"Promiscuous Teleology" -- Is This Why So Many Reject Evolution?

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

A pair of psychologists at Yale University have a new explanation for why so many people reject the theory of evolution -- our minds are hard-wired from birth to see design in the world around us. Paul Bloom is a psychologist at Yale and Deena Skolnick Weisberg is a doctoral candidate in psychology. Together, they argue that the roots of an anti-evolutionary impulse lie in childhood.
...

Those interesting minds are interested in knowing why so many Americans reject the theory of evolution. Bloom and Weisberg acknowledge that most evolutionary scientists assume that the rejection of evolution is rooted in theistic beliefs and a lack of scientific knowledge. If these were the reasons for this rejection, the advance of secularization and the massive increase in scientific knowledge should overcome this rejection. It is not happening that way.

As the authors explain:

We believe that these assumptions, while not completely false, reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of this phenomenon. While cultural factors are plainly relevant, American adults' resistance to scientific ideas reflects universal facts about what children know and how children learn. If this is right, then resistance to science cannot be simply addressed through more education; something different is needed.
...
Bloom and Weisberg believe that the minds of children are, in effect, hard-wired to see design in nature and the world around them. The "intuitive psychology" they describe means that children infer a design in the world they experience. They assume an intelligence behind what they observe, and assume that a creative intelligence is a necessary part of any explanation of why things are as they are.
...

Just as obviously, Bloom and Weisberg, speaking on behalf of the scientific establishment, assume that there is no purpose or design behind the cosmos. Thus, to use their own examples, there is no purpose for lions or clouds. Their naturalistic worldview leaves no other option. Lions and clouds just are, and they must be explained in purely materialistic terms.

These psychologists also deny any mind-body dualism and any notion that humans possess any "soul" or consciousness apart from the merely physical and biological operations of the brain as an organ. As with evolutionary theory, they are frustrated that the general public rejects this worldview.
...

While the authors acknowledge that the public is not stupid, they do believe that the public is wrong. In an incredibly revealing pair of sentences, they argue:

The community of scientists has a legitimate claim to trustworthiness that other social institutions, such as religions and political movements, lack. The structure of scientific inquiry involves procedures, such as experiments and open debate, that are strikingly successful at revealing truths about the world.

So we are supposed to see modern science as holding "a legitimate claim to trustworthiness" that other authorities -- including religious authorities -- lack. In the end, they propose that scientists combat resistance to science by convincing the public that scientists are worthy of trust.

I am not a scientist, but I would suggest that this falls short of a winning argument. The attorney who asks a jury, "What are you going to believe, my argument or what you see with your own eyes?," has a fool for a client.
...
this essay leads to the inevitable conclusion that you must indeed choose between Sunday School and modern science. If modern science insists that lions and clouds are purely accidental products of purely natural causes, this sets modern science in direct and unavoidable conflict with the claim that God made lions and clouds for a purpose -- and ultimately for His own glory.
...

This is precisely what Bloom and Weisberg, speaking for the scientific community, reject out of hand. These authors make that point clearly. Their argument also shows once again why "theistic evolution" is an incoherent proposal. The dominant model of evolution rejects any claim of design -- end of argument.

Many polls indicate that a majority of Americans reject the dominant evolutionary theory and believe in some form of divine creation. This frustrates the evolutionary scientists to no end. But they are asking Americans to reject what they learned in Sunday School in favor of a theory that insists that the universe is a great cosmic accident. It's not just children whose brains are hard-wired to reject that. (more)

Atheism and the Empty Glass

By J. P. Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

...we both claimed that consciousness is in the mind not in the brain, and that the mind can cause things to happen to the brain and vice versa. We also agreed that free will is not only real, but obviously so. Indeed, those who take the time to tell you that free will isn’t real are assuming that you have the free choice to listen to them and change your views accordingly!

Regarding free will, years ago Schwartz took brain scans of obsessive-compulsive people who engaged in repetitive hand-washing rituals. They all had a very distinctive, abnormal brain configuration. Schwartz then told the patients to do something for a few weeks and come back: Ever time they felt the compulsion to wash their hands, they were to exercise free will, choose to think different thoughts (for example, “I don’t need to wash my hands; a little dirt isn’t going to kill me”), and repeatedly practice this. When new scans were performed, all the patients had different and normal brain configurations. Lesson: By exerting free will, the mind can change the physical structure of the brain.

Subsequently, Schwartz has done experiments in which people’s brains are monitored as they watch videos of carnage at automobile-accident scenes. The anxiety center of the brain goes wild. Then he tells them to pretend they are paramedics who must make snap decisions of whom to treat first and what to do. When showed the same scenes the anxiety center remains calm. One can alter one’s brain and its role in facilitating anxiety, anger, and so forth by changing how one thinks and adjusting one’s perspective. Here was Schwartz’ punch line: People who see the glass half full regarding their lives are healthier, happier and more functional than those that don’t. And, he said, Christian theists who have a background belief that God is real, good, and caring will have a leg up on those without such a belief. (more)

Hitchens-Style Secularism Is Worse

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

...it is a general law of history that there is no theistic mess so bad that secularism cannot make it worse.
...
Christians may do badly, but let the secularists have power and history says an age of terror follows. Bluntly, the experience of the last two centuries is that traditional Christianity may make a frightful mess, but secularism fixes it through applied fright.

A Christian who does evil faces the command of Jesus to “love his neighbor as himself.”
...
If you are a secularist, what is your bottom line? What is the command that you might rationalize or try to fudge but cannot escape? What do secularists all have in common?
...
Secularism cheats by claiming numbers it does not have. There is no “secularism” only a group of people united by the denial of theism or supernaturalism. Each individual secularist is his own pope, Bible, or creed . . . which sounds attractive unless your neighbor is bigger, stronger, and his creed is meaner.
...

I can condemn Christians who kill the innocent on the basis of their own Christian faith. What is a secularist to do? Bad Christian states are full of bad Christians, but bad secular states are full of good secularists.

Almost every piece of tangible progress in the West traces back to Islamic, Christian, or Jewish thought. Even the best Greek thought (Plato and Aristotle) was theistic and not atheistic. In fact, the very existence of the tiny community of “secularists” (really only united by having nothing to unite them, the party of Zero) in modern times is due to the love and tolerance of religious believers.

...

There have been good scientists, citizens, scholars, logicians and thinkers who were secularists, but they worked in a university, political, and ethical system constructed by theists (especially Christians). The good news for the rest of us that most secularists in the United States and Western Europe are just Christians trying to get along without Christ. It does not work for long, but it beats where such secularism will head over time.

On what basis does the secularist condemn his fellow secularist in the old Soviet Union or modern China?

He can only sputter that he does not like what they do or “reason” is against their action (another way of saying he does not like it). The Soviet will reply (as he did reply) with learned books justifying his actions on “scientific” and rational grounds.

I am confident that the nice secular folk in the United States who object to the comparison are sincere. They would never put women in mental hospitals for belief in God as secularists did in the Soviet Union (where 22 million died) or make them work in concentration camps as secularists still do in China.

Well and good, but on what grounds do they say so? On what moral basis? Where does it come from?

...

The secular European culture seems intent on committing demographic suicide (a kind of self-genocide) by not making enough babies (”No babies please, I am a secularist!”) to sustain the population. If Darwinism is true, safe to say it is selecting against European secularists.

A Christian who kills the innocent is breaking God’s law. Have “Christian” states been inconsistent with Christian teachings? Of course. It is easy to judge them (as secularists do using our standards!). But on what basis does the secularist judge his co-secularists in China who are presently running slave labor camps full of religious believers in the name of anti-religion?

Our critics can accuse us of hypocrisy, because our principles are well known.

But how can you accuse an atheist of hypocrisy? They may not like the form secularism is taking in China with its slave labor camps, but on what basis are they condemning it? Are they using ethics borrowed from us without attribution? How can one be “bad” in an ethic people make up for themselves?

...

