If so, would you consider sending an email to a friend about it?

It probably wouldn’t be hard for you, it would be a further encouragment to me, and your friend might say thank you, too—as I am now: Thank you!

I, Charles Darwin: Being the Journal of His Visitation to Earth in the Year 2009 by Nickell John Romjue.

Through the intensest of inquiries—for my eye is as bright now as it was aboard the Beagle—I have observed many things.

Thus speaks Charles Darwin at the close of his re-visitation to earth in 2009, according to his journal found by one Nickell John Romjue, who has made it public it in this slim but eye-opening volume.

John is a near neighbor and friend of mine, a military historian whose writings I have recommended in past reviews. His fictional Darwin walks through fossil digs, visits laboratories, and even explores the Internet. Always the bright-eyed, reflective observer, he finds much that has not turned over time the way he had expected. He is confounded by the failure of the fossil record to support his theory as he had expected. He is perplexed by the confusions and contradictions in his “Tree of Life.” He is astonished over the fantastic complexity of the living cell, far beyond his 19th century imaginings. And he is astounded by the place he has come to hold in our world today:

This I say in due modesty. That I would become a legend in your time, as I have discovered, I attribute to my convincing demonstration in nature of the power of a fundamental idea. But I did not anticipate the scale of the power that my Idea would achieve beyond the realm of science….

I did not foresee that my Theory would evolve as an ideology, a belief system. “Evolution” itself, I have learned, evolved in ways beyond all expectation after I left the world….

Who in my day would have guessed that I would one day be worshiped?!! “Darwin Day,” indeed! I am a scientist, not an idol!…

I find myself in a world I helped to make…. I do not like all that I see. What are we as scientists if we abjure the objective weighing of new factual data? Science is honesty or it is nothing. It compels us to reassess even foundational ideas.

So he says near the middle of his 21st century journal. It is one of the book’s more powerful moments, as the scientist who is its subject is evolving under the force of new information into a Darwin few Darwinists today could love. More than anything, this great observer and originator of ideas is disturbed by the fossilization of his Idea into an unchallengeable, virtually metaphysical Ideal. He returns with bafflement to the same theme near the end:

I had not expected an evolution of Evolution into a belief system! That my Idea in the century to come would petrify into unassailable dogma, a metaphysics hostile to dissent, to heretical ideas, guarded about by custodians of the secrets like the ancient Egyptian priests—I had not foreseen.

The conversion of the mind of man to my Theory and its author congealed in your time into a closed Evolutionary school hostile to counter-inquiry, dismissive of criticism, and blind to contradictory evidence…. My Theory became creed—the Great Myth of the 20th Century.

I am giving you but a bare taste of the book here, but perhaps enough to disclose its imaginativeness, its intent, and the conclusions the author would have us draw from considering what the great scientist might make of more than a century of discovery since his death. It is an enjoyable read, a quick read, and obviously intended to be a controversial read.

I have set the book’s conclusions before you without benefit of its supporting argument. Make no mistake: though it is a work of fiction, it was intended to make a case; it’s just that it does it in a most engaging manner. And in that intent I think it works; but I will not present that argument for you here, even though doing so would perhaps protect me somewhat from charges of jumping to unfounded conclusions. ( I know which commenters I can expect to come here quickly to contest this!)

Rather than saying more, I would prefer to entice you, or possibly (depending on your perspective) goad you into reading it in “Darwin’s” own words for yourself. Ever the bright-eyed, reflective observer, always the original thinker, what would he say if he came back today?

I, Charles Darwin: Being the Journal of His Visitation to Earth in the Year 2009 by Nickell John Romjue. Tucson: Wheatmark, 2011. 107 pages. Amazon Price US$7.95.

Indianapolis – A bill approved today by the Indiana Senate to allow the teaching of creationism in public schools is being criticized as bad science education by Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading intelligent design think tank.

[From Discovery Institute - Article Database - Leading Intelligent Design Think Tank Condemns Passage of Creationism Bill by Indiana Senate as Bad Science and Bad Education]

I’m afraid a lot of prejudiced people are going to think the DI is playing a game of subterfuge here. No need to worry about that: their message on this is consistent in print, on the web, and face to face.

• Amy Hall
• Brett Kunkle
• Chris Horst
• John Stonestreet
• Jonathan Morrow
• Mary Jo Sharp
• Randall Hardman
• Sarah Flashing
• Sean McDowell

Oh, and also

• Tom Gilson

Okay, I admit to a little bias here. But these are great thinkers and writers. I’ve had opportunity to get to know John Stonestreet in particular this year. He’s a rare combination of bright, likable, aggressive (in the right ways), and humble, along with having an uncommonly solid grip on biblical truth. If you’re not hearing his radio broadcast/podcast, you ought to be. He’s been doing some very interesting interviews at Chuck Colson’s side lately, too: Jack Abramoff, Jimmy Carter, and several other interesting people.

The bloggers at the point are experienced authors and speakers on matters pertaining to Christian worldview. It is a distinct privilege to be associated with them. I’m learning a lot there, and I believe you can, too.

Consider this, after all: difficult though it may be for you to accept a talking serpent, is it really any harder than believing that evil is an illusion? Or that human uniqueness is an illusion: we’re really no different from the animals (so what good does it do us to think we’ve got a problem)? For me that’s unbelievable, ridiculous; laughable if it weren’t about something as serious as evil and suffering.

