Friday, April 5, 2013

"Why I'm Not an Atheist"- Ravi Zacharias joined by Vince Vitale for Q & A

Much of the material will be familiar to those who, like myself, have heard Ravi Zacharias before, but as those who do will also know there is always enough new material that he brings to bear to make it well worth watching.

This is presented at McCosh Hall Princeton University, Princeton New Jersey. This event was streamed live and took place at 8PM EDT 04/04/2013 (1PM 05/04/2013NZDT)

For some reason thankfully the full video is back up again and here is Ravi's address: "Why I am not an atheist"



The following video covers a lengthy question and answer session with Ravi and Vince Vitale which  offers valuable insights and is longer than his actual address:



Wednesday, April 3, 2013

'I begged them not to kill my baby'


On 22 March 2013 a young man, or rather, an armed youth with an accomplice held up a woman at gunpoint and demanded her money. At her refusal he turned and shot her infant- asleep in the pushchair- in the face, killing the baby. I am not sure whether I am more shocked at this event, or horrified at my own lack of shock at hearing about it, what about you?

What are the dehumanizing influences at work in society today?

The headline in the Mail on line reads:

'I begged them not to kill my baby': Two teens arrested for 'shooting dead 13-month-old toddler in his stroller as mother watched in horror'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297392/Sherry-West-tells-robbers-shot-sleeping-baby-Antonio-dead-

Demarquis Elkins, 17, and an unidentified 14-year-old boy attempted to rob Sherry West in Brunswick, Georgia but when she said she had no money, they shot her son in the head.
 

Do I see a connection between what is happening in the street and what is happening in the"hallowed" halls of academia? Absolutely. What are some of the factors that dehumanize people?
The mechanistic form [of dehumanization] occurs when features of human nature (e.g. cognitive flexibility, warmth, agency) are denied to targets. Targets of mechanistic dehumanization are seen as cold, rigid, interchangeable, lacking agency, and likened to machines or objects. (Wikipedia- emphasis mine)

  In a previous post I have quoted some interesting work by two well known thinkers of our time. Richard Tarnas and C.S. Lewis provide some helpful insight into the dehumanizing effects of modern scientism.

The following article which appeared in a number of publications some time ago serves to highlight why "free will" is an issue deserving to be looked at in our society with a lot more attention than it currently gets from the Christian Church. I have for some time highlighted why free will as it is understood commonly by evangelicals, seriously needs in house discussion as it effects so many facets of the Gospel.

But quite aside from this are the implications for all society and Western culture in particular because of the pervasive influence of scientism and science. I make this distinction because many scientists exceed the boundaries of science and the article below demonstrates this crossover. 

What follows is summed up in the phrase: neurophysiological determinism: 

 Free will is a figment of our imaginations- Joe Bennett Waikato Times, 02/05/2012

