Tag: Charles Darwin

The Errors of Our Ways: Science, Religion, and Racism

That Christians should have known better seems self-evident to us today. But, what of science?

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Most people know well the checkered history of Christianity on racism, especially in the United States. Much less is said (and therefore known) on the checkered history of science on racism in the west. One reason for that difference in our collective memories is the Enlightenment narrative: that science rescued the world from Christianity. More on that below.

I am not writing today to criticize Christianity less or science more for the moral failing of the history of racism in America. I am writing to bring some clarity where a popular narrative muddies the waters.

I think most people can agree that American (and British) Christianity has a racist past, but we have short (and biased) memories on this score. History is replete with dominant people groups subjecting other people groups to slavery, genocide, and other atrocities. It wasn’t just Americans, or western civilization, or Christians that perpetuated the evil of slavery.

That we even call those things atrocities today is a credit to Christianity. The story of Jesus voluntarily dying at the hands of the dominant power of his day, urging his followers to live lives of self-sacrifice, and looking after the benefit of others as he did changed everything.

It took three centuries, but the cross eventually became the symbol of this religious movement characterized by self-sacrificial love.

Prior to the death of Jesus, the cross was the ultimate symbol of the exultant might of the dominant state over its subjects. Those in power determined the values of the society they ruled, and those values were imposed with Draconian force on those who lived under that power.  “Might makes right” was just the way the world was for most of history.

Tom Holland, in his seminal book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, found the nexus for a radical change in the west in the crucifixion of Jesus. That event and the movement it inspired changed forever how the west (and now the rest of the world) views power and morality.

Tom Holland was an atheist When he did the research for this book. His area of expertise is Greco-Roman history. He was steeped in the brutish nature of the Roman world that championed power and elite, male dominance over all that was weak.

When he set out to trace his secular humanist values in western civilization, he knew there was some discontinuity between the Greco-Roman values he knew so well and his own, modern notions of basic human rights, so he was curious to locate the origin of that seismic shift.

His book, Dominion, traces our modern values from the roots where he found them in the history of western civilization. He found they go back to Jesus of Nazareth and the people who gave their lives to follow him.

The death of Jesus on the cross radically subverted the assumptions that ruled the world to that point. The Greco-Roman world that valued and honored power above all things gave way over time to the man who is claimed to be the Savior of the world who let himself be led like a lamb to his own slaughter. His life and message of self-sacrificial love became the bedrock for modern civil rights, human dignity, and the assumption that the powerful should shelter and care for the weak.

The criticism of Christians for racism and its worst manifestation – slavery – is deserved. Mostly because Christians “should’ve known better”. Of all people, Christians should have known better!

The water gets murky, though, in our modern memory because it has been influenced by a narrative that obscures the truth. The narrative that exposes the failing of Christianity often does so by directing attention away from the nonreligious world of reason and science, as if there is “nothing to see here.”

This view that rose to prominence during the Enlightenment is prevalent still today. It puts the full weight of condemnation for our failings on religion (and Christianity in particular). This is a false narrative, and, it obscures the truth and warps our perceptions that still persist.

There is nothing inherently wrong with science and reason. It is people who are flawed, and the flaws of people are not confined to science, or religion, or to any particular ideology or worldview. No ideology or worldview is immune.

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An Invitation to Test and See Whether God Exists

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The title of this piece is a bit of poetic license. I am combining the Psalmist’s challenge to “taste and see that the Lord is good….” (Psalm 34:8) with Paul’s admonition to “test everything”. (1 Thess. 5:21) The general thrust of these two verses is an invitation to seek God and truth and to test what we think we know.

Tasting suggests that we can experience that God is good, and testing suggests that we can measure, in some respect, that experience with God. While the existence of God is not susceptible to testing and measurement like we do with science in a laboratory or in physics (for many reasons), these statements are claims that we can in some sense measure, prove, and have confidence in our conclusions.

Both writers are talking about experience in these passages, something that is frowned upon as evidence in our modern, western culture. I will come back to that. First, though, I want to make some observations.

It should go without saying that tasting and testing requires some commitment to the process. Tasting is highly experiential. If we are going try to “taste” something, we have to engage in that process.

We cannot taste through another person’s experience. It requires our own engagement in the tasting, and that requires some willingness on our part to engage.

On the subject of being scientific about spiritual experience, we can and should listen to what others say who claim to have tasted that God is good. We can and should weigh the “results” and conclusions of various people who make these claims.

