Someone wrote to me to ask if his daughter should attend the “gay marriage of a homosexual friend. With such an invitation, this is where the rubber meets the road, at the practical level of friends. What principles should inform such a decision?

 Friendship is important and must be cultivated, but real friends understand when friends have principal problems. So what is the principle involved?

A wedding is not just fun with friends. A wedding is a legal event, where we witness the joining together of two spouses before the civic and religious authorities. In classical wedding ceremonies, those in attendance are asked to speak up publicly if there is any reason “why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony.” Thus a wedding is a public event that is part of the fabric of culture to which both the collectivity and God give their blessings.

Because it is a “wedding” I do not think you can separate attendance from endorsement. That is doubtless part of why gays want the formality of marriage. It obliges the rest of society formally to affirm the rightness of their relationship. As soon as Christians attend gay weddings as a matter of course, in the name of friendship and even “love,” we will have lost the public attempt to preserve creational marriage as society’s norm. If you want gay marriage as part of the law of the land, supporting individual gay marriages is a sure-fire way to make it happen.

 The collapse of Evangelical pastors into the pro-homosexual agenda is becoming a tidal wave. Pastor Dave Thomson states that “many of us faith pastors [don't all pastors have faith?] are and should be proud of Jason Collin’s bravery and commend him for his courage.” Collins, an NBA player, publicly announced his homosexuality last week. Christian leaders opposing this are, according to Thomson, “wreaking havoc in our churches’ pews, destroying families, and ultimately placing a banner of hate and hypocrisy over the front doors of our conservative faith churches.” An Assemblies of God pastor in Montana who has “been in ministry 27 years, a “born again, evangelical, charismatic, conservative, Republican Christian,” and his entire staff, now affirm God’s new pro-gay agenda.  (See article here.)

What did we expect from theologically-illiterate “conservative faith pastors” for whom “experience” is the overriding criterion and who seem to have no clue about the Bible’s fundamental worldview that defines existence, what we at TruthXchange call Twoism? Indeed the homosexual issue exposes the incredible long-standing weakness at this level of the Evangelical movement, so that vast numbers of “born again” people will finally join the pagan movement without even knowing it is happening. Watch what will happen. Many Evangelicals, with “faith pastors” and ”faith churches” will become 21st century liberals, preaching a watered down “faith” that goes easy on sin and eliminates the Fall. On the other hand, biblical orthodoxy that defends the Creator/creature distinction and all the other God-created holy distinctions (such as male and female) and preaches a Gospel of both grace and repentance, will be dismissed as a bizarre periphery of “hateful” hard-liners. That, of course, is the perfect scenario for persecution. A small-enough marginal group, easily treated as troublers of multicultural social peace, can then function as convenient scapegoats when things begin to implode–as they certainly will.

This makes our think tank subject of next year most significant and timely–”Christian Witness in the Midst of the Pagan Utopia: How do We Speak the Truth in the Land of the Lie?” 

Thomas Nagel has raised more than eyebrows in his recent book. Mind and Cosmos (Oxford, 2012). Provocatively subtitled, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel has raised serious questions against what is often elevated as a sacred cow over the past century. That sacred cow is the belief that Neo-Darwinism forms a Theory of Everything. For many (not all), Neo-Darwinism offers material explanations that render God an outmoded and superfluous hypothesis. Abraham Kuyper once described this phenomenon as “the veni, vidi, vici wherewith the theory of evolution with full speed occupied the ground in all the circles (Lectures on Calvinism, [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983] 113). When Neo-Darwinism occupies the ground over the significant circle of human consciousness, Nagel sees a theory that has stretched beyond its breaking point.

Being CONSCIOUS

Nagel (a graduate of Cornell, Oxford, and Harvard and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University) has long challenged attempts to reductively banish all consciousness to the realm of pure matter. His famous 1974 article, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” argued that there is a subjective texture to conscious experience that stubbornly resists all attempts at materialistic reduction. Mind and Cosmos, takes Nagel’s arguments much further, analyzing many features of consciousness that, he believes, fit into a Neo-Darwinism paradigm like square pegs in a round hole.

