cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice....
And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting
rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have
also a duty to my own people." (Munich, April 12, 1922)
i.. "If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbor,
i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of
the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we
who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the
community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished
a prodigious work." (Feb. 24, 1939)
j.. "We were convinced that the people needs and requires this
faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic
movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we
have stamped it out." (Berlin, Oct. 24, 1933)
k.. "An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of
nature and bows before the unknowable. An educated man, on the other
hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the
state of the animal)." (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, page 59)
In his book, They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer
interviewed Germans who discussed how their society changed right
before their eyes, and how, despite Hitler's rhetoric, God was nowhere
to be found. As one interviewee put it:
"The world you live in -- "your nation, your people" -- is not
the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched,
all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the
visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which
you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying
it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and
fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves;
when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a
system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system
itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to
sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
Of course, America has hardly "gone all the way" and is unlikely
to become as psychotic as Nazi Germany any time soon. But what do you
suppose God thinks of preventative war based upon deception? Or about
the use of depleted uranium? Or about dropping napalm on civilians? Are
Iraqi insurgents are any less certain that God is on their side than
our own Evangelical Marines?
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a brutal thug, but why do so many insist
on forgetting that the U.S. helped him to power in the first place?
Does God see our role in all of this as lightly as we do? And how many
U.S. citizens do you know, who, mired in fear, readily dismiss
America's use of torture and rationalize our disregard for
international law? What else might they overlook?
In 1937, Hitler said that because of Germany's belief in God and
God's favoritism towards Germany, the country would prevail and
prosper. "We, therefore, go our way into the future with the deepest
belief in God. Would all we have achieved been possible had Providence
not helped us? I know that the fruits of human labor are hard-won and
transitory if they are not blessed by the Omnipotent. Work such as ours
which has received the blessings of the Omnipotent can never again be
undone by mere mortals,"he said.
While attempting to solidify his power, Hitler also denounced
those who denounced religion -- as if he were talking about Hollywood
or blue states or Noam Chomsky. "For eight months we have been
conducting a fearless campaign against that Communism which is
threatening our entire nation, our culture, our art, and our public
morals, "Hitler said in a speech in Oct. 1933. "We have made an end of
denials of the Deity and the crying down of religion."
There will be no more crying down of religion in George Bush's
America, either. Though oft-repeated assertions made by the media in
the immediate aftermath of the election have proven to be nothing more
than myth, propagandists would have you believe that the American
people have spoken: "Moral values" reign supreme.
But how can any one of us know God's desires -- especially when
our enemies claim to have God on their side as well? And doesn't it
seem that religious hubris -- believing that God sanctions one's own
inhumane treatment of others -- always invites a fall?
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that
his justice cannot sleep forever," Thomas Jefferson said, of the price
America would eventually pay for slavery. "Nations, like individuals,
are punished for their transgressions," Ulysses S. Grant advised,
describing karmic retribution without pointing hateful fingers at
lesbians.
And long before that, the poet John Milton tried to "justify the
ways of God to Man." But yet, the world, with its conflicting visions
of morality, ethics and truth, still struggles to comprehend.
Perhaps Truth, for want of a better definition, is what God sees
when he looks at any given situation. And perhaps it is ultimately
impossible for us to know God's mind. After all, it's obvious that
Hitler wasn't telling the truth when he spoke of God and country -- and
by the same token, it's difficult to look at Najaf or Fallujah or Abu
Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay and see God's hand in any of it.
After one of Bush's operatives promised to "export death and
violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great
nation" Bob Woodward wrote: "The president was casting his mission and
that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master Plan." And sure
enough, when Woodward asked Bush if he had discussed the impending
invasion of Iraq with his father, President George H.W. Bush (who could
have offered sage advice), the President responded: "He is the wrong
father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father that
I appeal to."
But, without knowing God's mind, most of us have only History to
help us judge. And the fact is, without the benefit of History, some of
the "moral values" Hitler embraced sound eerily like those being
peddled today.
George Bush is not Hitler. America is not Nazi Germany. But
buying into religious assertions or thinking that God is on your side
is not wise when it comes to matters of war -- particularly when that
war is an aggressive preventative war based on false premises and
assumptions.
So, aside from Jerry Falwell, who speaks with hate-filled
authority, most of us do not know how God will judge us. We will have
to settle for History's imperfect record.
All of this begs the question, however. Given his assertions
regarding God's role in helping him decide policy ("I pray that I be as
good a messenger of His will as possible" Bush told Woodward. . . "I
felt so strongly that [invading Iraq] was the right thing to do") how
does Bush view the more mundane, secular implications of his actions?
When asked by Woodward how History would judge the war in Iraq, Bush
replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."
I challenge anyone to find the moral value in that.
Maureen Farrell is a writer and media consultant who specializes
in helping other writers get television and radio exposure.
© Copyright 2004, Maureen Farrell
by Maureen Farrell
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/12/far04041.html
"God does not make cowardly nations free." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
A couple weeks ago, while asserting that the Founding Founders
intended for the U.S. government to be infused with Christianity,
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that the Holocaust was able
to flourish in Germany because of Europe's secular ways. "Did it turn
out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews
were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America?"
Scalia asked a congregation at Manhattan's Shearith Israel synagogue.
"I don't think so."
One might expect regular citizens to be ignorant of history, but
a Supreme Court Justice? Does he imagine that the phrase "Gott mit Uns"
was a German clothier's interpretation of "Got Milk"?
If photographic evidence of the Third Reich's Christian leanings
were not enough, Hitler's own speeches and writings prove, at the very
least, that he presented many of the same faith-based arguments heard
in America today. Religion in the schools? Hitler was for it.
Intellectuals who practiced "anti-Christian, smug individualism"?
According to Hitler, their days were numbered. Divine Providence's role
in shaping Germany's ultimate victory? Who could argue? In other words,
there is enough historical evidence to color Scalia deluded. Writing
for Free Inquiry, John Patrick Michael Murphy explained:
"Hitler's Germany amalgamated state with church. Soldiers of
the vermacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: "Gott mit
uns" (God is with us). His troops were often sprinkled with holy water
by the priests. It was a real Christian country whose citizens were
indoctrinated by both state and church and blindly followed all
authority figures, political and ecclesiastical.
Hitler, like some of the today's politicians and preachers,
politicized "family values." He liked corporeal punishment in home and
school. Jesus prayers became mandatory in all schools under his
administration. While abortion was illegal in pre-Hitler Germany, he
took it to new depths of enforcement, requiring all doctors to report
to the government the circumstances of all miscarriages. He openly
despised homosexuality and criminalized it."
For anyone wanting even more proof, Mein Kampf is chock full of
the Fuhrer's musings on God. ("I believe that I am acting in accordance
with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord," Hitler wrote). But
anti-Semitic rants aside, some of Hitler's religious musings are
interchangeable with Mr. Bush's.
Hitler was raised a Catholic and spoke of his faith in God, yet,
singling out his rants against religion, politicians and pastors
continue to characterize him as a pagan barbarian. Such distortions are
convenient -- particularly in an age where propaganda concerning "moral
values" is readily gobbled up and Christian nation legislation waits in
the wings -- but, to paraphrase the Bible, overlooking the truth will
not make us free.
Scalia, who also cited the Bible to claim that government
"derives its moral authority from God," is hardly alone in his
assertions. Leo Strauss, the philosopher who has influenced
neoconservativism, and by proxy, George Bush's America, felt that
religion, like deception, was crucial to maintaining social order.
Meanwhile, neoconservative kingpin Irving Kristol has argued similar
points -- bragging about how easy it is to fool the public into
accepting the government's actions while arguing that America's
Founding Fathers were wrong to insist on the separation of church and
state. Why? According to Jim Lobe, it's because religion, as Strauss
and his disciples see it, is "absolutely essential in order to impose
moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control."
Saying that neoconservatives believe that secular society is
undesirable "because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and
relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in
turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external
threats," Lobe explained why Kristol and other neocons have "allied
themselves with the Christian Right" and, in some cases, have also
denounced Darwin's theory of evolution. "Neoconservatives are
pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers," Reason
magazine's Ronald Bailey explained, pointing to publications like
Commentary which has espoused the virtues of religious fundamentalism
and has questioned evolutionary science.
(Hitler did the same. The book The German Churches Under Hitler
includes his assertion that secular schools should not be tolerated
while Hitler's Table Talk quotes him questioning the wisdom in teaching
children both creationism and the theory of evolution. "The present
system of teaching in schools permits the following absurdity: at 10
a.m. the pupils attend a lesson in the catechism, at which the creation
of the world is presented to them in accordance with the teachings of
the Bible; and at 11 a.m. they attend a lesson in natural science, at
which they are taught the theory of evolution,"he said. "Yet the two
doctrines are in complete contradiction. As a child, I suffered from
this contradiction, and ran my head against a wall.")
Professor Shadia B. Drury also noted the similarities between the
methods endorsed by Hitler and neoconservatives' favorite philosopher.
She explained:
"Strauss loved America enough to try to save her from the
errors and terrors of Europe. He was convinced that the liberal
democracy of the Weimar Republic led to the rise of the Nazis. That is
a debatable matter. But Strauss did not openly debate this issue or
provide arguments for his position in his writings. I am inclined to
think that it is Strauss's ideas, and not liberal ideas, that invite
the kinds of abuses he wished to avoid. It behooves us to remember that
Hitler had the utmost contempt for parliamentary democracy. He was
impatient with debate and dispute, on the grounds that they were a
waste of time for the great genius who knew instinctively the right
choices and policies that the people need. Hitler had a profound
contempt for the masses - the same contempt that is readily observed in
Strauss and his cohorts. But when force of circumstances made it
necessary to appeal to the masses, Hitler advocated lies, myths, and
illusions as necessary pabulum to placate the people and make them
comply with the will of the Fuhrer. Strauss's political philosophy
advocates the same solution to the problem of the recalcitrant masses.
Anyone who wants to avoid the horrors of the Nazi past is well advised
not to accept Strauss's version of ancient wisdom uncritically. But
this is exactly what Strauss encouraged his students to do."
Although several others, including the legendary Seymour Hersh,
have noted the neoconservatives' belief that deception is essential,
the religious aspect of their philosophy is especially unnerving.
Religion may be the opium of the masses, but when zealots become so
certain of their own righteousness that they ignore their own humanity,
horror is the natural consequence. Islamic extremism offers the most
glaring recent example, and now that Osama bin Laden has been granted
permission to nuke America, the most extreme changes within the U.S.
could very well come from the outside world.
In the meantime, however, for those who have not yet noticed, our
own homegrown zealots -- those who advocate hatred in the name of the
Lord -- have made considerable headway, with gays and lesbians
currently at the center of legislation which, should it pass, will
alter this country forever.
When the Marriage Protection Act passed the House in July, the
New York Times called it "a radical assault on the Constitution. "If it
passes in the Senate, the bill could obliterate the separation of
powers and wipe out Constitutional protections for all minorities,
stripping the courts and possibly paving the way for Christian
nationhood. Other pieces of court stripping legislation bills designed
to topple the wall between church and state are also in play.
This encroaching infusion of church and state, combined with
recent decrees concerning moral values, doesn't resonate with inclusive
tolerance. "When was the last time a Western nation had a leader so
obsessed with God and claiming God was on our side? If you answered
Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, you're correct," Bob Fitrakis wrote.
"Nothing can be more misleading than to categorize Hitler as a barbaric
pagan or Godless totalitarian, like Stalin."
While many of us reserve a soft spot for true Christian
generosity and the warm teachings of Jesus, it's important to remember
that Christianity can be (and has been) distorted for darker purposes.
Whether you're talking about Nazi Germany, the pre-Civil War American
South, or the atmosphere in the U.S. these past few years, whenever
questions of conscience are vigorously denounced, you can bet there is
trouble ahead -- and the hijacking of faith and the manipulation of
religion should always arouse suspicion. Moral values as a mandate?
What better way to foster civil obedience and "One nation Under God"
unity in a time of preventative war, suppressed liberty and sanctioned
torture.
So, yes, despite tales of Hitler's atheism and Germany's
godlessness, the list of Hitler's religious assertions and Nazi
Christian affiliations is long, and before Americans swallow more
WMD-type baloney, it's best to comprehend this history and understand
that no nation, including our own, is immune to faith-based fascism.
Substituting "America" for "Germany," many of Hitler's religious
assertions could have been uttered by Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson --
with Hitler even asserting that God punished Germany for turning away
from Him -- before promising that renewed piety would protect the
Fatherland and make it prosperous and successful once more. "Once the
mercy of God shown upon us, but we were not worthy of His mercy.
Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell, fell as
scarcely any other people heretofore. In this deep misery we again
learned to pray," Hitler said in 1936, sixty-five years before Falwell
and Robertson blamed abortionists and feminists for the tragedies of
Sept. 11.
Hitler's religious phrases could have also come from the lips of
George W. Bush. "Our prayer is: Lord God, let us never hesitate, let us
never play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken
upon us,"Hitler said in March, 1933, sounding much like our president,
who believes that God wants him to liberate the people in Middle East
-- even if he has to torture, maim and kill tens of thousands in the
process. "I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Bob
Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we
have a duty.. . . Going into this period, I was praying for strength to
do the Lord's will. . . ."
Speaking in Berlin in March, 1936, Hitler said something
remarkably similar. "I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty
for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for
Germany," he said, before launching the preventive war heard round the
world.
Both leaders also promised peace while planning for war. "We seek
peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended," Bush
said, in his State of the Union address in Jan. 2003, two months before
launching a preventative war in Iraq. "Never in these long years have
we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace
at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign
foe!"Hitler said in Nuremberg on Sept. 13, 1936.
Yes, many of Hitler's faith-based comments could have come from
George Bush himself, and are undoubtedly the kinds of sentiments many
Americans not only agree with -- but take comfort in. This is not to
say that Bush is Hitler or that religion is evil, but to serve as a
reminder that things are not always what they seem. Christianity was
used to justify everything from the Salem witch trials to slavery in
America, and facilitated group-think in Germany -- when individuality
and questions of conscience were needed the most. These are but a few
of the Fuhrer's assertions:
a.. "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a
school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction
without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all
character training and religion must be derived from faith." (The
German Churches Under Hitler, p.241)
b.. "We must turn all the sentiments of the Volk, all its
thinking, acting, even its beliefs, away from the anti-Christian, smug
individualism of the past, from the egotism and stupid Phariseeism of
personal arrogance, and we must educate the youth in particular in the
spirit of those of Christ's words that we must interpret anew: love one
another; be considerate of your fellow man; remember that each one of
you is not alone a creature of God, but that you are all brothers! This
youth will, with loathing and contempt, abandon those hypocrites who
have Christ on their lips but the devil in their hearts." (Hitler:
Memoirs of a Confidant, page 140)
c.. "It will be the Government's care to maintain honest
cooperation between Church and State; the struggle against
materialistic views and for a real national community is just as much
in the interest of the German nation as in that of the welfare of our
Christian faith." (At the Reichstag, March 23, 1933)
d.. "Without pledging ourselves to any particular Confession
[Protestantism or Catholicism], we have restored to faith its
prerequisites because we were convinced that the people need and
require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the
atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical
declarations: we have stamped it out." (Berlin, Oct. 24, 1933)
e.. "But there is something else I believe, and that is that
there is a God. . . . And this God again has blessed our efforts during
the past 13 years." (Munich, Feb. 24, 1940)
f.. "You [blue-collar workers] represent the most noble of
slogans known to us: "God helps those who help themselves!' (Hitler:
Speeches and Proclamations, Vol. 2, page 1147)
g.. "Fifteen years ago I had nothing save my faith and my will.
Today the Movement is Germany, today this Movement has won the German
nation and formed the Reich. Would that have been possible without the
blessing of the Almighty? Or do they who ruined Germany wish to
maintain that they have had God's blessing? What we are we are, not
against but with the will of Providence. And so long as we are loyal,
honest, and ready to fight, so long as we believe in our great work and
do not capitulate, we shall also in the future have the blessing of
Providence." (Rosenheim, Aug. 11, 1935)
h.. "My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior
as a fighter. . . As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be
cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice....
And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting
rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have
also a duty to my own people." (Munich, April 12, 1922)
i.. "If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbor,
i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of
the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we
who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the
community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished
a prodigious work." (Feb. 24, 1939)
j.. "We were convinced that the people needs and requires this
faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic
movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we
have stamped it out." (Berlin, Oct. 24, 1933)
k.. "An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of
nature and bows before the unknowable. An educated man, on the other
hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the
state of the animal)." (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, page 59)
In his book, They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer
interviewed Germans who discussed how their society changed right
before their eyes, and how, despite Hitler's rhetoric, God was nowhere
to be found. As one interviewee put it:
"The world you live in -- "your nation, your people" -- is not
the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched,
all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the
visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which
you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying
it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and
fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves;
when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a
system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system
itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to
sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
Of course, America has hardly "gone all the way" and is unlikely
to become as psychotic as Nazi Germany any time soon. But what do you
suppose God thinks of preventative war based upon deception? Or about
the use of depleted uranium? Or about dropping napalm on civilians? Are
Iraqi insurgents are any less certain that God is on their side than
our own Evangelical Marines?
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a brutal thug, but why do so many insist
on forgetting that the U.S. helped him to power in the first place?
Does God see our role in all of this as lightly as we do? And how many
U.S. citizens do you know, who, mired in fear, readily dismiss
America's use of torture and rationalize our disregard for
international law? What else might they overlook?
In 1937, Hitler said that because of Germany's belief in God and
God's favoritism towards Germany, the country would prevail and
prosper. "We, therefore, go our way into the future with the deepest
belief in God. Would all we have achieved been possible had Providence
not helped us? I know that the fruits of human labor are hard-won and
transitory if they are not blessed by the Omnipotent. Work such as ours
which has received the blessings of the Omnipotent can never again be
undone by mere mortals,"he said.
While attempting to solidify his power, Hitler also denounced
those who denounced religion -- as if he were talking about Hollywood
or blue states or Noam Chomsky. "For eight months we have been
conducting a fearless campaign against that Communism which is
threatening our entire nation, our culture, our art, and our public
morals, "Hitler said in a speech in Oct. 1933. "We have made an end of
denials of the Deity and the crying down of religion."
There will be no more crying down of religion in George Bush's
America, either. Though oft-repeated assertions made by the media in
the immediate aftermath of the election have proven to be nothing more
than myth, propagandists would have you believe that the American
people have spoken: "Moral values" reign supreme.
But how can any one of us know God's desires -- especially when
our enemies claim to have God on their side as well? And doesn't it
seem that religious hubris -- believing that God sanctions one's own
inhumane treatment of others -- always invites a fall?
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that
his justice cannot sleep forever," Thomas Jefferson said, of the price
America would eventually pay for slavery. "Nations, like individuals,
are punished for their transgressions," Ulysses S. Grant advised,
describing karmic retribution without pointing hateful fingers at
lesbians.
And long before that, the poet John Milton tried to "justify the
ways of God to Man." But yet, the world, with its conflicting visions
of morality, ethics and truth, still struggles to comprehend.
Perhaps Truth, for want of a better definition, is what God sees
when he looks at any given situation. And perhaps it is ultimately
impossible for us to know God's mind. After all, it's obvious that
Hitler wasn't telling the truth when he spoke of God and country -- and
by the same token, it's difficult to look at Najaf or Fallujah or Abu
Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay and see God's hand in any of it.
After one of Bush's operatives promised to "export death and
violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great
nation" Bob Woodward wrote: "The president was casting his mission and
that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master Plan." And sure
enough, when Woodward asked Bush if he had discussed the impending
invasion of Iraq with his father, President George H.W. Bush (who could
have offered sage advice), the President responded: "He is the wrong
father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father that
I appeal to."
But, without knowing God's mind, most of us have only History to
help us judge. And the fact is, without the benefit of History, some of
the "moral values" Hitler embraced sound eerily like those being
peddled today.
George Bush is not Hitler. America is not Nazi Germany. But
buying into religious assertions or thinking that God is on your side
is not wise when it comes to matters of war -- particularly when that
war is an aggressive preventative war based on false premises and
assumptions.
So, aside from Jerry Falwell, who speaks with hate-filled
authority, most of us do not know how God will judge us. We will have
to settle for History's imperfect record.
All of this begs the question, however. Given his assertions
regarding God's role in helping him decide policy ("I pray that I be as
good a messenger of His will as possible" Bush told Woodward. . . "I
felt so strongly that [invading Iraq] was the right thing to do") how
does Bush view the more mundane, secular implications of his actions?
When asked by Woodward how History would judge the war in Iraq, Bush
replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."
I challenge anyone to find the moral value in that.
Maureen Farrell is a writer and media consultant who specializes
in helping other writers get television and radio exposure.
© Copyright 2004, Maureen Farrell
fw from a lapsed Christian who however still teaches at a RC high-school
Thanks. Brilliant.
With space, he could have gone into secular sects, and with that, the fundamental
texts to which they owe allegiance:
Mein Kampf, the CP Manifesto, Gramsci's prison writings, Darwin's of
course, though
currently the hegemonic discourse, The Humanist Manifestos, the UN CEDAW
Protocols,
in the USA that part of the First Amendment concerning religion... with
another cup
of coffee one could multiply the list several times. The EU Constitution could
easily go that way. Places of worship of the Church of Secularism can be
found on
most university campuses in the West, particularly in the Humanities
departments.
He nicely describes the situation regarding evolution/creation in schools.
Perhap
the most perceptive commentary I have seen on this is in "Kindly
Inquisitors" by
Jonathan Rauch (1993 U.Chic.Pr), subtitled "The New Attacks on Free
Thought". He is
by far the best of the libertarian/conservative gays. Probably easiest
obtained
through Te Puna.
> http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/001/17.62.html
>
> That Other Church
>
> Let's face it: Secularism is a religion. Let's treat it as such.
Thanks. Brilliant.
With space, he could have gone into secular sects, and with that, the fundamental
texts to which they owe allegiance:
Mein Kampf, the CP Manifesto, Gramsci's prison writings, Darwin's of
course, though
currently the hegemonic discourse, The Humanist Manifestos, the UN CEDAW
Protocols,
in the USA that part of the First Amendment concerning religion... with
another cup
of coffee one could multiply the list several times. The EU Constitution could
easily go that way. Places of worship of the Church of Secularism can be
found on
most university campuses in the West, particularly in the Humanities
departments.
He nicely describes the situation regarding evolution/creation in schools.
Perhap
the most perceptive commentary I have seen on this is in "Kindly
Inquisitors" by
Jonathan Rauch (1993 U.Chic.Pr), subtitled "The New Attacks on Free
Thought". He is
by far the best of the libertarian/conservative gays. Probably easiest
obtained
through Te Puna.
> http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/001/17.62.html
>
> That Other Church
>
> Let's face it: Secularism is a religion. Let's treat it as such.
Any Kiwis who haven't yet noticed the aggressive promotion in NZ of
Creationism®should take notice. Our emulation of the USA extends to this
mind-buggering totalitarian fad! VisioNetNZ is soft on Creationism®,
publicizes it favourably in its monthly DayStar®, and obstructs
promulgation among NZ churches of the mainstream theology (technically
called theistic evolution) propounded by Prof John Morton, Prof Neil Broom,
Rupert Sheldrake, myself, etc.
IDT is not nearly so irrational as Creationism®, but has functional
connections with it, and is less than respectable scholarship. Foreign
agents peddling IDT commercially in NZ have treated insolently some leading
local exponents of theistic evolution. Overt pushers of Creationism have
gone further, using libellous insults.
All this poison (under the banner of USA-inspired caricatures of
Christianity) is supposed to be justified by the awful intellectual offence
of neoDarwinism, and its fraudulent posing as some rebuttal of religion.
Two wrongs make a right ... yeah.
Attempts were made by "creationists" in Hamilton 3 decade ago to
interfere with school library holdings. The NZ education system is, on
recent trends, in for a burgeoning series of attacks by these varieties of
fundamentalism.
R
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=594808
The school of creationism
Children in a Pennsylvania town will be taught that God made the world,
igniting a debate which splits the USA.
Andrew Buncombe reports from Dover
20 December 2004
Was the landscape around the small town of Dover in Pennsylvania created
in just six days? Were the gently curving hills perfected, the streams
formed and finished, the wide, empty skies fixed in place beneath the
firmament and the narrow wooded valleys completed? Was it all really done
in less than a week?
It was, at least according to the creationist beliefs of much of the
town's population of 1,800, who have little time for Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution. And their fundamental beliefs are set to gain further
currency.
As of next month, in a hugely controversial move, the town's high school
will become the first in the US for several generations to teach a form of
creationism as part of its curriculum.
But the controversy that has split the town of Dover, an hour's drive
north of Baltimore, is not simply some local squabble. Rather it is a
debate that is taking place in communities across the US.
Classrooms, courtrooms, public places, even the very pledges that
officials swear when taking office have become the focus of a bitterly
contested and growing dispute about whether Christianity should be
officially incorporated into civic life or if there should be a real and
meaningful separation of church and state.
It is a row that has pitched Christian against Christian, scientist
against scientist.
It has led to accusations of lies and deliberate misrepresentation and
even claims that America is turning its back on its traditions. And now
that President George Bush, a born again evangelical, has won a second term
in office with the assistance of a large turnout by evangelicals at the
polls, the dispute is likely to get even more heated.
At the eye of this storm is Dover, where a legal battle that could end up
costing local taxpayers very dear has been launched.
"I was very surprised. I would not have thought it [would come to this],"
said Steven Sough, one of 11 parents who last week filed a lawsuit with the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to try to prevent the change to the
curriculum, arguing it would breach the US Constitution. "I have a
daughter, Ashley, who will be 14 in two-weeks time. This is a personal
issue. I want her learning science at school. I want her learning religion
at home with me or at church."
The dispute in Dover blew up in October when the elected members of the
district school board voted 6-3 that the biology course for 15-year-olds
should be amended to include a theory about the origins of life known as
intelligent design or ID.
The proponents of ID claim life is so complex that its origins must in
some way have been directed by a supernatural actor. The Seattle-based
Discovery Institute, a leading proponent of ID theory, says "certain
features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an
intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection".
In addition to ordering that pupils be taught about ID and "made aware in
the gaps or problems in Darwin's theory", the board arranged for the
donation to the school of 60 copies of a controversial biology book, Of
Pandas and People. Copies of the text, which is critical of Darwin's
"natural selection", were placed in the classrooms for pupils to browse.
After a meeting of the board on 18 October, two members, Carol and Jeff
Brown, resigned in protest. The Browns, both Christians, said they believed
religion had no place in science. "This country was founded on the belief
of freedom of religion and freedom from religion," said Mrs Brown, sitting
at her kitchen table, knitting with a ball of electric-blue wool.
Her husband said he also had practical concerns. "It is going to get
shot-down in court. We cannot afford it."
The lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU, accuses the school board of
breaching the First Amendment of the US Constitution which prohibits the
establishment of an official religion.
In its lawsuit it argued: "ID is a non-scientific argument or assertion,
made in opposition to the scientific theory of evolution that an
intelligent, supernatural actor has intervened in the history of life and
that life 'owes its origin to a master intellect'." It also noted that in
1987 the US Supreme Court ruled that creationism was a religious belief
that could not be taught alongside evolution.
The school board has insisted it is not trying to force religion into the
classroom. Vice-president Heather Geesey said its aim was simply to make
information about ID available. "All I want to do is have anything the
kids [could] learn, there for them to learn. That is our job, to teach
children everything we can. "I think [the row] has been [ the result of] a
misconception. Most of the people I know are in favour of it, or else are
once I explain it."
But what of intelligent design? Is it, as critics claim, simply
creationsim-lite? Glenn Branch, vice-president of the National Centre for
Science Education, which promotes Darwinism, said: "There is nothing wrong
with the idea of a creator but teaching it as [a part of science] leads to
detriment of both religion and science. There is a blurring of the two and
it involves a lot of misrepresentation of science."
The Discovery Institute's Centre for Science and Culture counters that
labelling creationism and ID together is simply an attempt by Darwinists to
limit scientific debate. Rob Crowther, a spokesman for the group, said:
"We advocate that schools teach more about evolution, not less. We think
that the scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution should be discussed
in the classroom, but that is much different from teaching any alternative
theory."
And what about Of Pandas and People? Now more than 15 years old, the book
is considered one of the seminal texts of ID. One of its co-authors, Dean
Kenyon, a controversial academic, is a fellow of the right-leaning
Discovery Institute.
But Professor Kenneth Miller of Brown University's biology department, who
wrote a stinging critique of the text during an earlier creationism row in
Kansas, said: "It's an awful book. It's filled with scientific mistakes
and misrepresentations. It is also out of date."
It is clear from even a day in the quiet town of Dover that behind the
rather academic argument about the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinism
and about its alleged gaps, the debate that is taking place here, as
elsewhere across the US, is really about two fundamentally different views
of the world. One says that America has for too long been in retreat from
its Christian traditions while the other argues that America's very
traditions include a separation of church and state.
In Dover, for instance, while the proponents of ID insist they do not wish
to put religion in the classroom, they readily admit their own
fundamentalist beliefs. The move to change the curriculum was initiated by
a school board member, William Buckingham, who at one public meeting
declared: "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone
take a stand for him?"
Mr Buckingham has declined to speak to reporters but his wife, Charlotte,
who works at one of the town's evangelical churches, told The Independent:
"All ID is saying is that the origin of life is so complex that it had to
be created by a higher power. That is all it says. It gives the students
a chance of going to think about that."
Asked whether she believed schools ought to be allowed to teach religion,
she said: "There are many people who homeschool their children because they
cannot get what want they want elsewhere, the truth about what we believe
about our creator."
Rumours suggest that the 60 copies of Pandas were donated to the school by
Irene and Don Bonsell, whose son is a board member. Mrs Bonsell, who
described herself as a creationist, refused to confirm or deny whether they
had donated the books. She said she approved of the books being available
to the students even though she also denied religion was being placed in
the classroom. "I think it's a good idea that students should learn this
theory," she said. "I'm a creationist. I don't understand what the
problem is [with ID]. It's another theory. Darwinism has never been
proved, it's just a theory. They are trying to take God out of everything,
out of the pledge, off our money."
Pandas also has evangelical links. The book is published by the
Texas-based Foundation for Truth and Ethics, a small conservative
think-tank which has published two other books, one promoting abstinence
before marriage and another which disputes that America's founding
principles came from Greek, Roman and Enlightenment traditions but rather
from Christianity.
The foundation's president, John Buell, who formerly worked to promote
Christianity on university campuses, said Pandas was not a religious book
even though he conceded that ID implied a "supernatural power".
In Dover, the school board will meet lawyers this week to discuss its
options and decide whether to go ahead with the changes to the curriculum
and fight the lawsuit. The members' decision will be carefully scrutinised
not just by the townsfolk of Dover but by school boards across the US which
are considering similar measures.
In Grantsburg, Wisconsin, for instance, a school board has revised its
curriculum to teach "various scientific models of theories of origin"
though it has since argued that it will only be teaching students "about
the controversy surrounding evolution" and not ID.
In Charles County, Maryland, the school board is considering a proposal to
eliminate textbooks "biased toward evolution" from classrooms. Similar
proposals have been considered this year in Missouri, Mississippi and
Oklahoma. In Cobb County, Georgia, school textbooks have for the last two
years contained a sticker which informs students: "Evolution is a theory,
not a fact."
Indeed, if recent polls are accurate, the Dover school board members may
not be lacking in support. A poll last month by Gallup suggested that 45
per cent of Americans believe that humans were created by God in their
current form within the past 10,000 years.
It is less clear what the students in Dover think about the proposed
changes. On a freezing afternoon last week, Melissa Owen, 16, and
18-year-old Alex Jones, were waiting for a lift home. They both believed
that the teaching of ID should be allowed in classes that were elective
rather than mandatory.
Melissa confirmed that all the students were talking about the
controversy. "It was freezing today, there was no heat," she said.
"People were joking that the school was saving money to pay for the
lawsuit."
Creationism®should take notice. Our emulation of the USA extends to this
mind-buggering totalitarian fad! VisioNetNZ is soft on Creationism®,
publicizes it favourably in its monthly DayStar®, and obstructs
promulgation among NZ churches of the mainstream theology (technically
called theistic evolution) propounded by Prof John Morton, Prof Neil Broom,
Rupert Sheldrake, myself, etc.
IDT is not nearly so irrational as Creationism®, but has functional
connections with it, and is less than respectable scholarship. Foreign
agents peddling IDT commercially in NZ have treated insolently some leading
local exponents of theistic evolution. Overt pushers of Creationism have
gone further, using libellous insults.
All this poison (under the banner of USA-inspired caricatures of
Christianity) is supposed to be justified by the awful intellectual offence
of neoDarwinism, and its fraudulent posing as some rebuttal of religion.
Two wrongs make a right ... yeah.
Attempts were made by "creationists" in Hamilton 3 decade ago to
interfere with school library holdings. The NZ education system is, on
recent trends, in for a burgeoning series of attacks by these varieties of
fundamentalism.
R
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=594808
The school of creationism
Children in a Pennsylvania town will be taught that God made the world,
igniting a debate which splits the USA.
Andrew Buncombe reports from Dover
20 December 2004
Was the landscape around the small town of Dover in Pennsylvania created
in just six days? Were the gently curving hills perfected, the streams
formed and finished, the wide, empty skies fixed in place beneath the
firmament and the narrow wooded valleys completed? Was it all really done
in less than a week?
It was, at least according to the creationist beliefs of much of the
town's population of 1,800, who have little time for Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution. And their fundamental beliefs are set to gain further
currency.
As of next month, in a hugely controversial move, the town's high school
will become the first in the US for several generations to teach a form of
creationism as part of its curriculum.
But the controversy that has split the town of Dover, an hour's drive
north of Baltimore, is not simply some local squabble. Rather it is a
debate that is taking place in communities across the US.
Classrooms, courtrooms, public places, even the very pledges that
officials swear when taking office have become the focus of a bitterly
contested and growing dispute about whether Christianity should be
officially incorporated into civic life or if there should be a real and
meaningful separation of church and state.
It is a row that has pitched Christian against Christian, scientist
against scientist.
It has led to accusations of lies and deliberate misrepresentation and
even claims that America is turning its back on its traditions. And now
that President George Bush, a born again evangelical, has won a second term
in office with the assistance of a large turnout by evangelicals at the
polls, the dispute is likely to get even more heated.
At the eye of this storm is Dover, where a legal battle that could end up
costing local taxpayers very dear has been launched.
"I was very surprised. I would not have thought it [would come to this],"
said Steven Sough, one of 11 parents who last week filed a lawsuit with the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to try to prevent the change to the
curriculum, arguing it would breach the US Constitution. "I have a
daughter, Ashley, who will be 14 in two-weeks time. This is a personal
issue. I want her learning science at school. I want her learning religion
at home with me or at church."
The dispute in Dover blew up in October when the elected members of the
district school board voted 6-3 that the biology course for 15-year-olds
should be amended to include a theory about the origins of life known as
intelligent design or ID.
The proponents of ID claim life is so complex that its origins must in
some way have been directed by a supernatural actor. The Seattle-based
Discovery Institute, a leading proponent of ID theory, says "certain
features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an
intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection".
In addition to ordering that pupils be taught about ID and "made aware in
the gaps or problems in Darwin's theory", the board arranged for the
donation to the school of 60 copies of a controversial biology book, Of
Pandas and People. Copies of the text, which is critical of Darwin's
"natural selection", were placed in the classrooms for pupils to browse.
After a meeting of the board on 18 October, two members, Carol and Jeff
Brown, resigned in protest. The Browns, both Christians, said they believed
religion had no place in science. "This country was founded on the belief
of freedom of religion and freedom from religion," said Mrs Brown, sitting
at her kitchen table, knitting with a ball of electric-blue wool.
Her husband said he also had practical concerns. "It is going to get
shot-down in court. We cannot afford it."
The lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU, accuses the school board of
breaching the First Amendment of the US Constitution which prohibits the
establishment of an official religion.
In its lawsuit it argued: "ID is a non-scientific argument or assertion,
made in opposition to the scientific theory of evolution that an
intelligent, supernatural actor has intervened in the history of life and
that life 'owes its origin to a master intellect'." It also noted that in
1987 the US Supreme Court ruled that creationism was a religious belief
that could not be taught alongside evolution.
The school board has insisted it is not trying to force religion into the
classroom. Vice-president Heather Geesey said its aim was simply to make
information about ID available. "All I want to do is have anything the
kids [could] learn, there for them to learn. That is our job, to teach
children everything we can. "I think [the row] has been [ the result of] a
misconception. Most of the people I know are in favour of it, or else are
once I explain it."
But what of intelligent design? Is it, as critics claim, simply
creationsim-lite? Glenn Branch, vice-president of the National Centre for
Science Education, which promotes Darwinism, said: "There is nothing wrong
with the idea of a creator but teaching it as [a part of science] leads to
detriment of both religion and science. There is a blurring of the two and
it involves a lot of misrepresentation of science."
The Discovery Institute's Centre for Science and Culture counters that
labelling creationism and ID together is simply an attempt by Darwinists to
limit scientific debate. Rob Crowther, a spokesman for the group, said:
"We advocate that schools teach more about evolution, not less. We think
that the scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution should be discussed
in the classroom, but that is much different from teaching any alternative
theory."
And what about Of Pandas and People? Now more than 15 years old, the book
is considered one of the seminal texts of ID. One of its co-authors, Dean
Kenyon, a controversial academic, is a fellow of the right-leaning
Discovery Institute.
But Professor Kenneth Miller of Brown University's biology department, who
wrote a stinging critique of the text during an earlier creationism row in
Kansas, said: "It's an awful book. It's filled with scientific mistakes
and misrepresentations. It is also out of date."
It is clear from even a day in the quiet town of Dover that behind the
rather academic argument about the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinism
and about its alleged gaps, the debate that is taking place here, as
elsewhere across the US, is really about two fundamentally different views
of the world. One says that America has for too long been in retreat from
its Christian traditions while the other argues that America's very
traditions include a separation of church and state.
In Dover, for instance, while the proponents of ID insist they do not wish
to put religion in the classroom, they readily admit their own
fundamentalist beliefs. The move to change the curriculum was initiated by
a school board member, William Buckingham, who at one public meeting
declared: "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone
take a stand for him?"
Mr Buckingham has declined to speak to reporters but his wife, Charlotte,
who works at one of the town's evangelical churches, told The Independent:
"All ID is saying is that the origin of life is so complex that it had to
be created by a higher power. That is all it says. It gives the students
a chance of going to think about that."
Asked whether she believed schools ought to be allowed to teach religion,
she said: "There are many people who homeschool their children because they
cannot get what want they want elsewhere, the truth about what we believe
about our creator."
Rumours suggest that the 60 copies of Pandas were donated to the school by
Irene and Don Bonsell, whose son is a board member. Mrs Bonsell, who
described herself as a creationist, refused to confirm or deny whether they
had donated the books. She said she approved of the books being available
to the students even though she also denied religion was being placed in
the classroom. "I think it's a good idea that students should learn this
theory," she said. "I'm a creationist. I don't understand what the
problem is [with ID]. It's another theory. Darwinism has never been
proved, it's just a theory. They are trying to take God out of everything,
out of the pledge, off our money."
Pandas also has evangelical links. The book is published by the
Texas-based Foundation for Truth and Ethics, a small conservative
think-tank which has published two other books, one promoting abstinence
before marriage and another which disputes that America's founding
principles came from Greek, Roman and Enlightenment traditions but rather
from Christianity.
The foundation's president, John Buell, who formerly worked to promote
Christianity on university campuses, said Pandas was not a religious book
even though he conceded that ID implied a "supernatural power".
In Dover, the school board will meet lawyers this week to discuss its
options and decide whether to go ahead with the changes to the curriculum
and fight the lawsuit. The members' decision will be carefully scrutinised
not just by the townsfolk of Dover but by school boards across the US which
are considering similar measures.
In Grantsburg, Wisconsin, for instance, a school board has revised its
curriculum to teach "various scientific models of theories of origin"
though it has since argued that it will only be teaching students "about
the controversy surrounding evolution" and not ID.
In Charles County, Maryland, the school board is considering a proposal to
eliminate textbooks "biased toward evolution" from classrooms. Similar
proposals have been considered this year in Missouri, Mississippi and
Oklahoma. In Cobb County, Georgia, school textbooks have for the last two
years contained a sticker which informs students: "Evolution is a theory,
not a fact."
Indeed, if recent polls are accurate, the Dover school board members may
not be lacking in support. A poll last month by Gallup suggested that 45
per cent of Americans believe that humans were created by God in their
current form within the past 10,000 years.
It is less clear what the students in Dover think about the proposed
changes. On a freezing afternoon last week, Melissa Owen, 16, and
18-year-old Alex Jones, were waiting for a lift home. They both believed
that the teaching of ID should be allowed in classes that were elective
rather than mandatory.
Melissa confirmed that all the students were talking about the
controversy. "It was freezing today, there was no heat," she said.
"People were joking that the school was saving money to pay for the
lawsuit."
I fw this rather long item because it strikes me as unusually
cogent. (I get the impression that editing may have been below par; peh nö
attentsionsz.)
Foreign Policy Research Institute WIRE
A Catalyst for Ideas
www.fpri.org
PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE
by Max L. Stackhouse
Volume 12, Number 2
October 2004
Max L. Stackhouse is the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor
of Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Princeton
Theological Seminary, where he directs Kuyper Center for
Public Theology. An ordained minister in the United Church
of Christ, Dr. Stackhouse is a member of the American
Academy of Religion. This essay is a condensed version of
the Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs,
delivered on October 14, 2004. This lecture was established
by a grant from Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. Previous
lecturers include Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British
Commonwealth; George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul
II, and James Billington, Librarian of Congress. All the
lectures are posted on:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE
The 9th Annual Templeton Lecture On Religion and World Affairs
by Max L. Stackhouse
The defeat of fascism, the victory of anti-colonial
movements, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late
20th century made it appear possible that democracy would
spread worldwide, accompanied by a fuller realization of
human rights, a global economy that benefits more of the
world's people, and a reduction of military threats to the
world's security. That "end of history" view may yet prove
to be the most probable global direction -- some 120 nations
adopted democratically oriented constitutions for the first
time in the last half century. But there are many reasons
to be concerned about the character of a democratic future.
Some of the newly independent nations have become one-party
states hovering on failure. Some Islamists have repudiated
democracy altogether and advocate a return to Caliphate
governance under sharia. Russia sometimes seems bound to
resume a czarist model of centralized political control; and
China is adamant in resisting democratic movements.
Moreover, some oppose the idea of human rights, one of the
pillars of democracy, claiming that its implicit assumption
-- that humanity consists of autonomous individuals -- is a
modern secularist invention. Still others protest the
currently emerging global economy, viewing it as a threat to
sovereignty and a design of the rich to exploit the poor.
And many fear endless attacks by shadowy, stateless
terrorist networks or by ethnic factions, both of which
challenge democratic prospects by inducing such a
preoccupation with security that democratic freedoms are
eroded.
In this situation, the world's most dynamic democracy and
only superpower is expected to be not only the world's
policeman, but also its godfather, bringing peace,
prosperity, and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq and
solving every other problem that appears on the horizon,
from Haiti to global warming to the AIDS crisis in
subsaharan Africa. This charge could tempt the nation into
a new imperialism. Even as the United States is criticized
for not engaging the problems of the world, it is condemned
for intervening everywhere and seducing the world's youth
away from their own cultures.
The deeper difficulty is that Americans do not have a clear
moral or spiritual view of what we are about, of why we
believe what we believe and do what we do. How can, should,
or may we use our power, and why? And what is the source of
that power?
Suppose that the U.S. succeeds in planting democracy
throughout the world. One might see this as either cultural
imperialism or a justifiable conversion of an unholy tyranny
to a just system that corresponds to the deepest levels of
human nature and the highest discernible sense of divine
intent. That sense might of course simply be the reigning
consensus among the currently powerful nations. Does that
consensus have, or need, a deeper grounding, an ultimate
source and norm of truth and justice that can guide how
humanity ought to live?
Historically, advocates of democracy believed that it did.
The late medieval "conciliarists" who displaced popes and
overrode emperors thought so, as did the Reformers and the
Puritans. We know that the deists and theists who advocated
the Bill of Rights thought so. And the U.S. didn't hesitate
to establish democratic regimes in Cuba and the Philippines
at the end of the Spanish-American War, in Germany and Japan
at the end of World War II, and in South Korea after the
conflict there.
Is there in fact a basis for democracy that is deeper than
the fact that it has apparently mostly worked better than
other forms, at least in the West? How can we make the case
for it today, especially with globalized media, technology,
economy, culture, and religions that are beyond the control
of any one government?
Critics regularly charge that America is an imperialist
nation bent on ruling the world, ready to override other
societies with its massive multinational corporations. No
doubt some Americans have such interests, but most see their
nation as rooted in "that order which we call freedom," with
a mission to help others form open societies, adopt
democratic values, and establish human rights in a
flourishing economy. We have sometimes failed in this
mission, but most agree on the mission.
However, religious leaders, theologians, political leaders,
and commentators have failed to enunciate the basis for our
mission, or identify ways to reform it when it goes wrong.
Can we justly clarify what it is that makes us ready to send
our young men and women to kill and die for democracy?
No civilization has yet endured that did not have a
religious vision at its core. History is littered with the
rubble of empires that fell as much by spiritual emptiness
as by economic and military weakness or external pressure.
But the enduring civilizations have had religious cores that
touch the hearts and minds of the people, becoming the moral
architecture to guide the leaders and evoke sacrificial
commitments. These enable the societies' continual renewal.
It is not that everyone agrees with the religious vision, or
has to, but that there is a framework within which debate
takes place.
One cannot imagine trying to understand the politics of
China or India without reference to Confucianism or
Hinduism, or the systems of government in Southeast Asia or
the Middle East without understanding Buddhism or Islam, or
what is going on in the EU without reference to the legacy
of traditional Christendom (even if the EU's current
advocates resist any reference to religion in its new
constitution). Nor can we understand the U.S. without an
awareness of Protestantism's historic influence -- or of the
failure of its mainline traditions to define the urgent
social issues -- and of the rise of Evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism, on the one hand, and post-Vatican II
Catholicism, on the other, as they seek to offer other
perspectives on the ultimate issues. It is not the duty of
religious organizations to make public policy, as some try
to do; but it is their responsibility to seek to influence
people's consciences so that their political decisions will
be informed by moral and spiritual convictions.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that
many have tried to interpret the world as if religion were
not central to societies and politics. But he argues that
life cannot be understood exclusive of religious ideas, as
they are incarnate in the dominant values of the culture.
Indeed, Huntington speaks of the irrelevance of purely
secular thought to contemporary politics, holding that
politics is and must be religious:
During the twentieth century, a secular century, Lenin,
Ataturk, Nehru, Ben Gurion, and the Shah (for instance) all
defined the identity of their countries in the secular
century's terms. That has changed, the Shah is gone, the
Soviet Union is gone, and in its place is a Russia that in
public statements identifies itself quite explicitly with
Russian Orthodoxy. In Turkey, India, and Israel, major
political movements are challenging the secular definition
of identity. Politicians in many societies have found that
religion either is crucial to maintaining their legitimacy
as rulers or must be suppressed because it presents a
challenge to that legitimacy.[1]
Societies do tend to have common features in the sense that
we can study them comparatively and see how they similarly
adapt to similar conditions and interests. Yet, societies
develop differently because they are bent in different
directions by distinctive religions; regulating convictions
have become woven into cultural values.
Some of the regulating convictions that shape democracy
become clear when we speak of human rights, which are
affirmed by the vision behind democracy, notwithstanding our
horrible record with regard to slavery and women's rights,
and the betrayal of our own principles in wartime, from the
early struggles with Native Americans to Abu Ghraib in 2004.
Still, the conviction that humans have rights has prevailed
again and again. Indeed, even in dark moments, prophetic
voices have drawn on Biblical roots to demand the
recognition that each person is made in the image of God and
thus has inalienable rights -- even the criminal, the enemy,
the heretic, the prisoner, and the terrorist.
As Michael Perry, one of the nation's leading authorities on
law and morality, has put it, "some things should never be
done to anyone; and some things should be done for
everyone."[2] That is why the authors of America's
Declaration of Independence and the UN's Declaration of
Human Rights could appeal to Biblical principles to advocate
rights. They are "self-evident truths" that shape
consciences, civilizations, and history. When one appeals
to human rights in the face of tyranny, torture, servitude,
arbitrary arrest, extortion, discrimination, or religious
persecution, one has played a valid moral trump, and the
people have the basis to demand a law code and to form
judicial process as a recourse and remedy. The awareness of
such principles gives hope for democratic vitality under
just law.
A second feature of society that gives hope for democracy
has to do with economic life. Capitalism is the most
efficient and productive economic system yet to be devised,
and it is sweeping the world. It improves the well-being of
most people, including the poor. Not only parts of South
America and the "little tigers" of East Asia, but also the
two most populous nations of the world, India and China,
have turned to versions of capitalism, making it likely that
the World Bank and UN millennium goal of halving world
poverty within ten years can be met. However, these same
trends will also increase inequality. A great many are
raised a little, and a substantial number are raised a good
bit, but only a few are raised a great deal, widening the
gap between the wealthy and the still struggling. A free
society does not demand enforced equality of economic
status, but it must work to equalize opportunity.
The formation of new middle classes and the rising
aspirations of those who have grasped the lower rungs of the
ladder increase the prospects for democracy. People with
some financial means and even relative security are better
able to educate their children, adopt new technologies,
develop more stable lifestyles, and migrate out of
dependency. They gain some command over their destinies,
demand their freedom from restrictive constraints, and
become more concerned about developing excellence in various
areas of their lives -- professional, educational,
environmental, and institutional. They deal with others
with greater integrity and seek to provide goods or services
that make them contributing members of society.
But the formation of new middle classes does not guarantee
democracy's development. Only some parts of the middle
classes begin to extend economic opportunities, form
communities of commitment, and exercise citizen
participation. The prospect that the new middle classes
will seek to extend democratic possibilities depends on
their "calling." It is one thing to have a job and a
career, it is quite another to see what one does in all the
daily rounds of life as being under the scrutiny of a God
who cares how we live and has purposes for our lives. Max
Weber probably had it about right when he argued that this
doctrine of vocation in the world played a distinctive role
in bringing about the asceticism that generated the modern
middle classes and its quest for excellence and
professionalism.
