The West has so steeped itself in epistemological and moral relativism that most folks today greatly bristle with anger if you dare to proclaim truth, or point out that some things are always morally binding. The idea that there is such a thing as objective truth which applies to all people in all places at all times is rejected out of hand by many.

And to proclaim the idea that there are certain things which are always wrong and can never be accepted will result in a tirade of accusations that you are being intolerant, bigoted, narrow-minded and judgmental. Such is the upside down culture we now live in.

When the ideas of truth and morality are rejected then of course anything goes. Our own personal preferences rule the day, and no one can say anyone is wrong or anything is false. It leaves us in a world of complete mental and moral anarchy.

As Cal Thomas put it recently, “There is no longer any cultural corrective because we have abandoned the concept of objective truth. Nothing is right or wrong, because that suggests a standard by which right and wrong might be defined. Personal choice is the new ‘standard,’ which is no standard at all. One might as well develop individual weights and measures.”

Quite right, and that is effectively what people are doing in today’s relativistic age: they are creating their own standards and their own measurements. Their own finite and fallen life becomes the rule of thumb. Their personal preferences become the standard for deciding if something is right or true.

But of course all that leaves us with is billions of differing and conflicting reference points. It is as if every person on the planet declared himself or herself to be due north, no matter where they are on the planet. So our compasses will then be pointing everywhere, which is the same as having them point nowhere.

If right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are only matters of personal taste and preference, like one’s favourite type of ice cream, then we are left adrift in a sea of personal preferences with no objective and transcendent arbiter. Any and every taste and like becomes its own justifying standard.

You like chocolate ice cream? Fine, I like vanilla. You like ascribing personhood and the right to life to the unborn? Fine, I don’t. You think Hitler and the Holocaust was a no-no? Fine, I can’t be so sure. You think racism or pollution or rape are always wrong? Fine, but I can’t say for sure, and I certainly can’t push my personal views on other people.

Well, judge, you tell me I ran through a red light? Fine. But I say it was green, or purple, or pink. It is all relative after all, and who are you judge to impose your narrow-minded and intolerant morality on me anyhow? I will decide what is true and false, right and wrong, thanks.

That is exactly the mental and moral mess we now find ourselves in. And lest it seem that I am exaggerating here, or making these things up, let me offer you a real-life scenario of this very thing. It comes from a recent exchange I had with a female on the issue of abortion.

I present here the actual debate which recently took place on another site. The only thing I alter is her name. So let me present ‘K’ to you, and our little back-and-forth on this topic:

K “What an interesting debate we have going on here. Let me predicate my comment by saying that I’m not sure what my opinion on Pro-choice or Pro-life is because I really do like to sit in the grey areas of life; very few things are black or white to me.”

B “K, killing a baby is a ‘grey area’ for you. Wow! Of course many said the same thing about owning slaves, or gassing Jews. When a society loses its moral compass, then of course everything becomes 99 shades of grey, with no black and white. What a horrific and barbaric place to be in.”

K “Thank you for paraphrasing what I said to reinforce your stance on the issue. I am not for the merciless killing of babies, but nor am I here to tell people what to do. That is why I live in the grey area. Just because my moral compass has a different north to yours and chooses not to accept others please don’t assume I like the idea of anyone being killed mercilessly.”

B “I of course merely extended the logic of your own reasoning. So let me do it again. Simply take your very words and apply them to similar situations: ‘I am not for the merciless selling of slaves, but nor am I here to tell people what to do.’ ‘I am not for the merciless killing of Jews, but nor am I here to tell people what to do.’ Exact same thing K. Either these things are wrong or they are not. And if they are wrong, then of course you should tell people what to do. Otherwise you are simply being morally callous and indifferent. Sadly you have simply steeped yourself in a culture of moral relativism which says there are no moral absolutes and there is never a place to say a person might be wrong. Just as you are doing to me right now! You believe it is morally wrong for me to share my moral point of view, all the while telling us it is wrong to make moral evaluations. Sorry, but you need to carefully listen to what you are in fact saying here.”

K “From your perspective Bill. And from my perspective it’s not the same thing. What’s wrong with accepting every situation on its own merits. Moral relativity is not always wrong – I don’t believe that there is always a definitive wrong or a definitive right – but sometimes there are for me. To say that I support slavery and genocide is to simplify my world view. Not once have I said that expressing your view was the wrong thing to do. I just said I have a different one. Read into my words what you will and choose to differ or agree.”

B “Your tone is helpful K for which we are grateful, but sadly your reasoning here is not. You simply cannot take the following two statements as true, and then expect to be taken seriously:
-there are no ultimate moral rights and wrong or truth and falsehoods
-I think what you are saying is untrue and immoral
That is effectively your position. Of course you think my views are wrong, otherwise you would not be having these discussions. You belive that your point of view on this is right, whereas mine is wrong. Thus you are making a clear moral value judgment, even though you claim we have no right to make such moral judgments! Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. You need to examine carefully the logic of your own position here. After all, we are talking about life and death issues. Those are not grey areas. Your unwillingness to accept moral absolutes means you can never condemn anything, even the Holocaust. And it also means you cannot disagree with me, since you have no external standard to appeal to here, merely your own personal opinion.”

That was the last post to this person, as she did not offer any further replies. Whether she was finally slapped in the face by the reality of her own logic, or lack thereof, or whether she simply tired of debating since she really had no leg to stand on, is not clear.

But her arguments are a perfect illustration of the very thing I have been talking about here. She was caught out big time by the logical absurdity of her own position. She was of course not able to sustain her case, and the further she argued, the more she shot herself in the foot. The more she tried to argue for her relativism, the more logically ensnared she became.

The simple point is that she actually thought I was incorrect in what I said, and thought she was correct. But of course under her own premises she is not entitled to think that way. She cannot on the one hand argue that there are no binding rights and wrongs, and then with the other hand seek to firmly claim that she in fact is right and that others are wrong.

But many such folks cannot even see the utter illogic and emptiness of their own position. They have, as Francis Schaeffer used to say, both of their feet planted firmly in midair. And the really scary thing is, they actually delight in and insist upon their intellectually obtuse and morally vacuous positions.

They actually relish their incoherence and inconsistencies. But for all their protests, they can never fully escape reality. They will always live in a moral universe, one which is framed in absolute truths. Such a person can try to deny the law of gravity or that Tokyo is north of Sydney, but all their blustering and posturing will not change one iota of reality.

But the most tragic part of all this is the fact that in such a world of relativism, we can only expect more, and not less, horrific things like the Holocaust. After all, who are we to say it is really wrong? Welcome to the Brave New World where truth is falsehood and good is evil.

What was it that the prophet Isaiah uttered some 2500 years ago? “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Is. 5:20).

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One such atheist is respected philosopher Thomas Nagel of New York University. He has penned a number of important volumes on philosophy, and his newest is causing no small stir. In his very important new book, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford, 2012), he has the courage to admit that the evidence is not looking good for reductionistic naturalism.