Too often they replace faith in God with some man-made ideology of the moment. (In West Europe that seems to be hedonism at the moment.) That’s when the killings start with none of that “love thy neighbor” stuff getting in the way. If baby gets in the way in Western Europe or secular America, too bad for baby. (more)

Love Amidst the Brokenness

By Timothy George
Christianity Today

The fall of Rome was the 9/11 of the ancient world; Alaric, its Osama bin Laden. As the "eternal city" crumbled, Augustine of Hippo pointed Christians to the City of God—the eternal church on pilgrimage through a world that is not our home.
...
September 11, 2001, is frequently compared to December 7, 1941, as a day that will "live in infamy." But a more appropriate analogy might be August 24, 410, when the city of Rome was besieged and pillaged by an army of 40,000 "barbarians" led by the Osama bin Laden of late antiquity, a wily warrior named Alaric.
...
What can we learn from Augustine's understanding of history in light of the fall of Rome? Augustine teaches us that Christians are those who live in time but who belong to eternity. He also teaches us that we must not equate any political entity—whether it be the Roman Empire, the American Republic, the United Nations, or anything else—with the kingdom of God. This is one side of the Augustinian equation, but there is another. Christians hold a double citizenship in this world. Like the apostle Paul—who could claim that his true political identity was in heaven (Phil. 3:20), but who also appealed to Caesar as a Roman citizen when his life was at stake—so believers in Christ live as sojourners, resident aliens, in a world of profound discontinuity and frequently contested loyalty.
...

The key word here, chastened, calls for a posture of engagement that acknowledges, in the words of the old gospel hymn, "this world is not my home; I'm just a-passin' through," while at the same time working with all our might to love our neighbors as ourselves and to seek justice and peace as we carry out what Augustine calls "our business within this common mortal life."

There are two major (and regrettably common) mistakes Augustine wants us to avoid. One is the lure of utopianism—the mistake of thinking we can produce a society that will solve our problems and bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. This was the basic error of both Marxism and 19th-century liberalism.

The other error, equally disastrous, is cynicism. This creeps upon us as we see ever-present evil. We withdraw into our own self-contained circle of contentment, which can just as well be a pious holy huddle as a secular skeptics club.

...

C. S. Lewis confronted the temptation to give in to lethargy and cynicism when he preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford on October 22, 1939. Less than two months earlier, Hitler had invaded Poland. Britain was about to face the horrible Nazi onslaught. This is what Lewis told the assembled students:

"It may seem odd for us to carry on classes, to go about our academic routine in the midst of a great war. What is the use of beginning when there is so little chance of finishing? How can we study Latin, geography, algebra in a time like this? Aren't we just fiddling while Rome burns?

"This impending war has taught us some important things. Life is short. The world is fragile. All of us are vulnerable, but we are here because this is our calling. Our lives are rooted not only in time, but also in eternity, and the life of learning, humbly offered to God, is its own reward. It is one of the appointed approaches to the divine reality and the divine beauty, which we shall hereafter enjoy in heaven and which we are called to display even now amidst the brokenness all around us."

That is our calling, too, amidst the brokenness—including the threat of terrorism—all around us. We are to be faithful to God's calling, to bear witness to the beauty, the light, and the divine reality that we shall forever enjoy in heaven. We are to do this in a culture that seems, at times, like Augustine's: a crumbling world beset by dangers we cannot predict.

The Christian attitude toward history is neither arrogant self-reliance ("We can make it on our own") nor indifference ("It doesn't matter what we do anyway"), but hope—the hope that radiates from a messy manger, a ruddy tree, and an empty tomb. Christians are those who know that time and this world do not terminate upon themselves; they are penultimate realities that can never satisfy the deepest longing of the human heart, the restless heart Augustine wrote so much about. And so we live in this world not self-indulgently nor triumphantly, as though our future were in our own hands, but humbly, compassionately, committedly, and yes, ambiguously, as those who belong ultimately to another City, one with foundations whose builder is God. (more)

Is Faith Personal?

By Mark Shea
National Catholic Register

One of the most common claims you will hear in our ongoing national conversation about faith is the notion that faith is “personal” and therefore not a fit topic for public discussion.

...

What is “personal” is that which has to do with the person. Persons are fundamentally public and social beings, not private and subjective figments of the imagination. Indeed, persons are, by definition, rational beings in relationship with other rational beings and not atomized “individuals” with no relationship to one another at all.

I get this understanding from Pope John Paul II, a philosopher who spent most of his adult life thinking and talking about the meaning of personhood. Unlike most of our culture, he realized that “person” is not interchangeable with “individual.” But because of this, we must realize that one of the central notions of our popular culture is absolutely totally 180 degrees dead wrong.

I speak of the notion that what is personal is “private” or “subjective” or “esoteric” — unknowable and incommunicable to others.

Much of our political life is based on this false notion of “personal” subjectivity.

Identity politics lives on the idea that if you are not a member of “my special group” you can’t possibly know “how I feel” and therefore you have no right to speak. If you are not black, you have no right to speak about pathologies in the black community.

If you are not a woman, you cannot speak about feminism or women’s rights. If you aren’t homosexual, you cannot address the question of “homosexual marriage.”

...

Of course, such thinking is folly. Nobody with cancer picks their doctor on the basis of whether he has “experienced” cancer and therefore has a “right” to treat it. Nobody asks their car repairman if he knows how it feels to be in an accident. What matters is their understanding of the relevant information and how it relates to the common good.

But this idolatry of subjectivism nonetheless still spills over to our religious discourse. People often tend to talk as though “spiritual experiences” and other such “peak moments” are things experienced in total isolation and are impossible to share with others.

...

That is why a jury of peers can sit in judgment of a man who has robbed a bank, or committed a rape or shot a man. For every one of them knows what it is to feel the temptations of money, sex, anger, power, rage, lust, greed, pride or fear. Indeed, the only thing that ultimately separates them from the criminal is that, feeling such things, they have not robbed, raped or killed.

In the same way, people need not be great artists to appreciate great art. For the great artist is great not because he makes people feel something no one has ever felt, but because he makes them feel something everyone has always felt.

In just the same way, religious matters will eternally be fit for discussion in the public square precisely because they are entirely about questions like “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What must I do?” “Is there a God?” “Is there meaning?” “Is there hope?” “Is there love?” (more)

Atheism Ranting: The Pity and Poverty of Modern Anti-Theism

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Atheists have a problem. Secularism hasn’t produced much historically and is fairly unappealing. When it has been placed in charge of a culture, it either killed millions in brutal states nobody would imitate or committed demographic suicide in dead end socialist Western Europe. Since the 1960’s secularists have manged to shoot through centuries of accumulated cultural confidence and capital in just under five decades.

...

Culturally Hitchens is simply and utterly wrong. If the cultural contributions of Christianity were removed how impoverished Britain would be! From the development of the university, to the Cathedral of Saint Paul, to the development of modern science, to hospitals, to the poetry of Donne and Milton the British Isles are awash in the gifts of the Christian religion. Science would not exist without it and a generation with technical, but little human education should not be trusted with it. Only religion can keep the two together.

Morally Hitchens and the new secularists cheat at every turn. They believe in doing “right,” but never ground it in anything. Pleasure, easy pleasure, threatens to overwhelm them. Hitchens, to his credit, wants to fight the War on Terror, but his secular friends cannot be convinced to do so. It is not pleasant to die for a culture when you believe that this life is all there is. Why not just live for self? Why die for King and country or raise children when one can simply eat, drink, and be merry?

...

Roberts can doubt any particular miracle and remain a supernaturalist but Hitchens must doubt them all. Roberts is open to the validity of any religious experience, while Hitchens must explain them all away. Roberts can see design in nature or believe the Creator acted in undetectable ways, Hitchens must not see the Creator anywhere.

...

His ideas are bad, but he is not the foe. His unhappiness and anger are just a symptom of what happens when even capable and good men try to be gods. We should pray that he is able to find the truth and see reality as it is. (more)

Confident, Conservative, and Christian Against the Fearful, Fascist, and Fundamentalist

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The worst cases of this in the modern intellectual climate are the secularists who cannot read a book like the Bible with the sympathy my traditional Christian students give Homer. They are so afraid of us that they cannot understand us.
...

Christian civilization is conservative. We always act to conserve the best of the past while moving forward to our next millennium of history.

Christian civilization is fundamentally Christian! The pillars stand, not because we have not thought about them, but because they have stood so much thought. The doctrines of the Church do not endure and receive respect from us because they are hidden, but because they are massive and hard from weathering blows without a scratch that make the assault of a Hitchens or Sam Harris almost amusing if it were not so sad.