I very briefly sketch a host of features of being CONSCIOUS (some raised by Nagel, others which I introduce) that pose problems to any One-ist system in which creation is all there is. 

Choice-making. We are capable of making choices that, though influenced by the physical world, are more than the sum of physical causes. Can meaningful choices be reduced to a natural world that operates by machine-like determinism (or random quantum indeterminism)? If we could so reduce freedom, then no one chooses to be a Neo-Darwinian and the entire debate is itself reduced to the involuntary buzzing of biological machines. 

Oughts. Consciousness deals not only with facts (i.e., what is) but also with values (i.e., what ought to be). Can normative values like good and evil come from the material world of mere descriptive facts? Can nonmaterial realities like Ought-ness sprout into existence out of the soil of material Is-ness? As Don Delillo asks in his novel, White Noise:

They can trace everything you say, do, and feel to the number of molecules in a certain region… What happens to good and evil in this system? Passion, envy and hate? Do they become a tangle of neurons?… What about murderous rage? A murderer used to have a certain fearsome size to him. His crime was large. What happens when we reduce it to cells and molecules? (White Noise [New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1986] 190).

Non-Physical Laws. Physical stuff follows physical laws. Consciousness, however, can operate not by physical laws but also laws of logic. Take for example, the logical law of transivity: If A=B and B=C then A=C. Is this law physical? If so, where is it? If so, what is its chemical make-up? What genetic mutation in our evolutionary past produced the law of transivity, or the law of non-contradiction, or any other logical law?

Semantics. The physical world is a world of syntax. Take for example, Nagel’s book. It is loaded with physical syntax—black ink arranged in certain squiggly shapes on paper, all with chemical composition and spatial location. Yet there is more going on than mere syntax in Mind and Cosmos. There is also “semantics,” the meaning conveyed through but not reducible to the physical syntax. For example, we could arrange red ink with different chemicals on recycled paper to say Geist undKosmos (German) or L’espritet le Cosmos (French). All the physical syntax has changed but the semantic remains. Semantics cannot be reduced to physical syntax. Can the physical realm of syntax explain the emergence of the conscious realm of semantics ?

Creativity. From the dark beauty of Van Gogh’s Starry Night to a child’s crayola orange sun, consciousness exhibits the power of creativity. Is every masterpiece on canvas or construction paper, every song, poem, play, dance, or dinner merely the mechanistic byproduct of matter in motion? Is the artist no more than a bundle of swirling chemicals? Can the whole realm of aesthetic value be explained away as physical facts? Was Wordsworth wrong in thinking that “There’s more to the flower than the botanist can study?”

Intentionality. Think about Mars. You can do so without the excruciating headache of the Red Planet materializing in your brain matter. You are not thinking Mars but thinking about Mars. Consciousness has the power to be about things (what philosophers call “intentionality”). Could genetic mutations in the concrete world of matter produce something nonphysical like an abstract thought?

Owned Experiences. The physical world is an It that can be described in the objective categories of science. There is not only an It-ness but also an irreducible I-ness to consciousness, a subjectivity, a unified frame of reference that endures over time, a first-person perspective. Imagine, for example, a scientific tome about bats, explaining everything that can be known scientifically about these winged rodents. What’s one question such a scientific tome would not answer? It would not answer Nagel’s famous question, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ What does it feel like to fly blind through the darkness, sending out sonar shrieks to swoop full speed at an unassuming insect dinner? How do we get I-ness and What-Its-Likeness from the unconscious It of the physical world?

Underlying purposes. The It of the physical world is what philosophers call nonteleological. Physical stuff does not think with underlying purposes. A beaker of mercury does not think, ‘Ok, my goal is to boil at 574 degrees.’ It just does. Consciousness, however, is teleological. We think purposefully, toward goals, acting for some reason (even if it’s often for totally unreasonable reasons). Can purposeless It-ness of the physical world generate the teleological For-ness of the conscious world?

