Thinking Christian

Well, finally I’ve seen it. I loved it. It was entertaining, it was motivating, it was interesting, at times it was moving. That’s my short reaction.

From there, though, I’m going to say what I wish many others writing about this movie would say: I’m too engaged in it to try to write an objective review, so I’m not going to try. I have something to say, but we all know it’s coming from my acknowledged position as someone who supports Expelled’s general thesis. (This is not the time for me to support my position, by the way. I’ve done that before, I’ll do it again, but not now.)

First, I can easily tell why some people didn’t like it. If you disagree strongly with its thesis, you’re going to hate the film. Nothing else could be expected. Reviews by anti-ID writers claiming to be objective, and especially on the anti-ID blogs, need to be taken with a large grain of salt. (Reviews by anti-ID writers who haven’t even even seen the film will have to be swallowed with an entire salt-lick–or better yet, not ingested at all.)

Second, the Darwin-to-Nazism connection was not over-stated. Historical facts are historical facts.

Third, I appreciate the way some evolutionary scientists are recorded on film speaking the truth. Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins said they don’t have a clue (well, Ruse has a clue, but not a very good one) how life originated. Will Provine said evolution means life is meaningless and free will does not exist. P.Z. Myers said one of his purposes as a scientist is to eliminate religion. This is not news to anyone who has been participating in this debate, but it will be to a lot of other viewers.

Fourth, I’m surprised I haven’t seen more noise raised about how religion is dwelt on in the film. There’s been some mention of it at Panda’s Thumb, and especially by Larry Arnhart, but I would have thought they would have been all over this. The relation between ID and religion keeps being over-simplified, and Expelled offers a ripe target for taunters who tend to do that: “See, it’s all about religion after all! Told you so!” I’ve encountered some of that, but having seen the film now I’m surprised there hasn’t been more.

But then, that’s the aspect of this debate I’m most interested in. Our church’s youth group is going to see the film tomorrow, and since I’ll be leading them later on through some reflections on it, I’ll be going with them. I’ll have more to say about this religion connection after that.

The other burning question is, what will this movie contribute to the evolution-ID debate? From the evolutionist side, anger. For others, it’s the kind of thing that ought to whet an appetite for more information. It touched on the science just enough to show that ID has something going for it–mostly in terms of the origin of life, and in the massive complexity of the cell. To believe ID is valid just on the basis of the film, having done no other study, would be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion. (Their conclusion might be right, but their way of coming to it is inadequate.)

If on the other hand the film opens the door for more research–through increased academic freedom, and increasing interest in the topic–it will have a slow but very significant effect on the debate.

In the meantime, I strongly encourage you to see Expelled.

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William Dembski asked again yesterday, “What’s wrong with uttering ‘Darwin’ and ‘Hitler’ in the same breath?” There actually is a connection, he says (rightly), so why is something like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed so vilified for saying so? Expelled’s most criticized feature in the period prior to its release has been its use of Nazi-related imagery. (I was on an airplane last night, so I still haven’t seen the film myself.)

Dembski asked this question rhetorically. It would help to consider some actual answers anyway. I propose four of them here.

1. There is no inevitable link from Darwin to Hitler.

Richard Dawkins pointed this out in his predictably scathing review of Expelled:

It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him) is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism.

He goes on to say he doubts Hitler is more guilty of this fallacy than other world leaders have been. Dawkins is right at least to this extent: to say, or even to imply, that there is a strict philosophical and ethical progression from Darwin to Dachau is wrong. Darwin’s theory was a description of how life’s complexity and diversity arose. It’s a statement of a condition of nature. As such, it contains no ethical imperative. It just is, or rather, Darwinian theory just claims to tell about an “is.” Oughts don’t come from is-es.

Now, as I have suggested elsewhere, we still have to wonder about the problem this raises. For Dawkins and others, neo-Darwinism is the sole explanation for life. If the sole explanation of life cannot lead to any oughts, then are there any oughts at all? Where do they come from? Dawkins’s own ethics (see his review article, in the paragraph about Hitler) have nothing to do with his beliefs about what life is about. They almost seemed snatched out of thin air, so disconnected are they from his other views regarding reality.

Nevertheless, we must be quite cautious never to suggest that Darwin led inevitably to Hitler by philosophical necessity.

