Guarding the Guardians

I love studies that discuss why religious people think the way they do.
 Unfortunately, not all such studies are created equal.
Consider this one, from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

The study purports to show that the more analytical one's thought processes are, the less religious a person's beliefs will be.

Sadly, the study doesn't prove what the scientists claim it proves.

While it does seem to show that people capable of solving math problems are less inclined to religious belief, it doesn't show that the ability to solve math problems (or engage in other analytic thinking) causes this decrease in religious belief. That is, the study doesn't prove causation, just correlation.

Which is not a real surprise. I distinctly remember following this exact line of reasoning while I was in honors math and science classes in Catholic high school. In all the histories I read describing the lives and accomplishments of all the scientists I studied, none of these histories mentioned religious belief at all. All the really brilliant people I knew about were atheists. The only time religious belief was mentioned was when someone actively rejected it.

Thus, I knew Isaac Asimov, one of the most brilliant science writers of the 20th century, was an avowed atheist, but did not know that Isaac Newton, the most brilliant scientist of the last 400 years, was an avowed believer who wrote more theology then he did science.

I knew Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist who came up with the incorrect Steady State theory, was an atheist, but did not know the George Lemaitre, the astrophysicist who came up with the correct Big Bang theory, was a priest.

No one told me that at least two Popes were each among the leading scientists of their day, nor that one of these, Pope John XXI, was an authority on both medicine and logic. His classic work on logic, Summulae Logicales, was the standard textbook on the subject for over 300 years. He died while working in his private scientific laboratory.

For my entire childhood and most of my adult life, I was completely unaware of how Catholic theology formed the empirical sciences.

So, let us assume that the students being tested lived in a culture very much like the one I grew up in just thirty years ago, a culture which constantly told them that thinking, rational people did not believe in God.

When such students are presented with priming concepts oriented towards rational thought, that would simultaneously prime them to think of what they associate with rational thought - disbelief in God. If they were doing that, you would get exactly the results this study shows.

In short, all this study shows is that schools are successfully linking the idea that rationalism is opposed to religion. It doesn't show that rationalism actually undermines religion.

Now, here's the interesting part.

For some reason, according to both the LA Times and Science magazine, the scientific authors of the study insist on the irrational non sequitor that logic is the cause of disbelief, rather than noting the much more logical conclusion that one is simply correlated with the other. The editors of one of the leading journals in the nation, Science, published this study, complete with its irrational non sequitor.

I wonder why that is?

Perhaps scientific studies into religion causes irrational thought among the scientists who attempt to implement those studies?

What, exactly, happens in the brains of scientists when they contemplate creating studies that don't prove what they say the studies prove?

Someone should investigate that.

Why Scientists Can't Be Trusted

Scientific American, a marvelous magazine in many respects, recently published an article which not only demonstrated the foolishness of one scientist, but highlighted the foolishness of specialists in general.

In it, Dr. Judith Rich Harris opines that parents don't matter when it comes to child-rearing. According to Harris, a child's peer group and teachers make a far larger impact on a child's life and habits than do parents. The most a parent contributes is a handful of DNA, most similarities between children and parents can be chalked up to this DNA contribution, and the actual lifestyle results are really not imparted by parents at all.

Now, it is clearly the case, as any parent can attest, that individual children have individual quirks of personality wholly unrelated to how they are raised. A father who gets on all fours and growls like a lion at his little girl will likely see the young lass scream and run away, while a father who does the same to his little boy will see the young lad scream and attack. Some children are born with naturally outgoing personalities, others are naturally introspective. Certainly it is not all nurture - nature plays its part.

But, to say that a child's peer group and teachers have more impact than his parents is missing the point. Who controls the child's access to other children his age? Who determines which teachers the child will be exposed to?

Who among us has not had a parent tell us, "Why don't you make friends with X? They're a wonderful family!" or "If I discover that you are hanging around with Y, you will be grounded until you are 18."

Similarly, are there no parents who have said, "That is the school for my child!" or "We're going to have to get you moved to a different teacher. This one is not helping you."

While Dr. Harris has some interesting observations, some of them even worthwhile, she doesn't appear to ever have been a parent herself. Even if we grant her thesis, even if we agree that teachers and other children more direct impact on a child's socialization outside the home than parents do, we still must acknowledge that those other people only have this influence because they are permitted to have it by the parents.