No, what we want for a believable explanation of the human problem is one that takes seriously who we are, and doesn’t try to convince us our problems are less than they are. Our problem is actually greater than most of us realize.

We have seen that God created us in his image. The original humans were indeed fully human: in fully human relationships with each other, with the natural word (for which they had been given responsibility), and with God. They were free innocent, free from blame, fulfilling the relational and individual purposes for which God intended them. Being fully human they could love fully, which meant they loved by chose, not by robotic necessity; but to choose love intentionally meant to reject unlove intentionally, which required that there be some form of unlove that was possible to reject.

God gave them a world nearly without limits, but not quite. He gave them the possibility of choosing to reject his goodness and love.There was one tree whose fruit was off limits. It was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: knowledge they did not have, for their innocence was of a quieter kind than ours. It was not a struggling innocence, or an innocence restored, or innocence among blameworthiness (for while the jury can find the defendant innocent of the charge, it would never say, “we find this person innocent of all wrongdoing of any kind whatever, his whole life long.”)

This openness and freedom, this goodness, was what we were made for. When we say, as we often do, “it’s not supposed to be this way!” we’re speaking of what we know: there is another way instead that it’s supposed to be. When we say, “This is just wrong!” it’s because we know there is a real right that our experience isn’t living up to. When we say, “I don’t know why I can’t do better than this,” it’s because we have a conception of something really better that’s missing in us, that we’re not living up to. Recall Pascal’s words from last time:

The greatness of man.—The greatness of man is so evident, that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognise that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.

For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? … Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But any one is inconsolable at having none. (Pensées 409)

We were meant for complete goodness, and we cannot forget it. What happened? We call it The Fall. The serpent deceived Eve. She knew that to transgress God’s limits was to die. The charm he wove on her was one that is repeated over and over still today: To be a god under herself (Genesis 3:4-5):

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Adam joined her in stepping over the line. And the two, for the first time, knew evil. The good that they had perhaps hardly recognized previously, as a fish hardly knows what water is, they finally saw; and saw that they had lost it. They were frightened, or embarrassed, or they felt exposed; they could no longer feel the freedom of goodness they had had before. They hid.

We are still frightened, embarrassed; we still feel exposed. Especially—but not only—when we know we have done wrong. We still hide. You still hide. I still hide. You and I both still know we do wrong, and we still feel a need to hide, from God, from others, from ourselves.

When God asked what was going on, they dissembled, shifting the blame: “It was the serpent’s fault!” “It was the woman’s fault!” (How many times will that latter accusation be spoken today?) This rings true, doesn’t it?

God knew better, obviously. He let them know then the consequences of their rebellion. Their relationship with him was broken; they no longer had the free and open fellowship with him they had had. This was a spiritual form of death, of separation from God. Their relationship with each other turned into alienation and confused desire, and it was hardly moments later that the first murder was committed. Their relationship with the world was mangled, and the joy of fulfillment through work turned into the pain and sweat of laborious toil. These things are our experience today. These things are real. We have fallen from a real place of rightness to a real place of trouble and wrong. The whole earth suffers the pangs of it (Romans 8:18-23).

The difficulty we are in is bigger than many of us realize, especially in that it includes a severed relationship with God, the one source of all love and all goodness, and because it is a forever problem.

Even in the pronouncing of those consequences, though, God spoke of hope: the serpent would be crushed (Gen. 3:15). Looking back at it we see the significance of the identity of the crusher: it would be the offspring of the woman, not of the man, who would do that. We see the first gleam of a solution even in the first appearance of the problem.

For when it comes to explaining our problem as humans, it’s a nice thing if it also helps us understand the solution. It’s not logically necessary that our problem would have a solution;* it could have been that we’re all locked in illusion with no way out, or that we’re on an evolutionary path that has no good ending in sight forever. Still, if our problem really is the kind that has an answer, that would be helpful to know, wouldn’t it? We will come back to the solution very soon in this series, or you can take an advance look at it here.

As for that talking serpent and that magic fruit: It doesn’t take that much to believe these things, now, does it? What’s more outlandish, a serpent who can talk, or the idea that 7 billion organisms who are fundamentally no different from any other animal can talk? What’s more outrageous: the idea that there is a spiritual side to reality, and that one hostile spirit leader became embodied temporarily in a serpent, or the idea that 7 billion embodied humans are absolutely nothing but machines in motion?

The fruit was probably literally a fruit, in my opinion, but it could have been anything. It wasn’t a magical apple, though. It was simply an open door for them to exercise their free will to follow God or to reject him. It represented a choice. They made it. Ever since then we’ve been trying to understand what to do with our problems.

*I mean it’s not logically necessary from a limited perspective. There are many who believe that the existence of a good God is logically necessary, and I think they are right; which would seem to imply that whatever human problems might exist, there is a good God to deal with them in a good way. But I’m not taking this concept of logical necessity out to that extent right now.

No, seriously. What’s wrong with us?

Maybe nothing’s wrong with us. Sure, it seems like something’s not right with humanity, but maybe it’s just an illusion. There are modern naturalists/materialists who say consciousness and free will are human illusions. They’re not the only ones who place common-sense human experience in doubt. “Christian Science” (which is neither) teaches that evil is unreal, and that our only real problem is believing otherwise. Death is a “mortal illusion.”

It seems to me that would be a hard belief to try to hold to. “Christian Science” is a small minority religion, for reasons that are plain to see. Few of us have even heard of Mary Baker Eddy, its founder.