...

The same was happening in theology. A careful, thoughtful dialog had to take place between new science and theology, but the modernist would have none of that. All of theology had to bow the knee to science. It was true in all the human fields of knowledge. All literature had to conform to modernist ideas and many schoolchildren were left as deprived of their cultural heritage as if the moderns had simply burned the books.

...

The fundamentalists wanted to keep the best of the past, but like all traditional Christians were happy to use the tools of science. They wanted movies, radio, and faster presses. They did not like the use to which the science they have developed was being turned by their ungrateful intellectual children.

It was the modernist who was the real fundamentalist, a kind of intellectual fascist. It was he that wished to supplant and replace everything immediately with the “up to date.” He ignored books and ideas that did not fit his model. It is the fascist who demands that everything that does not exalt the powerful of this age be discarded.

...

We can develop orthodoxy, but as a living body of truth that stimulates, humbles, and leads to a tension between what is revealed and what seems true today. This tension cannot be finally settled in this life. In fact, it is that provocative tension that has made Christianity so fecund and so able to weather all intellectual storms.

Christianity is always confident and conservative, because it knows (based on experience and reason) that it is going forward. It will be around. The fearful, the fascist, the fundamentalist in the modern sense sees the future as a howling chasm against which he must protect himself and the fragile shell of civilization. It is a brittle and hopeless task, but oddly it is a task in which the best ally is the very traditional Christian they fear. (more)

Not Just Because You Had Me: True Motherhood

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The temptation is to assume my mother is special just because she went through labor and had me. That is, of course, the self-centered view . . . as if I am sort of hero whose very birth makes a hero of the woman who went through the labor.
...

Read Luke 11:

27 And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. 28 But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.

Jesus does not use many words, but His sayings pierce to the heart of the matter. Women cannot be reduced to their biological function (wombs and breasts) and neither can motherhood. A mother is blessed (happy) or fulfilled when she takes her function (even the unique biology of womankind) and uses it as a chance to “hear the word of God, and keep it.”

...

The focus is on her human obedience and humility. Mary believed and God acted. It is this that makes a true mother and a blessed human being.

A true mother hears the call to parenthood and bears her child. Of course, even a bad woman could do this, but a true mother believes and acts in righteousness. Mary was not blessed because of her biology, but because of her obedience!

...

By being such a godly example of obedience to the command of motherhood, she birthed a desire for God in both of her children. We longed to have what she has. She was (like any real mother, biological or adoptive) a real parent to holiness. (more)

Child Molesters and Restorative Justice

By J. P. Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

Until the 1950’s, there were four aspects of and goals for criminal justice: punishment, deterrence, protection of society, and rehabilitation. Here are three crucial points about the list. (1) Only the first one (punishment) requires taking the crime as intrinsically evil. It looks back in time at the crime, sees the balance of good and evil in the universe as disturbed, and seeks to right those scales and punish evil simply because it is evil and not because punishment would bring about good future benefits to society (or victims). Punishment is unrelated to revenge whose presence or absence is irrelevant to the appropriateness of the punishment.
...
(2) Only the first one (punishment) requires that human beings have free will necessary for moral praise, blame, and responsibility. You can engage in deterrence, protection and rehabilitation (i.e., behavior modification) with a rogue dog without assuming that the dog’s actions were freely done. But you cannot consistently punish someone without assuming the actor was free and, therefore, responsible.
...
All four of the traditional notions are legitimate, but today, secular progressives no longer believe in punishment, and rehabilitation has morphed into restorative justice. Here’s why. With the loss of a Judeo-Christian worldview in which free will and objective evil make sense, in its place we have the emergence of naturalism, Darwinian evolution and a culture in which we are reduced to our brains. The result: Human beings are now seen as determined by their brain chemistry, their genes and their environment. Free will is gone. And with the rise of tolerance and moral relativism, the difference between objective good and evil is hard to justify. Thus, the two essential requirements for punishment (free will, intrinsic evil) no longer make sense to secular progressives, and punishment has gone the way of the dodo. In its place, the last three notions (deterrence, protection, rehabilitation) are severed from good and evil and are solely utilitarian means to sustain what cultural elites believe the social order should be. Sounds like the former Soviet Union, doesn’t it?

I tend to agree in principle with Dr. Moreland and Dr. Reynolds (Ref. Illegal Immigration: Is Law King?) than with John M. Czarnetzky and Ronald J. Rychlak (Ref. The International Criminal Court: An Obstacle to Peace?) on the issue of balancing justice/the law and compassion.

Misleading Edge

Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
edited by John Brockman
reviewed by Anika Smith & Casey Luskin

When sixteen leading Darwinists write essays on a crash schedule to get a book out by the end of the school year, you might suspect a sense of urgency, and indeed, editor John Brockman opens Intelligent Thought with a plea for his colleagues to defend Darwin-based civilization from “the Visigoths at the gates,” the proponents of Intelligent Design, “whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages” and who pose “the gravest of threats to the American economy.”
...
On this site, Brockman shared an e-mail sent to him from a Darwinian who teaches freshmen at Columbia, who was concerned that students aren’t rejecting Intelligent Design for the right reasons, but “merely because the religious and conservative stripes of ID can sometimes look a little uncool.” He and his colleagues wrote Intelligent Thought to present the public, especially students, with scientific reasons to reject Intelligent Design.
...
Despite the promise of the subtitle, much of Intelligent Thought is devoted not to scientific but to philosophical and especially dysteleological arguments against Intelligent Design. A dysteleological argument makes certain extra-scientific, theological assumptions about the moral purposes of the designer, then asserts that life or the universe could not be the result of intelligence because nature is (allegedly) not the nature those assumptions require.
...

Darwin himself was unable to reconcile what he saw as natural evil (in particular, a family of parasitic wasps) with his view of a loving and powerful God. Again and again, the arguments set forth in this volume and presented by the Darwinians as scientific resolve into the classic theological debate over the problem of evil.

These theological objections have nothing to do with the theory of Intelligent Design. Indeed, such objections can be disposed of through the simple observation that even things with an evil moral purpose can be intelligently designed. Torture chambers and electric chairs are clearly designed, often ingeniously so, the evil uses to which they are put notwithstanding. What this book poses are questions not about the world as science can study it, but about final causes, about which science has nothing to say. (more)

Greenpeace Builds Replica of Noah's Ark

I can't remember the last time Greenpeace uses the Bible to support its cause and ideology. How "convenient" (ref. "An Inconvenient Truth") for them. I wonder if they would use the Bible to support their position on methodological naturalism.

Fads and Fixtures: Ten Deadly Trappings of Evangelism

By Joe Carter

"Virtually all the people on Time magazine's list of 'The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals' share at least one glaringly significant trait," says Phillip Johnson, "For the most part, these are the fadmakers." Phil goes on to list a number of "cheerleaders for whatever is fashionable", including the usual suspects such as Rick Warren and Tim LaHaye, and explains why their programs are fads:

Not one of those movements or programs even existed 35 years ago. Most of them would not have been dreamed of by evangelicals merely a generation ago. And, frankly, most of them will not last another generation. Some will last a few short months (like the Jabez phenomenon did); others may seem to dominate for several years but then die lingering deaths (like Bill Gothard's movement is doing). But they will all eventually fade and fall from significance. And some poor wholesale distributor will be left with warehouses full of Jabez junk, Weigh-Down Workshop paraphernalia, "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets, Purpose-Driven" merchandise, and stacks and stacks of "emerging church" resources.

The following are ten fixtures of evangelism that I find particularly harmful. None of them are inherently pernicious (well, except for #10) but they have a tendency to be used in ways that are counterproductive to their intended purposes.

#1 Making Converts
#2 The Sinner's Prayer
#3 "Do you know Jesus as…"
#4 Tribulationism
#5 Testimonies
#6 The Altar Call
#7 Witnessing
#8 Protestant Prayers
#9 The Church Growth Movement
#10 Chick Tracts
(more)

"Is Christianity Good for the World?"

Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson debate. (Parts 1 and 2)

Theologian Douglas Wilson and atheist Christopher Hitchens, authors whose books are already part of a larger debate on whether religion is pernicious, agreed to discuss their views on whether Christianity itself has benefited the world. Below is their exchange, one in a series that will appear on our website over the course of this month.

