The Evolution Solution

Christians believe God created the world through love, secular humanists believe random forces established life through violence.

Christians tell us that violence is the result of our sin, an illness no one was meant to suffer. Secular humanists tell us violence is the language and fabric of nature.

So, why do the champions of evolution in the classroom, the people who insist there is no God and that we are just highly-evolved animals, oppose violence?

How does that work? Doesn’t the whole point of evolution revolve around the idea that violence not only cannot be removed from the world, but that any attempt to remove it would destroy the very process that created the rich biodiversity we are all told we must preserve? If we believe in evolution, if we love what it has created, then why oppose the process through which it creates?

Let’s take a look at a specific case. I have already commented on the disappearance of the 1970’s “broody-hen” rhetoric. According to this line of thinking, anyone who opposed legal abortion viewed women as nothing more than egg-laying machines. According to this theory, pro-lifers who supposed to be opposed because they saw women as nothing but baby-making machines.

Oddly, now that embryonic stem cell research and surrogate motherhood has become all the rage, in other words, now that women really are treated like hens who are prized more for their eggs than their intellects, the “broody-hen” argument has disappeared. But that isn’t the only argument that is going by the wayside.

Remember when abortion was supposed to be a privacy issue, an issue between a woman and her doctor? When was the last time you heard that argument? It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Why did it disappear?

That’s easy. It disappeared because pharmacists are doctors of medicine. When a woman goes to a pharmacist to fill a subscription for Plan B, RU-486, or any other abortifacient drug, she establishes a doctor-patient relationship with her pharmacist, a relationship that we were long told is very private, very holy. Government has no place regulating that relationship, except when the doctor decides that drug-induced abortion is not safe or appropriate treatment for his patient.

Today, if any doctor dares to make such a judgment, he is required by law to send his patient to a doctor who doesn’t care about the woman’s life or health, i.e., a doctor who will fill a prescription for a death-dealing drug. Apparently, government has no business regulating the doctor-patient relationship except when the doctor refuses to participate in baby-killling.

Given this reality, is it any wonder that Jill Stanek – the nurse who reported how live-birth aborted children were being left to die – has discovered that the Department of Justice refuses to prosecute hospitals, doctors or nurses that kill infants? In other words, we oppose violence, except when it is directed at innocents?

A burning political question must be answered. What do you do when you are ruled by homicidal megalomaniacs? We can’t vote them out. The leaders of both parties are certifiably insane, as is the media that spins the edicts they issue.

Much as I despise sharia law and hate the idea of being ruled by it, it is becoming barely possible that being a dhimmi would not be a step down. We would simply be trading one set of evil rulers for another. The imams’ particular predilictions for evil may be different, but the evil itself is the same. As one Muslim demonstrator told Pope Benedict XVI, “We will oppose your worship of life with our worship of death.” That kind of sentiment could make him an honorary secular American.

Science of Theology, Religion of Physics Part III

In the last essay, we saw why science cut ties with Christianity. Now we shall examine the details of what happened. In order to do this, we must have a understand how closely science mirrors faith.

A good scientist is a prophet if only because science was born from religious faith. Consider the two aspects of science: the content of observable experience and the power, that is, the logic, to properly consider true causes and true effects. A well-informed scientist can correctly predict the outcome of a scenario. He knows the properties of the objects in the event, he knows how these properties interact, he can thereby foresee the future.

Faith works in a very similar way. It has two aspects: the content of human experience and the power by which that experience is understood and believed. Like the scientist, the faith-filled prophet is able to foresee the future. The difference lies only in the way it is forseen.

Science and Religion

The scientist knows the qualities of interacting objects intimately and is thereby able to accurately describe the outcome of an interaction. The prophet has intimate knowledge of the qualities of the One who moves the objects. As a result, he is also able to accurately describe the outcome of an interaction. As Scripture tells us over and over, the false prophet, like the poor or uninformed scientist, is marked by his inability to accurately predict what will happen next. Similarly, the false prophet, like the poor scientist, is unable to read the signs of the times, he is unable to understand the significance of something that does not turn out as expected.

