Clouds of Conspiracy: Is Media Bias Real? Look No Further Than Global Warming

By Raymond J. Keating
Salvo Magazine

Rigorous analysis of media bias really began in 1981, when Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman surveyed journalists at top media outlets on their political views and voting habits. The findings? Overwhelmingly liberal. Not exactly shocking, but it was nice to have the data. In the following years, survey after survey confirmed the media’s leftist leanings.

For example, a 2005 survey of 300 journalists by the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy found that 52 percent of news reporters voted for John Kerry, the Democrat in the 2004 presidential election, versus 21 percent who voted for President George W. Bush, the Republican. In addition, 33 percent said they were Democrats, while 10 percent said they were Republicans. And self-identified liberals came in at 28 percent, as opposed to the 10 percent who called themselves conservatives.
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The story of man-made climate change, or global warming, has everything a left-leaning journalist could possibly desire: It’s about the environment, always a fave topic, and it pits those who care about the earth against big bad business and the presumably insensitive, self-absorbed consumer—likewise topics about which liberals love to write. And because there are scientists out there who argue that the case on global warming is already closed—that it is definitely mankind’s CO2-spewing actions that are changing the climate—most major media outlets have shown themselves eager to run regular “news” stories that present man-made global warming as fact, insisting that no disagreement exists among scientists.
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Just in case you were wondering, it is not at all difficult to find climate scientists and experts who disagree with the absolutist position on man-made global warming. Over 17,000 scientists have signed the Global Warming Petition Project from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Here’s what the petition states:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Despite such findings, however, media outlets such as The New York Times continue to proceed as if the global warming threat isn’t a theory at all, but rather as demonstrable as gravity. Not only that, but when they are forced to admit that there are some who do disagree with such certainty, they often portray these individuals as idiots—or worse.

Take Brian Montopoli’s recent interaction with CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley. On CBS’s “Public Eye” blog, Montopoli describes their conversation:

Pelley’s most recent report, like his first, did not pause to acknowledge global warming skeptics, instead treating the existence of global warming as an established fact. I again asked him why. “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel,” he asks, “am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” He says his team tried hard to find a respected scientist who contradicted the prevailing opinion in the scientific community, but there was no one out there who fit that description. “This isn’t about politics or pseudo-science or conspiracy theory blogs,” he says. “This is about sound science.”

Global warming skeptics equivalent to Holocaust deniers? No respected scientist disputes the manmade global warming theory? Pelley is a classic example of a biased reporter who cannot fathom that he might possibly be biased. Somewhat ironically, this ostensibly “open-minded” liberal won’t even consider that an alternative viewpoint is possible.
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Are there exceptions to global warming bias in the media? Of course; but they seem to be a small minority. Lawrence Solomon, a columnist for Canada’s Financial Post, started a series in late 2006 on global warming dissenters and deniers. In a 2007 news column, Solomon explained that when starting out, he accepted “the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet” and was only looking to do a few profiles on the dissenters to allow them “to have their views heard.” He was not prepared for the information that he encountered. What did he learn?

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists—the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects—and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled.

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According to a new Zogby poll on public attitudes in the U.S. toward global warming, 70 percent of Americans believe that man-made climate change is a fact. Clearly, media bias can, and does, influence our culture. The point here is not whether global warming is truly occurring, but whether the media covers the topic in a fair and complete fashion, which they do not. And if this is the case with global warming, on how many other issues is media bias influencing people’s views?
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Cramping Their Style

You know media bias has gotten out of hand when news outlets begin controlling the language choices of their reporters. Well, that’s exactly what is happening within two very prominent new agencies. Both the New York Daily News (NYDN), the sixth largest paper in the U.S., and the Associated Press (AP) use linguistic style guides that give preferential treatment to those who support abortion. For example, the AP demands that its writers avoid using the word “pro-life,” preferring instead “anti-abortion.” It likewise insists that abortion advocates be described as supporters of “abortion rights,” as opposed to “pro-abortion” or even “pro-choice.” The NYDN has a similar set of requirements, stipulating that writers should use “abortion foes” and “abortion opponents” instead of “pro-life” and “pro-lifers,” but then takes the matter a few steps further. Indeed, it also requires its writers to replace “unborn child” with “fetus,” and to replace “mother” with “woman” in the phrase, “when the life of the mother is at stake.” So much for objective reporting.