Douglas Wilson is author of Letter from a Christian Citizen, senior fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College, and minister at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He is also the editor of Credenda/Agenda magazine and has written (among other things ) Reforming Marriage and A Serrated Edge: A Brief Defense of Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking. His Blog and Mablog site inevitably makes for provocative reading.

Christopher Hitchens wrote, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything(Twelve Books). Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man," Letters To a Young Contrarian, and Why Orwell Matters. He was named, to his own amusement, number five on a list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect. (more)

The Incredible Shrinking Father; Sperm banks are aiding and abetting a radical agenda: the dad-free family

By Kay S. Hymowitz

Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. An unmarried woman decided that she wanted a child and asked a friend to be a sperm donor. He agreed, and the woman gave birth to twins. The mother says that she always intended to raise the kids alone and never wanted the friend involved in their lives. The donor says that he planned to be the twins' father in name and practice. There is no written contract. What does the contemporary Solomon do?
...

You'd think that we have enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births and divorce. But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination, or AI.

While the number of kids born as a result of the procedure (about 1 million so far in the United States) is still quite small, AI is having a disproportionate cultural and legal effect and is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family.

...

But with a growing number of AI cases involving single women and lesbian couples, the pretense of the donor's nonexistence is no longer tenable because there is no "other father." The issues then grow vastly more complicated: When is a sperm donor a father? Can his mother be the child's grandmother? Can a child have two mothers and no father?

...

But it hasn't proved obvious to most legal experts, who continue to be guided by the old formula: As long as a doctor performs the insemination or a sperm bank sells the sperm, the donor is not a father. This doesn't simply mean that the child is fatherless in the way that, say, an orphan is fatherless. Rather, the child is born into an entirely new human circumstance. For, according to the law, the child never had a father at all. The man who fathered him is not in fact his father; instead, he's the originating site of organic material that was for sale, like a sulfur mine or a fish farm.

...

Say a man has a drunken one-night stand. If the woman gets pregnant, the law sees him as a father, and he must pay child support for the next 18 years. But if a college student visits the local sperm bank twice a week for a year, produces a dozen children anonymously and pockets thousands of dollars, he can whistle his way back to econ class, no worries. Intentionality can't explain that legal disconnect.

...

A family court in Burlington County, N.J., recently put two women on a state birth certificate. Some legal scholars are proposing that courts move beyond the "heterosexist model" entirely. Why not put three parents—or four, for that matter—on the birth certificate?

...

Intentionality, it seems, can accomplish almost anything. And AI's potential has not been lost on radical feminists and postmodern anthropologists, who see the possibilities for deconstructing the traditional family—as indicated by book titles such as Conceiving the New World Order and Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination Is Changing the World.

...

Yet even if the numbers of those suffering from father hunger are relatively small, their plight is consistent with a powerful human theme explored by storytellers from Homer to George Lucas: the child's longing to know his father. Marquardt describes AI and other reproductive technologies as presenting us with a competition between the rights of adults and the needs of children. Is there any question which is winning?

...

There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men reinforces the worst that women fear in men.

Think of all the complaints you hear: Men can't commit, they're irresponsible, they don't take care of the kids. By going to a sperm bank, women are unwittingly paying men to be exactly what they object to. But why expect anything different? The very premise of AI is that, apart from their liquid DNA, we can will men out of children's lives. (more)

Some Basics on Design, Creation, and Other Such Matters (VI/VI): What Is Next and a Short Bibliography

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Christians need to move beyond the defensive to develop an offensive strategy. To do this, believers have to have a better understanding of the problem we face. Creationists have often assumed that the creation/evolution debate is fundamentally about harmonizing scientific facts with the Bible, so they have mounted a scientific defense of the Biblical account and a critique of evolutionary theory. In conservative Christian circles this strategy works well, but in the universities it is ignored because of a pervasive naturalistic bias. If naturalism remains the dominant way of thinking in the universities, the failure of current evolutionary theory would simply lead to the development of some naturalistic alternative. The fundamental problem is naturalism.
...
Christians must show others that naturalism is imposing philosophical constraints on academic research. Most people in our nation are not aware that a secular dogma is limiting intellectual inquiry. Such ideological control is foreign to the American story. Of course, if we are to argue in this fashion, our behavior must reflect our claims. Christians must make plain that they do not want to impose their own brand of conformity on the university. We have enough bad experience with censorship in the marketplace of ideas to have no wish to restrict the free exchange of ideas ourselves. Conservative Christians can show their sincere commitment to this principle by showing an open attitude in their own research. We must listen to our critics and engage in a constant evaluation of our own views. If we advance our beliefs in this manner, then creationism will not only be right, it will be heard.
...

Most of all charity should guide interaction with others, even with opponents. Christians must examine the best ideas of naturalists and not their worst. Christians would be unwise to resort to personal attacks. Writings need not lack force, but can battle bad ideas with vigor while treating intellectual foes with charity. Within the church the in fighting must stop. It is intellectual suicide for supporters of an old earth and a young earth to bicker.

The key question for the believer is this: does this scientist or theologian support an open philosophy of science. In other words, will he let the data point to a Creator or is he constrained from doing so based on preconceptions? If he has an open philosophy of science, Christians can afford to be tolerant about the details. Taken as a whole, people will come to the truth. It is not, after all, so hard to find. The heavens proclaim the glory of God, they do not whisper. On the other hand, if they have a closed philosophy of science, nothing about God can come of it, no matter how personally pious they might be. Such a person is fundamentally an enemy of traditional Christian faith. If Christians really believe that God is there, then they must be open to the possibility that He has done something detectable by modern science.

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are ideals for which a Christian strives. They should form the framework for story telling. The Bible, God’s written word, gives the Christian a sublime story to tell. This story must engage the hearts and imaginations of this coming generation. Christians know the story of an amazing grace shown to the cosmos, and if they sing that story sweetly, even the most wretched culture can be saved.

A Starting Bibliography

Dembski, William. Mere Creation (InterVarsity, 1996)

Harre, Rom. The Philosophies of Science (Oxford, 1985)

Johnson, Phillip. Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity, 1991)

Johnson, Phillip. Reason in the Balance (InterVarsity, 1994)

Johnson, Phillip. Defeating Darwinism (InterVarsity, 1998)

Losee, John. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford, 1980)

Moreland, J.P. Christianity and the Nature of Science (Baker, 1989)

Moreland, J.P. ed., The Creation Hypothesis (InterVarsity, 1994)

Moreland, J.P. and Reynolds John Mark, ed. Three Views of Creation and Evolution (Zondervan, 1999)

Pearcy, Nancy R. and Thaxton, Charles B. The Soul of Science (Crossway, 1994) (more)

Some Basics on Design, Creation, and Other Such Matters (V/VI): Intelligent Design and Christianity as the True Myth

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Christianity is an attractive explanation for reality shared by hundreds of millions of people. These numbers include intellectuals, scientists, and scholars in every field. Many (though not all) of these people (lay and intellectual) have doubts about Darwin, even after reading the arguments, and see evidence for design in nature. It is just too implausible to assume that these people are all crack-pots or liars. They may not be right, but they have thought about it. You can be sure that highly trained philosophers like J.P. Moreland and Al Plantinga have thought about the evidence. To be simple about it: if major intellectual figures such as Al Plantinga, in his area of expertise, can have his doubts about the full blown Darwinism/naturalist story than surely we are justified to share them.
...

The time has come for some fresh thinking. Philosophical rigor and plain old intellectual curiosity demands it. It has never been sensible to think that one could derive information from non-information without an intelligent agent in the first place. The naturalistic scientist used to claim that the appearance of design in a structure like the eye was imposed on the eye by the religious observer. The design was not there, it just appeared to be there since the religious were looking for it. This will no longer do, however. DNA, for example, does not just “appear” designed it contains information. This information is precise and essential to the existence of life. The information does not just consist of the sum of the natural component parts. It exists apart from what makes up the living thing.