Significance. Lastly, we can see that consciousness can get in touch with and reflect real meaning. There is something really truly significant about people giving and receiving love, something of transcendent value that cannot be reduced to interacting particles or the biological quest for survival. How does the significance dimension of our conscious worlds—the Why-ness of our existence—emerge from the physical world of mere Is-ness (what Jean Paul Sartre once described as “the bare, valueless nausea of existence”)?

At first glance it may seem that Neo-Darwinian Materialism faces a singular problem: How do we get consciousness from non-consciousness? What we see upon closer inspection, however, is a long series of faith-leaps required to believe that physical processes explain everything. Does it require too much faith to believe that the unconscious It of the material world somehow spawned This-or-That-ness (choice-making power), Ought-ness (moral values), Therefore-ness (logical laws), What-ness (semantics), About-ness (intentionality), Awe-ness (creativity), I-ness (indexicality), What-It’s-Like-ness (qualia), For-ness (teleology), and Why-ness (significance)? For Nagel the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

MIND MATTERS

How do thinkers committed to Neo-Darwinian materialism respond to such challenges? One common strategy is to simply refuse to grant nonphysical status to such qualities of consciousness. We are told that “Man is a being purely physical” (Paul d’Holbach), that “Man is a machine… that can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions,” (Jacques Monod), that we are “the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process” (Paul Churchland). As materialist, Jaegwon Kim clarifies, 

To think that one can be a serious physicalist and at the same time enjoy the company of things and phenomena that are nonphysical, I believe, is an idle dream… [T]his is what we should expect from physicalism… Physicalism cannot be had on cheap (Mind in a Physical World, [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001] 120).

Yet if we reduce minds to matter then what, we may ask, would we use to justify such a conclusion, “minds” that turns out to be a logic-less, freedom-less, goal-less buzzing of brain matter? Is the argument that there are no minds itself merely the physical byproduct of non-minds? How then could such conclusions possibly be logically valid? The materialist (what Kim calls a “physicalist”) must make use the very thing he is denying, a mind to argue there are no minds, landing him in the same self-refuting plight as the man who states that that “There is no such thing as a sentence with more than three words in it.” As C.S. Lewis observed,

It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be real insight.  A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court.  For that theory would itself have, been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.  It would have destroyed its own credentials.  It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense…Evolution gave us a reason for everything, but made it impossible for us to believe that our reasoning was correct (Miracles, [New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001] 21-22).

Darwin himself seemed plagued by such problems when he wrote in a personal letter,

The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind (“Letter to William Graham” in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1, [D. Appleton and Company, 1887] 255)?

The problems consciousness poses to materialism, cogently reiterated and deepened in Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (see also Alvin Plantinga’s “Darwin, Mind, and Meaning” here), ought to give us pause to reconsider biblical Two-ism. With the Bible’s essential Creator-creature distinction our origin is not traced to unthinking matter, but to a thinking Creator. Reason, therefore, is not eliminated as an untrustworthy, physical survival mechanism, but embraced as a truth-knowing mechanism gifted to us by the transcendent God of truth. In the biblical worldview of two, in the otherness that separates the Maker from the material world He made, we find a reason to reason. Our freedom, morality, logic, meaning, creativity, individuality, experience, and purpose are no longer explained out of existence, but nourished and expanded as we “love God with all our minds…”    

KILLING THE INNOCENT

By Gloria Duncan

Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, in speaking of the terrorists in the
bombings in Boston stated, “These people target others who have done nothing
wrong. All they proved  was that they can kill innocent people”. .When we
think of the holocaust we remember the horrible loss of over 6 million human
beings. A scientific justification that dehumanized these people led to the
killings. Today other innocent people are being killed, not by bombs or in
concentration camps, but by abortion—over 50 million unborn babies since
1973. Today “scientific” arguments that claim the unborn baby is merely
subhuman tissue is used to justify abortion. Like toddler and adolescent,
the terms embryo and fetus do not refer to nonhumans but to humans at
various stages of development. The comparison of babies’ rights and mothers’
rights is unequal. What is at stake in abortion is the mother’s lifestyle as
opposed to the baby’s life. The Bible does, in fact, prohibit the killing of
innocent people (Exodus 20:13) and considers the unborn to be human beings
worthy of protection (21-25). Children are a blessing and a gift from the
Lord (Psalm 127:3-5). May we do all we can to provide this protection.