Telling the Truth Slant:

Other Examples of Media Bias

Tell the truth,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “but tell it slant.” It’s a sentiment that could serve as the unacknowledged motto of the mainstream media. Under the guise of “straight” reporting, our major news sources manipulate how we perceive and respond to current events in a variety of ways, from story selection to carefully worded headlines to outright disinformation. Here are just six examples of the rampant media bias to which we have been subjected in recent months:

1 The Associated Press’s June 5 story on the 16-count indictment of Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson for bribery, racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and other offenses never mentioned Jefferson’s party affiliation—Democrat—although it did identify the party affiliation of other politicians mentioned in the story, including California Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Ohio Republican John Boehner.

2 The media ran more that 6,000 stories and innumerable photos on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But nine days after evidence showing how al-Qaeda tortures its victims—including tools, drawings, and photos—was released, ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post had yet to run a story with photos on the material, which was discovered by US soldiers in Iraq in April and declassified in May.

3 After his release from prison on June 1, assisted-suicide activist Jack Kevorkian was interviewed by Mike -Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Among the things not shown or mentioned in the interview were: the hug between Wallace and Kevorkian when the two met; the fact that Wallace is a euthanasia proponent himself; Kevorkian’s advocacy of human vivisection, which in his book Prescription Medicide he calls “obitiatry”; the facts that most of Kevorkian’s assisted-suicide victims were not terminally ill and that he has never advocated that euthanasia be limited to the terminally ill.

4 The June 12th dedication of a new memorial in Washington, D.C., that commemorates the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world, received scant media coverage, according to Michael Chapman of NewsBusters:

From yesterday’s dedication of the memorial, there has been some print coverage, yet most of the stories have been buried inside the papers. For instance, Los Angeles Times, p. 15; Chicago Tribune, p. 3; Miami Herald, p. 17; and the Washington Post (registration required) placed the story in its Style section but did run a page 1 story in its free “express” newspaper, distributed around D.C. . . . But, so far, I have not seen any network news coverage and only one mention on MSNBC in a Financial Times article on the MSNBC Web site.

The AP’s coverage of the dedication was headlined, “China denounces anti-communism memorial,” and led with the paragraph, “China criticized the United States’ ‘Cold War’ thinking Wednesday after President Bush attended the opening of a Washington memorial for those killed in communist regimes.” The story by Scott McDonald devoted four of its first six paragraphs to China’s complaints, one to China’s current political situation, and one to the dedication ceremony.

5 ABCNews.com’s coverage of the Massachusetts Legislature’s vote defeating the state’s marriage amendment ballot measure carried this headline:

Gay Marriage Safe in Massachusetts: A Vote to Redefine Marriage as a Union Between a Man and a Woman Was Defeated

6 Michael Medved noticed that the BBC described the terror suspects arrested for planning the car bombings in London and Glasgow in June as arising from “the disfranchised South Asian community,” and commented:

Well first, it’s ridiculous to describe successful physicians as disfranchised in any way. Second, the reference to “South Asian community” is misleading—like the description of one of the plotters as “Indian.” The refusal to use the words “Muslim” or “Islamist” to identify these terrorists—echoed by the official policy of the new Prime Minister, -Gordon Brown—suggests that the would-be bombers might be Hindu—since Hinduism is the primary religion of South Asia, and certainly of India.

Of course, they’re all Muslim, and at least two are from the Middle East, not Pakistan. The press identifies the ringleader, Mohammed Asha, as Palestinian, even though he spent his life in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Britain—another distortion from media outlets that often ignore or deny the truth about terrorism and about Islam. (more)

The Peace Racket

By Bruce Bawer
City Journal

If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”

This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it’s wishful thinking that doesn’t follow logically from the history of the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to stand up for yourself than if you’re proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it’s denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes.
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Peace studies initiatives may train students to be social workers, to work in churches or community health organizations, or to resolve family quarrels and neighborhood disputes. At the movement’s heart, though, are programs whose purported emphasis is on international relations. Their founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that “our time’s grotesque reality” was—no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s “structural fascism.” He’s called America a “killer country,” accused it of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and gleefully prophesied that it will soon follow Britain “into the graveyard of empires.”

No fan of Britain either, Galtung has faulted “Anglo-Americans” for trying to “stop the wind from blowing.” If the U.S. and the U.K. oppose a dangerous development, in his view, we’re causing trouble—Milošević, Saddam, and Osama are just the way the wind is blowing. Galtung’s kind of thinking leads inexorably to the conclusion that one should never challenge any tyrant. Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in 1956, and his views on World War II suggest that he’d have preferred it if the Allies had allowed Hitler to finish off the Jews and invade Britain.

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as “a model for everyone else,” he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation—among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.” At least you can’t accuse Galtung of hiding his prejudices. In 1973, explaining world politics in a children’s newspaper, he described the U.S. and Western Europe as “rich, Western, Christian countries” that make war to secure materials and markets: “Such an economic system is called capitalism, and when it’s spread in this way to other countries it’s called imperialism.” In 1974, he sneered at the West’s fixation on “persecuted elite personages” such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Thirty years later, he compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany for bombing Kosovo and invading Afghanistan and Iraq. For Galtung, a war that liberates is no better than one that enslaves.