This is the basic difference between science and religion. Pure science means to study and elucidate the relationship between objects. Pure theology studies and elucidates the relationships between persons. Applied science attempts to coordinate the relationships between objects in order to benefit persons. Applied theology, also called religion, attempts to properly coordinate the relationships between persons.

Science determines the qualities of an object by intensive study of the object itself. Theology determines the qualities of the person by inviting the person to reveal himself. This is one of the principle differences between science and theology: objects can be revealed by external study, while persons are only self-revealed. No amount of study will fully reveal the qualities of a person - only the person’s own decision to reveal himself will do that.

Science can become confused with theology because the human person is a body-soul duality. That is, each person is at once an object, by virtue of his body, and a person, by virtue of his soul. As a result, the worldview that sees everything in terms of object relations has a tendency to ignore or not fully regard persons. Theology, on the other hand, has a tendency to ignore the object relations in preference to the interpersonal relations. Thus, it is bad science to look at a human being merely as an object, just as it is bad theology to look at a person merely as a soul.

Science is similar to Christian theology in aspect and method precisely because science grew out of that theology. Judeo-Christian belief is unique in saying that creation is good in itself, created out of nothing into goodness. By insisting on creation ex nihilo, the Judeo-Christian understanding insists that the existence of reality has an over-arching purpose. God brought reality into existence for a reason.

Luther as Buddha

Now, one corollary of this insistence of both the Creator and His Creation is the conclusion that evil does not have its own existence. God created everything good. He did not create evil. Since He is the source of all that exists, evil is an absence of good, not a presence of itself.

This distinction is important. Whereas the Hindu and the Buddhist insist that reality is an illusion, the Christian insists that reality exists, good exists and evil exists, but the last only in a negative fashion. For the Christian, evil is a deprivation, a distortion of the good – it does not have existence itself, rather, it is the absence of existence. To say that something is evil is to say that it has lost part of the existential qualities we would normally expect it to have. A thing is evil because it has, in a certain sense, fallen partly out of existence.

The corollary to this is quite stunning. Any theology that asserts the flesh is completely corrupted, full of nothing but evil, implicitly agrees with Eastern mysticism – the flesh is an illusion. America is a famously Protestant culture. The complete corruption of the flesh is a famously Protestant doctrine. The antagonism between Western science and Western religious faith is at its worst in Protestant cultures. This is the reason.

Protestant theology insists both on the total corruption of the flesh and reason as the whore of the devil. It has to. If Luther is right about the total corruption of the flesh, then the total uselessness of reason necessarily follows. All that evil reality leaves is intuition, which Protestants endorse as “blind faith.” Many theologians have attempted to make a correlation between the Christian Desert Fathers and Eastern mysticism, but seen in this light, the real correlation with Eastern mysticism can only be found in Lutheran theology and its offshoots.

But there is another point. Because Protestant theologies insist on the “alien righteousness” of God, it insists on treating God as object instead of subject. If God is object, if God is not person in the way we understand persons, then He should in principle be subject to scientific scrutiny.

In fact, God is Bridegroom. Demanding that God should be subject to scientific scrutiny in order to know Him is much akin to demanding that every prospective spouse be subject to scientific scrutiny in order to determine if marriage should take place: it is exactly the wrong way to go about things. The objectification of God built into the very structure of Protestant theology is, perhaps, why Protestant Faith insists so strongly on the need for personal relationship with God. It is an explicit counter-weight to the insistence on God as alien.

The Right Path

Catholic Christianity takes a different tack. As the Church has always taught, as a very recent papal encyclical again demands, faith and reason are both necessary to personal relationship with God. Faith is not blind and it is never contrary to logic or the accurate perceptions of the senses. Faith is based on personal knowledge of personal relationships lived out in material reality.