Neuroscientists, stop reading now. All this is old hat to you. But it's new hat to me, and fascinating new hat, and liberating new hat. And I think I'm going to wear it, or at least try it on for size.
But first an apology. A month or so back a gentleman emailed me about something I'd said on the radio. He wrote, and I quote, "free will is a childish delusion".
"Scoff," I wrote back. "Pooh pooh. I have free will. My free will is writing this email. Without free will we are automata."
Since then, however, I have been on a wee journey and I would like to retract my scoff and pooh pooh. But I have forgotten the gentleman's name and deleted his email. So if you're reading this, sir, sorry. You were right. I was wrong.
The change of mind followed last week's column about the mutiny of the body. In response I got several emails directing me to some neuroscientific research. It seems that neuroscientists have been nibbling at the idea of free will for years without telling me.
For example, they attached electrodes to people's skulls and then asked the people to click a computer mouse at a moment of their choosing. The boffins found that when people decided to click the mouse, their brain had already begun the physical process of clicking. In other words, the decision to click had been made before the people realised they'd made it. The click was already going to happen.
There were numerous similar experiments. They all suggested that when we think we decide to do something of our own free will, our consciousness is merely catching up with a decision that we have already made. We are rationalising after the fact. We are deluding ourselves into thinking we are in conscious control of our actions. It's a nice, consoling delusion, but a delusion nonetheless.
In another experiment two people sat at a ouija board and put a finger on the glass, with instructions to move and stop the glass when they felt like it. But there was a trick. One of the fingerers was a stooge. He'd been told to do nothing at all, to be passive. The only person moving and stopping the glass was the other chap.
After the experiment this other chap was asked how often he had made the decision to move or stop the glass and how often the stooge had. He said it was roughly 50-50. Even though he made every decision himself, he ascribed half of them to his passive partner.
He saw the glass stop or start and guessed who'd done it. He didn't know when he was making decisions. He just made them. Conscious free will doesn't exist.
Still disbelieving? Still scoffing and pooh poohing? Well so was I, sort of. But then a while later I was in the shower singing You'll Never Walk Alone. It's a splendid shower song, a tap rattler and a tonic on a weekday morning. But when I asked myself at what exact moment I'd decided to sing I realised I hadn't consciously decided to sing. I'd just started singing.
Since then I've been paying close attention to myself. Getting up to make coffee, to check the mail box, to play with the dog, all these things just happen. I must decide to do them, but I am not aware of the decision until I find myself doing them.
None of which is surprising. We don't decide to breathe, or dream, or digest food, or move our feet when we walk, or be scared during earthquakes or squeal with delight when a televangelist gets caught in a whorehouse. We do these things and millions of other things without conscious decision, without free will. So why not all of them?
Acknowledging the absence of free will does not diminish us. We continue to make the same decisions as we made before. We just recognise that we are both machine and driver and that they are one and the same thing and they go where they will go. There is no point in beating ourselves up about it or trying to affect it. And thus we lose the false constructed self who imagines he's at the wheel. And with him go those twin bogeys of self-love and self-hate. Try it. It's most refreshing.
And now, having spent the morning piggybacking on neuroscientists whose findings should enrage bishops, bugger judges and make people happy, I'm going to spend the afternoon finding out how I've chosen to enjoy myself.
Joe Bennett.

The implications for society if this scientism is taken as reality are unthinkable. While many over the years have written me off as a fundamentalist nutter who denies" free will" I have affirmed over and over my "obsession" is to rightly distinguish between human will according to the only objective authority we have, the Christian Bible, and philosophical libertarian free will. While I seriously condemn libertarian free will on the one hand- within Christendom; I am just as ready to defend the reality of human will  in the marketplace of ideas-as valid and incompatible with the sort of physical determinism espoused in Joe Bennett's article above.

As one commentator said with regard to Bennett's piece:
This can be good news for many but for others it is seriously bad news - no praise no blame - maybe the rich don't deserve their money and the criminals don't deserve their punishment.

If this becomes a social more, an accepted piece of anthropological reality- what becomes of our whole society which is built on a voluntary moral structure? Humanity is thereby reduced to mere animality, this ultimate nihilism is already at work within society. No free-will, no right, no wrong, no accountability, no meaning or purpose, no intentionality, no rationality, no humanity- it is all a figment of our imagination, a trick of evolutionary naturalism, a genetic mask, simply a pragmatic delusion useful for the continuation of the species. For an eloquent example of acedemia preaching the naturalistic dogma see this debate and listen carefully to the last question asked of its spokesperson Dr Alex Rosenberg.

What is especially dangerous is the fact that the four horsemen of the new atheist apocalypse, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens not only espouse this view but are avid or rather devout fundamentalist crusaders who promote and propagandize this view.  Listen to what Wikipedia quotes from Sam Harris:
In his book, The Moral Landscape, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris also argues against incompatibilist free will. He offers one thought experiment where a mad scientist represents determinism. In Harris' example, the mad scientist uses a machine to control all the desires, and thus all the behavior, of a particular human. Harris believes that it is no longer as tempting, in this case, to say the victim has "free will". Harris says nothing changes if the machine controls desires at random - the victim still seems to lack free will. Harris then argues that we are also the victims of such unpredictable desires (but due to the unconscious machinations of our brain, rather than those of a mad scientist). Based on this introspection, he writes "This discloses the real mystery of free will: if our experience is compatible with its utter absence, how can we say that we see any evidence for it in the first place?" adding that "Whether they are predictable or not, we do not cause our causes."That is, he believes there is compelling evidence of absence of free will. Harris' viewpoint implicitly assumes a philosophy of materialism, that is, that mental events are reducible to neurological occurrences.