Today's massive conversions to Pentecostalism in Latin
America and Africa, and to Evangelicalism in Asia replicate
the earlier Reformation dynamics, though usually without the
same doctrinal apparatus. This is also the case with the
growth of parallel movements in America, in the "mega-
churches" that puzzle the mainline churches that are
declining in membership. Those given the opportunity to
move toward the middle classes are questing for a new
ordering of their lives, and these movements are drawing
people into bonds of discipline and are often less tolerant
of libertine lifestyles, that are having a notable political
impact.
There are two key doctrinal points here that support
democratic prospects: first, that humans are made in the
image of God, and second, that God calls each person to live
a godly life that is manifest in the development of
excellence in all areas of worldly life. These doctrinal
points are incarnate in the now public dynamics that are
globalizing our world, one working through the attempt to
articulate principles of justice, the other appearing in the
forms of increased productivity and disciplined lifestyles.
One aids democratic prospects from above, one from below.
Both form a new middle.
I believe democracy does have a theological base, but a less
direct one. It usually depends on a basically mechanical
and statistical procedure whereby each person votes to
determine leadership or policy. That procedure involves
only two agents -- individual votes, cumulatively tabulated,
and the state, the organized body that manages the election
and accepts its results. The Terrors of the French
Revolution and of the Red Guard's Cultural Revolution remind
us of the perils of the mobocracy into which mere populism
can degenerate, while the fact that both Hitler and Stalin
both claimed to be elected reminds us of what statism can
become.
If a democracy is to have an inner moral fiber, it must have
several other things besides voters and the state, an
independent legal system that recognizes the voters' human
rights and civil liberties, and a free economic system.
It must also have:
* schools that teach critical thinking;
* media that provides information and inspiration from a
range of perspectives;
* stable families that nurture responsible persons and
inculcate moral habits and spiritual insight;
* political parties that voice the needs and hopes of
the people and form the "loyal opposition" when they are
not in power;
* voluntary associations that take up causes or perform
services that need attention but are not the obvious
duty of the government; and
* above all, independent religious communities able to
treat both the political and social aspects of life from
a transcendent point of view.
In short, a viable democracy depends on a division of powers
not only within the government, but among the institutions
outside state control in a viable civil society. This
demands a separation of church and state, with the religious
organizations providing an organized moral and spiritual
center of loyalty that does not allow interests to be the
only basis of politics.
Civil society is strongest where multiple religious
institutions are well developed. Democracy as a political
design was first mentioned in ancient Greece, but it did not
flourish there: it fell every time it was tried to tyranny,
mobocracy, plutocracy, or imperialism, for the character of
ancient Greece religion could not sustain a moral core.
Democracy only flourished after the church became a center
of loyalty and began to form schools, hospitals, guilds,
parties, and associations for fellowship and service, in
what was a long and slow, but providential, process.
Other forms of democracy, most notably deriving from the
French Revolution and influencing in various ways the German
Enlightenment, the Russian Revolution, and the secular
democrats of the Americas, renounced the idea that religion
was a necessary part of democracy. Secular democrats
attempted to establish a state-guided democracy based on
what Rousseau called the "general will." Religion would be
removed from public discourse, even prohibited from public
display (as we have seen in the recent banning of the
wearing of headscarves by Muslims and nuns, in schools and
government offices).
This development was partly understandable, for there are
forms of religious dogma that do not defend human rights and
that inhibit economic development. And there are movements
claiming roots in the Christian church that are anti-
intellectual and sectarian. These groups hate pluralism and
engender enclaves of self-righteous piety that worship a God
who only condemns the world.
But their critique of bad religion banishes too much. The
French Revolution yielded Napoleon, Germany's enlightened
philosophers easily succumbed to fascism, the Soviet
"people's democracy" fell to Bolshevism, and the secular
populists of the Americas became prey of liberationist
ideologies. As they say now in Latin America, the church
opted for the oppressed, and the poor opted for
Evangelicalism. Not only must religion be taken seriously,
but also the kind of theology that is willing and able to
touch the heart and address public issues must be seen as
necessary for the future of democracy. A profound theology
will press us toward a democracy ordered in a way that
accords with God's law and purposes. That poses the
critical issues.
All of us have a personal faith, a theology, a set of
personal convictions about ultimate reality; and millions of
people belong to some organized wing of their religious
tradition. Each tradition has a distinctive way of defining
the ideal political order. Some are more capable of
supporting the conditions under which democracy flourishes
than others. Most have some national or international
religious body, or chief representatives, who periodically
issue statements that have direct political implications --
ethical issues framed by a theological tradition tend not to
stay under the steeple.
Today, the debate about the morality of the Iraq war is very
alive, with theological convictions about "just war"
doctrines just below the surface. The question has arisen
whether human rights are being compromised for the sake of
security and national defense. The issue of the extent to
which government should control corporations' ecological or
outsourcing practices is also on the agenda, as well as the
propriety of limiting abortion or stem-cell research. An
open debate about these theologically laden issues is vital
to democracy.
Public theology has the task of engaging in public dialogue
on such ethical issues. The Judeo-Christian tradition
offers two deeply rooted Biblical themes that undergird the
"principled pluralism" that presses society toward the kind
of democracy that is the necessary supplement to the idea of
the image of God, on which human rights rest, and to the
idea of vocation, on which professional integrity rests.
These are the recognition of sin and the possibility of
covenant.
Recognizing sinfulness implies awareness that humans and
their societies are all imperfect. Thus, every idealistic
quest for harmony of all the parts will lead to pride and
totalitarianism. The consolidation of power in the hands of
the few tempts humanity to an arrogance that corrupts the
powerful and either exploits or makes passive the rest.
Accordingly, power must be distributed and thereby limited.
If each sphere of civil society is well developed, the
various spheres can correct one another or cooperate to
reform the whole.
That cooperation invites the possibility of forming
covenantal relationships. Daniel Elazar, one of the great
scholarly gems of the last century, traced this idea through
the West's history and documented how, from its roots in
ancient Judaism, it was adopted and adapted by certain
strands of Christianity and found resonance in many
cultures, engendered a passion for a pluralistic democracy,
and opposed both the hierarchical authoritarianism found in
most classical cultures and the balkanizing atomism of
modernity. The idea of covenant is based on the formation
of communities of commitment for purposes that include but
transcend our human material interests.
Christianity contributed to this concept the idea of love as
the inner spirit of covenantal bonding. That is what forms
character and reforms society in this life, even though
perfection is impossible and forgiveness is necessary.
Christians believe that this is what Christ manifests and
what is working among us in all the spheres of common life.
It is what gives us faith that, in spite of sin, evil will
not prevail. Being realistic about sin and confident in the
possibility of love allows Christians to believe that there
is a moral and spiritual heart of a democratic society and
political order.
If these theological motifs are, as I believe, already
present deep within democratic life, they need to be made
conscious for democracy to flourish and spread. A serious
public theology will have to engage the great world
religions to find out whether they have comparable concepts
and prospects and where they may be able to adjust such
motifs for the emerging global civil society. This is
another area, for many the newest one, where our theology
must be public.
Notes
[1] "Religion, Culture, and International Conflict After
September 11," Ethics and Public Policy Center
Conversations, June 17, 2002, www.eppc.org.
[2] The Idea of Human Rights, Oxford, 1998, p. 35.
----------------------------------------------------------
cogent. (I get the impression that editing may have been below par; peh nö
attentsionsz.)
Foreign Policy Research Institute WIRE
A Catalyst for Ideas
www.fpri.org
PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE
by Max L. Stackhouse
Volume 12, Number 2
October 2004
Max L. Stackhouse is the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor
of Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Princeton
Theological Seminary, where he directs Kuyper Center for
Public Theology. An ordained minister in the United Church
of Christ, Dr. Stackhouse is a member of the American
Academy of Religion. This essay is a condensed version of
the Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs,
delivered on October 14, 2004. This lecture was established
by a grant from Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. Previous
lecturers include Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British
Commonwealth; George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul
II, and James Billington, Librarian of Congress. All the
lectures are posted on:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE
The 9th Annual Templeton Lecture On Religion and World Affairs
by Max L. Stackhouse
The defeat of fascism, the victory of anti-colonial
movements, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late
20th century made it appear possible that democracy would
spread worldwide, accompanied by a fuller realization of
human rights, a global economy that benefits more of the
world's people, and a reduction of military threats to the
world's security. That "end of history" view may yet prove
to be the most probable global direction -- some 120 nations
adopted democratically oriented constitutions for the first
time in the last half century. But there are many reasons
to be concerned about the character of a democratic future.
Some of the newly independent nations have become one-party
states hovering on failure. Some Islamists have repudiated
democracy altogether and advocate a return to Caliphate
governance under sharia. Russia sometimes seems bound to
resume a czarist model of centralized political control; and
China is adamant in resisting democratic movements.
Moreover, some oppose the idea of human rights, one of the
pillars of democracy, claiming that its implicit assumption
-- that humanity consists of autonomous individuals -- is a
modern secularist invention. Still others protest the
currently emerging global economy, viewing it as a threat to
sovereignty and a design of the rich to exploit the poor.
And many fear endless attacks by shadowy, stateless
terrorist networks or by ethnic factions, both of which
challenge democratic prospects by inducing such a
preoccupation with security that democratic freedoms are
eroded.
In this situation, the world's most dynamic democracy and
only superpower is expected to be not only the world's
policeman, but also its godfather, bringing peace,
prosperity, and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq and
solving every other problem that appears on the horizon,
from Haiti to global warming to the AIDS crisis in
subsaharan Africa. This charge could tempt the nation into
a new imperialism. Even as the United States is criticized
for not engaging the problems of the world, it is condemned
for intervening everywhere and seducing the world's youth
away from their own cultures.
The deeper difficulty is that Americans do not have a clear
moral or spiritual view of what we are about, of why we
believe what we believe and do what we do. How can, should,
or may we use our power, and why? And what is the source of
that power?
Suppose that the U.S. succeeds in planting democracy
throughout the world. One might see this as either cultural
imperialism or a justifiable conversion of an unholy tyranny
to a just system that corresponds to the deepest levels of
human nature and the highest discernible sense of divine
intent. That sense might of course simply be the reigning
consensus among the currently powerful nations. Does that
consensus have, or need, a deeper grounding, an ultimate
source and norm of truth and justice that can guide how
humanity ought to live?
Historically, advocates of democracy believed that it did.
The late medieval "conciliarists" who displaced popes and
overrode emperors thought so, as did the Reformers and the
Puritans. We know that the deists and theists who advocated
the Bill of Rights thought so. And the U.S. didn't hesitate
to establish democratic regimes in Cuba and the Philippines
at the end of the Spanish-American War, in Germany and Japan
at the end of World War II, and in South Korea after the
conflict there.
Is there in fact a basis for democracy that is deeper than
the fact that it has apparently mostly worked better than
other forms, at least in the West? How can we make the case
for it today, especially with globalized media, technology,
economy, culture, and religions that are beyond the control
of any one government?
Critics regularly charge that America is an imperialist
nation bent on ruling the world, ready to override other
societies with its massive multinational corporations. No
doubt some Americans have such interests, but most see their
nation as rooted in "that order which we call freedom," with
a mission to help others form open societies, adopt
democratic values, and establish human rights in a
flourishing economy. We have sometimes failed in this
mission, but most agree on the mission.
However, religious leaders, theologians, political leaders,
and commentators have failed to enunciate the basis for our
mission, or identify ways to reform it when it goes wrong.
Can we justly clarify what it is that makes us ready to send
our young men and women to kill and die for democracy?
No civilization has yet endured that did not have a
religious vision at its core. History is littered with the
rubble of empires that fell as much by spiritual emptiness
as by economic and military weakness or external pressure.
But the enduring civilizations have had religious cores that
touch the hearts and minds of the people, becoming the moral
architecture to guide the leaders and evoke sacrificial
commitments. These enable the societies' continual renewal.
It is not that everyone agrees with the religious vision, or
has to, but that there is a framework within which debate
takes place.
One cannot imagine trying to understand the politics of
China or India without reference to Confucianism or
Hinduism, or the systems of government in Southeast Asia or
the Middle East without understanding Buddhism or Islam, or
what is going on in the EU without reference to the legacy
of traditional Christendom (even if the EU's current
advocates resist any reference to religion in its new
constitution). Nor can we understand the U.S. without an
awareness of Protestantism's historic influence -- or of the
failure of its mainline traditions to define the urgent
social issues -- and of the rise of Evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism, on the one hand, and post-Vatican II
Catholicism, on the other, as they seek to offer other
perspectives on the ultimate issues. It is not the duty of
religious organizations to make public policy, as some try
to do; but it is their responsibility to seek to influence
people's consciences so that their political decisions will
be informed by moral and spiritual convictions.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that
many have tried to interpret the world as if religion were
not central to societies and politics. But he argues that
life cannot be understood exclusive of religious ideas, as
they are incarnate in the dominant values of the culture.
Indeed, Huntington speaks of the irrelevance of purely
secular thought to contemporary politics, holding that
politics is and must be religious:
During the twentieth century, a secular century, Lenin,
Ataturk, Nehru, Ben Gurion, and the Shah (for instance) all
defined the identity of their countries in the secular
century's terms. That has changed, the Shah is gone, the
Soviet Union is gone, and in its place is a Russia that in
public statements identifies itself quite explicitly with
Russian Orthodoxy. In Turkey, India, and Israel, major
political movements are challenging the secular definition
of identity. Politicians in many societies have found that
religion either is crucial to maintaining their legitimacy
as rulers or must be suppressed because it presents a
challenge to that legitimacy.[1]
Societies do tend to have common features in the sense that
we can study them comparatively and see how they similarly
adapt to similar conditions and interests. Yet, societies
develop differently because they are bent in different
directions by distinctive religions; regulating convictions
have become woven into cultural values.
Some of the regulating convictions that shape democracy
become clear when we speak of human rights, which are
affirmed by the vision behind democracy, notwithstanding our
horrible record with regard to slavery and women's rights,
and the betrayal of our own principles in wartime, from the
early struggles with Native Americans to Abu Ghraib in 2004.
Still, the conviction that humans have rights has prevailed
again and again. Indeed, even in dark moments, prophetic
voices have drawn on Biblical roots to demand the
recognition that each person is made in the image of God and
thus has inalienable rights -- even the criminal, the enemy,
the heretic, the prisoner, and the terrorist.
As Michael Perry, one of the nation's leading authorities on
law and morality, has put it, "some things should never be
done to anyone; and some things should be done for
everyone."[2] That is why the authors of America's
Declaration of Independence and the UN's Declaration of
Human Rights could appeal to Biblical principles to advocate
rights. They are "self-evident truths" that shape
consciences, civilizations, and history. When one appeals
to human rights in the face of tyranny, torture, servitude,
arbitrary arrest, extortion, discrimination, or religious
persecution, one has played a valid moral trump, and the
people have the basis to demand a law code and to form
judicial process as a recourse and remedy. The awareness of
such principles gives hope for democratic vitality under
just law.
A second feature of society that gives hope for democracy
has to do with economic life. Capitalism is the most
efficient and productive economic system yet to be devised,
and it is sweeping the world. It improves the well-being of
most people, including the poor. Not only parts of South
America and the "little tigers" of East Asia, but also the
two most populous nations of the world, India and China,
have turned to versions of capitalism, making it likely that
the World Bank and UN millennium goal of halving world
poverty within ten years can be met. However, these same
trends will also increase inequality. A great many are
raised a little, and a substantial number are raised a good
bit, but only a few are raised a great deal, widening the
gap between the wealthy and the still struggling. A free
society does not demand enforced equality of economic
status, but it must work to equalize opportunity.
The formation of new middle classes and the rising
aspirations of those who have grasped the lower rungs of the
ladder increase the prospects for democracy. People with
some financial means and even relative security are better
able to educate their children, adopt new technologies,
develop more stable lifestyles, and migrate out of
dependency. They gain some command over their destinies,
demand their freedom from restrictive constraints, and
become more concerned about developing excellence in various
areas of their lives -- professional, educational,
environmental, and institutional. They deal with others
with greater integrity and seek to provide goods or services
that make them contributing members of society.
But the formation of new middle classes does not guarantee
democracy's development. Only some parts of the middle
classes begin to extend economic opportunities, form
communities of commitment, and exercise citizen
participation. The prospect that the new middle classes
will seek to extend democratic possibilities depends on
their "calling." It is one thing to have a job and a
career, it is quite another to see what one does in all the
daily rounds of life as being under the scrutiny of a God
who cares how we live and has purposes for our lives. Max
Weber probably had it about right when he argued that this
doctrine of vocation in the world played a distinctive role
in bringing about the asceticism that generated the modern
middle classes and its quest for excellence and
professionalism.
Today's massive conversions to Pentecostalism in Latin
America and Africa, and to Evangelicalism in Asia replicate
the earlier Reformation dynamics, though usually without the
same doctrinal apparatus. This is also the case with the
growth of parallel movements in America, in the "mega-
churches" that puzzle the mainline churches that are
declining in membership. Those given the opportunity to
move toward the middle classes are questing for a new
ordering of their lives, and these movements are drawing
people into bonds of discipline and are often less tolerant
of libertine lifestyles, that are having a notable political
impact.
There are two key doctrinal points here that support
democratic prospects: first, that humans are made in the
image of God, and second, that God calls each person to live
a godly life that is manifest in the development of
excellence in all areas of worldly life. These doctrinal
points are incarnate in the now public dynamics that are
globalizing our world, one working through the attempt to
articulate principles of justice, the other appearing in the
forms of increased productivity and disciplined lifestyles.
One aids democratic prospects from above, one from below.
Both form a new middle.
I believe democracy does have a theological base, but a less
direct one. It usually depends on a basically mechanical
and statistical procedure whereby each person votes to
determine leadership or policy. That procedure involves
only two agents -- individual votes, cumulatively tabulated,
and the state, the organized body that manages the election
and accepts its results. The Terrors of the French
Revolution and of the Red Guard's Cultural Revolution remind
us of the perils of the mobocracy into which mere populism
can degenerate, while the fact that both Hitler and Stalin
both claimed to be elected reminds us of what statism can
become.
If a democracy is to have an inner moral fiber, it must have
several other things besides voters and the state, an
independent legal system that recognizes the voters' human
rights and civil liberties, and a free economic system.
It must also have:
* schools that teach critical thinking;
* media that provides information and inspiration from a
range of perspectives;
* stable families that nurture responsible persons and
inculcate moral habits and spiritual insight;
* political parties that voice the needs and hopes of
the people and form the "loyal opposition" when they are
not in power;
* voluntary associations that take up causes or perform
services that need attention but are not the obvious
duty of the government; and
* above all, independent religious communities able to
treat both the political and social aspects of life from
a transcendent point of view.
In short, a viable democracy depends on a division of powers
not only within the government, but among the institutions
outside state control in a viable civil society. This
demands a separation of church and state, with the religious
organizations providing an organized moral and spiritual
center of loyalty that does not allow interests to be the
only basis of politics.
Civil society is strongest where multiple religious
institutions are well developed. Democracy as a political
design was first mentioned in ancient Greece, but it did not
flourish there: it fell every time it was tried to tyranny,
mobocracy, plutocracy, or imperialism, for the character of
ancient Greece religion could not sustain a moral core.
Democracy only flourished after the church became a center
of loyalty and began to form schools, hospitals, guilds,
parties, and associations for fellowship and service, in
what was a long and slow, but providential, process.
Other forms of democracy, most notably deriving from the
French Revolution and influencing in various ways the German
Enlightenment, the Russian Revolution, and the secular
democrats of the Americas, renounced the idea that religion
was a necessary part of democracy. Secular democrats
attempted to establish a state-guided democracy based on
what Rousseau called the "general will." Religion would be
removed from public discourse, even prohibited from public
display (as we have seen in the recent banning of the
wearing of headscarves by Muslims and nuns, in schools and
government offices).
This development was partly understandable, for there are
forms of religious dogma that do not defend human rights and
that inhibit economic development. And there are movements
claiming roots in the Christian church that are anti-
intellectual and sectarian. These groups hate pluralism and
engender enclaves of self-righteous piety that worship a God
who only condemns the world.
But their critique of bad religion banishes too much. The
French Revolution yielded Napoleon, Germany's enlightened
philosophers easily succumbed to fascism, the Soviet
"people's democracy" fell to Bolshevism, and the secular
populists of the Americas became prey of liberationist
ideologies. As they say now in Latin America, the church
opted for the oppressed, and the poor opted for
Evangelicalism. Not only must religion be taken seriously,
but also the kind of theology that is willing and able to
touch the heart and address public issues must be seen as
necessary for the future of democracy. A profound theology
will press us toward a democracy ordered in a way that
accords with God's law and purposes. That poses the
critical issues.
All of us have a personal faith, a theology, a set of
personal convictions about ultimate reality; and millions of
people belong to some organized wing of their religious
tradition. Each tradition has a distinctive way of defining
the ideal political order. Some are more capable of
supporting the conditions under which democracy flourishes
than others. Most have some national or international
religious body, or chief representatives, who periodically
issue statements that have direct political implications --
ethical issues framed by a theological tradition tend not to
stay under the steeple.
Today, the debate about the morality of the Iraq war is very
alive, with theological convictions about "just war"
doctrines just below the surface. The question has arisen
whether human rights are being compromised for the sake of
security and national defense. The issue of the extent to
which government should control corporations' ecological or
outsourcing practices is also on the agenda, as well as the
propriety of limiting abortion or stem-cell research. An
open debate about these theologically laden issues is vital
to democracy.
Public theology has the task of engaging in public dialogue
on such ethical issues. The Judeo-Christian tradition
offers two deeply rooted Biblical themes that undergird the
"principled pluralism" that presses society toward the kind
of democracy that is the necessary supplement to the idea of
the image of God, on which human rights rest, and to the
idea of vocation, on which professional integrity rests.
These are the recognition of sin and the possibility of
covenant.
Recognizing sinfulness implies awareness that humans and
their societies are all imperfect. Thus, every idealistic
quest for harmony of all the parts will lead to pride and
totalitarianism. The consolidation of power in the hands of
the few tempts humanity to an arrogance that corrupts the
powerful and either exploits or makes passive the rest.
Accordingly, power must be distributed and thereby limited.
If each sphere of civil society is well developed, the
various spheres can correct one another or cooperate to
reform the whole.
That cooperation invites the possibility of forming
covenantal relationships. Daniel Elazar, one of the great
scholarly gems of the last century, traced this idea through
the West's history and documented how, from its roots in
ancient Judaism, it was adopted and adapted by certain
strands of Christianity and found resonance in many
cultures, engendered a passion for a pluralistic democracy,
and opposed both the hierarchical authoritarianism found in
most classical cultures and the balkanizing atomism of
modernity. The idea of covenant is based on the formation
of communities of commitment for purposes that include but
transcend our human material interests.
Christianity contributed to this concept the idea of love as
the inner spirit of covenantal bonding. That is what forms
character and reforms society in this life, even though
perfection is impossible and forgiveness is necessary.
Christians believe that this is what Christ manifests and
what is working among us in all the spheres of common life.
It is what gives us faith that, in spite of sin, evil will
not prevail. Being realistic about sin and confident in the
possibility of love allows Christians to believe that there
is a moral and spiritual heart of a democratic society and
political order.
If these theological motifs are, as I believe, already
present deep within democratic life, they need to be made
conscious for democracy to flourish and spread. A serious
public theology will have to engage the great world
religions to find out whether they have comparable concepts
and prospects and where they may be able to adjust such
motifs for the emerging global civil society. This is
another area, for many the newest one, where our theology
must be public.
Notes
[1] "Religion, Culture, and International Conflict After
September 11," Ethics and Public Policy Center
Conversations, June 17, 2002, www.eppc.org.
[2] The Idea of Human Rights, Oxford, 1998, p. 35.
----------------------------------------------------------
Full written judgement next week, I assume, at
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VCAT/recent-cases.html
From: "Roslyn Phillips"
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 6:27 PM
Subject: Shock ruling on religious vilification
17 December 2004
Shock ruling on religious vilification
Dear Friends,
We were just about to party, party, party at our end of year Christmas
celebration with our committee and mailing helpers when the news came
through from Melbourne.
Suddenly I no longer felt hungry. I was stunned.
This morning Judge Higgins of the Victorian Civil and Administrative
Tribunal announced that he has found Christian pastors Daniel Scot and
Danny Nalliah guilty of religious vilification.
The judge's 100 pages of reasons will be released next week, but a short
summary said that the two Daniels breached section 8 of the Racial and
Religious Tolerance Act 2001, which says a person cannot engage in
conduct which "incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or
severe ridicule of, that other person or class of persons".
Judge Higgins said the exceptions allowed under the Act - which included
events held for any genuine religious purpose, did not apply in this
case because the conduct of the defendants could "not be regarded as
reasonable and in good faith".
This is astounding. The event in question, you may remember, was a
seminar for Christians held in a church, conducted by a pastor with expert
knowledge of Islam and the Quran, to explain Quranic teachings and to help
Christians know how best to reach out to Muslim people. There was no evidence
that Christian seminar attendees felt hatred towards Muslims as a result of
the teaching - rather the reverse, since Pastor Daniel Scot had encouraged
them to love Muslims and invite them into their homes.
However, the Act does not require such evidence to be provided. The
evidence of vilification, it seems, was not whether Christians felt hatred or
contempt towards Muslims as a result of the seminar, but whether the
three Muslim attendees (who did not reveal their faith and were technically
not invited) felt hurt by Daniel Scot's translations of Quranic verses. The
three Muslim attendees acknowledged under cross-examination that their
knowledge of the Quran was slight.
The judge said that Pastor Scot "failed to differentiate between Muslims
throughout the world, that he preached a literal translation of the
Quran and of Muslims' religious practices which were not mainstream".
Bill Muehlenberg of the Australian Family Association pointed out: "Most
Muslims would object to this, arguing that they do adhere to a literal
understanding and translation of the Quran. And how does a secular
judge with no expertise in religion make such decisions, when Islamic scholars
themselves are divided on such crucial questions of theology,
interpretation and exegesis?
"Much of what the judge considered offensive was simply quotations from
the Quran itself. To argue that quoting a religious book makes one guilty
of vilification would put 98% of religious discussion out of bounds," Bill
Muehlenberg said.
Indeed. Phillip Adams - the atheist columnist in The Australian who
seems to have a fixation against all things biblical and Christian - would be
behind bars in no time. Or would he? It seems that the Victorian Act
may only apply to religions other than Christianity. Moreover Queensland
has a similar Act, and the ALP wants a law against racial and religious
vilification to apply nationwide.
Bill Muehlenberg argues that such laws could mean the death of
Christianity in Australia. But that would only happen if we lie down and
let it die.
This is a wake up call!
Bill and others are encouraging us to write letters to the papers, phone
the talkbacks, and tell the true story to as many MPs and other people as
possible.
Amen! As never before, we must get on our knees, then jump to our
feet. We need to defend the fundamental right of free speech. We must
defend the
right to tell the truth.
After all, some people find even the truth of the Gospel - that all of
us are sinners in need of Christ's salvation - vilifying and offensive.
The day may come when we are not allowed to preach it, even in a church.
..........................................................................
http://www.news.com.au/
Church vilified Muslims: ruling
December 17, 2004
AN evangelical Christian
ministry has been found to have vilified Islam during a seminar and in a
newsletter which mocked the religion.
The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal
(VCAT) today blasted the Catch the Fire Ministries, its pastor Danny
Nalliah and speaker Daniel Scot over the March 2002 seminar in Melbourne
and several articles in the church's newsletter.
In a decision handed down today in a key test of Victoria's three-year-old
racial and religious vilification laws, Judge Michael Higgins found in
favour of the Islamic Council of Victoria, which took the action against
Catch The Fire.
Judge Higgins found that Catch the Fire and Pastor Scot had breached
section eight of the Religious and Racial Tolerance Act.
Also found in breach was church leader Pastor Nalliah, who was an
unsuccessful senate candidate for the Family First party in this year's
federal election.Judge Higgins will decide on penalties, which could
include orders for an apology or damages, early next year.
Judge Higgins said the seminar run by the ministry, a newsletter on its
website, and a website article written by an author identified as Richard
all breached the Act.
In a summary of reasons for his decision, Judge Higgins said Pastor Scot
had throughout the seminar made fun of Muslim beliefs and conduct.
"It was done, not in the context of a serious discussion of Muslims'
religious beliefs," Judge Higgins said.
"It was presented in a way which is essentially hostile, demeaning and
derogatory of all Muslim people, their God, Allah, the prophet Mohammed and
in general Muslim religious beliefs and practices."
Judge Higgins said that, during the seminar, Pastor Scot had claimed that
the Koran promoted violence, killing and looting and that Muslims were
liars and demons.
Pastor Scot also had said Muslims had a plan to overrun western democracy
by violence and terror and wanted to turn Australia into an Islamic nation,
and he exaggerated Muslim population numbers in Australia.
"I find that Pastor Scot's conduct was not engaged in reasonably and in
good faith for any genuine religious purpose or any purpose that is in the
public interest," he said.
Judge Higgins said an article in the church's newsletter, written by Pastor
Nalliah, incited fear and hatred of Muslims, as did a third article by a
person identified as Richard, which claimed it was not possible to separate
Islam from terrorism.
Victoria's Equal Opportunity Commission welcomed the decision on the case,
which was the first to be heard by VCAT since the Racial and Religious
Tolerance Act took effect at the start of 2002.
"The decision is very significant in terms of showing how the Act operates
in practice," said the commission's chief executive, Dr Helen Szoke.
"It demonstrates where the line is drawn between legitimate public debate
and behaviour that incites hatred."
A full reason for the decision is expected to be handed down in the next
fortnight, including any penalties.
Yasser Soliman, president of the Islamic Council of Victoria, said it had
been important to make a stand against vilification of Muslims in the
community.
"We also had the support of the Catholic Church, the interfaith community
and the Uniting Church and the Jewish community" Mr Soliman said.
"Because it was very important that we all stood together against
vilification and understand that vilification is a tool used by extremists,
and we must always condemn extremism and vilification.
"That was important, because left unaddressed, it was limiting the (Muslim)
community's ability to be seen as average Australians.
"People were being demonised, (being denied) the ability to get jobs, to be
friends, to be safe.
"We had to act upon it and felt it was important to have it determined by law."
Mr Soliman said he was saddened that the Islamic Council had to take legal
action, but hoped the decision would help promote goodwill between
different religions.
He said he had told Pastor Nalliah that he would like to develop a better
relationship with his church.
Pastor Nalliah said the decision was a blow for freedom of speech in Victoria.
He said Catch the Fire would probably appeal to the High Court, depending
on the final decision and penalties imposed by Judge Higgins.
"Sadly, we've lost the right to speak as a nation, in a sense, as a result
of this verdict," he said.
"It's a loss for freedom of speech, not just for us, but for all Australians.
"Certainly it (the Act) goes too far."
AAP
This report appears on NEWS.com.au.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VCAT/recent-cases.html
From: "Roslyn Phillips"
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 6:27 PM
Subject: Shock ruling on religious vilification
17 December 2004
Shock ruling on religious vilification
Dear Friends,
We were just about to party, party, party at our end of year Christmas
celebration with our committee and mailing helpers when the news came
through from Melbourne.
Suddenly I no longer felt hungry. I was stunned.
This morning Judge Higgins of the Victorian Civil and Administrative
Tribunal announced that he has found Christian pastors Daniel Scot and
Danny Nalliah guilty of religious vilification.
The judge's 100 pages of reasons will be released next week, but a short
summary said that the two Daniels breached section 8 of the Racial and
Religious Tolerance Act 2001, which says a person cannot engage in
conduct which "incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or
severe ridicule of, that other person or class of persons".
Judge Higgins said the exceptions allowed under the Act - which included
events held for any genuine religious purpose, did not apply in this
case because the conduct of the defendants could "not be regarded as
reasonable and in good faith".
This is astounding. The event in question, you may remember, was a
seminar for Christians held in a church, conducted by a pastor with expert
knowledge of Islam and the Quran, to explain Quranic teachings and to help
Christians know how best to reach out to Muslim people. There was no evidence
that Christian seminar attendees felt hatred towards Muslims as a result of
the teaching - rather the reverse, since Pastor Daniel Scot had encouraged
them to love Muslims and invite them into their homes.
However, the Act does not require such evidence to be provided. The
evidence of vilification, it seems, was not whether Christians felt hatred or
contempt towards Muslims as a result of the seminar, but whether the
three Muslim attendees (who did not reveal their faith and were technically
not invited) felt hurt by Daniel Scot's translations of Quranic verses. The
three Muslim attendees acknowledged under cross-examination that their
knowledge of the Quran was slight.
The judge said that Pastor Scot "failed to differentiate between Muslims
throughout the world, that he preached a literal translation of the
Quran and of Muslims' religious practices which were not mainstream".
Bill Muehlenberg of the Australian Family Association pointed out: "Most
Muslims would object to this, arguing that they do adhere to a literal
understanding and translation of the Quran. And how does a secular
judge with no expertise in religion make such decisions, when Islamic scholars
themselves are divided on such crucial questions of theology,
interpretation and exegesis?
"Much of what the judge considered offensive was simply quotations from
the Quran itself. To argue that quoting a religious book makes one guilty
of vilification would put 98% of religious discussion out of bounds," Bill
Muehlenberg said.
Indeed. Phillip Adams - the atheist columnist in The Australian who
seems to have a fixation against all things biblical and Christian - would be
behind bars in no time. Or would he? It seems that the Victorian Act
may only apply to religions other than Christianity. Moreover Queensland
has a similar Act, and the ALP wants a law against racial and religious
vilification to apply nationwide.
Bill Muehlenberg argues that such laws could mean the death of
Christianity in Australia. But that would only happen if we lie down and
let it die.
This is a wake up call!
Bill and others are encouraging us to write letters to the papers, phone
the talkbacks, and tell the true story to as many MPs and other people as
possible.
Amen! As never before, we must get on our knees, then jump to our
feet. We need to defend the fundamental right of free speech. We must
defend the
right to tell the truth.
After all, some people find even the truth of the Gospel - that all of
us are sinners in need of Christ's salvation - vilifying and offensive.
The day may come when we are not allowed to preach it, even in a church.
..........................................................................
http://www.news.com.au/
Church vilified Muslims: ruling
December 17, 2004
AN evangelical Christian
ministry has been found to have vilified Islam during a seminar and in a
newsletter which mocked the religion.
The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal
(VCAT) today blasted the Catch the Fire Ministries, its pastor Danny
Nalliah and speaker Daniel Scot over the March 2002 seminar in Melbourne
and several articles in the church's newsletter.
In a decision handed down today in a key test of Victoria's three-year-old
racial and religious vilification laws, Judge Michael Higgins found in
favour of the Islamic Council of Victoria, which took the action against
Catch The Fire.
Judge Higgins found that Catch the Fire and Pastor Scot had breached
section eight of the Religious and Racial Tolerance Act.
Also found in breach was church leader Pastor Nalliah, who was an
unsuccessful senate candidate for the Family First party in this year's
federal election.Judge Higgins will decide on penalties, which could
include orders for an apology or damages, early next year.
Judge Higgins said the seminar run by the ministry, a newsletter on its
website, and a website article written by an author identified as Richard
all breached the Act.
In a summary of reasons for his decision, Judge Higgins said Pastor Scot
had throughout the seminar made fun of Muslim beliefs and conduct.
"It was done, not in the context of a serious discussion of Muslims'
religious beliefs," Judge Higgins said.
"It was presented in a way which is essentially hostile, demeaning and
derogatory of all Muslim people, their God, Allah, the prophet Mohammed and
in general Muslim religious beliefs and practices."
Judge Higgins said that, during the seminar, Pastor Scot had claimed that
the Koran promoted violence, killing and looting and that Muslims were
liars and demons.
Pastor Scot also had said Muslims had a plan to overrun western democracy
by violence and terror and wanted to turn Australia into an Islamic nation,
and he exaggerated Muslim population numbers in Australia.
"I find that Pastor Scot's conduct was not engaged in reasonably and in
good faith for any genuine religious purpose or any purpose that is in the
public interest," he said.
Judge Higgins said an article in the church's newsletter, written by Pastor
Nalliah, incited fear and hatred of Muslims, as did a third article by a
person identified as Richard, which claimed it was not possible to separate
Islam from terrorism.
Victoria's Equal Opportunity Commission welcomed the decision on the case,
which was the first to be heard by VCAT since the Racial and Religious
Tolerance Act took effect at the start of 2002.
"The decision is very significant in terms of showing how the Act operates
in practice," said the commission's chief executive, Dr Helen Szoke.
"It demonstrates where the line is drawn between legitimate public debate
and behaviour that incites hatred."
A full reason for the decision is expected to be handed down in the next
fortnight, including any penalties.
Yasser Soliman, president of the Islamic Council of Victoria, said it had
been important to make a stand against vilification of Muslims in the
community.
"We also had the support of the Catholic Church, the interfaith community
and the Uniting Church and the Jewish community" Mr Soliman said.
"Because it was very important that we all stood together against
vilification and understand that vilification is a tool used by extremists,
and we must always condemn extremism and vilification.
"That was important, because left unaddressed, it was limiting the (Muslim)
community's ability to be seen as average Australians.
"People were being demonised, (being denied) the ability to get jobs, to be
friends, to be safe.
"We had to act upon it and felt it was important to have it determined by law."
Mr Soliman said he was saddened that the Islamic Council had to take legal
action, but hoped the decision would help promote goodwill between
different religions.
He said he had told Pastor Nalliah that he would like to develop a better
relationship with his church.
Pastor Nalliah said the decision was a blow for freedom of speech in Victoria.
He said Catch the Fire would probably appeal to the High Court, depending
on the final decision and penalties imposed by Judge Higgins.
"Sadly, we've lost the right to speak as a nation, in a sense, as a result
of this verdict," he said.
"It's a loss for freedom of speech, not just for us, but for all Australians.
"Certainly it (the Act) goes too far."
AAP
This report appears on NEWS.com.au.
12/25/04
Homosexual undermining of Christian-based organisations [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 02:36:25 PM
......... it is this kind of activist zealotry against
pro-family and religious people and against groups like the Boy Scouts
of America and The Salvation Army - groups that merely seek to live out
their moral beliefs - that prompts the IFI (Illinois Family Institute)
to strongly oppose misguided legislation that would codify special
rights for homosexuals or criminalize expressed biblical views on
homosexual behavior as hate speech.
etc.
For the full item, please click on the URL listed below
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1301629.html
pro-family and religious people and against groups like the Boy Scouts
of America and The Salvation Army - groups that merely seek to live out
their moral beliefs - that prompts the IFI (Illinois Family Institute)
to strongly oppose misguided legislation that would codify special
rights for homosexuals or criminalize expressed biblical views on
homosexual behavior as hate speech.
etc.
For the full item, please click on the URL listed below
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1301629.html
>Re: ".. they are militant atheists bent on deceit"
>
>SPOT ON!
I am of course open to correction - but no attempt has yet
reached me. Meanwhile I'll go on expressing my opinion.
I remain staggered at the feebleness of the Church in response to
the brazen militant atheism of Dawkins, L Wolpert, S Weinberg etc. I fear
it's a corollary of the basic modern blunder of trying to appear similar to
the mainstream decadent culture. If one pretends long enough, one isn't
finally pretending! What is more puzzling is that even 'evangelicals' seem
stupefied by the atheistic attack, leaving the defence largely to
"creationism" which is such an embarrassment.
R
>A Yank wrote:
>
>> ID theory is without any serious scientific merit, so the only real
>>motivation for promoting it is religious, which does violate the
>>separation of church and state.
>
>Isn't it peculiar that so many Yanks misrepresent this aspect of
>their own constitution. Educated non-Yanks are well aware that the
>prohibition is on *establishment* of any religion - a technical term
>meaning legal privileges such as enjoyed by the Church of England and
>the Church of Scotland. The notion that "the separation of church and
>state"
>as required in that constitution goes much further, prohibiting e.g
>prayers
>in schools, or display of the Ten Commandments outside a public bldg, is
>blatant rubbish. The ACLU's assertion that teaching IDT "may violate
>the
>constitutional separation of church and state" is ludicrous. In their
>case, it is not credible that they are merely ignorant of what the
>constitution actually says; they are militant atheists bent on deceit.
>(Similarly, the "right to bear arms" is grossly misrepresented.
>Look up that clause in the constitution and then decide whether anything
>like open slather is promised.)
>
>BTW the newspaper story is wrong in saying that IDT is any
>"explanation of the origins of life". Like Darwinism, it is about how
>life evolved, not its origins.
>
>R
>
>>
>>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=29&u=/ap
>/20041214
>>/ap_on_re_us/evolution_debate
>> ACLU to Sue Over Pa. Evolution Debate
>>Mon Dec 13
>>By MARTHA RAFFAELE, Associated Press Writer
>
>>HARRISBURG, Pa. - The state American Civil Liberties Union plans to file
>>a federal lawsuit Tuesday against a Pennsylvania school district that is
>>requiring students to learn about alternatives to the theory of evolution.
>>The ACLU said its lawsuit will be the first to challenge whether public
>>schools should teach "intelligent design," which holds that the universe
>>is so complex that it must have been created by some higher power.
>>The Dover Area School District was believed to be the first in the
>>nation to mandate intelligent design when it voted 6-3 in October in favor
>>of including the concept in the science curriculum.
>>The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have
>>scheduled a news conference Tuesday to discuss the suit, which will be
>>filed in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, ACLU spokesman Paul Silva said
>>Monday.
>>Neither Silva nor Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for
>>Separation of Church and State, would comment on the specifics of the
>>complaint.
>>School superintendent Richard Nilsen had no comment Monday.
>>Administrators have declined to comment on the mandate, which applies to
>>ninth-grade biology classes at Dover High School, in rural south-central
>>Pennsylvania.
>>School board member William Buckingham spearheaded the change as the
>>leader of the board's curriculum committee. He has said that he proposed
>>the change as a way of balancing evolution with competing theories that
>>raised questions about its scientific validity.
>>At least one other district has recently become embroiled in federal
>>litigation over teaching evolution. A federal judge in Georgia is
>>considering the constitutionality of a suburban Atlanta district's
>>decision to include a warning sticker about evolution in biology textbooks.
>>Last month, the Dover district issued a statement saying that state
>>academic standards require the teaching of evolution, which holds that
>>Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions
>>of years.
>>But the statement also said Charles Darwin's theory "is still being
>>tested as new evidence is discovered," and that intelligent design "is an
>>explanation of the origins of life that differs from Darwin's view."
>>Additionally, district officials said they would monitor the lessons "to
>>make sure no one is promoting but also not inhibiting religion."
>>The ACLU has said intelligent design is a more secular form of
>>creationism, a Biblical-based view that credits the origin of species to
>>God, and may violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
>
>SPOT ON!
I am of course open to correction - but no attempt has yet
reached me. Meanwhile I'll go on expressing my opinion.
I remain staggered at the feebleness of the Church in response to
the brazen militant atheism of Dawkins, L Wolpert, S Weinberg etc. I fear
it's a corollary of the basic modern blunder of trying to appear similar to
the mainstream decadent culture. If one pretends long enough, one isn't
finally pretending! What is more puzzling is that even 'evangelicals' seem
stupefied by the atheistic attack, leaving the defence largely to
"creationism" which is such an embarrassment.
R
>A Yank wrote:
>
>> ID theory is without any serious scientific merit, so the only real
>>motivation for promoting it is religious, which does violate the
>>separation of church and state.
>
>Isn't it peculiar that so many Yanks misrepresent this aspect of
>their own constitution. Educated non-Yanks are well aware that the
>prohibition is on *establishment* of any religion - a technical term
>meaning legal privileges such as enjoyed by the Church of England and
>the Church of Scotland. The notion that "the separation of church and
>state"
>as required in that constitution goes much further, prohibiting e.g
>prayers
>in schools, or display of the Ten Commandments outside a public bldg, is
>blatant rubbish. The ACLU's assertion that teaching IDT "may violate
>the
>constitutional separation of church and state" is ludicrous. In their
>case, it is not credible that they are merely ignorant of what the
>constitution actually says; they are militant atheists bent on deceit.
>(Similarly, the "right to bear arms" is grossly misrepresented.
>Look up that clause in the constitution and then decide whether anything
>like open slather is promised.)
>
>BTW the newspaper story is wrong in saying that IDT is any
>"explanation of the origins of life". Like Darwinism, it is about how
>life evolved, not its origins.
>
>R
>
>>
>>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=29&u=/ap
>/20041214
>>/ap_on_re_us/evolution_debate
>> ACLU to Sue Over Pa. Evolution Debate
>>Mon Dec 13
>>By MARTHA RAFFAELE, Associated Press Writer
>
>>HARRISBURG, Pa. - The state American Civil Liberties Union plans to file
>>a federal lawsuit Tuesday against a Pennsylvania school district that is
>>requiring students to learn about alternatives to the theory of evolution.
>>The ACLU said its lawsuit will be the first to challenge whether public
>>schools should teach "intelligent design," which holds that the universe
>>is so complex that it must have been created by some higher power.
>>The Dover Area School District was believed to be the first in the
>>nation to mandate intelligent design when it voted 6-3 in October in favor
>>of including the concept in the science curriculum.
>>The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have
>>scheduled a news conference Tuesday to discuss the suit, which will be
>>filed in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, ACLU spokesman Paul Silva said
>>Monday.
>>Neither Silva nor Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for
>>Separation of Church and State, would comment on the specifics of the
>>complaint.
>>School superintendent Richard Nilsen had no comment Monday.
>>Administrators have declined to comment on the mandate, which applies to
>>ninth-grade biology classes at Dover High School, in rural south-central
>>Pennsylvania.
>>School board member William Buckingham spearheaded the change as the
>>leader of the board's curriculum committee. He has said that he proposed
>>the change as a way of balancing evolution with competing theories that
>>raised questions about its scientific validity.
>>At least one other district has recently become embroiled in federal
>>litigation over teaching evolution. A federal judge in Georgia is
>>considering the constitutionality of a suburban Atlanta district's
>>decision to include a warning sticker about evolution in biology textbooks.
>>Last month, the Dover district issued a statement saying that state
>>academic standards require the teaching of evolution, which holds that
>>Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions
>>of years.
>>But the statement also said Charles Darwin's theory "is still being
>>tested as new evidence is discovered," and that intelligent design "is an
>>explanation of the origins of life that differs from Darwin's view."
>>Additionally, district officials said they would monitor the lessons "to
>>make sure no one is promoting but also not inhibiting religion."
>>The ACLU has said intelligent design is a more secular form of
>>creationism, a Biblical-based view that credits the origin of species to
>>God, and may violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
Superficially similar. Porter, however, seems to have a not-too-cleverly
disguised ideology.
____
Standing up to aggressive secularism
December 9 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/12/08/1102182363720.html
The anti-Christmas drive is out of touch with people of all beliefs,
writes Miranda Devine.
Wogs-Are-Stealing-Christmas is the perennial festive season story,
popping up on talkback radio in late November with enduring reliability.
But this year - the year the ideology pendulum swung back towards reason
- the story has finally been exposed as a myth and a smokescreen.
As it turns out, multicultural Sydney just loves Christmas. Bankstown's
Centro shopping centre, smack bang in one of the most multicultural
areas of Australia, with more than 132 nationalities, 53 per cent of the
population born overseas, and an abundance of young mums with
headscarves, happens to boast one of the city's most lavish Christmas
displays.
"Despite Bankstown being one of Sydney's most ethnically and religiously
diverse areas, Christmas and what it stands for is a huge celebration in
my local area and we are proud of it," the Bankstown MP, Tony Stewart,
told the NSW Parliament last month. So keen was Stewart to explode the
old theft myth he even tabled a list of 226 Christmas songs played
"every hour of shopping time at Centro Bankstown". They include Six
White Boomers, The Spirit of Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town
and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
"We love to see Christians celebrating Christmas," said Keysar Trad, the
president of the Lakemba-based Lebanese Muslim Association. "We love
Christ and Mary."
After an outcry in December 2001, when the previous owner of the
Bankstown shopping centre downgraded the decorations and ditched the big
nativity scene, the new owner has installed almost $200,000 of Christmas
baubles. There is a Santa Claus with a real beard, nativity scene,
trees, elves, angels, bells and stars. A young woman who personalises
coloured Christmas balls for shoppers is Muslim, wearing a headscarf,
Trad said yesterday.
The decorations at multicultural Bankstown are far more elaborate than
the desiccated version of Christmas in the city of Sydney, under the
professed Catholic Lord Mayor Clover Moore. In contrast to her
predecessor Frank Sartor's generous, even over-the-top, coloured lights
and ornaments on the 19th-century sandstone Town Hall, Moore has
provided a drab little tree above the portico and a bleak Seasons
Greetings card.
The excuse is always used by those such as Moore and the head of the
Oporto chicken chain - who tried to ban Maltese Catholic franchisee
Charlie Saliba from putting up a nativity scene in his Hornsby store -
that keeping the Christianity in Christmas is offensive to minority
groups.
But there is no sign in this essentially easygoing country that Muslims,
Jews, Buddhists or Hindus are trying to ban Christmas. As is often the
case, self-appointed arbiters of public tolerance have simply co-opted a
non-existent cause to serve their own ends, damaging those they profess
to protect in the process.
"What purports to inspire tolerance instead inspires hostility and
intolerance," Waleed Aly, a member of the executive of the Islamic
Council of Victoria, wrote in The Australian newspaper this week. Jesus
is a revered prophet to Muslims. Driving an "anti-Christmas campaign" is
not Islam but "aggressive atheism".
Others, such as American rabbi Daniel Lapin, have called it
fundamentalist secularism, the umbrella under which new intolerances
have gathered in the name of tolerance.
"If Christmas decorations help bring people back to God, whether they
are Christian or Muslim, that is a good thing," said Trad. "At the
moment society is being told that religion is the cause of all conflict.
But religion is in fact the cause of unity, harmony, respect and all the
high principles."
Conservative Christians have much in common with moderate Muslims. Both
are under attack by the zealots of secularism. They share a desire to
stem the tide of the I Am Charlotte Simmons world created by intolerant
anti-religious fundamentalist secularism. It is a world of empty
materialism, patois and degrading hooking-up sex, which Tom Wolfe brings
to life in his latest novel about university existence.