If you and I were life-long friends who had been through every trial and tribulation for the last forty years, and you told me you would meet me on the corner of Fifth and Main tomorrow, then I would have forty years of evidence to support that statement. Those years of evidence tell me not only whether or not you will, in fact, be there, but it tells me what car you are likely to be driving and might possibly even tell me what you will be wearing when you get there. I have not yet met you on that corner, but I know what I will find when I get there. I have faith in you because I know you.

I have faith in God in precisely the same way. I have seen how He acts in my life, I have seen the witness of others throughout history. They gave me historical documents describing how He acts in their lives. I have millenia of lived experience to base my faith on. As a result, I have more faith in Him then I have in the sunrise tomorrow, for if the sun does not rise tomorrow, I know that lack is not for evil, but for my good. This is a level of faith that we can never derive from objects alone, but only from the self-revealed knowledge of the One who wields those objects.

Science is no longer acquainted with this understanding. Because Luther shares common ground with an Eastern world-view that is antithetical to the Christian statement “reality exists,” science, especially American science, has found it necessary to reject Christianity in toto. It can hardly do otherwise.

Protestants insist Catholic Faith is false. American science, insofar as it has been developed by Protestants, is predisposed to draw the same conclusion. Catholic Faith has always been foreign to American culture; Catholics have long been an immigrant, illiterate and very minority population whose ideas are rejected out of hand by Protestant worldviews. Thus, most American scientists know Christianity only through its Protestant variants. Since Protestant Christianity is opposed to the basic worldview required in order to do good research, that is, since it explicitly rejects reason and embraces the total corruption of reality, implying that the world is essentially an illusion, science is perfectly correct to reject it.

Unfortunately, by the only variants of Christianity it knows well, it thereby insists that it rejects all Christianity. In short, science throws the baby out with the bathwater. It has now largely rejected the very idea that brought it into existence.

Christianity is built on the understanding that reality has a purpose, that it is brought out of nothing into existence precisely so that God could take on flesh and walk among us in a way our senses can perceive and that He will return in that self-same literally sensible way.

In rejecting Christianity, modern science believes it must also reject purpose, for Christianity is the only world-view that insists reality has a purpose. By rejecting Christianity in toto, science simultaneously and explicitly embraces the idea that the interaction of objects within the universe does not display purpose. This creates a problem.

If objects and their interactions are purposeless, then science cannot exist, if only for the mundane reason that scientists are part of that reality, which means scientists have no purpose. In short, by denying Christianity, we deny that we can explain anything at all. We can only note the movement of purposeless objects, and wonder why we note them since we are nothing but purposeless objects. If the human soul is but a biochemical interaction, if there is no Prime Mover, then reality is indeed functionally an illusion. The Eastern mystics are right.

Here is the great irony. Christianity describes the reality that calls science into existence. By rejecting all of Christianity because of one mistaken variant, science thereby embraces the very Eastern mysticism that its philosophy most adamantly opposes. Unless it realizes its folly and returns to its Catholic roots, Western science will eventually become the means by which Western culture decomposes into Eastern mysticism and non-science. Science will self-destruct.

In his book, The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler points out that Hinduism is built around the concept of self-annihilation. As he puts it, India is a “culture of Thanatos.” It is no coincidence that Pope John Paul II described Western society as a “culture of death.” We need only look at Western fertility rates, contraception, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality. We have already embraced Eastern self-annihilation. There is but one difference between us: the East pursues this annihilation through the self-manipulative techniques of yoga while the West pursues it through the techniques of science, the manipulation of others. In this case, it hardly matters - both roads lead to the same end.

Science of Theology, Religion of Physics: Part II

As was pointed out in the previous essay, neither Eastern mysticism nor any other religious worldview except Christianity was amenable to the development of science. While it is easy to identify isolated accomplishments in non-Christian cultures - individual Indians and Arabs made important discoveries in mathematics and medicine, for instance - each of these accomplishments was due primarily to the spark of an individually brilliant mind. Never do we see the in these cultures the detailed study of reality that the culture of Western Europe developed and accomplished.