Buy this from Amazon: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel Click Here

Given that this is the default worldview of almost all atheists, this is quite a radical stance to be taking. Yet he is brave enough to go where very few atheists are willing to travel. His book takes head-on the reigning materialist paradigm, and in the process, takes heavy swipes at the neo-Darwinian position. Let me offer a few quotes:

“I believe there are independent empirical reasons to be skeptical about the truth of reductionism in biology. Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes. … It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naive response not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples” (pp. 5-6).

“My skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is especially true with regard to the origin of life.  … I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science” (p. 7).

“I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension. . . . I find this view antecedently unbelievable – a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. . . . I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two” (p. 128).

It would seem that with such a strong case being made against the naturalistic worldview, the acceptance of the clear alternative would be part of his case. But unfortunately that is not so – he still dismisses theism as much as he does reductionist materialism:

“Even if the dominance of materialist naturalism is nearing an end, we need some idea of what might replace it. . . . Materialism requires reductionism; therefore the aim is not so much to argue against reductionism as to investigate the consequences of rejecting it – to present the problem rather than to propose a solution” (p. 15).

He briefly examines theism, and sees its clear benefits over reductionistic materialism, but still finds it wanting: “neither evolutionary naturalism nor theism provides the kind of comprehensive self-understanding that we are after”. (p. 29). But the question remains why he finds theism not up to the task here.

Could it be that he does not want it to be that way? This is not a matter of speculation. He has actually told us this in his earlier works. For example, back in 1997 he confessed in The Last Word to a “fear of religion itself.” He went on to say,

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world.”

The candour here is greatly appreciated. At the end of the day he does not want theism to be true. In this he simply has said what many other atheists have said: they are atheists because they simply do not like the alternative. It is not so much because of the evidence, or lack of it, but because of an a priori commitment.

They simply do not want to believe. Of course for the theist, this is quite understandable. Indeed, for the Christian, this has already been discussed millennia ago. Jesus himself said that people will not come to faith in him, because of their lifestyle: they are living a life of darkness, and coming to the light exposes the evil in a man’s heart – that is why people refuse to come to faith (John 3:19-21).

Paul says the same thing in Romans 1. People “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” as he puts it in 1:18. Ravi Zacharias puts it this way: “A man rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the scarcity of evidence. A man rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit his need for God.”

Or as R.C. Sproul says in his 1978 volume, If There’s a God, Why Are There Atheists?: “The question of the existence of and nature of God is a question attended by a host of vested interests. If we are to examine the question with integrity, we must both recognize and face the implications of our vested interests. If we refuse to do that, then truth will perish, and so will we.”

Everyone has vested interests, and everyone has reasons why they do not want to acknowledge God and his rightful rule in our lives. Nagel has been honest enough to admit that he simply does not like the idea of God; therefore he refuses to embrace it – and Him.

He rightly sees that the main alternative – naturalistic neo-Darwinism – is problematic indeed, but he refuses to bow to the only reasonable alternative. But again, we can appreciate his openness here. As believers we can pray for him. Like another famous atheist, he might just one day renounce his atheism.

Antony Flew did this not so long ago, and in large part this came about because of the evidence being presented by the Intelligent Design theorists. That evidence compelled him to renounce his atheism and at least embrace deism. Had he remained alive longer he might even have become a Christian.

Nagel too offers his indebtedness to ID: “I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves” (p. 10).

Flew, following Socrates, said he had to “follow the evidence wherever it would lead”. It is hoped that Nagel will as well. But as stated, at the end of the day, the issue is not so much intellectual as moral and spiritual. Nagel has already admitted to this.

It is hoped that he and other atheists will be open enough, honest enough, and humble enough to indeed follow the evidence where it may lead, even if it means acknowledging the rightful King of the Universe, and renouncing any claims to that throne.

As R.C. Sproul said, “The New Testament maintains that unbelief is generated not so much by intellectual causes as by moral and psychological ones. The problem is not that there is insufficient evidence to convince rational beings that there is a God, but that rational beings have a natural hostility to the being of God.”

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In it I sought to take somewhat technical philosophical terminology and explain it in a way the average layman could understand. I then applied it to the issue of abortion. Here I wish to take some of the same concepts and apply it to the issue of marriage, and the debate over homosexual marriage. Let me repeat what I said in that earlier article in the next seven paragraphs:

Philosophers going as far back as Aristotle have spoken of predication, properties and the like. Predication very simply refers to the attributing of characteristics to a subject or a thing. What a thing is may have different properties or ways of being characterised.

For our purposes here I wish to speak of two basic predications, or predicates, which have been distinguished in intellectual history for nearly three millennia now. These two main predicates are the essential and the accidental. It is important to be clear about how these differ, since discussions about personhood and the like depend upon these distinctions.

In very simple fashion, let us define our terms this way:
-An essential predicate, attribute, or property is one that belongs to the very nature or essence of a thing. They are necessary and permanent properties of a thing.
-An accidental predicate, attribute, or property is a quality which is not an essential part of a thing’s essence. They are contingent and temporary properties of a thing.

Thus something which is essential is that which must be true of a thing. If that quality or characteristic is missing, then that thing or object no longer is or can be. As John and Paul Feinberg explain: “An essential characteristic is a quality that is part of the very essence of a thing. If that quality is lost, the thing ceases to exist. On the other hand, an accidental quality is one that is not part of a thing’s essence. It can be lost or gained without the thing ceasing to exist.”

So let’s flesh this out and start applying it to people. It is not hard to show how the two predicates are quite different:
-If we say that Socrates is a human being, we are saying something basic or fundamental about what kind of a thing Socrates is: this is an essential predication.
-If we say that Socrates is tall, we are saying something which is not fundamental or essential, but something that merely happens to be the case: it is an accidental predication.

There are plenty of accidental properties. The colour of your hair is one. A human being can have red hair or brown hair or black hair or blonde hair or no hair. It does not matter what the hair is like – that does not determine what a human being is.

A person can be left-handed or right-handed, or have no hands at all. But a human being still exists, regardless of the accidental predicates of one’s hands. Being male or female, thin or fat, short or tall, are also accidental predicates. These things can change or differ, but they do not make a human being any less human.

OK, now let’s relate this to the issue of homosexual marriage. My point is very simply this: marriage by its very nature and essence is about two people of different genders coming together. While marriage may have accidental predicates, such as the duration of the ceremony, the particular ages of the participants, whether it is a church wedding or not, and so on, its essential predicate is the one man/one woman requirement.

That is what makes marriage marriage. This gendered nature of marriage is its essential defining feature. Take away the two genders and you no longer have marriage. In the same way, take away three legs or three angles and you no longer have a triangle.

Simply redefining something does not change its ultimate reality. There is a famous story of this attributed to Abraham Lincoln. He asked the following question: “How many legs would a dog have if you called a tail a leg?” To the response “five,” Lincoln replied, “No, a dog would still only have four legs; calling a tail a leg does not make it so”.

It’s the same here. Marriage is still about a man-woman relationship. Calling homosexual marriage marriage does not make it so. It is just a rhetorical sleight-of-hand trick. But someone has just penned a piece on all this and he does such a good job of it that it is better to just let him speak.