Here’s another woman, though, whose name is not quite so obscure: ever heard of Oprah? Oprah Winfrey, I mean—that Oprah. (As if you needed me to add the last name.) She launched a spirituality seminar a couple of years ago that drew something like 2 million participants, in cooperation with a writer/teacher named Eckhart Tolle. Tolle teaches that “All problems are illusions of the mind,” and (p. 74 here)

Some spiritual teachings state that all pain is ultimately an illusion, and this is true. The question is: Is it true for you? Do you want to experience pain for the rest of your life and keep saying that it is an illusion? Does that free you from the pain? What we are concerned with here is how you can realize this truth—make it real in your own experience.

To live, to feel —
To feel, perchance not to dream — ay there’s the rub,
For in this unreal life what confusions may come…”

That’s not how Hamlet speaks it, but it fits. We live. We feel. If we are supposed to persuade ourselves it’s all a dream, well, that’s a hard thing to do. It seems a cruel thing, even, to call our pains and griefs unreal. How could anyone suggest such a thing? I think it’s because they’re trying to understand our problem, to grasp what’s really wrong with us, but they’re looking the wrong place for it.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) knew where to find the answer. He was also possibly the best at articulating the question.

Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men. (Pensées 199)

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable.  (Pensées 397)

And those who most despise men, and put them on a level with the brutes, yet wish to be admired and believed by men, and contradict themselves by their own feelings; their nature, which is stronger than all, convincing them of the greatness of man more forcibly than reason convinces them of their baseness.  (Pensées 404)

In these fragmentary “thoughts” (English for Pensées) Pascal puts his finger on the problem. We are great, yet we are miserable. We see a hopeless, sorrowful fate ahead, and we cannot shake off the sure knowledge that it is wrong to be in this condition.

I do not know of whom he was speaking in fragment 404, or what philosophical eddies were swirling about Europe in the 1600s that would have put men “on a level with the brutes.” Perhaps it was a recrudescence of Epicurean naturalism. In today’s world, though, a thought like that would surely refer to those who tell us that evolution explains us completely. We are no different from the lower animals except that we have climbed higher on the evolutionary ladder; but those who understand what it means that evolution is unguided and directionless know that “higher” means nothing. If there is no direction, then there is no higher or lower. (I spoke of this in a related sense last time.)

It becomes a particular puzzle why grief and pain and moral wrongs should vex us so much more than they do the animals. It almost tempts one to say, if this is what I get for being “higher,” then please, let me down from here!

Let us hear from Pascal once more:

The greatness of man.—The greatness of man is so evident, that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognise that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.

For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? Was Paulus Æmilius unhappy at being no longer consul? On the contrary, everybody thought him happy in having been consul, because the office could only be held for a time. But men thought Perseus so unhappy in being no longer king, because the condition of kingship implied his being always king, that they thought it strange that he endured life. Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But any one is inconsolable at having none. (Pensées 409)

Naive evolutionism says we are on the way up. Savvy evolutionism, Christian Science, and New Age Tolle-ism may have nothing else in common, but they agree in this: it’s a mistake to think there is any “up.” Pascal, by contrast, understood that we have been higher before than we are: that man “has fallen from a better nature which once was his.”

This comes straight out of Genesis 3, which will be the topic of my next article in this series. Few passages of literature have been subjected to such ridicule as the first few chapters of Genesis. This is unwarranted on many grounds, one of which Pascal has captured in his fragments 397 and 409. We know there’s something wrong. We know we were intended for something better. We reject the ridiculous lie that this is all illusion, a misunderstanding.

Some readers may find Genesis 3 unbelievable on account of its mythical feel: a talking serpent and a deathly fruit. We’ll come back to that in a while. In fact I haven’t even begun to discuss what that passage has to offer by way of explaining our problem. I can’t ask you to accept that explanation when I haven’t even set it forth for you; but what I do ask of you is to consider how unreal, how strange, how mythical are the New Age or naturalistic evolutionary explanations of our condition:

For in this unreal life what confusion may come…”

There are many confusions in this life, but let’s not be fooled about this one: we know we were meant for better than this. Evolution knows nothing of any “better” for humans; and calling it illusion is no way to explain it either.

I’m halfway through discussing this crucial turning point, and I haven’t even stated what it is yet. While you wait for the next half, I urge you not to close your mind. You may discover that Genesis 3 explains humankind—including yourself—better than you ever dreamed. There’s more coming tomorrow.

(Image source)

Illusions Of Humanness?
Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Chicago and author of Why Evolution is True, wrote recently in USAToday that we don’t have free will. Not at all. Not even a little bit. He means that seriously: we don’t make choices, ever. We may think we do, but that’ss an illusion. What really happens instead is that the atoms and molecules in our brain do what atoms and molecules do, based on natural law; and because natural law can only do what natural law requires, nothing can possibly happen except for what natural law requires.

Like rocks falling off a hill

That means you and I can only do what natural law requires, not what we decide. A rock doesn’t decide if it’s going to fall down a hill. Your neurons don’t decide if they’re going to have their electrochemical reactions. The only way around that requirement of natural law would be some kind of spooky supernatural exception, he thinks. He’s right about that, in a way: it’s the image of God in us. We share with God the ability to make decisions of our own, and not to be mere puppets of our brains’ electrochemistry.

Others have gone so far as to say that consciousness is an illusion, or that we have no meaning and no purpose.