 Research has found that reducing a person's belief in free will can make them less helpful and more aggressive. This could occur because the individual's sense of Self-efficacy suffers. (Wikipedia. Emphasis mine)

Further evidence of this has shown up in recent psychological experiments in various forms and venues. This from BBC Future 25 Sept. 2013



Are you reading this because you chose to? Or are you doing so as a result of forces beyond your control?
After thousands of years of philosophy, theology, argument and meditation on the riddle of free will, I'm not about to solve it for you in this column (sorry). But what I can do is tell you about some thought-provoking experiments by psychologists, which suggest that, regardless of whether we have free will or not, whether we believe we do can have a profound impact on how we behave.
The issue is simple: we all make choices, but could those choices be made otherwise? From a religious perspective it might seem as if a divine being knows all, including knowing in advance what you will choose (so your choices could not be otherwise). Or we can take a physics-based perspective. Everything in the universe has physical causes, and as you are part of the universe, your choices must be caused (so your choices could not be otherwise). In either case, our experience of choosing collides with our faith in a world which makes sense because things have causes.
Consider for a moment how you would research whether a belief in free will affects our behaviour. There's no point comparing the behaviour of people with different fixed philosophical perspectives. You might find that determinists, who believe free will is an illusion and that we are all cogs in a godless universe, behave worse than those who believe we are free to make choices. But you wouldn't know whether this was simply because people who like to cheat and lie become determinists (the "Yes, I lied, but I couldn't help it" excuse).
What we really need is a way of changing people’s beliefs about free will, so that we can track the effects of doing so on their behaviour. Fortunately, in recent years researchers have developed a standard method of doing this. It involves asking subjects to read sections from Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis. Crick was one of the co-discoverers of DNA’s double-helix structure, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize. Later in his career he left molecular biology and devoted himself to neuroscience. The hypothesis in question is his belief that our mental life is entirely generated by the physical stuff of the brain. One passage states that neuroscience has killed the idea of free will, an idea that most rational people, including most scientists, now believe is an illusion.
Psychologists have used this section of the book, or sentences taken from it or inspired by it, to induce feelings of determinism in experimental subjects. A typical study asks people to read and think about a series of sentences such as "Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion”, or "Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules”.
The effects on study participants are generally compared with those of other people asked to read sentences that assert the existence of free will, such as "I have feelings of regret when I make bad decisions because I know that ultimately I am responsible for my actions", or texts on topics unrelated to free will.
And the results are striking. One study reported that participants who had their belief in free will diminished were more likely to cheat in a maths test. In another, US psychologists reported that people who read Crick’s thoughts on free will said they were less likely to help others.
Bad taste
A follow-up to this study used an ingenious method to test this via aggression to strangers. Participants were told a cover story about helping the experimenter prepare food for a taste test to be taken by a stranger. They were given the results of a supposed food preference questionnaire which indicated that the stranger liked most foods but hated hot food. Participants were also given a jar of hot sauce. The critical measure was how much of the sauce they put into the taste-test food. Putting in less sauce, when they knew that the taster didn't like hot food, meant they scored more highly for what psychologists call "prosociality", or what everyone else calls being nice.
You've guessed it: Participants who had been reading about how they didn't have any free will chose to give more hot sauce to the poor fictional taster – twice as much, in fact, as those who read sentences supporting the idea of freedom of choice and responsibility.
In a recent study carried out at the University of Padova, Italy, researchers recorded the brain activity of participants who had been told to press a button whenever they wanted. This showed that people whose belief in free will had taken a battering thanks to reading Crick's views showed a weaker signal in areas of the brain involved in preparing to move. In another study by the same team, volunteers carried out a series of on-screen tasks designed to test their reaction times, self control and judgement. Those told free will didn't exist were slower, and more likely to go for easier and more automatic courses of action.
This is a young research area. We still need to check that individual results hold up, but taken all together these studies show that our belief in free will isn't just a philosophical abstraction. We are less likely to behave ethically and kindly if our belief in free will is diminished.
This puts an extra burden of responsibility on philosophers, scientists, pundits and journalists who use evidence from psychology or neuroscience experiments to argue that free will is an illusion. We need to be careful about what stories we tell, given what we know about the likely consequences.
Fortunately, the evidence shows that most people have a sense of their individual freedom and responsibility that is resistant to being overturned by neuroscience. Those sentences from Crick's book claim that most scientists believe free will to be an illusion. My guess is that most scientists would want to define what exactly is meant by free will, and to examine the various versions of free will on offer, before they agree whether it is an illusion or not.
If the last few thousands of years have taught us anything, the debate about free will may rumble on and on. But whether the outcome is inevitable or not, these results show that how we think about the way we think could have a profound effect on us, and on others.
The closing sentence of this article reminded me of a statement by Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and himself a psychoanylist who came to recognize the inherent danger in irresponsible evaluations of what it means to be human. Even our perceptions of human nature can themselves act as channels of influence in our behaviour.
"If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes … as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted, with the last stage of that corruption in … Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment-or, as the Nazi liked to say, of 'Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
When a society continues to give more and more weight to philosophical systems that inexorably and inextricably undermine all that we hold sacred about humanity- it should be no surprise that we will, in turn, reap a horrible harvest.