I refer to Wallace Alcorn and his excellent article, “Same-sex marriage is a philosophical impossibility”. He notes how the activists are simply playing language games here: “If a triangle can have four sides and a circle can be square, then I guess red can be the new green and black can be called white. If these things were possible, then I guess two men living together and two women living together can be considered a marriage.”

He continues, “A red ball possesses the properties red and round. Calling a green round object or a red square object a red ball does not make it a red ball. Calling same-sex ‘marriage’ does not make it marriage.

“The universe in this philosophic consideration is marriage, which is — by its very definition and essence — the complementary wedding of male and female. Other properties of this particular can be health, ethnic, and intelligence. All such are non-essentials (the term is ‘accidentals’) and can vary greatly and still be marriage. This is so because these are either consistent with or indifferent to the essence of the universal. In contrast, same-sex by its very nature is dissonant and incongruous with the essence of marriage.

“Again in the taxonomy of philosophy, the accidental properties of a given marriage are irrelevant to its essence. They just happen to be present without being necessary. What is not an accidental property is an essential property. These are accidental properties but heterosexuality is an essential property when the universe is marriage. Again: a green ball is not a red ball precisely because the property red is absent.

“Without such essential properties as sex that is compatible and complementary, an alleged marriage simply is not marriage at all. Without this, the relationship might be beautiful and wonderful socially or even domestically — but it is not marriage.

“I have been reluctant to offer this line of reasoning, because following it requires some knowledge of the terms and categories of technical philosophy. (This, without also showing the invalidity of same-sex marriage by its violation of the laws of identity and contradiction.) But this dimension needs to be factored into any comprehensive consideration. It should be sufficient for some, then, to allow there is this factor even if they need to reread to follow it.

“Neither a male-male nor a female-female relationship has the essential — i.e., of the essence — property of male-female. Same-sex marriage is neither validated nor created. It is metaphysically impossible. So to think is a logical fallacy; so to speak is semantic nonsense.”

Quite so. I can go on all day long and declare that the Australian football team which won the AFL Grand Final yesterday was in fact the Geelong Cats. But no amount of blustering on my part will change the reality: the Sydney Swans won yesterday.

And no amount of blustering or bullying by the activists can ever change the fact that marriage by definition and essence is a heterosexual institution.  They can play their little semantic games all they like, but reality remains reality.

www.austindailyherald.com/2012/09/24/alcorn-same-sex-marriage-is-a-philosophical-impossibility/

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Abraham Lincoln once put it this way: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Vladimir Lenin boasted, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” And again, “Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”

Well did Churchill lament, “Schools have not necessarily much to do with education… they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” And religious leaders too have seen the battleground that education is.

Charles Spurgeon offered this caution: “To leave our youthful population in the hands of secular teachers, will be to sell them to the Ishmaelites.” But it is not just a question of secularism robbing kids of values. If education were indeed value-neutral, that would still be a worry.

As C. S. Lewis wrote, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil”. Or as Theodore Roosevelt once put it, “To educate a child in the mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

But education of course is not value-neutral. Someone’s worldview and values will always be pushed. And what we have witnessed over the past century or so is the steady expulsion of Judeo-Christian values, replaced by those of the secular humanists.

But don’t take my word for it. The secular warriors have been most explicit about their intentions of capturing education for their purposes. They have made it absolutely clear that they are engaged in a war on religion, and want to replace it with their own religion: secular humanism.

All the early atheists and secular humanists admitted to the religious nature of their worldview. For example, in the late nineteenth century England Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), and other atheists sought to overthrow the cultural dominance of Christianity. Their goal was to secularise society, and replace Christianity with the “church scientific”.

His grandson, Julian Huxley (1887-1975), sought to “develop a scientific religion” which he called “evolutionary humanism”. As he wrote in 1959, “It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with the earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form.”

And they knew the key role which public education would play in carrying out their work of indoctrination. John Dewey (1859-1952), the father of modern education, and a signatory to the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, was adamant about the role of education in promoting agendas and pushing values: “Schools do have a role – and an important one – in production of social change.” (John Dewey, 1859-1952)

Or as he said elsewhere; “We make a religion of our education. . . . Faith in education signifies nothing less than belief in the possibility of deliberate direction of the formation of human disposition and intelligence.” And again, “I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”

The early secular humanists all knew the importance of using the education system to indoctrinate the young. They knew that if they could get to our kids at an early age, they could win them for their religion of secular humanism. Way back in 1919 the American Communist Party had this as their slogan: “Give us one generation of small children to train to manhood and womanhood and we will set up the Bolshevist form of the Soviet Government.”

John Dunphy, who wrote “A New Religion for a New Age,” in The Humanist (January/February, 1983) was most clear about this: “…the battle for mankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity. . . . These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing the classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level – preschool, day care center or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”

Or as Charles Francis Potter, another signatory to Humanist Manifesto put it, “Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”

More recently the postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) said this: “I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”

Rightly did Thomas Sowell write in his 1993 volume, Inside American Education: “Advocates of Secular Humanism have been quite clear and explicit as to the crucial importance of promoting their philosophy in the schools, to counter or undermine religious values among the next generation.”

Or as Dennis Prager put it in his recent book, Still the Best Hope: “Just as the purpose of Christian seminaries is to produce committed Christians, the primary purpose of most Western universities is, consciously or not, to produce committed secular leftists. The major difference between them is that Christian seminaries declare their purpose, and Western universities do not.”

James Dobson and Gary Bauer, writing in Children at Risk (1990) said: “The humanistic system of values has become the predominant way of thinking in most of the power centers of society. It has outstripped Judeo-Christian precepts in the universities, in the news media, in the entertainment industry, in the judiciary, in the federal bureaucracy, in business, medicine, law, psychology, sociology, in the arts, in many public schools and, to be sure, in the halls of Congress.”

Or as Ann Coulter rightly complained in Godless America: “Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left’s madrassas. . . . At least the crazy Muslims get funding from Saudi Arabia for their madrassas. Liberals force normal Americans to pay for their religious schools.”

Quite so. We now have religion and values galore in our public schools. But they are those of the secular humanists. And this has certainly not been by accident; it has been quite deliberate, as the above evidence affirms. Those with agendas have long known the importance of capturing education for their purposes.

As William F. Buckley warned a half century ago: “The most influential educators of our time – John Dewey, William Kilpatrick, George Counts, Harold Rugg, and the lot – are out to build a New Social Order. There is not enough room…for…religion (Christianity). It clearly won’t do…to foster within some schools a respect for an absolute, intractable God, a divine intelligence who is utterly unconcerned with other people’s versions of truth…It won’t do to tolerate a competitor for the allegiance of man. The State prefers a secure monopoly for itself…Religion (Christianity), then, must go…The fight is being won. Academic freedom is entrenched. Religion (Christianity) is outlawed in public schools. The New Social Order is larruping along.”

As Mark Steyn put it in After America: “The massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite – its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity – for the price of which you wind up in Hock.”