Moral Meaninglessness?
Others degrade the moral significance of life. They claim that morality is up to the individual or the culture: that morality is relative, in other words. They say we ought to tolerate moral differences among one another. Most of them don’t see where that path leads. I’ve interacted on the web with one who did, though. He conceded that his moral relativism meant that “In their own times and places, slavery, suttee, and child sacrifice were not wrong.” This came from a university professor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. (Suttee, or sati, was the former custom in India, wherein a widow was required to throw herself alive onto her late husband’s funeral pyre and be burned to death along with his body.)

Did you catch what that professor said? Cultures determine their own morality, so when slavery is the culture, slavery is not wrong. In case that didn’t sink home, I’ll say it this way: in the deep South in 1845, slavery was not wrong. In Alabama in 1850, slavery was right. How stupid is that? How disgusting! How obviously wrong!

Moral relativism makes moral progress impossible--even this!

And it’s degrading, too. Consider that another implication of this is that in 1950 in Montgomery, segregation and racism were not wrong. So when Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, and when Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement to recognize African-Americans’ full humanness, at the end of it all we shifted from one cultural viewpoint to another, and neither one of them was wrong. It was a lateral shift. It wasn’t moral progress at all. The relativist position says, “what right do you have to judge another culture?” But moral progress means precisely that we judge another culture: our own previous culture. It means that at the end of it all, we say, “we’ve become better than we were.” Moral progress is impossible if you can’t say we’ve become better than we were before—but relativism doesn’t allow that.

By the way, if you really want to annoy a moral relativist, remind them that if it’s wrong to judge other cultures, then they can’t find the slightest fault with our previous culture of condemning homosexuality. That was the cultural norm, so it must have been just fine. Not only that, but if we move toward a culture that approves homosexuality, that’s not progress—not even from their own (twisted) perspective—because there is no such thing as moral progress.

A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy?
This denial of the image of God saps the very humanness out of us. Peter Singer, an ethicist at Princeton University, accuses us of “speciesism” for considering ourselves more significant than the animals. This is the mindset behind the animal rights movement: who are we to think we’re any better than the animals? Ingrid Newkirk of PETA once said that from an ethical perspective, “A rat is a pig is a dog is. a boy.”

One scientist is so concerned about the “harm” we’re doing to the earth, he thinks the best thing that could happen would be the elimination of fully 90% of all humans.

Note carefully that I’m not saying every believer in evolution believes these things. I doubt that most of them do. But those among them who do believe these things are the ones who are on the right track, if evolution is true. The others are denying crucial, necessary implications of the theory. If blind, unguided evolution is true, then ethically speaking, a rat is indeed a pig is a dog is a boy. There’s no basis for considering them different in worth. If you disagree, then you’re genuinely being speciesist. You bad person, you! But wait–our whole culture is speciesist, and if our whole culture approves, then it can’t be bad after all. You morally insignificant organism, you!

Why then do some believers in unguided evolution deny the theory’s implications? Why do they still think humans are different? Why do some of them still think we have moral significance, or free will? It’s because they can’t get around the reality. We really are created in the image of God.

The Image of God Strikes Back
One of my favorite authors, J.P. Moreland, wrote a book I want to read someday: The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism. I like that title. There are some genuine 50¢ words in there, but they’re good ones. Imago Dei is “image of God” in Latin. Naturalism is the theory (roughly) that nothing exists but nature: nothing but matter and energy, interacting by natural law and chance. It says there is no God and no spiritual reality, and there are no souls, only bodies.

Recalcitrant is the key word. It means “obstinately uncooperative.” We use it to describe misbehaving kids or criminals who won’t change, no matter how much correction gets applied to them. Human nature is obstinately resistant to cooperating with what evolutionary theory says we ought to think about ourselves. If unguided evolution is true, we shouldn’t be fooled by these “illusions” of consciousness or free will—but we just can’t help ourselves. We shouldn’t think we’re more significant than any other organism, but we just won’t get with the program!

There’s a reason for our obstinacy. The fact is we are humans, and no matter how hard someone might try to talk ourselves out of it, we’re going to go on being human. We were created in the image of God. That’s who we are, and that’s who we will always be.

To summarize, we who are created in God’s image will go on living as if created in God’s image: thinking, feeling, deciding, relating, building, and creating. There are theories out there that deny this, but they run up hard against reality, and they fail.

Being created in God’s image means that we glorify him by thinking, feeling, deciding, relating, building, and creating—even in so-called “non-spiritual” realms of life; and these are good things to do.

It also means that we have moral significance. It means we can fail morally, and turn all of this to bad ends. No one needs to tell you we’ve done that, but still we’re going to spend considerable time on it when we move to our next topic.

NORWICH, U.K., January 23, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In remarks that critics have said are disturbingly reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopian novel “Brave New World,” a UK ethicist has argued that since pregnancy causes “natural inequality” between the sexes, women must be liberated from the “burdens and risks of pregnancy” through the use of “ectogenesis”, or artificial wombs.

“Pregnancy is a condition that causes pain and suffering, and that affects only women. The fact that men do not have to go through pregnancy to have a genetically related child, whereas women do, is a natural inequality,” writes Dr. Anna Smajdor in an article that recently appeared in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.

“If there were a disease that caused symptoms and risks similar to those caused by pregnancy, I contend that it would be regarded as being fairly serious, and that we would have good reasons to try to insure against it,” argues Smajdor, who lumps pregnancy along with “diseases” that continue for many months, such as the measles….