India, Arabia, China - these civilizations did not lack the intellect for scientific work, they lacked the outlook for it. The outlook lacked because the worldviews that permeated their cultures insisted on points that science must explicitly deny. These cultures all insisted the world cannot be accurately perceived through the senses, that only intuition is a reliable guide. Science, on the other hand, insists the world can be accurately perceived both through the senses and through tools that extend the reach of those senses. Intuition is a fallible tool, the senses, as used through the tools that extend their reach, are infallible.

Thus, because Eastern mystics insist “...the world is not as you perceive through the senses. Reality can only be perceived through the intuition,” for such an Eastern mystic, it would not matter if tools to extend the senses were developed and used - the senses are still fooled. The study of reality that is science is, for such a worldview, simply a fool’s game.

Christianity sees things quite differently. Precisely because it insists that God made Himself sensible in the Incarnation, it necessarily insists that the material world does not and cannot lie. If it could lie, the Incarnation could be false. The Incarnation cannot be false, therefore reality cannot lie.

Only the Christian worldview insisted on the central importance of sensory perception to faith. As the Apostle John insisted, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested: and we have seen and do bear witness and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father and hath appeared to us. That which we have seen and have heard, we declare unto you: that you also may have fellowship with us and our fellowship may be with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3). Note how emphatic John is on the importance of sensory perception to identifying truth: he heard, he saw, his hands handled. Sensory perception is even called the basis for Christian faith and fellowship. The phrase “reality exists” is an essentially Judeo-Christian religious phrase.

Unfortunately, the truth of this statement is lost because the meaning of one word has been lost. We no longer really understand what “faith” means. If asked for a definition of “faith,” many people today will quote St. Paul, “Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). This seems to be distinctly at odds with science, in which evidence must be seen in order to constitute evidence. What few realize is how badly this phrase has been misunderstood. The Apostle did not mean to tell us that we should embrace faith blindly. Rather, he meant to tell us that faith is formed by facts.

The problem lies precisely in the fact that too many Christians emphasize the second half of the phrase at the expense of the first. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Hope is based in facts. Every time you order a hamburger at the local McDonald’s, you have made an act of faith. Consider: you entered the parking lot only because the sign said the people in the building served food. Once inside, you see a menu listing food items, tables for the consumption of food, napkins, forks, soda machines while the smell of cooking meat and frying potatoes wafts through the air. The man behind the counter asks what you would like to eat. The facts evince the possibility of food.

Do you know that you will be given edible food if you order? No, you don’t. Perhaps it is all an elaborate hoax. Or perhaps the cook is sick, the food tainted, or the last burger just sold to the previous customer and the counter person is yet unaware of the fact. But the facts give you hope, so you place your order. This is an act of faith – you haven’t yet seen the hamburger that will ultimately be given to you, but you have a lot of sensory evidence and previous experience upon which to base your hope. Your act of faith is based on the substance of hopeful facts, it is an act made on evidence as yet unseen. Your scientific hypothesis - they will give me food - is about to be tested against reality.

As we can see, faith is never blind. The idea that it is grows out of a serious misunderstanding, the embrace of a central principle of Eastern mysticism: “reason is the whore of the devil.” The phrase is from Martin Luther’s Table Talk. When taken in conjunction with Luther’s theory of total corruption, it constitutes an inelegant summary of the principle that reality is an illusion.

Because science must necessarily reject the idea that reality is an illusion, science must necessarily reject the idea of Protestant Christianity. The scientific worldview developed in Catholic Europe just before the Reformation. It is important to realize that Protestant Christian thought never made and has still not made, a complete break from its Catholic roots. Syncretist from the beginning, Protestant theology happily embraced simultaneously contradictory principles. Thus, it was able to simultaneously embrace scientific techniques while proclaiming a worldview that was actually at odds with what science insisted on – the centrality of the senses and of rationality to truth.