The schools have been captured by the other side. Unless our children have been given a solid training in the biblical worldview, they will be ill-equipped to take on the secularist educators. As Dr. D. James Kennedy pleaded, “Don’t send an eight-year-old out to take on a forty-year-old humanist. I have never seen any people more unhappy than fathers or mothers who have come to me and said, ‘Where did we go wrong? We gave him everything, and now he’s turned his back completely on everything we believe.’ Yes, they gave him everything but a Christian education.”

Or as Mark Steyn wrote: “For four decades America watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while conservatives deluded themselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact, that it could be contained within the precincts of academe, was always foolish.”

Exactly. We have lost millions of Christian young people to the religion of secular humanism. If we want to turn this around we first must be aware of the problem. In the West the schools are no longer the domain of the Judeo-Christian worldview, but secular humanism. And as Francis Schaeffer wrote in A Christian Manifesto: “These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results.

“We must never forget that the humanist position is an exclusivist, closed system which shuts out all contending viewpoints – especially if these views teach anything other than relative values and standards. Anything which presents absolute truth, values, or standards is quite rightly seen by the humanists to be a total denial of the humanistic position.”

So parents have a lot of serious thinking to do here. Will they abandon their children to the wolves in the public school system? Some may feel called to do so. But many may well need to look seriously at some other options – before it is too late.

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The other meaning has to do with careful evaluation, testing, discerning, assessing, and judging. That is something Christians should do all the time, as Scripture makes clear:
-Proverbs 14:33 Wisdom reposes in the heart of the discerning
-Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD.
-1 Corinthians 2:15 The spiritual man makes judgments about all things
-1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 Test everything.

An important part of critical thinking is the use of logic. This is not the place to say much more about logical thinking in general, and the basic principles of logic. Instead I here want to just focus on what are known as logical fallacies. Simply stated, these come in two varieties: formal fallacies, which have to do with errors in the way an argument is put together; and informal fallacies, which have to do with errors in clarity or soundness of the reasoning process.

As to the former, let me only very briefly discuss these. Referred to as deductive reasoning, they have to do with a logical formulation, or a syllogism. Here are some basic features of a syllogism:

-A syllogism is an argument with two (or more) premises and a conclusion.
-An argument is valid when the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. In such an argument it is logically impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.
-An argument is invalid if the premises do not entail the conclusion.
-An argument is sound if it is both valid and the premises are true.

This is a sound argument:
1.  All men are mortal (major premise)
2.  Socrates is a man (minor premise)
3.  Therefore, Socrates is mortal (conclusion)

This is an invalid argument (the conclusion does not follow from the premises):
1.  All men are from Mars
2.  All women are from Mars
3.  Therefore, all men are women

This is a valid argument, but not sound, because a premise is not true:
1.  All men are from Mars
2.  Bill is a man
3.  Therefore, Bill is from Mars

This argument is valid, but not necessarily sound:
1.  God created all things
2.  Evil exists
3.  God created evil
e.g., Christians could qualify premise 1: evil is not a thing or substance, but a privation.

Informal fallacies

But for the rest of this article I want to concentrate on common informal fallacies, or mistakes in the reasoning process. There are quite a few such fallacies, but here I offer a dozen of the more common forms:

Non sequitur (Latin, “it does not follow”). An argument is a non sequitur if the conclusion does not follow from the premise. In it the conclusion can be either true or false, but the argument is a fallacy because the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

Example: The early Christians were pacifists because they did not intervene when Paul was arrested.

Attacking the person (ad hominem). An attack on the person making an argument, instead of responding to the argument itself.

Examples:
“You are just a religious bigot.”
“You are homophobic.”
“Bill, you do realise that your obsession with homosexuality raises serious questions about your own sexuality.”

Begging the question (petitio principii). A type of fallacy occurring when the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. The conclusion is snuck into the premises. It is a circular argument. It assumes what it is trying to prove.

Example: “Only an untrustworthy person would run for office. The fact that politicians are untrustworthy is proof of this.”

Category mistake. This involves comparing apples with oranges. It mixes two ideas that don’t belong together.

Example: “Just as South Africa had apartheid, so you will not allow same-sex marriage.” But skin colour or race is an innate characteristic, while sexual preference is not.

Red herring. Changing the subject to some irrelevant or different issue.

Example: You might be debating the issue of abortion, and someone throws in another issue, such as capital punishment, which is really a separate issue.

False dilemma. This involves a situation in which two alternative points of view are held to be the only options, when in reality there exists one or more other options which have not been considered.

Example: Either you support heroin injecting rooms or you want addicts to die. But in fact there is a third option. Because you love the heroin addict, and want him to live, you will seek to get him free of his heroin addiction. Getting the addict off drugs is the loving thing to do.

A straw man argument. This is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. You present a misrepresentation or distortion of the opponent’s position, making it easier to refute.

Example: Christians want to set up a theocracy and force people to become Christians.

The Naturalistic Fallacy. Confusing is with ought, or turning description into prescription.

Example:
Everyone is doing it (eg., premarital sex). Therefore, there is nothing wrong with premarital sex. So is genocide and mass murder OK because nature has floods and tsunamis?

Simple ambiguity, or equivocation. A word or phrase is used in two different senses, or with two or more meanings.

Example
1. All sides of rivers are banks.
2. All banks have money.
Therefore,
3. All sides of rivers have money.

It is always important that we clearly define our terms in a given argument, and make sure the other side knows and accepts our meanings of the terms.

Appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam). An emotional appeal that overlooks the facts of a case.

Example: “We should allow embryonic stem cell research so that Christopher Reeve can walk again.” This is not making an argument, it is appealing to our emotions.

Appeal to authority. There is a place for authority, but often it is a misplaced appeal.

Examples:
“Santa Claus exists because my dad says so.”
“There is no God because Dawkins said so.”

Genetic fallacy. Confusing the origins of an idea with reasons for believing in an idea. An argument is rejected or regarded as mistaken or false because it comes from a bad or questionable source.

Examples:
“You were born in Christian America, and that is why you are a Christian.” But this is irrelevant to the argument. The issue is, are there good grounds for believing in Christianity?
“You are against abortion because you are a Catholic.” Whether or not one is a Catholic is beside the point. Are there good reasons for holding that abortion is wrong?

Buy this from Amazon: Come, Let Us Reason: An Introduction to Logical Thinking by Norman L. Geisler, Ronald M. Brooks Click Here

These then are some of the more common logical fallacies. We need to be aware of these, and train our minds to spot them. Believers need to be able to think clearly, critically and logically, both as they assess other people’s arguments, and as they make their own.

For those who want to take all this much further, see the helpful volume by Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks: Come Let Us Reason: An Introduction to Logical Thinking (Baker, 1990).

[1218 words]

“Understanding Christianity as a worldview is important not only for fulfilling the great commission but also for fulfilling the cultural commission – the call to create a culture under the lordship of Christ. God cares not only about redeeming souls but also about restoring his creation. He calls us to be agents not only of his saving grace but also of his common grace. Our job is not only to build up the church but also to build a society to the glory of God. Evangelism and cultural renewal are both divinely ordained duties. God exercises his sovereignty in two ways: through saving grace and common grace. . . . As agents of God’s common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew his creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty, and to heal and help those suffering from the results of the Fall.”