Christians in the US military are coming under outlandish attack. I do not believe the average citizen realizes what a boon it is to have legal lethal force placed in the hands of many soldiers who claim Christ as their ultimate Commander in Chief. This blessing is about to be undermined. A seemingly hate-inspired Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, (you will not believe this) is employed by the Pentagon to set in motion a policy to court-marshall Christian military, whether soldiers or chaplains, who share their faith. He openly charges Christians with “virulent religious oppression,” vilifying them as “monstrosities” and “pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers,” and compares them to “bigots” in the Deep South during the civil rights era. Weinstein concludes, “Let’s call these ignoble actions (that is, teaching orthodox Christian beliefs from the Bible) what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.”  (See here.)

Christian believers as “human monsters.” This  language from Weinstein is so hateful and over-the-top that it ought to provoke immediate suspicion and outrage from any normally-constituted human being. I am reading sociologist Peter L Berger’s A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. He looks into human experience for signs of transcendence, and points to things like “order” and “hope.” But one sign he identifies is odd, an “argument from (eternal) damnation.” He claims that a refusal to condemn certain kinds of evil should be seen as a radical human failure to identify evil. The kinds of deeds he is talking about are not just evil. He states: “They are monstrously evil. And it is this monstrosity that seems to compel even people normally or professionally given to such perspectives to suspend relativization.” (p.66). He is thinking of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s crimes against humanity during WWII, which nobody relativizes. Such deeds should not be simply condemned. They should be damned­—and the fact of this sense of eternal damnation for Berger is a sign of transcendence.

How can Weinstein, who, as his name suggests, may know something of the holocaust, be recognized in polite, official society when he uses such terms about the faith of millions of Christians across the planet and throughout history, whose moral response is to follow Christ by turning the other cheek? The amount of hatred here might qualify for Berger as an “argument from damnation”! The failure of the authorities to condemn Weinstein, and their encouragement of him, indicates the point our society has reached in terms of hatred of the truth and the rejection of the supernatural.

We are being taken over by pseudo “christians,” wolves in sheep’s clothing, deliberately deceiving the nation, in cahoots with Islam, Planned Parenthood, the gay agenda, and various forms of collectivism, but attending church, even using Christian terminology when its suits them. It was delicious to see them in action last week; Bill Clinton, the philanderer-in chief, feted by a special reception to honor him with an “Advocate For Change Award,” by 5000 members of GLAAD (Gay and Lesbians Alliance Against Defamation), well deserved since there he was self-righteously advocating the change of the Defense Of Marriage Act that he himself had self-righteously authored; Obama refusing to go the Thatcher’s funeral but accepting to speak at the annual Planned Parenthood dinner, as the Gosnell monstrosity, which they favor, was being fully exposed. That Obama would consider fundraising for the nation’s biggest abortion business under the theme “Not In Her Shoes ” when the nation was being shown, in Gosnell’s clinic, glass beakers filled with baby feet that will never wear shoes, is beyond imagination, as is the silence of the moralizing Main Stream Media who utter not a word. Eventually, Obama pulled out, not for moral reasons but for realpolitik. Exposure to the fire in the kitchen–the truth–just got too hot. Such people, for their unashamed dishonesty and hypocrisy need to be exposed.