As Phillip Johnson points out, one cannot understand Hamlet by doing chemical experiments on the paper and ink of the play book. Information cannot be reduced to the medium that contains it. This booklet can be place on paper, in electronic form on the internet, or memorized and stored in my mind. In each place, it exists in a different medium. The information, however, stays the same. How did this information come to be? Merely studying the medium cannot explain information, because any given medium is not necessary for it to exist.

Whether one is a Christian or a non-Christian one can argue that information may be not be reducible to the medium. It may exist apart from it (as Plato suggested) and come from somewhere or someone. Encoding may require an ultimate Encoder.

...

Lofty words or even powerful arguments are not enough to move the world. It is not enough even to be right. The Declaration of Independence recites many facts related to the world of the eighteenth century. This data does not cause the Declaration to endure. When that same Declaration moved Eastern Europeans to overthrow communist tyranny, it was not because of the “facts” it contained. The Declaration captured an idea, a story of liberty, and it was that vision that moved men both in 1776 and 1989.

Christians, of all people, should be the first to recognize the importance of the story. We do not have a Bible that consists of a simple listing of theological or metaphysical truths. God decided to convey His message in the story of His peoples, the Jews and the Church. Orthodox Christians believe that God’s Word is true. This truth is most often told in stories of real men and women, in parables, or in letters written to fellow believers. The Bible contains a worldview, an entire way of looking at the world, related through the lives of the people of God.

...

The stories that have captured the world of the twentieth century are based on naturalism, the belief that the world can be fully explained by natural causes. Most thinkers agree that the three people who most shaped the modern mind were Darwin, Freud, and Marx. Darwin made the triumph of naturalism possible by providing a means of explaining the origin and history of life that left no active role for God. Freud and later secular psychologists provided for psychological redemption without the need for the cross. Marx gave humanity an eschatological vision of a final conflict that would produce a secular paradise. Taken together these ideas formed a complete naturalistic religion. (more)

Some Basics on Design, Creation, and Other Such Matters (IV/VI): An Example of Ordering Ideas and The Three Views of Creation

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

If I could remind her of one thing, it is to never let your opponent force you to defend your provisional beliefs as if they were your primary beliefs.

What do I mean? (Make sure to re-read the second part of this series as background!) Be clear on what is a priority to you and focus on those things. Don’t ever let someone associate an idea you consider possible with those deepest convictions.

...

Though the state of scientific evidence is part of it, even if the situation were not as it is (underdeveloped young-earth alternatives), I would hold this view weakly for two reasons. First, the Bible and the fathers do not give a specific age of the earth. It is a weaker exegesis to get “age” from the Bible than bigger philosophical issues. Second, the issue is simply less important logically than other issues (existence of God). I cannot imagine being dogmatic about it or holding it as firmly as I hold evidence for the risen Lord.

...

Don’t be intimidated by the problems of an active theistic metaphysics. Atheists, naturalists, or secularists each have their own problems. Do you really want to get rid of an objective good, objective truth, and objective beauty? Do you really want to try to explain every putative supernatural event away? How simplistic a metaphysical system can you have before you are just being simplistic? (more)

Some Basics on Design, Creation, and Other Such Matters (III/VI): Plato, Darwin, Hume, and the Death of the Modern

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The question is: “What is true?”, not what fits my preconceived philosophy of science or theology.
...
In the Medieval West, design and the involvement of supernatural Intelligence were widely accepted, and they helped justify the idea that we live in a creation that can be studied and in which truths can be grasped beyond the surface appearances of things. Contrary to the stereotype of the period as a time of intellectual stagnation and dogmatism, philosophy of science continued to develop during the Middle Ages. Such men as Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham made important advances of the Greco-Roman understandings of the natural world and philosophy.
...
Many people were horrified by the societal ills brought on by the secularism they had embrace. One of these men was the prototypical Englishman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes was horrified at the decline in public morals. Darwinism had destroyed the Creator God of the Jews and Christians, but left no way to maintain the England that Doyle loved. Doyle gradually became convinced that the occult was the salvation of England. Wallace and many distinguished scientists gave him the intellectual cover that he needed. Soon the creator of Holmes was dedicating most of his time and considerable fortune to mediums, table tipping, and the fortunes of the growing Spiritualist religion.
...
Darwinism freed them from traditional religion. Most of their scientific friends embraced the secularist dogma of men like Darwin. The literary types would not go that far, however. They wanted to provide room for a “scientific religion.” They hoped spiritualist activity could be studied. Soon, in the generation that followed Doyle, fraud and frequent disappointment sent most the humanities professors in the direction of the irrational. The “new age” movement and post-modernity are symptoms of this difficulty. Where Doyle wanted “evidence” and the supernatural, the new humanities gurus abandoned reason altogether. (more)

Some Basics on Design, Creation, and Other Such Matters (II/VI): the Web of Belief

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

We can rarely isolate one idea (”my philosophy of science”) from all our other ideas.
...
Too often some people, even rational religious folk, view all their beliefs as equally important. They hold a particular interpretation of Genesis with the same tenacity as they hold to the existence of God. Surely this is a mistake!
...

There are central ideas that cause the web of belief to cohere. These ideas give a man an internally consistent image of self and the world. Coherence of these ideas is vital. A world-view with contradictory strands is inherently unstable.

The second important type of belief are the ideas that connect the man to the external world (which may include a physical and non-physical reality).

Science provides many (though not all) of the connecting strands of belief to the real world. As such it is an important tool in keeping men in contact with the real world that God made. No Christian theist can simply retreat from an attempt to explain his beliefs in the light of creation. Consistency is good, but it is not enough.

Humans with consistent world-views that have no connection to reality are usually found in asylums!

...

I do not expect my view of the world to be totally secure or utterly coherent. I must challenge every notion . . . including central ones. In the meantime, it is appropriate to be conservative about big changes. Is my theism working in general? Can I make sense of science and all of reality (including spiritual reality) in a way that is satisfying and does not cut off or avoid any questions?

...

A religious believer must examine the deepest metaphysical assumptions first. If they can be connected in a satisfying way to reality, many of the secondary (or tertiary) issues can be left as research problems.

Religion must never be used as an excuse or a short cut to cut off critical self-examination of assumptions. The Socratic examined life (the life of Aquinas or C.S. Lewis) is the good life . . . and religion is no short cut from it!

...

Even some “traditional” Christians try to be satisfied by merely stating, “I know in my heart that my beliefs are true!” Personal experience is one important bit of evidence, but more is needed if major decisions are to be based on Christianity.

If traditional Christianity is true, it has to be true at the places where it makes connections with external (non-personal) reality.

...

Biblical Christianity makes certain claims about history and reality. Now, why do those matter? They matter because they are anchors. They are the places where the Bible makes predications about the “way things are.”

The central predications are the most important. In terms of history, the most important claim is that Jesus rose from the dead. The tomb was empty. In terms of non-physical reality, I think it is the assertion that there is a non-physical realm (the real of the spirit) and that it matters. If the Bible gets the “big ones” right, then it can (of course) be given more slack on the secondary issues.

If the tomb was empty, then many things are possible! If I have a soul, then there are important limits to naturalistic science.

...

The story of the Flood is important, but it is not of equal importance to the life of Christ. The life of Christ is central to the Christian faith in a way the ark story could never be.

If the story of the Christ does not cohere and connect to reality, then the Faith is doomed. On the other hand, one could be a Christian, without believing in the Flood, as C.S. Lewis did. So even the “young-earth” Christian should spend more time “working” on the New Testament accounts of Christ, than on the Genesis accounts of the Flood. Young-earth types can easily make common cause with those believers (like Lewis) who do not share our provisional wish to defend the historicity of the Flood account.

This same sort of intellectual ordering can be applied to issues within Genesis itself. If the believer has good reason to be a Christian apart from Genesis (in the person and work of Christ for example), then he can accept that somethings in Genesis (which are epistemologically less central) can safely be left for further research.

Genesis asserts that the cosmos is a cosmos (ordered) and a creation. Is this true? This is more central to the faith than the confusion of languages at Babel. This is not to say that Babel has no importance, just less importance. The first priority of believers (if they wish to remain believers) must be to establish the coherence and external reliability of the idea of “creation.”

...

The Christian religion gives humanity an explanation for the existence of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. A Christian knows why math works and simple answers are better than complex ones!

