Renunciation and Rebirth
In regard to the last of the above, it may seem to many that the ultimate requirement-to give up one's self and one's life -represents a kind of cruelty on the part of God or fate, which makes our existence a sort of bad joke and which can never be completely accepted, This attitude is particularly true in present-day Western culture, in which the self is held sacred and death is considered an unspeakable insult. Yet the exact opposite is the reality, It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and, lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion.
The process of giving up the self (which is related to the phenomenon of love, as will be discussed in the next section of this book) is for most of us a gradual process which we get into by a series of fits and starts. One form of temporary giving up of the self deserves special mention because its practice is an absolute requirement for significant learning during adulthood, and therefore for significant growth of the human spirit. I am referring to a subtype of the discipline of balancing which I call "bracketing." Bracketing is essentially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one's self-putting one's self aside, so to speak-so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self.
The discipline of bracketing illustrates the most consequential fact of giving up and of discipline in general: namely, that for all that is given up even more is gained, Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process. The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new. The pain of death is the pain of birth, and the pain of birth is the pain of death. For us to develop a new and better idea, concept, theory or understanding means that an old idea, concept, theory or understanding must die.
This lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births. "Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live," said Seneca two millennia ago, "and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die. "t It is also clear that the farther one travels on the journey of life, the more births one will experience, and therefore the more deaths, the more joy and the more pain.
This raises the question of whether it is ever possible to become free from emotional pain in this life. Or, putting it more mildly, is it possible to spiritually evolve to a level of consciousness at which the pain of living is at least diminished? The answer is yes and no. The answer is yes, because once suffering is completely accepted, it ceases in a sense to be suffering. It is also yes because the unceasing practice of discipline leads to mastery, and the spiritually evolved person is masterful in the same sense that the adult is masterful in relation to the child. Matters that present great problems for the child and cause it great pain may be of no consequence to the adult at all. Finally, the answer is yes because the spiritually evolved individual is, as will be elaborated in the next section, an extraordinarily loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.
The answer is no, however, because there is a vacuum of competence in the world which must be filled. In a world crying out in desperate need for competence, an extraordinarily competent and loving person can no more withhold his or her competence than such a person could deny food to a' hungry infant. Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, mastery and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call. They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power, although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people, since more often than not they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways. Nonetheless, exercise power they do, and in this exercise they suffer greatly, even dreadfully. For to exercise power is to make decisions, and the process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness (which is the way most decisions are made and why they are ultimately proved wrong). Imagine two generals, each having to decide whether or not to commit a division of ten thousand men to battle. To one the division is but a thing, a unit of personnel, an instrument of strategy and nothing more. To the other it is these things, but he is also aware of each and everyone of the ten thousand lives and the lives of the families of each of the ten thousand. For whom is the decision easier? It is easier for the general who has blunted his awareness precisely because he cannot tolerate the pain of a more nearly complete awareness. It may be tempting to say, "Ah, but a spiritually evolved man would never become a general in the first place." But the same issue is involved in being a corporation president, a physician, a teacher, a parent. Decisions affecting the lives of others must always be made. The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. One measure-and perhaps the best measure-of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering. Yet the great are also joyful.
So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy. Perhaps you may find an answer in the remainder of this book; perhaps you will not.
A final word on the discipline of balancing and its essence of giving up: you must have something in order to give it up. You cannot give up anything you have not already gotten. If you give up winning without ever having won, you are where you were at the beginning: a loser. You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it. This may seem incredibly elementary, but I think it is necessary to say it, since there are many people I know who possess a vision of evolution yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy short-cut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry. Some even believe that by such imitation they have really become saints and' prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.
Discipline has been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain of problem-solving instead of avoiding that pain-in such a way that all of life's problems can be solved. Four basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth or reality, and balancing. Discipline is a system of techniques, because these techniques are very much interrelated. In a single act one may utilize two, three or even all of the techniques at the same, time and in such a way that they may be distinguishable from each other.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Thursday, July 25, 2024
Healthiness of Depression
The Healthiness of Depression
The foregoing is a minor example of what those people with the courage to call themselves patients must go through in more, major ways, and often many times, in the process of psychotherapy. The period of intensive psychotherapy is a period of intensive growth, during which the patient may undergo more changes than some people experience in a lifetime. For this growth spurt to occur, a proportionate amount of "the old self' must be given up. It is an inevitable part of successful psychotherapy. In fact, this process of giving up usually begins before the patient has his first appointment with the psychotherapist. Frequently, for instance, the act of deciding to seek psychiatric attention in itself represents a giving up of the self-image "I'm OK." This giving up may be particularly difficult for males in our culture for whom "I'm not OK and I need assistance to understand why I'm not OK and how to become OK" is frequently and sadly equated with "I'm weak, unmasculine and inadequate."