With the French vote for same sex marriage yesterday, one more incremental time the Oneist (pagan) cosmology takes over the West. It was lost years ago, through the attacks of secular humanism and the unleashing of heterosexual license, so this is just the mopping-up period, the final dotting of the “i”s via the constitutionalization of sodomy. Civil unions do not do it. Homosexuality must be recognized with the mantle of total equality–for the “common good.” Ideologically nothing else will suffice, for homosexuality is the ultimate expression of pagan spirituality, as leading homosexuals admit. They affirm that this sexual expression is the perfectly embodied statement of Oneist spirituality. Gay theorist, Toby Johnson, states:

…gay attraction to and development of emotional relationships with members of our same sex results in our seeing the world with the harmonious, non-dualistic vision that is the traditional goal of mystical religion. Gay consciousness is “pre-Edenic,” fundamentally innocent, free of “original sin” [a notion that, in turn], generates the dualistic belief in good and evil. The real message of religion is not about God but about how human beings should live harmoniously and non-judgmentally in order to participate in and further the evolution of Earth (Gaia) into collective self-awareness and transcendent consciousness (God).

This period of legalization will be followed by the institutionalization and normalization of the victory, both by extending the implications to all manner of “loves,” and by the aggressive silencing all opposition, for a peaceful, unified world–built, alas, on the putrefaction of the sinful human heart, that will eventually choke on its own vomit! Our culture will be “given over” to its sinful choices, as Paul says in Romans 1:24, without any “Gospel restraint,” but it is not the final word. Because God gave over his Son to bear the sin of the world as a sacrificial victim, He will return as Lord and Judge of the earth to set all things right.

The curtain is quickly coming down on Western “Christian” civilization. Yesterday New Zealand, founded in large part by Scots Presbyterians, voted to legalize same sex marriage. One has to wonder what the worldwide consequences will be of this new form of “marriage.” The “loving wisdom” of a Republican senator, Mark Kirk, R-IL, opens the floodgates. Capitulating to gay marriage, he recently opined with moving sentimentality: “life comes down to who you love and who loves you.” But if this is true, then all kinds of “legalized” loving relationships will follow. Thus, a husband of three wives, recently said: “I just don’t want anyone telling me who I can or cannot love.”When all relationships are “legalized” legality and morality lose their meaning and we can dispense with them.  You do not have to look far to see this occurring. Yesterday, in an honest public radio interview, a leading lesbian stated that the real intention of creating “gay marriage” is to eliminate marriage entirely. Eliminating marriage entirely eliminates entirely the notion of a universe based on “legal” or “right” created structures, and thus eliminates a loving Creator.

Heterosexual monogamy, as part of God’s image, is one of God’s ways of affirming and preserving Twoism in the universe. If this is the case, then Oneism must eliminate it! Who would have thought that the global pagan regime—which we can feel coming—would be run by pansexuals, “morally” demanding equality for all, and determined to silence by all means possible those who preach the Gospel of God of Romans 1. It boggles the mind!

According to news reports, District Attorney Seth Williams will soon reveal the charges he will file against Kermit Gosnell, the 69-year-old abortion center owner who, after failed abortions, killed Karnamay Mongar and seven other infants with scissors. We have rarely seen such a grisly case of blood-letting, yet the mainstream media are not reporting it.

Even the somewhat liberal Kirsten Powers of USAToday states:

The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace…When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria…Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn’t make the cut.

Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, we would be seeing wall-to-wall coverage, but  his filthy clinic and his ghoulish collection of aborted babies (dating back thirty years!) had never been checked by the “authorities.”

Why the inaction and deafening silence? It is a question of worldview, a Oneist worldview.

Most of you who read my Inside/Outs have concluded that our American/Western society is “awful.” But how do we analyze “awful” and what can we do about it?  Among the many offensive changes is the chilling holocaust of abortion.

Rare have been the times that biblical Christianity has been in such open conflict with its enemy, today calling itself by the innocuous term, “progressivism.” Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the Marxist feminist PhD Harvard American Historian, observed about the Sixties, at the end of her life in 1998 “within a remarkably brief period …has occurred a cataclysmic transformation of the very nature of our society.”

