Thinking Christian

It all revolves around one man: Jesus Christ. Either he was the greatest person of history, the unique Son of God, or he is nothing at all to us today. What kind of man was he really?

We’ll have to take this one topic at a time, starting with this startling claim:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

Had he not been able to say that, Jesus would have stood in quite precarious position. The Law of which he spoke includes this:

If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, Let us go after other gods, which you have not known, and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul…. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God…. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

Jesus was a prophet giving signs and wonders. If he had been turning the people away from their God, he would have stood condemned for it. Indeed, he was killed on account of his claims.

Let’s back up a moment, though, and consider just that one statement of his, that he had come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, what Christians refer to as the Old Testament. Judaism in Jesus’ day was thoroughly imbued with these writings, along with a considerable body of rabbinical commentary. The Jews of the time were as monotheistic as any culture in history. Several hundred years prior, they had suffered exile for their idolatry and chasing after pagan Gods. The exile cured them: they never fell into sin of that sort again. Still, they knew their Scriptures said it would be hard to follow their God; that they would have to fall on his mercy, for they could not claim any personal righteousness before him.

In the midst of this milieu, then, Jesus says he has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. He meant it in two senses. First, that he would follow their commands fully; second, that he would complete them.

The audacity of the claim is astonishing. He said he would live the way no one had lived–not Moses, not Joseph, not Daniel, not Esther, not any of the best examples of Hebrew saints. Maybe you would like to try this: walk up to any strongly religious person and say that you expect to perfectly live out their religion’s tenets. See what kind of reaction you get! The crowds who heard him “were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”

Jesus’ fulfilling of the Law and Prophets is explained most fully in the New Testament book of Hebrews. There had been an elaborate sacrificial system in the Hebrew religion. Animals were slaughtered in huge numbers daily for the sins of the people. Hebrews says all of this was a foreshadowing of Christ. When he died on the cross, his death was sufficient to cover what virtually infinite numbers of animals could not–the guilt of all the people. He finished the sacrifices, by his one sufficient sacrifice.

There was yet another sense in which Jesus fulfilled the Law and the Prophets: he literally fulfilled prophecy. The two most striking sources were Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, both of which describe his crucifixion; but there were hundreds more besides. (I’ve made

It was an incredibly audacious claim that he made. Who could say such a thing? In the context of the day, it was more than unthinkable, and it was unthinkable still for decades following, which is one reason I can’t give much credence to claims that early Christians invented sayings like these.

So what can we conclude about Jesus from this one statement? He was wrong or he was right. If he was wrong, he would have surely been found out. Trust me–I had a blowup in the office this morning myself–it’s hard to pretend you’re perfect when you’re around people for very long. Yet the people who knew him best were his most ardent followers. Certainly this speaks to the truth of Christianity.

Tweet This Post

A few days ago Tony Hoffman suggested,

Expelled’s charge and the constant revival of this aspersion on this website — that Darwin leads to Hitler — seems fundamentally wrongheaded….

Tom, you keep saying that although you concede that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler there is in fact a historical one. While I agree with you, I have no idea what your point is in raising it….

It’s a good question. Besides having had about half a dozen deadlines land on me since then, I’ve had to take time to give it some serious thought. Now that I have some time again, what, indeed, is the point of all this?

I hope Tony recognizes I didn’t start this discussion. It was brought up by a movie that’s proving to be fairly popular, as documentaries go. There were some who objected that the Darwin-Hitler link was an ID proponents’ fabrication. I’ve weighed in to respond to that, but I didn’t start it.

Also, if one reviews what I’ve actually posted on this topic, I think “constant revival of this aspersion” is overstated. I wrote one post calling for understanding on why this is such a sensitive issue. I hope an approach of that sort isn’t considered off limits. Other than that, I’ve posted just one link to an article on another website, and two other sentences. Of course there has also been discussion, fueled by participants on all sides of the issue.

But whether or not I’m not to blame as Tony apparently thinks I am, that doesn’t address his real question: why would anybody expend any effort on this at all? Isn’t it all a complete red herring, a distraction from genuine issues? I don’t think so.

First, we ought to learn from history. That ought to be relatively uncontroversial. If the German scientists made a mistake interpreting Darwin, then for heaven’s sake, let’s not forget what they did, and make the same kinds of mistakes all over again! I see potential for it even in our enlightened 21st century. Haeckel’s biggest error was dehumanizing some races of humanity. Peter Singer and PETA are doing the same for the whole human race. For Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” For Singer, we are guilty of “speciesism” if we hold humans to be of more value than animals. This is Haeckel’s error writ large.

Second, it’s not quite true that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler. There are two at least two valid connections between them.