It is a world in which a Bringelly father appears in Campbelltown Local
Court, charged with common assault and stalking, for trying to stop his
14-year-old daughter from having an affair with a middle-aged man. It is
a world in which a middle-aged married teacher has an affair with his
15-year-old student, shacks up with her, causing her to be permanently
estranged from her family and then receives $28,000 in compensation from
the NSW Government because he lost his job.
These topsy-turvy corrupted values are not the result of religion; they
are the result of no religion. Aggressive secularists have had a free
kick at religion and every other institution for the last 40 years,
blaming them for all the ills of the world, while steadily dismantling
the protections and respect for authority that kept them safe while they
were growing up.
And now their influence is waning, they are desperate to keep alive the
old myths. A perfect recent example is an article in The Guardian
newspaper about a coming movie, Kinsey, about the American sex
researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey. Reprinted in these pages this week under
the headline "Moral right tries to turn the flock back to dark ages of
sexuality", it claims no one had a "guilt-and-fear-free orgasm" until
Kinsey researched sex, Margaret Sanger launched bra-burning, and Hugh
Hefner mass-marketed big-breasted nudes.
It is a ridiculous proposition, since, in most religions, orgasms
between a husband and wife have always been as guilt-free as they come,
especially if they produce lots of little believers. Guilt - for
adherents - comes into the equation only if the sex occurs outside
marriage or is harmful to one or other party, which is less a case of
opposing sex than trying to harness desire for the sake, ultimately, of
protecting families.
This year, despite attempts to resurrect the old myth, Christmas in
Sydney is doing just fine, with or without the Town Hall's
participation. We should really thank Moore for her grim Clayton's cards
and her joyless approach to Christmas. She is an interesting reminder of
a disintegrating world view, a lagging indicator, quite out of step with
the spirit of the age.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
________________
The post-Christian generation
The Age December 14 2004
http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2004/12/13/1102787011199.html
The religious amnesia evident in Australia at Christmas is not only sad,
it's dangerous, writes Muriel Porter.
Friends of mine recently took their young son to see the Myer Christmas
windows. He was engrossed by them, carefully following the story of The
Polar Express - a story he knows well - from scene to scene. Then he
came to the window depicting Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. The
nativity tableau was quite new to him. "So what's the story here then?"
he asked his parents.
Similar anecdotes could be told around the country, and not just about
schoolchildren. My friends' son belongs to the second generation at
least that has almost entirely missed out on learning the basic stories
of the Christian faith, the religion that shaped Western civilisation.
There are many reasons for this significant shift; the rapid decline in
church-going over the past 40 years is only the most obvious. As church
connection has waned, our culture has just as rapidly become
secularised. Misguided attempts to avoid possible offence to other world
faiths by stopping traditional Christian observances in schools and
kindergartens is the result of that secularisation, not its cause.
The mainstream churches wring their hands in despair, but some of the
blame clearly belongs with them. While the lives of women in particular
and families in general have changed dramatically since the 1960s, the
churches by and large have failed to listen, let alone lead.
The Catholic Church's blanket ban on artificial contraception, the
Anglican Church's hard-fought but only piecemeal concessions to female
equality, all the churches' resistance both to more fluid family
structures and to homosexual partnerships, have combined to give
Christianity a gloomy, life-denying, out-of-touch image. There has been
no great temptation for secular people to seek the God the Christian
churches preach.
As Christmas approaches, this cultural and religious amnesia is deeply
sad. At the heart of the festival is the scene depicted in the Myer
window - God incarnate in a baby born to a poor couple sheltering in a
stable in an occupied country. The deeper meaning of the story is that
God is one with us, intimately, not just 2000 years ago, but now,
always. As English poet John Betjeman put it, "The maker of the stars
and sea/ become a child on earth for me?" It is a story worth pondering,
or at the very least, hearing.
Generations of Australians are not just missing out on a story important
to their heritage. Their ignorance is making them vulnerable to
religious fundamentalism.
Our secular society's addiction to consumerism, gambling and large-scale
debt comes at a high price. The statistics on suicide, depression,
family break-up and dysfunction all indicate deep, long-term insecurity
and unhappiness.
When disillusionment sets in, people often long for a spiritual
dimension in their lives, and so become easy prey for fundamentalist
Christian groups with their slick marketing techniques and
pseudo-contemporary, music-focused programs. With no religious
background to provide the tools for discernment, they are readily swayed
by the clear certainties and the harsh take-it-or-leave-it morality
preached by charismatic authoritarian male church leaders.
It is no coincidence that the Pentecostal churches and the
fundamentalist sections of mainstream churches are drawing large numbers
of converts from the very generations who missed out on even a
rudimentary Christian education - people ranging from teenagers to the
early middle-aged. For a sizeable proportion of these young converts,
however, disillusionment will inevitably set in once more. They will
eventually chafe under the uncompromising, often loveless, teaching and
reject it completely. But without an earlier religious background to
provide perspective and suggest alternative approaches, they will reject
all of Christianity with it. A bitter cynicism and deeper malaise will
result.
And there is another sad result of secularisation. A culture without a
religious story is fragile and rudderless when it comes to death. People
with a residual belief in God but no coherent religious framework are
often left floundering when tragedy strikes. Without familiar holy
places, they resort to making shrines of the actual sites of death.
Homely memorials now dot our highways, or the sites of suicides.
Memorial plaques speak vaguely of God, but lack the hope and peace that
earlier generations - ironically much more deeply affected by sudden and
tragic family deaths - drew from their faith.
As a society, we have lost far more than we imagine by not having at
least a nodding acquaintance with the engaging story of Mary, Joseph,
and the Child of Bethlehem.
Dr Muriel Porter, an Anglican laywoman, writes regularly for The Age on
religion.
disguised ideology.
____
Standing up to aggressive secularism
December 9 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/12/08/1102182363720.html
The anti-Christmas drive is out of touch with people of all beliefs,
writes Miranda Devine.
Wogs-Are-Stealing-Christmas is the perennial festive season story,
popping up on talkback radio in late November with enduring reliability.
But this year - the year the ideology pendulum swung back towards reason
- the story has finally been exposed as a myth and a smokescreen.
As it turns out, multicultural Sydney just loves Christmas. Bankstown's
Centro shopping centre, smack bang in one of the most multicultural
areas of Australia, with more than 132 nationalities, 53 per cent of the
population born overseas, and an abundance of young mums with
headscarves, happens to boast one of the city's most lavish Christmas
displays.
"Despite Bankstown being one of Sydney's most ethnically and religiously
diverse areas, Christmas and what it stands for is a huge celebration in
my local area and we are proud of it," the Bankstown MP, Tony Stewart,
told the NSW Parliament last month. So keen was Stewart to explode the
old theft myth he even tabled a list of 226 Christmas songs played
"every hour of shopping time at Centro Bankstown". They include Six
White Boomers, The Spirit of Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town
and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
"We love to see Christians celebrating Christmas," said Keysar Trad, the
president of the Lakemba-based Lebanese Muslim Association. "We love
Christ and Mary."
After an outcry in December 2001, when the previous owner of the
Bankstown shopping centre downgraded the decorations and ditched the big
nativity scene, the new owner has installed almost $200,000 of Christmas
baubles. There is a Santa Claus with a real beard, nativity scene,
trees, elves, angels, bells and stars. A young woman who personalises
coloured Christmas balls for shoppers is Muslim, wearing a headscarf,
Trad said yesterday.
The decorations at multicultural Bankstown are far more elaborate than
the desiccated version of Christmas in the city of Sydney, under the
professed Catholic Lord Mayor Clover Moore. In contrast to her
predecessor Frank Sartor's generous, even over-the-top, coloured lights
and ornaments on the 19th-century sandstone Town Hall, Moore has
provided a drab little tree above the portico and a bleak Seasons
Greetings card.
The excuse is always used by those such as Moore and the head of the
Oporto chicken chain - who tried to ban Maltese Catholic franchisee
Charlie Saliba from putting up a nativity scene in his Hornsby store -
that keeping the Christianity in Christmas is offensive to minority
groups.
But there is no sign in this essentially easygoing country that Muslims,
Jews, Buddhists or Hindus are trying to ban Christmas. As is often the
case, self-appointed arbiters of public tolerance have simply co-opted a
non-existent cause to serve their own ends, damaging those they profess
to protect in the process.
"What purports to inspire tolerance instead inspires hostility and
intolerance," Waleed Aly, a member of the executive of the Islamic
Council of Victoria, wrote in The Australian newspaper this week. Jesus
is a revered prophet to Muslims. Driving an "anti-Christmas campaign" is
not Islam but "aggressive atheism".
Others, such as American rabbi Daniel Lapin, have called it
fundamentalist secularism, the umbrella under which new intolerances
have gathered in the name of tolerance.
"If Christmas decorations help bring people back to God, whether they
are Christian or Muslim, that is a good thing," said Trad. "At the
moment society is being told that religion is the cause of all conflict.
But religion is in fact the cause of unity, harmony, respect and all the
high principles."
Conservative Christians have much in common with moderate Muslims. Both
are under attack by the zealots of secularism. They share a desire to
stem the tide of the I Am Charlotte Simmons world created by intolerant
anti-religious fundamentalist secularism. It is a world of empty
materialism, patois and degrading hooking-up sex, which Tom Wolfe brings
to life in his latest novel about university existence.
It is a world in which a Bringelly father appears in Campbelltown Local
Court, charged with common assault and stalking, for trying to stop his
14-year-old daughter from having an affair with a middle-aged man. It is
a world in which a middle-aged married teacher has an affair with his
15-year-old student, shacks up with her, causing her to be permanently
estranged from her family and then receives $28,000 in compensation from
the NSW Government because he lost his job.
These topsy-turvy corrupted values are not the result of religion; they
are the result of no religion. Aggressive secularists have had a free
kick at religion and every other institution for the last 40 years,
blaming them for all the ills of the world, while steadily dismantling
the protections and respect for authority that kept them safe while they
were growing up.
And now their influence is waning, they are desperate to keep alive the
old myths. A perfect recent example is an article in The Guardian
newspaper about a coming movie, Kinsey, about the American sex
researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey. Reprinted in these pages this week under
the headline "Moral right tries to turn the flock back to dark ages of
sexuality", it claims no one had a "guilt-and-fear-free orgasm" until
Kinsey researched sex, Margaret Sanger launched bra-burning, and Hugh
Hefner mass-marketed big-breasted nudes.
It is a ridiculous proposition, since, in most religions, orgasms
between a husband and wife have always been as guilt-free as they come,
especially if they produce lots of little believers. Guilt - for
adherents - comes into the equation only if the sex occurs outside
marriage or is harmful to one or other party, which is less a case of
opposing sex than trying to harness desire for the sake, ultimately, of
protecting families.
This year, despite attempts to resurrect the old myth, Christmas in
Sydney is doing just fine, with or without the Town Hall's
participation. We should really thank Moore for her grim Clayton's cards
and her joyless approach to Christmas. She is an interesting reminder of
a disintegrating world view, a lagging indicator, quite out of step with
the spirit of the age.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
________________
The post-Christian generation
The Age December 14 2004
http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2004/12/13/1102787011199.html
The religious amnesia evident in Australia at Christmas is not only sad,
it's dangerous, writes Muriel Porter.
Friends of mine recently took their young son to see the Myer Christmas
windows. He was engrossed by them, carefully following the story of The
Polar Express - a story he knows well - from scene to scene. Then he
came to the window depicting Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. The
nativity tableau was quite new to him. "So what's the story here then?"
he asked his parents.
Similar anecdotes could be told around the country, and not just about
schoolchildren. My friends' son belongs to the second generation at
least that has almost entirely missed out on learning the basic stories
of the Christian faith, the religion that shaped Western civilisation.
There are many reasons for this significant shift; the rapid decline in
church-going over the past 40 years is only the most obvious. As church
connection has waned, our culture has just as rapidly become
secularised. Misguided attempts to avoid possible offence to other world
faiths by stopping traditional Christian observances in schools and
kindergartens is the result of that secularisation, not its cause.
The mainstream churches wring their hands in despair, but some of the
blame clearly belongs with them. While the lives of women in particular
and families in general have changed dramatically since the 1960s, the
churches by and large have failed to listen, let alone lead.
The Catholic Church's blanket ban on artificial contraception, the
Anglican Church's hard-fought but only piecemeal concessions to female
equality, all the churches' resistance both to more fluid family
structures and to homosexual partnerships, have combined to give
Christianity a gloomy, life-denying, out-of-touch image. There has been
no great temptation for secular people to seek the God the Christian
churches preach.
As Christmas approaches, this cultural and religious amnesia is deeply
sad. At the heart of the festival is the scene depicted in the Myer
window - God incarnate in a baby born to a poor couple sheltering in a
stable in an occupied country. The deeper meaning of the story is that
God is one with us, intimately, not just 2000 years ago, but now,
always. As English poet John Betjeman put it, "The maker of the stars
and sea/ become a child on earth for me?" It is a story worth pondering,
or at the very least, hearing.
Generations of Australians are not just missing out on a story important
to their heritage. Their ignorance is making them vulnerable to
religious fundamentalism.
Our secular society's addiction to consumerism, gambling and large-scale
debt comes at a high price. The statistics on suicide, depression,
family break-up and dysfunction all indicate deep, long-term insecurity
and unhappiness.
When disillusionment sets in, people often long for a spiritual
dimension in their lives, and so become easy prey for fundamentalist
Christian groups with their slick marketing techniques and
pseudo-contemporary, music-focused programs. With no religious
background to provide the tools for discernment, they are readily swayed
by the clear certainties and the harsh take-it-or-leave-it morality
preached by charismatic authoritarian male church leaders.
It is no coincidence that the Pentecostal churches and the
fundamentalist sections of mainstream churches are drawing large numbers
of converts from the very generations who missed out on even a
rudimentary Christian education - people ranging from teenagers to the
early middle-aged. For a sizeable proportion of these young converts,
however, disillusionment will inevitably set in once more. They will
eventually chafe under the uncompromising, often loveless, teaching and
reject it completely. But without an earlier religious background to
provide perspective and suggest alternative approaches, they will reject
all of Christianity with it. A bitter cynicism and deeper malaise will
result.
And there is another sad result of secularisation. A culture without a
religious story is fragile and rudderless when it comes to death. People
with a residual belief in God but no coherent religious framework are
often left floundering when tragedy strikes. Without familiar holy
places, they resort to making shrines of the actual sites of death.
Homely memorials now dot our highways, or the sites of suicides.
Memorial plaques speak vaguely of God, but lack the hope and peace that
earlier generations - ironically much more deeply affected by sudden and
tragic family deaths - drew from their faith.
As a society, we have lost far more than we imagine by not having at
least a nodding acquaintance with the engaging story of Mary, Joseph,
and the Child of Bethlehem.
Dr Muriel Porter, an Anglican laywoman, writes regularly for The Age on
religion.
12/24/04
Nature
Published online: 08 December 2004; |
doi:10.1038/432666a
Religion and science: Studies of faith
Tony Reichhardt1, David Cyranoski2 & Quirin Schiermeier2
1 Tony Reichhardt writes for Nature from Washington.
2 Additional reporting by David Cyranoski in Tokyo and Quirin Schiermeier
in Munich.
Embryonic stem-cell research is putting fresh strain on the already
fractious relationship between science and religion. TonyReichhardt
explores how faith is shaping the ever-changing landscape of bioethics.
When Pope John Paul II addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in
1992, he tackled yet again Galileo's famous battles with the Church four
centuries ago. In his talk, entitled "Faith can never conflict with
reason", the Pope was doing his best to mend fences. Although science and
religion form "two realms of knowledge", he said, "the two realms are not
altogether foreign to each other, they have points of contact".
Despite the Pope's optimistic words, the tension between faith and science
never fully subsides. And as these realms regularly come into contact,
over everything from Darwin to Dolly the cloned sheep, they sometimes
collide with explosive force.
Today, with scientists manipulating the machinery of life as never before,
the debate is in full swing. Nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,
cloning, creationism and genetic modification (see 'A recipe for
disaster?') all test the strained relationship between faith and advancing
technology.
Today's frontline controversy stem-cell research has prompted a wide range
of reactions from religious leaders, much of it negative. But the
fundamental, religion-based belief in the sanctity of human life, even at
the stage of an embryo, clashes in this field with another fundamental
human desire: to alleviate suffering and cure disease. The debate does not
leave room for simple answers, for individuals or society as a whole.
Francis Collins, head of the US National Human Genome Research Institute in
Bethesda, Maryland, and a devout Christian, has described himself as being
"intensely conflicted" over stem-cell research. "It is a classic example
of a collision between two very important principles," he says. The
opposition to stem-cell research cannot be dismissed as merely
'anti-science'. Most religious traditions sincerely value medicine and
science, and make a serious effort to reconcile scientific thinking with
doctrine (see 'Science and the Vatican', page 669).
Where there's life...
This process of discussion and reconciliation may even be initiating a
fundamental change. Some Catholics are beginning to hope that recent
insights into developmental biology could move the Church from its
135-year-old position that human life begins at conception, the main
obstacle to it accepting the study of stem cells extracted from human
embryos.
Much of the theological debate about stem-cell research centres on the
question of when life begins. Some traditions, including most sects of
Judaism and Islam, aren't troubled by this because they don't consider the
early embryo fully human. Most Jewish Talmudic scholars, for example,
argue that 'ensoulment' takes place 40 days or more into pregnancy, once
the human form is roughly established. Before that, the embryo is
described as 'water'. Israel accepts embryonic stem-cell research, and the
Israeli Academy of Sciences and the Jewish Rabbinical Assembly,
headquartered in the United States, have both come out in favour.
Likewise, researchers at the Royan Institute in Tehran have developed
stem-cell lines with the full blessing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei.
According to Hinduism, life begins at conception. But this does not make
for easy decisions on the ethics of stem-cell research. Destruction of an
embryo could still be justified if it is considered to be an
"extraordinary, unavoidable circumstance" and an act "done for greater
good", says Swami® Tyagananda, Hindu chaplain at the MIT Religious
Activities Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Based on these criteria,
many traditional Hindu priests are unwilling to condone the work, but it
has not provoked much opposition in India, for instance, where embryonic
stem-cell research is allowed.
The strongest objections come from Christian sects that regard the
sacrifice of an embryo, "even an undifferentiated clump of cells in a
three-day-old blastocyst", as totally unacceptable. Embryos cannot
be killed, they say, any more than Death Row prisoners can be used in
lethal experiments, even if the goal is to relieve suffering in others.
Evangelical Christianity relies on a specific interpretation of scripture
for its advice on this matter. Psalm 139: 13, for example, says: "For you
created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." In
Jeremiah 1: 5 God tells the prophet, "Before I formed you in the womb I
knew you," implying that Jeremiah had 'personhood' in God's eyes even
before he was an embryo.
This roughly matches current Vatican thinking. The Catholic Church holds
that human life is sacred from the moment of fertilization. But some
Catholic theologians point out that the Church's view on the moral status
of the embryo has changed over time, and may change again. In fact,
scientific breakthroughs - the discovery of the mammalian ovum in 1827 and
the first microscopic views of developing embryos - helped to shape the
Vatican's thinking. The findings informed Pope Pius IX's decision in 1869
to abandon the Church's moral distinction between early- and late-term
abortions and to call instead for full protection of life from the moment
of conception.
Today, the Vatican does not strictly claim that the early embryo is a
person - only that it deserves respect as a potential human being, says
Carlos Bedate of the Autonomous University of Madrid. Bedate has an
unusual background as a Jesuit priest with a doctorate in molecular
biology, and has served on a Spanish advisory committee for bioethics. He
thinks the ambiguity in Catholic thought could open a window for the
Church's acceptance of embryonic stem-cell research. Recent advances in
developmental biology have shown that an embryo's viability depends on the
cellular environment as well as its own DNA, says Bedate. "We cannot
consider that in the early embryo there is the entire information needed
to complete the process of development," he says.
Open debate
A few Catholic theologians have spoken out in favour of human embryonic
stem-cell research, including Jean Porter of the University of Notre Dame
in Indiana, Margaret Farley of Yale University, and Christian Kummer, who
trained as a zoologist and is now director of an institute for scientific
issues related to philosophy and theology at the Jesuit Faculty of
Philosophy in Munich. Kummer says that they are free to voice these views
without fear of censure from the Church. "Academic freedom is more
pronounced than one would expect from knowing the Vatican's official
positions," he says.
Bedate thinks that the Vatican may eventually be open to reconsidering the
issue on the basis of new scientific understanding. But any formal change
in the Church's position is likely to come very slowly, as Galileo's case
once showed.
Arguments about the moment of ensoulment are crucial, but they are not the
only factor in religion-based objections to stem-cell research. As
evangelical Christian Nigel Cameron, a bioethicist at the Institute on
Biotechnology and the Human Future in Chicago, Illinois, told a US Senate
committee in 2001: "It is by no means necessary to take the view that the
early embryo is a full human person in order to be convinced that
deleterious experimentation is improper."
The Church of England, for example, does not contend that early embryos are
fully human. Yet they are "deserving of respect" nonetheless. In its
guidelines on ethical investment, the Church concludes that "companies, a
major part of whose business is engaged in the cloning of embryos (even for
therapeutic use), should be avoided."
Another point of controversy is the source of the embryo. Some stem-cell
researchers use embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization (IVF)
clinics, whereas others clone new embryos to harvest their cells.
The very practice of IVF has faced strict opposition from the Catholic
Church on the grounds that it breaks the God-given connection between sex
and procreation - a rule often voiced during discussions on the ethics of
contraception. Most other religious groups, including evangelicals, see
IVF as a good solution for infertile couples who want children. But that
acceptance is now coming under greater scrutiny because IVF clinics
frequently discard 'excess' embryos that are not needed for implantation.
Although the
issue hasn't received the same attention as abortion, some Christian
leaders have begun to speak out. "IVF kind of snuck up on evangelicals. We
weren't paying as close attention as we should have," says Ben Mitchell,
an bioethicist and evangelical Christian at Trinity International
University in Deerfield, Illinois.
Fertile ground
In predominantly Catholic Italy, attempts to find a compromise on the
issue have led only to new problems. The country passed a law this year
legalizing IVF despite Vatican opposition. But no embryos
can be destroyed - all have to be transferred to the mother's uterus.
This can increase the risk to mothers and even lead to miscarriages in the
case of multiple pregnancies.
Other denominations, including the Unitarian Universalists, one of the most
liberal of religious groups, take more umbrage with using custom-made
embryos than the 'leftovers' from IVF. Although the Unitarian Universalist
Association has no official consensus opinion on stem cells, its president,
William Sinkford, offered his personal opinion in 2001 that there should be
no ban on embryonic stem-cell research. But he added: "I would contend
that no human embryos should be created specifically for stem-cell
experimentation, thus turning human life and human reproduction into a
commodity - surely a clear affront to our first principle affirming the
inherent dignity of human beings."
Perhaps this dignity seems all the more affronted since the resulting
experiments have not, so far, yielded life-saving results. Damien Keown, a
specialist in Buddhist ethics at Goldsmiths College in London, sums it up:
"Scientific curiosity seems to be the main factor motivating cloning
experiments at present, and overall Buddhists are likely to be sceptical
about the need for this curiosity to be satisfied at the price of
destroying human life."
When Seoul National University's Woo Suk Hwang cloned human embryonic
stem-cell lines earlier this year he cited his own Buddhist beliefs, saying
that the experiments were a kind of "recycling of life" in line with
reincarnation. Some Buddhist groups in South Korea, where Buddhists
account for about a third of the population, supported him. But most
Buddhist scholars say the killing of an embryo at any stage violates a
central tenet that living things should not be harmed. Cloning for
reproductive purposes, on the other hand, does not require destroying the
embryo and so does not in itself violate Buddhist precepts.
"The problem is not when life is started, but when it is stopped, as in
therapeutic cloning," says Keown. "Dr Hwang is on shaky ground in claiming
that Buddhism supports cloning, without careful qualification."
Protestants, who make up another third of South Korea's population,
reacted strongly to the news of Hwang's experiments. Sixteen Protestant
groups, representing 6,000 people - half of them doctors in the Christian
Medical Fellowship - met in September to plan a campaign devoted to making
the use of human embryos in research illegal.
But the extent to which religious opinion influences politics and laws
varies dramatically from society to society. In Spain, where 99% of the
population is Catholic, a law was recently passed to allow the use of IVF
embryos in stem-cell research. But in Italy, which vehemently opposes the
use of European Union funding for stem-cell research, the population is
"much more reactionary on religious issues than the Church itself", says
Enrico Alleva, acting head of behavioural pathophysiology at the National
Institute of
Health in Rome. Alleva believes that this zeal, rather than formal
Catholic doctrine, is at the core of the recent creationist movement in
Italy (see Nature428, 595; 2004) and of other perceived 'anti-science'
tendencies throughout Europe.
Body politic
Another place where religion has proved to be the driving force for
politics is the United States. In November's election, President George W.
Bush owed his victory in part to votes from his fellow evangelical
Christians.
Evangelicals are not uniformly conservative in their political views - some
oppose capital punishment, for example. But most evangelical leaders are
strongly against embryonic stem-cell research. The Southern Baptist
Convention, which represents the second largest USA denomination after
Catholics, says it relies on a "crass utilitarian ethic which would
sacrifice the lives of the few for the benefits of the many".
Such statements have surely influenced the United States' rigid policy on
stem-cell research, in which federal funding is limited for use on a few
dozen pre-established cell lines, and cannot be used to establish new ones.
Does this reflect public attitudes? Polls reveal mixed opinions -
although a lot hinges on the wording of the question. In July 2004,
Catholics for Free Choice published a poll of 2,239 Catholics nationwide,
and found that 72% supported "allowing scientists to use stem cells
obtained from very early human embryos to find cures for serious diseases
such as Alzheimer's, diabetes and Parkinson's".
But "polls on embryonic stem-cell research often fail to mention that the
research requires destroying human embryos", says Richard Doerflinger,
deputy director of the US Conference of Catholic BishopsSecretariat for
Pro-Life Activities. In August the Catholic bishops released the results
of their own poll. When given a choice between funding both adult and
embryonic stem-cell research or only work
that didn't require destroying an embryo, Americans preferred the latter by
61% to 23%.
Difficult question
Efforts to establish ethical rules on stem cells that transcend national
and spiritual boundaries have proved remarkably unsuccessful. After years
of delayed decisions, on 19 November the United Nations came to what was
widely called a "compromise" position on cloning technologies - it adopted
a non-binding declaration that asks member states to adopt legislation that
respects "human dignity". In the end, this statement is likely to be
interpreted in as many different ways as some lines from the Bible.
So scientists and theologians will continue to talk - and to disagree.
At least one thing has changed in this debate since Galileo's day, for
better or for worse: now, science is the orthodox worldview, in the
industrialized world at least, and religion stands outside, raising
objections. At bioethics conferences, says John Evans, a sociologist of
religion at the University of California, San Diego, biologists rarely show
any knowledge of theology. But "religious people are expected to have
spent huge amounts of time learning all the science", he notes.
One thing is certain. Everyone agrees that fundamental ethical questions
underlying stem-cell research, many of which transcend religion, need to be
addressed. "The power of these new technologies is so great that we can no
longer deal with them in a vacuum. This affects everyone across the
board," says Kevin FitzGerald of Georgetown University in Washington DC, a
Jesuit priest with PhDs in molecular genetics and bioethics. And stem
cells are just the beginning. "The stuff that's coming down the pipe will
make this look like child's play," he says. "Organic mixed with inorganic,
one species mixed with another. Everything from the molecular level on up
will be fluid."
Published online: 08 December 2004; |
doi:10.1038/432666a
Religion and science: Studies of faith
Tony Reichhardt1, David Cyranoski2 & Quirin Schiermeier2
1 Tony Reichhardt writes for Nature from Washington.
2 Additional reporting by David Cyranoski in Tokyo and Quirin Schiermeier
in Munich.
Embryonic stem-cell research is putting fresh strain on the already
fractious relationship between science and religion. TonyReichhardt
explores how faith is shaping the ever-changing landscape of bioethics.
When Pope John Paul II addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in
1992, he tackled yet again Galileo's famous battles with the Church four
centuries ago. In his talk, entitled "Faith can never conflict with
reason", the Pope was doing his best to mend fences. Although science and
religion form "two realms of knowledge", he said, "the two realms are not
altogether foreign to each other, they have points of contact".
Despite the Pope's optimistic words, the tension between faith and science
never fully subsides. And as these realms regularly come into contact,
over everything from Darwin to Dolly the cloned sheep, they sometimes
collide with explosive force.
Today, with scientists manipulating the machinery of life as never before,
the debate is in full swing. Nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,
cloning, creationism and genetic modification (see 'A recipe for
disaster?') all test the strained relationship between faith and advancing
technology.
Today's frontline controversy stem-cell research has prompted a wide range
of reactions from religious leaders, much of it negative. But the
fundamental, religion-based belief in the sanctity of human life, even at
the stage of an embryo, clashes in this field with another fundamental
human desire: to alleviate suffering and cure disease. The debate does not
leave room for simple answers, for individuals or society as a whole.
Francis Collins, head of the US National Human Genome Research Institute in
Bethesda, Maryland, and a devout Christian, has described himself as being
"intensely conflicted" over stem-cell research. "It is a classic example
of a collision between two very important principles," he says. The
opposition to stem-cell research cannot be dismissed as merely
'anti-science'. Most religious traditions sincerely value medicine and
science, and make a serious effort to reconcile scientific thinking with
doctrine (see 'Science and the Vatican', page 669).
Where there's life...
This process of discussion and reconciliation may even be initiating a
fundamental change. Some Catholics are beginning to hope that recent
insights into developmental biology could move the Church from its
135-year-old position that human life begins at conception, the main
obstacle to it accepting the study of stem cells extracted from human
embryos.
Much of the theological debate about stem-cell research centres on the
question of when life begins. Some traditions, including most sects of
Judaism and Islam, aren't troubled by this because they don't consider the
early embryo fully human. Most Jewish Talmudic scholars, for example,
argue that 'ensoulment' takes place 40 days or more into pregnancy, once
the human form is roughly established. Before that, the embryo is
described as 'water'. Israel accepts embryonic stem-cell research, and the
Israeli Academy of Sciences and the Jewish Rabbinical Assembly,
headquartered in the United States, have both come out in favour.
Likewise, researchers at the Royan Institute in Tehran have developed
stem-cell lines with the full blessing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei.
According to Hinduism, life begins at conception. But this does not make
for easy decisions on the ethics of stem-cell research. Destruction of an
embryo could still be justified if it is considered to be an
"extraordinary, unavoidable circumstance" and an act "done for greater
good", says Swami® Tyagananda, Hindu chaplain at the MIT Religious
Activities Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Based on these criteria,
many traditional Hindu priests are unwilling to condone the work, but it
has not provoked much opposition in India, for instance, where embryonic
stem-cell research is allowed.
The strongest objections come from Christian sects that regard the
sacrifice of an embryo, "even an undifferentiated clump of cells in a
three-day-old blastocyst", as totally unacceptable. Embryos cannot
be killed, they say, any more than Death Row prisoners can be used in
lethal experiments, even if the goal is to relieve suffering in others.
Evangelical Christianity relies on a specific interpretation of scripture
for its advice on this matter. Psalm 139: 13, for example, says: "For you
created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." In
Jeremiah 1: 5 God tells the prophet, "Before I formed you in the womb I
knew you," implying that Jeremiah had 'personhood' in God's eyes even
before he was an embryo.
This roughly matches current Vatican thinking. The Catholic Church holds
that human life is sacred from the moment of fertilization. But some
Catholic theologians point out that the Church's view on the moral status
of the embryo has changed over time, and may change again. In fact,
scientific breakthroughs - the discovery of the mammalian ovum in 1827 and
the first microscopic views of developing embryos - helped to shape the
Vatican's thinking. The findings informed Pope Pius IX's decision in 1869
to abandon the Church's moral distinction between early- and late-term
abortions and to call instead for full protection of life from the moment
of conception.
Today, the Vatican does not strictly claim that the early embryo is a
person - only that it deserves respect as a potential human being, says
Carlos Bedate of the Autonomous University of Madrid. Bedate has an
unusual background as a Jesuit priest with a doctorate in molecular
biology, and has served on a Spanish advisory committee for bioethics. He
thinks the ambiguity in Catholic thought could open a window for the
Church's acceptance of embryonic stem-cell research. Recent advances in
developmental biology have shown that an embryo's viability depends on the
cellular environment as well as its own DNA, says Bedate. "We cannot
consider that in the early embryo there is the entire information needed
to complete the process of development," he says.
Open debate
A few Catholic theologians have spoken out in favour of human embryonic
stem-cell research, including Jean Porter of the University of Notre Dame
in Indiana, Margaret Farley of Yale University, and Christian Kummer, who
trained as a zoologist and is now director of an institute for scientific
issues related to philosophy and theology at the Jesuit Faculty of
Philosophy in Munich. Kummer says that they are free to voice these views
without fear of censure from the Church. "Academic freedom is more
pronounced than one would expect from knowing the Vatican's official
positions," he says.
Bedate thinks that the Vatican may eventually be open to reconsidering the
issue on the basis of new scientific understanding. But any formal change
in the Church's position is likely to come very slowly, as Galileo's case
once showed.
Arguments about the moment of ensoulment are crucial, but they are not the
only factor in religion-based objections to stem-cell research. As
evangelical Christian Nigel Cameron, a bioethicist at the Institute on
Biotechnology and the Human Future in Chicago, Illinois, told a US Senate
committee in 2001: "It is by no means necessary to take the view that the
early embryo is a full human person in order to be convinced that
deleterious experimentation is improper."
The Church of England, for example, does not contend that early embryos are
fully human. Yet they are "deserving of respect" nonetheless. In its
guidelines on ethical investment, the Church concludes that "companies, a
major part of whose business is engaged in the cloning of embryos (even for
therapeutic use), should be avoided."
Another point of controversy is the source of the embryo. Some stem-cell
researchers use embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization (IVF)
clinics, whereas others clone new embryos to harvest their cells.
The very practice of IVF has faced strict opposition from the Catholic
Church on the grounds that it breaks the God-given connection between sex
and procreation - a rule often voiced during discussions on the ethics of
contraception. Most other religious groups, including evangelicals, see
IVF as a good solution for infertile couples who want children. But that
acceptance is now coming under greater scrutiny because IVF clinics
frequently discard 'excess' embryos that are not needed for implantation.
Although the
issue hasn't received the same attention as abortion, some Christian
leaders have begun to speak out. "IVF kind of snuck up on evangelicals. We
weren't paying as close attention as we should have," says Ben Mitchell,
an bioethicist and evangelical Christian at Trinity International
University in Deerfield, Illinois.
Fertile ground
In predominantly Catholic Italy, attempts to find a compromise on the
issue have led only to new problems. The country passed a law this year
legalizing IVF despite Vatican opposition. But no embryos
can be destroyed - all have to be transferred to the mother's uterus.
This can increase the risk to mothers and even lead to miscarriages in the
case of multiple pregnancies.
Other denominations, including the Unitarian Universalists, one of the most
liberal of religious groups, take more umbrage with using custom-made
embryos than the 'leftovers' from IVF. Although the Unitarian Universalist
Association has no official consensus opinion on stem cells, its president,
William Sinkford, offered his personal opinion in 2001 that there should be
no ban on embryonic stem-cell research. But he added: "I would contend
that no human embryos should be created specifically for stem-cell
experimentation, thus turning human life and human reproduction into a
commodity - surely a clear affront to our first principle affirming the
inherent dignity of human beings."
Perhaps this dignity seems all the more affronted since the resulting
experiments have not, so far, yielded life-saving results. Damien Keown, a
specialist in Buddhist ethics at Goldsmiths College in London, sums it up:
"Scientific curiosity seems to be the main factor motivating cloning
experiments at present, and overall Buddhists are likely to be sceptical
about the need for this curiosity to be satisfied at the price of
destroying human life."
When Seoul National University's Woo Suk Hwang cloned human embryonic
stem-cell lines earlier this year he cited his own Buddhist beliefs, saying
that the experiments were a kind of "recycling of life" in line with
reincarnation. Some Buddhist groups in South Korea, where Buddhists
account for about a third of the population, supported him. But most
Buddhist scholars say the killing of an embryo at any stage violates a
central tenet that living things should not be harmed. Cloning for
reproductive purposes, on the other hand, does not require destroying the
embryo and so does not in itself violate Buddhist precepts.
"The problem is not when life is started, but when it is stopped, as in
therapeutic cloning," says Keown. "Dr Hwang is on shaky ground in claiming
that Buddhism supports cloning, without careful qualification."
Protestants, who make up another third of South Korea's population,
reacted strongly to the news of Hwang's experiments. Sixteen Protestant
groups, representing 6,000 people - half of them doctors in the Christian
Medical Fellowship - met in September to plan a campaign devoted to making
the use of human embryos in research illegal.
But the extent to which religious opinion influences politics and laws
varies dramatically from society to society. In Spain, where 99% of the
population is Catholic, a law was recently passed to allow the use of IVF
embryos in stem-cell research. But in Italy, which vehemently opposes the
use of European Union funding for stem-cell research, the population is
"much more reactionary on religious issues than the Church itself", says
Enrico Alleva, acting head of behavioural pathophysiology at the National
Institute of
Health in Rome. Alleva believes that this zeal, rather than formal
Catholic doctrine, is at the core of the recent creationist movement in
Italy (see Nature428, 595; 2004) and of other perceived 'anti-science'
tendencies throughout Europe.
Body politic
Another place where religion has proved to be the driving force for
politics is the United States. In November's election, President George W.
Bush owed his victory in part to votes from his fellow evangelical
Christians.
Evangelicals are not uniformly conservative in their political views - some
oppose capital punishment, for example. But most evangelical leaders are
strongly against embryonic stem-cell research. The Southern Baptist
Convention, which represents the second largest USA denomination after
Catholics, says it relies on a "crass utilitarian ethic which would
sacrifice the lives of the few for the benefits of the many".
Such statements have surely influenced the United States' rigid policy on
stem-cell research, in which federal funding is limited for use on a few
dozen pre-established cell lines, and cannot be used to establish new ones.
Does this reflect public attitudes? Polls reveal mixed opinions -
although a lot hinges on the wording of the question. In July 2004,
Catholics for Free Choice published a poll of 2,239 Catholics nationwide,
and found that 72% supported "allowing scientists to use stem cells
obtained from very early human embryos to find cures for serious diseases
such as Alzheimer's, diabetes and Parkinson's".
But "polls on embryonic stem-cell research often fail to mention that the
research requires destroying human embryos", says Richard Doerflinger,
deputy director of the US Conference of Catholic BishopsSecretariat for
Pro-Life Activities. In August the Catholic bishops released the results
of their own poll. When given a choice between funding both adult and
embryonic stem-cell research or only work
that didn't require destroying an embryo, Americans preferred the latter by
61% to 23%.
Difficult question
Efforts to establish ethical rules on stem cells that transcend national
and spiritual boundaries have proved remarkably unsuccessful. After years
of delayed decisions, on 19 November the United Nations came to what was
widely called a "compromise" position on cloning technologies - it adopted
a non-binding declaration that asks member states to adopt legislation that
respects "human dignity". In the end, this statement is likely to be
interpreted in as many different ways as some lines from the Bible.
So scientists and theologians will continue to talk - and to disagree.
At least one thing has changed in this debate since Galileo's day, for
better or for worse: now, science is the orthodox worldview, in the
industrialized world at least, and religion stands outside, raising
objections. At bioethics conferences, says John Evans, a sociologist of
religion at the University of California, San Diego, biologists rarely show
any knowledge of theology. But "religious people are expected to have
spent huge amounts of time learning all the science", he notes.
One thing is certain. Everyone agrees that fundamental ethical questions
underlying stem-cell research, many of which transcend religion, need to be
addressed. "The power of these new technologies is so great that we can no
longer deal with them in a vacuum. This affects everyone across the
board," says Kevin FitzGerald of Georgetown University in Washington DC, a
Jesuit priest with PhDs in molecular genetics and bioethics. And stem
cells are just the beginning. "The stuff that's coming down the pipe will
make this look like child's play," he says. "Organic mixed with inorganic,
one species mixed with another. Everything from the molecular level on up
will be fluid."
Please send an e-postcard to the Vatican; a quick and easy action. Thanks.
Best wishes,
R
_________
Subject: E-mail the Vatican, say missionaries
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 10:29:04 +0000
------
The Columban Missionaries - a Roman Catholic organisation of missionary
priests, sisters and laity -are calling for letters to be sent to the
Justice and Peace Council appealing to the Holy See not to endorse genetic
engineering as a solution to world hunger.
The Columban Missionaries are calling on the Vatican to instead organise a
serious and inclusive consultation on food and how to combat hunger in a
world of plenty.
They're asking for the consultation process to draw on the experience and
expertise of as wide a group as possible and for it to be particularly
sensitive to contributions from local churches where poverty and hunger are
widespread.
E-mail the Vatican:
http://www.columban.com/pd/postcards/cm.html
The concerns of the Columban Missionaries together with multiple resources on
this issue can be found on their website: http://www.columban.com
Here are some of their concerns:
Moral Imperative of Biotechnology ?
http://www.columban.com
Since November 2003, when the Vatican hosted an international seminar on
genetically modified foods, there has been a growing concern, especially
among grass roots environmental, development, farming organizations and
local Churches, particularly in the Third Word, that the Vatican is
supporting the use of genetically engineered crops.
Since then, another Conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Science
and the US Embassy to the Holy See - 'Feeding the Hungry: Moral Imperative
of Biotechnology' - took place in the Gregorian University in September
2004.
The Study-Document on the Use of 'Genetically Modified Food Plants to Combat
Hunger in the World' published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004
promotes genetically engineered crops as a way to solve world hunger.
The majority of the speakers invited to both conferences are well known GMO
advocates. There was a noticeable absence of scientists or development
workers who question both the safety of GE crops and the proposition that
these will play a significant role in banishing hunger.
Even though the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace denied the November
2003 conference was biased in favour of GMOs and insisted that both sides of
the issue will be considered when the Vatican finally made a decision on
GMOs, there is no evidence that critical views of GMOs are being seriously
entertained. ......
E-mail the Vatican - it only takes a moment
http://www.columban.com/pd/postcards/cm.html
More resources: http://www.columban.com
----------------------------------------------
http://conservation.catholic.org/ecologicalcrisis.htm
PEACE WITH GOD THE CREATOR, PEACE WITH ALL OF CREATION
Message of His Holiness Pope John Paul II for the celebration of the WORLD DAY
OF PEACE, January 1, 1990
EXTRACT: "Finally, we can only look with deep concern at the enormous
possibilities of biological research. We are not yet in a position to assess
the biological disturbance that could result from indiscriminate genetic
manipulation and from the unscrupulous development of new forms of plant and
animal life, to say nothing of unacceptable experimentation regarding the
origins of human life itself. It is evident to all that in any area as
delicate as this, indifference to fundamental ethical norms, or their
rejection, would lead mankind to the very threshold of self-destruction."
----------------------------------------------
Best wishes,
R
_________
Subject: E-mail the Vatican, say missionaries
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 10:29:04 +0000
------
The Columban Missionaries - a Roman Catholic organisation of missionary
priests, sisters and laity -are calling for letters to be sent to the
Justice and Peace Council appealing to the Holy See not to endorse genetic
engineering as a solution to world hunger.
The Columban Missionaries are calling on the Vatican to instead organise a
serious and inclusive consultation on food and how to combat hunger in a
world of plenty.
They're asking for the consultation process to draw on the experience and
expertise of as wide a group as possible and for it to be particularly
sensitive to contributions from local churches where poverty and hunger are
widespread.
E-mail the Vatican:
http://www.columban.com/pd/postcards/cm.html
The concerns of the Columban Missionaries together with multiple resources on
this issue can be found on their website: http://www.columban.com
Here are some of their concerns:
Moral Imperative of Biotechnology ?
http://www.columban.com
Since November 2003, when the Vatican hosted an international seminar on
genetically modified foods, there has been a growing concern, especially
among grass roots environmental, development, farming organizations and
local Churches, particularly in the Third Word, that the Vatican is
supporting the use of genetically engineered crops.
Since then, another Conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Science
and the US Embassy to the Holy See - 'Feeding the Hungry: Moral Imperative
of Biotechnology' - took place in the Gregorian University in September
2004.
The Study-Document on the Use of 'Genetically Modified Food Plants to Combat
Hunger in the World' published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004
promotes genetically engineered crops as a way to solve world hunger.
The majority of the speakers invited to both conferences are well known GMO
advocates. There was a noticeable absence of scientists or development
workers who question both the safety of GE crops and the proposition that
these will play a significant role in banishing hunger.
Even though the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace denied the November
2003 conference was biased in favour of GMOs and insisted that both sides of
the issue will be considered when the Vatican finally made a decision on
GMOs, there is no evidence that critical views of GMOs are being seriously
entertained. ......
E-mail the Vatican - it only takes a moment
http://www.columban.com/pd/postcards/cm.html
More resources: http://www.columban.com
----------------------------------------------
http://conservation.catholic.org/ecologicalcrisis.htm
PEACE WITH GOD THE CREATOR, PEACE WITH ALL OF CREATION
Message of His Holiness Pope John Paul II for the celebration of the WORLD DAY
OF PEACE, January 1, 1990
EXTRACT: "Finally, we can only look with deep concern at the enormous
possibilities of biological research. We are not yet in a position to assess
the biological disturbance that could result from indiscriminate genetic
manipulation and from the unscrupulous development of new forms of plant and
animal life, to say nothing of unacceptable experimentation regarding the
origins of human life itself. It is evident to all that in any area as
delicate as this, indifference to fundamental ethical norms, or their
rejection, would lead mankind to the very threshold of self-destruction."
----------------------------------------------
Short-sighted dishonesty among anti-abortion Yanks [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 06:01:20 PM
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1273
Study Deems Federally Funded Sex Ed. Inaccurate, Misleading
by Julie Segraves
Abstinence-only programs funded by millions of tax-payer dollars were
found by a congressional study to provide false facts about reproductive
health.
Dec 4 - A congressional report released last week by Representative Henry
Waxman (D-California) found that many federally funded abstinence-only sex
education programs contain false and misleading information about
reproductive health.
The study, conducted by the House Committee on Government Reform's Special
Investigation Division, concluded that over two-thirds of the curricula
analyzed contain multiple scientific and medical inaccuracies.
House researchers limited their study to programs funded by Special
Programs of Regional and National Significance (SPRANS), which received the
bulk of the $138 million in federal monies budgeted for grants to
abstinence-only programs for fiscal year 2004. SPRANS programs received
$75 million of the available grants in 2004 for federally-funded abstinence
education. To qualify for a SPRANS grant, the curriculum cannot teach any
method other than abstinence to reduce the risk of pregnancy and can only
mention contraceptives in order to explain their rates of failure.
The study's findings concluded that eleven of the thirteen most used
curricula by SPRANS programs contained major errors and distortions of
public health information. These curricula were used in 25 states by state
health departments, school districts, hospitals and community-based
organizations.
The misrepresentations and errors ranged from inaccurate statistics about
abortion-related hazards to misstatements of scientific fact.
For instance, Me, My World, My Future, a textbook published by Teen-Aid,
says that five to ten percent of women who have a legal abortion will
become sterile. But, according to the Waxman study, there is no evidence
that elective abortions performed in the US alter a woman's fertility
except in extreme cases.
Another curriculum, published by Why kNOw Abstinence Education, teaches
that human cells have 24 chromosomes from each parent when in fact there
are 23. The same textbook erroneously teaches that "girls produce only
female ovum, boys, however, have both male and female sperm," as quoted by
the Waxman study.
The study also cited inaccurate assertions from the curricula about the
failure of condoms and the rates at which they prevent pregnancy and
sexually transmitted diseases.
"When used by real people in real-life situations, research confirms that
14 percent of the women who use condoms scrupulously for birth control
become pregnant within a year," teaches Big Talk Book, published by
Choosing the Best. As the study's authors point out, however, couples that
use condoms properly and "scrupulously," experience a failure rate of only
2 to 3 percent in the course of twelve months.
On the topic of HIV prevention through condom use, several of the
curricula cite a now-discredited study conducted by Dr. Susan Weller in
1993, according to the report released by Waxman. Weller's study, which
was rejected by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal
Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, concluded that
condoms only reduce HIV transmission by 69 percent.
Waxman's report also found that stereotypes about men and women were being
taught as fact. For instance, the report quotes Why kNOw curriculum as
teaching that "women gauge their happiness and judge their success by their
relationships" while suggesting that "men's happiness and success hinge on
their accomplishments."
Teachers are also telling students that life begins at conception, as if
the controversial viewpoint were based on solid scientific data rather than
a religious belief system. According to the report, one lesson middle
school curriculum published by Northwest Family Services, states:
"Conception, also known as fertilization, occurs when one sperm unites with
one egg in the upper third of the fallopian tube. This is when life
begins." Meanwhile, Me, My World, My Future calls a 43-day-old fetus a
"thinking person."
In a press statement about the report, Rep. Waxman said: "It is absolutely
vital that the health education provided to America's youth be
scientifically and medically accurate. The abstinence-only programs
reviewed in this report fail to meet this standard. Something is seriously
wrong when federal dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic
health facts."
Abstinence proponents criticized Waxman's report for being politically
motivated and some of the curricula's publishers called the study
inaccurate and misleading. But pro-choice and women's rights groups
praised the report.
"They are actually requiring teachers to teach students blatant and
dangerous falsehoods," said Nancy Keenan, president of the nonprofit
women's rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice America. "Only when people
are armed with complete and accurate information can they make appropriate
decisions. It's time for Congress to wake up to the truth and block George
Bush's relentless drive to shift federal funding into these ideological
programs instead of responsible, medically accurate sex education."
To date, studies on the efficacy of abstinence-only sex education have not
shown conclusive proof that such programs work in preventing teen
pregnancy. A widely cited October 2002 study conducted for the
non-ideological National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (NCPTP)
reviewed ten studies said by abstinence-only proponents to show that such
programs reduce sexual activity among youth. The survey found that "there
do not currently exist any abstinence-only programs with strong evidence
that they either delay sex or reduce teen pregnancy."