We turn now to Richard Dawkins as he relates the sort of determinism that he believes in, although as we shall see he is rationally inconsistent. Dawkins view is critiqued by Klaus Nurnberger in his book- Richard Dawkins' God Delusion: A Repentant Refutation:

Quotes from Dawkins are in orange.

"...if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of the bus are exactly what we should expect, along with the equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom , no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference... DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."
Nurnberger:
...At least in this passage his approach is one of stark physical and biological reductionism.  Reductionism denies meaning and purpose not only for the impersonal infrastructure of human consciousness, but for reality as such and as a whole, including the personal level of reality.
The question is how Dawkins himself can live with this idea. Does he really see himself as the victim of the evolutionary process without will, purpose and agency? Does he dance to the tune of his genes? Did he not decide to do research, publish books, and passionately propagate his atheistic stance? Is there really no trace of meaning in his life?...To deny meaning and purpose at this level of emergence is to deny humankind its humanity This can hardly be denied.
For Dawkins this pitilessly functioning universe is all there is. There is no transcendence. If nature were indeed absolute, we would be imprisoned within its dark shell without any chance of escape whatsoever. We would have no choice but to dance to the tune of chance mutations and their survival or demise in an environmental niches. We would be the helpless toys and victims of a blind impersonal fate. As I have repeatedly argued, a sense of freedom and responsibility simply cannot emerge on this basis. It is hard to imagine how Dawkins, if he took this stance seriously, could have escaped dismissive cynicism and
disempowering fatalism of the worst kind.
In fact he doesn't...On the contrary, he displays a defiant and dismissive self-certainty in his attitude to nature, life and other people. The question is on which kind of spiritual resource he draws to keep alive, active and purposeful- certainly not those of his Darwinian and naturalist convictions! The answer came when I read a passage that displays a "passionate defence of human dignity and freedom in the face of genetic determinism":
 
 Dawkins:
"We  have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism- something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
 Nurnberger:
So this is where his existential sustenance is rooted- in the mastery of the human subject over its own impersonal infrastructure. Nature is not the ultimate authority; the human being is. Human sovereignty depends on the human determination to master and transform reality into a tool for achieving humanity's purposes. The same is true for the meaningfulness of human life. Dawkins scornfully rejects the idea that atheists are nihilists. "The truly adult view...is that our life is as meaningful and as wonderful as we choose to make it"
Numberger admirably demonstrates the incoherence of Dawkins- who goes at great length to reduce humanity to genetic determinism on the one hand and with the other- like the flourish of the magicians hand- produces the rabbit out of the hat, proclaiming loudly and confidently the ultimacy in human autonomy and a life brimful of meaning if we so choose.

Having the cake and eating it as well.