A. There is an ethical consequence to Darwinism. It is not, as was supposed at the time, that it leads to a moral requirement that we “advance the species.” The connection is this: naturalistic Darwinism, if taken to be the sole explanation for all of life,* erases all ethical requirements. It is specifically the naturalism–closely related to atheism–that is the serious problem in all non-theistic versions of evolution (which I think answers Point 1 in Tony’s comment).

I’ve never seen a good refutation or even rebuttal for this. Paul stated the issue quite well two and a half years ago, long before the current debate began:

Just to be clear, I think the Holocaust was wrong. From my culture’s morality, from many cultures’ morality, but not from Hitler’s. I would fight against it no less.

That’s a hole big enough to drive a Panzer division through. Paul would “fight against it,” and for that I commend him; yet for him, that’s all he has. The only ultimate moral decider is power:

A relativistic moral law is made when a group of people (family, tribe, culture, country, etc.) decide to do so. There is no absolute or objective foundation for doing so: as I’ve said before, it is merely a question of power what laws are made…. When differing moral cultures clash, it’s up to power to decide the difference. Doesn’t look pretty, but that’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God.

Fighting is all anyone can do. There’s no recourse to any higher ethic. If Hitler had won, his power would have decided the difference between the differing moral cultures. Now, lest anyone think I’m picking on Paul, I think he’s right, based on his assumptions. I think he gets it. “That’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God,” says Paul, quite rightly; and that’s an assumption that squares up quite nicely with naturalistic, unguided evolution.

B. There is an ontological implication in Darwinism: humans are the same kind of thing as animals. Hitler applied this selectively, to be sure, but he applied it with great effect. He packed up hordes of people on trains like cattle, took them to the slaughtering plant, and used their parts as raw materials for industry. Yes–they wove gunny sacks out of Jewish hair. You can see unused remains of it still warehoused at Dachau. This, I believe, is why we abhor Hitler so much more than other great murderers like Stalin or Mao: they all killed; but only Hitler so thoroughly dehumanized. Darwinism dehumanizes in a different way. Hitler treated humans like animals; Darwinism says that’s what we are.

Third, ideas matter. I suppose we could trace all kinds of historical linkages to the Holocaust. In fact, I’ve actually heard people say this, even taking it to ridiculous extremes: “if you’re going to say Darwin was responsible, then so were the people who invented shower heads. It couldn’t have happened without them, either!” The difference is in ideas and their consequences. Darwinism–the naturalistic version–is not ethically neutral. It is not lacking in ethical implications. True, it doesn’t prescribe an ethic–it just applies a kind of metaphorical poison gas to any overarching, culture-transcending ethic a nation might turn to, in deciding whether to stand with or against a would-be tyrant like Hitler.

Fourth, contrary to Tony’s point 2, influencers certainly can be blamed for the actions of others that follow. They can be blamed to the extent that others did harm while following them:

• Doing actions the influencers recommended, taught, or prescribed, or
• Doing actions for which the influencers opened an ideological or ethical door, which would not otherwise have been opened.

Darwin was responsible in the second sense. This is the sense in which Berlinski (in Expelled), and Weikart (in his book on this topic) said, “Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for Hitler’s atrocities, but it was a necessary condition.” Without Darwinism, I believe, Germany would have resisted Hitler. It was not the only necessary link leading up to Nazism, but it was one of them.

*This is the sense in which I am speaking of “Darwinism” throughout this article: naturalistic evolution by means of random variation and natural selection, unguided by any intelligence. I recognize there are other versions of evolutionary theory.

Tweet This Post

This reminds me of so many other untested beliefs. Parents and teachers have been of the opinion lately that students will understand math better using real-world objects to illustrate abstract concepts. Research now suggests this is wrong.

“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

[From Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices - New York Times]

I don’t have an axe to grind regarding how math gets taught. I’m just intrigued that they actually tested the theory. It reminds me of other theories that have clear and testable sociological implications. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody actually did research to these to see if these are true:

• Intelligent Design is a science-stopper: if you can say “God did it,” you’ll give up doing research in the natural world.
• Raising children as Christians is child abuse.

But wait a moment: there already is research on that second one.

Do you have any other similar examples of ideas that need sociological research?

Tweet This Post

Interesting:

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive… or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?

[From When Language Can Hold the Answer - New York Times]

Tweet This Post

Denyse O’Leary was the co-author (with Dr. Mario Beauregard) of a book I reviewed in the April issue of Touchstone magazine: The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. Beauregard has published research (see links from here) challenging some neuroscientists’ view that spiritual experiences can be explained through physical brain science alone, and this book covers his work while also challenging those other scientists’ conclusions, and even their often-questionable research methods.