2. We’ve forgotten that there is an historical link from Darwin to Hitler.

Darwinism did not have to lead to Hitler, but the way evolution was interpreted in Germany, it happened anyway. The story is told in Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. David Klinghoffer has recently written a short synopsis of the same. Weikart traces a line among German scientists, physicians, psychiatrists and other thinkers that began a (philosophically false yet historically real) belief that, under evolutionary theory, the “progress of the species” is a great moral imperative. Progress was defined such that the mentally or physically handicapped were impediments to this progress, so they should not be allowed to reproduce. Eugenic practices–both forced sterilization and “elimination” (killing)–were vigorously promoted.

This theory was not confined just to individuals, though. The Northern European “species” of humans (yes, they used that term) was considered the most advanced. Ernst Haeckel, famous for doctoring drawings of embryos, used his creative artistry also to “show” that some “species” of humans were more close related to simians (apes, etc.) than to Europeans. I’ve been unable to find an internet-available version of the Haeckel woodcut that Weikart reproduced in his book, but there is one very similar to it here. Just imagine the same, only rearranged to show a “progression” from human to ape, in which the Hottentot and Papuan are placed next to the simian, and look much more simian than human (as Haeckel represents them).

Haeckel was not the only one. There was, as a matter of historical fact, an influential group of people writing of a moral imperative to improve humanity by eliminating its “lesser” members. These scientists do not appear to have been particularly anti-Semitic–that was HItler’s special contribution to the horror. But they laid a cultural groundwork. I’m convinced that Hitler could never have persuaded an entire nation to cooperate with his murderous program if they had not already been conditioned by this principle of racially-oriented eugenics. Darwin has hardly the only basis for Nazism–war and anti-Semitism have a much longer history than that!–but this particular form of murder could not, in my opinion, have happened without the groundwork laid by German Darwinists.

3. The Darwin-Hitler link carries incredible emotional and rhetorical power.

I find myself having to pause often for a sigh or a deep breath when I’m writing on this topic. Hitler was a horror. He invokes an incredible emotional effect–emotions that are entirely legitimate. We recoil from the images of the Holocaust.

Now when I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who is not prone in the first place to support Expelled’s message, I can easily imagine feeling outraged. Part of that outrage would be toward the Holocaust itself, and part of it would be toward the possibility that Expelled is making an effective point with it. But this leads to a far deeper and more important issue:

4. We’ve sacralized the Holocaust, so that it seems wrong to use it in support of another purpose.

Dembski’s article, to which this one is a response, refers to the Anti-Defamation League’s complaint of “trivializing the horrors of the Holocaust.” I don’t think that just speaking of historical realities leading up to the Holocaust could be considered trivializing. The problem is that this was used to support another theory, another agenda.

Let me compare this to something else on a far smaller and less important scale. For me as a musician and as a Christian believer, there is hardly anything higher or greater in all of art than Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Musically magnificent, it is also an incredibly glorious recounting of the greatness of Jesus Christ and his coming kingdom. Some bright advertising agency apparently got the idea, though, that its message was not much more than, “Gosh, I’m happy.” And they used it as the musical score for a toilet tissue advertisement. I was incensed. I think that ad disappeared rather quickly–I don’t watch much TV so I don’t know for sure–but I still get worked up just remembering it.

Six million deaths are considerably more significant than that, and if we can distinguish “sacralizing” from “deifying,” then there is something sacred, holy, and untouchable about the six million–each of them as individuals, and collectively as the victims of the Holocaust. We tread on holy ground here, and we ought to expect emotions to rise quickly and forcefully. Why is it wrong to say “Darwin” and “Hitler” in the same breath? Partly for the same reason, magnified, that it’s wrong to use the Hallelujah Chorus to sell toilet tissue.

And yet…

Yet there is a difference, too. God help us if we don’t learn from the Holocaust. If there really was an historical link from Darwin to Hitler–and there was–we must learn what happened, and why. The very sacredness of the Holocaust, the memory of the victims, demands it.

Richard Weikart’s recent article on this topic outlines six lessons to learn from it. I will focus on just one. What was it about Hitler and the Holocaust that was (and is) so horrifying? Stalin and Mao both killed more people than Hitler did. Pol Pot and Idi Amin rank high among genocidal maniacs. Why Hitler? Why is it that when we want to point to one glaring example of utter evil, it’s always his name that comes up?