He has a basis for morality and a way to account for the existence of the internal sense of self (the “I”). He also has a means of salvation and does not have to “explain away” precious and life-changing religious experience. The secularist must deny every miracle, but the Christian can believe in any that seem supported by the evidence. (more)

Some Basics on Design, Creation, and Other Such Matters (I/VI): the Relationship Between Religion and Science

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

This defensive strategy has had another sad result. Too few Christians have given themselves the intellectual freedom to examine their own point of view critically. Often what passes for Christian thinking amongst believers is neither very thoughtful nor very Christian. This is true on both the right and the left of the Christian community. Liberal Christian scientists like Howard Van Till fall into a theistic naturalism. Science is restricted to matter and energy in mindless motion. Religion is excluded from making a difference in scientific theorizing. Such a view of science leaves little room for traditional Christian beliefs like the existence of the soul. On the right, apologists invent academic degrees and repeat long discredited arguments to demonstrate that their favorite view of Scripture is true. This can amount to lying for Jesus. Too often both camps are locked in the naïve view that “science” gives humans “truth” about the world unmediated by the philosophic bias of the investigator.
...

The goal of a Christian philosophy of science is a “likely story” that takes into account everything known about the cosmos. Since religion provides knowledge, religious truths will have to be included. Since science gives knowledge as well, it will play a role in forming the proper Christian worldview. The Christian is free to consider any number of such stories. He is not constrained to look at only one sort. For example, God may have acted in a given moment of space and time or He may not have done so. The Christian is open to both. Traditional science is locked into an established Darwinian view that does not allow for such freedom of thought.

How could that be true? Isn’t the skeptical, non-religious scientist the free thinker? Sadly, this is far from the case. Most non-religious scientists have accepted the idea that naturalism is science. Naturalism is the philosophic notion that nature is all there is, was, or ever will be. This definition of science will not allow the secularist to examine the hypothesis that divine agency had a part in cosmic history even if the evidence points in that direction. This is the sad result of adopting a philosophy that is too cramped for valuable speculation.

...

The goal of science and religion, after all, should be to come as close to the truth as possible. Many secular scientists act as if the goal of science were to exclude God on a priori grounds. Like some dictionary bully, they attempt to define science as limited to naturalism. But the secularist is simply posturing. One does not, in the end, care whether Darwinism or any other theory fits some predetermined definition of science. The important question to ask regarding any theory is: “Is it true?” Put more precisely, of course, the question is: “Is this theory most likely true given all the evidence humans have at the moment?”

...

What does all of this talk of truth imply? In both science and theology it is easily possible that two logically incompatible theories can be developed that both explain the evidence. There is no “last word” on any theoretical subject. There are “brute facts” of the world and of divine revelation. That rock is really there. The text of the Bible is also real. Human certainty about that is so sure as to approach the absolute. Interpreting the world and the Word is trickier. It is then that contradictory theories can develop. The contradictions may be between two theories of science, or between two theories of religion, or between a theory of religion and a theory of science. The possibility of such theories existing has profound implications for the Christian.

...

The real lover of truth could also seek a new scientific theory for the sheer joy of developing new theories. In personal relationships it is rational to break off an engagement without an alternative. No one would claim that their affianced should stay only because there are no better options at present. In the same manner, a person may find a scientific theory aesthetically or religiously unappealing and so go looking for another. So long as such a man deals fairly with the evidence and reasons logically, he should be free to pursue alternate theories. This is a freedom that the dominant secular scientific orthodoxy will not allow.

...

Having shown that it is rational to look around, the Christian can begin to construct a sound and equally powerful theory about the cosmos. The lack of such a theory is the great weakness of any putative “creationist” worldview. There is one practical warning to the church that must be given at this point. Christian research must be free to develop as the evidence demands. (more)

The Upside of Income Inequality

By Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy
American.com

Income inequality in China substantially wid­ened, particularly between households in the city and the countryside, after China began its rapid rate of economic development around 1980. The aver­age urban resident now makes 3.2 times as much as the average rural resident, and among city dwellers alone, the top 10 percent makes 9.2 times as much as the bottom 10 percent.[1] But at the same time that inequality rose, the number of Chinese who live in poverty fell—from 260 million in 1978 to 42 mil­lion in 1998.[2] Despite the widening gap in incomes, rapid economic development dra­matically improved the lives of China’s poor.

Politicians and many others in the United States have recently grown concerned that earnings inequality has increased among Americans. But as the example of China—or India, for that matter—illustrates, the rise in inequality does not occur in a vacuum. In the case of China and India, the rise in inequality came along with an acceleration of eco­nomic growth that raised the standard of living for both the rich and the poor. In the United States, the rise in inequality accompanied a rise in the payoff to education and other skills. We believe that the rise in returns on investments in human capital is ben­eficial and desirable, and policies designed to deal with inequality must take account of its cause.

...

The potential generated by higher returns to education extends from individuals to the economy as a whole. Growth in the education level of the population has been a significant source of rising wages, productivity, and living standards over the past century. Higher returns to educa­tion will accelerate growth in living standards as existing investments have a higher return, and additional investments in education will be made in response to the higher returns. Gains from the higher returns will not be limited to GDP and other measures of economic activity; education provides a wide range of benefits not captured in GDP, and these will grow more rapidly as well due to the addi­tional investments in schooling.

The potential generated by higher returns to education extends from individuals to the economy as a whole. Growth in the education level of the population has been a significant source of rising wages, productivity, and living standards over the past century. Higher returns to educa­tion will accelerate growth in living standards as existing investments have a higher return, and additional investments in education will be made in response to the higher returns. Gains from the higher returns will not be limited to GDP and other measures of economic activity; education provides a wide range of benefits not captured in GDP, and these will grow more rapidly as well due to the addi­tional investments in schooling.

...

This brings us to our punch line. Should an increase in earnings inequality due primarily to higher rates of return on education and other skills be considered a favorable rather than an unfavor­able development? We think so. Higher rates of return on capital are a sign of greater productivity in the economy, and that inference is fully applica­ble to human capital as well as to physical capital. The initial impact of higher returns to human cap­ital is wider inequality in earnings (the same as the initial effect of higher returns on physical capital), but that impact becomes more muted and may be reversed over time as young men and women invest more in their human capital. (more)

The Lists: 30 Essential Books for Students and Autodidacts

By Joe Carter
The Evangelical Outpost

Tom Wolfe From Bauhaus to Our House | Tom Wolfe The Painted Word

The best book on modern architecture and the best book on modern art by the best essayist in the modern world.

Paul Johnson Modern Times | C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man

The two most essential books for understanding the 20th century.

Sun Tzu The Art of War | U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting

The key primers on warfare and strategy. (Note: Here is an online copy of Warfighting (PDF))

Plutarch Lives | Gary Wills Lincoln at Gettysburg

Although biographical in format, these works transcend the genre, illuminating not only the subjects but the reader as well.

Solomon Proverbs | Hugh Hewitt In, But Not Of

Practical wisdom is one of the most neglected areas in education. The book of Proverbs is the greatest guide to practical wisdom every produced. Hewitt's book, while written for Christians, is one of the best modern example of a vade mecum

Edwin Abbot Flatland | Jostein Gardner Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

Math and philosophy are cleverly illuminated in this pair of intriguing books.

E.D. Swinton The Defense of Duffer's Drift | Orson Scott Card Enders Game

Swinton's book teaches tactical thinking using an intriguing series of dreams. Card's book also provides lessons on tactics in one of the best science fiction books ever written. Both are on the Marine Corps Professional Reading List. (Note: Here is an online version of Duffer's Drift)

George Lakoff Metaphors We Live By | Copi Introduction to Logic

Anyone who wants to become a better thinker should learn how metaphors and logic work. These are two of best books on those subjects.

Malcolm Gladwell The Tipping Point | Michael Lewis Moneyball

Two masterworks by a pair of the most creative nonfiction writers in America.

Mortimer Adler How to Read a Book | Strunk and White The Elements of Style

The two reference books that every student should read, study, and digest.

Neil Postman Technopoly | Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death

Postman was not only our most astute media critic but one of the most prophetic voices of the last thirty years. Essential reading for understanding how our culture is shaped by media and technology.