The simple, but not always obvious, fact is that one cannot- consistently anyway- one cannot- with a sweep of the expansive arms of science- declare that the universe is devoid of meaning and then rocking on ones heels declare that if we try hard enough humanity can actually insert some meaning of her own into it. One might as well write a book carefully and with much  detail about how you don't know how to write a book. It is on a level of someone saying- "I cannot speak a word of English". Imagine the universe, (or perhaps to be more hip), the multiverse as a giant bubble which encompasses all of reality with nothing left over. Someone stands up and says there is no meaning. What does he mean? There being nothing outside of the multiverse, whoever stands up is standing within that bubble, and to make a denial of meaning is therefore self refuting. If there were no meaning- no-one could say there was no meaning. It would be a meaningless statement. No-one could know there was no meaning and no-one would be able to say there was none because that statement is loaded with meaning- but there is none. The universe would be locked up in meaninglessness. He might as well stand up within the bubble that encompasses all reality  and say nothing exists. Someone seriously needs to burst that bubble! (I inserted a link to the debate between Dr.s William L. Craig and Alex Rosenberg- the last question to Rosenberg was a sharp needle for that bubble)

The real rub is this: ONLY someone who transcends that universe or multiverse could make any objective universal statement about meaning. But something that transcends the universe is what the atheists are denying.   And this is where the priests of scientism see themselves, or how they would like us to see them- as transcendent  at least on a subconscious level anyway. This is the juncture at which science has become a quasi-religion and Richard Dawkins and his ilk take up the priesthood.

I reproduce here a few paragraphs from an older post: The Language of Natural Selection


In a paper written by Alvin Plantinga ("When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible." University of Notre DameIN 46556) Plantinga relates this quote by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins-

"although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin," said he, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Scientists with a naturalistic mindset have an axe to grind:
In other words Darwin finally made it possible to give a plausible explanation for the origins of complex life in such a way that intellectuals could thereby exclude the idea of God without compromising their intellectual credibility- which before then was not possible. As far as atheists are concerned "evolution is the only game in town". Here perhaps lies the clue to the religious nature and reason for the dogmatic tenacity of the theory of unguided evolution against growing evidence to the contrary.
Far from being scientifically neutral- evolution has deep religious and philosophical connotations.

Plantinga again- 
"among the secularists, evolution functions as a myth, in a technical sense of that term: a shared way of understanding ourselves at the deep level of religion, a deep interpretation of ourselves to ourselves, a way of telling us why we are here, where we come from, and where we are going."

From this it is clear that science has radically abandoned its territory of answering the "how" questions and blustered drunkenly into the realm of philosophers and theologians to ask the "why" questions.


In his book " The Biblical Philosophy of History" R.J. Rushdoony re-iterated the principle that getting an "ought from an is" poses an insurmountable problem for naturalism: 
 There is no attempt to give the obvious answer,... that meaning always escapes man when he seeks it in the realm of creation rather than in God. Because all things are made by God, nothing is understandable in terms of itself, but only in terms of God the Creator. Neither fact nor man can be understood in reference to himself alone, or to any created combination, but only in terms of God. Remove God, and, eventually, you remove meaning. John C. Greene has pointed out that the idea of evolution is philosophical and means progress, which is a value judgement. Attempts to "arrive at an objective, value-free definition of progress" soon fall. We can add that every attempt to do without God leads to an elimination not only of values, but also of meaning, as well. The issue is clear: no God, no meaning.
So we can see the truth of Rushdooney's dictum: "No God, no meaning" reflected accurately in the first quote of Dawkins above, in this Dawkins is consistent with his worldview, but then almost immediately he belies the inconsistency of his position and is forced to reinsert or sneak in meaning and purpose after all.

Another quote from Rousas J. Rushdooney:

"The only alternative to the doctrine of predestination is the assertion of the reign of total chance, of meaninglessness and brute factuality. The real issue is, what kind of predestination we shall have, predestination by God or predestination by man?"  



What then, will we turn to as an anchor of the soul, as an incontrovertible starting point for the sanctity of human life?


As always it is the same answer that was given some millennia ago: Jesus was asked if they- as God's people- should pay taxes to the occupying forces of Rome. He asked for a Roman coin. Then he asked whose image was on it? Of course the image of Ceasar was on it, then he uttered those immortal words:

"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."
This is not merely about taxes and duties to civil society, no it goes far deeper.