We are involved in a war of ideas: a worldview war. As William Lane Craig stated, “Evangelicals have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or outmoded, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint. This is a war which we cannot afford to lose.”

With that in mind I offer the following bibliography which deals with such things as truth, worldviews, and Christian analysis of religion and thought. For those wanting more specific recommendations, let me highlight a few authors who are always worthwhile in this regard: Colson, Geisler, Moreland, Noebel, Schaeffer, Sire and Zacharias. Here then are 66 titles for starters:

Anderson, J.N.D., Christianity and Comparative Religion. IVP, 1971.
Anderson, Norman, ed., The World’s Religions. Eerdmans, 1976.
Beckwith, Francis, William Craig and J.P. Moreland, To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview. IVP, 2004.
Bertrand, J. Mark, (Re)thinking Worldview. Crossway Books, 2007.
Breese, Dave, Seven Men Who Rule From the Grave. Scripture Press, 1990.
Brown, Colin, Christianity and Western Thought, vol. 1. Apollos, 1990.
Brown, Colin, Philosophy and the Christian Faith. Tyndale Press, 1969.
Burnett, David, Clash of Worlds. Monarch, 2002.
Carson, D.A., The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism. Zondervan, 1996.
Clendenin, Daniel, Many Gods, Many Lords: Christianity Encounters World Religions. Baker, 1995.
Colson, Charles, How Now Shall We Live? Tyndale, 1999.
Corduan, Winfried, A Tapestry of Faiths. IVP, 2002.
Cosgrove, Mark, Foundations of Christian Thought. Kregal, 2006.
Eckman, James, The Truth about Worldviews. Crossway Books, 2004.
Geisler, Norman and William Watkins, Worlds Apart: A Handbook on World Views. Baker, 1984, 1989.
Goheen, Michael and Craig Barthlomew, Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. Baker, 2008.
Guinness, Os, The Dust of Death. Inter-Varsity Press, 1973.
Guinness, Os, Time for Truth. Baker, 2000.
Hasker, William, Metaphysics: Constructing a World View. Inter-Varsity Press, 1983.
Henderson, David, Culture Shift: Communicating God’s Truth to our Changing World. Baker, 1998.
Hicks, Peter, Evangelicals and Truth. IVP, 1998.
Hoffecker, W. Andrew, ed., Revolutions in Worldview. P&R, 2007.
Holmes, Arthur, All Truth is God’s Truth. Inter-Varsity Press, 1977.
Holmes, Arthur, Contours of a World View. Eerdmans, 1983.
Holmes, Arthur, Faith Seeks Understanding. Eerdmans, 1971.
Kostenberger, Andreas, ed., Whatever Happened to Truth? Crossway Books, 2005.
Kreeft, Peter, A Refutation of Moral Relativism. Ignatius, 1999.
Lightner, Robert, The God of the Bible and Other Gods. Kregal, 1998.
Lindsley, Art, True Truth: Defending Absolute Truth in a Relativistic World. IVP, 2004.
Long, Zeb Bradford and Douglas McMurry, The Collapse of the Brass Heaven: Rebuilding our Worldview to Embrace the Power of God. Chosen Books, 1994.
McAndrew, Stephen, Why It Doesn’t Matter What You Believe If It’s Not True. DeepRiver books, 2012.
MacArthur, John, The Truth War. Thomas Nelson, 2007.
Macarthur, John, ed., Think Biblically: Recovering a Christian Worldview. Crossway Books, 2003.
McDowell, Josh and Don Stewart, Understanding Secular Religions. Here’s Life Publishers, 1982.
Moreland, J.P. and W.L. Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. IVP, 2003.
Moseley, N. Allan, Thinking Against the Grain: Developing a Biblical Worldview in a Culture of Myths. Kregal, 2003.
Nash, Ronald, Is Jesus the Only Savior? Zondervan, 1994.
Nash, Ronald, Life’s Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy. Zondervan, 1999.
Nash, Ronald, Worldviews in Conflict. Zondervan, 1992.
Naugle David K., Worldview: The History of a Concept. Eerdmans, 2002.
Netland, Harold, Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth. Eerdmans, 1991.
Newbigin, Lesslie, The Finality of Christ. SCM Press, 1969.
Newbigin, Lesslie, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.
Neill, Stephen, Christian Faith and Other Faiths. Oxford University Press, 1970.
Noebel, David, The Battle for Truth. Harvest House, 2001.
Noebel, David, Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth. Harvest House, 1991, 1995, 2006.
Noebel, David and Chuck Edwards, Thinking Like a Christian: Understanding and Living a Biblical Worldview. Broadman and Holman, 2002.
Palmer, Michael, Elements of a Christian Worldview. Logion, 1998.
Pearcey, Nancy, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity. Crossway Books, 2004.
Phillips, W. Gary and William Brown, Making Sense of Your World From a Biblical Viewpoint. Moody, 1991.
Samples, Kenneth Richard, A World of Difference. Baker, 2007.
Schaeffer, Francis, How Should We Then Live? Revell, 1976.
Scott, Brad, Streams of Confusion. Crossway, 1999.
Sire, James, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. IVP, 2004.
Sire, James, The Universe Next Door. Inter-Varsity Press, 1976.
Sire, James, Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? Inter-Varsity Press, 1994.
Sproul, R.C., Consequences of Ideas. Crossway, 2000.
Sunshine, Glenn, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews. Zondervan, 2009.
Tennent, Timothy, Christianity at the Religious Roundtable. Baker, 2002.
Walsh, Brian and Richard Middleton, Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View. Inter-Varsity Press, 1984.
Wells, David, No Place for Truth; or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?  Eerdmans, 1993.
Wilkens, Steve and Alan Padgett, Christianity and Western Thought, vol. 2. IVP, 2000.
Wilkens, Steve and Alan Padgett, Christianity and Western Thought, vol. 3. IVP, 2009.
Wilkens, Steve and Mark Sanford, Hidden Worldviews. IVP, 2009.
Wolters, Albert, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. Eerdmans, 1985.
Wright, Chris, Thinking Clearly About the Uniqueness of Jesus. Monarch, 1997.
Zacharias, Ravi, Cries of the Heart.  Word, 1998.
Zacharias, Ravi, Deliver Us From Evil.  Word, 1996.
Zacharias, Ravi, Jesus Among Other Gods. Word, 2000.

Happy reading!

[1123 words]

But in reality there is a far more important gap developing. I refer to a truth gap. Whereas most people a generation or two ago believed that there was such a thing as truth – and absolute truth at that – increasingly today we are finding an entire generation which has been raised on the destructive pap of relativism.

Millions of young people in the West today have absolutely no conception of such a thing as truth, and are firmly convinced that everything is relative. They have been duped into believing that there are no universal truths and no absolute rights and wrongs.

An acknowledgment of the reality of black and white has been replaced by a commitment to 99 shades of grey. Adherence to objective truth is seen as intolerant, narrow-minded and bigoted. Instead most young folks today luxuriate in subjectivity, relativism and uncertainty.

Thus we have a whole generation who cannot bring itself to say that the Holocaust was wrong, or that destroying marriage is wrong, or that killing unborn babies is wrong, yet will quite readily assure us that what is wrong is to say these things are wrong!