Parents are the guardians, the gatekeepers.
For this we were born, even if myopic scientists don't want to admit it.

Fr. Stanley Jaki

Father Stanley Jaki, Templeton Prize winner and one of the finest minds in the world, has passed away.

I had the honor of speaking with Father Jaki on several occasions, once even being blessed with the honor of doing a bit of research for him before one of his talks. His work is voluminous, marvelous, luminous. The world is richer for having had him here, and he will definitely be a man whose intercessions are powerful on earth. May God bless him richly in heaven.

Please, do an indulgence for him and/or for other souls in purgatory, to speed him on his way if he needs it.

Galileo Redux

It’s eerie, really. Five centuries ago, lay university professors invoked Scripture and religion in order to attack and destroy an opponent whose views threatened to topple academia. Today, they are doing it again. The only difference is the targets – in the early 1600’s, the university professors were trying to destroy Galileo. Today, they’re trying to destroy the theory behind intelligent design, using very nearly the same techniques they used against Galileo.

The University versus Heliocentrism
Contrary to popular belief, neither Copernicus nor Galileo were initially attacked by the Catholic Church. Indeed, both received most of their initial support from Catholic priests, bishops and popes. No, when it came to these two mathematicians, it was the lay academic community, the university professors, who hated their guts.

Galileo, you see, had the unfortunate distinction of being a mathematician at a time when mathematicians were universally considered second-class citizens by the academic community. Mathematicians were good only for creating siege engines, building fortifications and casting horoscopes. Galileo was so well loved by his colleagues that he was run out of the University of Pisa, and as the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, he earned less than one-tenth what the best-paid Aristotelian philosopher earned.

Aristotelian philosophers were at the top of the lay academic pecking order primarily because Aristotle’s physical theories were based not on mathematics but on philosophy. He assumed that every inanimate object had an innate purpose that determined its motion. Rocks fell down because they intended to reach the center of the earth. Hot air rose because it intended to reach the celestial sphere. Since intention determined the direction of motion, and since philosophy was the key to understanding purpose and intention, philosophy was considered the best way to understand the workings of the universe.

A mere mathematician could never hope to plumb the universe’s depths of mystery. Mathematicians played with mindless numbers. They cast horoscopes for superstitious people, and casting horoscopes was a mortal sin. Their number-play was only good for creating accurate calendars and calculating where a cannonball might land.

Heliocentrism was not a violation of Scripture so much as it was a violation of Aristotle. Any theory that seemed to contradict Aristotle also contradicted the authority of the university professors. In short, it directly attacked the prestige of most of the lay academic community.

Consequently, the most vociferous opponents to heliocentrism would be the members of the academic community. Copernicus knew this. As a Catholic priest whose mathematical expertise had been requested by the Fifth Lateran Council when it considered calendar reform, he was not concerned about the reaction of the Catholic Church to his new heliocentric theory, rather, he was concerned about the reaction of the lay academics. He dragged his feet on publishing his heliocentric theories because he was afraid the university professors would rip him to shreds.

Avoiding Peer Review
Thus, even though Pope Clement VII approved of his heliocentric work, Archbishop Schonburg of Capua offered him the money necessary to print it and Bishop Giese urged him to write the work, he demurred. In fact, when Copernicus tried to stall by claiming he needed an assistant, Bishop Giese even went so far as to secure for Copernicus the services of George Rheticus, a Protestant mathematician whose father had been beheaded by the Protestants for sorcery. Even as the Council of Trent was meeting to deal with the problem of Protestant heresy, Giese recognized that the Protestant son of a man executed for witchcraft was the best man for the job.

But Copernicus continued to stall. He knew the university professors would crucify him if he promoted a theory that undercut their authority. He was right. When Rheticus’ colleagues, the professors at the University of Wittenburg, heard that Rheticus was helping Copernicus develop heliocentric theory, they forced him out of his chair of mathematics. As Rheticus left town, he handed his job as Copernicus’ assistant over to a Lutheran minister, Osiander, who continued the editing work. Osiander would take advantage of Copernicus’ age and ill health by removing Copernicus’ dedicatory preface to Pope Paul III and replacing it with his own spurious preface which stated that heliocentric theory had no basis in fact.

Copernicus would never discover his new assistant’s duplicity. He was, instead, fortunate enough to die the same day his book was released from the printer. As a result, he did not face the abject hatred poured out on his head by the university community. Galileo saw the vitriol poured out by the professors upon Copernicus and hated them for it.