What he was saying concerned intrinsic values and justice. Who, (at least on an earthly level) makes the system of value intrinsic to coinage work? Who makes it possible? The one whose image is stamped on the coin- he gives the value- he validates this otherwise relatively worthless piece of metal the value which is accorded to it. Without which it really is just a valueless conglomeration of refined terrestrial stardust. Caesar gave the value to it- therefore render what is just and true to Caesar as the legitimating power of it, the one from whom, and through whom it derives its value.

Now ask yourself where your value comes from? Ask yourself why humanity should have intrinsic value, and why that sleeeping infant is of infinite value?

Whose image do you bear?

Whose image do you bear?

Why is human life sacred?  Because we bear the image of our maker.


                                                                        If chance be

the Father of all flesh,

disaster is his rainbow in the sky

and when you hear

State of Emergency!

Sniper Kills Ten!

Troops on Rampage!

Whites go Looting!

Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man

worshipping his maker.

Steve Turner, (English journalist), “Creed,” his satirical poem on the modern mind. Taken from Ravi Zacharias’ book Can Man live Without God? Pages 42-44





Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Rosemary McLeod: The Delusion of Human Rationality-Northern Advocate March 2013



OPINION: 
There is no delusion more surprising than that human beings are rational.
You need only consider the position the ghastly Kardashians occupy in the hearts and minds of millions of television viewers for evidence of that.
We wreck the world through overpopulation, squander resources and exterminate species far lovelier than ourselves. Climate change looks to be fiercely upon us. We're choking with plastic that nobody needs, yet everything we did to cause this situation was considered entirely reasonable. It still is, some would argue, on the basis of the profit motive. What could be less rational than that?
Just as Pope Francis takes over at the Vatican, hoping to anchor Catholicism firmly, overcome its scandals and demonstrate its values convincingly, the forces of darkness are planning to come here in the person of Sean Faircloth, whose surname I find amusing, all things considered.
Mr Faircloth is the American director of strategy and policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, or what, in the Pope's terms, might be called propagation of the faith. He is a devotee of the cult of Dawkinism, then, which argues that there is no God and therefore religion is absurd.
Why you need to join a club to believe that I don't know, since the world is crammed with busy atheists, but Mr Dawkins has had a revelation of the truth that requires followers, and the more the merrier. He deeply dislikes the evangelical Christian movement, a similar scenario to his own, in some ways, although with hymns.
"I'm looking for people from Down Under to be a voice for an international secular movement and to preach the gospel of rationality," Mr Faircloth says, apparently without irony. I think this man of the cloth protests too much.
As for me, I struggle to think of much in human endeavour that is more than slightly rational, and what I can think of has a track record every bit as unfortunate as religion's. For every war caused by religion, there has been an equally appalling one based on reason, or so the protagonists have thought.
Is art rational? I doubt it. Is classical music rational? Maybe Bach and Mozart would pass the test, but is our reaction to music itself rational? The arts often elicit an emotional response, which must be worrisome to the pure rationalist, whose mighty intellect understands all.
Are the Kardashians rational? If it's rational to be vulgar, I guess they are.
Punk rock was surely rational, considering the state of Britain at the time, and so was Marxist-Leninism when it was first expressed in the 19th century. But the communism of last century produced bloodthirsty tyrants and purges, the destructive Cultural Revolution in China and terrible famines in the Soviet Union and China on the basis of rational policies. Forced abortions in China, and the continuing abortion of female foetuses in China and India may be rational where female babies aren't valued, but I find it appalling. For compassion, which is possibly irrational, since we gain nothing personally by it, you'd have to look in a different book.
It seemed entirely rational to German fascism, which abhorred Christianity, to exterminate Jews, which rather suggests that being rational isn't everything and falls short of being anything worthwhile.
Yet there is fun to be had with Dawkinism. I can see its attraction. It would make you feel naughty, for one thing, which is always delightful.
I wonder, though, whether Mr Dawkins will need, in time, to set up temples of an entirely rational ugliness, devise a rationalist's creed and call for rational financial donations to spread the word. That seems to be the usual outcome of rabid adherence to any belief.
What would prove more interesting than Mr Dawkins' assault on the religious evangelicals would be a stoush with Pope Francis. Bold and brave as Mr Dawkins may be, I'd back a Jesuit to win that intellectual tussle.