They insist that there are no absolutes, thus relegating “tolerance” into a new absolute. That are absolutely certain that you are wrong when you insist that there are absolutes, and certain things are wrong. They detest with a passion anyone making sure and certain truth claims, themselves being sure and certain that there can be no such things.

They get livid when you say there are some things worth getting livid about. They will fight you to the death when you assert that there are certain things worth fighting to the death over. They will explode in moral indignation when you claim that some things are worth getting morally indignant about.

An entire generation seems to have lost the ability to think, to engage in moral clarity, and to utilise basic logic and rationality. And they celebrate this. They think it is a sign of progress that they have moved beyond mere logic, moral acuity, and mental soundness.

It really comes down to a clash of worldviews. The Judeo-Christian worldview is at complete odds with the secular humanist worldview which now reigns in the West. A generation has been steeped in the latter, and knows nothing about any other competing view of reality.

And as Francis Schaeffer wrote: “We must never forget that the humanist position is an exclusivist, closed system which shuts out all contending viewpoints – especially if these views teach anything other than relative values and standards. Anything which presents absolute truth, values, or standards is quite rightly seen by the humanists to be a total denial of the humanistic position.”

Quite so. For all of its lip service to diversity, acceptance, tolerance and openness, it is implacably opposed to any competing claims. It simply will not tolerate those who believe in absolute truth and universal morality. It will seek to shut down real debate and censor any contrary voices.

I document this on a regular basis. But those raised on this worldview cannot even see the utter double standards. I chat with young people all the time and it is quite amazing to see them get angry with me when I insist that there really is such a thing as truth.

As they seek to argue for their “tolerant” worldview, they quickly become exceedingly intolerant of me, yet see absolutely no incongruity in any of this. They will shout at me decrying my judgmentalism – little realising just how very judgmental they in fact are.

Indeed, as J. Budziszewski has written, “If you really believe that the meaning of tolerance is tolerating, then you ought to tolerate even intolerance. If you really believe that the best foundation for toleration is to avoid having strong convictions about good and evil, then you should not try to harbor the strong conviction that intolerance is bad.”

But all this would be totally lost on these folks. They have little or no ability to think logically or think critically, so they are quite happy to stumble through life in their mental fog, thinking they are somehow superior people because they refuse to judge anyone – except for those who happen to differ from them of course.

Now in the old days when reasoning and careful thinking were still in vogue, you could shame these people into silence by pointing out their obvious double standards, hypocrisy, and utter illogic. But today that does not work on most people.

Rational thought is sneezed at, logic is disdained, moral perception is dismissed, and intellectual coherence is yawned at. So it becomes almost impossible to argue with these people, to hold a proper debate, to engage in an intelligent conversation with them.

Any truth you speak, any facts you offer, or any evidence you present, means nothing to them. They will simply take any countervailing views as “hate” and “intolerance” and denounce you accordingly. They will then leave the room, pat themselves on the back, and think they have somehow won the argument.

Of course this happens all the time amongst today’s worldlings. But the really frightening thing is that perhaps most young people today who call themselves Christians also engage in the same mental mushiness, relativism, and moral myopia.

So many have lost altogether the ability to think, to discern, to critically analyse, to make moral differentiations. Thus they are Christian in name only. They may profess to be believers, but they live, think and act just like pagans. There is no difference at all between their worldview and that of the secular humanists.

That is because they have never learned to think biblically and they have never developed a biblical worldview. They have simply soaked up the prevailing secularism, relativism and sceptism of the surrounding culture. Instead of being transformed by the renewing of their minds, as Paul commands in Romans 12:2, they have allowed their minds to be turned into mush.

As such, they are breaking the greatest commandment which Jesus gave: to love God with all your heart, all your strength, and all your mind. This, as Francis Schaeffer said, is part of the “great evangelical disaster”. Those who should know better, who even come from Bible-believing churches, have simply stopped loving God with their minds. Indeed, they have simply stopped using their minds altogether.

But as C. S. Lewis warned, “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.” We have a generation of believers which needs to repent – repent of its worldliness, its anti-intellectualism, its compromise, and its indifference to truth and morality.

Fortunately there are many notable exceptions to what I have discussed above. There are many fine young believers who use their minds for the glory of God, who have a love of God’s word and a distrust of the world, and who are soldiering on for the Kingdom.

But they are too few and far between. We need an army of young believers to be raised up by God who will champion truth, affirm biblical absolutes, resist compromise, and fearlessly proclaim Christian principles. At the very least we all need to be praying for such an outcome.

If this does not occur, we will simply get much more of what G.K. Chesterton warned against: “a hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head”. And that is nothing to write home about.

[1292 words]

Until more details emerge we are limited in what we can say, but we can nonetheless look at this from several vantage points. This latest massacre can be examined from a sociological and political viewpoint. For example, a culture of violence tends to beget violence.

We in the West live in a culture in which our media and entertainment is absolutely saturated with violence, so can we really be surprised to see violence all around us? Indeed, the really surprising thing is that we don’t see much more violence, given the morally toxic atmosphere we live and breathe in.

Just take this film series itself. Writing four years ago about an earlier instalment, The Dark Knight, Jenny McCartney recaps the horrific violence found in the film: “But the greatest surprise of all – even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic – has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.

“I will attempt to confine my plot spoilers to the opening: the film begins with a heist carried out by men in sinister clown masks. As each clown completes a task, another shoots him point-blank in the head. The scene ends with a clown – The Joker – stuffing a bomb into a wounded bank employee’s mouth.

“After the murderous clown heist, things slip downhill. A man’s face is filleted by a knife, and another’s is burned half off. A man’s eye is slammed into a pencil. A bomb can be seen crudely stitched inside another man’s stomach, which subsequently explodes. A trussed-up man is bound to a chair and set alight atop a pile of banknotes. A plainly terrorised child is threatened at gunpoint by a man with a melted face. It is all intensely realistic.”

With not just adults but children soaking up this sort of stuff on a regular basis, no wonder we see so much wanton violence all around us. Also, cheap political points are already being scored here. Early on the leftist media was blaming the conservative Tea Party movement for the killings.

And of course in an instant there were the usual calls to ban all guns. Never mind the fact that last night 65 million legal gun owners in America did not kill anyone. Thus a bit of perspective is needed here, although it is not my intention here to enter into yet another big debate on the pros and cons of gun control.

We can also view this shooting from a philosophical and ideological perspective. For example, it seems this killer was doing a PhD in neuroscience. Now as some of you would be aware, perhaps most of this field of study is based on a completely naturalistic and materialistic worldview.

That is, the mind is said to be directly reducible to the brain, and many of the more radical materialists argue that there are not even any such things as mind, consciousness, thought, or free will. Their materialistic worldview – held as a philosophical pre-commitment, not on the basis of scientific findings – will not allow them to posit any non-material realities.

Thus we have the patently absurd situation of various reductionistic thinkers absolutely convinced that their thoughts are quite correct here as they try to tell us there are no such things as thoughts. Of course this is all tied up with the evolutionary and naturalistic worldview.