For Smajdor, the issue is simply a matter of sex equality: “Either we view women as baby carriers who must subjugate their other interests to the well-being of their children or we acknowledge that our social values and level of medical expertise are no longer compatible with ‘natural’ reproduction,” she concludes.

[From Brave New World: UK ethicist wants women to abandon motherhood, use artificial wombs | LifeSiteNews.com]

Elsewhere Dr. Smajdor has opined that “pregnancy is barbaric,” and

for expectant mothers, the fact of encompassing another life in their bodies often takes a serious toll on their autonomy…. Not only this, but their abilities and rights to make decisions about their medical care are at risk of being overridden in favor of the interests of the unborn child.

and

With regard to the safety of ectogenesis, I assume for the purpose of this argument, that sufficient research would need to be carried out to establish this.

 

 

Some questions I would like Dr. Smajdor to answer:

1. Is equality the highest good? (Can there be a highest good if equality is the highest good?)
2. Please describe the moral failure attached to placing others’ interests above your own.
3. What does the empirical evidence say concerning the well-being of children born through ectogenesis? Are they as emotionally and physically healthy as children born out of a women’s womb? (I’ll let you crib on this, Dr. Smajdor, since you and I both no there is no empirical evidence. See question 5 and following.)
4. What does the empirical evidence say concerning the well-being of women and families in a society that relies heavily on ectogenesis? (See question 5 and following, again.)
5. How do you suggest we obtain the relevant empirical evidence? Is there an ethical way to do it?
6. Is it ethical for you to make this recommendation while having no information on how it would affect the children or the adults?
7. Is it possible that you are simply following the logic of abortion, specifically, the logic that says the needs of the adult absolutely override the needs of the helpless and dependent young?
8. Or is it really the ethics of equality that drives you? What specifically is unethical about men and women being different from each other?
9. You say that pregnancy is a disease. How many other diseases are this productive of life and joy?
10. In light especially of questions 5 and 6, would you please explain to us what qualifies you to describe yourself as an ethicist?

In view of this and questions #5 and #6, if I had to place money on what’s really driving this woman’s opinions, I’d split it equally between the “ethics of equality,” and abortion-logic, or, “Who made me responsible for the next generation? They can fend for their own #!*% selves!”

I’ve had Reasons for God in my blogroll for quite a while. (That link list is hidden at the bottom of the page now, but it’s still there.) If you haven’t added it to your daily reading list, now is the time. For a first taste, you might read The Problem of Blind Faith, where he addresses a live and pressing question:

In talking with skeptical students around Boston, I have learned that few things drive them as crazy as Christians with a blind faith. They are perplexed: “How can your core convictions be completely divorced from reason and logic?”

He addresses it, as I say–and then he proceeds to challenge just about everyone on it, whether skeptic or Christian, because we all have a tendency to get it wrong.

2011 was a good year for new blogs. More to come.

Wherever experts gather to hurl opprobrium, in other words, has often been precisely where a newly discerned truth is emerging.

[From Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Offending the Experts]

Genesis 1:26-31 says,

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

For all the glory of the galaxies, and the brightness of the stars, still it appears that we humans are the apex of God’s creation, for only we were created in the image of God. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

What Does It Mean?

What does it mean to be “created in God’s image”? Obviously it has nothing to do with physical form, for the One who created physical reality is not a physical being himself. It doesn’t have anything to do with sharing in God’s infinite perfections: omnipresence, omnipotence, perfect knowledge and goodness, and so on.

Rather it means that we share a degree of God’s attributes of personality: intellect, emotions, will, relationship, responsibility, and moral significance. Let me expand those categories briefly:

• Intellect: We can think and learn.
• Emotions: We can love and have joy, or we can hurt and grieve.
• Will: We can make our own free choices.
• Relationship: We can live in intentional relationship with God, humans, and the rest of creation.
• Responsibility: We have genuine impact and accountability with respect to our effects on our own lives and the lives of other humans. We have a stewardship over the earth. We can create, build, grow things, and make a future that is ours. Or we can fail to do these things.
• Moral Significance: In all of things, we can do good, or not. Our choices have moral significance in a universe where morality is as real as the ground we walk on.

Glorifying God By Reflecting His Image

God is glorified in our expression of his image. Christians are familiar with the idea that “spiritual” activities glorify God. Worship, prayer, studying God’s character and his ways—these are all uniquely human things we do, made possible uniquely by being in God’s image.

We glorify God as we live out his image in us in other ways, too. Someone said to me once, “Surely the spiritual aspects of our lives are more important than the non-spiritual ones.” I answered, “I suppose you might be right—but tell me, what are these ‘non-spiritual aspects?’ Are they the parts of our lives that God isn’t interested in?” He got the point. It’s all significant. It’s all spiritual.

Let me illustrate further by pointing to two significant human activities that many Christians consider less than fully “spiritual:” work and art.

Working

Work is not a curse that was placed on us after the Fall. Hard labor, in which the ground fights back against us, which makes the back ache or (more currently) the carpal tunnels inflamed; and leaves us wondering whether the rain will fall and the food will really grow, or whether the money will last till the next paycheck—that’s the curse.

But work itself was meant to be a good thing. It’s how we shape our world. It’s how we create. It’s one of the main contexts wherein we relate to one another: doing things together. It’s how we bless one another. It’s how we express our individuality, while sharing in community.