Richard Tarnas The Passion of the Western Mind | Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence

Big, bold, broad surveys of intellectual history.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye | Alexander Solzenitzhen's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

While we may find ourselves trapped by location -- whether in a Soviet gulag or in Lorain, Ohio -- our freedom is dictated by our will. While the short novels by Solzenitzhen and Morrison may not appear to have much in common, both show how our beliefs can either set us free or trap us within ourselves.

Henry Hazlitt Economics in One Lesson | Charles Wheelan Naked Economics

The dismal science made slightly less dismal. Each will change the way you think about economics, and therefore how you think about life.

Tom Morris If Aristotle Ran General Motors | Vamos and Lidsky Fast Company's Greatest Hits

Although these books would be filed in the Management section of the bookstore, each shows that "business" is about more than making money. Morris is a superb philosopher who shows how Aristotle ideas on truth, beauty, goodness, and unity should shape our lives. In compiling their "greatest hits", Fast Company, the most fascinating business magazine of the last century, has produced an indispensable collection of innovative ideas. (more)

Hewitt Asked for A List: Thirty Books That Every College Student Should Read

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The order is (roughly) chronological and not in order of importance:

Iliad, Odyssey, History of the Peloponnesian War, Ethics (Aristotle), Metaphysics (Aristotle), Meno, Republic, Timaeus, Oedipus Rex, Bacchae, Orestia, On Friendship and On Duties (Cicero), Aeneid, Meditations, History of the Church (Eusebius), Confessions, City of God, Histories (Tacitus), Consolation of Philosophy, Summa Theologica (selections!), Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, The Prince, The Institutes (selections from Calvin), Fairie Queen, Shakespeare (Hamlet, Lear, As You Like It, Henry V, Julius Caesar), Faerie Queen (at least Book I), Leviathan, Second Treatise on Government, Pensees.

Ten Works of You Should Read to be Civilized:

1-3. Some poetry by Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, and Dickenson (counts as 3!)
4. Pride and Prejudice
5. Tale of Two Cities
6. Jane Eyre
7. Moby Dick
8. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
9. Brothers Karamazov
10. Anna Karenina

Modern Top 10 (US student):

1. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
2. Federalist Papers
3. Reflections on the Revolution in France
4. Wealth of Nations
5. Communist Manifesto
6. Origin of Species
7. On the Genealogy of Morals
8. Civilization and Its Discontents
9. No Exit
10. Lincoln’s speeches (especially Gettysburg, which should be memorized, and the Second Inaugural) (more)

Ten Great Christian Biographies

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

• Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1967, revised edition 2000.
• G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas -- "The Dumb Ox" (New York: Doubleday, 1933/1956).
• Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1950).
• David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
• Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (London: Blackwell, 1993).
• George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
• Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival, 2 volumes (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth Trust, 1970).
• Robert Moats Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
• D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 1994).
• Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939 and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981 (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982, 1990). (more)

Is the Apostolic Preaching of the Cross "Insane?"

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

What Dr. John repudiates is precisely what the Bible teaches. The Bible does not merely assert that Christ died on the cross for our sins -- it goes on to explain why this substitutionary death was necessary. In Romans 3, the Apostle Paul explains that God put forth Jesus on the cross as a propitiatory sacrifice for our sins. God's love is demonstrated in the fact that, even as his own righteousness demanded a perfect sacrifice for sin, He determined to send the Son as that perfect sacrifice. In Paul's words, this means that God is both just and the justifier. He rightly demanded an acceptable sacrifice in order to satisfy His wrath, but He also provided that same sacrifice. (more)

This Next Presidential Election 2/6: Direct and Dispose the Hearts of all Christian Rulers

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

I hope to vote the way I pray, sensibly. Prayers are often for the ideal, but politics functions in the fallen world as it is.

My prayers inspire me to hope, but my vote must go beyond hope to deal with a fallen reality. I can pray for the not-yet, but must vote for the can-be-now.

It is this possible-now that guides my voting.

...

Rights come from the Creator, as the Declaration of Independence points out, and include the right to life, liberty, human flourishing (or happiness). Government should be limited as much as possible to the protection of these basic rights (to avoid as much as possible harming the conscience of people who dissent from truth).

Fortunately in most cases, there is little dissent about these basic human rights. In fact, if I were of a different religion or point of view it is perfectly possible (using natural law and reason) that I could come to many of the same conclusions. Oddly, this means a bad Christian could easily be a worse ruler than a good atheist.

...

A Christian naturally wishes to vote for someone who is also Christian (family ties!), but must vote for the person who has the ability to govern well. The most competent ruler is the most like Christ (as ruler), even if the candidate is an atheist. (more)

This Next Presidential Election 1/6: Voting as We Pray

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

If Jesus is lord, then He must be lord of my vote. I am an American, but the King’s man first. My King Jesus wishes to see justice on His earth and I must vote (imperfectly and without hope of utopia until His return) in a measured way for this justice.
...

The fear, of course, for some non-Christian reading these words that this is the imposition of a theocracy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. God already reigns, of course, but in this age His followers are no more to be trusted than His foes. We are all fallen and to give too much power to any men (even those proclaiming themselves Christians) is foolish. (more)

This Next Presidential Election 3/6: Truly and Impartially Administer Justice (or Why Mitt Romney Should Never Be King of England!)

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

We beseech thee also, so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian Rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion, and virtue.

This old English prayer nicely sums up the traditional Christian consensus on a praying man’s view of God and government. If our goal is to live what we pray, then it is helpful to reflect occasionally on those prayers.

...

Some people know the truth and live it. Some people reject the truth and still live it. In this life, there are very few people from whom I cannot learn. The implications for my vote this election is to look for a man that knows the limits of government and its nature. Will a man try to make the government the church? Will he try to impose on my family? Will he trespass the role of voluntary civil organizations (like the Boy Scouts)?

We pray that our rulers will be competent and even good examples but we should not confuse their job with that of the church or family. Government is not here to produce children, show us the way to Heaven, or even to make us happy.

...

Human happiness used to be understood (in the Declaration of Independence or Aristotle) as flourishing as a human. To be happy was to exercise all the gifts of mankind, especially the intellect. To do this one had to learn to be virtuous. Traditionally government acts to provide the space and the chance for this to happen. It cannot think for us (!) or make us happy, but exists to give us the chance to achieve this blessed state for ourselves.

...

But to simply cast out any person who has a view I think “weird” is sad, limiting, and dangerous.

It is sad because it lacks the humility that should cause us to be as charitable as possible in our view of our neighbor. It is limiting because it narrows our field of candidates too much in this present age. It is dangerous because it threatens to over expand the role of the Church or because it (perversely) implies that the government should be involved in so many things that I can only trust a man who agrees with me on nearly everything.

...

I am happy to evangelize my Mormon neighbor and argue with Mormon professors. I am happy to examine any candidates view of what it means to “truly and impartially administer justice.” I would not vote for an Orthodox Christian who got the Nicaean Creed right, but the Constitution of 1789 wrong. I could (though I don’t know if I will) vote for a Mormon who gets the Creed wrong, but justice right. (more)

He is Risen! The Testimony of the Women of Holy Week Is True!

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Don’t accept any nonsense about this story. Ask the most important question: “Is it true?”

If it is true, then death has been conquered.

To put it mildly that would be more important than anything else you will consider today.

Crucified men in the first century didn’t survive Roman torture and roll away the stone of their guarded grave to live again unless something amazing had happened.

First-century people were not credulous dupes, ready to believe in anything. If you doubt that, read the account in Mark again. The friends of Jesus had too little faith, not too much. They were afraid and did not understand what was happening. It was hard for the women of Easter to believe, because it was such a huge event.

...

Jewish women expected a resurrection at world’s end, but of all men and not just one. This empty tomb and this God-Man was unexpected.

...

If you don’t believe Jesus is alive, then you have failed to follow the facts to the proper conclusion.

Jesus actual resurrection is a fitting ending to His extraordinary life. It was unexpected at the time, but makes sense, perfect sense, in retrospect.

Extraordinary claims may require extraordinary evidence, but for this Man to conquer death was not so extraordinary.

He was extraordinary and this was just the final extraordinary thing He did.

Jesus actual resurrection explains the empty tomb, the compatible (but not identical) reports of eye witnesses, the existence of the Gospels, and the Church.