We have managed to convince entire generations now that there is no God, no spiritual reality, and therefore no ultimate basis for right and wrong, truth and error. We are simply a collection of genetic replicators and morality as such really does not exist.

Atheists like Dawkins are quite happy to make such claims: “When the utility function – that which is being maximized – is DNA survival, this is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what gets hurt in the process. . . . Genes don’t care about suffering, because they don’t care about anything.”

Quite so, and with the West inundated with materialistic, anti-theistic evolutionary thinking, one should not really be too surprised to see people start acting out what has been drilled into their heads for decades. If we are simply here by chance in a meaningless world of no ultimate value and worth, and are simply survival mechanisms, than why not go on a shooting spree?

Finally, some biblical and theological thoughts can be offered here. Such atrocities always raise the issue of theodicy: why does God allow evil and suffering in the world? The truth is we do not have all the answers to this latest massacre, and never will, but it seems disingenuous to somehow seek to blame God for it.

We know who killed all these innocent people – it was James Holmes, not God. Holmes pulled the trigger, for whatever reason. Now could God have prevented this from occurring? Yes, in one way he could have – he simply could have stripped Holmes of his free will.

Indeed, he could end all evil in the world if he wanted to. He could decree that at midnight no more evil will transpire on planet earth. But the question that then arises is this: where will all of us be at a minute past midnight? The only way he could stop us from freely choosing to do evil acts is by eliminating us altogether.

That is one solution to the problem of evil, but hardly a satisfactory one. Real love is only possible with real free will. But sadly, real evil is also only possible with real free will. If we wish to see God eliminate evil overnight, then we must also insist that he eliminate love and those very things that makes our humanity worthwhile – even possible.

In a sinful world in which men and women have shaken their fists at God and screamed at him to get out of their lives, God has had to say, “OK, your will be done”. He is too much of a gentleman to crush our free will and our desires, so he allows us to do as we please, even with all the ugly consequences which come forth from that.

Dr. Jerry Newcombe offers similar thoughts here: “I can’t help but feel that to some extent, we’re reaping what we’ve been sowing as a society. We said to God, ‘Get out of the public arena.’ Lawsuit after lawsuit, often by misguided ‘civil libertarians,’ have chased away any fear of God in the land – at least in the hearts of millions.”

He continues, “Tens of millions of young people in this culture seem to have no fear of God. It’s becoming too commonplace that some frustrated person will go on a killing spree of random people. If they kill themselves, they think it’s all over. But that’s like going from the frying pan into the fire. Where’s the fear of God in our society? I don’t think people would do those sorts of things if they truly understood the reality of hell.

“I’ll never forget what an Alabama black pastor said to me one time when I interviewed him about judge Roy Moore, the Ten Commandments judge. He said: ‘All across American people should stand with Judge Moore about the Ten Commandments. Why? Because when they took prayer out of school, you didn’t hear about kids killing each other, about them bringing dope to school, shooting the teachers, you didn’t hear about that. You see what I’m saying? That’s what’s wrong. We need more God-fearing.’

“The founders gave us a system where voluntary God-fearing was the underpinning of civility in society. The more internal restraints people have, the less need they have for external restraints. (And the converse is true.) That’s why I can’t understand the ongoing crusade of those who want to remove any vestige of Judeo-Christian in the public arena. All they’re doing is making everything worse for everyone else.

“Religion and morality were key to the founders’ vision for a civil society. In his Farewell Address, George Washington highlighted the source of morality: ‘Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.’ Will somebody please tell that to these civil libertarian lawyers always suing against public displays of the Ten Commandments and the like?”

The secularisation of society, the rise of naturalistic evolutionary worldviews, the new militant anti-theism, the violence-saturated entertainment industry – these are all just some of the factors which seem to explain what happened in the Denver suburb last night.

Sure not one of these factors alone may account for what we witnessed last night, but taken together they do offer a plausible account of why Western society is in such a frightful state, and why it seems to be getting worse with each passing day.

Until we embrace again certain core truths, all this will simply escalate. One such truth was expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”

And the other core truth is that Jesus Christ came to perform open heart surgery on all those who would let him: to remove our sin-encrusted hearts and replace them with hearts full of God’s love and reconciliation. In our sinful condition we can only expect more such massacres.

But if we admit our need and allow Christ to bring newness of life, a fair amount of this evil we find in the world today can be eliminated or reduced. Indeed, one can simply ask this question: how much worse would things be, and how many more innocent people would be killed, if it were not for the restraining impact of the gospel, with millions of men and women made new in Christ?

www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/mass-shooting-at-batman-premiere-in-colorado/story-fnd134gw-1226431167005

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/2461820/Our-attitude-to-violence-is-beyond-a-joke-as-new-Batman-film-The-Dark-Knight-shows.html

www.religiontoday.com/columnists/guest-commentary/a-dark-night-indeed-another-senseless-act-of-violence.html

[1745 words]

“Religions are thought to serve as bulwarks against unethical behaviors. However, when it comes to predicting criminal behavior, the specific religious beliefs one holds is the determining factor, says a University of Oregon psychologist.

“The study, appearing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, found that criminal activity is higher in societies where people’s religious beliefs contain a strong punitive component than in places where religious beliefs are more benevolent. A country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell, for example, is likely to have a much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal. The finding surfaced from a comprehensive analysis of 26 years of data involving 143,197 people in 67 countries.

“The key finding is that, controlling for each other, a nation’s rate of belief in hell predicts lower crime rates, but the nation’s rate of belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates, and these are strong effects,” said Azim F. Shariff, professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Morality Lab at the UO. “I think it’s an important clue about the differential effects of supernatural punishment and supernatural benevolence. The finding is consistent with controlled research we’ve done in the lab, but here shows a powerful ‘real world’ effect on something that really affects people—crime.”

Interesting indeed. I guess a few thoughts arise from all this. If a person is an atheist or a secularist who denies any afterlife and a final reckoning, then he can certainly be tempted to think in terms of what can be gotten away with in this life. Sure, plenty of non-believers may well try to live a decent and moral life, but one has to ask why.

Given the premises of materialism, evolution, and atheism, there is no compelling reason to seek to be moral or good. Indeed, the very terms themselves do not readily fit into such a worldview. But don’t take my word for it, consider what the atheists themselves have said:

“But nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA.” -Richard Dawkins

“Moral properties … constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.” – J.L. Mackie

“Morality is no more … than an adaptation, and as such has the same status as such things as teeth and eyes and noses. . . . [M]orality is a creation of the genes” -Michael Ruse

For secularists, “there is no answer to the question, ‘Why not cruelty?’” – Richard Rorty

“The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.” -Thomas Huxley

“It is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.” -Richard Dawkins

Quite so. A full-blown working morality, and a coherent moral system make plenty of sense and fit in perfectly with the theistic worldview. But when it comes to reductionistic materialism and evolutionary theory, it is very hard to account for them at all. As Edgar Andrews rightly remarked:

“If our world is the product of amoral forces, and if man is simply cosmic flotsam scattered on the shores of time, then morality (including Dawkins’ longed-for generosity and altruism) simply does not exist. . . . To their credit, older atheists like Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre and Camus recognized this and saw that it led logically to nihilism or, at best, to absurdity. The ‘new atheists’ (who want us to call them ‘brights’) seem oblivious to the obvious.”