Recently we have been hearing of the "mid-life crisis." Actually, this is but one of many "crises," or critical stages of development, in life, as Erik Erikson taught us thirty years ago. (Erikson delineated eight crises; perhaps there are more.) What makes crises of these transition periods in the life cycle -that is, problematic and painful-is that in successfully working our way through them we must give up cherished notions and old ways of doing and looking at things. 'Many people are either unwilling or unable to suffer the pain of 'l giving up the outgrown which needs to be forsaken. Consequently they cling, often forever, to their old patterns of thinking and behaving, thus failing to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity. Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:
The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
The fantasy of omnipotence
The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one's parents
The dependency of childhood Distorted images of one's parents
The omnipotentiality of adolescence
The "freedom" of uncommitment
The agility of youth
The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
The fantasy of immortality
Authority over one's children
Various forms of temporal power
The independence of physical health
And ultimately the self and life itself.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
The foregoing is a minor example of what those people with the courage to call themselves patients must go through in more, major ways, and often many times, in the process of psychotherapy. The period of intensive psychotherapy is a period of intensive growth, during which the patient may undergo more changes than some people experience in a lifetime. For this growth spurt to occur, a proportionate amount of "the old self' must be given up. It is an inevitable part of successful psychotherapy. In fact, this process of giving up usually begins before the patient has his first appointment with the psychotherapist. Frequently, for instance, the act of deciding to seek psychiatric attention in itself represents a giving up of the self-image "I'm OK." This giving up may be particularly difficult for males in our culture for whom "I'm not OK and I need assistance to understand why I'm not OK and how to become OK" is frequently and sadly equated with "I'm weak, unmasculine and inadequate."
Recently we have been hearing of the "mid-life crisis." Actually, this is but one of many "crises," or critical stages of development, in life, as Erik Erikson taught us thirty years ago. (Erikson delineated eight crises; perhaps there are more.) What makes crises of these transition periods in the life cycle -that is, problematic and painful-is that in successfully working our way through them we must give up cherished notions and old ways of doing and looking at things. 'Many people are either unwilling or unable to suffer the pain of 'l giving up the outgrown which needs to be forsaken. Consequently they cling, often forever, to their old patterns of thinking and behaving, thus failing to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity. Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:
The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
The fantasy of omnipotence
The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one's parents
The dependency of childhood Distorted images of one's parents
The omnipotentiality of adolescence
The "freedom" of uncommitment
The agility of youth
The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
The fantasy of immortality
Authority over one's children
Various forms of temporal power
The independence of physical health
And ultimately the self and life itself.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Balancing
Balancing
By this time I hope it is becoming clear that the exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task, requiring both flexibility and judgment. Courageous people must continually push themselves to be completely honest, yet must also possess the capacity to withhold the whole truth when appropriate. To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing, and it is the fourth and final type that I would like to discuss here.
Balancing is the discipline that gives us flexibility. Extraordinary flexibility is required for successful living in all spheres of activity. To use but one example, let us consider the matter of anger and its expression. Anger is an emotion bred into us (and into less evolved organisms) by countless generations of evolution in order that our survival may be encouraged. We experience anger whenever we perceive another organism attempting to encroach upon our geographical or psychological territory or trying, one way or another, to put us down. It leads us to fight back. Without our anger we would indeed be continually stepped on, until we were totally squashed and exterminated. Only with anger can we survive. Yet, more often than not, when we initially perceive others as attempting to encroach on us, we realize upon closer examination that that is not what they intend to do at all. Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger. Thus it is necessary that the higher centers of our brain (judgment) be able to regulate and modulate the lower centers (emotion). To function successfully in our complex world it is necessary for us to possess the capacity not only to express our anger but also not to express it. Moreover, we must possess the capacity to express our anger in different ways. At times, for instance, it is necessary to express it only after much deliberation and self-evaluation. At other times it is more to our benefit to express it immediately and spontaneously. Sometimes it is best to express it coldly and calmly; at other times loudly and hotly. We therefore not only need to know how to deal with our anger in different ways at different times but also how most appropriately to match the right time with the right style of expression. To handle our anger with full adequacy and competence, an elaborate, flexible response system is required. It is no wonder, then, that to learn to handle our anger is a complex task which usually cannot be completed before adulthood, or even mid-life, and which often is never completed.