His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all “nice and smiling.” While “repressive in a certain liberal sense,” he wrote, Mao’s China was “endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.” Why, China showed that “the whole theory about what an ‘open society’ is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of ‘democracy’—and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects."
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Galtung’s use of the word “peace” to legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition. In August 1939, when the Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact, the same Western Stalinists who had been calling for war against Germany did an about-face and began to praise peace. (After Hitler invaded Russia, the Stalinists reversed themselves again, demanding that the West help Stalin crush the Third Reich.) The peace talk, in short, was really about sympathizing with Communism, not peace. And it continued after the war, when Stalin’s Western supporters whitewashed his monstrous regime and denounced anti-Communists as warmongering crypto-fascists. “Peace conferences” and “friendship committees” drew hordes of liberal dupes, who didn’t grasp that their new “friends” were not ordinary Russians but the jailers of ordinary Russians—and that the committees were about not “friendship” but deception, exploitation, and espionage.

The people running today’s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis’s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine’s program director believes that “humans have been out of balance for centuries” and that “a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies.” (Such New Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)

What these people teach remains faithful to Galtung’s anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. The account of capitalism in David Barash and Charles Webel’s widely used 2002 textbook Peace and Conflict Studies leans heavily on Lenin, who “maintained that only revolution—not reform—could undo capitalism’s tendency toward imperialism and thence to war,” and on Galtung, who helpfully revised Lenin’s theories to account for America’s “indirect” imperialism. Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it’s because others are rich. They’re taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty.

If the image of tenured professors pushing such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic case of liberals’ throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this: America’s leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—endowed by and named for the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, the ultimate symbol of evil corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism.
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The deep-culture approach also avoids calling tyrants or terrorists “evil”—for behind every atrocity, in this view, lies a legitimate grievance, which the peacemaker should locate so that all parties can meet at the negotiating table as moral equals. SUNY Binghamton, for instance, offers a peace studies course that seeks to “arrive at an understanding of contemporary violence in its ideological, cultural, and structural dimensions in a bid to move away from ‘evil,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘uncivilized’ as analytical categories.” For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions—and power. So students learn to identify “insurgent” or “militant” groups with the populations they purport to represent. A few years ago, a peace organization called Transcend equated the demands of the Basque terrorist group ETA with “the desires of the Basque people”—as if a “people” were a monolithic group for whom a band of murderous thugs could presume to speak. The complaints that Transcend made about the Spanish government’s “blockade positions”—its refusal to cave to terrorist demands—and the Spanish media’s lack of “objectivity”—their refusal to take a middle position between Spanish society and ETA terrorists—are standard Peace Racket fare. Similarly, during Saddam’s dictatorship, “peace scholars” wrote as if Iraq were equivalent to Saddam and the Baath party, entirely removing from the picture the Shiites and Kurds whom Saddam’s regime subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered.
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The Peace Racket maintains that the Western world’s profound moral culpability, arising from its history of colonialism and economic exploitation, deprives it of any right to judge non-Western countries or individuals. Further, the non-West has suffered so much from exploitation that whatever offenses it commits are legitimate attempts to recapture dignity, obtain justice, and exact revenge. Have Third World terrorists taken Americans hostage? Don’t call the hostages innocent victims. After all, as Americans, they’re complicit in a system that has long inflicted “structural violence” (or “structural terrorism”) upon the Third World poor. Donald Rothberg of San Francisco’s Saybrook Institute explains: “In using the term ‘structural violence,’ we identify phenomena as violent that are not usually seen as violent. For example, Western economic domination.”

