If Hitchens Is Right

I've been listening to some interviews of Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens concerning the release of their upcoming documentary Collision, which shows them debating whether Christianity is good for the world (click on the title of this post for more info). Hitchens is the global village atheist, and I wonder what would be true if Hitchens is right. I propose the following:

If Hitchens is right there will be no final justice.

If Hitchens is right no one will find out who won the debate.

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as a debate.

If Hitchens is right there is no standard for distinguishing good and evil.

If Hitchens is right there is no basis for his condemnations of wickedness.

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as being right.

If Hitchens is right why should anyone care about being wrong?

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as "good for the world."

Immortality without Eternal Life

Christian bioethicist, Nigel Cameron says:

In the end, taking life made in God's image may not be as bad, in God's eyes, as making life in our own.

Cameron is talking about genetic engineering and the problems it poses to a Christian understanding of humanity. One trans-humanis has said, "We are going to be as gods, we might as well get good at it." He's talking about our ability to isolate certain genes and genetically impart them to our future offspring.

Companies are actually at work patenting genes that will one day be for sale. So if you want your child to be immune to certain diseases in your family, you can buy the right kind of genes to impart that immunity. Great idea, right? But you can also determine eye and hair color as well as select genes for a forty-four inch vertical jump.

The trans-humanists believe that his will eventually lead to the genetic perfection of mankind and even to an immortal body made of synthetic material. Adbusters published the "Cyborg Manifesto" a few years ago in order to alert us to the views of the trans-humanists. As Cameron says, "These are not sci-fi crazies" but people who speak on the National Science Foundation Platforms. Here is part of the Adbusters parody of their views:

Trapped for millions of years in nature's garden with God calling the shots, we have finally discovered an escape hatch. Advances in computer technology, biotech, and nanotech have unlocked the promise of controlling our own evolutionary future, of burning the old DNA blueprint. For the first time in our history we can seize total control. We can declare the human body, its clumsy bones, its tiny brain, its cumbersome systems, a failed experiment. We can transcend our own biological vessels and decide for ourselves what it means to be human. For far too long we followed a genetic script handed down from on high. Now at last we get to direct, to make history, rather than just acting it out (Adbusters, The Cyborg Manifesto, last paragraph, qt. in Mars Hill Audio, vol. 81).

This is our folly: We want immortality without eternal life.

Doubt vs. Trust

When we doubt God, we think we know better or would do better. Given our limited nature, this is the height of arrogance. We need to trust God with his own universe.

God and the Storm

Ran across a good quote in a student's reading journal:

Sometimes you need to stop telling God how big the storm is, and start telling the storm how big God is.

Where Does One Find Happiness after the Industrial Revolution?

If it's generally true that the industrial revolution made work less satisfying, perhaps we responded by trying to make spending more satisfying. Instead of working to find fulfillment, we started working for a paycheck, and we all know what to do with that!

The Comeback Calvin

Timothy George recently wrote a good article in "Christianity Today" on the perseverance of Calvinism. See the link below or click on the title of this post to read.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/september/14.27.html

What's Wrong with a Secular State?

Peter Leithart published an article at the "First Things" website on our deficient understanding of the secular:

And yet, some Christians and many historians and sociologists view secularization as the genius of public Christianity, especially public Protestantism. In contrast to ancient Judaism and Islam, both of which imagine a public space dominated by a single religion, the church separates the sphere of shared life from the sphere of the church, reserving the sphere of the church for believers and regulating it by the demands of the gospel but defending the secular, neutral character of the public square.

John Milbank smells an equivocation in this argument. Western theology, he notes, has always acknowledged the reality of the saeculum, but this is understood in temporal rather than spatial terms. For Augustine, every earthly peace or justice, every political order, is relative to the absolute order, justice and peace of the eschaton. This secular age is a mixed age, during which wheat and tares grow up together. But this temporal secularity, Milbank argues, does not imply a morally neutral, secular public space, in part because, according to the classic view, both church and state partake of the conditions of the saeculum. The secular, Milbank insists, was not a natural order discovered when the veil of sacrality was lifted; the secular had to be created, and then defended, intellectually, politically, and even theologically. Early in the modern period, politicians and theorists formed, with the cooperation of theologians, the secular arena as a public space of amoral power politics, unrestrained economic self-interest, morally neutral social custom and structure. No word from God is permitted within this space, which is a playground where humans are freed to pursue their private happiness without any reference to ultimate ends. (Click on the title for a link to the full article.)