As a result, the sciences that grew on Protestant soils of Germany, England and America became increasingly out of step with the culture. Science insisted on rationality, Protestantism insisted “reason is the whore of the devil.” Science insisted on the importance of the senses, Protestantism insisted the sensory sacramental system was useless. The only point of contact was an elevation of literacy in both, but this emphasis merely exacerbated the disjunction between rational science and irrational Protestant religion. Mistaking the part (Protestantism) for the whole (Catholicism), science rejected Christianity whole and entire. As a result, it cut away its own rationale for being.

The next essay will examine exactly how this happened.

The Science of Theology, the Religion of Physics

In the re-emerging debate over creationism, intelligent design and evolution, much has been made of the need to keep religious faith out of the classroom. If this were accomplished, it would, of course, be a great loss, for if religious faith is removed from the classroom, physics, chemistry, and biology will have to be dispensed with and the hard sciences will be completely lost to us. This is a point that is lost on most of the people in the debate.

Take, for instance, the foundational premise of physics: reality exists. As members of a Christian Western culture, we often have a hard time understanding how fully those two words represent a specific religious viewpoint. To assert that reality is not an illusion, but is, in fact, substantial is to take sides in a long-standing religious debate.

The Hebrew and Christian faith insists on independent physical reality. The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist traditions, along with any number of similar religious traditions, hold precisely the opposite viewpoint. For these other faith traditions, reality is not only an illusion, but an obstacle to real peace. Christians say that in order to achieve peace, we must work for justice. Other religious traditions say that to achieve peace, we must recognize physical reality as an illusion, an artifact of the mind, a stumbling block that prevents our achieving total union with Nirvana or Moksha – Nothingness. For Christians, peace comes from a full transformation from our fallen selves into who we are. For others, peace comes from completely extinguishing who we are.

The idea that physical reality has an independent existence with laws that operate both upon it and upon me is a religious concept because it simultaneously insists we have the ability to know something outside of ourselves and insists there is something outside of ourselves to be known. After all, the very word “religion” is derived from “re-ligare” the Greek words for “tying back together.” For Christians, our investigation of physical reality is part of our task as persons. Through it, we begin to tie back together a reality that was irretrievably broken at some earlier point in time.

This is an important point, for investigation is only possible by means of a pre-existing purpose, and this purpose is the foundation of the statement “reality exists.” Let me explain. No one investigates a thing without having a purpose in mind. The purpose directs and forms the investigation. We investigate in order to establish “why.” But, where reality has no real existence, there is no “why.” Investigation is purposeless and therefore not undertaken. Thus, the statement “reality exists” assumes not only that the investigator exists, it also assumes that the thing to be investigated has a “why” associated with it. In short, “reality exists” assumes the existence of purpose in both the investigator and the thing to be investigated.

The search for a unified field theory is one example of such an assumption in action. The hard sciences exist only because an ordered reality pre-exists them. If the universe were formless chaos, there would be no underlying reality upon which logic could function, nor, arguably, would there be a way to demonstrate the existence of logic at all. Logic would be the illusion instead of the tool.

Physics tells us we can treat the particles that compose the universe as information packets. Physics does not point out the obvious: information exists only where purpose exists. Where reality is an illusion that repeats on an endlessly cyclic basis, there is no information to glean, no reality to tie together.

The Eastern faith traditions are, in this sense, not religions at all, for they carry no sense of the need to heal reality. Even the healing of the individual is accomplished only through personal self-annihilation, the removal of information (although they would call it the removal of illusion) from the equation. For them, the reality is simple: there is no equation.

As this discussion should demonstrate, it is no more possible to remove religion from the classroom than it is to remove religion from public discourse. If we would say “reality exists,” we have injected religion into the classroom. If we say “reality is an illusion,” we have avoided injecting religion into the classroom, but only by virtue of having denied the need for a classroom at all.