I think it’s because before he killed the six million, he dehumanized them. He dehumanized them rhetorically, in his writings and his speeches; and he dehumanized them by packing them like merchandise on trains, carting them off to death factories, killing them by assembly-line methods, using them for horrific experiments, and storing parts in warehouses. There’s still a roomful of human hair at Dachau, according to a friend of mine who has visited there. The thought angers me deeply even as I write this. Yes, Hitler was worse than the rest!

Before Hitler, Haeckel dehumanized vast sections of humanity. He did it in the name of evolution. And here, I think, the philosophical link is valid. There may not be an “ought” to derive from the “is” of evolution, but there is this: if Darwin’s version (along with its 21st century updates) is the whole story of humans, then there isn’t much difference between us and any other organism. There is no such thing as “more advanced,” because evolution knows no advancement except for the more excellent adaptation to an ecological niche. Ingrid Newkirk of PETA can rightly say, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” because there’s no real difference at the bottom of it all, no ontological difference.

I do not think it’s prostituting the Holocaust to draw this lesson from it: that which dehumanizes, points us toward Auschwitz and Dachau.

Conclusion

None of this has a lot to do with the manner in which Nazism was portrayed in Expelled. It couldn’t–I haven’t seen the movie yet. I hope, though, that it will help bring understanding to both sides: that supporters of Darwin will recognize there’s an actual historical basis for linking Darwin to Hitler, and it’s not wrong to say so. I hope others who disagree with evolution will be aware of the emotions we may stir up by saying so. I hope we can reason together on these things, learning from the facts, recognizing the real feelings, learning for the future.

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I’ll be on an airplane this evening, so I won’t see Expelled until sometime later this weekend. But I’ll be eager to read the reports tomorrow morning.

Here is what I hope not to see on the ID/Christian blogs: “We’re right! They’re idiots!” Panda’s Thumb has been saying that kind of thing all along from its anti-ID perspective, and other media are tending to pick up that theme.

I’m calling on ID and Christian bloggers to watch the film with careful discernment. I don’t know how well the film will prove its intended point and I don’t know how well its dramatic construction will be. I do know this: if we love the way it’s presented (or not), and if we agree with most of what it says (or not), we do not have to take a unidimensional, black/white stance that says it’s all good or all bad. We can be watching for points where we can agree strongly, while staying alert for possible weak points or errors.

I hope to see thoughtful responses in the blogs. I hope also to see gracious ones as well, no matter how you good or bad you think the film proves to be.

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Two articles of mine posted on other websites today:

On BreakPoint.com: Handling a Hot Topic (how Christians ought to engage in controversies like the one over Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed).

And on the website for the Center for a Just Society, the first of two articles on the whether there was some connection between Darwinism and Nazism, as the movie claims. This first one looks at Richard Dawkins’s to the matter in his review of the movie Expelled. The second one, to be published around Monday, acknowledges that no legitimate philosophical link can be drawn from Darwinism to Hitler’s ethics. There’s another question, though: was there an historical connection regardless?

I must refer you also to Richard Weikart’s expert article on that topic, published yesterday.

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Someone sent me a link to this YouTube video on “The Church of Oprah Exposed.” Oprah Winfrey has launched a series of webcasts in partnership with New Age author Eckhart Tolle, and claims viewership of 2 million people. I invite you–Christians, in particular–to view the YouTube video. I think it’s pretty persuasive, especially for those who begin with a Biblical mindset, but I’m not going to comment further on that here. Instead I’ve gone to Oprah’s website to see what she has to say for herself. (I’ll come back to the video in a bit also.)

Actually, the most telling reading on Oprah’s site was from Tolle. There is, for example, an excerpt from his book A New Earth. It gets off to a classic New Age beginning:

Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?

The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers—Buddha, Jesus, and others, not all of them known—were humanity’s early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings.

Regarding Tolle’s teachings,

This online class is not for or against any religion. It is intended to help all human beings, all over the world, bring about a shift in consciousness. Eckhart says, “How spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness…. When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha…or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms.

I do not accuse Tolle of willful deception. For all I know, he may be fully convinced this is true. Nevertheless this is entirely wrong. These sorts of things are commonly believed among adherents of new spirituality, but they are quite simply and thoroughly false.

In one aspect, the New Age is not wrong: in its calling persons to spirituality. I have written in support of that, as has Christian psychologist and author Henry Cloud. I fully endorse the search for something deeper, stronger, better than day-to-day material existence.