The NCPTP study's author, Dr. Douglas Kirby, pointed out that "this does
not mean that abstinence-only programs are not effective, nor does it mean
that they are effective." Instead, Kirby concluded that "given the great
diversity of abstinence-only programs combined with very few rigorous
studies of their impact, there is simply too little evidence to know
whether abstinence-only programs delay the initiation of sex."
On the other hand, a previous study by NCPTP found that sex education
programs that "deliver and consistently reinforce a clear message about
abstaining from sexual activity and/or using condoms or other forms of
contraception" and "provide basic, accurate information about the risks of
teen sexual activity and about ways to avoid intercourse or use methods of
protection against pregnancy and STDs" are most effective in decreasing
unprotected sexual activity by delaying sex or increasing contraceptive use.
Nevertheless, according to Cynthia Dailard of the Alan Guttmacher
Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive
health research and public education, there is no federal program that
funds comprehensive sexuality education.
Support for abstinence-only programs, however, has expanded rapidly under
the Bush Administration. Congress has budgeted $167 million for
abstinence-only education in fiscal year 2005 -- more than twice that spent
in FY 2001. The report released by Waxman states that abstinence-only
programs now reach "millions" of children and adolescents.
The United States has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the
industrialized world, much higher than most European countries.
Some believe Europe's success is based on the comprehensive, relatively
progressive sex education curricula taught there. In an interview with
WebMD Medical News, Susheela Singh, director of research at the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, which conducted a study of worldwide teen pregnancy
and abortion rates, attributed reduced rates of teen pregnancy in many
European countries to the acceptance that teens are sexually active and the
provision of condoms, emergency contraception and comprehensive sex
education.
As James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth in Washington, DC,
explained to WebMD: "In Europe, sex is a public health issue, driven by
research. In the US, sex is a political issue driven by controversy."
Study Deems Federally Funded Sex Ed. Inaccurate, Misleading
by Julie Segraves
Abstinence-only programs funded by millions of tax-payer dollars were
found by a congressional study to provide false facts about reproductive
health.
Dec 4 - A congressional report released last week by Representative Henry
Waxman (D-California) found that many federally funded abstinence-only sex
education programs contain false and misleading information about
reproductive health.
The study, conducted by the House Committee on Government Reform's Special
Investigation Division, concluded that over two-thirds of the curricula
analyzed contain multiple scientific and medical inaccuracies.
House researchers limited their study to programs funded by Special
Programs of Regional and National Significance (SPRANS), which received the
bulk of the $138 million in federal monies budgeted for grants to
abstinence-only programs for fiscal year 2004. SPRANS programs received
$75 million of the available grants in 2004 for federally-funded abstinence
education. To qualify for a SPRANS grant, the curriculum cannot teach any
method other than abstinence to reduce the risk of pregnancy and can only
mention contraceptives in order to explain their rates of failure.
The study's findings concluded that eleven of the thirteen most used
curricula by SPRANS programs contained major errors and distortions of
public health information. These curricula were used in 25 states by state
health departments, school districts, hospitals and community-based
organizations.
The misrepresentations and errors ranged from inaccurate statistics about
abortion-related hazards to misstatements of scientific fact.
For instance, Me, My World, My Future, a textbook published by Teen-Aid,
says that five to ten percent of women who have a legal abortion will
become sterile. But, according to the Waxman study, there is no evidence
that elective abortions performed in the US alter a woman's fertility
except in extreme cases.
Another curriculum, published by Why kNOw Abstinence Education, teaches
that human cells have 24 chromosomes from each parent when in fact there
are 23. The same textbook erroneously teaches that "girls produce only
female ovum, boys, however, have both male and female sperm," as quoted by
the Waxman study.
The study also cited inaccurate assertions from the curricula about the
failure of condoms and the rates at which they prevent pregnancy and
sexually transmitted diseases.
"When used by real people in real-life situations, research confirms that
14 percent of the women who use condoms scrupulously for birth control
become pregnant within a year," teaches Big Talk Book, published by
Choosing the Best. As the study's authors point out, however, couples that
use condoms properly and "scrupulously," experience a failure rate of only
2 to 3 percent in the course of twelve months.
On the topic of HIV prevention through condom use, several of the
curricula cite a now-discredited study conducted by Dr. Susan Weller in
1993, according to the report released by Waxman. Weller's study, which
was rejected by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal
Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, concluded that
condoms only reduce HIV transmission by 69 percent.
Waxman's report also found that stereotypes about men and women were being
taught as fact. For instance, the report quotes Why kNOw curriculum as
teaching that "women gauge their happiness and judge their success by their
relationships" while suggesting that "men's happiness and success hinge on
their accomplishments."
Teachers are also telling students that life begins at conception, as if
the controversial viewpoint were based on solid scientific data rather than
a religious belief system. According to the report, one lesson middle
school curriculum published by Northwest Family Services, states:
"Conception, also known as fertilization, occurs when one sperm unites with
one egg in the upper third of the fallopian tube. This is when life
begins." Meanwhile, Me, My World, My Future calls a 43-day-old fetus a
"thinking person."
In a press statement about the report, Rep. Waxman said: "It is absolutely
vital that the health education provided to America's youth be
scientifically and medically accurate. The abstinence-only programs
reviewed in this report fail to meet this standard. Something is seriously
wrong when federal dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic
health facts."
Abstinence proponents criticized Waxman's report for being politically
motivated and some of the curricula's publishers called the study
inaccurate and misleading. But pro-choice and women's rights groups
praised the report.
"They are actually requiring teachers to teach students blatant and
dangerous falsehoods," said Nancy Keenan, president of the nonprofit
women's rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice America. "Only when people
are armed with complete and accurate information can they make appropriate
decisions. It's time for Congress to wake up to the truth and block George
Bush's relentless drive to shift federal funding into these ideological
programs instead of responsible, medically accurate sex education."
To date, studies on the efficacy of abstinence-only sex education have not
shown conclusive proof that such programs work in preventing teen
pregnancy. A widely cited October 2002 study conducted for the
non-ideological National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (NCPTP)
reviewed ten studies said by abstinence-only proponents to show that such
programs reduce sexual activity among youth. The survey found that "there
do not currently exist any abstinence-only programs with strong evidence
that they either delay sex or reduce teen pregnancy."
The NCPTP study's author, Dr. Douglas Kirby, pointed out that "this does
not mean that abstinence-only programs are not effective, nor does it mean
that they are effective." Instead, Kirby concluded that "given the great
diversity of abstinence-only programs combined with very few rigorous
studies of their impact, there is simply too little evidence to know
whether abstinence-only programs delay the initiation of sex."
On the other hand, a previous study by NCPTP found that sex education
programs that "deliver and consistently reinforce a clear message about
abstaining from sexual activity and/or using condoms or other forms of
contraception" and "provide basic, accurate information about the risks of
teen sexual activity and about ways to avoid intercourse or use methods of
protection against pregnancy and STDs" are most effective in decreasing
unprotected sexual activity by delaying sex or increasing contraceptive use.
Nevertheless, according to Cynthia Dailard of the Alan Guttmacher
Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive
health research and public education, there is no federal program that
funds comprehensive sexuality education.
Support for abstinence-only programs, however, has expanded rapidly under
the Bush Administration. Congress has budgeted $167 million for
abstinence-only education in fiscal year 2005 -- more than twice that spent
in FY 2001. The report released by Waxman states that abstinence-only
programs now reach "millions" of children and adolescents.
The United States has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the
industrialized world, much higher than most European countries.
Some believe Europe's success is based on the comprehensive, relatively
progressive sex education curricula taught there. In an interview with
WebMD Medical News, Susheela Singh, director of research at the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, which conducted a study of worldwide teen pregnancy
and abortion rates, attributed reduced rates of teen pregnancy in many
European countries to the acceptance that teens are sexually active and the
provision of condoms, emergency contraception and comprehensive sex
education.
As James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth in Washington, DC,
explained to WebMD: "In Europe, sex is a public health issue, driven by
research. In the US, sex is a political issue driven by controversy."
http://www.rsnz.org/news/date/2004/12/3
Mystics can pocket a million - when pigs can fly
Canadian magician and arch-sceptic James Randi is offering the reward to
any who can prove supernatural powers or a phenomenon beyond the reach
of science
---
I wonder if he will define in advance what standard of proof will be applied.
R
Mystics can pocket a million - when pigs can fly
Canadian magician and arch-sceptic James Randi is offering the reward to
any who can prove supernatural powers or a phenomenon beyond the reach
of science
---
I wonder if he will define in advance what standard of proof will be applied.
R
http://www.thomhartmann.com
Thom Hartmann's Personal and Global Transformation Newsletter
Scalia To Synagogue - Jews Are Safer With Christians In Charge
by Thom Hartmann
Antonin Scalia, the man most likely to be our next Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, turned history on its head recently when he attended an
Orthodox synagogue in New York and claimed that the Founders intended for
their Christianity to play a part in government.
Scalia then went so far as to suggest that the reason Hitler was able to
initiate the Holocaust was because of German separation of church and
state.
The Associated Press reported on November 23, 2004, "In the synagogue that
is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he [Scalia] noted that in
Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word 'God.'"
"Did it turn out that," Scalia asked rhetorically, "by reason of the
separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they
were in the United States of America?" He then answered himself, saying,
"I don't think so."
Scalia has an extraordinary way of not letting facts confound his
arguments, but this time he's gone completely over the top by suggesting
that a separation of church and state facilitated the Holocaust. If his
comments had gotten wider coverage (they were only noted in one small AP
article, and one in the Jerusalem Post), they may have brought America's
largest religious communities - both Christian and Jewish - into the
streets.
Born in 1936, Scalia is old enough to remember the photographs that came
out of Germany when he was a boy - they were all over the newspapers and
news magazines at war's end. It's difficult to believe he wasn't exposed
to them as a teenager, particularly having been raised Catholic. And if he
missed all that, one would think that his son the priest would have told
him about them.
The photos that can be seen, for instance, at
of the Catholic Bishops giving the
collective Nazi salute. The annual April 20th celebration, declared by Pope
Pius XII, of Hitler's birthday. The belt buckles of the German army, which
declared "Gott Mit Uns" ("God is with us"). The pictures of the 1933
investiture of Bishop Ludwig Müller, the official Bishop of the
1000-Years-Of-Peace Nazi Reich.
That last photo should be the most problematic for Scalia, because Hitler
had done exactly what Scalia is recommending - he merged church and state.
Article 1 of the
"Decree
concerning the Constitution of the German Protestant Church, of 14 July
1933," signed by Adolf Hitler himself, merged the German Protestant Church
into the Reich, and gave the Reich the legal authority to ordain priests.
Article Three provides absolute assurance to the new state church that the
Reich will fund it, even if that requires going to Hitler's cabinet. It
opens: "Should the competent agencies of a State Church refuse to include
assessments of the German Protestant Church in their budget, the
appropriate State Government will cause the expenditures to be included in
the budget upon request of the Reich Cabinet."
That new state-sponsored German church's constitution opens: "At a time in
which our German people are experiencing a great historical new era through
the grace of God," the new German state church "federates into a solemn
league all denominations that stem from the Reformation and stand equally
legitimately side by side, and thereby bears witness to: 'One Body and One
Spirit, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One God and Father of All of Us,
who is Above All, and Through All, and In All.'"
Section Four, Article Five of he new constitution further established a
head for the new German state-church with the title of Reich Bishop. Hitler
quickly filled the job with a Lutheran pastor, Ludwig M¸ller, who held the
position until he committed suicide at the end of the war.
Which brings up one of the main reasons - almost always overlooked by
modern-day commentators, both left and right - that the Founders and
Framers were so careful to separate church and state: They didn't want
religion to be corrupted by government.
Many of the Founders were people of faith, and even the Deists like
Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson were deeply touched by what Franklin
called "The Mystery." And they'd seen how badly religious bodies became
corrupted when churches acquired power through affiliation with or
participation in government.
The Puritans, for example, passed a law in Plymouth Colony in 1658 that
said, "No Quaker Rantor or any other such corrupt person shall be a freeman
in this Corporation [the state of Massachusetts]." Puritans banned Quakers
from Massachusetts under pain of death, and, as Norman Cousins notes in his
book about the faith of the Founders, In God We Trust, "And when Quakers
persisted in returning [to Massachusetts] in defiance of law, and in
practicing their religious faith, the Puritans made good the threat of
death; Quaker women were burned at the stake."
Quakers were also officially banned from Virginia prior to the introduction
of the First Amendment to our Constitution. Cousins notes: "Quakers who
fled from England were warned against landing on Virginia shores. In fact,
the captains of sailing ships were put on notice that they would be
severely fined. Any Quaker who was discovered inside the state was fined
without bail."
Throughout most of the 1700s in Virginia, a citizen could be imprisoned for
life for saying that there was no god, or that the Bible wasn't inerrant.
"Little wonder," notes Cousins, "that Virginians like Washington,
Jefferson, and Madison believed the situation to be intolerable."
Even the oppressed Quakers got into the act in the 1700s. They finally
found a haven in Pennsylvania, where they infiltrated government and
promptly passed a law that levied harsh fines on any person who didn't show
up for church on Sunday or couldn't "prove" that s/he was home reading
scripture on that holy day.
Certainly the Founders wanted to protect government from being hijacked by
the religious, as I noted in a
previous article that
quotes Jefferson on this topic. But several of them were even more
concerned that the churches themselves would be corrupted by the lure of
government's easy access to money and power.
Religious leaders in the Founders' day, in defense of church/state
cooperation, pointed out that for centuries kings and queens in England had
said that if the state didn't support the church, the church would
eventually wither and die.
James Madison flatly rejected this argument, noting in a July 10, 1822
letter to Edward Livingston: "We are teaching the world the great truth,
that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The
merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in
greater purity without, than with the aid of Government."
He added in that same letter, "I have no doubt that every new example will
succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and
Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed
together."
Madison even objected to government giving money to churches to care for
the poor. It would be the beginning of a dangerous mixture, he believed -
dangerous both to government and churches alike. Thus, on February 21,
1811, President James Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that
authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the
poor.
In Madison's mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty - a
function of government - and must not be allowed to become a hole through
which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer's
purse. Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a "legal
agency" - a legal precedent - that would break down the wall of separation
the founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from
religious zealots gaining political power.
Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down
the proposed law, "Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an
also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of
poor children of the same;..." which, Madison said, "would be a precedent
for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into
effect a public and civil duty."
Madison also opposed - although he couldn't stop - the appointment of
chaplains for Congress. "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses
of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle
of religious freedom?" he asked in 1820. His answer: "In the strictness the
answer on both points must be in the negative. ...The establishment of the
chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well
as of Constitutional principles."
Madison went on to suggest that if members of Congress wanted a chaplain,
they should pay for it themselves. "If Religion consist in voluntary acts
of individuals, singly, or voluntarily associated, and it be proper that
public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their
religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own
expense. How small a contribution >from each member of Congress would
suffice for the purpose! How just would it be in its principle! How noble
in its exemplary sacrifice to the genius of the Constitution; and the
divine right of conscience! Why should the expense of a religious worship
be allowed for the Legislature, be paid by the public, more than that for
the Ex. or Judiciary branch of the Gov."
But always, in Madison's mind, the biggest problem was that religion itself
showed a long history of becoming corrupt when it had access to the levers
of governmental power and money.
In 1832, he wrote a letter to the Reverend Jasper Adams, pointing this out.
"I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to
trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil
authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on
unessential points. The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other
or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them will be best guarded
against by entire abstinence of the government from interference in any way
whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order and protecting
each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others."
As he wrote to Edward Everett on March 18, 1823, "The settled opinion here
is, that religion is essentially distinct from civil Government, and exempt
from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to
both..."
Yet now, in 2004, the religious appear to be on the verge of both
corrupting government and being corrupted themselves by the power and
influence government can wield.
For example, as Reverend Moon has moved more and more into the political
realm - from funding activities of both George H.W. Bush and his son George
W. Bush, to funding the money-losing but politically activist Washington
Times newspaper, to financially bailing out Jerry Falwell, to setting up
numerous charities that now ask for federal funding - we see an increasing
and ominous participation of legislators and Moonies. Moon, for example,
was crowned by several members of >Congress in the Senate Dirksen Office
building on March 23, 2004. As the Washington Post noted in a July 21 story
by Charles Babington, Moon himself proclaimed to our elected
representatives attending the ceremony, "Emperors, kings and presidents . .
. have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is
none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True
Parent."
Others, like Falwell and Robertson, who want to use the money and power of
government to promote their religious agendas, are making rapid inroads
with George W. Bush's so-called "faith-based initiatives," which shift
money from government programs for the poor and needy to churches and
religious groups.
All of this - the merging of church and state - is now being aggressively
promoted by no less than Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, in
no less shocking a venue than the nation's oldest Orthodox synagogue.
In some distant place, Adolf Hitler and Bishop Müller must be smiling at
Scalia's encouragement of the growing conflation of church and state in
America. It's exactly what they worked so hard to achieve, and what helped
make their horrors possible.
And Thomas Jefferson and James Madison must have tears in their eyes.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily
progressive talk show.
His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal
Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,"
"We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson
Do?: A Return To Democracy."
===========
Scalia in shul: State must back religion
Uriel Heilman, THE JERUSALEM POST
Nov. 23, 2004
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used an appearance at an Orthodox
synagogue in New York to assail the notion that the US government should
maintain a neutral stance toward religion, saying it has always supported
religion and the courts should not try to change that.
Speaking at a conference on religious freedom in America on Monday hosted
by Manhattan's Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation
in North America, Scalia said that the founding fathers never advocated the
separation of church and state and that America has prospered because of
its religiousness.
"There is something wrong with the principle of neutrality," said Scalia,
considered among the court's staunchest conservatives. Neutrality as
envisioned by the founding fathers, Scalia said, "is not neutrality between
religiousness and nonreligiousness; it is between denominations of
religion."
Scalia cited early examples of support of religion in the public sphere by
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, the last of
whom went so far as to argue at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 for
the institution of daily prayers.
Today, Scalia noted, the government exempts houses of worship from
real-estate tax, pays for chaplains in Congress, state legislatures, and
the military, and sanctions the opening of every Supreme Court session with
the cry, "God save the United States!"
"To say that the Constitution allows the court to sweep away that
long-standing attitude toward religion seems to me just wrong," he said. "I
do think we're forgetting our roots."
Scalia's speech, at a conference marking the 350th anniversary both of Jews
in America and of Shearith Israel, elicited a standing ovation.
Scalia was nominated to the nine-member Supreme Court in 1986 by president
Ronald Reagan to fill the seat vacated by William Rehnquist, who became the
chief justice after Warren Berger retired. Now, with speculation that
Rehnquist is on the verge of retirement after a recent diagnosis of thyroid
cancer, Scalia may be the leading candidate to take his place.
It is widely believed that President George W. Bush will appoint a staunch
conservative as chief justice if he gets the chance, and the only other
Supreme Court justice considered sufficiently conservative is Clarence
Thomas, appointed by president George H.W. Bush.
Originally from New York, Scalia wore a black skull cap as he addressed the
congregation with his back to the ark.
"The founding fathers never used the phrase 'separation of church and
state,'" he said, arguing that rigid separation of religion and state ñ as
in Europe, for example - would be bad for America and bad for the Jews.
"Do you think it's going to make Jews safer? It didn't prove that way in
Europe," he said.
"You will not hear the word 'God' cross the lips of a French premier or an
Italian head of state," Scalia said. "But that has never been the American
way."
Most establishment Jewish groups, however, are staunch supporters of
church-state separation. Earlier this month, for example, the American
Jewish Committee was part of a coalition that won a lawsuit to block a
Florida program allowing state aid to go to parochial schools. In 2000,
the Anti-Defamation League led several Jewish groups in criticizing vice
presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Lieberman for talking too much about God
on the campaign trail.
Scalia said expunging religion from public life would be bad for America,
and that the courts, instead, should come around to most Americans' way of
thinking and to the founding fathers' vision for the US. He noted that
after a San Francisco court last year barred the recitation of the Pledge
of Allegiance in public schools because it includes the phrase "under God,"
Congress voted nearly unanimously to condemn the decision and uphold use of
the phrase.
"I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions," he said.
If America's approach toward religion does change, it should be through
democratic process, not "judicial fiat." America believes in "a personal
God who takes an interest in the affairs of man," Scalia said. Quoting a
line from Psalms that says the faithful will surely prosper, he added, "I
think it is no accident that America has prospered."
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=110
1183314944&p=1078113566627
Thom Hartmann's Personal and Global Transformation Newsletter
Scalia To Synagogue - Jews Are Safer With Christians In Charge
by Thom Hartmann
Antonin Scalia, the man most likely to be our next Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, turned history on its head recently when he attended an
Orthodox synagogue in New York and claimed that the Founders intended for
their Christianity to play a part in government.
Scalia then went so far as to suggest that the reason Hitler was able to
initiate the Holocaust was because of German separation of church and
state.
The Associated Press reported on November 23, 2004, "In the synagogue that
is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he [Scalia] noted that in
Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word 'God.'"
"Did it turn out that," Scalia asked rhetorically, "by reason of the
separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they
were in the United States of America?" He then answered himself, saying,
"I don't think so."
Scalia has an extraordinary way of not letting facts confound his
arguments, but this time he's gone completely over the top by suggesting
that a separation of church and state facilitated the Holocaust. If his
comments had gotten wider coverage (they were only noted in one small AP
article, and one in the Jerusalem Post), they may have brought America's
largest religious communities - both Christian and Jewish - into the
streets.
Born in 1936, Scalia is old enough to remember the photographs that came
out of Germany when he was a boy - they were all over the newspapers and
news magazines at war's end. It's difficult to believe he wasn't exposed
to them as a teenager, particularly having been raised Catholic. And if he
missed all that, one would think that his son the priest would have told
him about them.
The photos that can be seen, for instance, at
collective Nazi salute. The annual April 20th celebration, declared by Pope
Pius XII, of Hitler's birthday. The belt buckles of the German army, which
declared "Gott Mit Uns" ("God is with us"). The pictures of the 1933
investiture of Bishop Ludwig Müller, the official Bishop of the
1000-Years-Of-Peace Nazi Reich.
That last photo should be the most problematic for Scalia, because Hitler
had done exactly what Scalia is recommending - he merged church and state.
Article 1 of the
concerning the Constitution of the German Protestant Church, of 14 July
1933," signed by Adolf Hitler himself, merged the German Protestant Church
into the Reich, and gave the Reich the legal authority to ordain priests.
Article Three provides absolute assurance to the new state church that the
Reich will fund it, even if that requires going to Hitler's cabinet. It
opens: "Should the competent agencies of a State Church refuse to include
assessments of the German Protestant Church in their budget, the
appropriate State Government will cause the expenditures to be included in
the budget upon request of the Reich Cabinet."
That new state-sponsored German church's constitution opens: "At a time in
which our German people are experiencing a great historical new era through
the grace of God," the new German state church "federates into a solemn
league all denominations that stem from the Reformation and stand equally
legitimately side by side, and thereby bears witness to: 'One Body and One
Spirit, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One God and Father of All of Us,
who is Above All, and Through All, and In All.'"
Section Four, Article Five of he new constitution further established a
head for the new German state-church with the title of Reich Bishop. Hitler
quickly filled the job with a Lutheran pastor, Ludwig M¸ller, who held the
position until he committed suicide at the end of the war.
Which brings up one of the main reasons - almost always overlooked by
modern-day commentators, both left and right - that the Founders and
Framers were so careful to separate church and state: They didn't want
religion to be corrupted by government.
Many of the Founders were people of faith, and even the Deists like
Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson were deeply touched by what Franklin
called "The Mystery." And they'd seen how badly religious bodies became
corrupted when churches acquired power through affiliation with or
participation in government.
The Puritans, for example, passed a law in Plymouth Colony in 1658 that
said, "No Quaker Rantor or any other such corrupt person shall be a freeman
in this Corporation [the state of Massachusetts]." Puritans banned Quakers
from Massachusetts under pain of death, and, as Norman Cousins notes in his
book about the faith of the Founders, In God We Trust, "And when Quakers
persisted in returning [to Massachusetts] in defiance of law, and in
practicing their religious faith, the Puritans made good the threat of
death; Quaker women were burned at the stake."
Quakers were also officially banned from Virginia prior to the introduction
of the First Amendment to our Constitution. Cousins notes: "Quakers who
fled from England were warned against landing on Virginia shores. In fact,
the captains of sailing ships were put on notice that they would be
severely fined. Any Quaker who was discovered inside the state was fined
without bail."
Throughout most of the 1700s in Virginia, a citizen could be imprisoned for
life for saying that there was no god, or that the Bible wasn't inerrant.
"Little wonder," notes Cousins, "that Virginians like Washington,
Jefferson, and Madison believed the situation to be intolerable."
Even the oppressed Quakers got into the act in the 1700s. They finally
found a haven in Pennsylvania, where they infiltrated government and
promptly passed a law that levied harsh fines on any person who didn't show
up for church on Sunday or couldn't "prove" that s/he was home reading
scripture on that holy day.
Certainly the Founders wanted to protect government from being hijacked by
the religious, as I noted in a
quotes Jefferson on this topic. But several of them were even more
concerned that the churches themselves would be corrupted by the lure of
government's easy access to money and power.
Religious leaders in the Founders' day, in defense of church/state
cooperation, pointed out that for centuries kings and queens in England had
said that if the state didn't support the church, the church would
eventually wither and die.
James Madison flatly rejected this argument, noting in a July 10, 1822
letter to Edward Livingston: "We are teaching the world the great truth,
that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The
merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in
greater purity without, than with the aid of Government."
He added in that same letter, "I have no doubt that every new example will
succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and
Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed
together."
Madison even objected to government giving money to churches to care for
the poor. It would be the beginning of a dangerous mixture, he believed -
dangerous both to government and churches alike. Thus, on February 21,
1811, President James Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that
authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the
poor.
In Madison's mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty - a
function of government - and must not be allowed to become a hole through
which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer's
purse. Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a "legal
agency" - a legal precedent - that would break down the wall of separation
the founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from
religious zealots gaining political power.
Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down
the proposed law, "Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an
also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of
poor children of the same;..." which, Madison said, "would be a precedent
for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into
effect a public and civil duty."
Madison also opposed - although he couldn't stop - the appointment of
chaplains for Congress. "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses
of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle
of religious freedom?" he asked in 1820. His answer: "In the strictness the
answer on both points must be in the negative. ...The establishment of the
chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well
as of Constitutional principles."
Madison went on to suggest that if members of Congress wanted a chaplain,
they should pay for it themselves. "If Religion consist in voluntary acts
of individuals, singly, or voluntarily associated, and it be proper that
public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their
religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own
expense. How small a contribution >from each member of Congress would
suffice for the purpose! How just would it be in its principle! How noble
in its exemplary sacrifice to the genius of the Constitution; and the
divine right of conscience! Why should the expense of a religious worship
be allowed for the Legislature, be paid by the public, more than that for
the Ex. or Judiciary branch of the Gov."
But always, in Madison's mind, the biggest problem was that religion itself
showed a long history of becoming corrupt when it had access to the levers
of governmental power and money.
In 1832, he wrote a letter to the Reverend Jasper Adams, pointing this out.
"I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to
trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil
authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on
unessential points. The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other
or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them will be best guarded
against by entire abstinence of the government from interference in any way
whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order and protecting
each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others."
As he wrote to Edward Everett on March 18, 1823, "The settled opinion here
is, that religion is essentially distinct from civil Government, and exempt
from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to
both..."
Yet now, in 2004, the religious appear to be on the verge of both
corrupting government and being corrupted themselves by the power and
influence government can wield.
For example, as Reverend Moon has moved more and more into the political
realm - from funding activities of both George H.W. Bush and his son George
W. Bush, to funding the money-losing but politically activist Washington
Times newspaper, to financially bailing out Jerry Falwell, to setting up
numerous charities that now ask for federal funding - we see an increasing
and ominous participation of legislators and Moonies. Moon, for example,
was crowned by several members of >Congress in the Senate Dirksen Office
building on March 23, 2004. As the Washington Post noted in a July 21 story
by Charles Babington, Moon himself proclaimed to our elected
representatives attending the ceremony, "Emperors, kings and presidents . .
. have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is
none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True
Parent."
Others, like Falwell and Robertson, who want to use the money and power of
government to promote their religious agendas, are making rapid inroads
with George W. Bush's so-called "faith-based initiatives," which shift
money from government programs for the poor and needy to churches and
religious groups.
All of this - the merging of church and state - is now being aggressively
promoted by no less than Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, in
no less shocking a venue than the nation's oldest Orthodox synagogue.
In some distant place, Adolf Hitler and Bishop Müller must be smiling at
Scalia's encouragement of the growing conflation of church and state in
America. It's exactly what they worked so hard to achieve, and what helped
make their horrors possible.
And Thomas Jefferson and James Madison must have tears in their eyes.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily
progressive talk show.
His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal
Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,"
"We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson
Do?: A Return To Democracy."
===========
Scalia in shul: State must back religion
Uriel Heilman, THE JERUSALEM POST
Nov. 23, 2004
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used an appearance at an Orthodox
synagogue in New York to assail the notion that the US government should
maintain a neutral stance toward religion, saying it has always supported
religion and the courts should not try to change that.
Speaking at a conference on religious freedom in America on Monday hosted
by Manhattan's Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation
in North America, Scalia said that the founding fathers never advocated the
separation of church and state and that America has prospered because of
its religiousness.
"There is something wrong with the principle of neutrality," said Scalia,
considered among the court's staunchest conservatives. Neutrality as
envisioned by the founding fathers, Scalia said, "is not neutrality between
religiousness and nonreligiousness; it is between denominations of
religion."
Scalia cited early examples of support of religion in the public sphere by
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, the last of
whom went so far as to argue at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 for
the institution of daily prayers.
Today, Scalia noted, the government exempts houses of worship from
real-estate tax, pays for chaplains in Congress, state legislatures, and
the military, and sanctions the opening of every Supreme Court session with
the cry, "God save the United States!"
"To say that the Constitution allows the court to sweep away that
long-standing attitude toward religion seems to me just wrong," he said. "I
do think we're forgetting our roots."
Scalia's speech, at a conference marking the 350th anniversary both of Jews
in America and of Shearith Israel, elicited a standing ovation.
Scalia was nominated to the nine-member Supreme Court in 1986 by president
Ronald Reagan to fill the seat vacated by William Rehnquist, who became the
chief justice after Warren Berger retired. Now, with speculation that
Rehnquist is on the verge of retirement after a recent diagnosis of thyroid
cancer, Scalia may be the leading candidate to take his place.
It is widely believed that President George W. Bush will appoint a staunch
conservative as chief justice if he gets the chance, and the only other
Supreme Court justice considered sufficiently conservative is Clarence
Thomas, appointed by president George H.W. Bush.
Originally from New York, Scalia wore a black skull cap as he addressed the
congregation with his back to the ark.
"The founding fathers never used the phrase 'separation of church and
state,'" he said, arguing that rigid separation of religion and state ñ as
in Europe, for example - would be bad for America and bad for the Jews.
"Do you think it's going to make Jews safer? It didn't prove that way in
Europe," he said.
"You will not hear the word 'God' cross the lips of a French premier or an
Italian head of state," Scalia said. "But that has never been the American
way."
Most establishment Jewish groups, however, are staunch supporters of
church-state separation. Earlier this month, for example, the American
Jewish Committee was part of a coalition that won a lawsuit to block a
Florida program allowing state aid to go to parochial schools. In 2000,
the Anti-Defamation League led several Jewish groups in criticizing vice
presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Lieberman for talking too much about God
on the campaign trail.
Scalia said expunging religion from public life would be bad for America,
and that the courts, instead, should come around to most Americans' way of
thinking and to the founding fathers' vision for the US. He noted that
after a San Francisco court last year barred the recitation of the Pledge
of Allegiance in public schools because it includes the phrase "under God,"
Congress voted nearly unanimously to condemn the decision and uphold use of
the phrase.
"I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions," he said.
If America's approach toward religion does change, it should be through
democratic process, not "judicial fiat." America believes in "a personal
God who takes an interest in the affairs of man," Scalia said. Quoting a
line from Psalms that says the faithful will surely prosper, he added, "I
think it is no accident that America has prospered."
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=110
1183314944&p=1078113566627
Anti-evolution teachings gain foothold in U.S. schools [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 05:38:59 PM
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/30/MNGVNA3PE11.DTL
Anti-evolution teachings gain foothold in U.S. schools
Evangelicals see flaws in Darwinism
- Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Dover, Pa. -- The way they used to teach the origin of the species to high
school students in this sleepy town of 1,800 people in southern
Pennsylvania, said local school board member Angie Yingling disapprovingly,
was that "we come from chimpanzees and apes."
Not anymore.
The school board has ordered that biology teachers at Dover Area High
School make students "aware of gaps/problems" in the theory of evolution.
Their ninth-grade curriculum now must include the theory of "intelligent
design," which posits that life is so complex and elaborate that some
greater wisdom has to be behind it.
The decision, passed last month by a 6-to-3 vote, makes the 3,600-student
school district about 20 miles south of Harrisburg the first in the United
States to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools,
putting it on the front line of the growing national debate over the role
of religion in public life.
The new curriculum, which prompted two school board members to resign, is
expected to take effect in January. The school principal, Joel Riedel, and
teachers contacted by The Chronicle refused to comment on the changes.
The idea of intelligent design was initiated by a small group of
scientists to explain what they believe to be gaps in Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution, which they say is "not adequate to explain all natural
phenomena. "
On an intelligent-design Web site (www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org), the
theory is described as "a scientific disagreement with the claim of
evolutionary theory that natural phenomena are not designed.''
Critics such as Eugenie Scott, director of the Oakland-based National
Center for Science Education, say the Dover school board's decision is part
of a growing trend. Religious conservatives, critics say, have been waging
a war against Darwin in classrooms since the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was convicted of illegally teaching
evolution, but his conviction later was thrown out on a technicality by the
Tennessee Supreme Court.
"There's a constant impetus by conservative evangelical Christians to
bring religion back into the public schools," said Witold Walczak, legal
director of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The end goal is to get rid of evolution. They view it as a threat to their
religion."
The intelligent-design theory makes no reference to the Bible, and its
proponents do not say who or what the greater force is behind the design.
But Yingling, 46, who graduated from Dover High School in 1976, and other
supporters of the new curriculum in this religiously conservative slice of
rural Pennsylvania say they know exactly who the intelligent designer is.
"There's only one creator, and it has to be God," said Rebecca Cashman,
16, a sophomore at Dover High. She frowned when asked to recollect what
she learned about evolution at school last year.
"Evolution -- is that the Darwin theory?" Cashman shook her head. "I
don't know just what he was thinking!"
Patricia Nason at the Institute for Creation Research, the world leader in
creation science, said her organization and other activist groups are
encouraging people who share conservative religious beliefs to seek
positions on local school boards.
"The movement is to get the truth out," Nason said by telephone from El
Cajon (San Diego County). "We Christians have as much right to be involved
in politics as evolutionists. We've been asleep for two generations, and
it's time for us to come back."
Emboldened by their contribution to President Bush's re-election,
conservative religious activists are using intelligent design as a new
strategy of attacking evolution without mentioning God, Scott said.
"There is a new energy as a result of the last election, and I anticipate
an even busier couple of years coming on," Scott said.
She called intelligent design "creationism lite" masquerading as science.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 banned the teaching of creationism -- which
holds that God created the world about 6,000 years ago -- in public schools
on the grounds of separation of church and state.
John West of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main sponsor and
promoter of intelligent design, defended the theory he says addresses
"evolution follies."
"Mainstream criticism should be raised in classrooms," West said.
The Dover school district's challenge to the primacy of evolution is not
isolated. In Cobb County, Ga., parents sued a local school board for
mandating that biology textbooks prominently display disclaimers stating
that evolution is "not a fact." A federal court is expected to rule next
month.
In Grantsburg, Wis., a school board revised its science curriculum to
teach "various scientific models of theories of origin." In Charles County,
Md. , the school board is considering a proposal to eliminate textbooks
"biased toward evolution" from classrooms. Similar proposals have been
considered this year in Missouri, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
"There is nothing random about this," said Barry Lynn, executive director
of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "You might say
it's a planned evolution of an attack on the science of evolution."
The drive to bring more religion and what have been labeled "moral values"
into the classroom goes beyond challenges to Darwin's theory, Scott said.
The Charles County school board also proposed to censor school reading
lists of "immorality" or "foul language" and to allow the distribution of
Bibles in schools. In Texas, the nation's second-biggest school textbook
market, the State Board of Education approved health textbooks that defined
abstinence as the only form of contraception and changed the description of
marriage between "two people" to "a lifelong union between a husband and a
wife."
"The religious right has a list of topics that it wants action on," Scott
said. "Things like abortion, abstinence, gays are higher up in the food
chain of their concern, but evolution is part of the package."
This drive has found fertile ground in this part of Pennsylvania, where
billboards reading, "Many books inform but only the Bible transforms" line
the road, and family restaurants offer free booklets titled "What the Bible
says about moral purity" and "The Bible is God's word" at the door.
"These brochures give you an idea where some people in this community are
coming from," said Jeff Brown, 54, who, along with his wife Carol, 57,
resigned from the school board after they voted against changing the
biology curriculum.
Yingling, who voted in favor, said she believes God created the world in
six days and doesn't believe in evolution "at all." Another board member
who supported the measure, William Buckingham, refused to say what he
believes but has identified himself as a born-again Christian.
But religious beliefs or motivations should be beside the point, said
Richard Thompson, an attorney who represents the board members. Thompson is
the president of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., a pro-bono
firm whose Web site promises "the sword and shield for the people of faith."
The decision was "supportive of academic freedom more than anything
else," Thompson said.
While not talking about his own religious convictions, Thompson added,
"When you look at cell structure and you see the intricacy of the cell, you
can come to the conclusion that it doesn't happen by natural selection,
there has to be intelligent design." Thompson said he is ready to represent
the board in the Supreme Court if it comes to that. Some parents and
teachers in Dover already have asked the Pennsylvania ACLU to sue the board
on their behalf. Walczak said the organization's legal team is studying the
case before deciding whether to go to court.
Brown, the former school board member, says he is not arguing with other
people's religious beliefs.
"Don't get me wrong: I don't have a problem with having these booklets
where people can pick them up. But I do have a problem with people shoving
this down the throats of our children on taxpayers' dollars," Brown said.
"I happen to believe both in God and evolution," he said, and his wife
nodded: "Hear, hear."
The Browns appear to be in the minority. Although public schools have been
teaching evolution for decades, a national Gallup poll in November 2004
showed that only 35 percent of those asked believed confidently that
Darwin's theory was "supported by the evidence.'' More than one-third of
those polled by CBS News later in November said creationism should be
taught instead of evolution.
"A guy came up to me and said, 'Wait a minute, you believe in God and
evolution at the same time? Evolution isn't in the Bible!' " said Brown,
nibbling on a deep-fried mozzarella stick at the Shiloh Family Restaurant
on Route 74. As he became more agitated, his voice grew louder, and other
customers -- mostly gray-haired women and elderly men in baseball hats --
turned their heads to look at the couple. Carol Brown kept putting her
index finger to her lips, gesturing for her husband to be quieter.
After the Browns left the restaurant, a waitress in her 30s slipped a note
to a Chronicle reporter.
"Beware," it read. "God wrote over 2,000 years ago that there would be
false prophets and teachers. If you would like to know the truth read the
Bible."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent actions in the teaching of evolution
Tennessee, April 2003: Blount County's Board of Education votes not to
adopt three high school biology textbooks because they do not present
creationism alongside evolution.
California, September 2003: The Board of Trustees of the Roseville Joint
Union High School District (Placerville County) decide not to enact a
district- wide policy on teaching evolution. Science teachers have told the
district that they do not want to add anti-evolutionist materials that are
not state- approved.
Oklahoma, April 2004: Textbook legislation passes after it is stripped of
a provision that all textbooks include a disclaimer describing evolution as
"a controversial theory which some scientists present as scientific
explanation for the origin of living things" and "the unproven belief that
random, undirected forces produced a world of living things."
Pennsylvania, October 2004: A Dover, Pa., school board votes to include
intelligent design in the district's science curriculum, making it the
first such school district in the country.
Georgia, November 2004: A lawsuit is filed against the Cobb County School
District over this disclaimer inserted into textbooks: "This textbook
contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact,
regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached
with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Source: National Center for Science Education; Chronicle research
------------------------------------------------------------------------
National polls on the issue
In your opinion, is Darwin's theory supported by evidence?
Supported by evidence, 35%
Not supported, 35%
Don't know enough to say, 29%
Which best describes your views of the origin of life?
Man developed with God guiding, 38%
Man developed with no help from God, 13%
God created man in present form, 45%
Source: Gallup Poll, conducted Nov. 7-10. The poll surveyed 1,016 adults;
the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Percentage favoring the teaching of creationism instead of evolution
Overall, 37%
Kerry voters, 24%
Bush voters, 45%
Self-described evangelical Christians, 60%
Source: CBS News poll, conducted Nov. 18-21. The poll surveyed 795
registered voters nationwide; the margin of error is plus or minus 3
percentage points.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent actions in the teaching of evolution
Tennessee, April 2003: Blount County's Board of Education votes not to
adopt three high school biology textbooks because they do not present
creationism alongside evolution..
California, September 2003: The Board of Trustees of the Roseville Joint
Union High School District Placerville County) decide not to enact a
district- wide policy on teaching evolution. Science teachers have told
the district that they do not want to add anti-evolutionist materials that
are not state approved..
Oklahoma, April 2004: Textbook legislation passes after it is stripped of
a provision that all textbooks include a disclaimer describing evolution as
"a controversial theory which some scientists present as scientific
explanation for the origin of living things"and "the unproven belief that
random, undirected forces produced a world of living things.".
Pennsylvania, October 2004: A Dover, Pa., school board votes to include
intelligent design in the district's science curriculum, making it the
first such school district in the country..
Georgia, November 2004: A lawsuit is filed against the Cobb County School
District over this disclaimer inserted into textbooks: "This textbook
contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact,
regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached
with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Source: National Center for Science Education; Chronicle research
E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.
Anti-evolution teachings gain foothold in U.S. schools
Evangelicals see flaws in Darwinism
- Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Dover, Pa. -- The way they used to teach the origin of the species to high
school students in this sleepy town of 1,800 people in southern
Pennsylvania, said local school board member Angie Yingling disapprovingly,
was that "we come from chimpanzees and apes."
Not anymore.
The school board has ordered that biology teachers at Dover Area High
School make students "aware of gaps/problems" in the theory of evolution.
Their ninth-grade curriculum now must include the theory of "intelligent
design," which posits that life is so complex and elaborate that some
greater wisdom has to be behind it.
The decision, passed last month by a 6-to-3 vote, makes the 3,600-student
school district about 20 miles south of Harrisburg the first in the United
States to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools,
putting it on the front line of the growing national debate over the role
of religion in public life.
The new curriculum, which prompted two school board members to resign, is
expected to take effect in January. The school principal, Joel Riedel, and
teachers contacted by The Chronicle refused to comment on the changes.
The idea of intelligent design was initiated by a small group of
scientists to explain what they believe to be gaps in Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution, which they say is "not adequate to explain all natural
phenomena. "
On an intelligent-design Web site (www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org), the
theory is described as "a scientific disagreement with the claim of
evolutionary theory that natural phenomena are not designed.''
Critics such as Eugenie Scott, director of the Oakland-based National
Center for Science Education, say the Dover school board's decision is part
of a growing trend. Religious conservatives, critics say, have been waging
a war against Darwin in classrooms since the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was convicted of illegally teaching
evolution, but his conviction later was thrown out on a technicality by the
Tennessee Supreme Court.
"There's a constant impetus by conservative evangelical Christians to
bring religion back into the public schools," said Witold Walczak, legal
director of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The end goal is to get rid of evolution. They view it as a threat to their
religion."
The intelligent-design theory makes no reference to the Bible, and its
proponents do not say who or what the greater force is behind the design.
But Yingling, 46, who graduated from Dover High School in 1976, and other
supporters of the new curriculum in this religiously conservative slice of
rural Pennsylvania say they know exactly who the intelligent designer is.
"There's only one creator, and it has to be God," said Rebecca Cashman,
16, a sophomore at Dover High. She frowned when asked to recollect what
she learned about evolution at school last year.
"Evolution -- is that the Darwin theory?" Cashman shook her head. "I
don't know just what he was thinking!"
Patricia Nason at the Institute for Creation Research, the world leader in
creation science, said her organization and other activist groups are
encouraging people who share conservative religious beliefs to seek
positions on local school boards.
"The movement is to get the truth out," Nason said by telephone from El
Cajon (San Diego County). "We Christians have as much right to be involved
in politics as evolutionists. We've been asleep for two generations, and
it's time for us to come back."
Emboldened by their contribution to President Bush's re-election,
conservative religious activists are using intelligent design as a new
strategy of attacking evolution without mentioning God, Scott said.
"There is a new energy as a result of the last election, and I anticipate
an even busier couple of years coming on," Scott said.
She called intelligent design "creationism lite" masquerading as science.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 banned the teaching of creationism -- which
holds that God created the world about 6,000 years ago -- in public schools
on the grounds of separation of church and state.
John West of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main sponsor and
promoter of intelligent design, defended the theory he says addresses
"evolution follies."
"Mainstream criticism should be raised in classrooms," West said.
The Dover school district's challenge to the primacy of evolution is not
isolated. In Cobb County, Ga., parents sued a local school board for
mandating that biology textbooks prominently display disclaimers stating
that evolution is "not a fact." A federal court is expected to rule next
month.
In Grantsburg, Wis., a school board revised its science curriculum to
teach "various scientific models of theories of origin." In Charles County,
Md. , the school board is considering a proposal to eliminate textbooks
"biased toward evolution" from classrooms. Similar proposals have been
considered this year in Missouri, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
"There is nothing random about this," said Barry Lynn, executive director
of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "You might say
it's a planned evolution of an attack on the science of evolution."
The drive to bring more religion and what have been labeled "moral values"
into the classroom goes beyond challenges to Darwin's theory, Scott said.
The Charles County school board also proposed to censor school reading
lists of "immorality" or "foul language" and to allow the distribution of
Bibles in schools. In Texas, the nation's second-biggest school textbook
market, the State Board of Education approved health textbooks that defined
abstinence as the only form of contraception and changed the description of
marriage between "two people" to "a lifelong union between a husband and a
wife."
"The religious right has a list of topics that it wants action on," Scott
said. "Things like abortion, abstinence, gays are higher up in the food
chain of their concern, but evolution is part of the package."
This drive has found fertile ground in this part of Pennsylvania, where
billboards reading, "Many books inform but only the Bible transforms" line
the road, and family restaurants offer free booklets titled "What the Bible
says about moral purity" and "The Bible is God's word" at the door.
"These brochures give you an idea where some people in this community are
coming from," said Jeff Brown, 54, who, along with his wife Carol, 57,
resigned from the school board after they voted against changing the
biology curriculum.
Yingling, who voted in favor, said she believes God created the world in
six days and doesn't believe in evolution "at all." Another board member
who supported the measure, William Buckingham, refused to say what he
believes but has identified himself as a born-again Christian.
But religious beliefs or motivations should be beside the point, said
Richard Thompson, an attorney who represents the board members. Thompson is
the president of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., a pro-bono
firm whose Web site promises "the sword and shield for the people of faith."
The decision was "supportive of academic freedom more than anything
else," Thompson said.
While not talking about his own religious convictions, Thompson added,
"When you look at cell structure and you see the intricacy of the cell, you
can come to the conclusion that it doesn't happen by natural selection,
there has to be intelligent design." Thompson said he is ready to represent
the board in the Supreme Court if it comes to that. Some parents and
teachers in Dover already have asked the Pennsylvania ACLU to sue the board
on their behalf. Walczak said the organization's legal team is studying the
case before deciding whether to go to court.
Brown, the former school board member, says he is not arguing with other
people's religious beliefs.
"Don't get me wrong: I don't have a problem with having these booklets
where people can pick them up. But I do have a problem with people shoving
this down the throats of our children on taxpayers' dollars," Brown said.
"I happen to believe both in God and evolution," he said, and his wife
nodded: "Hear, hear."
The Browns appear to be in the minority. Although public schools have been
teaching evolution for decades, a national Gallup poll in November 2004
showed that only 35 percent of those asked believed confidently that
Darwin's theory was "supported by the evidence.'' More than one-third of
those polled by CBS News later in November said creationism should be
taught instead of evolution.
"A guy came up to me and said, 'Wait a minute, you believe in God and
evolution at the same time? Evolution isn't in the Bible!' " said Brown,
nibbling on a deep-fried mozzarella stick at the Shiloh Family Restaurant
on Route 74. As he became more agitated, his voice grew louder, and other
customers -- mostly gray-haired women and elderly men in baseball hats --
turned their heads to look at the couple. Carol Brown kept putting her
index finger to her lips, gesturing for her husband to be quieter.
After the Browns left the restaurant, a waitress in her 30s slipped a note
to a Chronicle reporter.
"Beware," it read. "God wrote over 2,000 years ago that there would be
false prophets and teachers. If you would like to know the truth read the
Bible."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent actions in the teaching of evolution
Tennessee, April 2003: Blount County's Board of Education votes not to
adopt three high school biology textbooks because they do not present
creationism alongside evolution.
California, September 2003: The Board of Trustees of the Roseville Joint
Union High School District (Placerville County) decide not to enact a
district- wide policy on teaching evolution. Science teachers have told the
district that they do not want to add anti-evolutionist materials that are
not state- approved.
Oklahoma, April 2004: Textbook legislation passes after it is stripped of
a provision that all textbooks include a disclaimer describing evolution as
"a controversial theory which some scientists present as scientific
explanation for the origin of living things" and "the unproven belief that
random, undirected forces produced a world of living things."
Pennsylvania, October 2004: A Dover, Pa., school board votes to include
intelligent design in the district's science curriculum, making it the
first such school district in the country.
Georgia, November 2004: A lawsuit is filed against the Cobb County School
District over this disclaimer inserted into textbooks: "This textbook
contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact,
regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached
with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Source: National Center for Science Education; Chronicle research
------------------------------------------------------------------------
National polls on the issue
In your opinion, is Darwin's theory supported by evidence?