Re Rosemary McLeod's column: Humanity profited little from belief in rationality.

I notice the claim is not that humanity profited little from rationality, but that we didn't profit from a belief in it. So McLeod takes the post-modern, skeptical, nihilistic attitude and draws into question rationality itself. Don't you listen to the archetypal prophet of nihilism Friedrich Nietzsche? He spent the last decade or so in the insane asylum, largely in silence. At least he was consistent. Hear what he said when he was still talking: "I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar."

I can only assume you are not a true nihilist because you still expect us to read and try to make rational sense out of what you say.

Of course if we did take any notice of what you said then you might put yourself out of a job. To consistently deny rationalism is to cut off the branch on which you sit. I do agree with your appraisal of Dawkin's fundamentalist crusade along with other statements concerning atheistic communism and the like - but denying rationality is not a good move. Atheism, while pretending to be rational, ultimately, when driven to final conclusions is the truly irrational worldview. Why do you feel compassion is possibly irrational? Is what we stand to gain the standard for rationality?

Monday, April 1, 2013

What Happens When The Gospel Is Preached?

"The Gospel is the power of God for salvation."

Many, many people today would argue that it is mere foolishness and openly scoff and treat the gospel with derision. And, the Bible not only agrees with this view, it explicitly anticipates this view. But it does so with this caveat.  It is foolishness to the spiritually dead.
For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. 1 Corinthians 1:18
And yet the Scriptures declare that it brings the power and reality of new life to dead people. The Gospel came not to make bad people good- but to make dead people live.

How does this work?

"Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Romans 10:17
Many, "leaning on their own" (natural or carnal) "understanding" read right over the top of this verse and it comes to the mind as- "Faith comes by hearing the Word of God" But that's not what it says nor is it what is intended. Yes faith does come by hearing the word of God but the word of God also and primarily delivers our pair of spiritual ears.

 This does not merely say faith comes by hearing the Word of God. No, this verse shows the logical order of faith. How can dead people hear? Dead people are beyond hearing, spiritually dead people cannot hear the Gospel which is a message of the Spirit as much as it is a message carried by words. For a carnal mind cannot hear what the Spirit is saying through the Gospel. A carnal mind only hears things according to the nature of the world, but this word carries a life of its  own, which is not according to this world, it is a supernatural word, a word from beyond this life and it carries a life which is from beyond this world. It is a message that brings life just like an apple seed carries the life of an apple tree within its husk. And that life from God bears no relation to the life which flows from the earth.  "
"And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness." 1 John 5:19
Our carnal life, the life which we inherit from our earthly parents, which comes from this world, is from below, the life which flows from above is the seed in the Gospel message.

So then the first work of the Holy Spirit upon dead people is to give them spiritual ears. They hear the message of the Gospel as if for the first time, maybe they have heard it a hundred times before, but today has salvation come to their house. Today has the sovereign grace of God visited upon them and given them eyes that they should see, and ears that they should hear. The first work of the Spirit has created a new heart or inclination in the soul, now they have a will to believe, and the Spirit continues to work on the soul- the mind and wash away the objections to the faith. The result of this inner and secret work in the "womb" finally comes to fruition with a confession of the mouth: "Jesus is Lord". A new creation is born. The Word of Life in Christ Jesus has reproduced after its own kind.

So then, hearing has come by the word of God. The carnal mind has awakened from the deadness of spiritual death. Now the Gospel of life in Christ Jesus makes sense, its realities are brought near. The sinner feels its own deadness, and it begins to long for light and life. And that life, that power of salvation has come with the word which they now hear, and now all the stumbling blocks to faith, all the resistance to belief has been swept away, or is being swept away. That word has brought an ability to hear, and that hearing has brought understanding, and that has brought belief, and that belief has brought new life, which in the fullness of gestation brings a new birth.

A new spirit.
                 A new life.
                               A new birth.
                                                 Resurrection from death.

Resurrection is not only the story of the risen Christ, it is the repeated message of Easter for all who believe.



"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." Romans 1:16



"If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God." Colossians 3:1