There is a simple way to understand the deep conflict of contemporary worldviews. Don’t be intimidated by the word “worldview.” According to the Apostle Paul, there are only two: You worship creation or you worship the Creator (Rom 1:25). This is the ultimate “binary,” by which I mean things that are and remain distinct or different, and will never be fused into one.

The two irreconcilable worldviews may be described in the following ways:

Oneism

The world is self-creating and self-explanatory, and everything is made up of the same stuff, whether matter, spirit or a mixture. There is one basic kind of self-creating existence. In one way or another we worship evolving Nature as divine. Since everything shares in the same divine substance, all distinctions are eliminated and everything is god.

Twoism

The world is the work of an external Creator who caringly made it but is separate and different from it. There are two kinds of existence—the Creator who is uncreated, and everything else, which is created. This worldview celebrates two-ness. We worship as divine only the personal triune Creator, who defined distinctions as the essence of all existence.

If you can do the theological arithmetic of One or Two you will understand the deep conflict in our world. Present opposition to the Gospel is twofold: 1. The promotion of a Oneist view of all of reality, and, 2. The determined elimination of “the binary,” that is, all expressions of biblical Twoism, and especially the binary of the distinction between the Creator and the creation.

In forthcoming Inside/Outs I intend to show, in each area of life where we see conflict, how various social disagreements find their roots in the religious conflict of these two worldviews.

So let’s see how Oneism and Twoism are evident in the issue of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Francis Schaeffer was right when he warned us a generation ago about the worldview known as secular humanism, which believed that since humanity is only the product of chance, then there are no moral reasons why we should treat fellow human beings as special, created in God’s image.

But there is now a further reason to explain this human tragedy—the “logic” of Oneism.  Pro-abortion advocates argue that the fetus is part of the woman’s body. She “owns” it and is thus free to get rid of it, as she might choose to have a face lift or a tummy tuck. (Biologists understand that the mother’s own body treats the fetus as a foreigner, as evidenced by morning sickness and the biological preparation for independent life.) Planned Parenthood recently stated, without embarrassment that the decision to kill the child who survives an abortion remains with the mother and her doctor! The binary is busted in this horrendous act of infanticide.

This is a noxious form of Oneism. The distinction between two human beings, each made individually in God’s image and deserving of utmost respect, is rejected in favor of the rights of one human being. The mother is important. The baby ultimately has no existence.

Oneism claims to unite us, but without the Twoist world of morals, Oneism leads to more than “awful.” It leads to total degradation and judgment.

The radio host, Janet Mefferd, sent me an article today about how evolution and climate change are now a significant part of what is taught as scientific orthodoxy in state school curricula. Providentially, Janet is also interviewing today Dr. Cal Beisner, head of the Cornwall Alliance, an expert in all things regarding the environment from a biblical perspective, and well worth hearing. An hour later, I saw a notice for the appearance of a new book, The Emerging Christ (Orbis Books, 2013) by a Roman Catholic nun, Sr. Ilia Delio. The various citations and reviews show that she is picking up the spiritual evolutionary theories of Teillard de Chardin, a Jesuit, who was excommunicated from his church for his heretical teaching.

Both events are surprisingly related. The first shows that our rising generations are being brainwashed into believing that there is only one explanation for the natural universe, namely, its evolutionary progress, whose fate is in our hands. The second gives a spiritual account of the same phenomena. As Sr. Delio claims: “…there is a [evolutionary] movement towards wholeness in the universe,…all bodies are joined together by a luminous thread of love…[and] the secret of the universe, our inner power, lies within.”

Christians can be seduced by this thinking, especially phrases from Sr. Delio, like: “Christianity is about future, not salvation as an end in itself or heaven or eternal life- but new life.” Alas, this “new life” has nothing to do with the rescue of sinners and the creation from death through the atoning work of Jesus, who, because of this, now reigns as Lord of the cosmos. How easily Christians are falling for the spiritual optimism of the “evolutionaries” who reject God the creator and worship themselves and creation as divine, just the latest form of pagan Oneism.

For more free resources from truthxchange on this topic, visit our Think Tank audio here.