A few days ago on her Mindful Hack blog, Denyse raised a good question in response to my review, which, by agreement with Touchstone, I will not be posting on the web for at least three months. I’ll quote this much from near the end of it for context, though:

For my money, philosophical approaches are sufficient to put materialism* away for keeps. But that doesn’t make it any less satisfying to learn the heavily hyped “empirical evidence” for materialist neuroscience is distorted, weak, and contradicted by other research.

Denyse wrote,

On the whole, he seems to have liked the book, though he wonders why we cannot demolish materialism through philosophy alone…. Philosophy alone cannot decide the issue. We must look at evidence from science as well.

Well, of course she is right about this. I will not quote her reasons (they are in the ellipsis) since you ought to read them from the source.

She is right in that philosophy has not, in fact, dec ided the issue. “For my money” (as I said), I think it should have done so by now, because materialist views of mind seem to be utterly self-defeating. They place all causation in the literally mindless machinery of electrochemical activity. There’s no room left for any other causation.

Therefore things like reasons and thoughts, which cannot be identified with that machinery, don’t cause anything. If you disagree with that, your disagreement was not caused by any reasons you might have, but by that mindless machinery firing away inside you. That pretty much eliminates your ability to say you have reasoned your way to your conclusion. Your reasons don’t have any power to cause anything, including the conclusions you erroneously think you came to because of your reasons.

Those who try to disagree usually do so by saying that reasons and thoughts actually can be identified with the machinery; that the brain’s physical activity doesn’t have to be distinct from what feels to us like logical reasoning and free decision making. Others say that reasons and thoughts more or less “ride along” on top of the machinery. The first answer, however, makes an illusion out of our freedom to think and to decide, while the other retains the problem of thoughts and reasoning not causing anything at all.

I’m reminded of a comic strip from years ago in which a tiger (I think) jumped up on an elephant and growled out, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you!” The elephant, quite unperturbed, just continued on its way. Whereupon the tiger on top said, “Okay, now that I’ve got you, where am I taking you?” If thoughts “ride along” on top of the brain’s machinery, they’re as powerless to direct its ways as the tiger is to tell the elephant where to go. Less so, in fact: they don’t even have claws.

Though all this to me seems certainly to be correct, I know others disagree. I suspect that for many of them, it’s because they don’t like where this reasoning heads. If they jump on this elephant, it’s going to carry them (like it or not) toward belief in some kind of spiritual reality.

Therefore, with genuine appreciation I grant Denyse’s point: any support this position receives from science is more than welcome.

*”Materialism” here means a view of reality in which nothing exists except for matter, energy, and their interactions according to deterministic natural law or pure chance. On this view there is no spiritual reality.

Tweet This Post

Via Amanda Witt and Wittingshire, a great post on the power and value of art on The Diary of a Former Atheist, including:

• All beauty and goodness has a living Source. In modern parlance, we call this source “God.”
• The closer we get to God, the closer we get to perfect joy.
• We have a strong tendency to drift away from God. Yet further away we get, the more unsettled and miserable we are.
• When other people drift away from God it makes our lives more difficult.
• The pleasures and comforts of the material world seem like they will make us happy, but don’t.
• We love other people, but not as much as we should.
• Acts of evil are shocking offenses to the way things should be.
• There is evidence of God in the material world, and our hearts soar when we see it.

And so on. All of these conditions are true objectively (they’re not “your truths” or “my truths”), all have been known in some way or another to every person who ever lived, and none can be discerned from the material world alone. It delights us to share our experiences of these truths with our fellow human beings, because it creates a bond that surpasses our animal instincts and connects us at the level of the soul.

The line I quoted in the title of this blog post comes from the next paragraph–but you’ll want to read the whole thing.

Tweet This Post

This from Martin Cothran is the review of Expelled I wish I had been a good enough writer to do. It includes:

In fact, ID critics seem to find it singularly profound to judge this movie on criteria that have little to do with the purpose of the movie. The movie doesn’t prove ID; the movie doesn’t give an accurate and detailed scientific description of this or that; the movie doesn’t give a balanced treatment of the issue; yada, yada, yada. Of course, these are not things the movie even purports to do, much less attempt. This is not a movie about intelligent design or evolution. This is a movie about the debate over intelligent design and evolution. Any criticisms that don’t take account of this are simply nonsensical and irrelevant.

If you slog through the comments from critics and keep your eye peeled, you can find an occasional criticism that, right or wrong, actually belongs in a movie review. One of these rare specimens is the charge that the film is “boring.” C’mon. Unless you fall within the category of totally ignorant of the issue of evolution and uncaring (in which case you didn’t buy a ticket to go see the movie in the first place), you’re going to be mad–either at the Darwinists’ ideological cartel, or at the producers for making the movie. You’re either going to be cheering Ben Stein on or gnawing on knuckles in frustration. But bored? No way.

Tweet This Post