He ridiculed his fellow academics from the very first moment he began lecturing at Pisa, writing poetry that made the academic gowns the laughing-stock of the town. His short tenure in the mathematics chair at Padua was not much more successful. Few people remember that Galileo did not work for a university, but for the Count of Florence. He hated the university professors as much as they hated him.

Thus, when Galileo’s telescope brought supporting evidence for the Copernican theory, it was not the Church that attacked him – it was the academic community. Even as the Jesuits and Dominicans threw luxuriant parties for Galileo in Rome to celebrate his new discoveries, the lay academics schemed to destroy this disrespectful upstart, this mathematician. Indeed, while priests and bishops delighted in the new vistas the telescope opened up, most of the academic community refused to even look through the lens. They claimed the visions thus received were optical illusions. Maginini, the famous Ptolemaic astronomer, promised to wipe Galileo’s new planets from the sky.

The Two-Edged Sword
As Protestants vied with the consecrated Catholic men over the proper interpretation of Scripture, the academics saw their opening. It was the lay academics who first brought Scripture into the heliocentrism debate, accusing Galileo of heresy, of violating the God’s own divine word.

It was the lay academics who duped a foolish Dominican priest into attacking Galileo from the pulpit, much to the dismay of the Dominican astronomers who had just feted the astronomer from Florence. The Church was eventually drawn into the controversy not by Jesuit astronomers, but by lay academic advisors to the Church, men who insisted that Rome had a duty to stop Galileo, for he were left unchecked, he would destroy the entire university system.

They were half-right. He destroyed the Aristotelian philosophy professors. For the first time in history, Galileo had begun to use mathematics to systematically describe the way the objects in the world interacted with one another. He stripped away the false Aristotelian idea that we must first understand an object’s purpose before we can understand how inanimate objects interact. He showed that mathematical formulas alone were sufficient to describe movement. In short, he proved that inanimate objects were truly inanimate – they were not quasi-persons with intentions or purposes. Galileo drove the last nail into the coffin of Aristotelian paganism.

Galileo destroyed the chairs of philosophy. They have never regained their places of honor in the pantheon of human knowledge. But, since Galileo’s time, the scientific community has made an egregious error. As it gained ascendancy and public adulation, it has continued to attack and abjure the necessity of philosophy and theology.

Unfortunately for promoters of science, philosophy is unavoidable. The mathematical method of studying the world itself embodies a philosophy, and a remarkably incomplete philosophy at that. Numbers can only tell us what, they can never tell us why. Numbers describe but they do not ultimately explain. Science is about nothing but numbers – measurement is the foundation of everything it does. Because it focuses so doggedly on numbers, it has begun to insist that there is nothing beyond numbers – there is no purpose, no intentionality, nothing beyond measurement and description. This is the theory of evolution in a nutshell.

Any theory which attempts to provide a volitional explanation is derided as mere philosophy, or worse, religion. Thus, today, the same battle lines are being drawn: the academic community versus the philosophers and theologians. This time, however, the roles are reversed. Now the scientists possess the heights of adulation, while the philosophers are paid a pittance in both salary and respect.
In Galileo’s time, the philosophers hung grimly onto their posts by denying the use of mathematics and insisting that only purpose mattered. Today’s scientists hang grimly onto their posts by denying the importance of philosophy/theology and insisting that only measurement matters.

The Crux of the Matter

Today, both sides fail to realize the essential complementarity of science and theology. Science describes the relationship between objects. Theology describes the relationship between persons. Because persons possess bodies, that is, because persons can be treated as objects, science makes the fatal mistake of assuming persons are objects. Because they are so successful at describing the interaction between inanimate objects, scientists they think they can successfully describe the interaction between persons.

But the relationships between persons are not subject to what scientists do best: measure. How much do you love your wife? 4.2? 3.14159? Numbers cannot be assigned to relationships. Quantity is most certainly a quality, but quantity does not exhaust every quality a person may reveal. The qualities of inanimate objects can be revealed through external study, but the qualities of a person are revealed only through self-revelation. We can see what a person does, but we cannot know with certainty why the person does it unless that person reveals the why. What we cannot ask of objects – the why – we cannot refrain from asking of subjects, of each other.