In that process, we could categorize, compare, and contrast the tasting and the testing and reach some conclusions purely on basis of the data collected. I have done that anecdotally for years, and I suspect I could find some more objective data pools of these largely subjective “experiences”. The larger the data pool, the more objective we can be in our analysis of them, though they are subjective for the individuals involved.

Tasting and testing, as we are challenged to understand it in the Bible, however, is more personal than that. We can study other peoples’ experiences for a lifetime and never really know what the experience is like in the “biblical” sense of knowing.

These thoughts today are inspired by the following quotation by CS Lewis from his seminal book, Mere Christianity:

“A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works; indeed, he certainly won’t know how it works until he’s accepted it.”

The emphasis on accepting something without knowing how it works seems to run counter to the way we do science, but I don’t think it really is. We do a lot of science on a hunch without knowing whether we are right or wrong. We might call those hunches educated guesses. We don’t know whether a hunch or educated guess is right until we put it to the test, and we understand it better in the process.

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How Not to Look for God: An “Unapologetic” Argument for God

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In two previous articles attempting to make an “unapologetic” argument for God, I have just been ramping up to make the argument. I still haven’t gotten there yet, and I am still just getting started.

That’s right. I am still working on getting to the starting line. Maybe I will still get there.

I say, “unapologetic”, rather loosely, in case you are wondering.  I am not being apologetic in the sense of apologizing for anything. Apologetics has nothing to do with being sorry, of course. It means to provide a defense, and it specifically describes the effort of providing a defense for Christianity.

The word, apologetics, derives from the Greek word, apologia, which means “a speech in defense” or a “verbal defense” or a “well-reasoned reply”. The world is used in Peter 3:15 as follows:

“Always be prepared to give an answer [apologia] to everyone who asks you to give the reason [logos] for the hope that you have.”

I am using “unapologetic” as a kind of play on words. I am not giving a typical apologetic argument for the existence of God, and I am not being apologetic about doing that.

I previously made the observation that we all start with axioms, premises on which we support our positions for and against God, but we are incapable of proving those axioms. We consider them “self-evident”, but that is, frankly, just another way of saying that we can’t prove our starting premises” we have to assume they are true, and we go from there.

We take our fundamental premises on faith, essentially. This includes everyone, even in science.

As an example, consider the scientist, like a few I have heard, who says that science is the only way to know truth and all truths can be revealed by science. That premise cannot be scientifically proven. Therefore, you just must take it on faith.

Ironically, that statement is also self-contradictory. If science is the only way to know truth, and the statement itself cannot be proven by science, then even if it is right, it is wrong! (Echoing John Lennox here.)

I recently heard the astrophysicist, Michael Guillen, say similarly that science does not prove anything absolutely. As an example, he says we could posit that ravens are always black. Every raven the modern world has ever encountered and documented may be black, but that doesn’t mean that every raven that ever existed and every raven that will ever exist is always black.

To make the claim that all ravens are black is to go beyond science. We can only verify the blackness of all the ravens we can find and the ravens that other people have documented, but we can’t verify the blackness of the ravens that were never documented or the ravens that have not yet existed.

William Lane Craig talks about the philosophy of logical positivism championed by people like AJ Ayer in the 1940’s and 50’s. Logical positivism, or “verificationism”, as Craig calls it, was claimed that consideration of the existence of God is meaningless because it is not verifiable by the five senses. The book, Language, Proof and Logic, was a kind of “manifesto” of this view, says Craig,

Verificationsim was used by Ayer to nix anything metaphysical. According to this view, a statement is only meaningful if it is capable of being empirically verified. Since metaphysical statements are beyond the reach of empirical science, they cannot be verified. Metaphysical statements were, therefore, dismissed out of hand. According to Craig,

“Ayer was very explicit about the theological implications of this verificationism. Since God is a metaphysical object, the possibility of knowledge was ‘ruled out’ by our treatment of metaphysics. Thus, there can be no knowledge of God.”

Do you see the problem with this view? One only need ask, “Is that statement capable of being empirically verified?”

Ayer’s view was built on an axiom he could not prove, and which could not be proven by the methods he arbitrarily limited according to the premise he assumed. His view could not even stand up to itself!

Craig says the collapse of verificationism was “the most philosophical event of the twentieth century”. The verification principal was not only unscientific; it was self-refuting. “The statement, ‘You should only believe what can be scientifically proven cannot, itself, be scientifically proven.’”