The next essay will discuss how science has reached the absurd position of denying its own reality.

It’s a Religious War

It’s a Religious War

Miguel Estrada, the Hispanic Catholic judge whose nomination was put on hold seven times, is the latest victim of the latest religious war. He was left hanging for over two years, his nomination put on hold seven times, simply because he wouldn’t deny his faith. He recently withdrew his nomination in order to get on with his life.

Attorney General William Pryor made similar refusal to deny his faith and has suffered a similar filibuster. Thomas Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas, and others have also been subject to it. Apparently, the Democrats believe only Christians who do not hold serious Christian beliefs can hold office. One might call it the “Christians Resembling Avowed Pagans” (CRAP) campaign.

Reports on this issue always return to the phrase, “separation between church and state.” Ignore the fact that this phrase appears in neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence. Ignore the fact that several states, including Jefferson’s Virginia, had religious tests for office holders for years after the Constitution was ratified. Where did this idea of church-state separation come from? Prior to The American Constitutional Convention of 1787, every country in the world, every culture known to man, required its office holders to at least affirm the existence of a Supreme Being (seven U.S. states still have this requirement). Even John Locke, probably the biggest influence on Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, denied atheists (and Catholics) the right to hold office.

This opposition to faith in the public square is founded in part on the Reformation and its wars of religion. Even Islam did its part. It laid siege to Vienna, with armies composed in part of enslaved Christians, not once but twice in one hundred and sixty years. Indeed, the 1683 siege was so effective that, if it were not for Catholic Poland and her soldiers, most of Europe would now speak Arabic and live under sharia. These wars resulted in tens of thousands injured and killed, hundreds of villages burned to the ground, general famine in large areas of western Europe. It wasn’t pleasant.

People saw religion as the cause of the problem. Remove religion from the public sphere, and war would leave with it. Modern historians recognize there is some truth to this, but not much. When there is no formal science of economics or biology, when there is no enormous difference between the living standards of one country and another, what can motivate people to war? Whatever the king's real motivation might be, the public reasons have to resonate with the culture. When the culture is steeped in religion, the public reasons given for war will likewise tend to be steeped in religion. A ruler can’t appeal to the fall in gross national product when no one, including him, knows what that is.

The French Revolution became the first attempt to throw religion out of the public square. It enthroned a prostitute as a “goddess”, followed that with a public debauch and guillotines that rose and fell from sunrise to sunset for weeks on end. It also resulted in Napolean and the Napoleanic Wars, the first totalitarian and the first European experience of total war.

The Constitutional Convention tried a similar tactic. We had only slightly better luck. Within thirty years, we fought the War of 1812 and began the long series of Indian and other wars that would keep our army, navy, and now air force, busy right up to the present day.

Today, we are told a non-religious society is more peaceful. It isn’t. It’s bloodier. In Christian society, wars were governed by certain rules: no fighting on Sundays or holy days. No fighting on fast days. No fighting during Advent or Lent. War still wasn’t a holiday, but it did not involve the whole of society. Often, the inhabitants of two countries at war were only barely aware of the fact. The two groups of citizens often continued visiting each other as if nothing were wrong. Nothing was.

Science is not so indifferent. The Franco-Prussian war (1871) was fought to validate Darwinian theory that only the strongest races survive. Both the French and the Germans thought of their nations as “races”. That war led directly to World War I. Anglo-American legislation and eugenics theory gave Hitler the law and the science to support his ideas on race, World War I gave him the reason. Now the “superior” Germans fought the “inferior” Slavs and Jews, the “superior” white Americans fought the “inferior” yellow Japanese horde. With World War II, the world-wide race war, we discovered that science provides not only the rationale to fight a war, but the means to exponentially increase the violence. In terms of body bags, one hundred years of scientific wars, particularly those based on American eugenics and Marxist economics, have killed many times more people than all the religious wars combined ever have.

Maybe it’s time we divorced economics and biology from public life, and put religion back in.