Or as Peter Williams put it, “Evolution might account for our having certain moral feelings about actions, but it can’t objectively prescribe that we objectively ought to pay attention to those feelings because they correspond to an objective moral ideal (where, in a naturalistic metaphysics, can one fit such a thing as an objective moral ideal?). Nor can it obligate us to pay attention to them, because only persons can prescribe or obligate behaviour, whilst a wholly naturalistic evolutionary history is impersonal. As agnostic philosopher Anthony O’Hear says of Dawkins, ‘this particular Darwinian is quite unable to explain why we have an obligation to act against our “selfish” genes’.”

But of course it is not just the secularists who can be mentioned here. Increasingly, and tragically, there are more and more folks who call themselves Christians who are effectively coming around to the secularist worldview, at least in this area. Many are questioning – if not abandoning altogether – the biblical teachings on final judgment, hell and eternal punishment.

Of course that is not really unexpected. The Bible itself warns about apostasy, doctrines of demons, false prophets, and scurrilous teaching. And the fact that so many of these folks are simply soaking up the surrounding culture’s emphasis on relativism, PC trendiness, and unbiblical notions of tolerance means that they are quite willing to walk away from Biblical truth.

Thus plenty of gullible Christians are now jettisoning the clear teachings of Scripture here. Just the other day I had a very agitated young woman assure me that the Bible does not teach about hell and that it is just an invention of the fifth century! She of course did not have a clue what she was talking about, and her dogged insistence was only matched by her woeful ignorance.

This is not the place to go into all the biblical teaching on final judgment and hell – that awaits another article or two. But it must be pointed out to these “Christians” who apparently have never actually read their Bibles that this is a very consistent teaching found in the whole of Scripture.

Not only that, but Jesus spoke more about hell than anyone else in the New Testament. There are over 160 references to it in the Christian Scriptures and over 70 of these references are attributed to Jesus. As Spurgeon put it, “It is a very remarkable fact that no inspired preacher of whom we have any record ever uttered such terrible words concerning the destiny of the lost as our Lord Jesus Christ.”

As J.C. Ryle correctly noted, “Disbelieve hell, and you unscrew, unsettle, and unpin everything in Scripture.” Absolutely, and that certainly includes the doctrine of free will. If we take away hell we effectively take away human moral autonomy as well.

C.S. Lewis was spot on to write: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”

Or as G K Chesterton commented, “Hell is God’s great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.” Thus Lewis states elsewhere, “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

As to the particular study with which this article began, I know little about the psychologist who did it, or how reliable his findings are. But however dependable this study is, it seems to be simply a matter of common sense that if we deny the afterlife and final judgment completely, or just water down or reject hell and highlight only heaven, that may well have ramifications for how we behave in this life.

The results of the study certainly seem to bear this out – and it fits with what we know of reality. Ideas have consequences, and when we reject God’s ideas and truth for man-made moral relativism and epistemological mush, then we will see the bitter fruit coming forth.

How many will seek to please men while snubbing God by rejecting the clear teachings of his word? Indeed, as Thomas Watson asks, “How many souls have been blown into hell with the wind of popular applause?”

www.lifesitenews.com/news/study-belief-in-hell-is-associated-with-reduced-crime?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ecae23edd4-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_21_2012&utm_medium=email

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Many thinkers have nicely laid out the various differences here. One author who has written countless articles and books on this is Thomas Sowell. He does a very good job of describing this ideological warfare, this war of worldviews.

As I wrote elsewhere, “The two main visions Sowell discusses are what he calls the constrained and the unconstrained visions. The constrained vision (the conservative worldview) acknowledges that there are limits. There are limits to human nature, limits to what governments can do, limits to what can be achieved in a society.

Buy this from Amazon: A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell Click Here

“The unconstrained vision (the radical or leftist worldview) tends to downplay limits. Mankind is seen as more or less perfectible; social and political utopia is to a large extent achievable; and evil is not endemic or inherent in the human condition, and therefore is able to be mostly eliminated.

“The conservative vision tends to reflect the Judeo-Christian understanding that mankind is fallen, is limited, is prone to sin and self, and cannot produce heaven on earth, at least without the help of God. The left-liberal vision, by contrast, tends to see the human condition as innocent, malleable and perfectible, and tends to think that utopia on earth is achievable under the right social conditions.”

In a new article Sowell looks at how both fascism and socialism are really of one piece – they both belong to the domain of the left. He writes, “One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

“Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely – and correctly – regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book Liberal Fascism cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.

“Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left. It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot – and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.

“What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people – like themselves – need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.

“The left’s vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, ‘We the People…’ That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution’s limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges’ new interpretations, based on notions of ‘a living Constitution’ that will take decisions out of the hands of ‘We the People,’ and transfer those decisions to our betters.”

Quite right. And in another very recent article Matt Barber also speaks to these competing visions. As he says, “This is about worldview. This is about an epic clash between two irreconcilable, diametrically opposed socio-political philosophies. It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins and somebody loses.” And he does a nice job of summarising these two:

“On the one hand, we have secular-socialism, a cultural and political philosophy embraced by labor unions, Barack Obama, the base of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and many of those controlling the reins of our elitist institutions. It is ‘progressivism.’ This is a philosophy that, throughout history, has proven to be a serial failure. One need only look to Europe for the latest example.

“This secularist worldview is based loosely on the unattainable, redistributionist ramblings of Karl Marx, the father of communism. It hates Christianity. It hates constitutionalism. It hates the precepts of individual liberty and responsibility codified throughout our nation’s founding documents. It embraces moral relativism and says there are no clear lines of demarcation between right and wrong. It says that government is God and that as government giveth, government taketh away. In sum: It’s garbage.”

“On the other hand we have the Judeo-Christian worldview. This is the socio-political philosophy embraced by our Founding Fathers. The historical record is unequivocal. It was within this framework that our U.S. Constitution was created. It is conservatism. It says that we are endowed by our ‘Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’

“It embraces the virtues of fiscal responsibility, individual liberty and personal charity. It says there is black and white – right and wrong. It strives for less government and more freedom. It acknowledges that there is a sovereign God – to whom we are all accountable – including both government and those whom ‘we the people’ place in government. It holds that as God giveth, God taketh away, and that you lying, cheating, ungodly snakes in Washington, D.C., better just take a step back and quick. In sum: It is truth.”

Yep, that is not a bad broad-brush look at these opposing ideologies, these manifestly incompatible worldviews. But if that is a bit too theoretical or intellectual for you to take in, I have another way of rounding all this off. And that is to simply share a poster which just appeared on another site. It pretty nicely summarises the state of play, and the war we are in – in very practical terms:

“Only under a godless government can you legally kill your children and go to jail for disciplining them. (All nations will be judged.)”

townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/06/12/socialist_or_fascist

townhall.com/columnists/mattbarber/2012/06/11/liberalism_is_terminally_ill

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