The Gospel accounts contain details that fit the times, make theological points, but are not overly theological. If their only purpose was theological, then why the details such as the name of Joseph of Arimathea (almost surely historical) who helped bury Jesus?

Skeptics like to point to the difficulty of a total harmony of the Gospel accounts, but scholars note that it can be done and that eye witness accounts are often difficult to harmonize. It is only the carefully fabricated lie that is perfect from one “witness” to the next. (more)

On Envy and Temperance

By Greg Peters
Scriptorium Daily

The medieval author Richard of St. Victor wrote, “The duty of the true preacher consists of two things; instruction in truth and exhortation to virtue” (The Mystical Ark, Appendix). In this post I hope to do the latter by continuing my musings on the vices and the virtues. Please recall that a virtue is a habitual and firm disposition to do good; specifically, to pursue good and to choose it in all concrete actions. The goal of the virtuous life is to become like God. A vice is the opposite of a virtue: doing what is bad instead of what is good, pursuing that which is against good and choosing to do it. The result of a vice is alienation from God. The virtues are those characteristics of a godly life that we must highly desire and greatly esteem.
...

Finally, the results of envy are something that we should not desire. Proverbs 14:30 tells us that “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” Further, Job 5:2 says, “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.” In light of this, what should be our response? Simply put, we need to obey the tenth commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:17). By not coveting we do not give in to the vice of envy for “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Also, we need to counter the vice of envy with the virtue of temperance.

Temperance is the virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. The temperate person directs the appetites of the flesh toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion. As one ancient writer said, “Do not yield to every impulse you can gratify or follow the desires of your heart” (Ecclesiasticus 5:2) and “Do not let your passions be your guide, but restrain your desires” (18:30). In the New Testament, temperance is often called “moderation” or “sobriety.” For example, in his letter to Titus, Paul commands us “to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world” (2:12). Likewise, 1 Corinthians 15:34a says, “Become sober-minded as you ought, and stop sinning” and 2 Timothy 4:5a says, “But you, be sober in all things.”

...

Recorded here is the account of the queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon after hearing of the magnificence of the temple that Solomon had constructed. The queen was so amazed at what she saw that “she was overwhelmed” (v. 5). It is obvious from this passage that the queen herself was a very wealthy monarch. Yet, she was overwhelmed at Solomon’s temple. Surely, her temptation could have been to desire to have such a temple for herself. Or, out of desire, to attack the Israelite’s and make the temple her own property. Interestingly, she chose neither of these envious actions. Rather, she praised the Lord (v. 9) and “she left and returned with her retinue to her own country” (v. 13). You see, the queen of Sheba rejoiced with Solomon for the Lord’s blessing upon him and the nation of Israel. She did not become envious, she became expressively joyful. This is the attitude that we are to have when others are blessed by God. Instead of envying those whom God chooses to bless, we must rejoice with them. This demonstrates that we are temperate persons who are not giving in to the vice of envy. (more)

Fertility, Faith, & the Future of the West

A conversation with Phillip Longman
Christianity Today

It's fair to say that most self-described "progressives" don't agree with me that low fertility is a problem. Many environmentalists, for example, believe that fewer people means a cleaner environment. Other progressives suppose that a decline in population would increase the amount of food and other resources available to the poor. Many feminists, gays, and "childless by choice" people in general feel threatened by suggestions that society needs more children. And when it's pointed out that the lowest birthrates are generally found among the most "progressive" people, then the conversation gets really heated.

On all these counts, I believe progressives are in denial. Today in the United States, for example, we have far cleaner air and water than we did in the 1940s, when the population was just half its current size. That's no paradox. Population growth is a spur to more efficient and cleaner use of resources, so our cities are no longer choked with smoke from steam engines and our cars get far better mileage and are far less polluting. Similarly, population growth is what drove us as a society to find far more productive ways to grow food. Thanks to increased crop yields, per capita food production is higher than ever, even as world population surpasses 6 billion. At the same time, there is more forested land in the United States than in the 19th century because so much less acreage is needed for farmland.

Progressives also tend to forget that many of their positions on human reproduction, such as a "woman's right to choose," only won widespread support when fears of overpopulation began to pervade the culture in the 1960s and '70s. Until then, bans on abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, for example, were justified in many people's minds by fears of underpopulation, which left questions of human reproduction too important to be settled by individual "choice." They also forget that if progressives themselves "forget to have children" then the future belongs to people who have opposing values. Finally, progressives forget that without a growing population, such "crown jewels" of the welfare state as Social Security lose their financial sustainability. (more)

Moses and Multiculturalism

By R. R. Reno
First Things

Moses does what many would-be world citizens who have committed real-world acts of terrorism and conspiracy have done throughout the modern era. Moses flees from Pharaoh into Midian as Lenin fled to Switzerland in order to escape from the tsar’s secret police. And is this surprising? What could be more natural and normal? What, to recall Nussbaum, could be more simply and post-culturally human than to revert back to our basic animal desire for security and survival? Or, as the shopkeeper in Islamabad worries, what is more nakedly human than to seek transformation of the world into an amoral playground for the powerful who seek dominion and pleasure?

God does not leave Moses alone in his incipient multicultural personality, his Bolshevik combination of universalism, idealism, amorality, and selfishness. On Mount Horeb, the LORD God appears to Moses and commands him to return to Egypt to act on behalf of the enslaved Israelites. Moses resists, anticipating our present ambivalences. Who am I to go? How can I impose my worldview upon others? If I do go, then in whose name should I say I was sent? After all, some say we should live according to the god of duty, others the god of utility, and still others the will of the majority. God does not give Moses an epistemological principle to adjudicate. He does not provide a governing principle or a master ideal. Instead, the LORD gives Moses his everlasting name.

...

To my mind, the trajectory of the biblical account of Moses, a trajectory reenacted every time a child is circumcised or baptized or in any way dedicated to a determinate cultural authority rather than left free to float along in life as an unattached, uncommitted, unclaimed world citizen, helps us understand an important point of conflict in the current culture wars. On one side, we have an educational ideal widely held. This vision wishes to deracinate. If we can live as cultural polytheists, exposed to many different perspectives and allowing no divine name to take possession of our souls, then our moral imaginations will be freed from the limiting confines of no one culture’s view of good and evil. On the other side, we have an old-fashioned ideal, one as old as culture itself. In this view, the human person must be subjected to and formed by that authority of the divine, without which he or she will live only as an animal, seeking only the base goods of pleasure, power, and survival. The conflict is fundamental and irreconcilable.

Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human–which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism. (more)

Why Aren’t Americans Very Happy?

By J P Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

But what if there is no ultimate purpose? Suppose we played Monopoly with one rule change: You may do anything during your turn. So you put hotels everywhere. I follow by dumping the board over and turning on the television. Immediately you realize that your move is futile. Why? Because if the game as a whole is without purpose, the individual moves within the game are meaningless. What if atheistic Darwinists are right: we are the result of a blind, meaningless process and life is just “one darn thing after another”? In such a world the difference between Mother Teresa and Saddam Hussein reduces to the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper. (more)

Oxford’s Preposterous Proposition

By Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online

Last week, I appeared at the Oxford Union to debate the proposition: “This House regrets the founding of The United States of America.” Such is the extent of anti-Americanism out there that this was considered to be a reasonable debate topic by Britain’s best and brightest.
...
The defenders of the proposition were originally scheduled to be one student plus three invited speakers: two Islamist radicals and a bona fide Communist.
...
And, if you are honest with yourselves, you know — KNOW! — that should any of my opponents succeed in having their perfect world realized, those of you who did not stay in Britain to fight such oppression would count yourselves lucky to find asylum in the United States of America.
...
Yes, anti-Americanism fashions itself a form of anti-globalization. But this is most often a ruse. Do keep in mind that my opponents represent a truly tyrannical form of globalization. Whether it’s “Workers of the World Unite” or the World Caliphate, the choice they are presenting is globalization for losers, while America, to the extent it represents globalization at all, offers the globalization of liberty.

The mere fact that you had to select three men from outside this heritage to defend the proposition, is proof enough that it is indefensible from within it. For, again, if you want to lament the birth of America, you must lament all that has been born of America.

And if you are prepared to do that, you are prepared to regret all that was born of Britain as well.

To which I say again: Surely you must be joking. (more)