I remember reading a book on leadership by John Kotter. He was speaking about how someone at KFC had devised a new sandwich for them to sell. It took a lot to get that sandwich to market: developing the recipe; doing market analysis; building a new kind of sandwich cooker; distributing the cooker to all the restaurants; training the employees; acquiring, prepping, and shipping the ingredients; pricing the product; running a promotional campaign; and probably a whole lot more besides. Kotter wrote at length about how fired up the manager in charge of it all was throughout the process.

My first thought when I read it was, Oh, good grief. Who can get so excited about a dumb sandwich? Aren’t there more important things in life than that? But then I remembered all the fast food sandwiches I had eaten, and I had to genuinely repent: Thank God for managers like that! They’ve blessed my life thousands of times. They’ve blessed multiple millions of other people, too. And so have the people in the restaurants who make each individual sandwich, and ring them up for us, and clean the tables after we eat.

I’m sure you can see how this applies to more than sandwiches. Your work is a contribution you make as one individual, which becomes a blessing to the whole community. It’s a reflection of the image of God. Our work is one of the two or three most important domains where we live out the creative, contributing stewardship for which he created us.

Creating

Similarly with the arts. A good book is a good thing, even if it’s not about the Bible. So is a great piece of music, or a beautifully designed building, or an outstanding film or play. God made us creative as he is creative, and to participate by creating is to reflect his image. To enjoy and to appreciate others’ creativity is, too. And again, it doesn’t have to be about “spiritual” things.

Obviously any of these things can go wrong, and in many tragic ways they have. Creativity gone bad has given is our contemporary film and TV wasteland of sin and degradation. We could all name multiple examples like that, but that’s our next topic in this series. For now I want to emphasize that work, creativity, and stewardship were part of God’s plan for us before our fall into sinful rebellion against God.

Work and creating are only illustrations of God’s image in us, by the way. I could have chosen many others. Our relational need for each other (“It is not good for the man to be alone”) came before the Fall. Our moral significance preceded the fall; otherwise it could not have been a moral sort of Fall. I could say more but I will move on instead. More tomorrow!

(Image Source 1 and 2)

These are all Christian blogs that began in 2011. Today I’m going to share the list of blogs that came my way through requests in December so you can go ahead and start acquainting yourself with them.

Starting on Friday I will feature several of the better blogs, one or two or three at a time. These are listed here in no particular order. I like all of them! Some bloggers gave me a link to one of their best or favorite posts of 2011, and I’m including those links where they were provided.

A word about “Christian” blogs: I made a request specifically for new Christian bloggers to let me know about themselves. It’s always possible for someone with unorthodox or non-Christian views to respond to an opportunity like this. I’m looking through their some of their material but not all of it, and unless that limited survey shows me some reason to believe otherwise, I’m taking the stance of erring (if I must) on the side of trusting these bloggers’ self-description as Christian (“mere Christian,” in Lewis’s terms). You can let me know if I included someone here that I should not have.

Reasons for God: The Problem of Blind Faith

All Things Reformed: Preparing God’s People to Share Their Christian Testimony

With the Grain of the Universe

Books on Trial

The Providence of God

Rebel Theologian: Hellish Love

Christian Apologetics and Intelligence Ministry

The Root and Fatness

Razor Swift Research Group

Mimschach Musings: In the Face of Natural Disaster

A Civil Discussion: Secondary Objections: Faith and the Quest for Knowledge

The Point with John Stonestreet

Self-described as a “seeker,” and yet worth mentioning:

The Best Possible World

Begun before 2011, but also worth mentioning anyway:

Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Good

Faith, Reason, and Philosophy, via Google Translate (Finnish in the original)

Walking Beside the Boat

“Whither is humanity?

When Friedrich Nietzsche’s Madman told the world, ”God is dead, and we are his murderers,” it was as if he alone understood the enormity of the crime. This deicide was never anything but a fiction: Nietzsche never thought there was a real God who could really be killed; instead he saw the idea of God dying in the European mind. (Others knew God was alive and laughing at the Madman.)

It took a Nietzsche to fathom the depths of what this “death of God” would mean:

How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him….”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves.“

And what if the Madman were to survey the world today? Would he not would cry out, “Humanity is dead!” Yes, and he would ask, “Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying humanity? Do we smell nothing as yet of the human decomposition?” And he might again conclude that his time is not yet.

But why would the Madman say such a thing? How have we killed humanity? you ask. Is this not a more clearly a fiction than Nietzsche’s ever was? Are there not 7 billion persons who can witness to humanity’s vitality?

Yes, humanity still lives, just as God still lived in Nietzsche’s day. It lives in spite of the universal mass murder that philosophical naturalism would inflict upon it: the attempted strangulation of the idea of the human. Its quest is the murder not of persons but of personhood, not of humans but of humanness itself. Naturalism will not succeed in this. That does not mean it is not trying.

I do not lay this charge directly at the naturalist’s feet: it is naturalism that is culpable, not you who are naturalists. Instead I call you to account, you who are naturalists, for your blithe ignorance of the magnitude of the atrocities you endorse. You tell of the carnage as if it brings hope to your breast. Who gave you the sponge to wipe away your own concern for the heart of humanness?

To be human is to be rational and aware, to have at least a measure of freedom, to be more than an animal, more than a machine. Your naturalism would deny that.

Your naturalism seeks to disown free will in humans, without which humanness is less than a shell of itself, and genuine humanity is eliminated.