It is this mind-set that leads peace professors to accuse the U.S. of “state terrorism,” to call George W. Bush “the world’s worst terrorist,” and even to characterize those murdered in the Twin Towers as oppressors who, by working at investment banks and brokerage houses, were ultimately responsible for their own deaths. Barash and Webel, for instance, write sympathetically of “frustrated, impoverished, infuriated people . . . who view the United States as a terrorist country” and for whom “attacks on American civilians were justified” because one shouldn’t distinguish “between a ‘terrorist state’ and the citizens who aid and abet that state.” They also approvingly quote Osama bin Laden’s claim that for many “disempowered” people, “Americans are the worst terrorists in the world”—thereby inviting students to consider Osama a legitimate spokesperson for the “disempowered.” Speaking at a memorial concert on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, George Wolfe of Ball State University’s peace studies program suggested that we “reflect on what we as Americans may have done or not done, to invoke such extreme hatred.” The Kroc Institute’s David Cortright agrees: “We must ask ourselves . . . what the United States has done to incur such wrath."
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One peace studies motif holds that the U.S. intentionally preserves its enemies to justify military expenses. According to a 2000 article by Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, for instance, the Pentagon deplored the prospect of peace between the Koreas because it “would erase the most menacing of our putative ‘rogue state’ adversaries” and thus “imperil . . . future military appropriations.” (For Klare, North Korea is only “putatively” a rogue state.) The director of Cornell’s peace studies program, Matthew Evangelista, blames the cold war on the U.S. Defense Department and claims that it ended only because a good-hearted, newly enlightened Gorbachev “heeded the advice of transnational [peace] activists.” You might think that no one could fall for such nonsense. But keep in mind that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and that students starting college in 2007 arrived in the world a year later. They don’t remember the cold war—and are ripe targets for disinformation.

As for America’s response to terrorism, Barash and Webel tidily sum up the view of many peace studies professors: “A peace-oriented perspective condemns not only terrorist attacks but also any violent response to them.” How should democracies respond to aggression? Hold dialogue. Make concessions. Apologize. Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 capitulation to Hitler at Munich taught—or should have taught—that appeasement just puts off a final reckoning, giving an enemy time to gain strength. The foundation of the Peace Racket’s success lies in forgetting this lesson. Peace studies students discover that the lesson of World War II is the evil of war itself and the need to prevent it by all possible means—which, of course, is exactly what Chamberlain thought he was doing in Munich. What they learn, in short, is the opposite of the war’s real lesson.

Warblogger Frank Martin described his visit to the military cemetery at Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where a teenage guide said that the Allied soldiers “were fighting for bridges; how silly that they would all fight for something like that.” Martin was outraged: “I tried to explain that they weren’t fighting for bridges, but for his and his families’ freedom.” That teenager articulated precisely the kind of thinking that peace professors seek to instill in their students—that freedom is at best an overvalued asset that can hinder peacemaking, and at worst a lie, and that those who harp on it are either American propagandists or dupes who’ve fallen for the propaganda. In March, Yusra Moshtat, an associate of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, and Jan Oberg, director of the foundation, wrote that “words like democracy and freedom are deceptive, cover-ups or Unspeak.” And in a 1997 speech at a Texas peace foundation, Oscar Arias, ex-president of Costa Rica and founder of his own peace foundation, described the American preoccupation with freedom versus tyranny as “obsolete,” “oversimplified,” and above all “dangerous,” because it could lead to war. In other words, if you want to ensure peace, worry less about freedom. Appease tyranny, accept it, embrace it—and there’ll be no more war.
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Take the case of Brett Mock, who writes in FrontPage Magazine that a peace studies class he’d taken in 2004 at Ball State University—“indoctrination rather than education,” as he puts it—had been “designed entirely to delegitimize the use of the military in the defense of our country.” The teacher, George Wolfe, “would not allow any serious study of the reasons for the use of force in response to an attack,” and students were expected to “parrot . . . back views we did not agree with.” To get full credit, moreover, Mock reports, students had to “meditate at the Peace Studies center,” “attend Interfaith Fellowship meetings,” or join Peace Workers—a group that Wolfe founded and that, according to Sara Dogan of Students for Academic Freedom, “is part of a coalition of radical groups that includes the Muslim Students Association . . . and the Young Communist League.” Kyle Ellis, another Ball State student, added that “Wolfe has required students to attend a screening of the antiwar propaganda film Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the War in Iraq, without material critical of the film and representing the other side.”

Then there’s Andrew Saraf, who in 2006 objected publicly to the one-sidedness of a peace studies course taught at his Bethesda high school by Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy. “The ‘class,’ ” Saraf complained, “is headed by an individual with a political agenda, who wants to teach students the ‘right’ way of thinking by giving them facts that are skewed in one direction.” McCarthy shrugged off the criticism, having long ago admitted his course’s bias: “Over the years, I’ve had suggestions from other teachers to offer what they call ‘balance’ in my courses, that I should give students ‘the other side.’ I’m never sure exactly what that means. After assigning students to read Gandhi I should have them also read Carl von Clausewitz? After Martin Luther King’s essay against the Vietnam War, Colin Powell’s memoir favoring the Persian Gulf War? After Justice William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall’s views opposing the death penalty, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein’s favoring it? After a woman’s account of her using a nonviolent defense against a rapist, the thwarted rapist’s side?” (Note, by the way, the facile juxtaposition of Bush and Saddam.)
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The more one considers oneself a global citizen, of course, the less one considers oneself an American citizen whose loyalty is to the Constitution and its freedoms. Each new global citizen, in fact, transfers his loyalty to the Peace Racket. No wonder these students often sound like cultists: “I have pledged my passion, dedication, and undying energy to the World Peace Program and the ongoing fight for a more peaceful world for all people.” They may think that they’ve figured out the world (“Global Militarism and Human Survival . . . has allowed me to analyze how the United States’ military agenda denies indigenous rights and crushes people’s hopes for social justice all over the world”), but all they’re doing is regurgitating ideological clichés. (more)