Since objects are not known through self-revelation. But persons are known only through self-revelation, the inquiry into the origins of persons cannot be solved through external study alone, because the very definition of person assumes a presence that is beyond the reach of even the most delicate scientific measuring instruments. These points are too often lost on everyone in the debate.
Thus, just as the university professors of Galileo’s time used Scripture as a weapon to attack the scientist, so today’s scientists use Scripture to attack the philosopher/theologian, but in an oddly perverse way. The original attack was built on the immutable authority of Scripture. Today’s attack is built on the supposition that Scripture has no real authority, and anyone who adheres to it is, in fact, a fool and an ignoramus of the first order.

In modern times, Scripture lacks authority in part because Scripture does not measure. It is not scientific. Insofar as anyone adheres to a non-scientific worldview, that person is a backward savage whose opinion is not to be respected.

Now, it is manifestly true that one can adhere to the scientific worldview when it comes to the study of objects and adhere to the theological worldview when it comes to the encounter with persons. However, because so few people properly distinguish the proper spheres of science and theology, men and women on both sides of the debate constantly denigrate the intelligence and the intelligibility of own positions. Either Scripture or nature is not given its proper due.
While scientists too easily forget that Scripture is divine revelation, theologians too easily forget that nature is also part of divine revelation. The scientist and his measuring tools are exploring a sacred expression of God’s own self-revelation, even if it happens not to be Scripture. To the extent that theologians and philosophers do not acknowledge this, scientists will ignore their pleas for recognition.

Thus, scientists correctly note that intelligent design is not science, strictly speaking, because intelligent design deals in “why,” that is, while it recognizes the complexity of the reality being measured, it does not investigate the “how” but the “why” of that complexity. Unfortunately, these same scientists fail to note that evolution, at least insofar as it attempts to explain the reasons “why” human persons exist, is also not science. It measures the complexity of the fossil record but insists there is no “why” at all.

Now, real science does not pretend to answer “why” questions, it only answers “how” questions. By insisting there is no “why” – a proposition which real science is manifestly not equipped to discuss - evolution is shown to be nothing more than nihilistic philosophy dressed up as science.
Many scientists complain that the debate over evolution remains a debate only in America. They point out that the Communist Chinese and the Europeans do not engage in such absurd discussion. They are correct. The denial of evolution is precisely the denial of the nihilism the rest of the world already embraces. In other words, the complaint tells us only what we already know.

Galileo was the first scientist, the first to apply mathematics to everything he did. He lived and died a sound Catholic who never wavered in the Faith, regardless of what individual men were coerced into doing to him. Because he was a good scientist, he was able to distinguish between the men who attacked him and both the falsehoods and the truths they espoused. But while Galileo was a good Catholic, he was never a good university professor. He hadn't the stomach to live a lie.

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.

On Political Parties

America’s three-party system is mutating yet again, but it is unclear exactly how the game will play out. Hmmm….? Yes, you read that right. America’s three-party system.

America never really had a party system until roughly the middle of the 1800’s, when the Whigs and the Democratic-Republicans faced each other during and after Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The Whigs had formed to oppose Jackson’s policies, but the issue of slavery was as fractious then as the issue of abortion is today. It shattered the party into two wings, with the anti-slavery wing eventually mutating into today’s Republican party.

Unfortunately, Jackson’s presidency also shattered the Democratic-Republicans. Jackson’s party eventually mutated into today’s Democrats. By the end of the Civil War, only two major parties were left standing: the Republicans and the Democrats.

But the Civil War created a third political party. After all, the war had created the system of railroads and telegraph lines that made fast news transmission possible. With the post-war ubiquity of the telegraph, America developed the modern news media.

As Joseph Pulitzer, of Pulitzer prize fame, and William Randolph Hearst, founder of the Hearst newspaper empire, pointed out, they could manipulate public opinion at will and start wars as they saw fit. And they did. The Spanish-American War was largely an invention of Hearst’s desire to sell newspapers. Then, as now, making the sale was more important than saving lives.

These three parties, two voted into power by ballot, the third voted into power by sales, faced each other off in shifting alliances over the next century. The third party was voted into power because the American people chose it. We liked hearing one kind of news as opposed to another kind, delivered in a yellow-journalism style as opposed to a different style; we chose what kind of lies we most liked to hear and we empowered the ones who pleased us with lies to keep at it.