But this new spirituality is wrong–most obviously wrong, that is–in its claim that it supports, completes, and unites all the sages’ wisdom. This cannot be done, and I object in strongest terms to the distortion of Christianity–and of Jesus Christ himself–that this entails.

Jesus Christ did not say that spiritual fulfillment is about developing a new state of consciousness. He most decidedly did not say (as new spirituality proponents typically do) that it’s about recognizing one’s own divinity. He did not say, as Oprah did in the video linked above, that “There couldn’t possibly be one way;” that there are millions of paths to God. He did not say, as Oprah said in the video, “God, in the essence of all consciousness, isn’t something to believe, God is; and God is a feeling experience, not a believing experience… if God for you is still about a belief, then it’s not truly God.”

In fact, when Jesus rebuked his followers it was for their lack of belief. He said he was the one way to the Father. He said that spiritual fulfillment comes from recognizing we are not God, that we need God, and that we can only come to God through recognizing and believing who he is, how we fall short, and how he graciously draws us to himself anyway through Christ. Tolle cannot reconcile that with his supposedly all-inclusive teachings.

Supposedly all-inclusive, I emphasize. In another video Tolle says that “the moment you say that only my belief or our belief is true, and you deny other people’s beliefs, then you’ve adopted an ideology, and then religion becomes a closed door.” Mr. Tolle, I ask you this: do you believe that? Do you then deny what I wrote in the previous two paragraphs? You say you are not for or against any religion; but Christianity does claim to have an exclusive claim through Jesus Christ: are you not opposed to that exclusive claim?

Christianity’s scandal in today’s mindset, which I have fairly emblazoned in fire across this page, is its exclusivism, its claim that it is true and contradictory beliefs are false. For this I do not apologize. It is nothing more nor less than saying that what we believe is true, we believe is true. Tolle, for his part, is saying that if his way is true, then Christ’s claims are false. He excludes my religious beliefs. In fact all belief systems are exclusivistic. (Hindu teachers in Asia are appalled at Western versions of Eastern religions that claim to accept all truths as equal. They at least know better.)

Yet, oh, this new spirituality sounds so inviting! It sounds so marvelous that we could enter into a new form of consciousness and find the freedom we so desperately want! Indeed there is freedom to be sought and to be found, in Christ. There is light, and enlightenment, and spiritual guidance, and refreshment, and all the things the New Agers tell us they can provide. There is also one thing they cannot offer: truth. For their way is patently self-contradictory, and further, it requires us to believe that we are God ourselves, that we have it within ourselves to solve all our own eternal problems (really, now!) and that Christ’s life, his death on the cross, and his resurrection were just one among many of the universe’s nice ideas.

I have great sympathy with the new spirituality’s rejection of modernist materialism. Thus far, so good. The rest, however, is rubbish.

Related: Knowing the True God

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A new study just reported from Germany concludes that “Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain…. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.”

This echoes a previous study by Benjamin Libet, which had similar results though with a shorter time interval. Many interpreted Libet’s study as refuting free will, since in some sense the brain apparently decided before the conscious mind did. The current study’s authors are more cautious:

Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts even up to 7 seconds ahead of time how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: “Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.”

[From Unconscious decisions in the brain]

Regardless of whether those “prepared” decisions can be reversed, however, free will may still exist. First, there are still massive philosophical absurdities associated with its denial. Bill Dembski just blogged on one of those yesterday. Second, is there any requirement that free choices be entirely conscious choices? Why would that be so? Third, it’s unclear from this report in just what way the unconscious aspects of the decision are fed and influenced by conscious thinking. Fourth, if free will is not operating in the decisions this team studied, just how are decisions made? Do they have any explanation for that at all?

Such an explanation would have to jump a significant hurdle. The one providing it would have to show that he or she believes it not because of deterministic necessity, but because there are good reasons to believe it. The distance between the two is enormous.

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I’ve had to do an inordinate amount of maintenance on this blog, because its back end (writing and managing posts) has not been working properly. As I’m doing this maintenance, I’m changing the theme (the overall look) and the comment functions frequently. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.

Update: After an hour or two of work, I can’t solve this. I’m wondering if there’s a problem with the server (ISP).

Until I get another chance to work on this, be advised that I’ll have to turn off comment preview and comment editing every time I post or edit a blog entry. It won’t work at all otherwise, so it’s unavoidable.

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