What Does 1 + 1 = 2 Mean?: Mathematics and Religiously-Based Explanations

By Joe Carter
The Evangelical Outpost

Several years ago I made the assertion on this blog that evangelicals should "think Christianly" about their work and fields of study. I also claimed that we are merely fooling ourselves if we believe that we can approach our vocations with a sense of religious neutrality. Naturally, some people were skeptical. Even those who agreed with my general point did not see, for example, how there could be a particularly Christian view to hard subjects like mathematics.
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Even the concept that 1 + 1 = 2, which almost all people agree with on a surface level, has different meanings based on what theories are proposed as answers. These theories, claims philosopher Roy Clouser, show that going more deeply into the concept of 1 + 1 = 2 reveals important differences in the ways it is understood, and that these differences are due to the divinity beliefs they presuppose.
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A belief is a religious belief, says Clouser, provided that (1) It is a belief in something(s) or other as divine, or (2) It is a belief concerning how humans come to stand in relation to the divine. The divine, according to Clouser, is whatever is "just there." He contends that self-existence is the defining characteristic of divinity, so that the control of theories by a belief about what is self-existent is the same as control by a divinity belief and thus amounts to religious control of all theories.
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Different traditions, religions, and belief systems may disagree about what or who has divine status, or whether such an ontological concept should be considered a "religious belief." But what they all agree upon is that something has such a status. A theist, for instance, will say that the divine is God while a materialist will claim that matter is what fills the category of divine. Therefore, if we examine our concepts in enough detail, we discover that at a deeper level we're not agreeing on what the object is that we're talking about. Our explanations and theories about things will vary depending on what is presupposed as the ultimate explainer. And the ultimate explainer can only be the reality that has divine status.

Returning to our example, we find that the meaning of 1 + 1 = 2 is dependent on how we answer certain questions, such as: What do "1" or "2" or "+" or "=" stand for? What are those things? Are they abstract or must they have a physical existence? And how do we know that 1 + 1 = 2 is true? How do we attain that knowledge?
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Leibnitz's view -- When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, an inventor of the calculus, was asked by one of his students, "Why is one and one always two, and how do we know this?" Leibnitz replied, "One and one equals two is an eternal, immutable truth that would be so whether or not there were things to count or people to count them." Numbers, numerical relationships, and mathematical laws (such as the law of addition) exist in this abstract realm and are independent of any physical existence. In Leibnitz's view, numbers are real things that exist in a dimension outside of the physical realm and would exist even if no human existed to recognize them.

Russell's view -- Bertrand Russell took a position diametrically opposed to Leibnitz. Russell believed it was absurd to think that there is another dimension with all the numbers in it and claimed that math was essentially nothing more than a short cut way of writing logic. In Russell's view, logical classes and logical laws -- rather than numbers and numerical relationships -- are the real things that exist in a dimension outside of the physical realm.

Mill's view -- John Stuart Mill took a third position that denied the extra-dimensional existence of numbers and logic. Mill believed that all that we can know to exist are our own sensations -- what we can see, taste, hear, and smell. And while we may take for granted that the objects we see, taste, hear, and smell exist independently of us, we cannot know even this. Mill claims that 1 and 2 and + stand for sensations, not abstract numbers or logical classes. Because they are merely sensations, 1 + 1 has the potential to equal 5, 345, or even 1,596. Such outcomes may be unlikely but, according to Mill, they are not impossible.

Dewey's view -- The American philosopher John Dewey took another radical position, implying that the signs 1 + 1 = 2 do not really stand for anything but are merely useful tools that we invent to do certain types of work. Asking whether 1 + 1 = 2 is true would be as nonsensical as asking if a hammer is true. Tools are neither true nor false; they simply do some jobs and not others. What exists is the physical world and humans (biological entities) that are capable of inventing and using such mathematical tools.
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What all of the explanations have in common, what all non-theistic views share, is a tendency to produce theories that are reductionist -- the theory claims to have found the part of the world that everything else is either identical with or depends on. This is why the Christian view on math, science, and everything else must ultimately differ from theories predicated on other religious beliefs. (more)

What Did Jesus Believe About Scripture?