It seeks to kill humanness—and thus all of humanity—when it tries to persuade us no person’s consciousness is anything other than illusion.

It seeks to kill humanity—all the glory of being human—when it places us on a plane with the animals and charges us with “speciesism” for considering ourselves otherwise.

It seeks to kill humanity—all the integral wholeness of the human—when it claims we are but machines crafted and co-opted by genes to reproduce themselves.

It seeks to kill humanity—all of humanity, all of humanness—when it tells us that physics and chemistry provide the most real, the most true explanation for who and what we are.

And all of this is to say nothing of the death of the human in relation to the living God who imparted humanity to us as beings in his own image.

Naturalism’s success would mean the destruction of all humanness everywhere. The universal murder would be accomplished. The genocide would be complete.

This is preposterous! you say. Where is this death of which you speak?

You do not see it, though it is right before your eyes? (“I have come too early,” said the Madman; “my time is not yet.”)

And again you say Call me not a murderer! I too am human. I will not kill; I will not accept such a charge upon me!

Yes, naturalist, you are human, and it is your humanness that may save you in the end. You say consciousness is an illusion, yet you say so consciously. You choose to say that choice is impossible. Your doctrine of fragmented reductionism issues not from your genes and neurotransmitters but from yourself: a person; a real person; a whole person. Your abstract naturalism unleashes its weapons of mass destruction upon humanness everywhere; still, your own very real humanness survives. So while you claim the murderous doctrine with your words, with your life you deny it; and how good it is that you do, for that very denial means your survival as a human person.

Nietzsche gloried in the horror of God’s “death.” Would he regard humanity’s death the same way? I can hardly think he would, even though today’s deadly naturalism is a tree nourished in the earth piled on God’s fictional grave. Nietzsche proclaimed God’s death as the liberation of humanity, but there finally comes a point when a horror such as this cannot hide under such a mask.

For though naturalism is an abstraction, its weapons have real effects on the world, just as the fiction of God’s death had real effects. Naturalism’s abstract weapons inflict real damage. The more the naturalist insists that we are but meat computers, puppets of our chemistry and environment, laboring under an illusion of human glory, meaning, and uniqueness when we ought to reject our speciesism and bow to the knowledge of our bland sameness, the more the naturalist and the rest of us will believe such things, and the more we will act as if they were real. We will treat ourselves and each other according to the degraded view we assign ourselves and others.

Has it not happened already in the wasteland of the TV sitcom? You say that is a trivial example. Is that not the point? We have trivialized our days and our evenings. We have trivialized our economic lives: our highest goal is not to serve but to survive, until one day we can walk out of it with the right gadgets and on the right golf course. We have degraded romance and intimacy into the virtually anonymous “hook-up.” We have degraded marriage into a come-and-go-as-you-please convenience. We have trivialized all our human experience; because we have taught ourselves humanness itself is trivial.

Therefore to the naturalist I say this: you carry with you a deadly weapon. You have it strapped on your body, as it were, for there is no escape, no exception: this universal death would entail the suicide of its perpetrators’ humanness, along with that of the rest of the world. Would you die for this? Or—speaking literally rather than figuratively now—would you deny your entire humanness for this?

Nietzsche’s Madman understood better than others (though not well enough) what the God-killers were clamoring to destroy. He would know today  (though not well enough) what it means that so many seek to strangle all humanness out of all human beings.

God survived the Madman. The Madman is, in the end, quite mad. Humanity will survive his re-visitation.

Postscript

It bears repeating: Naturalism has grown up out of the fictional grave of God. Ironically some naturalists call themselves “humanists.” I speak again to you who consider yourself a naturalist: perhaps you do not care about God. Maybe you find the thought of God loathsome to you. I do not know what might have led you there. I would dearly love to call you to the place where you could understand that God is really good, loving, and great; to help you see that whatever you find ugly in God is founded in some distortion or misconception, rather than in reality. If you could answer that call I would be happy to greet you in the company of those who, by God’s grace, have come to experience his truth and goodness.

That may be too long and difficult a step for you to take. It might involve a change of mind that for you at this stage is beyond even imagining. Then I ask you to consider taking this smaller step. It’s in the right direction. I ask you to consider a step back toward affirming your own humanness, and that of all the people you know and love. Give up telling yourself with words what your real self knows to be false. Affirm—do not deny as “illusion”—your own freedom, your own awareness, your own worth beyond that of the animals. You are human, and you know it.

The genocide of which I have been speaking here is abstract, not real. In the end our humanness will prevail. Let your own humanness prevail in you—even if it leads you one frightening step back toward God.

Please let me know what you think. Thanks!

(Post time updated to keep this entry visible on the home page.)

The easiest approach is to remain aloof from the culture and condemn it.

[From Engage the Culture, Pastor, If You Dare: Part 1 of 3]

The easiest approach is rarely the right approach.

The old school house isn’t what it used to be—especially if your child’s principal is a member of the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP). If so, then he or she has helped sponsor a curriculum that you need to know about.

It’s called “Ready, Set, Respect!” Its ostensible mission, as presented on its first few pages, is to promote mutual respect among elementary school children, and to teach that teasing and bullying are wrong. So far I agree completely. I was bullied and teased in grade school, and my son and daughter have experienced this in big ways, including one incident that required a sustained period of medical help, and another in which an administrator was suspended for the way he treated one of our children. My daughter in particular has been ostracized for believing in Jesus Christ. “Ready, Set, Respect!” is just the thing that would have helped her in elementary school, right? It gets off to a great start, after all:

Elementary school is a time of rapid development for children.

