DOES SCIENCE MAKE SPIRITUAL EXPLANATIONS IRRELEVANT?

Textbook author and evolutionist Douglas Futuyma’s has written that Darwinism and the sciences have made “spiritual explanations” irrelevant:

·       “Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”

How so? Has Darwin or biology provided an adequate explanation for life, the cell, DNA, or an entire assortment of other questions?

Even more damning to Futuyma’s assertion is the utter inadequacy of science to explain:

·       The fine-tuning of the universe

·       The origin, immutability, knowability, elegance, and universality of the laws of science, which make science possible

·       To provide evidence that anything has ever occurred naturally with Divine intent. (These can only be answered from a pre-science perspective.)

Perhaps our eyes do not deceive and “all their seeming evidence of design and purpose” is actually “evidence of design and purpose.”

Enjoying the Blessings of Christ while Denying His Being: An Evangelistic Strategy

Zenaida is charming, gifted, creative, and accomplished. However, she had a tumor that had threatened all of this, even her life. However, through this horrible ordeal, she found faith “within herself,” showering upon her peace and love.

I asked her where it came from. A judo expert had claimed that the secret of his craft was to make use of the energy and directionality of the opponent. This is what I was trying to do. When Zenaida mentioned “peace and love,” I saw an opening that I could possibly exploit evangelistically.

• Tell me more about your new found faith!

She readily complied:

• It was something that exposed the ego and all of its strivings. It also revealed my self-serving ideals and the shallowness of all the things that had been important to me. It showed me that there was something greater.

Before probing deeper, I tried to affirm those areas of agreement:

• We are so addicted to promoting our ego that we deny all of those things about ourselves that don’t promote us… But what do you think is the source of this love and peace that you encountered in the hospital?

We agreed about the need to suffer in order to hear the things of the Spirit. Although she agreed that the Spirit is intelligent and not of this world, Zenaida still insisted that it is part of who we are. It also was obvious that she wanted to limit its influence by denying this Spirit personhood and intention. Therefore, she claimed:

• I don’t have to define it. That would be to put it into a box. There are certain areas in our lives where we shouldn’t impose our categories.

It seemed that she was enjoying the light while denying its possible influence. The Light represents a threat to our autonomy. We intuitively know that if there is a God, He can make claims upon our lives.

This reminded me of my cousin’s story. Years before, she had locked her keys in her car with the engine running. Desperately, she ran in circles around the parking lot until she saw a key lying on the ground. Against all evidence, she knew that this key would unlock her car, and it did! At that moment, she knew that God loved her, but then, inexplicably, she was overcome by fear.

After many years, she still couldn’t understand this fear. I gave her my theory:

• You now knew that you are obligated to follow God, and this scared you to death.

She agreed! I thought that Zenaida was experiencing something similar. She wanted the blessings of God without the obligations. She protected herself against these moral obligations by refusing to probe more deeply into this strange Intelligence. So I asked her an invasive question:

• If you were receiving a check for $10,000 each month from a secret benefactor, would you not feel any obligation to try to discover his identity, at least in order to express your gratefulness?

Zenaida protested against my analogy, once again insisting that there are areas where we shouldn’t use our mind. It had become clear that the idea of Jesus was distasteful to her.

I felt we had reached an impasse, and so graciously excused myself. The seed had been planted. God would have to provide the growth.

ISIS, Transcendence, and the Failures of the West and the Church

It might not simply be a taste for blood and sex that draws thousands of Westerners to ISIS. It might also be that ISIS offers them a commodity that has become increasingly  discredited in the West – transcendence and a higher reason for being.

In support of this point, writer Janie B. Cheaney offers these affirmative quotations to explain the attractiveness of ISIS:

• “[A] yearning for a transcendent cause that liberal society can have trouble satisfying,” wrote Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

• “His discontent … is driven by ideas, and by the human needs those ideas seek to satiate,” observed Charlie Cooke at National Review.

• “The Islamic State not only has the romance of revolution and the promise of action and power, but also religious and apocalyptic appeal,” concluded Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week.

• “Because it gives meaning to life,” Michael Ledeen summed up on his own blog. (World Mag, Oct. 4, 2014, 22) 

According to the videos aired in the West, these jihadists seem to celebrate the fact that they are faithfully serving Allah by doing the “right thing.”

