Friday night, Taylor and I went to see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new film by actor Ben Stein (you might remember him as the devastatingly boring teacher in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Here’s a synopsis from CNS News:
“Expelled” calls attention to the plight of highly credentialed scholars who have been forced out of prestigious academic positions because they proposed Intelligent Design as a possible alternative to Charles Darwin’s 150-year-old theories about the origins of life. Instead of entertaining a debate on the merits of competing theories, the scientific establishment has moved to suppress the ID movement in a “systematic and ruthless” way at odds with America’s founding principles, the film asserts.
This film employs humor and artistic filmmaking techniques to drive home its point. My opinion is that it scores on all levels. I was especially moved by the connection Stein shows between a Darwinian approach to the origin of life and the practice of eugenics. He tours a facility in Germany used to experiment on and ultimately to exterminate what the Nazi’s considered “undesirables” (the mentally retarded, deformed, diseased, etc.).
At the end of the tour, he asks his guide, a young german woman, if she believed that what the Nazi doctors did was evil. Her response was, “It’s not for me to judge.” I hope hers was simply a “polite” answer. But if it is more a reflection on society as a whole, then we witnessing the product of, I believe, two phenomena:
1. The loss of a sense of absolute or transcendant morality in our culture.
and
2. The failure of the church to engage in a thoughtful, relevant way to #1 above.
We cannot simply proclaim that the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. I believe God is calling us to enter the battle with the proper weaponry starting with the “belt of truth” (Eph. 6:14). It’s all about epistemology. We can and must make truth claims–especially in light of the moral relativism of our day–and back them up with reasons why they are objective.
Your two phenomena remind me of this 1912 quote from J. Gresham Machen:
Right. Great point. So many of us in the church are too willing to say to the skeptics such things as:
“I may be delusional but at least I’m saved” or “I’m sorry you think I’m delusional but It’s what I believe” or “I’m not delusional, you are! Nyah, nyah, nyah!”
We play right into the faith vs. reason assumption rather than embracing faith “based on” reason.
Somehow people have come to associate religion/”faith” with low epistemic standards as opposed to science which has high epistemic standards. They are merely different forms of knowledge which may overlap at times. One allows for things like personal testimony, tradition and so on which may be incorrect while the other will always be too myopic to see important truths by definition but both are important. For example, if we reduce ourselves to our brain events that may be important scientific knowledge but it is blind to important truths about sentience, which is the only way one can have scientia/knowledge in the first place. On the other hand the physical substrate and matter which we exist in still matters, it’s just not all that matters.
It’s interesting to note the role that sex pays in the Darwinist scenario. For example, zoologist and atheist Richard Dawkins says:
Why did we lose our body hair? Sex selection. Why do we retain some body hair? Yep, sex selection. Why do humans walk on two legs? Again, the same answer, sex selection. Why do dogs walk on all four? You guessed it, sex selection.
I am struck by the connection that Dawkins “sex-is-the-savior” Darwinist viewpoint has in contrast with the Biblical warning of how a wrong view of God spins off into a warped view of sex:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Romans 1:18-24
HT
Wow Dan. I’m speechless. You have just explained why those of us who are losing our hair are so irresistable.
One thing I learned about sexual selection is that in terms of evolution, it does not really work. What Dawkins is saying is that some weakness makes you more attractive. If we are selected by nature to propagate our genes because of the strength their traits express, then it is ridiculous to contend that the weakness of a potential mate would make them more attractive. Sorry Ken.
Design of life – Sexual Selection
Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for ‘exaggerating’ or ‘going easy’ on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the ‘Politics-is-applied-biology’ Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of ‘agnostism’ was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany.
‘Kampf’ was a direct translation of ‘struggle’ from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application.
Catch 22: As an indication of the evolutionary ‘PUS’, Haeckel’s 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium. Despite factum est that Haeckel’s crackpot raging Recapitulation/Biogenetic Law and functioning gill slits of human embryos have been at the ethical tangent race hygiene/eugenics/genocide, infanticide, and Freudian psychoanalysis (subconscious atavisms). Dawkins is the Oxford professor for PUS – and should gather the courage of Stephen Jay Gould who could feel ashamed about it. Text book authors are making science a mockery!
More from my conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology (and underline/edit them a ‘bit’):
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. In England, they are fertilizing human embryos for research purposes and pipetting chimera embryos of humans and monkeys, ‘legally’. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.
I am suspicious over the burial of the Kampf (Struggle). The idea of competition is innate in the modern society. It is the the opposite view in a 180 degree angle to the Judaeo-Christian ideal of agapee (contra epithumia, eros, filia & storge) (ahava in Hebrew), that I personally cheriss. The latter sees free giving, altruism, benevolence and self sacrificing love as the beginning, motivation, and sustainer of the reality.
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm
It seems like there growing momentum toward reexamining what is being taught in the public schools in regard to Darwinian evolution.