The industrialists of the time recognized this. They went with the flow by creating the compulsory mass school system. Invented by men like Carnegie and Rockefeller at the turn of the 1900s, the mass school system was designed to stratify society into a hierarchical social class system. The schools trained most people to be nothing more than factory workers, with concomitantly low literacy and intellectual skills. The unions that the industrialists fought so hard against were slowly destroyed by the industrialists’ new right-to-work card, the college degree.

Universities became the new apprenticeships, replacing both the agrarian small-business apprenticeship model and the union card. Whereas the earlier systems placed an apprentice into a job according to biological nepotism, the new system places people according to intellectual nepotism – only those who think the right thoughts will move into positions of power. As a result, university professors have become the gatekeepers to society. The newest political party, the university, fills the empty slots in political, judicial and media positions.

But new and interesting possibilities appear on the horizon. Hearst and Pulitzer dominated the political situation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The mainstream media and Hollywood dominated it in the latter half of the twentieth. Even now, Microsoft is positioning itself to dominate the news distribution of the early twenty-first. Whether control of the mechanism by which information is distributed turns out to be as critical as control of the informational content itself remains to be seen. Clearly, though, the monopolies are changing.

Newsweek Lied, People Died

In an unexpected turn of events, Newsweek has revealed their recent story concerning false allegations that military interrogators flushed the Koran down a toilet was actually funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“I’ve always loved Andres Serrano,” said one of the Newsweek reporters who broke the story, “In fact, he personally taught me how to fill a urine cup. I had one of his autographed cups gilded. It’s on my mantelpiece today. I figure it’s worth maybe a quarter million.”

Serrano, well-known for his marvelous artistic work, “Piss Christ,” which submerged a crucifix into a jar of his own urine, applauded his student’s work. “Well, of course people died!” he replied in response to this reporter’s queries, “That’s the essence of art. That’s what I love about the Arab street - Moslems have the hearts of artists. What I’ve been teaching for years is that we need to ascend to a radically new level of performance art and now we’re beginning to get there.”

Accomplished artist Chris Ofili agreed. Ofili is well-known for his spectacular rendition of the Holy Virgin Mary, which represents her exposed breast as a ball of elephant dung, and replaces the angels that traditionally crowd around her with cut-outs of human buttocks.

“The problem with American Catholics is they don’t understand art. They look at this work of mine, they see it, and what do they do? They write letters of protest! I mean, is that it? That’s all?? I’m trying to provoke a real involvement in society, maybe a riot, maybe some arson, and all I get is letters and a couple of white folk carrying signs.”

“I was really in a funk about that for a long time.” Ofili continued, “I had just about given up on America. But then this happens! Newsweek reporters are my kind of people. The NEA drops a dime on one of my students and Newsweek was there to play this into a big happening. I wish I could have been in Afghanistan to see the blood flow!”

German anatomist and chemist Gunther von Hagens was also highly enthusiastic about the Newsweek work. Hagens, who calls himself the Plastinator, takes dead human bodies, peels away the skin, extracts all water and fat and injects them with silicone and other polymers, and then presents them, flayed for better viewing, in various states of dismemberment. This exhibit has toured art museums internationally.

“What I want to do now is get those corpses, plastinate them, and continue Newsweek’s work,” said Hagens. “The problem is, we didn’t get enough bodies. I’m working with reporters at Newsweek, Time and CBS right now to finish another grant proposal to the NEA. Flushing the Koran was a good first step, but it’s time to move on. We’re proposing one of those suicide bombers detonate himself near the Ka’aba.”

The Ka’aba is the holiest site in Islam, a meteorite which has been at the center of Arab worship since well before Mohammed.

“Take out the Ka’aba and the Moslems will go NUTS!" Hagens said, "That should get us the kind of body count that today’s art demands. In fact,” he added, “we don’t even have to take it out. We just publish an article saying that Bush has targeted it for destruction. Everybody who reads our stuff already has the vision of Bush that we want them to have. It will be easy!”

“This is what art is all about,” enthused an NEA board member, “Art builds on reality. When we first saw the Newsweek proposal to invent a story about desecrating the Koran, I have to say I was not very excited. In America, we have desecrated everything we could think of and it never got us more than a few nasty notes from some ignorant hotheads.”

“We have been striving to evoke the 60’s again, to bring back the riots, the smell of tear gas, the rubber bullets. All of this is an important part of American culture. It’s hard to believe, but many young people today have literally never run down the street with their clothes on fire from an exploding smoke grenade.”