Several years ago, I attended an interfaith conference at a local liberal church, where I was surprised to see a 15 year-old waiting expectantly for the conference to begin. Intrigued, I asked him why he had come:

• I want to hear what the Imam says.

I asked him, “Why the Imam? Why not also the Rabbi and the Pastor?” His answer saddened me:

• I have some Muslims in my family. They take their faith seriously.

What an indictment of the church! What has happened to us that we reflect our Lord so lamely?

However, this is also an indictment of Western society. Cheaney puts it this way:

• The West has spent the last two centuries chasing true belief from the main stage of public life. Pluralism, our highest communal value, requires no one to believe anything that would render anyone else’s beliefs invalid.

It is worse than that! Pluralism – also called “religious pluralism” or “multi-culturalism” – claims that, since everything is relative and there is no religious or cultural truth – we cannot say that one religion or culture is more true than another. In fact, judging one religion better than another is now labelled “arrogant,” “imperialistic” and “chauvinistic,” especially in Western media and the university. No one wants to be labeled a “narrow-minded bigot,” and so Christians have been marginalized, silenced, and made to feel ashamed of their faith.

However, by purging such religious truth claims from educated society, the West has paid a great price. Not only can it not speak convincingly against ISIS, it can no longer hold up a better portrait of transcendence for our hungry and deluded youth. Cheaney therefore writes:

• The poverty of pluralism becomes apparent when rootless young Muslim men find transcendent meaning in slaughtering infidels… It fulfills a need that won’t be satisfied at any bargaining table. It will have to be fought and defeated.

However, how can we fight against this ideology if we do not have one to hold up in place of Jihad. Cheaney therefore observes:

• But faith can only be fought with faith, and Western culture has undercut itself… It picked the juicy low-hanging fruits of Christianity [like love, justice, equality, and forgiveness] while disregarding the Son who shines on them, valued the comforts but discounted the Comforter.

Oddly, this is something that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim, ex-Dutch Parliamentarian, and atheist, seems to understand better than most Western intellectuals and even Christians:

• The Christianity of love and tolerance remains one of the West’s most powerful antidotes to the Islam of hate and intolerance. Ex-Muslims find Jesus Christ to be a more attractive and humane figure than Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

• I have a theory that most Muslims are in search of a redemptive God. They believe that there is a higher power and that this higher power is the provider of morality, giving them a compass to help them distinguish between good and bad.  Many Muslims are seeking a God or a concept of God that in my view meets the description of the Christian God.  Instead they find Allah. They find Allah mainly because many are born in Muslim families where Allah has been the reigning deity for generations… (p. 239)

• The Christian leaders now wasting their time and resources on a futile exercise of interfaith dialogue with the self-appointed leaders of Islam should redirect their efforts to converting as many Muslims as possible to Christianity, introducing them to a God who rejects Holy War and who has sent his son to die for all sinners out of a love for mankind… The Vatican and all the established Protestant churches of northern Europe believed naively that interfaith dialogue would magically bring Islam into the fold of Western civilization. It has not happened, and it will not happen…. To help ground these people in Western society, the West needs the Christian churches to get active again in propagating their faith. It needs Christian schools, Christian volunteers, the Christian message… The churches should do all in their power to win this battle for the souls of humans in search of a compassionate God, who now find that a fierce Allah is closer to hand. (Nomad, pp. 247, 249, 250, 251)

We all need the Transcendent. Since the West marginalizes it, the pilgrim will just go elsewhere, even in the gutter, to find it. Oddly, it is an atheist that sees this more clearly than the rest of us.

Six Reasons why Objective, Transcendent Moral Law is Necessary to Preserve Equality

When we think about equality, we think of many different issues:

1. Equality among all Life Forms
2. Equality of Role among the Various Age and Sex Groupings
3. Equality of Income

The list can be extensive, and so I want to limit my discussion of equality to those things that the vast majority of Westerners value – The Bill of Rights reflecting our unalienable human rights, equal protection under the law, and the value of all human life.

What is necessary to provide an adequate rationale and foundation for these kinds of equality? Many offer the rationale of “majority rules” based upon pragmatic considerations – what works in terms of providing the maximum benefit to the greatest number of people.

While I don’t reject such pragmatic considerations, I want to argue that more – objective transcendent moral law - is necessary for any legal or ethical system. Let me try to explain. If moral law is not objective, it doesn’t exist outside of our own thinking. It’s merely a human creation without any reality of its own.