By J. P. Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

Jesus’ view of Scripture

It is no accident that for nearly two thousand years the church has believed and taught what is called a verbal, plenary view of the Bible’s inspiration. To be sure, this way of putting it, and the employment of an associated term “inerrancy” is of more recent vintage, but the associated concepts are old, indeed. The church has taught that verbal, plenary inspiration is what one discovers upon close inspection of Jesus’ own teachings about Scripture. Here is a definition of this view: The inspiration of Scripture is God’s superintending of human authors so that by using their own individual personalities they wrote without error in the original text His revelation, His inspired truth. Inspiration implies inerrancy, i.e., included in what the Bible teaches about its own inspiration is the idea that the Bible is inerrant (inerrancy is part of what it means to say the Bible is inspired). To claim that the Bible is inerrant is to claim that, when properly interpreted, everything the Bible teaches to be true is true. The Bible contains no errors, including errors of fact, ethics, or doctrine.

This definition comports well with three aspects of Jesus’ implicit and explicit view of Scripture. First, Jesus held that Scripture’s assertions are true. This is nicely illustrated in two texts. John 10: 35 says “the Scripture cannot be broken.” In context this means that it cannot be found to assert a falsehood. Jesus is arguing that if people in Old Testament times were called gods in the sense of judges who stood in God’s place, then the people should not react if Jesus calls himself the Son of God. He should be given the chance to clarify and demonstrate his claim. Now his argument depends on the fact that in ancient days people were really called gods in the limited sense just mentioned. He is confident of this because scripture says so (cf. Psalm 82:6) and “Scripture cannot be broken;” if it says something happened, it happened. Similarly, Jesus taught that all (each and every) things taught about him had to happen (Luke 18:31; 24:44). Why all of them and why did they have to happen? The underlying assumption is that everything Scripture asserts is true. Thus, Jesus can simply claim, “Thy word is truth” (John 17:3).

Jesus did not believe all the truth we can know about God is in the Bible—for example, he thought we could learn about God by observing the sun and rain (Matthew 5:44-45). Nor did Jesus believe all commands of Scripture were equally weighty; there are, he said, lesser and weightier matters of the Law (Matthew 23:23). But Jesus did believe all teachings of Scripture were equally true.

Second, Jesus held that inspiration characterizes Scripture down to its morphemes—the smallest units of language that convey meaning. For example, “a” in “atheism” is a morpheme that conveys meaning. Thus, inspiration is not a mere feature of paragraphs, sentences, or the general drift of a passage. Within the proper framework of interpretation, the very words themselves (in the original Hebrew and Greek texts) were inspired. In the heat of theological debate, Jesus defended views in which his entire case turned on an implicit tense of a verb (Matthew 22:32) or the choice of a single word (Matthew 22:43-45). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that even the smallest letter or stroke of God’s Word would be fulfilled (found to be true). The smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet is a yodh, roughly equivalent to the size of a comma when compared to ordinary letters in English. A stroke was tiny little dash mark that distinguished a Hebrew “r” from a “d”. These are morphemes in Hebrew.

Finally, Jesus held a plenary view of inspiration, i.e., that all the components of the Old Testament were equally inspired. This set him apart from some (e.g., the Sadducees) who accepted only the inspiration of the Books of Moses and others who held that the Law was more inspired than, say, the prophets. Not so for Jesus. In Luke 24:44 Jesus uses a widely employed threefold division to refer to the inspired canon of Scripture—“the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms”—a canon that includes the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Bible and excludes Intertestamental writings. However, in Matthew 5:17-19 Jesus uses an odd, lesser used phrase to refer to the same canon—“the Law or (not and) the Prophets.” In so doing, Jesus means to place the “Prophets” (the rest of the Old Testament) on an equal footing with the Books of Moses.
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When a person quotes a source, that person has a purpose, an intention for his own communication that he uses the quote to realize. What matters is not the accuracy of the quotation per se, but the adequacy of the quotation for the specific purposes of the quoter’s own utterance. If I paraphrase the President’s recent speech to give a friend an accurate sense of his general strategy for the economy, it doesn’t matter if I don ‘t cite him accurately word for word since my purpose is appropriately accomplished by a paraphrase. The paraphrase must accurately reflect the President’s views in keeping with the general, not detailed or specific point I am making.