In the previous “unapologetic” articles, I claim that we all have to take certain things on faith, especially our starting premises, which are the tools by which we view and explore the world, but not all of those starting premises are created equal. Some of them cannot even stand up to themselves!

But, enough of that. I need to get to the point of this article.

It seems axiomatic that, if one wants to determine whether God exists, and if one is sincere in making that determination, one will not start with a premise that will inevitably result in the logic that God does not exist.

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The Paths that Diverge at the Crossroads of Existential Angst

Why do I wonder? Why am I conscious of my wondering, and why does my wondering create in me such terrifying angst?

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Stephen Meyer describes the existential angst he experienced in his early teens in an interview with Sean McDowell that is embedded in its entirety at end of this article. Meyer majored in physics and geology, but he accumulated a minor in philosophy on his way to an undergraduate degree. His interest in philosophy was driven by the existential angst he felt as a young man.

Stephen would become a geophysicist and college professor. Then he would go on to obtain a Masters n Philosophy and a Ph.D in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge.

Meyer explained that he wanted to be popular and good at sports, like most teenager’s, but that wasn’t going well for him. A couple of nights before a planned ski trip with his father, some “weird questions” started “popping” into his mind, like: “What’s it going to matter in a hundred years?”

He was initially troubled by those questions, but anticipation for the ski trip distracted him for the time being. On the skiing trip, however, he broke his leg badly.

He woke up from an operation with a full leg cast. Several days in the hospital and limitations on his mobility stirred his active teenage brain to dwell on the questions that haunted him before the trip.

While he was in the hospital, his father brought him a book on the history of baseball. As he read the book, he began to notice the stories all ended the same way. The great prospects were scouted. They came up to the majors with budding promise. They had a fantastic career. They accumulated records, and they retired….

…. and, “Then what?”, He wondered.

In his 14-year old mind, baseball was the greatest thing a person could do. Now, he wondered, “In a hundred years, would anyone remember those accomplishments?”

The mundane routines of his life – getting up in the morning, taking the bus to school, coming home, doing his homework and chores, and getting up in the morning to do it all again – led him to fear “that nothing I was doing was going to amount to anything”.

The routine of hobbling to the mailbox each day to get the newspaper to read the baseball box scores added to the existential weight. As days went by, he became conscious of the dates on the newspapers. Each day a new date, one after the other, with each one passing into memory.

Snap your finger one moment, he realized, and the next moment you are remembering the moment you snapped your finger. Each moment is passing even as you dwell on the moment, and then it is gone. An endless reminder of his finitude.

He became aware of the ephemeral nature of time, and began to wonder, “What is it that is the same all the time and is the basis for binding all these passing sense impressions together?”

This question led to the conclusion, “Unless there is something that doesn’t change, everything that is constantly changing has no lasting reality, let alone meaning.”

He had no reason to believe there was an answer to this angst. There was no reason to believe there was anything that was always the same, that there was anything that was unchanging. There was nothing evident to him to anchor the ever changing world of his experience to anything solid.

This reminds me of an early realization in my own life. I was maybe around 5-7 years old, when we watched a reel of home movies of my father and grandparents and me as a younger child. This was, perhaps, my first self-conscious awareness of the passage of time.

I don’t know if I dreamt this, or imagined it, or whether it was a “vision”, but what I recall was real. I still remember it, though the immediacy of the feelings that went with it have faded. I experienced the sensation of floating in the unimaginably vast emptiness and expanse of space – alone – not connected to anyone or anything.

The feeling that accompanied the dream was utter and terrifying emptiness and disconnectedness. Words don’t do it justice. I imagine now that the Yawning, gnawing feeling utterly terrifying feeling I had is similar to what Meyer experienced as he wrestled with the questions whirling in his young mind.

Meyer realized one day, when he had a strong urge to ask his parents, that his parents could offer him no better solution. He realized there was no sense even asking. They were finite creatures like him. They could not provide salve for what bothered him.

Stephen Meyer remembers looking at his windowsill in his leg cast and staring at the pattern in the wood. He wondered, “How do I know that what I am seeing is really there and not just something that is going on in my brain?”

In his next thought he wondered, “Is this what it means to be insane?” Then arose the fear that led to a new fear that the questions meant there was something wrong with him. Meyer speculates that a psychologist might have diagnosed him with anxiety leading to a panic attack.