Other NEA members agreed, “Americans are too willing to take anything we dish out. Every bit of artwork we’ve funded, from ripping apart children in the womb to paying off judges to hijack the Constitution, it doesn’t matter. Nothing works anymore. We needed to find people with backbone, people who would stand up to us so we could laugh as we crushed them. We can’t get Americans to riot anymore.”

“Oh, sure, killing Schiavo was fun,” added another, “and we don’t regret a dime of the money we spent on our best up-and-coming artists, men like George Felos and Judge Greer, but that was a one-time thing. The NEA has finally found a way to take performance art worldwide. We’re done with wrapping islands in plastic. Let’s start wrapping the Koran in dog vomit!”

Buchanan Cuts to the Chase

If you get a chance to read Pat Buchanan's latest piece on World War II, do it.

I have noted more than once in this space that Nazi eugenics policies were made in America. Today, the policies we fought to destroy in Germany are sixty years ago are firmly ensconced here.

Buchanan points out that our military "victory" in WWII was anything but.
Sure, we killed a small man with a mustache, but all we got in exchange was a Russian with a mustache, a man who was a more skilful despot and killer.

We didn't win WWII.

We lost it, both militarily and philosophically.
But we're so stupid, it's taken us six decades to realize it.

Evolving Lies

As even disinterested observers admit, any theory that has to account for both Giganotosaurus and Genesis is going to require nuance. Unfortunately, the people involved in the evolution-creationism debate tend to lack the quality to a startling degree. As a result, the evolution-creation debate is extremely silly and wildly amusing. But, that having been said, one side has waged a dirty fight, and it is time that we who watch the struggle with popcorn in hand insisted on fairness all around.

Have you heard of The Selfish Gene? It is Exhibit A in the gallery. The problem lies precisely in the title of Richard Dawkins’ book, and I use the verb “lies” most deliberately. You see, Dawkins gets in an illegal kidney punch on the creationists before you even open the book.

He isn’t alone. When we read through the evolutionist arguments, we hear constantly of “the evolutionary imperative to preserve the individual” or “self preservation is the first law of nature." We hear about good genes, bad genes, junk genes, advanced species, less advanced species. There is only one thing they don’t mention. This whole line of conversation is a lie.

Every time a supporter of evolution speaks this way, he is explicitly denying the evolutionary theory he pretends to support. But how can this be? Dawkins seems quite the supporter of evolution.

He is. And that’s the problem.

You see, Dawkins, Gould, et. al., are quite willing to punch the daylights out of a creationist and knock him to the mat, but they don’t fight clean. They simply refuse to stay in their own corner of the English vocabulary while the referee is giving the count. Let me explain.

Take the word “good”. Something can only be good if it has a teleology, a purpose. That is, something is good only insofar as it is a necessary component towards achieving a good, as opposed to a bad, end. But here’s the kicker. In order to have a purpose, there must first be an intellect and a will. That is, you must be a person. Only a person can have a purpose. Tables don’t have a purpose. They don’t think, “I suppose I will support the dishes for breakfast today.” Tables just are. “Good” is a value judgement persons use when they consider the use of an object in reference to the purpose they have in mind. The words “good” and “bad” have no meaning apart from persons.

Now, there’s a debased word: “person.” What is a person? The word “person” is a strictly theological term, developed in the second century to describe the three Persons of the Trinity. There is one God, but three Divine Persons. The three Persons of the Trinity are distinguished only by their divine relations. Human persons are in the divine image and likeness. A human person is a created entity that is called into a relationship with the Divine Persons of the Trinity by the Trinity Himself. We humans are persons only because we are called to participate in communion with the Original Three Persons.

This is very important. From the creationist’s point of view, if God didn’t call us into relationship with Himself, we would be animals, not persons. Because God is Himself, because He calls us, we become ourselves, persons.

So Dawkins cheats when he uses the word “selfish.” "Self" can only be distinguished through personhood. In a room filled with inanimate objects, none of the objects think, so none of the objects have a "self-ness." It is only persons who make the distinction between "self" and "other." This is precisely because we, as human persons, are defined only by our relationship to the Three Divine Persons. Divinity is wholly “other” compared to my puny “self.” That’s how I know my self exists – I ain’t Him, so I must be me. The logic is impeccable.