Thus, different gospel writers paraphrase Jesus’ speeches a bit differently for different purposes and audiences, the New Testament often paraphrases citations of Old Testament texts that are not word for word accurate, and Jesus’ use of the Septuagint follows this pattern. All that matters is that the quote is an accurate representation of the original for the purposes of the citation. After all, not every detail of the original source is relevant for the speaker’s purposes, and he is free to paraphrase in such cases. (more)

The Feeling Intellect: Finding God Is Impossible Unless He Reveals Himself

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Bottom Line: The intellect cannot be divorced from feelings or emotion. The highest intellectual activity will be motivated by the highest emotions to see God, but cannot find God without His revealing Himself. Religion without revelation cannot see God. Knowing is sterile unless God gives it meaning and passion.
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Dead, but sane?

Passionate, but crazy?

These often seem like the two options in life. Think clearly and live like a machine or be poetic and lose the ordered intellect.

Christians refuse either and her greatest poets (like Dante) have demanded a passion that ends in a vision of God that is fantastic and geometric.

The Christian poets and philosophers have always declared the two are united in heaven without confusion.
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Great Christians such as Thomas, Dante, Luther, and C.S. Lewis may have disagreed on how the mystery was to be precisely understood, but they agreed that when it was correctly understood it would be precisely true and passionately beautiful. In fact, they could disagree in theology, philosophy, and hymnody precisely because they agreed that Christianity was a revelation of God to man that empowered a passionate intellect!

This is a terrific power to unleash in mankind and the disunity that sometimes occurs amongst the divines is less shocking than there startling unity on so much.

What humanity needs is a ‘feeling intellect’ and the proper place for that feeling intellect to be directed. This property of the soul is a way to motivate the mind and order the passions of individual persons.
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Reason is not just a “logic machine” that can control the lower passions. What motivates the desire for logic? What motivates the passion for geometric precision or scientific understanding?

This is the feeling intellect about which William’s writes so effectively. For Williams this property is not confined to individual men, but is also a greater cosmic reality. This recognition begins, however, with the activation of a logical passion or a passionate precision in the feeling intellect.
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Plato has suggested three parts to the human soul: a multi-form beast (erotic passions), a lion (higher passions), and a ’small man.’ It is the man, who contains the intellect, that should govern the rest, but this is difficult. Fortunately, he has one advantage: as a mini-me (!) he contains all the parts of my soul and so knows the way these parts should be ordered.

This model-man placed by Plato inside the head is rightly ordered with passions and emotions that are directed by reason. In a well ordered soul, the ‘model man’ in the head can govern the greater man in the body because it understands each part of the nature of the whole. It is a paradigm for the greater man.

The intellect in this picture is not just ‘reason,’ but an intellect with passion (a small amount!) at its immediate disposal.

What does the whole man do? He seeks, as is suggested in Timaeus , for “right ordering” (justice) in the cosmos. Man, if rightly ordered, looks for the Feeling Intellect in the whole. He knows and loves it having seen an image of it in himself, but there the problem arises.
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Unlike Plato, the Christian has the advantage of the God who is our proper End having revealed himself to mankind. As Williams writes the quest for the cosmic Feeling Intellect without the Revelation of God in Christ Jesus is as likely to end in demon worship as anything even remotely good.

In commenting on Williams, Lewis adds (Arthurian Torso, pp. 118-119) that acknowledging the mere reality of the Feeling Intellect is not enough to save mankind. The vision of the Feeling Intellect can be turned to evil as well as good: ending in an Infernal Vision as well as the Beautific.

It can worship the sign instead of the One to whom the sign points. This is the arrogant student (Lord have mercy!) who worships the creature rather than the Creator, the poem rather than the Poet, and the art rather that the Artist.

This arrogance is heard whenever mankind cries out for culture for culture’s sake. Even great men, great Christians, can fall into this wicked idolatry.
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Great poetry and great music do reach the feeling intellect. They are able to inspire it and then the high passions motivate the intellect to see the Good, True, and Beautiful. This seems good, but it is worldly wisdom that can only destroy and not bring true salvation.

In that quest, man cannot succeed, but God has mercy on fallen man and reaches down to Him. God who is known to be unknown reveals Himself.

At that point the temptation for men who reject this revelation is to turn to the worship of pure “soul” or intellectual activity. The poet can love his poetry, the artist his art, and the musician his music. This seems better, but it will equally fail. Now the man is loving that stirs and frames love and not the object of that love.

Culture is not the answer. It too is a false god if it is sought for its own sake. It can stir the small feeling intellect in a man to reach out to the Divine, but it cannot find a sure resting place.

It is easy to go the wrong way if man simply looks for the known Unknown in his own wisdom. Even great poetry, art, or music at best only wakes us up from our sleep and shows us that we are lost. Only God can guide us back to Himself from this dark place.