In college, though, Meyer was able to find some clarity and context for his experience in the study of existentialism: “Without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any ultimate meaning or value.” (Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre). Meyer realized, “That was what was bothering me!”

Everything is in flux from our human vantage point. Everything is passing, passing, passing….. Nothing has any lasting meaning or value from the position of a finite being. The anxiety he felt was a “metaphysical anxiety”.

Stephen Meyer’s journey is somewhat similar to mine, except for the details. This journey is also common to human experience, and it has ancient roots. Anyone who has spent any time reading Ecclesiastes knows what I am talking about.

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Pulling at the Threads of the Christian Paradigm that Uniquely Influenced the Western World

Down at the bedrock of modern, western values remains a Christian foundation.

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Galleries under the central arena of the Colosseum in Rome, Italy

I read Tom Holland’s new book, Dominion, about a year ago, and I have written about it a few times. Many Christians would not think to read a history about Western Civilization by a self-described secular humanist (once atheist, perhaps now agnostic) historian.

Most non-Christians are likely to be uncomfortable with the chronicle Holland describes of the radically influential role that Christianity played in the development of Western Civilization, providing the foundation, in fact, for secular humanist ideals. When Holland dug down to the bedrock of modern, western values, he was surprised himself to find them anchored on a Christian foundation.

Holland did not set out to write a Christian apologetic, and he seems to remain somewhat uncertain how to process what he “discovered”. What he found, though, changed his mind about Christianity. He gives a brief explanation in the following clip:

Though Holland has had a turnabout on his view of Christianity, he finds himself caught in an odd position wrought by the unexpected discovery that his lifelong, secular humanist values flow from the radical catalyst of Christian influence and remain embedded ubiquitously in its very fabric. The awkwardness of his current position is evident in his interviews and discussions about the book.

Christians and secular thinkers, alike, wrestle with his book. Holland doesn’t hide any warts, and he doesn’t pull any punches. Neither does he obfuscate the thoroughly paradigmatic shift in Western thinking that Christianity worked into a society that once proudly and unashamedly championed strength and privilege over the poor, the weak, and the lowly.

Holland exposes the metanarrative developed during the Enlightenment and thereafter that belies the foundation on which the Enlightenment structure was built. Far from advancing the progression of human values, the Enlightenment threatened to undo the distinctly Christian concern for the poor, weak, and lowly while attempting to wrest western civilization from the hold of the Divine. Humanism saved the Christian ethic, albeit divorced from Christ.

Consider the full title of Darwin’s great tome which staked out the ground of a scientific (and social) revolution free from God’s interference:

“The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”

The title of Darwin’s book championing the evolutionary paradigm, harkens back to the Greco-Roman value system that despised the poor, the weak and the lowly. That value system did not just turn a callous eye at wanton and discriminate cruelty, it cheered on the strong while they snuffed out the weak. It was national sport!

The very reason the full title never “stuck” (I now believe) is due to a fundamental, pervasive, and thoroughly entrenched counter-value of the intrinsic worth of human life that is uniquely Christian in its source.

The intrinsic value of all human life, from the greatest to the least, from the wisest and strongest to the weakest and most imbecilic, from the fittest to the most infirm, is traceable to the Christian belief that all human beings are made in the image of God. That the survival of the fittest did not take hold as a western social or ethical value is attributable to the deeply ingrained Christian ethic that survived yet, despite the efforts to eradicate its God from modern equations.

Modern humanists may attempt to recast Darwin into a humanistic mold, but the idea of “social Darwinism” bears his name through no model of random, unguided selection. According to John G. West, Charles Darwin, himself, set in motion the inertia for eugenics, among other things, that were associated with social Darwinism:

Darwin himself in The Descent of Man provided the rationale for what became the eugenics movement, and how the vast majority of evolutionary biologists early in the twentieth century were right to see negative eugenics as a logical application of Darwin’s theory.

While the defense of Darwin against the charge of social Darwinism has largely succeeded in popular and polite company, the very title of the Origin of Species (by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) belies the success of that effort. The fact that the full title is merely a parenthetical today is evidence only of a concerted rescue campaign.

Christian values survived despite the Enlightenment coupe, not because of it. Humanism today assumes the evolutionary paradigm for its science alongside the uniquely Christian paradigm of intrinsic human value. That the two assumptions do not fit well together seems to be lost on modern minds.

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