Supported by evidence, 35%
Not supported, 35%
Don't know enough to say, 29%
Which best describes your views of the origin of life?
Man developed with God guiding, 38%
Man developed with no help from God, 13%
God created man in present form, 45%
Source: Gallup Poll, conducted Nov. 7-10. The poll surveyed 1,016 adults;
the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Percentage favoring the teaching of creationism instead of evolution
Overall, 37%
Kerry voters, 24%
Bush voters, 45%
Self-described evangelical Christians, 60%
Source: CBS News poll, conducted Nov. 18-21. The poll surveyed 795
registered voters nationwide; the margin of error is plus or minus 3
percentage points.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent actions in the teaching of evolution
Tennessee, April 2003: Blount County's Board of Education votes not to
adopt three high school biology textbooks because they do not present
creationism alongside evolution..
California, September 2003: The Board of Trustees of the Roseville Joint
Union High School District Placerville County) decide not to enact a
district- wide policy on teaching evolution. Science teachers have told
the district that they do not want to add anti-evolutionist materials that
are not state approved..
Oklahoma, April 2004: Textbook legislation passes after it is stripped of
a provision that all textbooks include a disclaimer describing evolution as
"a controversial theory which some scientists present as scientific
explanation for the origin of living things"and "the unproven belief that
random, undirected forces produced a world of living things.".
Pennsylvania, October 2004: A Dover, Pa., school board votes to include
intelligent design in the district's science curriculum, making it the
first such school district in the country..
Georgia, November 2004: A lawsuit is filed against the Cobb County School
District over this disclaimer inserted into textbooks: "This textbook
contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact,
regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached
with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Source: National Center for Science Education; Chronicle research
E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.
11/28/04
>http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/147/22.0.html
>Were the Darwinists Wrong?
>National Geographic stacks the deck.
>Thomas Woodward is author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent
>Design
I indicate just my main reservations on this article.
> I - a speaker and writer on the
>debate between Darwinism and intelligent design theory
The main debate, in the total scholarly picture, is between
Darwinism and theistic evolution. IDT is very recent, coyly narrow, and
not a great contribution - largely OK as far as it goes, but ignoring
most of what has been previously contributed. To make out that IDT is the
main intellectual response to (neo)Darwinism is ludicrously biased. Prof
Nield discusses it in the attached article.
>If we imagine the "clash of two theories" - the older notion of "separate
>creations" by a supremely wise designer, versus Darwin's "common ancestry"
>of all life, driven by natural selection - it appears here that the younger
>system has utterly crushed the older.
This appearance is very deceptive. It has been pointed out all
along that natural selection can only *narrow* the variance; it has little
potential for creativity. In materialistic neoDarwinist theory, then, the
creativity must come from mutation. Since this process is regularly
labelled as random, the coherence within & between organisms is not
logically explained by neoDarwinism.
> throughout the article,
>small-scale or modest "variations" in animals are treated blithely as
>evidence for the origin of new organs or body structures - what biologists
>call "macroevolution."
>Most significantly, there is no hint that intelligent, well-informed
>dissent exists anywhere in the university world.
I agree with that complaint. But what does this IDTer point to as
opponents 'in the university world' of materialism?
>most tellingly: Why not reveal the widespread questioning of the
>creative power of natural selection - a foundational problem now widely
>admitted even among evolutionary researchers?
This question can be almost as cogently thrown at the IDTers, who
black out most of the scholarly depth as if their own novel minor ideas are
the most important.
>In a nutshell: How can an article of this importance completely ignore the
>scholarly labors of a mushrooming network of scientists at leading
>universities who have held important university-based symposia, and
>published over fifty books in the last decade?
More to the point: why does Woodward ignore the mainstream scholars
of real standing - Wm Temple, Sir Alister Hardy, John Morton, Neil Broom,
etc?
He wishes to imply that IDT is the main answer to materialist
neoDarwinists. This is not an accurate picture. IDT operates as a front
for Creationism®, aligned with that fanatical sect in evading the evidence
that evolution has occurred. IDT is inherently weak in that it relies on
'God of the gaps' reasoning: nobody has yet imagined how the bacterial
flagellum could have evolved by neoDarwinian gradualism, so a designer(s)
must be inferred. It's OK as far as it goes, but insists on staying stuck
there as if Dawkins has to admit this point before the discussion can move
on.
> PBS stations across the US
>have aired the pro-ID documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
This highly polished expensive propaganda for the narrow tendency
'IDT' is generally good but fails to mention that what is at issue is how,
not whether, evolution has occurred.
>Paul identified the downward spiral in Romans chapter one as one where men
>deified dumb nature, imbuing it with powers and spiritual significance that
>can never be justified.
well put
> The Christian, aware of this pitfall, and armed
>with the best arguments and evidence on both sides of the issue, can
>systematically compare and evaluate evolutionary theory and intelligent
>design theory.
This is cheeky, and seriously misleading. It appears to
counterpose IDT against 'evolutionary theory'. But the latter includes
both the greatest intellectual con trick - neoDarwinism, propounded
particularly crudely by Natl Geog - and the theistic evolution theory
which is actually the mainstream scholarship in this field, blacked out by
the obdurate narrowness of IDT.
> For the philosophical naturalist
This is an inferior term. Far more widely understood is the
synonym 'materalist'. The term 'naturalist' has another meaning, so why go
for this ambiguity? I fear it's a mark of one who is not fully trying to
clarify ideas.
>, "nature is all there is."
What more there is, Dembski & Behe scarcely begin to discuss.
Prof Nield's other attached article shows that J Wells, the most
obvious link between those two most visible IDTers and "creationism", is
not on the level.
R
Is Intelligent Design Theory the Way Forward?
Donald Nield
(Except for editorial changes, this document is as published in Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Volume 9, Issue 2, May 2001, 8-13.)
Introduction
There is increasing recognition that the position of the "creation scientists" in their battle against "materialistic evolutionists" is untenable1,2. In recent years an alternative approach called "intelligent design theory" has been proposed, and this is the topic of the present article.
The modern Intelligent Design (ID) movement was to a large extent sparked off by the publication in 1985 of the book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by the Australian medical geneticist Michael Denton, who now works at the University of Otago. Today the leading lights are Phillip Johnson (lawyer), Michael Behe (biochemist) and William Dembski (mathematician). Robert Pennock3 lists a couple of dozen other people who are also associated with the movement, and it is noteworthy that virtually all are U.S. Americans (Hugh Ross, a Canadian, is an exception). Several of those named have contributed to a proceedings of a Mere Christianity conference4. Philosophers are represented in the movement by William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, Paul Nelson and Stephen C. Meyer. A person of particular interest is Jonathan Wells, of the Unification Church, who has publicly stated that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism, and to that end has collected two PhD's, one in Theology from Yale and the other in Biology from U.C. Berkeley.
Together with Nelson and Meyer, Wells now works at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which was founded in 1996. According to its web site (www.crsc.org) the CRSC "strives to replace materialism and its destructive cultural legacies with a positive alternative. The Center seeks to develop a robust science for the twenty-first century, illuminated by an empirically fruitful Theory of Intelligent Design … [namely] a scientific research program that seeks to detect intelligent causes in natural systems, as well as apply the explanatory power of intelligent design to empirical problems in scientific research". A CRSC document "The Wedge Strategy" started circulating on the internet in 1998. This describes a 3-phase strategy to implement ID over the next 5 then 20 years. Its goals are to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." The document focuses on overthrowing evolution, not from within the scientific establishments, but through convincing the public that ID theory is the morally acceptable one. Jay Richards , Director of Program Development for CRSC, has admitted that much of the content of the document can be found in Johnson's book Defeating Darwinism By Opening Minds (1995). Johnson has updated his arguments in a new book, The Wedge of Truth (2000). In May 2000 the Discovery Institute sponsored a policy briefing for Members of Congress on Capitol Hill, Washington. The speakers (Behe, Meyer, Nancy Pearcey, Dembski, Johnson) presented their version of the scientific debate between Darwinian evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory, and also addressed the social moral and political consequences of Darwinism.
Thus it is not surprising that the ID movement is seen by many people as the new face of Creationism, and that it has aroused opposition. This has been exemplified by the removal in October 2000 of Dembski from his job as Director of the Michael Polanyi Institute at Baylor University (in Waco, Texas) as a result of opposition from members of the Biology faculty. The Institute had been formed the previous year on the initiative of the President of the University, which is a Southern Baptist institution. (I understand from an Internet forum comment that the Southern Baptist Church has endorsed ID.)
In this article I do not have space to deal in detail with Johnson's writings, but I note the assessment of Forster and Marston2 (p. 112) that "Johnson is a Christian lawyer with no expertise in either science or metaphysics, whose confusion of the two has been widely influential". (The reader interested in this matter is referred to the critiques in References 2 and 3.) Instead, I will concentrate on a discussion of the published work of Behe and Dembski.
Intelligent Design: Irreducible Complexity
The concept of Intelligent Design may be considered to be the intellectual offspring of William Paley, the English theologian and moral philosopher, who in 1802 published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Here Paley argued from analogy, suggesting that if one happened to find a watch (rather than a stone) it was obvious that there must somewhere be a watchmaker. From this he went on to claim that the order and design of the natural world necessarily presupposed a grand design and thus a Designer.
The modern successor to Paley is Michael Behe (pronounced "BEEhee"). In his book Darwin's Black Box 5 he defined an irreducibly complex (IC) system as one composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (He used a mousetrap as an illustration.) Behe asserted that such systems cannot evolve directly by a series of small modifications each of which is a slight improvement to some initial system. He briefly mentions that indirect circuitous development is possible, but he asserts that this is tremendously unlikely. Also, it would be tremendously unlikely for any complex system to arise naturally in one fell swoop by mutation. His book gives several details of several complex biological systems. He claims that these systems are IC, and that the scientific community has no Darwinian explanation of them. He concludes that these aspects of life did not evolve, and therefore by default these are the result of Intelligent Design. Behe was careful to say nothing about a Designer. It was only later that it became public knowledge that he is a Roman Catholic.
A weakness of Behe's thesis is that the determination that a given system is IC depends on the present state of knowledge. Hence his argument is analogous to a "God of the gaps" explanation. Numerous biochemists have disputed Behe's claim that his various complex systems are in fact irreducible. For example, I refer to Don Lindsay6, who noted that IC systems had already been discussed by H.J. Muller7 in 1939, and that Muller had argued that evolution would routinely cause such systems. Lindsay notes that Behe assumes that evolution always progresses by addition, whereas it is well known that it often occurs by subtraction. Further, Shanks and Joplin8 give several examples of biochemical systems that continue to function when apparently crucial elements are missing. That article says, "It is a hallmark characteristic of evolved biochemical systems that there are typically multiple causal routes to a given functional end, and when one route fails, another can take over." (I should mention that Behe has responded to the Shanks/Joplin article, and his response has been further criticized in further internet forum discussion. The argument involves whether or not elements of the systems discussed by Shanks and Joplin are sufficiently well matched.) In particular, Behe spent his Chapter 4 arguing that the blood clotting cascade could not be reduced, but Lindsay says that there are lab mice from which several parts of the clotting cascade have been removed, and they seem quite normal. Lindsay also gives internet links to evidence that the immune system is not IC, and says that there is now experimental evidence for the correctness of a detailed theory on how this system could have started.
Thus Behe's thesis is very vulnerable to attack from an empirical quarter. A person who is committed to the belief that ID has occurred can brush aside such criticisms as that gene duplication provides the complexity, that evolution can create systems from genes that are already around for other purposes, that some steps of evolution are no longer seen but were there before a system looked irreducibly complex, or that some seemingly complex systems initially worked at a simpler level which eventually evolved to a complex level. However, when those criticisms are brushed aside the overall credibility of the basic thesis is reduced.
Behe's thesis is also vulnerable to criticism on philosophical grounds. Behe makes a point of saying nothing about how or at what time an IC system is designed, but it is very unsatisfactory to stop an enquiry at this point. It is pertinent to ask such questions as: Was there more than one design process? If not, was the design executed solely at the origin of life? If there was more than one design process, how were the various processes coordinated? To what extent was the design carried out by natural processes? Can a non-Darwinian natural process account for the design itself? According to Behe, IC must be determined on a case-by-case basis. Korthof10 has pointed out that this means that Design Theory is a hybrid theory – at least some organisms are products of both design and evolution by natural processes. To the extent that ID is independent of natural processes, ID is a sterile hypothesis, because it discourages research into possible natural mechanisms that could have produced design-like features.
Dembski11 in his most recent book has commented on the objection that "Design substitutes extraordinary explanations where ordinary explanations will do and thereby commits a god-of-the-gaps fallacy." At the end of a lengthy attempt at rebuttal, he gets around to asking the important question, "How long are we to continue a search [for an explanation in terms of natural causes] before we have a right to give up the search and declare not only that continuing the search is vain but also that the very object of the search is nonexistent?" He acknowledges that there is no precise line of demarcation. To my mind this is a reason why the search should never be terminated.
The Design Inference
The recent books by Dembski11,12 have been reviewed by Alan Padgett13 (a professor of theology and philosophy of science at Azusa Pacific University), who notes that the members of the ID movement are not content with a good argument from design against philosophical naturalism, but they wish to insert "design" into the paradigms and explanatory traditions of the natural sciences. Most advocates of design accept biological evolution, as long as that is not the whole story, and Padgett notes that this is a great step forward in the religion-science debate among conservative protestants.
Padgett also remarks that, in contrast to Swinburne14, whose version of the argument is that the whole of the universe is designed, Dembski and friends focus on the design of particular items within the universe. By concentrating on the scientific and philosophic challenges to Darwinism, the ID theorists largely ignore the argument from design to the existence of God.
In his technical monograph The Design Inference, Dembski12 seeks to eliminate chance (as an explanation) through small probability, by means of an "explanatory filter" whose purpose is to use probability estimates to "eliminate chance entirely." Dembski thereby attempts to give a rigorous analysis of the common informal logical reasoning concerned with causal explanations of why something happens. The filter involves a succession of decision modes: if the event has high probability it is deemed to be due to natural law, if it has intermediate probability then it is ascribed to chance, while if it has low probability together with "specified complexity" (something that involves prescribed patterns) then it is ascribed to design.
Padgett comments that Dembski has made a real advance in probability and information theory with his attempt to give a rigorous definition of design in terms of "complex specified information" (in relation to patterns in the data), but he criticizes the explanatory filter. Dembski reduces all kinds of regularity to natural laws, but some regularities are not based upon the laws of nature. After reducing all highly probable events to natural laws, Dembski then reduces all natural laws (necessity) to algorithms and mathematical functions; but not all laws of nature are mathematical, nor can they all be given numeric values. Padgett says that Dembski is on firmer ground when stating that the laws of nature, if we know them all, will make a particular event probable if that event is indeed caused by such laws. But we do not know all the regularities of the natural world. At best we can only talk about what is highly probable given our current knowledge. The filter demands that, in order to eliminate chance, we are aware of all the "chance hypotheses" for any given event, but this demand seems out of reach. Thus this filter does not in practice always eliminate chance as Dembski wants it to. Moreover, Dembski insists that natural causes cannot generate complex specified information, but Padgett notes that in the future it may be possible for us to understand how complex specified information can be generated by self-organizing physical systems.
Padgett admires the ID group for putting forward a bold, empirical hypothesis, namely that the origin of life comes from some intelligent designer, but he questions the claims of this movement to "insert" design back into science. He notes that ID is already part of such sciences as economics, archaeology and anthropology. However, when ID people say "science" they usually mean natural science, so in fact they wish to add ID to the paradigms and explanatory schemes of the natural sciences. But natural science focuses upon the natural world, both for its object of study and its explanatory scheme. Padgett says that natural sciences explain things on natural terms. The natural sciences leave the study of intelligent agency to the social sciences, such as psychology. The natural sciences can identify an event which, given our current knowledge, they cannot now explain. Perhaps, then, the event was designed. That is as far as natural science can go, and perhaps that is all the ID movement needs to get scientists to look and see if certain facts about the world, especially facts about the origins of living systems, exhibit signs of design rather that natural causation. Padgett sees no reason in principle why astronomers or biologists should be unwilling to do so apart, of course, from a prior commitment to naturalism as a world view.
I agree with Padgett's concluding remarks. He does not believe that the ID folks will win the day. He accepts the notion that life will some day be explained through natural causes, while insisting that God is the origin of all natural things, natural causes, and natural laws. In this way design and evolution are not opposites. Rather, evolution is based upon natural regularities, which are in turn created by God. Evolution is based upon design.
Dembski's design inference argument has also been criticized on philosophic grounds. After presenting some technical arguments (to which Dembski has responded at his home page, www.baylor.edu/~William_Dembski), Fitelson et al.15 make some general comments. They say that Darwinian theory makes probabilistic, not deductive, predictions, and there is no reason to think that the only alternative to Darwinian theory is intelligent design. Further, to test evolutionary theory against the hypothesis of ID, you must know what both hypotheses predict about observables. If defenders of the design hypothesis want to make their theory to be scientific, they need to do the scientific work of formulating and testing the predictions that creationism makes, and they must face this responsibility.
Applications of Design Theory
Dembski's earlier book The Design Inference briefly treats the creation/evolution controversy as case study. Dembski notes that creationists accept the premise that if life is due to chance then it has small probability, whereas evolutionists such as Dawkins reject this premise. In his more recent book Intelligent Design ( a book which essentially consists of a series of essays) Dembski is much less circumspect. In Chapter 7 he mentions the compartmentalization, complementarity and conflict models for the relationship between Science and Theology, and then offers a fourth option that he calls the mutual support model. (The support that he has in mind is epistemic support, something characterized by explanatory power rather than rational compulsion, and in this sense the big bang model of Science and the doctrine of creation of Theology support each other.) This is his motivation for the subtitle of his book, The Bridge Between Science and Theology.
However, in Chapter 4, titled "Naturalism and its cure" (a revised version of a chapter in the book referred to in Endnote 4), Dembski argues in a way that seems to me to be based on a conflict model. He starts by saying that throughout Scripture the fundamental divide separating humans is between those who can discern God's action in the world ( the "spiritual" ) and those who are blind to it (the "natural"). Dembski calls the view that nature is self-contained "naturalism" and then says that naturalism leads irresistibly to idolatry. He then says that within Western culture, naturalism has become the default position for all serious inquiry, and that its most virulent form is known as scientific naturalism. He then argues that the cure for the disease of naturalism is Intelligent Design: intelligent causes should be admitted to full scientific status. He sees ID as a two-pronged approach to eradicating naturalism. On the one hand, ID presents a scientific and philosophic critique of naturalism. Here the scientific critique identifies the empirical inadequacies of naturalistic evolutionary theories (both cosmic and biological), whereas the philosophical critique demonstrates how naturalism is a metaphysical ideology with no empirical backing. The other prong of ID is a positive scientific research programme.
Dembski wants to dump methodological naturalism. He says we need to realize that methodological naturalism is the functional equivalent of full-blown naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism asserts that nature is self-sufficient. Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that nature is self-sufficient. But once science is taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become functionally equivalent.
According to Dembski, ID is incompatible with "theistic evolution". He says that theistic evolution takes the Darwinian picture of the biological world and baptizes it, identifying this picture with the way God created life. When boiled down to its scientific content, however, theistic evolution is no different from atheistic evolution, treating only undirected natural processes in the origin and development of life. ID and theistic evolution differ fundamentally about whether the design of the universe is accessible to our native intellect. Design theorists say yes; theistic evolutionists say no.
Dembski says that for the Darwinian establishment, the "theistic" in "theistic evolution" is superfluous, and by Occam's razor should be dispensed with. The ID theorists' objection is to the presence of the word "evolution", because they regard the neo-Darwinian synthesis as problematic. The ID theorists' critique of Darwinism begins with Darwinism's failure as an empirically adequate scientific theory, not with its supposed incompatibility with some system of religious belief. Here Darwinism is being regarded as the totalizing claim that the mutation-selection mechanism accounts for all the diversity of life. Dembski holds that the evidence does not support this claim. What evidence there is supports limited variation within fixed boundaries (microevolution). Macroevolution – the unlimited plasticity of organisms to diversify across all boundaries – even if true, cannot legitimately be attributed to the mutation-selection system. To do so is to extrapolate beyond its evidential base. Dembski says that the following problems have proven utterly intractable not only for the mutation-selection mechanism but also for any other undirected natural process proposed to date: the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of multicellular life, the origin of sexuality, the scarcity of transitional forms in the fossil record, the biological big bang that occurred in the Cambrian era, the development of complex organ systems and the development of irreducible complex molecular machines. In making these claims that such problems are utterly intractable, Dembski and his fellow ID theorists leave themselves open to empirical refutation.
Dembski then goes on along a path previously trodden by creationists. He asks such questions as: Why does Darwinism, despite being so inadequately supported as a scientific theory, continue to garner the full support of the academic establishment? Why must science explain solely by recourse to undirected natural processes? He says we are dealing with competing worldviews and incompatible metaphysical systems. In the creation-evolution controversy we are dealing with a naturalistic metaphysic that shapes and controls what theories of biological origins that are permitted on the playing field in advance of discussion or weighing of evidence. This metaphysic is so pervasive and powerful that it not only rules alternative views out of court, but it cannot even permit itself to be criticized. It is this metaphysic that constitutes the main target of the design theorists' critique of Darwinism. As I have already mentioned, Dembski has a simple answer: dump methodological naturalism. This leaves him on a collision course with most scientists.
It seems to me that ID theory is based on a philosophy of naïve realism. I believe that a more adequate approach to science and theology is one based on critical realism. When one realizes that science is merely providing a model of the real world, rather than making statements about the real world itself, it is obvious that Dembski's filter loses its coercive force, because the input to the filter is only provisional, and that means the output of the filter must too be only provisional.
For further pertinent discussion of the work of Dembski (and also of that of Moreland) the reader is again referred to Forster and Marston2, Chapter 10.
Dembski16 has recently posted a 15000 word essay on the Internet in which he responds to several of his critics, including the theistic evolutionist Howard Van Till who in recent years has pressed the ID theorists to clarify their definition of design so that their views can be properly critiqued. In this essay Dembski makes some revealing personal statements and raises a number of interesting matters which space limitations prevent me from discussing here. I regret that Dembski has declined to comment on pertinent points raised by Wesley Elsberry17 (whom Dembski refers to as an Internet stalker).
An Assessment
In my view the bridge between science and theology that Dembski11 and others are trying to construct is being built in the wrong place (because its foundations are subject to erosion as empirical advances in the sciences are made) and is being built for the wrong reason, one which is peculiar to the USA, a country where religion may not be taught in public schools for legal and constitutional reasons. The more idealistic members of the ID group may honestly believe that ID theory is independent of theology and can be regarded as legitimate science and that the "wedge" is distinct from ID theory. Further, they claim that ID theory leads to useful scientific hypotheses that are amenable to empirical testing (though as far as I am aware the only specific examples they have put forward are merely predictions that certain systems have minimum level of complexity). However, there is little doubt that the more prominent members of the ID movement, those associated with the Discovery Institute, are motivated primarily by a different agenda. They insist that ID theory is independent of theology so that ID theory may be permitted to be taught in public schools. Thus Pennock3 and others have adequate cause for referring to the ID movement as Intelligent-Design Creationism. In fact, Dembski's bridge is more like an assault ramp (wedge-shaped), and is discontinuous at the science end because Dembski has chosen to do away with methodological naturalism rather than just metaphysical naturalism.
A Better Way Forward
Thanks to the efforts of Polkinghorne18 and others, a contemporary revival of natural theology is taking place. Polkinghorne notes that this is one revised in relation to its predecessors in two important respects. First, it is more modest in its claim. It does not assert that God's existence can be demonstrated in a logically compelling way but that theism makes more sense of the world, and of human experience, than does atheism. Second, its appeal is not to particular occurrences or particular entities, in contrast to the way in which Paley discussed the optical system of the eye or Behe discusses particular complex systems. For the new natural theologians, the occurrences of such phenomena are part of the history of the physical world that is science's legitimate role to seek to explain as fully as it can. Instead, the new natural theology looks to the laws of nature that science has to take as assumed, and it asks whether there is more to be understood about these laws than their mere assertion. It is in no way a rival to science within science's proper domain. Rather, it serves as a complement to science, going beyond the latter's self-limited realm of enquiry. There is no recourse to a "God of the Gaps" but to the God whose steadfast will is held to be expressed in the laws of nature that science discovers but does not explain.
An approach along these lines, for which "theistic evolution" is a suitable umbrella label, is in my opinion a better way forward. The argument for design is now based on the whole universe rather than particular systems. The remarkable coincidences in the magnitudes of physical constants that make our universe livable in were highlighted by Barrow and Tipler19 (and related arguments have been presented by Broom20). The no less remarkable list of chemical and biochemical properties of matter that have enabled the origin and evolutionary development of life has been presented by Denton21 , who is at pains to emphasize that his argument is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumptions of modern science – that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. It is clear that Denton has moved on some distance since the publication of his previous book (mentioned near the beginning of this article)! It is time for the creationists to move forward too.
Endnotes
1. Donald Nield, "Creation and science without 'Creation Science' ", Stimulus 8, No.4 (November 2000), 15-19
2. Roger Forster and Paul Marston, Reason, Science and Faith (Monarch Books/ Angus Hudson, London, 1999)
3. Robert T. Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999)
4. William A. Dembski (ed.), Mere Creation : Science, Faith & Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 199
5. Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Touchstone, New York, 1996)
6. D. C. Lindsay, Review of Darwin's Black Box found on 29-09-00 at www.cs.colorado.edu/~Lindsay/creation/behe.html
7. H. J. Muller, Reversibility in evolution considered from the standpoint of genetics, Biological Reviews 14 (1939), 261-280
8. N. Shanks and K. H. Joplin, "Redundant complexity: a critical analysis of intelligent design in biochemistry,'"Philosophy of Science 66 (1999), 268-298
9. M. J. Behe, "Self-organization and irreducible complex systems: A reply to Shanks and Joplin," Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), 155-162
10. Gert Korthof, "Does irreducible complexity refute neo-Darwinism? Darwin's Black Box, a review," 6 August 2000, online at home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/korthof8.htm
11. William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 1999)
12 .William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 199
13. Alan G. Padgett, "Creation by design: Is the intelligent-design movement asking natural scientists to work outside their proper focus?" Christianity Today: Books & Culture: Science pages July/Aug. 2000, online at www.christianitytoday.com.
14. Richard Swinburne, Is there a God? (Oxford University Press, 1996)
15. B Fitelson, C. Stephens and E. Sober, "How not to detect design Critical notice: William A. Dembski: The Design Inference", Philosophy of Science 66 (1999), 472-488
16. William Dembski, "Intelligent Design coming clean", Metaviews 098, dated 2000.11.17, posted at www.meta-list.org
17. Wesley Elsberry maintains an archive of documents related to Dembski, including reviews of his work and his activities at Baylor University, at inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/wad.html
18. J. Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction (SPCK, London, and Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 199
19. J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 199
20. Neil Broom, How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or Atheism: Should Science Decide (Aldershot: Ashgate,1998; revised edition: InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2001)
21. M. J. Denton, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (The Free Press, New York. 199
Donald Nield holds the degrees of MSc (NZ), MA (Cambridge), PhD (Auckland) and BD (Otago), and since 1962 has taught at the University of Auckland, where currently he is an Associate Professor of Engineering Science. He is an Elder at Balmoral Presbyterian Church.
---
This article was published in the New Zealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth"by
Jonathan Wells
Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science,University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland
All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000,if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.
The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (see the document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotional description of which reads:
'In this shocking book,Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high school textbooks – and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.
The best known "icons of evolution" – from pictures of apes evolving into humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on tree trunks – are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution thatare simply untrue.
These icons of evolution appear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature is full of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that without these icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowingly misinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'
With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of this article correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these in detail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominance in the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censor dissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should be disqualified from receiving public funds.
The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of ten recent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given a failing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests that owners of textbooks can insert in their books.
There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy,and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of the authors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accurately presented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and he has put his own particular spin on those facts.
I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers(the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light of both what Wells has written and what is actually written in the introductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology: Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.
The questions and my answers are:
Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth –- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model was made up of … the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancient world. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actual atmosphere of the early Earth … Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Urey experiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including amixture having a very low concentration of O2. A biotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models,though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acids commonly found in organisms … The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth,or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clear that substantial progress has been made.
Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor –- thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion",which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. Theso-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea of punctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of life concept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is not refuted.
Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry,then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry –- a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology … Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying that evolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures thatfunctioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whether similarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and this means that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.
Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos asevidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known forover a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gill pouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrate embryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identify anatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structures are extensively modified in different ways during later development of the organisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descent with modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that the development of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of the evolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists havebeen led astray by their theoretical assumptions.
Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds –- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered the ancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch ofthe avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modernbirds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organisms cannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.
Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection –- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wells refers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authority on the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of the scientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanismin moths.
Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finchesduring a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection –- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended,and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant just as an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches track changes in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes in characteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-term changes in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breeding stocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers have published more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in the wild.
Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution –- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is not evidence for evolution per se.
Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident –- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says:"Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a series of steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homosapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of the human family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across thepage. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with many splinter groups having traveled down dead ends… " Wells has not presented an accurate account of what is now known about human evolution.
Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact –- even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. The claims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on amisrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM so as to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.
Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.
The writer is grateful to Dr. Robert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.
>Were the Darwinists Wrong?
>National Geographic stacks the deck.
>Thomas Woodward is author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent
>Design
I indicate just my main reservations on this article.
> I - a speaker and writer on the
>debate between Darwinism and intelligent design theory
The main debate, in the total scholarly picture, is between
Darwinism and theistic evolution. IDT is very recent, coyly narrow, and
not a great contribution - largely OK as far as it goes, but ignoring
most of what has been previously contributed. To make out that IDT is the
main intellectual response to (neo)Darwinism is ludicrously biased. Prof
Nield discusses it in the attached article.
>If we imagine the "clash of two theories" - the older notion of "separate
>creations" by a supremely wise designer, versus Darwin's "common ancestry"
>of all life, driven by natural selection - it appears here that the younger
>system has utterly crushed the older.
This appearance is very deceptive. It has been pointed out all
along that natural selection can only *narrow* the variance; it has little
potential for creativity. In materialistic neoDarwinist theory, then, the
creativity must come from mutation. Since this process is regularly
labelled as random, the coherence within & between organisms is not
logically explained by neoDarwinism.
> throughout the article,
>small-scale or modest "variations" in animals are treated blithely as
>evidence for the origin of new organs or body structures - what biologists
>call "macroevolution."
>Most significantly, there is no hint that intelligent, well-informed
>dissent exists anywhere in the university world.
I agree with that complaint. But what does this IDTer point to as
opponents 'in the university world' of materialism?
>most tellingly: Why not reveal the widespread questioning of the
>creative power of natural selection - a foundational problem now widely
>admitted even among evolutionary researchers?
This question can be almost as cogently thrown at the IDTers, who
black out most of the scholarly depth as if their own novel minor ideas are
the most important.
>In a nutshell: How can an article of this importance completely ignore the
>scholarly labors of a mushrooming network of scientists at leading
>universities who have held important university-based symposia, and
>published over fifty books in the last decade?
More to the point: why does Woodward ignore the mainstream scholars
of real standing - Wm Temple, Sir Alister Hardy, John Morton, Neil Broom,
etc?
He wishes to imply that IDT is the main answer to materialist
neoDarwinists. This is not an accurate picture. IDT operates as a front
for Creationism®, aligned with that fanatical sect in evading the evidence
that evolution has occurred. IDT is inherently weak in that it relies on
'God of the gaps' reasoning: nobody has yet imagined how the bacterial
flagellum could have evolved by neoDarwinian gradualism, so a designer(s)
must be inferred. It's OK as far as it goes, but insists on staying stuck
there as if Dawkins has to admit this point before the discussion can move
on.
> PBS stations across the US
>have aired the pro-ID documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
This highly polished expensive propaganda for the narrow tendency
'IDT' is generally good but fails to mention that what is at issue is how,
not whether, evolution has occurred.
>Paul identified the downward spiral in Romans chapter one as one where men
>deified dumb nature, imbuing it with powers and spiritual significance that
>can never be justified.
well put
> The Christian, aware of this pitfall, and armed
>with the best arguments and evidence on both sides of the issue, can
>systematically compare and evaluate evolutionary theory and intelligent
>design theory.
This is cheeky, and seriously misleading. It appears to
counterpose IDT against 'evolutionary theory'. But the latter includes
both the greatest intellectual con trick - neoDarwinism, propounded
particularly crudely by Natl Geog - and the theistic evolution theory
which is actually the mainstream scholarship in this field, blacked out by
the obdurate narrowness of IDT.
> For the philosophical naturalist
This is an inferior term. Far more widely understood is the
synonym 'materalist'. The term 'naturalist' has another meaning, so why go
for this ambiguity? I fear it's a mark of one who is not fully trying to
clarify ideas.
>, "nature is all there is."
What more there is, Dembski & Behe scarcely begin to discuss.
Prof Nield's other attached article shows that J Wells, the most
obvious link between those two most visible IDTers and "creationism", is
not on the level.
R
Is Intelligent Design Theory the Way Forward?
Donald Nield
(Except for editorial changes, this document is as published in Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Volume 9, Issue 2, May 2001, 8-13.)
Introduction
There is increasing recognition that the position of the "creation scientists" in their battle against "materialistic evolutionists" is untenable1,2. In recent years an alternative approach called "intelligent design theory" has been proposed, and this is the topic of the present article.
The modern Intelligent Design (ID) movement was to a large extent sparked off by the publication in 1985 of the book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by the Australian medical geneticist Michael Denton, who now works at the University of Otago. Today the leading lights are Phillip Johnson (lawyer), Michael Behe (biochemist) and William Dembski (mathematician). Robert Pennock3 lists a couple of dozen other people who are also associated with the movement, and it is noteworthy that virtually all are U.S. Americans (Hugh Ross, a Canadian, is an exception). Several of those named have contributed to a proceedings of a Mere Christianity conference4. Philosophers are represented in the movement by William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, Paul Nelson and Stephen C. Meyer. A person of particular interest is Jonathan Wells, of the Unification Church, who has publicly stated that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism, and to that end has collected two PhD's, one in Theology from Yale and the other in Biology from U.C. Berkeley.
Together with Nelson and Meyer, Wells now works at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which was founded in 1996. According to its web site (www.crsc.org) the CRSC "strives to replace materialism and its destructive cultural legacies with a positive alternative. The Center seeks to develop a robust science for the twenty-first century, illuminated by an empirically fruitful Theory of Intelligent Design … [namely] a scientific research program that seeks to detect intelligent causes in natural systems, as well as apply the explanatory power of intelligent design to empirical problems in scientific research". A CRSC document "The Wedge Strategy" started circulating on the internet in 1998. This describes a 3-phase strategy to implement ID over the next 5 then 20 years. Its goals are to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." The document focuses on overthrowing evolution, not from within the scientific establishments, but through convincing the public that ID theory is the morally acceptable one. Jay Richards , Director of Program Development for CRSC, has admitted that much of the content of the document can be found in Johnson's book Defeating Darwinism By Opening Minds (1995). Johnson has updated his arguments in a new book, The Wedge of Truth (2000). In May 2000 the Discovery Institute sponsored a policy briefing for Members of Congress on Capitol Hill, Washington. The speakers (Behe, Meyer, Nancy Pearcey, Dembski, Johnson) presented their version of the scientific debate between Darwinian evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory, and also addressed the social moral and political consequences of Darwinism.
Thus it is not surprising that the ID movement is seen by many people as the new face of Creationism, and that it has aroused opposition. This has been exemplified by the removal in October 2000 of Dembski from his job as Director of the Michael Polanyi Institute at Baylor University (in Waco, Texas) as a result of opposition from members of the Biology faculty. The Institute had been formed the previous year on the initiative of the President of the University, which is a Southern Baptist institution. (I understand from an Internet forum comment that the Southern Baptist Church has endorsed ID.)
In this article I do not have space to deal in detail with Johnson's writings, but I note the assessment of Forster and Marston2 (p. 112) that "Johnson is a Christian lawyer with no expertise in either science or metaphysics, whose confusion of the two has been widely influential". (The reader interested in this matter is referred to the critiques in References 2 and 3.) Instead, I will concentrate on a discussion of the published work of Behe and Dembski.
Intelligent Design: Irreducible Complexity
The concept of Intelligent Design may be considered to be the intellectual offspring of William Paley, the English theologian and moral philosopher, who in 1802 published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Here Paley argued from analogy, suggesting that if one happened to find a watch (rather than a stone) it was obvious that there must somewhere be a watchmaker. From this he went on to claim that the order and design of the natural world necessarily presupposed a grand design and thus a Designer.
The modern successor to Paley is Michael Behe (pronounced "BEEhee"). In his book Darwin's Black Box 5 he defined an irreducibly complex (IC) system as one composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (He used a mousetrap as an illustration.) Behe asserted that such systems cannot evolve directly by a series of small modifications each of which is a slight improvement to some initial system. He briefly mentions that indirect circuitous development is possible, but he asserts that this is tremendously unlikely. Also, it would be tremendously unlikely for any complex system to arise naturally in one fell swoop by mutation. His book gives several details of several complex biological systems. He claims that these systems are IC, and that the scientific community has no Darwinian explanation of them. He concludes that these aspects of life did not evolve, and therefore by default these are the result of Intelligent Design. Behe was careful to say nothing about a Designer. It was only later that it became public knowledge that he is a Roman Catholic.
A weakness of Behe's thesis is that the determination that a given system is IC depends on the present state of knowledge. Hence his argument is analogous to a "God of the gaps" explanation. Numerous biochemists have disputed Behe's claim that his various complex systems are in fact irreducible. For example, I refer to Don Lindsay6, who noted that IC systems had already been discussed by H.J. Muller7 in 1939, and that Muller had argued that evolution would routinely cause such systems. Lindsay notes that Behe assumes that evolution always progresses by addition, whereas it is well known that it often occurs by subtraction. Further, Shanks and Joplin8 give several examples of biochemical systems that continue to function when apparently crucial elements are missing. That article says, "It is a hallmark characteristic of evolved biochemical systems that there are typically multiple causal routes to a given functional end, and when one route fails, another can take over." (I should mention that Behe has responded to the Shanks/Joplin article, and his response has been further criticized in further internet forum discussion. The argument involves whether or not elements of the systems discussed by Shanks and Joplin are sufficiently well matched.) In particular, Behe spent his Chapter 4 arguing that the blood clotting cascade could not be reduced, but Lindsay says that there are lab mice from which several parts of the clotting cascade have been removed, and they seem quite normal. Lindsay also gives internet links to evidence that the immune system is not IC, and says that there is now experimental evidence for the correctness of a detailed theory on how this system could have started.
Thus Behe's thesis is very vulnerable to attack from an empirical quarter. A person who is committed to the belief that ID has occurred can brush aside such criticisms as that gene duplication provides the complexity, that evolution can create systems from genes that are already around for other purposes, that some steps of evolution are no longer seen but were there before a system looked irreducibly complex, or that some seemingly complex systems initially worked at a simpler level which eventually evolved to a complex level. However, when those criticisms are brushed aside the overall credibility of the basic thesis is reduced.
Behe's thesis is also vulnerable to criticism on philosophical grounds. Behe makes a point of saying nothing about how or at what time an IC system is designed, but it is very unsatisfactory to stop an enquiry at this point. It is pertinent to ask such questions as: Was there more than one design process? If not, was the design executed solely at the origin of life? If there was more than one design process, how were the various processes coordinated? To what extent was the design carried out by natural processes? Can a non-Darwinian natural process account for the design itself? According to Behe, IC must be determined on a case-by-case basis. Korthof10 has pointed out that this means that Design Theory is a hybrid theory – at least some organisms are products of both design and evolution by natural processes. To the extent that ID is independent of natural processes, ID is a sterile hypothesis, because it discourages research into possible natural mechanisms that could have produced design-like features.
Dembski11 in his most recent book has commented on the objection that "Design substitutes extraordinary explanations where ordinary explanations will do and thereby commits a god-of-the-gaps fallacy." At the end of a lengthy attempt at rebuttal, he gets around to asking the important question, "How long are we to continue a search [for an explanation in terms of natural causes] before we have a right to give up the search and declare not only that continuing the search is vain but also that the very object of the search is nonexistent?" He acknowledges that there is no precise line of demarcation. To my mind this is a reason why the search should never be terminated.
The Design Inference
The recent books by Dembski11,12 have been reviewed by Alan Padgett13 (a professor of theology and philosophy of science at Azusa Pacific University), who notes that the members of the ID movement are not content with a good argument from design against philosophical naturalism, but they wish to insert "design" into the paradigms and explanatory traditions of the natural sciences. Most advocates of design accept biological evolution, as long as that is not the whole story, and Padgett notes that this is a great step forward in the religion-science debate among conservative protestants.
Padgett also remarks that, in contrast to Swinburne14, whose version of the argument is that the whole of the universe is designed, Dembski and friends focus on the design of particular items within the universe. By concentrating on the scientific and philosophic challenges to Darwinism, the ID theorists largely ignore the argument from design to the existence of God.
In his technical monograph The Design Inference, Dembski12 seeks to eliminate chance (as an explanation) through small probability, by means of an "explanatory filter" whose purpose is to use probability estimates to "eliminate chance entirely." Dembski thereby attempts to give a rigorous analysis of the common informal logical reasoning concerned with causal explanations of why something happens. The filter involves a succession of decision modes: if the event has high probability it is deemed to be due to natural law, if it has intermediate probability then it is ascribed to chance, while if it has low probability together with "specified complexity" (something that involves prescribed patterns) then it is ascribed to design.
Padgett comments that Dembski has made a real advance in probability and information theory with his attempt to give a rigorous definition of design in terms of "complex specified information" (in relation to patterns in the data), but he criticizes the explanatory filter. Dembski reduces all kinds of regularity to natural laws, but some regularities are not based upon the laws of nature. After reducing all highly probable events to natural laws, Dembski then reduces all natural laws (necessity) to algorithms and mathematical functions; but not all laws of nature are mathematical, nor can they all be given numeric values. Padgett says that Dembski is on firmer ground when stating that the laws of nature, if we know them all, will make a particular event probable if that event is indeed caused by such laws. But we do not know all the regularities of the natural world. At best we can only talk about what is highly probable given our current knowledge. The filter demands that, in order to eliminate chance, we are aware of all the "chance hypotheses" for any given event, but this demand seems out of reach. Thus this filter does not in practice always eliminate chance as Dembski wants it to. Moreover, Dembski insists that natural causes cannot generate complex specified information, but Padgett notes that in the future it may be possible for us to understand how complex specified information can be generated by self-organizing physical systems.
Padgett admires the ID group for putting forward a bold, empirical hypothesis, namely that the origin of life comes from some intelligent designer, but he questions the claims of this movement to "insert" design back into science. He notes that ID is already part of such sciences as economics, archaeology and anthropology. However, when ID people say "science" they usually mean natural science, so in fact they wish to add ID to the paradigms and explanatory schemes of the natural sciences. But natural science focuses upon the natural world, both for its object of study and its explanatory scheme. Padgett says that natural sciences explain things on natural terms. The natural sciences leave the study of intelligent agency to the social sciences, such as psychology. The natural sciences can identify an event which, given our current knowledge, they cannot now explain. Perhaps, then, the event was designed. That is as far as natural science can go, and perhaps that is all the ID movement needs to get scientists to look and see if certain facts about the world, especially facts about the origins of living systems, exhibit signs of design rather that natural causation. Padgett sees no reason in principle why astronomers or biologists should be unwilling to do so apart, of course, from a prior commitment to naturalism as a world view.
I agree with Padgett's concluding remarks. He does not believe that the ID folks will win the day. He accepts the notion that life will some day be explained through natural causes, while insisting that God is the origin of all natural things, natural causes, and natural laws. In this way design and evolution are not opposites. Rather, evolution is based upon natural regularities, which are in turn created by God. Evolution is based upon design.
Dembski's design inference argument has also been criticized on philosophic grounds. After presenting some technical arguments (to which Dembski has responded at his home page, www.baylor.edu/~William_Dembski), Fitelson et al.15 make some general comments. They say that Darwinian theory makes probabilistic, not deductive, predictions, and there is no reason to think that the only alternative to Darwinian theory is intelligent design. Further, to test evolutionary theory against the hypothesis of ID, you must know what both hypotheses predict about observables. If defenders of the design hypothesis want to make their theory to be scientific, they need to do the scientific work of formulating and testing the predictions that creationism makes, and they must face this responsibility.
Applications of Design Theory
Dembski's earlier book The Design Inference briefly treats the creation/evolution controversy as case study. Dembski notes that creationists accept the premise that if life is due to chance then it has small probability, whereas evolutionists such as Dawkins reject this premise. In his more recent book Intelligent Design ( a book which essentially consists of a series of essays) Dembski is much less circumspect. In Chapter 7 he mentions the compartmentalization, complementarity and conflict models for the relationship between Science and Theology, and then offers a fourth option that he calls the mutual support model. (The support that he has in mind is epistemic support, something characterized by explanatory power rather than rational compulsion, and in this sense the big bang model of Science and the doctrine of creation of Theology support each other.) This is his motivation for the subtitle of his book, The Bridge Between Science and Theology.
However, in Chapter 4, titled "Naturalism and its cure" (a revised version of a chapter in the book referred to in Endnote 4), Dembski argues in a way that seems to me to be based on a conflict model. He starts by saying that throughout Scripture the fundamental divide separating humans is between those who can discern God's action in the world ( the "spiritual" ) and those who are blind to it (the "natural"). Dembski calls the view that nature is self-contained "naturalism" and then says that naturalism leads irresistibly to idolatry. He then says that within Western culture, naturalism has become the default position for all serious inquiry, and that its most virulent form is known as scientific naturalism. He then argues that the cure for the disease of naturalism is Intelligent Design: intelligent causes should be admitted to full scientific status. He sees ID as a two-pronged approach to eradicating naturalism. On the one hand, ID presents a scientific and philosophic critique of naturalism. Here the scientific critique identifies the empirical inadequacies of naturalistic evolutionary theories (both cosmic and biological), whereas the philosophical critique demonstrates how naturalism is a metaphysical ideology with no empirical backing. The other prong of ID is a positive scientific research programme.
Dembski wants to dump methodological naturalism. He says we need to realize that methodological naturalism is the functional equivalent of full-blown naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism asserts that nature is self-sufficient. Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that nature is self-sufficient. But once science is taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become functionally equivalent.
According to Dembski, ID is incompatible with "theistic evolution". He says that theistic evolution takes the Darwinian picture of the biological world and baptizes it, identifying this picture with the way God created life. When boiled down to its scientific content, however, theistic evolution is no different from atheistic evolution, treating only undirected natural processes in the origin and development of life. ID and theistic evolution differ fundamentally about whether the design of the universe is accessible to our native intellect. Design theorists say yes; theistic evolutionists say no.
Dembski says that for the Darwinian establishment, the "theistic" in "theistic evolution" is superfluous, and by Occam's razor should be dispensed with. The ID theorists' objection is to the presence of the word "evolution", because they regard the neo-Darwinian synthesis as problematic. The ID theorists' critique of Darwinism begins with Darwinism's failure as an empirically adequate scientific theory, not with its supposed incompatibility with some system of religious belief. Here Darwinism is being regarded as the totalizing claim that the mutation-selection mechanism accounts for all the diversity of life. Dembski holds that the evidence does not support this claim. What evidence there is supports limited variation within fixed boundaries (microevolution). Macroevolution – the unlimited plasticity of organisms to diversify across all boundaries – even if true, cannot legitimately be attributed to the mutation-selection system. To do so is to extrapolate beyond its evidential base. Dembski says that the following problems have proven utterly intractable not only for the mutation-selection mechanism but also for any other undirected natural process proposed to date: the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of multicellular life, the origin of sexuality, the scarcity of transitional forms in the fossil record, the biological big bang that occurred in the Cambrian era, the development of complex organ systems and the development of irreducible complex molecular machines. In making these claims that such problems are utterly intractable, Dembski and his fellow ID theorists leave themselves open to empirical refutation.
Dembski then goes on along a path previously trodden by creationists. He asks such questions as: Why does Darwinism, despite being so inadequately supported as a scientific theory, continue to garner the full support of the academic establishment? Why must science explain solely by recourse to undirected natural processes? He says we are dealing with competing worldviews and incompatible metaphysical systems. In the creation-evolution controversy we are dealing with a naturalistic metaphysic that shapes and controls what theories of biological origins that are permitted on the playing field in advance of discussion or weighing of evidence. This metaphysic is so pervasive and powerful that it not only rules alternative views out of court, but it cannot even permit itself to be criticized. It is this metaphysic that constitutes the main target of the design theorists' critique of Darwinism. As I have already mentioned, Dembski has a simple answer: dump methodological naturalism. This leaves him on a collision course with most scientists.
It seems to me that ID theory is based on a philosophy of naïve realism. I believe that a more adequate approach to science and theology is one based on critical realism. When one realizes that science is merely providing a model of the real world, rather than making statements about the real world itself, it is obvious that Dembski's filter loses its coercive force, because the input to the filter is only provisional, and that means the output of the filter must too be only provisional.
For further pertinent discussion of the work of Dembski (and also of that of Moreland) the reader is again referred to Forster and Marston2, Chapter 10.
Dembski16 has recently posted a 15000 word essay on the Internet in which he responds to several of his critics, including the theistic evolutionist Howard Van Till who in recent years has pressed the ID theorists to clarify their definition of design so that their views can be properly critiqued. In this essay Dembski makes some revealing personal statements and raises a number of interesting matters which space limitations prevent me from discussing here. I regret that Dembski has declined to comment on pertinent points raised by Wesley Elsberry17 (whom Dembski refers to as an Internet stalker).