In addition to gaining knowledge and developing skills, these years are ones during which children typically begin to develop an understanding of themselves and the world and people around them. As such, the social environment of classrooms and schools provides the opportunity for children to initiate and develop relationships and navigate increasingly complex peer relationships. That complexity can often lead to incidents of name-calling and use of hurtful and biased words. If left uninterrupted by educators and other adult role models, these behaviors can escalate as the prejudice and biased attitudes that influence them take root in children’s hearts and minds….

Ready, Set, Respect! provides a set of tools to help elementary school educators ensure that all students feel safe and respected and develop respectful attitudes and behaviors.

(Did you catch that word “all”? We’ll come back to that.)

Schoolchildren exhibit all kinds of prejudice and bias: racial prejudice, bias against the obese or clumsy, resentment toward academically successful students, disdain for those whose parents make less money, disrespect for boys who seem less than masculine or girls who seem too much so, and above all, a readiness to go after anyone who seems vulnerable.

“Ready, Set, Respect!” includes a plethora of excellent exercises for reducing name-calling, put-downs, and bullying. Who could object to school resources encouraging mutual respect? Well, I could, when said resource is something other than it purports to be. Sure, it teaches respectful behaviors; but at root it’s really a curriculum for social re-engineering. It should be called “Ready, Set, Re-Engineer!” In addition to teaching respect among children, it advances messages including (the following are all direct quotes, other than material inside brackets):

• diversity related to sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression
• Most students experience isolation at one time or another. For many young students the first time this may emerge is in response to others’ perceiving that they are not behaving “enough” like a boy or “enough” like a girl. [True enough, and valid, but bear in mind that word "all" that I highlighted earlier.]
• Did you ever see representations of diverse families (such as those headed by same sex couples, adoptive families, or step-families) represented in your elementary classes when you were in school? [Same-sex precedes adoptive and step-families, for some reason]
• A hetero-normative viewpoint is one that expresses heterosexuality as a given instead of being one of many possibilities…. The assumption (reinforced by imagery and practice) that a boy will grow up and marry a woman is based on such a viewpoint.
• Write math problems with contexts that include a variety of family structures and gender-expressions. For example, “Rosa and her dads were at the store and wanted to buy three boxes of pasta. If each costs $.75, how much will all three boxes cost?
• Ask students to think about how they would feel if someone said something hurtful or mean about someone in their family or another family. Offer to the students that sometimes people may say something that can be hurtful or may ask a question about a family member or structure that they are not familiar with and that is different to their own [for example,] physical differences between the parents/guardians and children in terms of the color of their skin or type of hair or because there are two parents of the same gender, or grandmother raising the children in the family. Explain to the students that there are lots of different types of families and it is important to respect all of those families. [Same-sex parenting is no more exceptional than a grandmother raising the children.]
• Suggested books to read:
• • 10,000 Dresses (for grades K-3): “Unfortunately, no one wants to hear about Bailey’s dreams of magical dresses. Then Bailey meets Laurel, an older girl who is inspired by his imagination and courage. Working together, they make Bailey’s dreams come true.”
  • My Princess Boy (for grades K-2): “Dyson loves pink, sparkly things. Sometimes he wears dresses. Sometimes he wears jeans. He likes to wear his princess tiara, even when climbing trees. He’s a Princess Boy. This is a story about unconditional love and acceptance.”

I said I would come back to that important word “all.” Just one quick, easy question: how much respect do you think teachers and administrators should give a student who disagrees with any of this? How much diversity is really being encouraged here? Why does this publication offer no illustrations relating to my daughter’s experience of being bullied for her beliefs?

Okay, that last question was just stupid. The answer is obvious. It’s because this curriculum is about much more (or much less) than mutual respect. It’s about social re-engineering from kindergarten on up. Some people, including some students, don’t approve of that project. Their opinions are not welcome, and they are not respected.

NAESP principals lead schools attended by 33 million students. Is your child’s principal a member?

Punctuation criticism from a credible source:

Although My partner and i honestly such as this submit, I believe there were the punctuation miscalculation near in the end with the Finally section.

I’m trying to decide whether this is a compliment:

My brother suggested I might like this blog. He used to be totally right. This post actually made my day. You cann’t imagine just how so much time I had spent for this information! Thank you!

He used to be totally right, but then he suggested I might like this blog…

How weird is that:

Hmmm… that was weird, my last comment got eaten.

I guess that never happened to this spammer before.

Premiss 2. Science’s competence (meaning the empirical, physical sciences) is strictly in the study of events and entities in conjunction with, in relation to, or as determined by natural law or by chance. (From generally accepted definitions of the natural sciences)

Conclusion 1. If  some function or capacity exists whose action or operation is not determined by natural law or chance,  then science has no competence concerning that function or capacity. (Premiss 2)

Prediction 1. If LFW does not exist, science will not detect it. (Obviously so)

Prediction 2. If LFW does exist, science will not detect it. (Premiss 1 and Conclusion 1)

Observation 1: Science has not detected LFW.

Conclusion 2: Scientific observations are entirely consistent with Prediction 1 and with Prediction 2. (Predictions 1 and 2, Observation 1)

Conclusion 3: As far as science knows how to determine, either LFW exists or it does not. (Conclusion 2)