Christianity is a revelation from God to man. It is the Way God provides from the dark wood for man’s small feeling intellect to find the great objective fact of the cosmic Mind. In the person of Jesus Christ, God then reveals Himself to man in a way man can love, the Feeling Intellect empowering man’s feeling intellect to find its proper end. (more)

Counseling with Boethius

By Greg Peters
Scriptorium Daily

Could it be that when counseling pastorally that I too could (or should) bring Lady Philosophy into the session? Have my past efforts at pastoral counseling been too simplistic? Did I really bring long-term consolation to those whom I counseled? It is tempting to sit with grieving Christian parents who may have miscarried early in a pregnancy assuring them that “God has a plan for all events in our lives, including the tragedies.” The statement is theologically correct, but pastorally insensitive. Though the couple may be saying, “why did God do this to us?,” they are likely asking a deeper question, “why do my friends who aren’t serving God having healthy children while I am unable to bring a child to birth?” A robust theological discussion of God’s agency in all of life’s events would be the last thing that this couple probably wants to hear. Rather, like Boethius they may find consolation in hearing that true living comes from participation in God. Though the impious may seem happy, true happiness is only found in God. These are the truths that Lady Philosophy was able to help Boethius see and understand, thus changing his perspective on why he was imprisoned and why he would ultimately be martyred. It brought him much-needed consolation. For me, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is a reminder that only Truth brings lasting consolation. Anything else will only be a Band-Aid on a gushing wound. My desire as a pastoral counselor must be to bring true consolation. Thus, my role is akin to that of Lady Philosophy — I have the words of wisdom, I must impart them in such a way as to bring deep and abiding consolation. (more)

John Wesley’s Mom Whoops Aristotle

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Aristotle supposes the world to have been eternal, that is, streamed by connatural result and emanation from God, as the light from the sun, and that there was no instant of duration assignable of God’s existence in which the world didn’t also actually coexist.

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This error seems grounded on a true notion of the eternal infinite goodness of God, which he truly supposes must eternally be communicating good to something or other, and it was his want of the knowledge of revealed religion that probably led him into it.

Aristotle, other words, was half right. It’s true that God is infinitely good, and that his goodness is of a kind to be giving itself away to others. But that doesn’t mean that God always needed to have a world around to give his goodness to. Aristotle’s problem, Susanna argued, was that he had never heard of the Trinity.

For had he ever heard of that great article of our Christian faith concerning the Holy Trinity, he had then perceived the almighty Goodness eternally communicating being and all the fullness of the Godhead to the divine Logos, his uncreated Word, between whose existence and that of the Father there is not one moment assignable. As likewise the eternal Spirit, streaming from the Father and Son by connatural result and emanation as light from the sun…

The little old world doesn’t have to bear the burden of being God’s eternal recipient of self-giving goodness. The eternal Son has eternally existed alongside the Father, receiving eternally and fully the goodness of God the Father. Had Aristotle known this, he could have kept his correct notion of God as self-giving goodness, without being forced into the error of thinking the world was God’s eternal partner.

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Consider the infinite boundless goodness of the ever blessed Trinity, adore the stupendous mystery of divine love! That God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost should all concur in the work of man’s redemption! What but pure goodness could move or excite God, who is perfect essential blessedness! That cannot possibly receive any accession of perfection or happiness from his creatures. What, I say, but love, but goodness, but infinite incomprehensible love and goodness could move him to provide such a remedy for the fatal lapse of his sinful unworthy creatures? (Works p. 225)

Her starting point was a joyful certainty that God was not needy, but absolutely self-sufficing. He created the world not because he needed an outlet for his love, and certainly not because his blessedness was cramped and needed more objects in order to increase:

Then consider what that blessed Being is to us –A creator, he made us of nothing; we are the effect of infinite power, wisdom and goodness! He had no need of us, being perfectly happy in the contemplation of his own perfections; therefore not to increase but communicate his happiness and glory did he give us being. (Works p. 304, dated 1709)

The doctrine of the Trinity is a complex matter, and a variety of things might come to mind when you think of the doctrine. Most Christians, sadly, immediately think of the tension between the three and the one, and start casting about for analogies for it. For Susanna Wesley, apparently the first thought that leaped to mind when the subject of the Trinity came up was, instead, the absolute self-sufficiency of God as a triune fellowship of love. Closely linked to that divine aseity, however, was the unexacted, unaccountable freedom of his generosity in creating and redeeming us.

We know there is but one living and true God, though revealed to us under three characters –that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In God the Father we live, move, and have our natural being; in God the Son, as Redeemer of mankind, we have our spiritual being since the fall; and by the operation of his Holy Spirit the work of grace is begun and carried on in the soul; and there is no other name given under heaven by which men can be saved, but that of the Lord Jesus. (more)