An Assessment
In my view the bridge between science and theology that Dembski11 and others are trying to construct is being built in the wrong place (because its foundations are subject to erosion as empirical advances in the sciences are made) and is being built for the wrong reason, one which is peculiar to the USA, a country where religion may not be taught in public schools for legal and constitutional reasons. The more idealistic members of the ID group may honestly believe that ID theory is independent of theology and can be regarded as legitimate science and that the "wedge" is distinct from ID theory. Further, they claim that ID theory leads to useful scientific hypotheses that are amenable to empirical testing (though as far as I am aware the only specific examples they have put forward are merely predictions that certain systems have minimum level of complexity). However, there is little doubt that the more prominent members of the ID movement, those associated with the Discovery Institute, are motivated primarily by a different agenda. They insist that ID theory is independent of theology so that ID theory may be permitted to be taught in public schools. Thus Pennock3 and others have adequate cause for referring to the ID movement as Intelligent-Design Creationism. In fact, Dembski's bridge is more like an assault ramp (wedge-shaped), and is discontinuous at the science end because Dembski has chosen to do away with methodological naturalism rather than just metaphysical naturalism.
A Better Way Forward
Thanks to the efforts of Polkinghorne18 and others, a contemporary revival of natural theology is taking place. Polkinghorne notes that this is one revised in relation to its predecessors in two important respects. First, it is more modest in its claim. It does not assert that God's existence can be demonstrated in a logically compelling way but that theism makes more sense of the world, and of human experience, than does atheism. Second, its appeal is not to particular occurrences or particular entities, in contrast to the way in which Paley discussed the optical system of the eye or Behe discusses particular complex systems. For the new natural theologians, the occurrences of such phenomena are part of the history of the physical world that is science's legitimate role to seek to explain as fully as it can. Instead, the new natural theology looks to the laws of nature that science has to take as assumed, and it asks whether there is more to be understood about these laws than their mere assertion. It is in no way a rival to science within science's proper domain. Rather, it serves as a complement to science, going beyond the latter's self-limited realm of enquiry. There is no recourse to a "God of the Gaps" but to the God whose steadfast will is held to be expressed in the laws of nature that science discovers but does not explain.
An approach along these lines, for which "theistic evolution" is a suitable umbrella label, is in my opinion a better way forward. The argument for design is now based on the whole universe rather than particular systems. The remarkable coincidences in the magnitudes of physical constants that make our universe livable in were highlighted by Barrow and Tipler19 (and related arguments have been presented by Broom20). The no less remarkable list of chemical and biochemical properties of matter that have enabled the origin and evolutionary development of life has been presented by Denton21 , who is at pains to emphasize that his argument is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumptions of modern science – that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. It is clear that Denton has moved on some distance since the publication of his previous book (mentioned near the beginning of this article)! It is time for the creationists to move forward too.
Endnotes
1. Donald Nield, "Creation and science without 'Creation Science' ", Stimulus 8, No.4 (November 2000), 15-19
2. Roger Forster and Paul Marston, Reason, Science and Faith (Monarch Books/ Angus Hudson, London, 1999)
3. Robert T. Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999)
4. William A. Dembski (ed.), Mere Creation : Science, Faith & Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 199
5. Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Touchstone, New York, 1996)
6. D. C. Lindsay, Review of Darwin's Black Box found on 29-09-00 at www.cs.colorado.edu/~Lindsay/creation/behe.html
7. H. J. Muller, Reversibility in evolution considered from the standpoint of genetics, Biological Reviews 14 (1939), 261-280
8. N. Shanks and K. H. Joplin, "Redundant complexity: a critical analysis of intelligent design in biochemistry,'"Philosophy of Science 66 (1999), 268-298
9. M. J. Behe, "Self-organization and irreducible complex systems: A reply to Shanks and Joplin," Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), 155-162
10. Gert Korthof, "Does irreducible complexity refute neo-Darwinism? Darwin's Black Box, a review," 6 August 2000, online at home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/korthof8.htm
11. William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 1999)
12 .William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 199
13. Alan G. Padgett, "Creation by design: Is the intelligent-design movement asking natural scientists to work outside their proper focus?" Christianity Today: Books & Culture: Science pages July/Aug. 2000, online at www.christianitytoday.com.
14. Richard Swinburne, Is there a God? (Oxford University Press, 1996)
15. B Fitelson, C. Stephens and E. Sober, "How not to detect design Critical notice: William A. Dembski: The Design Inference", Philosophy of Science 66 (1999), 472-488
16. William Dembski, "Intelligent Design coming clean", Metaviews 098, dated 2000.11.17, posted at www.meta-list.org
17. Wesley Elsberry maintains an archive of documents related to Dembski, including reviews of his work and his activities at Baylor University, at inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/wad.html
18. J. Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction (SPCK, London, and Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 199
19. J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 199
20. Neil Broom, How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or Atheism: Should Science Decide (Aldershot: Ashgate,1998; revised edition: InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2001)
21. M. J. Denton, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (The Free Press, New York. 199
Donald Nield holds the degrees of MSc (NZ), MA (Cambridge), PhD (Auckland) and BD (Otago), and since 1962 has taught at the University of Auckland, where currently he is an Associate Professor of Engineering Science. He is an Elder at Balmoral Presbyterian Church.
---
This article was published in the New Zealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth"by
Jonathan Wells
Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science,University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland
All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000,if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.
The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (see the document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotional description of which reads:
'In this shocking book,Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high school textbooks – and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.
The best known "icons of evolution" – from pictures of apes evolving into humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on tree trunks – are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution thatare simply untrue.
These icons of evolution appear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature is full of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that without these icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowingly misinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'
With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of this article correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these in detail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominance in the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censor dissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should be disqualified from receiving public funds.
The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of ten recent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given a failing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests that owners of textbooks can insert in their books.
There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy,and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of the authors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accurately presented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and he has put his own particular spin on those facts.
I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers(the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light of both what Wells has written and what is actually written in the introductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology: Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.
The questions and my answers are:
Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth –- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model was made up of … the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancient world. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actual atmosphere of the early Earth … Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Urey experiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including amixture having a very low concentration of O2. A biotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models,though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acids commonly found in organisms … The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth,or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clear that substantial progress has been made.
Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor –- thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion",which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. Theso-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea of punctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of life concept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is not refuted.
Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry,then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry –- a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology … Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying that evolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures thatfunctioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whether similarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and this means that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.
Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos asevidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known forover a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gill pouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrate embryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identify anatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structures are extensively modified in different ways during later development of the organisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descent with modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that the development of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of the evolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists havebeen led astray by their theoretical assumptions.
Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds –- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered the ancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch ofthe avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modernbirds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organisms cannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.
Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection –- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wells refers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authority on the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of the scientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanismin moths.
Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finchesduring a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection –- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended,and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant just as an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches track changes in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes in characteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-term changes in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breeding stocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers have published more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in the wild.
Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution –- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is not evidence for evolution per se.
Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident –- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says:"Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a series of steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homosapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of the human family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across thepage. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with many splinter groups having traveled down dead ends… " Wells has not presented an accurate account of what is now known about human evolution.
Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact –- even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. The claims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on amisrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM so as to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.
Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.
The writer is grateful to Dr. Robert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/147/22.0.html
Were the Darwinists Wrong?
National Geographic stacks the deck.
By Thomas Woodward | posted 11/23/2004
"Have you seen the cover of the latest National Geographic issue?"
In recent weeks, this question came to me in countless phone messages and
e-mails, not to mention a dozen personal encounters. A campus worker in
Berlin sent an urgent e-mail after spotting the German edition. My friends
and academic colleagues are curious what I - a speaker and writer on the
debate between Darwinism and intelligent design theory - thought about the
magazine's provocative cover story, which boldly asks, "Was Darwin Wrong?"
Readers were jolted around the world that such a question should leap from
the cover of National Geographic. Hopes surged for a few seconds among
skeptics of evolution, until they turned to David Quammen's article, which
answers with a loud, triumphal "No!" Quammen's piece unfolds as a
glittering showcase for Darwinism, a reassuring mini-museum in print. Ten
pages of text - more in the genre of high school cheerleading than sober
analysis - are embedded in a lush gallery of 22 pages of glossy pictures,
including an amazing array of nine separate "sidebar" mini-articles.
If we imagine the "clash of two theories" - the older notion of "separate
creations" by a supremely wise designer, versus Darwin's "common ancestry"
of all life, driven by natural selection - it appears here that the younger
system has utterly crushed the older. Sketched in terms of a basketball
tourney, Quammen paints a complete rout - a 118-0 shutout.
One triumphal paragraph, which serves as an opening sketch of Quammen's
thrust, refers to Darwinian macroevolution as "deeply persuasive - a theory
you can take to the bank. The essential points are slightly more
complicated than most people assume, but not so complicated that they can't
be comprehended by any attentive person. Furthermore, the supporting
evidence is abundant, various, ever increasing, solidly interconnected, and
easily available in museums Š and a mountainous accumulation of
peer-reviewed scientific studies."The reader, leafing through dazzling
color illustrations, tracing a series of arguments, evidences, and
historical summaries, is led gently, but steadily, to one "overwhelming"
conclusion: Only pitiful ignorance (or worse, religious bias and fear)
could keep a normal-thinking adult from embracing Darwinian evolution as
FACT.
My emphasis on the word "fact" is designed to convey the sense of brimming
confidence which is the article's emotional subtext. The editor's purpose
was, quite literally, to overwhelm the reader. In fact, the first page
tells us of evolution's "overwhelming evidence" - twice, in headline and
text.
Several scholars have noted in recent weeks that throughout the article,
small-scale or modest "variations" in animals are treated blithely as
evidence for the origin of new organs or body structures-what biologists
call "macroevolution." Huge unsolved problems that plague the current
gene-centered macroevolutionary theory - revealed in such cutting-edge
texts as MIT Press's
Origination of Organismal Form - are not mentioned.
Ignoring the opposition
Most significantly, there is no hint that intelligent, well-informed
dissent exists anywhere in the university world. As I read Quammen's
article, I kept looking in vain for his response to the telling critiques
of the Intelligent Design Movement. This is puzzling, in light of the
conundrum that is confronted in the article: Why so many Americans still
doubt Darwinism?
In terms of specific evidences (and "evidence" is a key word for Quammen),
major questions are unaddressed: Why not discuss the Cambrian Explosion?
Or the mystery of how complex molecular wonders such as the blood clotting
system or the flagellum could have possibly formed, step-by-Darwinian-step?
Why not confront, at least briefly, the riddle of how the vast quantities
of genetic information, sufficient to run even the simplest living system,
arose? And most tellingly: Why not reveal the widespread questioning of the
creative power of natural selection - a foundational problem now widely
admitted even among evolutionary researchers?
In a nutshell: How can an article of this importance completely ignore the
scholarly labors of a mushrooming network of scientists at leading
universities who have held important university-based symposia, and
published over fifty books in the last decade?
It appears that we can draw a significant conclusion about defensive
tactics. This "silent treatment" is how defenders of a creaking paradigm
will act when it comes to the task of persuading the undereducated.
Quammen's pedagogical strategy - a "dumbing-down" of the question of
origins-simply sidesteps a half-dozen key flashpoints. Effectively, the ID
Movement doesn't exist.
Quammen cannot be ignorant of Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, or of his
published responses to his critics. He probably is aware of Jonathan
Wells' cogent criticism of the "classic proofs" of Darwinism in Icons of
Evolution. Besides, the design-detection system, published William Dembski
in The Design Inference and other books, is now common knowledge among most
evolutionary spokespersons, especially now that PBS stations across the US
have aired the pro-ID documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
Biologists may try to nurture the illusion that ID is fading, but
publishing trends point the other way. Stephen Meyer published in August a
pro-ID article in a refereed scientific journal (Proceedings of the
Biological Society of Washington), followed by a research article on
proteins in another key journal by Behe and University of Pittsburgh
physicist David Snoke. ID is not fading; it is advancing into crucial new
territory: refereed technical journals.
Alas, National Geographic knows that it can never overwhelm the reader if
such unsolved problems and blistering dissent are squarely faced. The late
Stephen Jay Gould adopted the same approach in his tome, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory, published shortly before his death in 2002. In the
course of 1433 pages, he did not mention a single ID scholar or argument,
even though he was familiar with ID, having attacked Phillip Johnson in
print as early as 1992. It's the easiest strategy in facing scientific
dissent: Act as if the dissenters do not exist.
Drawing a lesson
There is an important lesson to be drawn from Quammen's concluding
recollection of his visit with Philip Gingerich, a University of Michigan
paleontologist. Gingerich is described as a "reverent empiricist" who
"grew up in a conservative church in the Midwest and was not taught
anything about evolution."
"The subject was clearly skirted," said Gingerich, yet that background
helps him "understand the people who are skeptical about [evolution]." Now
he finds the experience of discovery a spiritual one. The factual answers
to his questions are in the "rocks of the ages." Gingerich's church
experience of "skirting the subject" of evolution is a tragic misstep of
church leadership that need not, and should not, be duplicated today.
An explosion of resources in this area have made it much easier for any
follower of Christ to evaluate the issues of Darwinism and Design from all
sides, and not from National Geographic's perspective that simply assumes
that nature - all on its own - has the ability to craft the diversity and
complexity of life on its own.
Paul identified the downward spiral in Romans chapter one as one where men
deified dumb nature, imbuing it with powers and spiritual significance that
can never be justified. The Christian, aware of this pitfall, and armed
with the best arguments and evidence on both sides of the issue, can
systematically compare and evaluate evolutionary theory and intelligent
design theory. For the philosophical naturalist, "nature is all there is."
Thus, the question of origins leads quickly to a guaranteed result: Darwin
wins, in a lopsided shutout.
Thomas Woodward is author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent
Design (Baker), a 2004 Christianity Today Book Award winner.
Were the Darwinists Wrong?
National Geographic stacks the deck.
By Thomas Woodward | posted 11/23/2004
"Have you seen the cover of the latest National Geographic issue?"
In recent weeks, this question came to me in countless phone messages and
e-mails, not to mention a dozen personal encounters. A campus worker in
Berlin sent an urgent e-mail after spotting the German edition. My friends
and academic colleagues are curious what I - a speaker and writer on the
debate between Darwinism and intelligent design theory - thought about the
magazine's provocative cover story, which boldly asks, "Was Darwin Wrong?"
Readers were jolted around the world that such a question should leap from
the cover of National Geographic. Hopes surged for a few seconds among
skeptics of evolution, until they turned to David Quammen's article, which
answers with a loud, triumphal "No!" Quammen's piece unfolds as a
glittering showcase for Darwinism, a reassuring mini-museum in print. Ten
pages of text - more in the genre of high school cheerleading than sober
analysis - are embedded in a lush gallery of 22 pages of glossy pictures,
including an amazing array of nine separate "sidebar" mini-articles.
If we imagine the "clash of two theories" - the older notion of "separate
creations" by a supremely wise designer, versus Darwin's "common ancestry"
of all life, driven by natural selection - it appears here that the younger
system has utterly crushed the older. Sketched in terms of a basketball
tourney, Quammen paints a complete rout - a 118-0 shutout.
One triumphal paragraph, which serves as an opening sketch of Quammen's
thrust, refers to Darwinian macroevolution as "deeply persuasive - a theory
you can take to the bank. The essential points are slightly more
complicated than most people assume, but not so complicated that they can't
be comprehended by any attentive person. Furthermore, the supporting
evidence is abundant, various, ever increasing, solidly interconnected, and
easily available in museums Š and a mountainous accumulation of
peer-reviewed scientific studies."The reader, leafing through dazzling
color illustrations, tracing a series of arguments, evidences, and
historical summaries, is led gently, but steadily, to one "overwhelming"
conclusion: Only pitiful ignorance (or worse, religious bias and fear)
could keep a normal-thinking adult from embracing Darwinian evolution as
FACT.
My emphasis on the word "fact" is designed to convey the sense of brimming
confidence which is the article's emotional subtext. The editor's purpose
was, quite literally, to overwhelm the reader. In fact, the first page
tells us of evolution's "overwhelming evidence" - twice, in headline and
text.
Several scholars have noted in recent weeks that throughout the article,
small-scale or modest "variations" in animals are treated blithely as
evidence for the origin of new organs or body structures-what biologists
call "macroevolution." Huge unsolved problems that plague the current
gene-centered macroevolutionary theory - revealed in such cutting-edge
texts as MIT Press's
Origination of Organismal Form - are not mentioned.
Ignoring the opposition
Most significantly, there is no hint that intelligent, well-informed
dissent exists anywhere in the university world. As I read Quammen's
article, I kept looking in vain for his response to the telling critiques
of the Intelligent Design Movement. This is puzzling, in light of the
conundrum that is confronted in the article: Why so many Americans still
doubt Darwinism?
In terms of specific evidences (and "evidence" is a key word for Quammen),
major questions are unaddressed: Why not discuss the Cambrian Explosion?
Or the mystery of how complex molecular wonders such as the blood clotting
system or the flagellum could have possibly formed, step-by-Darwinian-step?
Why not confront, at least briefly, the riddle of how the vast quantities
of genetic information, sufficient to run even the simplest living system,
arose? And most tellingly: Why not reveal the widespread questioning of the
creative power of natural selection - a foundational problem now widely
admitted even among evolutionary researchers?
In a nutshell: How can an article of this importance completely ignore the
scholarly labors of a mushrooming network of scientists at leading
universities who have held important university-based symposia, and
published over fifty books in the last decade?
It appears that we can draw a significant conclusion about defensive
tactics. This "silent treatment" is how defenders of a creaking paradigm
will act when it comes to the task of persuading the undereducated.
Quammen's pedagogical strategy - a "dumbing-down" of the question of
origins-simply sidesteps a half-dozen key flashpoints. Effectively, the ID
Movement doesn't exist.
Quammen cannot be ignorant of Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, or of his
published responses to his critics. He probably is aware of Jonathan
Wells' cogent criticism of the "classic proofs" of Darwinism in Icons of
Evolution. Besides, the design-detection system, published William Dembski
in The Design Inference and other books, is now common knowledge among most
evolutionary spokespersons, especially now that PBS stations across the US
have aired the pro-ID documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
Biologists may try to nurture the illusion that ID is fading, but
publishing trends point the other way. Stephen Meyer published in August a
pro-ID article in a refereed scientific journal (Proceedings of the
Biological Society of Washington), followed by a research article on
proteins in another key journal by Behe and University of Pittsburgh
physicist David Snoke. ID is not fading; it is advancing into crucial new
territory: refereed technical journals.
Alas, National Geographic knows that it can never overwhelm the reader if
such unsolved problems and blistering dissent are squarely faced. The late
Stephen Jay Gould adopted the same approach in his tome, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory, published shortly before his death in 2002. In the
course of 1433 pages, he did not mention a single ID scholar or argument,
even though he was familiar with ID, having attacked Phillip Johnson in
print as early as 1992. It's the easiest strategy in facing scientific
dissent: Act as if the dissenters do not exist.
Drawing a lesson
There is an important lesson to be drawn from Quammen's concluding
recollection of his visit with Philip Gingerich, a University of Michigan
paleontologist. Gingerich is described as a "reverent empiricist" who
"grew up in a conservative church in the Midwest and was not taught
anything about evolution."
"The subject was clearly skirted," said Gingerich, yet that background
helps him "understand the people who are skeptical about [evolution]." Now
he finds the experience of discovery a spiritual one. The factual answers
to his questions are in the "rocks of the ages." Gingerich's church
experience of "skirting the subject" of evolution is a tragic misstep of
church leadership that need not, and should not, be duplicated today.
An explosion of resources in this area have made it much easier for any
follower of Christ to evaluate the issues of Darwinism and Design from all
sides, and not from National Geographic's perspective that simply assumes
that nature - all on its own - has the ability to craft the diversity and
complexity of life on its own.
Paul identified the downward spiral in Romans chapter one as one where men
deified dumb nature, imbuing it with powers and spiritual significance that
can never be justified. The Christian, aware of this pitfall, and armed
with the best arguments and evidence on both sides of the issue, can
systematically compare and evaluate evolutionary theory and intelligent
design theory. For the philosophical naturalist, "nature is all there is."
Thus, the question of origins leads quickly to a guaranteed result: Darwin
wins, in a lopsided shutout.
Thomas Woodward is author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent
Design (Baker), a 2004 Christianity Today Book Award winner.
Legislation pending to allow de facto and gay couples to marry [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 04:08:59 PM
" ... legislation pending to allow de facto and gay couples to marry"
- Garth Bray
TVNZ reporter commentating
TV1 late nite news 17 Nov 04
Note the diabolical confusion this innocent-looking young man
glibly creates.
De facto couples are of course free to marry any time they wish,
under current law. They can use a civil celebrant if they wish - and
about half the marriages lately are (according to Arnold R Turner S.M) of
this non-church kind. There is no "legislation to allow de facto couples
to marry" pending, because they are already free to marry.
Mr Bray deceptively mentions, as if equivalent to that non-issue,
the Civil Union bill & its companion bill to create by legislation marriage
(in all but name) for homX & lesbian couples. Mr Bray is - perhaps
unintentionally - conflating two very different issues.
The intention of the Heather Simpson regime is evidently to
undermine marriage. It is all too easy to forget that their prime ideology
- WimminsLib, so misleadingly called "feminism" - is powered in
political activism by man-hating lesbians. Him Kill brought on national
radio by cellphone from some S. Pac tourist resort some obscure Yank
pseudo-expert solemnly intoning
"the family is more dangerous than the darkest alley"
to which Kill Him did not object at all. Those who power the appalling
injustice of framing men on "recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse"
use the term "family of origin" in pretending that happier social units are
formed by lesbians who have renounced their families. The strong tendency
to violence in lesbian households, and the wicked handicaps imposed on
children who have the misfortune to grow up in households with no stable
man resident, are suppressed by the media.
It is a severe drawback of our current political fads that we
cannot tell where Mss H Clark, M Wilson, H Fletcher esq, J Fitzsimons etc
stand in the spectrum hetX - bi - homX. It looks to me as if Wellington hs
been dominated for a decade by a murky, ever-shifting set of lesbian &
bisexual relationships. Numerous irrational political power-plays waste
much time & effort when there are more urgent real problems than ever.
Meanwhile the mischievous Ms H Fletcher CJ has been able to divert
our Parliament onto a sickening confusion of racial strife.
- Garth Bray
TVNZ reporter commentating
TV1 late nite news 17 Nov 04
Note the diabolical confusion this innocent-looking young man
glibly creates.
De facto couples are of course free to marry any time they wish,
under current law. They can use a civil celebrant if they wish - and
about half the marriages lately are (according to Arnold R Turner S.M) of
this non-church kind. There is no "legislation to allow de facto couples
to marry" pending, because they are already free to marry.
Mr Bray deceptively mentions, as if equivalent to that non-issue,
the Civil Union bill & its companion bill to create by legislation marriage
(in all but name) for homX & lesbian couples. Mr Bray is - perhaps
unintentionally - conflating two very different issues.
The intention of the Heather Simpson regime is evidently to
undermine marriage. It is all too easy to forget that their prime ideology
- WimminsLib, so misleadingly called "feminism" - is powered in
political activism by man-hating lesbians. Him Kill brought on national
radio by cellphone from some S. Pac tourist resort some obscure Yank
pseudo-expert solemnly intoning
"the family is more dangerous than the darkest alley"
to which Kill Him did not object at all. Those who power the appalling
injustice of framing men on "recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse"
use the term "family of origin" in pretending that happier social units are
formed by lesbians who have renounced their families. The strong tendency
to violence in lesbian households, and the wicked handicaps imposed on
children who have the misfortune to grow up in households with no stable
man resident, are suppressed by the media.
It is a severe drawback of our current political fads that we
cannot tell where Mss H Clark, M Wilson, H Fletcher esq, J Fitzsimons etc
stand in the spectrum hetX - bi - homX. It looks to me as if Wellington hs
been dominated for a decade by a murky, ever-shifting set of lesbian &
bisexual relationships. Numerous irrational political power-plays waste
much time & effort when there are more urgent real problems than ever.
Meanwhile the mischievous Ms H Fletcher CJ has been able to divert
our Parliament onto a sickening confusion of racial strife.
http://www.christian-underground.com
Tuesday Nov 16, 2004
I Will Pray
When I Want
Where I Want
School
Work
The Street
The Mall
Persecute Me
At Your Own Peril
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Pentagon has just >>>settled<<< an ACLU lawsuit that requires it to warn
military bases not to directly sponsor Boy Scout troops because the group
requires a belief in God for membership.
Write a letter of protest to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the
Pentagon caving in to the ACLU.
If we can not trust our Secretary of Defense to stand up to them (ACLU) and
protect our liberties, how can we trust him to protect us from others who
wish to take away our families liberty?
TVC has an easy tool set up to send Rumsfeld a letter:
http://capwiz.com/traditional/issues/alert/?alertid=6660921&type=AN
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Support the Christian Underground
- Spread the word! Share this email with others!
- Make a Contribution (Via PayPal)(Not Tax Deductible)
http://www.christian-underground.com/donate.php
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
* Subscription Info *
Was this email forwarded to you?
Want to join this list?
Simply fill out the subscription form located at
http://www.christian-underground.com/portal.php
Tuesday Nov 16, 2004
I Will Pray
When I Want
Where I Want
School
Work
The Street
The Mall
Persecute Me
At Your Own Peril
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Pentagon has just >>>settled<<< an ACLU lawsuit that requires it to warn
military bases not to directly sponsor Boy Scout troops because the group
requires a belief in God for membership.
Write a letter of protest to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the
Pentagon caving in to the ACLU.
If we can not trust our Secretary of Defense to stand up to them (ACLU) and
protect our liberties, how can we trust him to protect us from others who
wish to take away our families liberty?
TVC has an easy tool set up to send Rumsfeld a letter:
http://capwiz.com/traditional/issues/alert/?alertid=6660921&type=AN
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Support the Christian Underground
- Spread the word! Share this email with others!
- Make a Contribution (Via PayPal)(Not Tax Deductible)
http://www.christian-underground.com/donate.php
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
* Subscription Info *
Was this email forwarded to you?
Want to join this list?
Simply fill out the subscription form located at
http://www.christian-underground.com/portal.php
11/27/04
Episcopal bishop won't suspend priests involved in Druid rites [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 12:28:47 AM
Episcopal bishop won't suspend priests involved in Druid rites
(Wed, Nov/10/2004)
DOWNINGTOWN, Pa. - Two Episcopal priests who led Druidic activity will
not be suspended, said a bishop, who blamed the local scandal on
conservative groups out to destabilize the Episcopal Church USA.
The Rev. William Melnyk and his wife, the Rev. Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk, had
participated only in "exploratory thinking" with Druid circles as
students of pre-Christian Celtic spirituality, said Bishop Charles E.
Bennison, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.
But his discussions with the couple, he said, convinced him that they
had not led any Druid groups or joined nature-worshiping Druid rites.
"They made a small error of judgment that has been very costly to their
ministry and their church, and the church at large," Bennison said
Tuesday.
Melnyk resigned Saturday as rector of St. James' Church in Downingtown,
after a parish board asked him to step down. His wife remains rector of
St. Francis-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Malvern.
The couple's involvement in Druidism came to light last month after the
Episcopal Church's women's ministry listed two of the couple's Druidic
liturgies on its Web site for possible use in developing feminist
liturgies. The church removed the liturgies, but several Christian
groups and private Web sites accused the church of promoting pagan
rites. The church denied it.
Last week, the Melnyks wrote letters of apology, saying they "recanted
and repudiated" their Druid connection, and that their goal had been to
reach out to marginal Christians.
Bennison said he would send the couple written reprimands.
The Washington-based conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy
alerted Christian media to the online rites, and aimed "to intimidate
people in our church ... who would think out of the box," Bennison said.
Erik Nelson, research associate for the institute's Episcopal Action
Project, said he was surprised Bennison "would continue to defend (the
two priests) when they repented and admitted it was wrong."
Ruppe-Melnyk, reached at her church Tuesday, said, "We are just trying
to keep from escalating an unfortunate and misrepresented situation."
---
Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.philly.com
Article's URL:
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/103-11102004-398063.html
(Wed, Nov/10/2004)
DOWNINGTOWN, Pa. - Two Episcopal priests who led Druidic activity will
not be suspended, said a bishop, who blamed the local scandal on
conservative groups out to destabilize the Episcopal Church USA.
The Rev. William Melnyk and his wife, the Rev. Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk, had
participated only in "exploratory thinking" with Druid circles as
students of pre-Christian Celtic spirituality, said Bishop Charles E.
Bennison, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.
But his discussions with the couple, he said, convinced him that they
had not led any Druid groups or joined nature-worshiping Druid rites.
"They made a small error of judgment that has been very costly to their
ministry and their church, and the church at large," Bennison said
Tuesday.
Melnyk resigned Saturday as rector of St. James' Church in Downingtown,
after a parish board asked him to step down. His wife remains rector of
St. Francis-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Malvern.
The couple's involvement in Druidism came to light last month after the
Episcopal Church's women's ministry listed two of the couple's Druidic
liturgies on its Web site for possible use in developing feminist
liturgies. The church removed the liturgies, but several Christian
groups and private Web sites accused the church of promoting pagan
rites. The church denied it.
Last week, the Melnyks wrote letters of apology, saying they "recanted
and repudiated" their Druid connection, and that their goal had been to
reach out to marginal Christians.
Bennison said he would send the couple written reprimands.
The Washington-based conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy
alerted Christian media to the online rites, and aimed "to intimidate
people in our church ... who would think out of the box," Bennison said.
Erik Nelson, research associate for the institute's Episcopal Action
Project, said he was surprised Bennison "would continue to defend (the
two priests) when they repented and admitted it was wrong."
Ruppe-Melnyk, reached at her church Tuesday, said, "We are just trying
to keep from escalating an unfortunate and misrepresented situation."
---
Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.philly.com
Article's URL:
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/103-11102004-398063.html
NZ Anglican Bishops' response to the "Windsor" "Report" [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 12:17:50 AM
Were you aware that the NZ Anglican Bishops had issued a response to the
"Windsor" "Report"?
http://anglican.webstation.net.nz/main/windsor2004nz/
PASTORAL LETTER FROM ALL THE BISHOPS OF THEANGLICAN CHURCH
IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AND POLYNESIA TO THE MEMBERS OF OUR CHURCH
Greetings.
The Windsor Report from the Lambeth Commission on Communion
reached the media before the Church it was written for had read it. The
debate triggered on the Internet before and after the report's release
bears little resemblance to the careful and prayerful process of reception
that the Commission proposes.
Much of the media debate has little to do with what the Windsor
Report is really about - which is the question of how we stay together as
churches within the Anglican Communion and how we keep talking to each
other across significant divisions of culture, history, and understanding
of Scripture.
The Commission of 19 people from 14 of the 38 provinces of the
Anglican Communion included 2 New Zealanders, Bishop John Paterson of
Auckland and Dr Jenny Plane Te Paa, Ahorangi of Te Rau Kahikatea. We are
grateful to them for their comprehensive 93 page report, and commend it to
every local church for study and reflection. Especially valuable in our
view is the section on fundamental principles of scriptural authority and
interpretation. This section provides a rich resource for us all and
contains some challenging proposals for holding the authority of scripture
along side the principle of making decisions as close as possible to the
local level, and the discernment of which issues we can disagree about
without dividing the Church.
The report contains a number of strong recommendations that will
need to be considered by a much longer process of consultation
internationally, beginning with the meeting of the Primates in February
2005 and followed by the Anglican Consultative Council which meets in July
next year. Our own General Synod in May 2006 will need to address the
outcome of this international consultation process and discern what
decisions are appropriate for the life of this Church.
The strongest recommendations address the Episcopal Church of the
USA, and invite that church to express regret for ordaining the Bishop of
New Hampshire without sufficient consultation with the rest of the
communion. It also called for a moratorium on the ordination of any
further bishops who live in same gender unions until "some new consensus"
emerges internationally, among Anglicans.
Bishops were urged not to proceed with approving rites for the
blessing of same sex unions. More biblical and theological study of the
issue was encouraged, including a need for clarity about the distinction
between same sex union and same sex marriage.
A very strong recommendation calls on bishops who believe they
should intervene in other dioceses and provinces to express regret and
cease any further interventions.
We have yet to hear how those directly addressed by all these
calls will respond.
The report is very valuable in the advice it gives on maintaining
dialogue across deep divisions which can so easily be jeopardised by
precipitous action and demeaning the oversight role and authority of the
bishop.
Among the ways ahead that the Commission proposes is a number of
recommendations that would strengthen the international role of the
Anglican Communion and its councils as "instruments of unity". A proposal
for an Anglican Covenant is offered in order to foster "greater unity and
consolidate our understandings of communion", and a clearer and better
supported role for the Archbishop of Canterbury is outlined.
We are encouraged that much of the spirit and direction of this
report echoes our own General Synod resolution in May 2004, including the
acknowledgement of the ministries and contributions of gay and lesbian
people in this Church. We note that discussions following our General
Synod have heard a clear call from Tikanga Maori and Tikanga Pacifika for
more time to work separately in addressing issues of sexuality, both
culturally and theologically. We also note that this report does not
address the issue of new ordinations of gay and lesbian people, any more
than it addresses the question of homosexuality in general. Those matters
were outside its mandate. But the work on the same issues that we have
called for in our General Synod still remains to be done.
In our deep concern over all these issues and their potential to
divide us, we are determined as bishops not to close any doors or drop a
portcullis on the debate. Our determination is to keep the dialogue going
respectfully in order to win each other over, not to one side or the other,
but to the values of the Gospel that we share and that calls us all to
account.
In the words of the Windsor Report, "our aim is to work for healing
and restoration. The real challenge of the Gospel iswhether we live deeply
enough in the love of Christ, and care sufficiently for our joint work to
bring that love to the world, that we will 'make every effort to maintain
the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace' Ephesians 4-3.
As the primates stated in 2000, 'to turn from one another would be
to turn away from the cross', and indeed from serving the world which God
loves and for which Jesus Christ died."
Christ's peace be with you all.
22 October 2004
"Windsor" "Report"?
http://anglican.webstation.net.nz/main/windsor2004nz/
PASTORAL LETTER FROM ALL THE BISHOPS OF THEANGLICAN CHURCH
IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AND POLYNESIA TO THE MEMBERS OF OUR CHURCH
Greetings.
The Windsor Report from the Lambeth Commission on Communion
reached the media before the Church it was written for had read it. The
debate triggered on the Internet before and after the report's release
bears little resemblance to the careful and prayerful process of reception
that the Commission proposes.
Much of the media debate has little to do with what the Windsor
Report is really about - which is the question of how we stay together as
churches within the Anglican Communion and how we keep talking to each
other across significant divisions of culture, history, and understanding
of Scripture.
The Commission of 19 people from 14 of the 38 provinces of the
Anglican Communion included 2 New Zealanders, Bishop John Paterson of
Auckland and Dr Jenny Plane Te Paa, Ahorangi of Te Rau Kahikatea. We are
grateful to them for their comprehensive 93 page report, and commend it to
every local church for study and reflection. Especially valuable in our
view is the section on fundamental principles of scriptural authority and
interpretation. This section provides a rich resource for us all and
contains some challenging proposals for holding the authority of scripture
along side the principle of making decisions as close as possible to the
local level, and the discernment of which issues we can disagree about
without dividing the Church.
The report contains a number of strong recommendations that will
need to be considered by a much longer process of consultation
internationally, beginning with the meeting of the Primates in February
2005 and followed by the Anglican Consultative Council which meets in July
next year. Our own General Synod in May 2006 will need to address the
outcome of this international consultation process and discern what
decisions are appropriate for the life of this Church.
The strongest recommendations address the Episcopal Church of the
USA, and invite that church to express regret for ordaining the Bishop of
New Hampshire without sufficient consultation with the rest of the
communion. It also called for a moratorium on the ordination of any
further bishops who live in same gender unions until "some new consensus"
emerges internationally, among Anglicans.
Bishops were urged not to proceed with approving rites for the
blessing of same sex unions. More biblical and theological study of the
issue was encouraged, including a need for clarity about the distinction
between same sex union and same sex marriage.
A very strong recommendation calls on bishops who believe they
should intervene in other dioceses and provinces to express regret and
cease any further interventions.
We have yet to hear how those directly addressed by all these
calls will respond.
The report is very valuable in the advice it gives on maintaining
dialogue across deep divisions which can so easily be jeopardised by
precipitous action and demeaning the oversight role and authority of the
bishop.
Among the ways ahead that the Commission proposes is a number of
recommendations that would strengthen the international role of the
Anglican Communion and its councils as "instruments of unity". A proposal
for an Anglican Covenant is offered in order to foster "greater unity and
consolidate our understandings of communion", and a clearer and better
supported role for the Archbishop of Canterbury is outlined.
We are encouraged that much of the spirit and direction of this
report echoes our own General Synod resolution in May 2004, including the
acknowledgement of the ministries and contributions of gay and lesbian
people in this Church. We note that discussions following our General
Synod have heard a clear call from Tikanga Maori and Tikanga Pacifika for
more time to work separately in addressing issues of sexuality, both
culturally and theologically. We also note that this report does not
address the issue of new ordinations of gay and lesbian people, any more
than it addresses the question of homosexuality in general. Those matters
were outside its mandate. But the work on the same issues that we have
called for in our General Synod still remains to be done.
In our deep concern over all these issues and their potential to
divide us, we are determined as bishops not to close any doors or drop a
portcullis on the debate. Our determination is to keep the dialogue going
respectfully in order to win each other over, not to one side or the other,
but to the values of the Gospel that we share and that calls us all to
account.
In the words of the Windsor Report, "our aim is to work for healing
and restoration. The real challenge of the Gospel iswhether we live deeply
enough in the love of Christ, and care sufficiently for our joint work to
bring that love to the world, that we will 'make every effort to maintain
the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace' Ephesians 4-3.
As the primates stated in 2000, 'to turn from one another would be
to turn away from the cross', and indeed from serving the world which God
loves and for which Jesus Christ died."
Christ's peace be with you all.
22 October 2004
11/26/04
The End of Illusions
Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm
By Joseph Loconte
Review by Ryan Zempel
Ryan Zempel is News and Politics Editor at Townhall.com.
Paul L. Blakely declares that "[i]n the moment that this country goes to
war, the guarantees of the American Constitution will be swept aside by
a dictatorship."
Georgia Harkness calls for an "international police force in a world
federation of states.... involving some surrender of national
sovereignty and much economic reorganization."
Harry Emerson Fosdick asserts that "the all but unanimous judgment seems
to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of
the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so."
Are Blakely, Harkness, and Fosdick modern-day liberals decrying the war
in Iraq?
No, they are pacifist theologians arguing against U.S. involvement in
World War II.
Their arguments are found in what is likely the most timely collection
of 60-plus year old essays ever published.
Compiled by Joseph Loconte, the essays found in The End of Illusions:
Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm are extremely
relevant today, echoing as they do many of today's arguments over the
war on terrorism.
Loconte frames the discussion as such in his introduction, and then
offers two sets of essays written from 1938 to 1941 -- the "peacemakers"
arguing against U.S. involvement in World War II, and the "prophets"
endorsing further U.S. assistance (whether militarily or otherwise) to
the Allies.
Although it is clear that Loconte (and, arguably, history itself) is on
the side of the interventionists, he presents the pacifists' best
arguments rather than easily knocked-down straw men.
Most of the pacifists approach the war having been ardent supporters of
World War I who were subsequently disillusioned when their idealistic
dreams came to naught at Versailles. Most are also theologically liberal
socialists who have discarded some fairly standard doctrines (hell, for
instance) and adopted the idea of human perfectionism.
When not making such ridiculous assertions as "[w]ithout military
opposition the Hitlers wither away", they make several rather
convincing arguments.
Their main contentions are that war is intrinsically evil; that Christ's
"law of love" requires nations to turn the other cheek; and that the war
is simply a "clash of imperialisms" between two equally culpable
parties.
Turning to the essays by the "prophets," one finds the pacifists'
arguments quickly and thoroughly obliterated, foremost by Reinhold
Niebuhr:
[M]ost modern forms of Christian pacifism are heretical. Presumably
inspired by the Christian gospel, they have really absorbed the
Renaissance faith in the goodness of man, have rejected the Christian
doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism, have
reinterpreted the Cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea
that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world, and
have rejected all other profound elements of the Christian gospel as
"Pauline" accretions which must be stripped from the "simple gospel of
Jesus." This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the
standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by
the facts of human existence. There are no historical realities which
remotely conform to it.
The other essayists similarly rebut the pacifists' arguments.
One of the more fascinating (and exceedingly relevant) essays is Lynn
Harold Hough's "Defending Justice Despite Our Own Injustice." Hough
targets those prophets of gloom who criticize their own nation in order
to eliminate any moral credibility it might have to oppose another. Such
people "use every ingenuity to find evil motives for good deeds and dark
purposes back of fair action." Sound familiar?
Hough instead agitates for action, regardless of our own nation's flaws.
"The evil which has been set loose upon the world must be crushed. And
we cannot wait for perfect men or perfect nations to crush it."
It is in Loconte's own summary of the interventionists' arguments that
the "law of love" doctrine is most succinctly combatted:
The pacifists tended to conflate the obligations of the Christian
community -- or, at least, one aspect of those obligations, the
requirement to love thy neighbor -- with the duties of government.
Indeed, if their policy could be reduced to a single biblical idea, it
would be to "turn the other cheek." The Christian realists repudiated
that view: the ethic of love expected of Jesus' followers could not be
imposed through politics on a sinful world; history had already revealed
the folly of that approach.
One fascinating inclusion in the book is an editorial which inspired
several of the essays. Titled "War and Peace: The failure of the Church
to teach absolute spiritual values will undermine Christian
civilization," it was published by Fortune magazine in January of 1940
and took the Church to task for failing to provide leadership and
spiritual absolutes in regards to the war. Specifically challenging the
pacifists' Versailles disillusionment, Fortune asserted that "[i]t is
for the flesh to be disillusioned, not for the soul."
Overall, The End of Illusions presents an excellent collection of the
theological arguments both for and against war. In this War on Terror
era in which preemptive war is a possibility, it is vital for each
person to have a base of beliefs regarding war from which they operate.
These essays, historically removed from the present circumstances, can
assist one in creating such a philosophy, grounded in basic principles
rather than colored by one's preexisting biases regarding the current
conflict.
Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm
By Joseph Loconte
Review by Ryan Zempel
Ryan Zempel is News and Politics Editor at Townhall.com.
Paul L. Blakely declares that "[i]n the moment that this country goes to
war, the guarantees of the American Constitution will be swept aside by
a dictatorship."
Georgia Harkness calls for an "international police force in a world
federation of states.... involving some surrender of national
sovereignty and much economic reorganization."
Harry Emerson Fosdick asserts that "the all but unanimous judgment seems
to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of
the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so."
Are Blakely, Harkness, and Fosdick modern-day liberals decrying the war
in Iraq?
No, they are pacifist theologians arguing against U.S. involvement in
World War II.
Their arguments are found in what is likely the most timely collection
of 60-plus year old essays ever published.
Compiled by Joseph Loconte, the essays found in The End of Illusions:
Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm are extremely
relevant today, echoing as they do many of today's arguments over the
war on terrorism.
Loconte frames the discussion as such in his introduction, and then
offers two sets of essays written from 1938 to 1941 -- the "peacemakers"
arguing against U.S. involvement in World War II, and the "prophets"
endorsing further U.S. assistance (whether militarily or otherwise) to
the Allies.
Although it is clear that Loconte (and, arguably, history itself) is on
the side of the interventionists, he presents the pacifists' best
arguments rather than easily knocked-down straw men.
Most of the pacifists approach the war having been ardent supporters of
World War I who were subsequently disillusioned when their idealistic
dreams came to naught at Versailles. Most are also theologically liberal
socialists who have discarded some fairly standard doctrines (hell, for
instance) and adopted the idea of human perfectionism.
When not making such ridiculous assertions as "[w]ithout military
opposition the Hitlers wither away", they make several rather
convincing arguments.
Their main contentions are that war is intrinsically evil; that Christ's
"law of love" requires nations to turn the other cheek; and that the war
is simply a "clash of imperialisms" between two equally culpable
parties.
Turning to the essays by the "prophets," one finds the pacifists'
arguments quickly and thoroughly obliterated, foremost by Reinhold
Niebuhr:
[M]ost modern forms of Christian pacifism are heretical. Presumably
inspired by the Christian gospel, they have really absorbed the
Renaissance faith in the goodness of man, have rejected the Christian
doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism, have
reinterpreted the Cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea
that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world, and
have rejected all other profound elements of the Christian gospel as
"Pauline" accretions which must be stripped from the "simple gospel of
Jesus." This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the
standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by
the facts of human existence. There are no historical realities which
remotely conform to it.
The other essayists similarly rebut the pacifists' arguments.
One of the more fascinating (and exceedingly relevant) essays is Lynn
Harold Hough's "Defending Justice Despite Our Own Injustice." Hough
targets those prophets of gloom who criticize their own nation in order
to eliminate any moral credibility it might have to oppose another. Such
people "use every ingenuity to find evil motives for good deeds and dark
purposes back of fair action." Sound familiar?
Hough instead agitates for action, regardless of our own nation's flaws.
"The evil which has been set loose upon the world must be crushed. And
we cannot wait for perfect men or perfect nations to crush it."
It is in Loconte's own summary of the interventionists' arguments that
the "law of love" doctrine is most succinctly combatted:
The pacifists tended to conflate the obligations of the Christian
community -- or, at least, one aspect of those obligations, the
requirement to love thy neighbor -- with the duties of government.
Indeed, if their policy could be reduced to a single biblical idea, it
would be to "turn the other cheek." The Christian realists repudiated
that view: the ethic of love expected of Jesus' followers could not be
imposed through politics on a sinful world; history had already revealed
the folly of that approach.
One fascinating inclusion in the book is an editorial which inspired
several of the essays. Titled "War and Peace: The failure of the Church
to teach absolute spiritual values will undermine Christian
civilization," it was published by Fortune magazine in January of 1940
and took the Church to task for failing to provide leadership and
spiritual absolutes in regards to the war. Specifically challenging the
pacifists' Versailles disillusionment, Fortune asserted that "[i]t is
for the flesh to be disillusioned, not for the soul."
Overall, The End of Illusions presents an excellent collection of the
theological arguments both for and against war. In this War on Terror
era in which preemptive war is a possibility, it is vital for each
person to have a base of beliefs regarding war from which they operate.
These essays, historically removed from the present circumstances, can
assist one in creating such a philosophy, grounded in basic principles
rather than colored by one's preexisting biases regarding the current
conflict.
> I'm glad you requoted that discussion; I had lost the original in a
>change of computers or some mishap.
I dare say you'd also lost my comments on Cantab fisofoly prof
Simon Blackburn - copied below, with StartonBoost®.
> A book that impressed me many years ago was called 'Straight and Crooked
>Thinking'.
- by Robt Thouless - it impressed me too, in 1960.
> It named various errors of argument by reference to stories that
>illustrated them. 'The No True Scotsman Argument' is described here.
>
> http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/n/no/no_true_scotsman.html
>
> You will no doubt have heard the joke
>
> Q: 'Why does it take four premenstrual women to change a lightbulb?'
> A: 'It just DOES!!!!!'
>
> I propose to name the argument in question the 'PMT lightbulb argument.'
>
Nice try - see if you can track down Thouless and ask him whether
it exemplifies any fallacy that he recognises and that is not yet named.
I fear it won't do so.
It does suffer from the handicap of starting with a statement which
is only a joke. To exemplify total refusal of logic, it will be clearer if
a straightforward joke-free start is made.
> Essentially my position is that it is legitimate to answer some questions
>with the statement 'I don't know'.
I'm entirely sympathetic to that generality. What does it have to
do with the 'bulk crazed women changing light-bulb' joke?
I remind you at this point that what Christians claim is only
belief - that is what really matters. True, Christian beliefs are based,
where possible, on long careful thought - which is more than you can
claim for your supposedly clever inventions. But the key output is merely
the most reasonable belief. Knowledge we freely admit to be harder to come
by; luckily, it doesn't matter so much as the beliefs on which one bases
one's decisions.
> If theists can't tolerate that, they tend to create an answer, usually
>magical, and invariably non-falsifiable.
On the other hand, aggressive scientism proponents such as Dawkins
tend to imply that all is explained by their version of science.
Your hinted appeal to Popper's idea is a largely irrelevant attempt
to impose scientism - the assumption that only scientific knowledge
counts as knowledge. We are involved with a broader canvas.
> Thus the question 'How did the Big Bang happen' is one that, as far as I
>understand it, has no clear scientific answer at present. The question
>can be re-expressed in anthropomorphic terms as 'Who assembled the
>explosives for the Big Bang', or more prosaically 'Who made the Universe'.
>
>MY response would be to challenge the assumption that the cause of the
>Big Bang, or the Universe was a 'Who' rather than an 'It', and then say 'I
>dont know.'
>
>The theist response would be to announce that God made the Universe.
>This naturally suggests the next question; 'Who made God.'
>The point of asking it is to expose the absurdity of the hypothesis. It
>doesn't solve the problem.
>
yes, that is strictly correct. I thought I'd dealt with it, but
you don't seem to register.
Therefore I set out the logic more spaciously, as a logic tree.
first final cause
/
/
quasiUrge cause(s)
/
/
uncaused non-physical cause(s)
/
/
\/
universe began
See note inserted near end of Blackburn discussion (below).
> And if you think the PMT lightbulb argument will work at the God level,
>there is no good reason to say it won't work one step earlier (the
>Universe just IS), or one step later
>(The divinity who made God
This is a simple misuse of the term - by defn.
>just IS).
When & why did you dump Occam?
The non-physical cause(s) could be several. The chain of demiurges
could be long - or infinite, with about as much reason as Wheeler's
ludicrous 'bulk worlds' notion. But if you apply Occam's principle of not
multiplying entities needlessly, all that raving is dismissed to the Form
IV level which you claim to think I've not gone beyond.
You can babble like that only thru refusing to admit the categories
of cause which I pointed out to you but which you sense you can't afford to
face up to. That attitude is dishonest - and stupid. If you had faith
in truth, you would pursue it without fear.
The fallacy you've named is characterised by utter refusal to apply
any logic. I fully agree that deserves a name, and I'm pleasantly
surprised you've decided to name it in 'honour' of the sex which more often
does refuse to follow any logic - and not only premenstrually, as I
ruefully realise with my post-menopausal wife. But you are not entitled to
equate (furtively) utter lack of logic with wrong logic.
> Just deconstruct your own statement.
I'm so unsympathetic to the postmodernism that uses the verb
'deconstruct' that I have no practice at doing it. God is THE final
cause, the solution to the infinite regress problem.