In contrast to this, the sun has an objective and independent existence apart from what I might think about it, while those who claim that morality is just a matter of our own decision-making deny that morality has any independent existence of its own.

(Moral law must also be transcendent. It must transcend all of our conflicting thinking and feeling and hold us all accountable. As such, it must be higher and more authoritative than our philosophies and cultural biases. It must also be immutable and not subject to changes in culture, human thought, and the opinions of humanity. It must partake of the same immutability and universality as do the laws of physics. Finally, it can only be authoritative if it comes from and is enforced by an all-just and wise Being.)

Let me just focus on one aspect of moral law – equality. The principle of quality is incoherent and therefore unsustainable without objective moral law for several reasons:

1. Without objective transcendent moral law, there is no rational basis for equality. We certainly do not find equality in nature but rather the survival-of-the-fittest. When the Transcendent is rejected, we are left with philosophical materialism. From a material point of view, there isn’t any equality even among humans. So are taller, stronger, smarter, better educated, and more popular than others. More importantly, some contribute to the common welfare, while others detract. Therefore, from a materialistic point of view, some would therefore be more deserving of rights and privileges than others.

On an interpersonal level, we believe that everyone is entitled to respect. As a probation officer, I would try to treat everyone in a way that respected his/her dignity as a human being. However, the material world does not provide any basis for such respect. Some of my probationers had arrest records yards long. Yet, as a Christian, I knew that they still bore the image of God and consequently were endowed with certain unalienable rights. If I had been a materialist, I would have been constrained to treat them in accord with their past performance alone.

2. Pragmatism is inherently selfish. The secularist denies Transcendence. He must therefore base his morality on pragmatic considerations – on what brings benefits. However, we all want benefits. We are all pragmatists. Pragmatism has been the default morality of humanity, and it has borne bad fruit. Whenever a nation has denied the Transcendent – the communist nations are a prime example – we observe unmitigated horrors. This is because pragmatism, the quest for benefits, is inherently selfish. As such, it can bear good fruit but also the worst imaginable evils.
   
   Most secularists will admit this problem and will respond that pragmatism has to be an enlightened and egalitarian pragmatism. However, this is just what communism had boasted to be. Even “enlightened” pragmatism is doomed to failure simply because pragmatism is based upon self-interest and not on immutable, transcendent moral law.

3. Pragmatic idealism will eventually run out of steam and not motivate the sacrifices necessary to make this ideal work. Without the confidence that we are serving the God of all truth and love, we will not be able to continually take risks to save Jews and merely to be a whistle-blower. The stresses of life will eventually lead us to the “why bother” philosophy.

4. Without the biblical revelation that we are special and created in the image of God and therefore possess indelible worth, we will not be able to counter the charges that our morality is chauvinistic – man-centered. Why should our laws favor humanity and not cows or even termites? What makes us any more valuable than the termite? Some would answer, “our intelligence.” However, such an answer undermines the very human equality we wish to protect. If we are valued according to our intelligence or creativity, then we must value the more intelligent and creative above others.

Even the Deist, Thomas Jefferson, was unable to conceive of our rights apart from God: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” (Notes on the State of Virginia)

The anti-Christian philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged the connection between the Bible and equality: “Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.” (Will to Power)

5. Subjective secular morality is arbitrary, culture-based and changeable. How then can anyone take it seriously if we regard our laws as merely the product of the cultural elite or the majority. Such laws and ethics lack the power to motivate in a positive direction. For example, take the testimony of serial-killer, Ted Bundy:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

6. Without the biblical sanctity-of-human-life orientation, we inevitably move in a quality-of-life direction, where we are valued, not according to our God-given value, but according to a cultural assessment of value. Under this form of valuation, some humans will inevitably be considered more valuable than others – the less esteemed members of society. These might include criminals, odd-balls, or even republicans or democrats. Such a system of valuation will only regard certain members as “equals.”

In addition to the problem of denying the Transcendent’s impact on moral law and equality, is the problem of finding a purpose in life. Without the Transcendent, there is nothing higher into which we can plug ourselves to derive any sense of purpose and dignity. We are relegated to living according to our feelings for our commitment to family or any other ideal. However, our feelings are highly changeable. Therefore, if our lives depend on our feelings, our lives will be characterized by instability and confusion. In order to escape this confusion, we will have to turn off our minds. And this is just what this generation is doing.