The World According to Evolution

But, the whole point of evolutionary theory is to explicitly deny the need for persons at all, human or divine. Thus, evolution necessarily and specifically must deny the idea of "self." Evolutionary theory teaches one foundational truth: everything depends on the random interaction of chemicals, interactions completely unaffected by the presence or absence of personhood, self-ness or anything like it. Evolution insists on this foundation, in fact.

But, without persons, evolution has no teleology, no purpose. Thus, atheistic evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolution is either good or bad. According to the theory, evolution simply is. It isn’t headed for an endpoint. It doesn’t have a purpose. Evolution doesn't select good traits or bad traits. It is a mindless process. It can't select. It just is.

Even if it could select, there would be nothing to select. There are no good or bad traits. There are traits that survive and traits that do not survive. Just because a trait survives does not make it good - the trait may only be useful in a highly specialized niche which is swiftly disappearing, and the species with the trait will therefore disappear as the environment changes. The same is true for a trait that does not survive. Complexity only means the trait is probably newer, but newer is not better, nor is older worse. Everything is just a random swirl of chemicals, no meaning, no purpose, no end, no "higher forms" versus "lower forms" of life. Even life is not better or worse than being an inanimate object. Everything just is.

The Lab Test for Sin

So, when evolutionists use the word “imperative” in regards to evolution, they are lying. As Merriam Webster points out, the word “imperative” is drawn from the Latin imperare, "to command." It means: “of, relating to, or constituting the grammatical mood that expresses the will to influence the behavior of another; expressive of a command, entreaty, or exhortation; having power to restrain, control, and direct; not to be avoided or evaded : NECESSARY [an imperative duty].”

“Will,” “influence,” “entreaty,” “restrain”… all of these words require purpose, each requires an intellect and a will. A tree doesn’t command. A fungus does restrain. Bacteria are agents of influenza, not influence.

Evolutionists know all this, but they insist on using language that pretends otherwise.

When evolutionists start talking about "self," "selfishness," “good,” “bad,” or anything remotely touching on personhood, they have – by that fact - stopped using the language of evolution. Poorly-schooled students of evolutionary theory may think they are still discussing evolution, but evolutionary theory specifically denies that they are. The students have anthropomorphized the discussion, pretended a will and intellect are present when none are, they have brought in a factor that is completely extraneous, absolutely irrelevant, to the evolutionary discussion. They are, in short, discussing theology, not science.

But evolutionists don’t just pull this trick when discussing DNA. They do the same things when discussing animals. They claim, for instance, that animals make and use tools. But the words “make” and “tool” imply purpose. Only persons have purposes. Certainly we can observe that an animal acts in a specific way, but that does not prove the animal has intentionality. Vines grow toward the sun. Do they intend to grow towards the sun? No. Even if they did, there is no way to prove it scientifically.

Funhouse Mirrors

Science cannot test for intentionality. If science could test for intentionality, then it could test for that subset of intentionality known as disordered intentionality.

Put another way, if you can scientifically prove that apes act intentionally, then you can scientifically prove apes can sin. In fact, if you can prove intentionality, you can prove apes do sin. If you can prove it for apes, you can prove it for men.

I've heard science make a lot of claims, but I've never heard a scientist claim he could demonstrate through lab technique what is a sin and what is not. Yet this is precisely the claim that scientists make when they claim that apes, dolphins, orangutans, tangerines, pick your favorite animate or inanimate object, make and use tools. They are claiming that they can test for intentionality, for sin.

They see an ape take an action - it throws a stick. They anthropomorphize that action (which is not science), saying "Wow, we throw sticks too!" Then they claim that science has demonstrated something when, in fact, the scientist has really only observed and anthropomorphized. Just because a scientist does something doesn't make it science.

In fact, we could extend their reasoning to show the fallacy. I fall down. So do apes. So do unbalanced bricks. Thus, all three must be persons.

See how easy it is? I simply have to begin the observation with the assumption that the things I am comparing myself to possess an intellectual state like mine. By the very fact that anyone assumes this kind of similarity, this kind of connection between the actions of bricks, apes and man, those actions are anthropomorphized. Thus, the scientist assumes what he set out to prove: apes are persons.

"But wait," says the scientist, "I have further argument!"

"Oh?" I reply, "And what might that be?"

"Apes, bricks and persons are all made out of the same subatomic particles! See, this proves definitively that all three are persons!"