That's what I've now diagrammed as a logic tree.
Now please review this commentary which i sent you a few y ago.
====================
Prof Blackburn puts old arguments in only slightly new ways, and
then, confident that his atheist/agnostic 'New Republic' USA readership
won't be familiar with old answers, creates an impression that he is
attacking theism with new unanswerable reason.
I insert comments on specific bits only. A more cohesive
counter-attack could be written affirmatively, but meanwhile here we are
defending piecemeal against serious crudities. I would be interested in
thoughts on the uses of this novel mode of writing made possible by simple
WP programs such as email.
>
>
>
>An Unbeautiful Mind
>by Simon Blackburn
>professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
>His recent books include Think (Oxford University Press) and Being Good
>(Oxford University Press).
>
>Post date: 08.02.02
>Issue date: 08.05.02
>Faith, Science and Understanding
>by John Polkinghorne
>(Yale University Press, 208 pp., $19.95)
>
>
>
>The God of Hope and the End of the World
> by John Polkinghorne
>(Yale University Press, 192 pp., $19.95)
>
>
...
>We evolved only because of a number of cosmic accidents, including the
>extinction of the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago.
Blackburn (B) seems to be saying humans couldn't have evolved if
dinosaurs hadn't died out. For one so bonded to science, this is a curious
utterance. How could it be tested? What does it really mean?
Insofar as it has any meaning, I see no incompatibility between
persistence of some dinosaurs and evolution of man. Mammals were already
evolving before the end of the dinosaurs, and we don't suppose those small
early mammals were as intelligent as man; so why are dinosaurs incompatible
with man?
>Nature shows us no particular favors: we get parasites and diseases and we
>die, and we are not all that nice to each other. True, we are moderately
>clever, but our efforts to use our intelligence to make things better for
>ourselves quite often backfire, and they may do so spectacularly in the
>near future, from some combination of manmade military, environmental, or
>genetic disasters.
I comment below on this old argument from evil.
>Thinking scientifically, what then might be the best explanation of the
>cosmos in which we find ourselves?
It is a basic fallacy to define the approach to such a question as
being solely by thinking scientifically. Science has little if anything to
contribute to such questions. It studies only matter & energy; this
self-limitation of scope is fine, but then (as Broom & I say) science is a
trespasser if attempting to pronounce on moral, let alone spiritual,
questions.
> What is the best explanation of the Vale of Tears in which human life
>plays itself out? The eighteenth century and (despite the best efforts of
>Hume and Kant) the early nineteenth century seized on the answer: there is
>a divine architect. It is often thought that Darwin scotched this answer
>by providing an evolutionary explanation of the existence of complex life.
>On this account, Hume and Kant failed to kill the argument of the divine
>architect, the argument from design, and it was only when Darwin came
>along that it withered in the popular imagination. Some scientists,
>notably Richard Dawkins, have been a little triumphalist about this.
This is a very biased statement. Dawkins has, very verbosely, said
almost nothing while claiming total victory; he has been not a little but a
ludicrous lot triumphalist.
> Polkinghorne's favorite fact is the minute adjustment of the various
>cosmological constants and magnitudes without which large atoms and
>molecules could not exist. Why do they have these fortunate properties?
>We do not know; and in the absence of fairly wild cosmological
>speculation, there is no evolutionary story to help us. Most scientists
>would surely leave it there. Maybe one day there will be a physical
>theory explaining the value of these constants, or maybe not.
This is a slightly novel way of defining final cause out of
existence. But that's all it is - a furtive axiom, claimed to be popular
among scientists but merely asserted - sheer bluff.
>But Polkinghorne jumps in. The problem signals the need for a "deeper
>form of intelligibility, going beyond the scientific." In other words, it
>must be due to the divine architect, or providence, lovingly going to all
>that trouble to make a universe especially for us.
This last sentence is a good example of the sudden degradations in
argumentative style to which this polemicist resorts. You will find
nothing of the sort in Temple's 'Nature, Man & God' but a scrupulously
neutral, genuinely polite style of argumentation.
If P or anyone else resorts to final (and formal) cause to explain
origins in nature, this is not rightly called "jumping in".
>Hume and Kant told us that such thinking is natural, but not scientific.
>It is extravagant, and it is not falsifiable, since it generates no new
>predictions. It merely represents a primitive preference for explaining
>the unknown in terms of agency rather than in terms of nature--a tendency
>that science had to suppress and to overcome before it could develop.
This is an interesting contradiction of Turner's account of the
origins of science. I know which one I believe.
>And it requires truly spectacular leaps of understanding. The minds
>that we know about are physically embodied and dependent upon physical
>brains. But the mind of the architect is not. Our minds cannot make
>things without materials and their abiding properties. But the architect
>can. Our minds require physical birth and nurture, language and culture.
>But the architect requires none of these things.
Yes; that is obviously the case. But instead of discussing it, B
begs the question - simply behaves as if any fool can see this is not
worth discussing.
>We also face a regress of second, third, and upward architects,
>meta-designers, each responsible for the previous one. After all, if the
>balance and the complexity of the world needs to be explained by a
>designer, then the superior balance and the superior complexity of this
>designer is also in need of explanation. But no, the divine mind is
>self-sufficient.
It is extremely unlikely that B is not familiar with the standard
answers to this line of talk. But he behaves as if he's not heard of
them. By now I begin to doubt his honesty.
{Now I insert an outline of those standard answers which a prof
like B has a duty to know but an enthusiastic ill-read amateur hasn't come
across.
I've already given a sufficient answer above. In hope that it will
have a better chance of sinking in if I also give a different wording:-
1 It may seem a logical possibility, in itself, that the
universe 'just is' - the apparently universal requirement for 4 causes
being wiped just for this special instance. I doubt even Hume tried this
one on. But as Broom and I have pointed out time & again, randomness will
not yield order, even given bulk megatime; indeed, even if the evidence
didn't point to a beginning, infinite time wouldn't explain how random
processes in physics & chem (i.e processes in matter & energy) could lead
to the evident order of ecology or of one 'simple' cell. To deny final
cause just because one dislikes the concept (notwithstanding one's using it
routinely in daily life) is to depart from reason.
2 Given design, the number of designers remains to be
discerned. There could be an demiurge, created by an quasiurge, who in
turn had been instituted by some hemiurge, created in turn as the first
rude effort of some infant deity who later abandoned it, ashamed of his
lame performance. But, as I say, why dump Occam? Is your motive for doing
so that you dislike the drift of the reasoning? Are you afrain that some
priest will try to sign you up? Relax ... coercion is not involved in
proper evangelism.
3 Natural theology thus points to (does not prove -
there, you have as you have always had, free admission we do not *know* -
so don't keep harping on that point as if it represents some king-hit for
atheism) one creator.
4 The nature of that creator then remains to be studied.
>But even waiving these familiar objections, where do the leaps of logic
>land us? If all of an architect's buildings use lots of glass, we presume
>that the architect is happy with glass.
Thinking scientifically, we might alternatively infer s/he is
unduly influenced by the glass suppliers. Two can play at Hume, you know;
but it's often a time-wasting diversion.
>We proportion cause to effect.
A vague remark (appearing to confuse quantitative with qualitative
explanation).
>Similarly, if all we know about a designer is that he designed a Vale of
>Tears, the natural inference, the scientific inference, the economical
>inference, is to a mind that gets off on Vales of Tears. Or more
>cautiously, one might speculate about a designer, or a design team, that
>either does not know about the tearful bits, or does not care about them,
>or cannot in any case do anything about them. Hume put the point in his
>inimitable way. He says of someone using the design argument:
>
>"This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to
>a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant
>deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is
>the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of
>derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in
>some superannuated deity; and ever since his death has run on at
>adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from
>him...."
>If we are told, moreover, that after death we go to another world that the
>same architect designed, our best bet--thinking scientifically, of course--
Again, this is a crude confusion: science has little potential to
investigate such spiritual questions. That does not prove they're unreal
- just not matter or energy.
>will be that this other creation of the same designer will be much like
>this one. If the just suffer and the unjust flourish in this world, that
>is probably how it will always be. Suffering worlds are what this
>architect does, judging from the one sample of his work that lies in view.
>Naturally enough, Hume concludes that so "wild and unsettled" a system of
>theology is in no way preferable to none at all. Or as Wittgenstein was
>later to say, nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can
>be said.
See Temple (& others) for the far more logical hope that the next
world will bring justice.
>
>II.
>
>The design argument is all you get, or in fact a bit beyond what you get,
>when you think scientifically.
The argument from morality is not ruled out from scientific
thinking, is it? Some properties of God can be inferred from our innate
sense of right & wrong. Existence of various codes of morality is a
different, more cultural matter - we need only note in passing that the
codes differ less than is sometimes suggested. But the sheer given fact of
one's mental world, that one tends to discern right from wrong and seek to
act rightly, is more surely known than anything from science. According to
Temple, the basis for fruitful philosophy is your directly experienced fact
that your life has meaning only in relation to other persons, and those
relations are inherently of a moral nature. The proper way to live is
accordingly to put one's faith in relations - with family & friends,
and with one's Maker. (This is Temple's big breach with what he calls the
disastrous attempt, beginning with Descartes and now giving us B, to build
up understanding individualistically.)
If then we follow Temple in seeing as the main foundation-stone in
our edifice of knowledge the fact that morality is inherent in the human,
there does have to exist some evil in order for 'good' to be meaningful.
If there were no evil, a long list of virtues could not exist - e.g.
courage, patience, self-sacrificing, hope, striving, and the final
convivial rejoicing of victory. Kipling's famous poem 'If' - though
excessively stern & demanding - gives a glimpse of some largely male
virtues; a huge body of song, graphic art, and literature praises
largely-female virtues. Many of the propensities which define the human as
distinct from all other species enable glorious achievements, but only at
the inescapable risk of choosing wrong instead. A vague disgruntlement at
the fact that God made a moral universe must take the cake for 'most futile
feeling'. Evil is around, as a matter of fact; let's make the best of this
reality.
The problem of evil, when over-rated, leads tragically to
deprivation of hope. The 'problem' of good is much more important to
philosophy: how can we account for the existence of so much *good* ?!
The Argument from Morality points to - though it cannot
prove - God as the explanation of good. (Some modern atheists point
instead, pathetically, to a mixture of chemicals called DNA.)
I thus argue B is wrong to assert that, thinking scientifically,
the design argument is all you get. The sheer fact that morality exists
seems to me at least as cogent to theism - and to dissuading atheism.
> So to bypass all the devastating Humean objections, the
>scientist-theologian has to make a break. The answer, unsurprisingly,
>does not lie in scientific thinking. It lies in revelation. The mind of
>the architect, read off from the world as a whole, does not do much for
>us.
This is much as insisted by Murray Rae - and why not? But the
mere words 'break' and 'unsurprisingly' insinuate that the reasoning which
B is describing is somehow invalid. What a bluff artist is this B !
> We have to cope with the world as it is, whatever we think about whether
>it is the creation of someone who creates worlds like this. But the
>architect's mind as revealed not by the world, but by what people say
>about it: now that is a different story.
>
>Revelation comes in two flavors: your own, or that of others, personal or
>historical. Polkinghorne allows for the former. At least he thinks that
>the experience of being bowled over by a piece of mathematics, or the
>awfulness of moral duty, or the beauty of the morning primrose, gives us
>glimmerings of the divine nature of providence. Or as he would put it,
>they afford fructifying and salvific multi-leveled encounters with
>Reality. "Encounter" is a favorite word in this kind of theology, because
>it neatly insinuates success without actually stating it.
This is a projection by B. He accuses "this kind of theology" of
using sneaky insinuation instead of proper argument. That's rich, coming
from him!
> Polkinghorne prudently concentrates upon history. Personal revelation is
>not really for Anglicans, raising on the one hand the Anglican dread of
>superstition and Rome, and on the other hand the Anglican loathing of
>enthusiasm and low-church anarchy.
This outsider makes bold claims to understand an organisation he is
not familiar with. I need do no more than deny, from my better-informed
position, his ignorant accusations.
>I approve of this caution: one man's revelation is indeed another man's
>lunacy. Better, then, to stick with established history, and especially
>with Scripture, the "laboratory notebooks of gifted observers of God's
>ways with men and women."
This 'approval' is from one dedicated not to truth but to polemical
atheism. It certainly should not define the path of reasoning for the rest
of us. Comprehensive theology will not be as restricted as he wishes.
>In a fairly typical passage, Polkinghorne writes: "I understand
>revelation not as being propositional knowledge ineffably conveyed, but as
>the record of the particularly transparent people and events through which
>God has graciously shown forth the divine nature." I find the phrasing
>here peculiar. You do not have to be an especially gifted observer of
>God's ways with men and women to notice that he doles out disease, famine,
>accident, parasites, pain, and death in spades.
This claim that God allows obviously gratuitous pain - B has not
mentioned God's allowing immorality - is not nearly as sound as he wants
you to assume.
It distresses me that Bertrand Russell "the most influential
philosopher of the 20th century" apparently never discussed with his friend
William Temple, *the* English intellect of his day, such misunderstandings
as Russell reveals in this quote:-
"When physical pain flares up beyond a point it is utterly ghastly
, the most ghastly thing on earth. God made it for his pleasure, having
full power to make a world without it. King Leopold, Caligula & the rest
were all gentle lambs compared with their Creator."
Russell's complaint exemplifies a type of argument (originally
promoted in the 18th century by Hume) which has lately become common: the
existence of any evil, or anyhow the existence of so hugely much evil as we
so readily observe, proves that God cannot be as traditionally believed -
all-powerful, all-knowing, & entirely good. The argument usually continues
to the effect that this defective God cannot be worthy of worship, so that
the arguer's atheism or agnosticism is supposedly justified.
Not only ordinary non-believers but even serious philosophers
continue to treat as if unresolved these arguments of Hume & Russell. The
extreme, qualitative version, complaining at God's allowing some - any -
evil, is not difficult to dispose of along the following lines. The surest
facts known are that we have free will and that we are a valuing animal:
the human conscious person makes choices, and the important choices are
between right and wrong (difficult though they often be to discern, and
more difficult to implement). The fact that I am a person willing to do
right instead of wrong is surer knowledge than any facts I can learn from
science (and many of those are pretty sure!). I hope each reader will find
similarly in honest thought.
To complain that God did wrong by creating a moral world, and that
God is therefore not deserving of worship, is not only fatuous but also
self-contradictory. Such nerdish evasiveness has diverted far too many
philosophers since the 17th-century "Enlightenment". In condemning God for
the existence of evil, one is stating a moral judgement, whereas anyone who
really objects to the existence of good & bad should, to be consistent,
refrain from forming any moral attitude to this supposed defect in God, or
indeed to anything. Such a pose is no basis for living.
The trendy notion of a 'safe' world is, when you think about it, a
vision of boring science-fiction robots, unrealistic, even repulsive. We
do have to put up with some bad in order to have any good. There is no
possibility, this side of the first 3 chapters of the Bible (which are
infinitely wiser than any attempted literal reading would suggest), of a
moral Disneyland in which we are guaranteed safety - absence of pain
whether from the fact that fire will sometimes burn and water drown or from
the choices of humans to do harm to others and to themselves or just to be
negligent. All we can do is to minimise harm as best we can.
Woolly-minded notions of abolishing violence should be replaced by the
target of minimising violence. Taking this duty seriously will, by the
way, require us to give much more guidance for children, backed up by a
judicious painful but non-injurious smack in certain circumstances.
Having agreed that some evil must exist, or at the very least that
it is pointless to complain at the qualitative fact, the quantitative
argument remains: need there be so much evil? How can we assess the
minimum extent of evil entailed in free will? If we cannot do that, at
least roughly, then how could anyone claim that there actually is
needlessly much evil? Supposing the onus of proof is on those who assert
there is gratuitously much evil, how can they discharge that burden? I for
one cannot see how much evil is entailed in even my own sinful nature, let
alone Caligula, Himmler or Richard Nixon. If on the other hand I have the
onus of proving that there is only as much evil as need be consequent upon
the exertions of about ten billion human wills, I must immediately say I
can't see how to do it. (I am sure such a task is far beyond all human
capability.)
I will instead rely on what I have been able to discern of the
Creator's intentions, from both natural theology and such explorations of
spiritual realms as have reached me through the leading civilisations of
the past two millennia. Those are the bases of my faith that, while nobody
can trace evils to causes in any comprehensive way, God has not permitted
more than need be. This is obviously a statement of faith, not of fact -
a choice of the sort forced upon us once we admit certitude is unavailable
in this matter. In a period of history which looks increasingly
apocalyptic, the validity of this faith is increasingly cogent.
> But the gifted see something different. In particular they see, or saw,
>events apparently occurring in first-century Palestine (rather than, say,
>seventh-century Arabia or nineteenth-century Salt Lake City). Who were
>these "particularly transparent people"? "Transparent" presumably means
>not so much guileless or gullible, but somehow receptive or tuned in, so
>as to be the chosen audience for the arrival of divinity on Earth.
>
> But that cannot be right either, since the Jews of first-century
>Palestine were not particularly receptive to the idea of an incarnation.
>They may have been waiting for a messiah, but their theological traditions
>found the idea of an incarnate God blasphemous. That is why, twenty years
>after the event, Paul had to start proselytizing in Asia Minor and Greece
This again is an invalid mode of arguing. Luke's magnificent
account 'how they brought the Good News from Jerusalem to Rome' (which is
the best history we have of that part of the Med in that period), and
Paul's letters to various Christian communities along the way, are not an
account let alone an admission of defeat turning aside to a somehow
secondary target; evangelism will be pursued in all directions as best one
can. Failure of many Jews in C1 and for that matter in C21 to see the
Messiah is regrettable, a puzzle, but not a test of Christianity's
validity.
The claims of Muhammed and Joseph Smith, alluded to, are judged on,
firstly, their own internal evidence. Smith's looks immediately dubious in
that it uses language never spoken by anybody. If God gave a new
revelation during C19 he would have used language that somebody, somewhere,
had spoken. But as E V Rieu points out, the A.V ('King James') language
never existed. No nobleman, or even anyone alive in 1611 or any other
time, ever said to his servant 'make ready wherewith I may sup' instead of
'get something ready for my supper'. Apeing the A.V style makes Smith
immediately fishy. Other defects became evident.
As for the illiterate merchant of C7, I don't have space here to
set forth the reasons why his 'revelation' has been rejected by
Christianity. If you take the possibility seriously, I'll discuss it with
you. Meanwhile, for me to bother, I'll need to hear from you that there
could be any revelation.
>, and even then it was only gradually that he worked up to the idea of
>Jesus being divine.
This is news to me. Again it's funny that this outsider knows more
about it than I do.
>All went well after that, since pagans were much more receptive to his
>idea. Indeed, Paul tells us that they were perfectly cheerful about
>regarding Paul himself and his companion Barnabas as yet more gods. It
>was much easier to make gods in Thessalonia and Corinth than in Jerusalem.
Paul & Barnabas were NOT trying to make gods, nor to be seen as
gods. The desperate illogic B resorts to reminds me of fanatical
feminazis.
> Historically, this makes things all very messy. It is as if a very
>gifted orator and politician set about proclaiming the resurrection of
>Elvis as far as possible from Memphis, in a place prone to accept this
>sort of thing, and at least twenty years after the historical Elvis, pills
>and hamburgers and all, left us. A wise strategy
This is a revealing remark, reinforcing the impression that B is
interested in power not truth. He means not 'wise' but 'shrewd' - he is
appraising a power-grab for efficacy on its own selfish terms. He has
the amoral view of the world characteristic of PR agents & feminazis. I
predict he likes neoDarwinism in much the way Dawkins does.
>, but scarcely a reason for supposing that the people of Memphis are
>particularly transparent and open to encounters with the divine. Of
>course, given the background theory--a divine creator who for some reason
>tends to conceal himself, but then mysteriously
again the sarcasm - as if such a decision by God could be other
than mysterious to humans, and as if being mysterious is gratuitous, indeed
suspect; and hinting that a proper understanding of the matter would strip
aside all the mysteriousness that has been wrongfully imposed by
Christianity.
This is not reasoning but racketeering. Con-men by the Cam are a
considerable tradition - Bertrand Russell etc.
> decides upon one revelation to one people in one place at one time--he
>has to choose some people, some place, some time. But that is only given
>the background theory. If you know in advance that there are to be true
>reports of flying saucers, you can deduce that the people of New Mexico
>who make these reports are the favored recipients of alien manifestations;
>but you cannot argue from the favored transparency of the good folk of New
>Mexico to the existence of flying saucers. Nor can you argue from the
>same premise to the wisdom of extraterrestrials in exhibiting themselves
>in New Mexico rather than, say, in Times Square, where they might have
>more impact.
>
>In other words, although Polkinghorne is officially using history as
>evidence for theology, he is actually using theology to determine how to
>read the history. This is always so. Presumably Polkinghorne does not
>believe in the Prophet's night flight to Jerusalem, and presumably Osama
>bin Laden does not believe in Christ's resurrection, but in neither case
>are their minds made up by historical evidence or scientific thinking.
In an unintended way, B is correct here. Believers' minds are
indeed not made up by any one aspect - solely natural theology, or solely
historical evidence, or solely scientific thinking. All of those, and
other modes of knowledge also, combine in faith.
>But Polkinghorne seems to lack perfect pitch when it comes to historical
>confirmation. He supposes that the literal truth of the Resurrection is
>well confirmed by the halting and confused character of the biblical
>accounts of how and where the dead Jesus appeared, and how difficult it
>was to be sure it was Him:
>
>"Such a non-triumphalist indication of the problematic character of
>recognizing the risen Christ, so variously expressed, seems to me much
>more likely to be the kernel of an historical reminiscence than a feature
>curiously common to a bunch of made-up tales."
>
>Would that these were the options! Surely any historian, and for that
>matter any scientist who has made a study of our cognitive functions, and
>certainly any philosopher, would be a little more sensitive to many other
>possibilities of explanation. The Gospel writers were neither independent
>of one another
So what? he implies they wrongfully colluded.
> nor witnesses to what they wrote about.
This is of course a frank blunder - just plain false - a
revealing error, implying that B is so hell-bent on hectoring Christianity
that he doesn't even check elementary facts.
>Delusions are contagious and emotions are malleable, and they are
>powerful determinants of belief. Reminiscences themselves are known to be
>subjects of invention, since memory makes up stories and is itself easily
>assaulted and manipulated.
>
>Self-deception, in short, is the human lot. And one wonders if
>Polkinghorne the scientist would take the hesitation and the uncertainty
>and the lack of agreement that attended certain laboratory observations to
>be confirmations of their accuracy. It is true that there are occasions
>when agreement is suspiciously perfect, and many frauds have been detected
>because of it; but this does not turn a confusion of witnesses into a
>reliable indicator of anything.
>
>There is also the innocent tactic of taking the very improbability of a
>historical narrative as a reason for placing confidence in it. What could
>possibly explain the peoples' acceptance of such wild stories as those of
>the biblical miracles except that they are true?
This may seem to B an obscure form of reasoning; yet is it so hard
to follow? Snow says of the fabulous Ramanujan Taxi Number Analysis story
that it must be true because no-one could possibly have made it up; and I
incline to agree. The main facts of the NT are much further from possible
invention. Christians remark on the unique degree of oddity in the
Christian (including OT) stories: 'how odd of God to choose the Jews' etc.
Which is more impressive: Prince of Egypt or Lord of the Rings? Can B not
see this argument as having some force within the actual context (rather
than his quasi-Humean narrow scope)?
B fails to understand some important reasoning which he
nevertheless purports to attack. The next 4 paras are a severe example of
failing to grasp what P says.
>III.
>
>Polkinghorne believes that the arrival of persons on Earth is "an event of
>prime significance for the understanding of what is going on.
>
>"Are we to believe that some animals are self-conscious and some
>are not, and that's that? To take so dismissive and epiphenomenal a view
>of personhood seems to be tantamount to denying that there are any
>meaningful events in cosmic history at all. I cannot conceive of an
>occurrence in the universe's evolutionary development that is more
>astonishing and fraught with signs of fruitful significance than that it
>should have become aware of itself through the coming to be of humanity. "
>
>This illustrates a pervasive rhetorical device, a tendency to do what
>Polkinghorne passes for philosophy by posing false contrasts. (The
>dilemma of immortality or futility was another.) On the one hand, our
>nature as persons is "fraught with signs of fruitful significance," or
>some kind of portent for an infinite life to come; or on the other hand we
>dismiss it, or treat it as "epiphenomenal." Treating something as
>epiphenomenal means treating it as irrelevant to the way events occur: the
>whistle on the engine rather than the steam that moves it, in William
>James's famous example. But nobody in their right mind treats the fact
>that there are persons around as irrelevant to the way events happen. Our
>sayings and doings and plans and intentions make things happen, just as
>our buses and airplanes and bombs make things happen. This does not
>freight us with fruitful significance. It freights us only with buses,
>airplanes, and bombs.
>
>Nor would anyone say that some animals are self-conscious and some are
>not, and that's that.
In my observation, most scientists would "say that some animals are
self-conscious and some are not". Strictly, one can't tell what
consciousness a nematode or pogonophoran has, but Kipling's Jungle Book was
infinitely wiser than B.
The main point of B's sentence is ," ... and that's that". B is
wrong in thinking that no sane scientist would think this. The assumption
is widespread. That is where atheism gets you: an intellectual slum.
P is correct: self-consciousness requires explanation beyond matter
& energy. But Dawkins, and I fear B, simply purge 2 of the 4 Causes. This
low has fisofoly Cantab sunk!
>Self-consciousness is connected with a great number of capacities:
>capacities for planning and forming intentions, for the use of language,
>for awareness of the gaze of others. We can discern the difference
>between self and world even in our knowledge of ourselves as animals with
>a point of view, moving around an independent space. But human
>self-consciousness is also shown in complex emotions, such as shame or
>embarrassment. We would certainly like a better understanding of the
>difference between ourselves as clearly self-conscious and other higher
>primates as less clearly so, down through the animal world to creatures
>that exhibit none of the complex signs of it. Many disciplines and many
>books are devoted to elucidating such an understanding. One of the few
>things that they agree upon is that it is a dead end to think that mind
>and body are two different substances, mysteriously connected. It is
>Cartesian dualism that makes the influence of the mind on the world
>mysterious, and threatens to treat the mind as epiphenomenal. As Darwin
>noticed, such a view is refuted every time we blush.
>Polkinghorne is not officially a Cartesian dualist. He says he is a
>monist, or a believer in a single substance, and he refers approvingly to
>Aristotle's idea that the soul is the form of the body. But he also
>believes that agency, our ability to make things happen, requires some
>kind of interruption from outside the physical order into what would
>otherwise be the causal ordering of events in the universe.
No; the point is there could be no 'causal ordering of events'
without all 4 causes. To make the statue needed not only the bronze
(material cause) & the process of making the statue (efficient cause) but
also the man who resolves (final cause) and the 'statue idea' (formal
cause) in the mind of that maker. Thank you Big Ari - you'll do me on
this one. What a plurry genius.
>Referring to chaos theory, Polkinghorne suggests that it ushers in the
>right new kind of causal process. Only "an extension of causal principles
>beyond the energetic exchanges described by a reductionist physics" allows
>"a genuinely instrumental role for mind, active in the execution of human
>intentions." Mind can get in and push things about only because things
>are not really set by physical facts. We can roll up our sleeves and make
>things happen only because nature is chaotic, "subtle," and "supple."
>Similarly, God's agency within the world occurs when he gets in among the
>"cloudy unpredictabilities of created processes." Chaos thus offers a
>habitat for God's interferences in the physical processes of nature, his
>loving little buffets nudging it toward fulfillment of the divine plan.
This para is IMHO fine on its face - but I get the impression B
is again being somewhat sarcastic and implying subtly that the ideas set
forth are obviously wrong. This shows how early we are in the revival of
the science/Christianity debate.
>Perhaps it was this idea that earned Polkinghorne his $1 million. But
>there are scientific problems with it, as he himself admits briefly. The
>usual interpretations of dynamical systems offered by chaos theory have
>them perfectly deterministic
v good point too often overlooked
>, but indefinitely sensitive to initial conditions.
Good one B; 'indefinitely' - not 'infinitely' because matter is
particulate.
>Chaos introduced no new kinds of causality.
None was needed; only large Ari's as brought up to date by Morton.
But chaos theory does help to imagine how tiny impingements on matter could
get amplified in an animal.
>And even if some extension of the science were defensible, it leaves the
>philosophy of mind completely at sea. The whole point of the Aristotelian
>view is that it is absolutely incompatible with a model in which the mind
>leaps into what would otherwise be the unfolding of physical systems,
>pulling levers in just the gaps where physics fails to make things happen.
>For the Aristotelian, the agent is the animal; and animals do not act in
>spite of physics, but because of physics.
Ari never said that, as physics wasn't invented for bulk centuries
after him.
>There is no more of a problem about my agency in the world than there is
>about the fact that my computer's capacities make it show letters as I
>type them.
Appalling crudity.
>(Aristotle said that if an eye were an animal, its soul would be sight.)
>In fact, it is only a Cartesian dualism of mind and body that suggests
>that there is any problem about reconciling agency and physics.
The problem in this area is how mind moves matter. Free will is
the surest fact, but how spirit moves matter remains, even for us let alone
divine action, a puzzle. Progress in understanding is achieved neither by
jeering that Christian fisofolers haven't yet solved it, much less by
declaring that we are just like kompughters.
>
>When someone uses the argument from design, they are involved with the
>idea of a self-sufficient "mind," requiring no birth, no sustaining brain,
>no surroundings, no law-governed physical environment in which to continue
>to exist. One hypothesis about why people allow themselves such a bizarre
>idea is the evolutionary one: that we are adapted to look for intentions
>and purposes whenever we find things around us that we do not understand.
>But this is surely only a part of the picture.
A much more important source is a first-person illusion, and the same one
that sustains Polkinghorne's problems with mind and body. When we act and
think, we are not conscious of the multitude of causes in the brain or
outside it that make our acting and thinking possible.
How many we're unaware of is hard to estimate, but we are aware of
some causes, in some actions & thoughts.
>The illusion is to project that lack of awareness onto the universe: to
>think that instead of being unaware of causes, we are aware that there are
>no causes.
Could this be a valid opportunity to use a brutal form of argument
that B so radically misuses - nobody in their right mind would think that
there are no causes, so the notion is not worth bringing up.
>Our own actions and thoughts then become little exemplars of divine
>self-sufficiency. If we can have minds and make thoughts, just like that
which we most assuredly can
>,why can't God have a mind and make worlds, just like that?
This is a version of the idea that God is a mere projection of the
human mind.
>
>It is a melancholy thought that so much of mankind's long affair with
>religion springs from an illusion infecting our conception of mind: the
>illusion that when we do not know what causes us to act and think, we know
>that nothing causes us to act and think. But it is only this illusion
>that sustains the argument from design, and it is only the argument from
>design that sustains belief in a self-sufficient divine agent.
B can hardly be unaware that there are several other arguments.
>A cloud of religion can be condensed into a drop of philosophy, and we
>have another exception that Hume needed to admit when he said that,
>generally speaking, errors in religion are dangerous, but errors in
>philosophy are merely laughable.
He was a calculating fellow who was aware of his political need to
look like a theist. In his day B's sort weren't so tolerated! This quoted
remark is a decoy. Atheistic fisofolers like B & Hume generally have been,
and mean to be, dangerous. Overconfident or decadent cultures overindulge
them at their peril.
>
>For gods are dangerous things. When the divine architect condescends to
>reveal himself to an especially transparent people, you would think that
>He or She or They would take a lot of care over the messages the receivers
>get from Him or Her or Them. Polkinghorne notices that the biblical
>record does not come out too well on this score: "Inevitably it expresses
>attitudes (to women, genocide and slavery, for instance) which we cannot
>endorse today." Inevitably? Could not omnipotence have gotten in among
>those cloudy chaotic processes with a bit more fine-tuning, and gotten
>some words down that were a bit clearer and more supportable about women,
>genocide, and slavery, and all the other things for which people have been
>beaten and burned and drowned and stoned on biblical authority?
The argument usually continues or is implied to the effect that
this defective God cannot be worthy of worship, so that the arguer's
atheism or agnosticism is supposedly justified. So B's mind is so much
mightier than God's that he can discern moral defects in God.
>But Polkinghorne is calm and unperturbed, because when doing ethics from
>the Bible "I feel that I can discern a cousinly relationship between
>myself and many other Christians as we seek to bring modern knowledge and
>ancient experience together in a consonant combination."
>
>In other words, and thank heavens, we can mix 'n' match. If we do not
>like bits of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, we may thankfully junk them.
This is just a red herring. P hadn't said anything about junking;
he was rejoicing in the coherent strands of good in the Judaeo-Christian
tradition.
>If Jesus's view of fig trees and pigs and witchcraft and possession by
>devils, or his view of Canaanites (or perhaps it was just Canaanite women)
>as "dogs,"
I leave others to comment on whether these are fair references.
>no longer appeals to us, then we may tiptoe past. And if Paul's evident
>belief that the world was about to come to an end impugns his status as
>recipient of the divine word, we may airbrush it out. In this way we may
>arrive at "a consonant combination" and a good night's sleep.
B implies, passim, that he knows of a better basis for
civilisation. Note that he fails to compare Christian civilisation with
its contemporaries but instead vaguely adduces some assumed absolute
standard.
>Meanwhile our cousinly fellow-readers in Rome or Riyadh can
>enthusiastically help the God of love to persecute those who use
>contraceptives or like their sex upside down or back to front, before
>marriage or in a mirror. According to Polkinghorne, this is just the
>price of complexity and plurality. Whereas the truth is that when you mix
>'n' match you only bring back what you already wanted to bring back.
>Appeals to biblical authority are pure reader responses, hermeneutics run
>riot, postmodernism in action.
To arrive at such a reductio should give a cautious fisofoler pause.
For a start, appeals to biblical authority long preceded
postmodernism and therefore can't be a result thereof. Secondly, such
appeals insists on a search for truth whereas pomo denies there is any
truth. What a confusion B has got himself into here!
>At Princeton, Polkinghorne earnestly assures us, he and an
>"interdisciplinary group of scholars" recently spent three fruitful years
>making scientific estimates of God's plans for the destiny of the world.
>According to Polkinghorne and the Princetonians, the last things, when the
>Day of Judgment comes and the tombs are opened, are a bit like what we
>have now, but also a bit different: they are an "interplay between
>continuity and discontinuity." They do not include real Hell. They
>include only people who have not asked for admission to heaven, and these
>get some kind of after-life Bible classes. Beyond that, Heaven itself is
>a bit vague, but it includes pilgrimage and progress and increasing
>fullness. Heaven does not provide endless harps and psalms; nor, I think,
>does it afford Aquinas's favored pleasure of watching the tortures of the
>damned, nor Islam's seventy-two virgins per male martyr. In fact, I could
>not discover whether it included sex at all
Is B implying that if he were given a less vague picture of Heaven
he would adopt theism? Is his real complaint that Heaven is
under-specified? Why doesn't he argue more straightforwardly?
>, but in their three years of deliberations Polkinghorne's group determined
>--scientifically, remember--
Did they say so? I doubt it. I predict this will turn out to be
a frame-up.
>that it may include some animals, especially domestic pets, although
>perhaps not too many of them, since it is permissible for God to "cull
>individuals in order to preserve the herd."
>
>In any case, we need not inquire too closely into these details of
>Polkinghorne and the Princetonians' eschatological calculations, since we
>are assured in advance that all manner of things shall be well. But why,
>then, did God not skip the first course, the current Vale of Tears, and go
>straight to the Fields of Elysium? We are confidently assured that the
>team's work "clearly establishes the value of the old creation, since it
>affords the raw material for eschatological transformation into the new
>creation." Even God, it seems, cannot make an omelet without breaking
>eggs.
That is true; but to state it with no explanation of its relevance
is just too coy.
>
>I do not know whether Polkinghorne's position is orthodox; from the
>outside it strikes me as somewhat blasphemous. I certainly do approve of
>a comfortable, domestic, friendly afterlife, with not too much wailing and
>gnashing of teeth, rather like a Cambridge college but even more
>harmonious. It confirms one's sense that the Church of England is a
>docile old Labrador, toothless and friendly, and nobody need take much
>notice of it.
It was also a key basis for saving the world from conquest by the
Fascist Axis. Name a comparable achievement of the vague nihilism from
which B snipes.
>When schism erupts and heretics get things wrong, or when agnostics and
>atheists (such as myself) lock God out, chaps such as Sir John give us a
>sherry and a biscuit on the lawn, rather than burning, stoning, and
>crucifying, as their ill-bred cousins love to do.
Such generous treatment of such a dishonest atheist reminds me of
Emperor Alexius' showering gifts on the barbaric westerners who'd created a
bloodbath in the capital of the finest civilisation. Yes, Christians are
'the prisoners of love'; and Christianity thus supplies the only known
basis for a decent civilisation. If B would take a more honest empirical
view of the achievements of Christianity, he'd be less inclined to snipe at
it.
>
>And yet I did end Polkinghorne's books, with their supreme contempt for
>philosophical reasoning and historical thinking, in despair about
>humanity's desperate self-deceptions and vanities and illusions.
>Everything will be all right in the end, we are washed in the blood of the
>lamb, we are blessed, and above all God is on our side. Who could
>dissent?
>Fantasy beats reason every time.
What a desperately cynical utterance.
>People
excepting Simon Blackburn?
>believe what they want to believe.
>I do not know how it is at Princeton, but at Cambridge there are eight
>established chairs in the Faculty of Divinity, but only two in the Faculty
>of Philosophy.
sounds about right
>Hallelujah!
This childish ending is ambiguous - but probably doesn't matter
much. I take it to be an expression of cynicism. I therefore grieve for
this man. He should explore the religion on which was based 'The Idea of a
University'.
>Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at the University
>of Cambridge.
>His recent books include Think (Oxford University Press) and Being Good
>(Oxford University Press).
>
>RELATED LINKS
>To Feel and Feel Not
>Simon Blackburn on Martha C. Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The
>Intelligence of Emotions.
>Both Sides Now
>Stephen Holmes on a curious reinterpretation of Tocqueville.
>Hymns and Gyms
>Caleb Crain on Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant
>America, 1880-1920.
>God's Pragmatist
>Erin Leib takes a look at the obsessively religious side of William
>James.
>Threads of History
>Alan Taylor on dispelling a myth believed by sentimentalists, feminists,
>antimodernists, and evolutionists.
>
>Copyright 2002, The New Republic
>change of computers or some mishap.
I dare say you'd also lost my comments on Cantab fisofoly prof
Simon Blackburn - copied below, with StartonBoost®.
> A book that impressed me many years ago was called 'Straight and Crooked
>Thinking'.
- by Robt Thouless - it impressed me too, in 1960.
> It named various errors of argument by reference to stories that
>illustrated them. 'The No True Scotsman Argument' is described here.
>
> http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/n/no/no_true_scotsman.html
>
> You will no doubt have heard the joke
>
> Q: 'Why does it take four premenstrual women to change a lightbulb?'
> A: 'It just DOES!!!!!'
>
> I propose to name the argument in question the 'PMT lightbulb argument.'
>
Nice try - see if you can track down Thouless and ask him whether
it exemplifies any fallacy that he recognises and that is not yet named.
I fear it won't do so.
It does suffer from the handicap of starting with a statement which
is only a joke. To exemplify total refusal of logic, it will be clearer if
a straightforward joke-free start is made.
> Essentially my position is that it is legitimate to answer some questions
>with the statement 'I don't know'.
I'm entirely sympathetic to that generality. What does it have to
do with the 'bulk crazed women changing light-bulb' joke?
I remind you at this point that what Christians claim is only
belief - that is what really matters. True, Christian beliefs are based,
where possible, on long careful thought - which is more than you can
claim for your supposedly clever inventions. But the key output is merely
the most reasonable belief. Knowledge we freely admit to be harder to come
by; luckily, it doesn't matter so much as the beliefs on which one bases
one's decisions.
> If theists can't tolerate that, they tend to create an answer, usually
>magical, and invariably non-falsifiable.
On the other hand, aggressive scientism proponents such as Dawkins
tend to imply that all is explained by their version of science.
Your hinted appeal to Popper's idea is a largely irrelevant attempt
to impose scientism - the assumption that only scientific knowledge
counts as knowledge. We are involved with a broader canvas.
> Thus the question 'How did the Big Bang happen' is one that, as far as I
>understand it, has no clear scientific answer at present. The question
>can be re-expressed in anthropomorphic terms as 'Who assembled the
>explosives for the Big Bang', or more prosaically 'Who made the Universe'.
>
>MY response would be to challenge the assumption that the cause of the
>Big Bang, or the Universe was a 'Who' rather than an 'It', and then say 'I
>dont know.'
>
>The theist response would be to announce that God made the Universe.
>This naturally suggests the next question; 'Who made God.'
>The point of asking it is to expose the absurdity of the hypothesis. It
>doesn't solve the problem.
>
yes, that is strictly correct. I thought I'd dealt with it, but
you don't seem to register.
Therefore I set out the logic more spaciously, as a logic tree.
first final cause
/
/
quasiUrge cause(s)
/
/
uncaused non-physical cause(s)
/
/
\/
universe began
See note inserted near end of Blackburn discussion (below).
> And if you think the PMT lightbulb argument will work at the God level,
>there is no good reason to say it won't work one step earlier (the
>Universe just IS), or one step later
>(The divinity who made God
This is a simple misuse of the term - by defn.
>just IS).
When & why did you dump Occam?
The non-physical cause(s) could be several. The chain of demiurges
could be long - or infinite, with about as much reason as Wheeler's
ludicrous 'bulk worlds' notion. But if you apply Occam's principle of not
multiplying entities needlessly, all that raving is dismissed to the Form
IV level which you claim to think I've not gone beyond.
You can babble like that only thru refusing to admit the categories
of cause which I pointed out to you but which you sense you can't afford to
face up to. That attitude is dishonest - and stupid. If you had faith
in truth, you would pursue it without fear.
The fallacy you've named is characterised by utter refusal to apply
any logic. I fully agree that deserves a name, and I'm pleasantly
surprised you've decided to name it in 'honour' of the sex which more often
does refuse to follow any logic - and not only premenstrually, as I
ruefully realise with my post-menopausal wife. But you are not entitled to
equate (furtively) utter lack of logic with wrong logic.
> Just deconstruct your own statement.
I'm so unsympathetic to the postmodernism that uses the verb
'deconstruct' that I have no practice at doing it. God is THE final
cause, the solution to the infinite regress problem.
That's what I've now diagrammed as a logic tree.
Now please review this commentary which i sent you a few y ago.
====================
Prof Blackburn puts old arguments in only slightly new ways, and
then, confident that his atheist/agnostic 'New Republic' USA readership
won't be familiar with old answers, creates an impression that he is
attacking theism with new unanswerable reason.
I insert comments on specific bits only. A more cohesive
counter-attack could be written affirmatively, but meanwhile here we are
defending piecemeal against serious crudities. I would be interested in
thoughts on the uses of this novel mode of writing made possible by simple
WP programs such as email.
>
>
>
>An Unbeautiful Mind
>by Simon Blackburn
>professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
>His recent books include Think (Oxford University Press) and Being Good
>(Oxford University Press).
>
>Post date: 08.02.02
>Issue date: 08.05.02
>Faith, Science and Understanding
>by John Polkinghorne
>(Yale University Press, 208 pp., $19.95)
>
>
>
>The God of Hope and the End of the World
> by John Polkinghorne
>(Yale University Press, 192 pp., $19.95)
>
>
...
>We evolved only because of a number of cosmic accidents, including the
>extinction of the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago.
Blackburn (B) seems to be saying humans couldn't have evolved if
dinosaurs hadn't died out. For one so bonded to science, this is a curious
utterance. How could it be tested? What does it really mean?
Insofar as it has any meaning, I see no incompatibility between
persistence of some dinosaurs and evolution of man. Mammals were already
evolving before the end of the dinosaurs, and we don't suppose those small
early mammals were as intelligent as man; so why are dinosaurs incompatible
with man?
>Nature shows us no particular favors: we get parasites and diseases and we
>die, and we are not all that nice to each other. True, we are moderately
>clever, but our efforts to use our intelligence to make things better for
>ourselves quite often backfire, and they may do so spectacularly in the
>near future, from some combination of manmade military, environmental, or
>genetic disasters.
I comment below on this old argument from evil.
>Thinking scientifically, what then might be the best explanation of the
>cosmos in which we find ourselves?
It is a basic fallacy to define the approach to such a question as
being solely by thinking scientifically. Science has little if anything to
contribute to such questions. It studies only matter & energy; this
self-limitation of scope is fine, but then (as Broom & I say) science is a
trespasser if attempting to pronounce on moral, let alone spiritual,
questions.
> What is the best explanation of the Vale of Tears in which human life
>plays itself out? The eighteenth century and (despite the best efforts of
>Hume and Kant) the early nineteenth century seized on the answer: there is
>a divine architect. It is often thought that Darwin scotched this answer
>by providing an evolutionary explanation of the existence of complex life.
>On this account, Hume and Kant failed to kill the argument of the divine
>architect, the argument from design, and it was only when Darwin came
>along that it withered in the popular imagination. Some scientists,
>notably Richard Dawkins, have been a little triumphalist about this.
This is a very biased statement. Dawkins has, very verbosely, said
almost nothing while claiming total victory; he has been not a little but a
ludicrous lot triumphalist.
> Polkinghorne's favorite fact is the minute adjustment of the various
>cosmological constants and magnitudes without which large atoms and
>molecules could not exist. Why do they have these fortunate properties?
>We do not know; and in the absence of fairly wild cosmological
>speculation, there is no evolutionary story to help us. Most scientists
>would surely leave it there. Maybe one day there will be a physical
>theory explaining the value of these constants, or maybe not.
This is a slightly novel way of defining final cause out of
existence. But that's all it is - a furtive axiom, claimed to be popular
among scientists but merely asserted - sheer bluff.
>But Polkinghorne jumps in. The problem signals the need for a "deeper
>form of intelligibility, going beyond the scientific." In other words, it
>must be due to the divine architect, or providence, lovingly going to all
>that trouble to make a universe especially for us.
This last sentence is a good example of the sudden degradations in
argumentative style to which this polemicist resorts. You will find
nothing of the sort in Temple's 'Nature, Man & God' but a scrupulously
neutral, genuinely polite style of argumentation.
If P or anyone else resorts to final (and formal) cause to explain
origins in nature, this is not rightly called "jumping in".
>Hume and Kant told us that such thinking is natural, but not scientific.
>It is extravagant, and it is not falsifiable, since it generates no new
>predictions. It merely represents a primitive preference for explaining
>the unknown in terms of agency rather than in terms of nature--a tendency
>that science had to suppress and to overcome before it could develop.
This is an interesting contradiction of Turner's account of the
origins of science. I know which one I believe.
>And it requires truly spectacular leaps of understanding. The minds
>that we know about are physically embodied and dependent upon physical
>brains. But the mind of the architect is not. Our minds cannot make
>things without materials and their abiding properties. But the architect
>can. Our minds require physical birth and nurture, language and culture.
>But the architect requires none of these things.
Yes; that is obviously the case. But instead of discussing it, B
begs the question - simply behaves as if any fool can see this is not
worth discussing.
>We also face a regress of second, third, and upward architects,
>meta-designers, each responsible for the previous one. After all, if the
>balance and the complexity of the world needs to be explained by a
>designer, then the superior balance and the superior complexity of this
>designer is also in need of explanation. But no, the divine mind is
>self-sufficient.
It is extremely unlikely that B is not familiar with the standard
answers to this line of talk. But he behaves as if he's not heard of
them. By now I begin to doubt his honesty.
{Now I insert an outline of those standard answers which a prof
like B has a duty to know but an enthusiastic ill-read amateur hasn't come
across.
I've already given a sufficient answer above. In hope that it will
have a better chance of sinking in if I also give a different wording:-
1 It may seem a logical possibility, in itself, that the
universe 'just is' - the apparently universal requirement for 4 causes
being wiped just for this special instance. I doubt even Hume tried this
one on. But as Broom and I have pointed out time & again, randomness will
not yield order, even given bulk megatime; indeed, even if the evidence
didn't point to a beginning, infinite time wouldn't explain how random
processes in physics & chem (i.e processes in matter & energy) could lead
to the evident order of ecology or of one 'simple' cell. To deny final
cause just because one dislikes the concept (notwithstanding one's using it
routinely in daily life) is to depart from reason.
2 Given design, the number of designers remains to be
discerned. There could be an demiurge, created by an quasiurge, who in
turn had been instituted by some hemiurge, created in turn as the first
rude effort of some infant deity who later abandoned it, ashamed of his
lame performance. But, as I say, why dump Occam? Is your motive for doing
so that you dislike the drift of the reasoning? Are you afrain that some
priest will try to sign you up? Relax ... coercion is not involved in
proper evangelism.
3 Natural theology thus points to (does not prove -
there, you have as you have always had, free admission we do not *know* -
so don't keep harping on that point as if it represents some king-hit for
atheism) one creator.
4 The nature of that creator then remains to be studied.
>But even waiving these familiar objections, where do the leaps of logic
>land us? If all of an architect's buildings use lots of glass, we presume
>that the architect is happy with glass.
Thinking scientifically, we might alternatively infer s/he is
unduly influenced by the glass suppliers. Two can play at Hume, you know;
but it's often a time-wasting diversion.
>We proportion cause to effect.
A vague remark (appearing to confuse quantitative with qualitative
explanation).
>Similarly, if all we know about a designer is that he designed a Vale of
>Tears, the natural inference, the scientific inference, the economical
>inference, is to a mind that gets off on Vales of Tears. Or more
>cautiously, one might speculate about a designer, or a design team, that
>either does not know about the tearful bits, or does not care about them,
>or cannot in any case do anything about them. Hume put the point in his
>inimitable way. He says of someone using the design argument:
>
>"This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to
>a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant
>deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is
>the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of
>derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in
>some superannuated deity; and ever since his death has run on at
>adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from
>him...."
>If we are told, moreover, that after death we go to another world that the
>same architect designed, our best bet--thinking scientifically, of course--
Again, this is a crude confusion: science has little potential to
investigate such spiritual questions. That does not prove they're unreal
- just not matter or energy.