This touches on my earlier discussion of the freedom afforded by a state church. It turns out that Patrick Henry proposed that Christianity be designated as the state religion of Virginia, where he was a four time governor. He wasn't specifying a particular denomination, just Christianity, but he was up against Jefferson and Madison. His proposal did not carry the day though he tried several times. Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom did pass and Madison considered the establishment of Christianity to be a violation of the Roger William's tradition of "offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every religion" (qt. Moynahan, The Faith, 592). Patrick Henry's evangelical voice was a minority among our other deistic founders.

Stanley Fish argues that the First Amendment to the Constitution views religion as a dangerous element when combined with government. No doubt state religions have been coercive in the past, but they have also produced the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the Reformation. Would the Thomistic synthesis, the Sistine Chapel, the reforms of Luther and Calvin, and the music of Johan Sebastian Bach been possible without Christendom state-religion?

Christendom had its share of abuses but it also testified to the fact that "all things hold together in Christ" (Col. 1:17). We have lost this public testimony in America, while also depriving the government of an absolute basis for law. Our government derives "its just powers from the consent of the governed" (The Declaration of Independence). We are still in middle of this experiment which I suggest is going badly. Without a transcendent basis for moral law, right and wrong is only what the individual thinks it is. With no consensus possible, radical individualism tears at the moral fabric of society. The only healing possible comes through repentance and hope for a more robust public square where the church and the state dialogue until the coming of Christ.

Barach Obama recently disbanded the president's council on bioethics, where Christians had a voice on the dignity of human life made in the image of God. The president said that he needed a policy group not an advisory committee. Yikes! This is a step backward. A state with no thoughtful Christian input on one of the most significant questions of our time is secular in the worst way.

A Lazy Thinker

William James said:

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

Are they found in James' conclusion to his rhetorical question? A lazy thinker forgets to test his theory by applying it to itself.

Subjective Objectivity

Objectivity is seeing reality as it is. How do you do that?

OK, I've tried to establish that objectivity is not neutrality. We can't achieve objectivity by hanging upside down and shaking out the presuppositions. We have to pour in the right presuppositions by hearing the word of God and studying the world of God. Thus the right presuppositions about reality bestow a subjectivity that serves as the means to objectivity. Our presuppositions become the mental, emotional, interpretive instrument that focuses and expands our perceptions of reality. Our perceptions and interpretations must be constantly fine tuned and readjusted by encounters with the subject over our whole lives on into our sanctified eternity.

When radical post-moderns deny objective reality they confuse reality with our perceptions of it. Objective reality exists though we don't perceive it clearly, but as Paul says, "through a glass darkly." Kant said there are no "uninterpreted facts." But there are uninterpreted facts or we wouldn't be able to test our interpretations. The fact that we can test our knowledge means that there is a reality to test it against. There is a reality to account for and the better our accounting the closer we come to seeing objective reality.

When it comes to studying history, I've also argued that we have to acknowledge our presuppositions and realize how they affect our interpretation. Then we can set them in reserve while we try to enter the worldview of another. In this way, we strive to put the subject in historical perspective. After we have accurately understood, we have earned the right to critique and appreciate. We evaluate through our subjective worldview through which we hopefully perceive objective reality in an accurate way. We may congratulate ourselves on having achieved this whenever somebody pays us the compliment of having understood their point-of-view.

In sum, we can be objective in the sense seeing reality as it is from God's perspective and being fair to our subject's self-understanding. Right?

In other words, we need to be impartial when fairness is called for, and partial whenever the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are at stake.