Well, no, it doesn't. But this is essentially the DNA argument. So we share much of the same DNA (and all of the same subatomic particles) with apes. So what? Personhood is a function of God's divine call to us to share intimate communion with Him. That call is completely independent of whether or not we have a particular somatic structure or particular material components. Personhood is a gift from God, it is not a consequence of the particular arrangement of components in material reality. Personhood is bestowed from above, it does not bubble up from below.

Why do they think apes are persons? Because they do bad things? So do virii and tsunamis. Oh, so apes have a brain? Very nice - so does an ant. Oh, so it's a rather complex brain? Yes, so is that of a human corpse. So it's a rather complex living brain? Yes, I suppose it is. And?

And... And... AND... So what?

Brains are tools for the intellect. The intellect is an aspect of the immortal spiritual soul. The brain is not itself the intellect, it is the mediating tool the intellect makes use of in human beings to express itself. Strictly speaking, the brain is not necessary for the possession or expression of a person’s intellect.

God is Three Persons. God is also anencephalic, but He seems to get on just fine without a brain or even a skull to house it in. So do the angels. So do we. If you don't think so, talk to the saints in heaven. God is Three Persons. He has no DNA. Angels are persons, they have intellect and will. They have no DNA. Human beings in heaven are persons, and they are totally separated from their DNA. Personhood, intellect, will, these things are from God. God gives us an intellect and a will so we can respond to His call to enter relationship with Him. Personhood, intellect, will, this is a theology discussion, not a science discussion.

The Language of Kudzu

So why do smart people keep making extraordinarily stupid mistakes of language? The first question is obvious: are these mistakes? Evolutionists are not stupid. They know perfectly well they are mis-using the language. In their own texts, they even go out of their way to point out that their own use of these theological terms is not correct. They put the theological words in quotes, they warn the reader that evolution really doesn’t have intentionality, nor does anything that is subject to evolution (including us?). They knowingly, routinely encroach on theological discourse; they knowingly, routinely violate the very science they claim to want to explain.

The scientist might argue that he is simply using the theological word in a new, narrowly scientific technical sense. Alright. It is certainly the case that words change in meaning over time. But, the fact is, due to cultural usages, words have meanings that are independent of what anyone might want them to mean.

Take, for instance, the way particle physics has taken over the use of the word "color" for quarks. “Color” in the macro universe refers to specific wavelengths of light. Quarks are not photons, so speaking of a quark’s “color” has no relevance or reference to color as a child with a box of crayons knows color. Intellectually, everyone who has ever read an article about quarks knows this.

But the word "color" is so culturally laden that any use of it, even in a context in which the original definition clearly has no application, causes the person encountering the word to react in a certain way. When we see the word “color” next to a quark, we inevitably picture the quark as a pinhead speck of a specific color - red or blue or green - even though we know intellectually that this is perfectly silly. Quarks don’t emit photons, they don’t have color in a macro-sense.

Now, in physics, this double meaning of “color” is not a problem because mentally visualizing a red quark doesn't interfere with the quark concept. None of the calculations involved, none of the discussions concerning the particle, touch on anything remotely close to the original meaning of the word "color." The habit of the mind to visualize the color is slightly annoying, but nothing more.

But with evolutionary theory, it is different. Evolutionary theory intentionally and repeatedly mis-uses theological terms, terms relating to the person. It specifically attempts to take over the use of the theological vocabulary critical to expressing the very ideas it attacks. It intends to destroy the ability to speak of divinity or personhood at all. Evolution supporters simply co-opt all the words we use to discuss theological concepts, and then they implicitly define those words in ways which divorce them completely from the original theological concepts they were meant to express. And they do this despite the fact that the discipline itself denies it needs those terms.

Like kudzu, the foreign vine in the Southern United States that covers over and destroys everything it touches, evolutionary theory has invaded the English language and stripped it of all theological meaning.

Now, I don’t mind hearing a good discussion of evolution. But I strenuously object to the intentional destruction of the English language. If you want to discuss evolution, go right ahead. But stop taking and using words that don't belong to the lexicon of evolution.

In evolution, things happen, neither good nor bad, just things. There is no self. There are just chemicals. That's it. Talk about evolution correctly or don’t talk about it. Those who don't stick to correct language, go crazy. Worse, they drag the rest of us with them. I, for one, don’t want to go.

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.