>will be that this other creation of the same designer will be much like
>this one. If the just suffer and the unjust flourish in this world, that
>is probably how it will always be. Suffering worlds are what this
>architect does, judging from the one sample of his work that lies in view.
>Naturally enough, Hume concludes that so "wild and unsettled" a system of
>theology is in no way preferable to none at all. Or as Wittgenstein was
>later to say, nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can
>be said.
See Temple (& others) for the far more logical hope that the next
world will bring justice.
>
>II.
>
>The design argument is all you get, or in fact a bit beyond what you get,
>when you think scientifically.
The argument from morality is not ruled out from scientific
thinking, is it? Some properties of God can be inferred from our innate
sense of right & wrong. Existence of various codes of morality is a
different, more cultural matter - we need only note in passing that the
codes differ less than is sometimes suggested. But the sheer given fact of
one's mental world, that one tends to discern right from wrong and seek to
act rightly, is more surely known than anything from science. According to
Temple, the basis for fruitful philosophy is your directly experienced fact
that your life has meaning only in relation to other persons, and those
relations are inherently of a moral nature. The proper way to live is
accordingly to put one's faith in relations - with family & friends,
and with one's Maker. (This is Temple's big breach with what he calls the
disastrous attempt, beginning with Descartes and now giving us B, to build
up understanding individualistically.)
If then we follow Temple in seeing as the main foundation-stone in
our edifice of knowledge the fact that morality is inherent in the human,
there does have to exist some evil in order for 'good' to be meaningful.
If there were no evil, a long list of virtues could not exist - e.g.
courage, patience, self-sacrificing, hope, striving, and the final
convivial rejoicing of victory. Kipling's famous poem 'If' - though
excessively stern & demanding - gives a glimpse of some largely male
virtues; a huge body of song, graphic art, and literature praises
largely-female virtues. Many of the propensities which define the human as
distinct from all other species enable glorious achievements, but only at
the inescapable risk of choosing wrong instead. A vague disgruntlement at
the fact that God made a moral universe must take the cake for 'most futile
feeling'. Evil is around, as a matter of fact; let's make the best of this
reality.
The problem of evil, when over-rated, leads tragically to
deprivation of hope. The 'problem' of good is much more important to
philosophy: how can we account for the existence of so much *good* ?!
The Argument from Morality points to - though it cannot
prove - God as the explanation of good. (Some modern atheists point
instead, pathetically, to a mixture of chemicals called DNA.)
I thus argue B is wrong to assert that, thinking scientifically,
the design argument is all you get. The sheer fact that morality exists
seems to me at least as cogent to theism - and to dissuading atheism.
> So to bypass all the devastating Humean objections, the
>scientist-theologian has to make a break. The answer, unsurprisingly,
>does not lie in scientific thinking. It lies in revelation. The mind of
>the architect, read off from the world as a whole, does not do much for
>us.
This is much as insisted by Murray Rae - and why not? But the
mere words 'break' and 'unsurprisingly' insinuate that the reasoning which
B is describing is somehow invalid. What a bluff artist is this B !
> We have to cope with the world as it is, whatever we think about whether
>it is the creation of someone who creates worlds like this. But the
>architect's mind as revealed not by the world, but by what people say
>about it: now that is a different story.
>
>Revelation comes in two flavors: your own, or that of others, personal or
>historical. Polkinghorne allows for the former. At least he thinks that
>the experience of being bowled over by a piece of mathematics, or the
>awfulness of moral duty, or the beauty of the morning primrose, gives us
>glimmerings of the divine nature of providence. Or as he would put it,
>they afford fructifying and salvific multi-leveled encounters with
>Reality. "Encounter" is a favorite word in this kind of theology, because
>it neatly insinuates success without actually stating it.
This is a projection by B. He accuses "this kind of theology" of
using sneaky insinuation instead of proper argument. That's rich, coming
from him!
> Polkinghorne prudently concentrates upon history. Personal revelation is
>not really for Anglicans, raising on the one hand the Anglican dread of
>superstition and Rome, and on the other hand the Anglican loathing of
>enthusiasm and low-church anarchy.
This outsider makes bold claims to understand an organisation he is
not familiar with. I need do no more than deny, from my better-informed
position, his ignorant accusations.
>I approve of this caution: one man's revelation is indeed another man's
>lunacy. Better, then, to stick with established history, and especially
>with Scripture, the "laboratory notebooks of gifted observers of God's
>ways with men and women."
This 'approval' is from one dedicated not to truth but to polemical
atheism. It certainly should not define the path of reasoning for the rest
of us. Comprehensive theology will not be as restricted as he wishes.
>In a fairly typical passage, Polkinghorne writes: "I understand
>revelation not as being propositional knowledge ineffably conveyed, but as
>the record of the particularly transparent people and events through which
>God has graciously shown forth the divine nature." I find the phrasing
>here peculiar. You do not have to be an especially gifted observer of
>God's ways with men and women to notice that he doles out disease, famine,
>accident, parasites, pain, and death in spades.
This claim that God allows obviously gratuitous pain - B has not
mentioned God's allowing immorality - is not nearly as sound as he wants
you to assume.
It distresses me that Bertrand Russell "the most influential
philosopher of the 20th century" apparently never discussed with his friend
William Temple, *the* English intellect of his day, such misunderstandings
as Russell reveals in this quote:-
"When physical pain flares up beyond a point it is utterly ghastly
, the most ghastly thing on earth. God made it for his pleasure, having
full power to make a world without it. King Leopold, Caligula & the rest
were all gentle lambs compared with their Creator."
Russell's complaint exemplifies a type of argument (originally
promoted in the 18th century by Hume) which has lately become common: the
existence of any evil, or anyhow the existence of so hugely much evil as we
so readily observe, proves that God cannot be as traditionally believed -
all-powerful, all-knowing, & entirely good. The argument usually continues
to the effect that this defective God cannot be worthy of worship, so that
the arguer's atheism or agnosticism is supposedly justified.
Not only ordinary non-believers but even serious philosophers
continue to treat as if unresolved these arguments of Hume & Russell. The
extreme, qualitative version, complaining at God's allowing some - any -
evil, is not difficult to dispose of along the following lines. The surest
facts known are that we have free will and that we are a valuing animal:
the human conscious person makes choices, and the important choices are
between right and wrong (difficult though they often be to discern, and
more difficult to implement). The fact that I am a person willing to do
right instead of wrong is surer knowledge than any facts I can learn from
science (and many of those are pretty sure!). I hope each reader will find
similarly in honest thought.
To complain that God did wrong by creating a moral world, and that
God is therefore not deserving of worship, is not only fatuous but also
self-contradictory. Such nerdish evasiveness has diverted far too many
philosophers since the 17th-century "Enlightenment". In condemning God for
the existence of evil, one is stating a moral judgement, whereas anyone who
really objects to the existence of good & bad should, to be consistent,
refrain from forming any moral attitude to this supposed defect in God, or
indeed to anything. Such a pose is no basis for living.
The trendy notion of a 'safe' world is, when you think about it, a
vision of boring science-fiction robots, unrealistic, even repulsive. We
do have to put up with some bad in order to have any good. There is no
possibility, this side of the first 3 chapters of the Bible (which are
infinitely wiser than any attempted literal reading would suggest), of a
moral Disneyland in which we are guaranteed safety - absence of pain
whether from the fact that fire will sometimes burn and water drown or from
the choices of humans to do harm to others and to themselves or just to be
negligent. All we can do is to minimise harm as best we can.
Woolly-minded notions of abolishing violence should be replaced by the
target of minimising violence. Taking this duty seriously will, by the
way, require us to give much more guidance for children, backed up by a
judicious painful but non-injurious smack in certain circumstances.
Having agreed that some evil must exist, or at the very least that
it is pointless to complain at the qualitative fact, the quantitative
argument remains: need there be so much evil? How can we assess the
minimum extent of evil entailed in free will? If we cannot do that, at
least roughly, then how could anyone claim that there actually is
needlessly much evil? Supposing the onus of proof is on those who assert
there is gratuitously much evil, how can they discharge that burden? I for
one cannot see how much evil is entailed in even my own sinful nature, let
alone Caligula, Himmler or Richard Nixon. If on the other hand I have the
onus of proving that there is only as much evil as need be consequent upon
the exertions of about ten billion human wills, I must immediately say I
can't see how to do it. (I am sure such a task is far beyond all human
capability.)
I will instead rely on what I have been able to discern of the
Creator's intentions, from both natural theology and such explorations of
spiritual realms as have reached me through the leading civilisations of
the past two millennia. Those are the bases of my faith that, while nobody
can trace evils to causes in any comprehensive way, God has not permitted
more than need be. This is obviously a statement of faith, not of fact -
a choice of the sort forced upon us once we admit certitude is unavailable
in this matter. In a period of history which looks increasingly
apocalyptic, the validity of this faith is increasingly cogent.
> But the gifted see something different. In particular they see, or saw,
>events apparently occurring in first-century Palestine (rather than, say,
>seventh-century Arabia or nineteenth-century Salt Lake City). Who were
>these "particularly transparent people"? "Transparent" presumably means
>not so much guileless or gullible, but somehow receptive or tuned in, so
>as to be the chosen audience for the arrival of divinity on Earth.
>
> But that cannot be right either, since the Jews of first-century
>Palestine were not particularly receptive to the idea of an incarnation.
>They may have been waiting for a messiah, but their theological traditions
>found the idea of an incarnate God blasphemous. That is why, twenty years
>after the event, Paul had to start proselytizing in Asia Minor and Greece
This again is an invalid mode of arguing. Luke's magnificent
account 'how they brought the Good News from Jerusalem to Rome' (which is
the best history we have of that part of the Med in that period), and
Paul's letters to various Christian communities along the way, are not an
account let alone an admission of defeat turning aside to a somehow
secondary target; evangelism will be pursued in all directions as best one
can. Failure of many Jews in C1 and for that matter in C21 to see the
Messiah is regrettable, a puzzle, but not a test of Christianity's
validity.
The claims of Muhammed and Joseph Smith, alluded to, are judged on,
firstly, their own internal evidence. Smith's looks immediately dubious in
that it uses language never spoken by anybody. If God gave a new
revelation during C19 he would have used language that somebody, somewhere,
had spoken. But as E V Rieu points out, the A.V ('King James') language
never existed. No nobleman, or even anyone alive in 1611 or any other
time, ever said to his servant 'make ready wherewith I may sup' instead of
'get something ready for my supper'. Apeing the A.V style makes Smith
immediately fishy. Other defects became evident.
As for the illiterate merchant of C7, I don't have space here to
set forth the reasons why his 'revelation' has been rejected by
Christianity. If you take the possibility seriously, I'll discuss it with
you. Meanwhile, for me to bother, I'll need to hear from you that there
could be any revelation.
>, and even then it was only gradually that he worked up to the idea of
>Jesus being divine.
This is news to me. Again it's funny that this outsider knows more
about it than I do.
>All went well after that, since pagans were much more receptive to his
>idea. Indeed, Paul tells us that they were perfectly cheerful about
>regarding Paul himself and his companion Barnabas as yet more gods. It
>was much easier to make gods in Thessalonia and Corinth than in Jerusalem.
Paul & Barnabas were NOT trying to make gods, nor to be seen as
gods. The desperate illogic B resorts to reminds me of fanatical
feminazis.
> Historically, this makes things all very messy. It is as if a very
>gifted orator and politician set about proclaiming the resurrection of
>Elvis as far as possible from Memphis, in a place prone to accept this
>sort of thing, and at least twenty years after the historical Elvis, pills
>and hamburgers and all, left us. A wise strategy
This is a revealing remark, reinforcing the impression that B is
interested in power not truth. He means not 'wise' but 'shrewd' - he is
appraising a power-grab for efficacy on its own selfish terms. He has
the amoral view of the world characteristic of PR agents & feminazis. I
predict he likes neoDarwinism in much the way Dawkins does.
>, but scarcely a reason for supposing that the people of Memphis are
>particularly transparent and open to encounters with the divine. Of
>course, given the background theory--a divine creator who for some reason
>tends to conceal himself, but then mysteriously
again the sarcasm - as if such a decision by God could be other
than mysterious to humans, and as if being mysterious is gratuitous, indeed
suspect; and hinting that a proper understanding of the matter would strip
aside all the mysteriousness that has been wrongfully imposed by
Christianity.
This is not reasoning but racketeering. Con-men by the Cam are a
considerable tradition - Bertrand Russell etc.
> decides upon one revelation to one people in one place at one time--he
>has to choose some people, some place, some time. But that is only given
>the background theory. If you know in advance that there are to be true
>reports of flying saucers, you can deduce that the people of New Mexico
>who make these reports are the favored recipients of alien manifestations;
>but you cannot argue from the favored transparency of the good folk of New
>Mexico to the existence of flying saucers. Nor can you argue from the
>same premise to the wisdom of extraterrestrials in exhibiting themselves
>in New Mexico rather than, say, in Times Square, where they might have
>more impact.
>
>In other words, although Polkinghorne is officially using history as
>evidence for theology, he is actually using theology to determine how to
>read the history. This is always so. Presumably Polkinghorne does not
>believe in the Prophet's night flight to Jerusalem, and presumably Osama
>bin Laden does not believe in Christ's resurrection, but in neither case
>are their minds made up by historical evidence or scientific thinking.
In an unintended way, B is correct here. Believers' minds are
indeed not made up by any one aspect - solely natural theology, or solely
historical evidence, or solely scientific thinking. All of those, and
other modes of knowledge also, combine in faith.
>But Polkinghorne seems to lack perfect pitch when it comes to historical
>confirmation. He supposes that the literal truth of the Resurrection is
>well confirmed by the halting and confused character of the biblical
>accounts of how and where the dead Jesus appeared, and how difficult it
>was to be sure it was Him:
>
>"Such a non-triumphalist indication of the problematic character of
>recognizing the risen Christ, so variously expressed, seems to me much
>more likely to be the kernel of an historical reminiscence than a feature
>curiously common to a bunch of made-up tales."
>
>Would that these were the options! Surely any historian, and for that
>matter any scientist who has made a study of our cognitive functions, and
>certainly any philosopher, would be a little more sensitive to many other
>possibilities of explanation. The Gospel writers were neither independent
>of one another
So what? he implies they wrongfully colluded.
> nor witnesses to what they wrote about.
This is of course a frank blunder - just plain false - a
revealing error, implying that B is so hell-bent on hectoring Christianity
that he doesn't even check elementary facts.
>Delusions are contagious and emotions are malleable, and they are
>powerful determinants of belief. Reminiscences themselves are known to be
>subjects of invention, since memory makes up stories and is itself easily
>assaulted and manipulated.
>
>Self-deception, in short, is the human lot. And one wonders if
>Polkinghorne the scientist would take the hesitation and the uncertainty
>and the lack of agreement that attended certain laboratory observations to
>be confirmations of their accuracy. It is true that there are occasions
>when agreement is suspiciously perfect, and many frauds have been detected
>because of it; but this does not turn a confusion of witnesses into a
>reliable indicator of anything.
>
>There is also the innocent tactic of taking the very improbability of a
>historical narrative as a reason for placing confidence in it. What could
>possibly explain the peoples' acceptance of such wild stories as those of
>the biblical miracles except that they are true?
This may seem to B an obscure form of reasoning; yet is it so hard
to follow? Snow says of the fabulous Ramanujan Taxi Number Analysis story
that it must be true because no-one could possibly have made it up; and I
incline to agree. The main facts of the NT are much further from possible
invention. Christians remark on the unique degree of oddity in the
Christian (including OT) stories: 'how odd of God to choose the Jews' etc.
Which is more impressive: Prince of Egypt or Lord of the Rings? Can B not
see this argument as having some force within the actual context (rather
than his quasi-Humean narrow scope)?
B fails to understand some important reasoning which he
nevertheless purports to attack. The next 4 paras are a severe example of
failing to grasp what P says.
>III.
>
>Polkinghorne believes that the arrival of persons on Earth is "an event of
>prime significance for the understanding of what is going on.
>
>"Are we to believe that some animals are self-conscious and some
>are not, and that's that? To take so dismissive and epiphenomenal a view
>of personhood seems to be tantamount to denying that there are any
>meaningful events in cosmic history at all. I cannot conceive of an
>occurrence in the universe's evolutionary development that is more
>astonishing and fraught with signs of fruitful significance than that it
>should have become aware of itself through the coming to be of humanity. "
>
>This illustrates a pervasive rhetorical device, a tendency to do what
>Polkinghorne passes for philosophy by posing false contrasts. (The
>dilemma of immortality or futility was another.) On the one hand, our
>nature as persons is "fraught with signs of fruitful significance," or
>some kind of portent for an infinite life to come; or on the other hand we
>dismiss it, or treat it as "epiphenomenal." Treating something as
>epiphenomenal means treating it as irrelevant to the way events occur: the
>whistle on the engine rather than the steam that moves it, in William
>James's famous example. But nobody in their right mind treats the fact
>that there are persons around as irrelevant to the way events happen. Our
>sayings and doings and plans and intentions make things happen, just as
>our buses and airplanes and bombs make things happen. This does not
>freight us with fruitful significance. It freights us only with buses,
>airplanes, and bombs.
>
>Nor would anyone say that some animals are self-conscious and some are
>not, and that's that.
In my observation, most scientists would "say that some animals are
self-conscious and some are not". Strictly, one can't tell what
consciousness a nematode or pogonophoran has, but Kipling's Jungle Book was
infinitely wiser than B.
The main point of B's sentence is ," ... and that's that". B is
wrong in thinking that no sane scientist would think this. The assumption
is widespread. That is where atheism gets you: an intellectual slum.
P is correct: self-consciousness requires explanation beyond matter
& energy. But Dawkins, and I fear B, simply purge 2 of the 4 Causes. This
low has fisofoly Cantab sunk!
>Self-consciousness is connected with a great number of capacities:
>capacities for planning and forming intentions, for the use of language,
>for awareness of the gaze of others. We can discern the difference
>between self and world even in our knowledge of ourselves as animals with
>a point of view, moving around an independent space. But human
>self-consciousness is also shown in complex emotions, such as shame or
>embarrassment. We would certainly like a better understanding of the
>difference between ourselves as clearly self-conscious and other higher
>primates as less clearly so, down through the animal world to creatures
>that exhibit none of the complex signs of it. Many disciplines and many
>books are devoted to elucidating such an understanding. One of the few
>things that they agree upon is that it is a dead end to think that mind
>and body are two different substances, mysteriously connected. It is
>Cartesian dualism that makes the influence of the mind on the world
>mysterious, and threatens to treat the mind as epiphenomenal. As Darwin
>noticed, such a view is refuted every time we blush.
>Polkinghorne is not officially a Cartesian dualist. He says he is a
>monist, or a believer in a single substance, and he refers approvingly to
>Aristotle's idea that the soul is the form of the body. But he also
>believes that agency, our ability to make things happen, requires some
>kind of interruption from outside the physical order into what would
>otherwise be the causal ordering of events in the universe.
No; the point is there could be no 'causal ordering of events'
without all 4 causes. To make the statue needed not only the bronze
(material cause) & the process of making the statue (efficient cause) but
also the man who resolves (final cause) and the 'statue idea' (formal
cause) in the mind of that maker. Thank you Big Ari - you'll do me on
this one. What a plurry genius.
>Referring to chaos theory, Polkinghorne suggests that it ushers in the
>right new kind of causal process. Only "an extension of causal principles
>beyond the energetic exchanges described by a reductionist physics" allows
>"a genuinely instrumental role for mind, active in the execution of human
>intentions." Mind can get in and push things about only because things
>are not really set by physical facts. We can roll up our sleeves and make
>things happen only because nature is chaotic, "subtle," and "supple."
>Similarly, God's agency within the world occurs when he gets in among the
>"cloudy unpredictabilities of created processes." Chaos thus offers a
>habitat for God's interferences in the physical processes of nature, his
>loving little buffets nudging it toward fulfillment of the divine plan.
This para is IMHO fine on its face - but I get the impression B
is again being somewhat sarcastic and implying subtly that the ideas set
forth are obviously wrong. This shows how early we are in the revival of
the science/Christianity debate.
>Perhaps it was this idea that earned Polkinghorne his $1 million. But
>there are scientific problems with it, as he himself admits briefly. The
>usual interpretations of dynamical systems offered by chaos theory have
>them perfectly deterministic
v good point too often overlooked
>, but indefinitely sensitive to initial conditions.
Good one B; 'indefinitely' - not 'infinitely' because matter is
particulate.
>Chaos introduced no new kinds of causality.
None was needed; only large Ari's as brought up to date by Morton.
But chaos theory does help to imagine how tiny impingements on matter could
get amplified in an animal.
>And even if some extension of the science were defensible, it leaves the
>philosophy of mind completely at sea. The whole point of the Aristotelian
>view is that it is absolutely incompatible with a model in which the mind
>leaps into what would otherwise be the unfolding of physical systems,
>pulling levers in just the gaps where physics fails to make things happen.
>For the Aristotelian, the agent is the animal; and animals do not act in
>spite of physics, but because of physics.
Ari never said that, as physics wasn't invented for bulk centuries
after him.
>There is no more of a problem about my agency in the world than there is
>about the fact that my computer's capacities make it show letters as I
>type them.
Appalling crudity.
>(Aristotle said that if an eye were an animal, its soul would be sight.)
>In fact, it is only a Cartesian dualism of mind and body that suggests
>that there is any problem about reconciling agency and physics.
The problem in this area is how mind moves matter. Free will is
the surest fact, but how spirit moves matter remains, even for us let alone
divine action, a puzzle. Progress in understanding is achieved neither by
jeering that Christian fisofolers haven't yet solved it, much less by
declaring that we are just like kompughters.
>
>When someone uses the argument from design, they are involved with the
>idea of a self-sufficient "mind," requiring no birth, no sustaining brain,
>no surroundings, no law-governed physical environment in which to continue
>to exist. One hypothesis about why people allow themselves such a bizarre
>idea is the evolutionary one: that we are adapted to look for intentions
>and purposes whenever we find things around us that we do not understand.
>But this is surely only a part of the picture.
A much more important source is a first-person illusion, and the same one
that sustains Polkinghorne's problems with mind and body. When we act and
think, we are not conscious of the multitude of causes in the brain or
outside it that make our acting and thinking possible.
How many we're unaware of is hard to estimate, but we are aware of
some causes, in some actions & thoughts.
>The illusion is to project that lack of awareness onto the universe: to
>think that instead of being unaware of causes, we are aware that there are
>no causes.
Could this be a valid opportunity to use a brutal form of argument
that B so radically misuses - nobody in their right mind would think that
there are no causes, so the notion is not worth bringing up.
>Our own actions and thoughts then become little exemplars of divine
>self-sufficiency. If we can have minds and make thoughts, just like that
which we most assuredly can
>,why can't God have a mind and make worlds, just like that?
This is a version of the idea that God is a mere projection of the
human mind.
>
>It is a melancholy thought that so much of mankind's long affair with
>religion springs from an illusion infecting our conception of mind: the
>illusion that when we do not know what causes us to act and think, we know
>that nothing causes us to act and think. But it is only this illusion
>that sustains the argument from design, and it is only the argument from
>design that sustains belief in a self-sufficient divine agent.
B can hardly be unaware that there are several other arguments.
>A cloud of religion can be condensed into a drop of philosophy, and we
>have another exception that Hume needed to admit when he said that,
>generally speaking, errors in religion are dangerous, but errors in
>philosophy are merely laughable.
He was a calculating fellow who was aware of his political need to
look like a theist. In his day B's sort weren't so tolerated! This quoted
remark is a decoy. Atheistic fisofolers like B & Hume generally have been,
and mean to be, dangerous. Overconfident or decadent cultures overindulge
them at their peril.
>
>For gods are dangerous things. When the divine architect condescends to
>reveal himself to an especially transparent people, you would think that
>He or She or They would take a lot of care over the messages the receivers
>get from Him or Her or Them. Polkinghorne notices that the biblical
>record does not come out too well on this score: "Inevitably it expresses
>attitudes (to women, genocide and slavery, for instance) which we cannot
>endorse today." Inevitably? Could not omnipotence have gotten in among
>those cloudy chaotic processes with a bit more fine-tuning, and gotten
>some words down that were a bit clearer and more supportable about women,
>genocide, and slavery, and all the other things for which people have been
>beaten and burned and drowned and stoned on biblical authority?
The argument usually continues or is implied to the effect that
this defective God cannot be worthy of worship, so that the arguer's
atheism or agnosticism is supposedly justified. So B's mind is so much
mightier than God's that he can discern moral defects in God.
>But Polkinghorne is calm and unperturbed, because when doing ethics from
>the Bible "I feel that I can discern a cousinly relationship between
>myself and many other Christians as we seek to bring modern knowledge and
>ancient experience together in a consonant combination."
>
>In other words, and thank heavens, we can mix 'n' match. If we do not
>like bits of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, we may thankfully junk them.
This is just a red herring. P hadn't said anything about junking;
he was rejoicing in the coherent strands of good in the Judaeo-Christian
tradition.
>If Jesus's view of fig trees and pigs and witchcraft and possession by
>devils, or his view of Canaanites (or perhaps it was just Canaanite women)
>as "dogs,"
I leave others to comment on whether these are fair references.
>no longer appeals to us, then we may tiptoe past. And if Paul's evident
>belief that the world was about to come to an end impugns his status as
>recipient of the divine word, we may airbrush it out. In this way we may
>arrive at "a consonant combination" and a good night's sleep.
B implies, passim, that he knows of a better basis for
civilisation. Note that he fails to compare Christian civilisation with
its contemporaries but instead vaguely adduces some assumed absolute
standard.
>Meanwhile our cousinly fellow-readers in Rome or Riyadh can
>enthusiastically help the God of love to persecute those who use
>contraceptives or like their sex upside down or back to front, before
>marriage or in a mirror. According to Polkinghorne, this is just the
>price of complexity and plurality. Whereas the truth is that when you mix
>'n' match you only bring back what you already wanted to bring back.
>Appeals to biblical authority are pure reader responses, hermeneutics run
>riot, postmodernism in action.
To arrive at such a reductio should give a cautious fisofoler pause.
For a start, appeals to biblical authority long preceded
postmodernism and therefore can't be a result thereof. Secondly, such
appeals insists on a search for truth whereas pomo denies there is any
truth. What a confusion B has got himself into here!
>At Princeton, Polkinghorne earnestly assures us, he and an
>"interdisciplinary group of scholars" recently spent three fruitful years
>making scientific estimates of God's plans for the destiny of the world.
>According to Polkinghorne and the Princetonians, the last things, when the
>Day of Judgment comes and the tombs are opened, are a bit like what we
>have now, but also a bit different: they are an "interplay between
>continuity and discontinuity." They do not include real Hell. They
>include only people who have not asked for admission to heaven, and these
>get some kind of after-life Bible classes. Beyond that, Heaven itself is
>a bit vague, but it includes pilgrimage and progress and increasing
>fullness. Heaven does not provide endless harps and psalms; nor, I think,
>does it afford Aquinas's favored pleasure of watching the tortures of the
>damned, nor Islam's seventy-two virgins per male martyr. In fact, I could
>not discover whether it included sex at all
Is B implying that if he were given a less vague picture of Heaven
he would adopt theism? Is his real complaint that Heaven is
under-specified? Why doesn't he argue more straightforwardly?
>, but in their three years of deliberations Polkinghorne's group determined
>--scientifically, remember--
Did they say so? I doubt it. I predict this will turn out to be
a frame-up.
>that it may include some animals, especially domestic pets, although
>perhaps not too many of them, since it is permissible for God to "cull
>individuals in order to preserve the herd."
>
>In any case, we need not inquire too closely into these details of
>Polkinghorne and the Princetonians' eschatological calculations, since we
>are assured in advance that all manner of things shall be well. But why,
>then, did God not skip the first course, the current Vale of Tears, and go
>straight to the Fields of Elysium? We are confidently assured that the
>team's work "clearly establishes the value of the old creation, since it
>affords the raw material for eschatological transformation into the new
>creation." Even God, it seems, cannot make an omelet without breaking
>eggs.
That is true; but to state it with no explanation of its relevance
is just too coy.
>
>I do not know whether Polkinghorne's position is orthodox; from the
>outside it strikes me as somewhat blasphemous. I certainly do approve of
>a comfortable, domestic, friendly afterlife, with not too much wailing and
>gnashing of teeth, rather like a Cambridge college but even more
>harmonious. It confirms one's sense that the Church of England is a
>docile old Labrador, toothless and friendly, and nobody need take much
>notice of it.
It was also a key basis for saving the world from conquest by the
Fascist Axis. Name a comparable achievement of the vague nihilism from
which B snipes.
>When schism erupts and heretics get things wrong, or when agnostics and
>atheists (such as myself) lock God out, chaps such as Sir John give us a
>sherry and a biscuit on the lawn, rather than burning, stoning, and
>crucifying, as their ill-bred cousins love to do.
Such generous treatment of such a dishonest atheist reminds me of
Emperor Alexius' showering gifts on the barbaric westerners who'd created a
bloodbath in the capital of the finest civilisation. Yes, Christians are
'the prisoners of love'; and Christianity thus supplies the only known
basis for a decent civilisation. If B would take a more honest empirical
view of the achievements of Christianity, he'd be less inclined to snipe at
it.
>
>And yet I did end Polkinghorne's books, with their supreme contempt for
>philosophical reasoning and historical thinking, in despair about
>humanity's desperate self-deceptions and vanities and illusions.
>Everything will be all right in the end, we are washed in the blood of the
>lamb, we are blessed, and above all God is on our side. Who could
>dissent?
>Fantasy beats reason every time.
What a desperately cynical utterance.
>People
excepting Simon Blackburn?
>believe what they want to believe.
>I do not know how it is at Princeton, but at Cambridge there are eight
>established chairs in the Faculty of Divinity, but only two in the Faculty
>of Philosophy.
sounds about right
>Hallelujah!
This childish ending is ambiguous - but probably doesn't matter
much. I take it to be an expression of cynicism. I therefore grieve for
this man. He should explore the religion on which was based 'The Idea of a
University'.
>Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at the University
>of Cambridge.
>His recent books include Think (Oxford University Press) and Being Good
>(Oxford University Press).
>
>RELATED LINKS
>To Feel and Feel Not
>Simon Blackburn on Martha C. Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The
>Intelligence of Emotions.
>Both Sides Now
>Stephen Holmes on a curious reinterpretation of Tocqueville.
>Hymns and Gyms
>Caleb Crain on Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant
>America, 1880-1920.
>God's Pragmatist
>Erin Leib takes a look at the obsessively religious side of William
>James.
>Threads of History
>Alan Taylor on dispelling a myth believed by sentimentalists, feminists,
>antimodernists, and evolutionists.
>
>Copyright 2002, The New Republic
Anti-Christian rituals promotwatching the deviants: this week's selection [Religion] -
GEA - gormfach@gmail.com @ 11:19:31 PM
s m a c a
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St
Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
31st October 2004
Bonus SMACA cartoon link!
"The Windsor Report: Cartoon Version" by Dave Walker
http://www.wibsite.com/features/windsorreport/
====================
SMACA NewSpots
"Satanic sailor a lovely boy: mum" October 27, 2004
The mother of the British Navy's first officially recognised Satanist says
her Devil-worshipping son is a sweet and loving man who used to accompany
her to church.
Read more...
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11197136%5E13762,00.html
====================
WHAT'S HAPPENING at St Matthew-in-the-City
THE WINDSOR REPORT "I am writing to invite you to Holy Trinity Cathedral
on Thursday November 4th at 7.30pm to listen to our Bishop, John Paterson,
and Dr Jenny Te Paa speak about their understandings of the Windsor Report
and what it might mean for us. St Matthew’s has a long history as a
"gay-friendly" environment and, while there may be people present of a more
conservative persuasion, this is an opportunity to talk with those
Anglicans who are more liberal on this issue. I would ask that those who
feel angry about the report be respectful of others present."
Glynn Cardy
THE BIG E is an event created in response to a need for professional
training in youth ministry in Aotearoa New Zealand, presented by the
Churches Youth Ministry Association and the Anglican Centre for Youth
Ministry Studies. 2004 is the fifth Big E, and has the theme “Culture". 15
– 19 November, Grafton Hall of Residence, Grafton, Auckland. Featuring
speakers and resource people including Hone Kaa, Manu Caddie, Lloyd Martin,
Pat Sneddon, Steve Taylor, Elaine Wainwright and Lynne Wall. For
registration details and bookings, contact the registrar Michael Wallace on
03 366 9274. For more information about CYMA, visit their web site,
Web:
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St
Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
31st October 2004
Bonus SMACA cartoon link!
"The Windsor Report: Cartoon Version" by Dave Walker
http://www.wibsite.com/features/windsorreport/
====================
SMACA NewSpots
"Satanic sailor a lovely boy: mum" October 27, 2004
The mother of the British Navy's first officially recognised Satanist says
her Devil-worshipping son is a sweet and loving man who used to accompany
her to church.
Read more...
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11197136%5E13762,00.html
====================
WHAT'S HAPPENING at St Matthew-in-the-City
THE WINDSOR REPORT "I am writing to invite you to Holy Trinity Cathedral
on Thursday November 4th at 7.30pm to listen to our Bishop, John Paterson,
and Dr Jenny Te Paa speak about their understandings of the Windsor Report
and what it might mean for us. St Matthew’s has a long history as a
"gay-friendly" environment and, while there may be people present of a more
conservative persuasion, this is an opportunity to talk with those
Anglicans who are more liberal on this issue. I would ask that those who
feel angry about the report be respectful of others present."
Glynn Cardy
THE BIG E is an event created in response to a need for professional
training in youth ministry in Aotearoa New Zealand, presented by the
Churches Youth Ministry Association and the Anglican Centre for Youth
Ministry Studies. 2004 is the fifth Big E, and has the theme “Culture". 15
– 19 November, Grafton Hall of Residence, Grafton, Auckland. Featuring
speakers and resource people including Hone Kaa, Manu Caddie, Lloyd Martin,
Pat Sneddon, Steve Taylor, Elaine Wainwright and Lynne Wall. For
registration details and bookings, contact the registrar Michael Wallace on
03 366 9274. For more information about CYMA, visit their web site,
Web:
10/27/04
Max L. Stackhouse is the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor
of Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Princeton
Theological Seminary, where he directs Kuyper Center for
Public Theology. An ordained minister in the United Church
of Christ, Dr. Stackhouse is a member of the American
Academy of Religion. This essay is a condensed version of
the Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs,
delivered on October 14, 2004. This lecture was established
by a grant from Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. Previous
lecturers include Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British
Commonwealth; George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul
II, and James Billington, Librarian of Congress. All the
lectures are posted on:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE
The 9th Annual Templeton Lecture On Religion and World Affairs
by Max L. Stackhouse
The defeat of fascism, the victory of anti-colonial
movements, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late
20th century made it appear possible that democracy would
spread worldwide, accompanied by a fuller realization of
human rights, a global economy that benefits more of the
world's people, and a reduction of military threats to the
world's security. That "end of history" view may yet prove
to be the most probable global direction -- some 120 nations
adopted democratically oriented constitutions for the first
time in the last half century. But there are many reasons
to be concerned about the character of a democratic future.
Some of the newly independent nations have become one-party
states hovering on failure. Some Islamists have repudiated
democracy altogether and advocate a return to Caliphate
governance under sharia. Russia sometimes seems bound to
resume a czarist model of centralized political control; and
China is adamant in resisting democratic movements.
Moreover, some oppose the idea of human rights, one of the
pillars of democracy, claiming that its implicit assumption
-- that humanity consists of autonomous individuals -- is a
modern secularist invention. Still others protest the
currently emerging global economy, viewing it as a threat to
sovereignty and a design of the rich to exploit the poor.
And many fear endless attacks by shadowy, stateless
terrorist networks or by ethnic factions, both of which
challenge democratic prospects by inducing such a
preoccupation with security that democratic freedoms are
eroded.
In this situation, the world's most dynamic democracy and
only superpower is expected to be not only the world's
policeman, but also its godfather, bringing peace,
prosperity, and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq and
solving every other problem that appears on the horizon,
from Haiti to global warming to the AIDS crisis in
subsaharan Africa. This charge could tempt the nation into
a new imperialism. Even as the United States is criticized
for not engaging the problems of the world, it is condemned
for intervening everywhere and seducing the world's youth
away from their own cultures.
The deeper difficulty is that Americans do not have a clear
moral or spiritual view of what we are about, of why we
believe what we believe and do what we do. How can, should,
or may we use our power, and why? And what is the source of
that power?
Suppose that the U.S. succeeds in planting democracy
throughout the world. One might see this as either cultural
imperialism or a justifiable conversion of an unholy tyranny
to a just system that corresponds to the deepest levels of
human nature and the highest discernible sense of divine
intent. That sense might of course simply be the reigning
consensus among the currently powerful nations. Does that
consensus have, or need, a deeper grounding, an ultimate
source and norm of truth and justice that can guide how
humanity ought to live?
Historically, advocates of democracy believed that it did.
The late medieval "conciliarists" who displaced popes and
overrode emperors thought so, as did the Reformers and the
Puritans. We know that the deists and theists who advocated
the Bill of Rights thought so. And the U.S. didn't hesitate
to establish democratic regimes in Cuba and the Philippines
at the end of the Spanish-American War, in Germany and Japan
at the end of World War II, and in South Korea after the
conflict there.
Is there in fact a basis for democracy that is deeper than
the fact that it has apparently mostly worked better than
other forms, at least in the West? How can we make the case
for it today, especially with globalized media, technology,
economy, culture, and religions that are beyond the control
of any one government?
Critics regularly charge that America is an imperialist
nation bent on ruling the world, ready to override other
societies with its massive multinational corporations. No
doubt some Americans have such interests, but most see their
nation as rooted in "that order which we call freedom," with
a mission to help others form open societies, adopt
democratic values, and establish human rights in a
flourishing economy. We have sometimes failed in this
mission, but most agree on the mission.
However, religious leaders, theologians, political leaders,
and commentators have failed to enunciate the basis for our
mission, or identify ways to reform it when it goes wrong.
Can we justly clarify what it is that makes us ready to send
our young men and women to kill and die for democracy?
No civilization has yet endured that did not have a
religious vision at its core. History is littered with the
rubble of empires that fell as much by spiritual emptiness
as by economic and military weakness or external pressure.
But the enduring civilizations have had religious cores that
touch the hearts and minds of the people, becoming the moral
architecture to guide the leaders and evoke sacrificial
commitments. These enable the societies' continual renewal.
It is not that everyone agrees with the religious vision, or
has to, but that there is a framework within which debate
takes place.
One cannot imagine trying to understand the politics of
China or India without reference to Confucianism or
Hinduism, or the systems of government in Southeast Asia or
the Middle East without understanding Buddhism or Islam, or
what is going on in the EU without reference to the legacy
of traditional Christendom (even if the EU's current
advocates resist any reference to religion in its new
constitution). Nor can we understand the U.S. without an
awareness of Protestantism's historic influence -- or of the
failure of its mainline traditions to define the urgent
social issues -- and of the rise of Evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism, on the one hand, and post-Vatican II
Catholicism, on the other, as they seek to offer other
perspectives on the ultimate issues. It is not the duty of
religious organizations to make public policy, as some try
to do; but it is their responsibility to seek to influence
people's consciences so that their political decisions will
be informed by moral and spiritual convictions.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that
many have tried to interpret the world as if religion were
not central to societies and politics. But he argues that
life cannot be understood exclusive of religious ideas, as
they are incarnate in the dominant values of the culture.
Indeed, Huntington speaks of the irrelevance of purely
secular thought to contemporary politics, holding that
politics is and must be religious:
During the twentieth century, a secular century, Lenin,
Ataturk, Nehru, Ben Gurion, and the Shah (for instance) all
defined the identity of their countries in the secular
century's terms. That has changed, the Shah is gone, the
Soviet Union is gone, and in its place is a Russia that in
public statements identifies itself quite explicitly with
Russian Orthodoxy. In Turkey, India, and Israel, major
political movements are challenging the secular definition
of identity. Politicians in many societies have found that
religion either is crucial to maintaining their legitimacy
as rulers or must be suppressed because it presents a
challenge to that legitimacy.[1]
Societies do tend to have common features in the sense that
we can study them comparatively and see how they similarly
adapt to similar conditions and interests. Yet, societies
develop differently because they are bent in different
directions by distinctive religions; regulating convictions
have become woven into cultural values.
Some of the regulating convictions that shape democracy
become clear when we speak of human rights, which are
affirmed by the vision behind democracy, notwithstanding our
horrible record with regard to slavery and women's rights,
and the betrayal of our own principles in wartime, from the
early struggles with Native Americans to Abu Ghraib in 2004.
Still, the conviction that humans have rights has prevailed
again and again. Indeed, even in dark moments, prophetic
voices have drawn on Biblical roots to demand the
recognition that each person is made in the image of God and
thus has inalienable rights -- even the criminal, the enemy,
the heretic, the prisoner, and the terrorist.
As Michael Perry, one of the nation's leading authorities on
law and morality, has put it, "some things should never be
done to anyone; and some things should be done for
everyone."[2] That is why the authors of America's
Declaration of Independence and the UN's Declaration of
Human Rights could appeal to Biblical principles to advocate
rights. They are "self-evident truths" that shape
consciences, civilizations, and history. When one appeals
to human rights in the face of tyranny, torture, servitude,
arbitrary arrest, extortion, discrimination, or religious
persecution, one has played a valid moral trump, and the
people have the basis to demand a law code and to form
judicial process as a recourse and remedy. The awareness of
such principles gives hope for democratic vitality under
just law.
A second feature of society that gives hope for democracy
has to do with economic life. Capitalism is the most
efficient and productive economic system yet to be devised,
and it is sweeping the world. It improves the well-being of
most people, including the poor. Not only parts of South
America and the "little tigers" of East Asia, but also the
two most populous nations of the world, India and China,
have turned to versions of capitalism, making it likely that
the World Bank and UN millennium goal of halving world
poverty within ten years can be met. However, these same
trends will also increase inequality. A great many are
raised a little, and a substantial number are raised a good
bit, but only a few are raised a great deal, widening the
gap between the wealthy and the still struggling. A free
society does not demand enforced equality of economic
status, but it must work to equalize opportunity.
The
of Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Princeton
Theological Seminary, where he directs Kuyper Center for
Public Theology. An ordained minister in the United Church
of Christ, Dr. Stackhouse is a member of the American
Academy of Religion. This essay is a condensed version of
the Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs,
delivered on October 14, 2004. This lecture was established
by a grant from Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. Previous
lecturers include Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British
Commonwealth; George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul
II, and James Billington, Librarian of Congress. All the
lectures are posted on:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html
PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE
The 9th Annual Templeton Lecture On Religion and World Affairs
by Max L. Stackhouse
The defeat of fascism, the victory of anti-colonial
movements, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late
20th century made it appear possible that democracy would
spread worldwide, accompanied by a fuller realization of
human rights, a global economy that benefits more of the
world's people, and a reduction of military threats to the
world's security. That "end of history" view may yet prove
to be the most probable global direction -- some 120 nations
adopted democratically oriented constitutions for the first
time in the last half century. But there are many reasons
to be concerned about the character of a democratic future.
Some of the newly independent nations have become one-party
states hovering on failure. Some Islamists have repudiated
democracy altogether and advocate a return to Caliphate
governance under sharia. Russia sometimes seems bound to
resume a czarist model of centralized political control; and
China is adamant in resisting democratic movements.
Moreover, some oppose the idea of human rights, one of the
pillars of democracy, claiming that its implicit assumption
-- that humanity consists of autonomous individuals -- is a
modern secularist invention. Still others protest the
currently emerging global economy, viewing it as a threat to
sovereignty and a design of the rich to exploit the poor.
And many fear endless attacks by shadowy, stateless
terrorist networks or by ethnic factions, both of which
challenge democratic prospects by inducing such a
preoccupation with security that democratic freedoms are
eroded.
In this situation, the world's most dynamic democracy and
only superpower is expected to be not only the world's
policeman, but also its godfather, bringing peace,
prosperity, and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq and
solving every other problem that appears on the horizon,
from Haiti to global warming to the AIDS crisis in
subsaharan Africa. This charge could tempt the nation into
a new imperialism. Even as the United States is criticized
for not engaging the problems of the world, it is condemned
for intervening everywhere and seducing the world's youth
away from their own cultures.
The deeper difficulty is that Americans do not have a clear
moral or spiritual view of what we are about, of why we
believe what we believe and do what we do. How can, should,
or may we use our power, and why? And what is the source of
that power?
Suppose that the U.S. succeeds in planting democracy
throughout the world. One might see this as either cultural
imperialism or a justifiable conversion of an unholy tyranny
to a just system that corresponds to the deepest levels of
human nature and the highest discernible sense of divine
intent. That sense might of course simply be the reigning
consensus among the currently powerful nations. Does that
consensus have, or need, a deeper grounding, an ultimate
source and norm of truth and justice that can guide how
humanity ought to live?
Historically, advocates of democracy believed that it did.
The late medieval "conciliarists" who displaced popes and
overrode emperors thought so, as did the Reformers and the
Puritans. We know that the deists and theists who advocated
the Bill of Rights thought so. And the U.S. didn't hesitate
to establish democratic regimes in Cuba and the Philippines
at the end of the Spanish-American War, in Germany and Japan
at the end of World War II, and in South Korea after the
conflict there.
Is there in fact a basis for democracy that is deeper than
the fact that it has apparently mostly worked better than
other forms, at least in the West? How can we make the case
for it today, especially with globalized media, technology,
economy, culture, and religions that are beyond the control
of any one government?
Critics regularly charge that America is an imperialist
nation bent on ruling the world, ready to override other
societies with its massive multinational corporations. No
doubt some Americans have such interests, but most see their
nation as rooted in "that order which we call freedom," with
a mission to help others form open societies, adopt
democratic values, and establish human rights in a
flourishing economy. We have sometimes failed in this
mission, but most agree on the mission.
However, religious leaders, theologians, political leaders,
and commentators have failed to enunciate the basis for our
mission, or identify ways to reform it when it goes wrong.
Can we justly clarify what it is that makes us ready to send
our young men and women to kill and die for democracy?
No civilization has yet endured that did not have a
religious vision at its core. History is littered with the
rubble of empires that fell as much by spiritual emptiness
as by economic and military weakness or external pressure.
But the enduring civilizations have had religious cores that
touch the hearts and minds of the people, becoming the moral
architecture to guide the leaders and evoke sacrificial
commitments. These enable the societies' continual renewal.
It is not that everyone agrees with the religious vision, or
has to, but that there is a framework within which debate
takes place.
One cannot imagine trying to understand the politics of
China or India without reference to Confucianism or
Hinduism, or the systems of government in Southeast Asia or
the Middle East without understanding Buddhism or Islam, or
what is going on in the EU without reference to the legacy
of traditional Christendom (even if the EU's current
advocates resist any reference to religion in its new
constitution). Nor can we understand the U.S. without an
awareness of Protestantism's historic influence -- or of the
failure of its mainline traditions to define the urgent
social issues -- and of the rise of Evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism, on the one hand, and post-Vatican II
Catholicism, on the other, as they seek to offer other
perspectives on the ultimate issues. It is not the duty of
religious organizations to make public policy, as some try
to do; but it is their responsibility to seek to influence
people's consciences so that their political decisions will
be informed by moral and spiritual convictions.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that
many have tried to interpret the world as if religion were
not central to societies and politics. But he argues that
life cannot be understood exclusive of religious ideas, as
they are incarnate in the dominant values of the culture.
Indeed, Huntington speaks of the irrelevance of purely
secular thought to contemporary politics, holding that
politics is and must be religious:
During the twentieth century, a secular century, Lenin,
Ataturk, Nehru, Ben Gurion, and the Shah (for instance) all
defined the identity of their countries in the secular
century's terms. That has changed, the Shah is gone, the
Soviet Union is gone, and in its place is a Russia that in
public statements identifies itself quite explicitly with
Russian Orthodoxy. In Turkey, India, and Israel, major
political movements are challenging the secular definition
of identity. Politicians in many societies have found that
religion either is crucial to maintaining their legitimacy
as rulers or must be suppressed because it presents a
challenge to that legitimacy.[1]
Societies do tend to have common features in the sense that
we can study them comparatively and see how they similarly
adapt to similar conditions and interests. Yet, societies
develop differently because they are bent in different
directions by distinctive religions; regulating convictions
have become woven into cultural values.
Some of the regulating convictions that shape democracy
become clear when we speak of human rights, which are
affirmed by the vision behind democracy, notwithstanding our
horrible record with regard to slavery and women's rights,
and the betrayal of our own principles in wartime, from the
early struggles with Native Americans to Abu Ghraib in 2004.
Still, the conviction that humans have rights has prevailed
again and again. Indeed, even in dark moments, prophetic
voices have drawn on Biblical roots to demand the
recognition that each person is made in the image of God and
thus has inalienable rights -- even the criminal, the enemy,
the heretic, the prisoner, and the terrorist.
As Michael Perry, one of the nation's leading authorities on
law and morality, has put it, "some things should never be
done to anyone; and some things should be done for
everyone."[2] That is why the authors of America's
Declaration of Independence and the UN's Declaration of
Human Rights could appeal to Biblical principles to advocate
rights. They are "self-evident truths" that shape
consciences, civilizations, and history. When one appeals
to human rights in the face of tyranny, torture, servitude,
arbitrary arrest, extortion, discrimination, or religious
persecution, one has played a valid moral trump, and the
people have the basis to demand a law code and to form
judicial process as a recourse and remedy. The awareness of
such principles gives hope for democratic vitality under
just law.
A second feature of society that gives hope for democracy
has to do with economic life. Capitalism is the most
efficient and productive economic system yet to be devised,
and it is sweeping the world. It improves the well-being of
most people, including the poor. Not only parts of South
America and the "little tigers" of East Asia, but also the
two most populous nations of the world, India and China,
have turned to versions of capitalism, making it likely that
the World Bank and UN millennium goal of halving world
poverty within ten years can be met. However, these same
trends will also increase inequality. A great many are
raised a little, and a substantial number are raised a good
bit, but only a few are raised a great deal, widening the
gap between the wealthy and the still struggling. A free
society does not demand enforced equality of economic
status, but it must work to equalize opportunity.
The