Mature mental health demands, then, an extraordinary capacity to flexibly strike and continually restrike a delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, directions, et cetera. The essence of this discipline of balancing is "giving up." Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
By this time I hope it is becoming clear that the exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task, requiring both flexibility and judgment. Courageous people must continually push themselves to be completely honest, yet must also possess the capacity to withhold the whole truth when appropriate. To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing, and it is the fourth and final type that I would like to discuss here.
Balancing is the discipline that gives us flexibility. Extraordinary flexibility is required for successful living in all spheres of activity. To use but one example, let us consider the matter of anger and its expression. Anger is an emotion bred into us (and into less evolved organisms) by countless generations of evolution in order that our survival may be encouraged. We experience anger whenever we perceive another organism attempting to encroach upon our geographical or psychological territory or trying, one way or another, to put us down. It leads us to fight back. Without our anger we would indeed be continually stepped on, until we were totally squashed and exterminated. Only with anger can we survive. Yet, more often than not, when we initially perceive others as attempting to encroach on us, we realize upon closer examination that that is not what they intend to do at all. Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger. Thus it is necessary that the higher centers of our brain (judgment) be able to regulate and modulate the lower centers (emotion). To function successfully in our complex world it is necessary for us to possess the capacity not only to express our anger but also not to express it. Moreover, we must possess the capacity to express our anger in different ways. At times, for instance, it is necessary to express it only after much deliberation and self-evaluation. At other times it is more to our benefit to express it immediately and spontaneously. Sometimes it is best to express it coldly and calmly; at other times loudly and hotly. We therefore not only need to know how to deal with our anger in different ways at different times but also how most appropriately to match the right time with the right style of expression. To handle our anger with full adequacy and competence, an elaborate, flexible response system is required. It is no wonder, then, that to learn to handle our anger is a complex task which usually cannot be completed before adulthood, or even mid-life, and which often is never completed.
Mature mental health demands, then, an extraordinary capacity to flexibly strike and continually restrike a delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, directions, et cetera. The essence of this discipline of balancing is "giving up." Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Withholding Truth
Withholding Truth
Lying can be divided into two types: white lies and black lies. A black lie is a statement we make that we know is false. A white lie is a statement we make that is not in itself false but that leaves out a significant part of the truth. The fact that a lie is white does not in itself make it any less of a lie or any more excusable. White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones. A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely. The patient who neglected to mention that she had overdrawn the family bank account was impeding her growth in therapy no less than if she had lied directly~ Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.
White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings." Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial. For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent. Even husbands and wives who have been brave enough to be open with each other find it difficult often to be open with their children.
They do not tell their children that they smoke marijuana, or that they fought with each other the night before concerning their relationship, or that they resent the grandparents for their manipulativeness, or that the doctor has told one or both that they have psychosomatic disorders, or that they are making a risky financial investment or even how much money they have in the bank. Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries. Yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful. The children know anyway that Mommy and Daddy smoke pot, that they had a fight the night before, that the grandparents are resented, that Mommy is nervous and that Daddy is losing money. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation. The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage. For some parents the desire to "protect" their children is motivated by genuine albeit misguided love. For others, however, the "loving" desire to protect their children serves more as a cover-up and rationalization of a desire to avoid being challenged by their children, and a desire to maintain their authority over them. Such parents are saying in effect, "Look, kids, you go on being children with childish concerns and leave the adult concerns up to us. See us as strong and loving caretakers. Such an image is good for both of us, so don't challenge it. It allows us to feel strong and you to feel safe, and it will be easier for all of us if we don't look into these things too deeply."
Nonetheless, a real conflict may arise when the desire for total honesty is opposed by the needs of some people for certain kinds of protection. For instance, even parents with excellent marriages may occasionally consider divorce as one of their possible options, but to inform their children of this at a time when they are not at all likely to opt for divorce is to place an unnecessary burden upon the children. The idea of divorce is extremely threatening to a child's sense of security -indeed, so threatening that children do not have the capacity to perceive it with much perspective. They are seriously threatened by the possibility of divorce even when it is remote. If their parents' marriage is definitely on the rocks, then children will be dealing with the threatening possibility of divorce whether or not their parents talk about it. But if the marriage is basically sound, parents woul.d indeed be doing their children a disservice if they said with complete openness, "Mommy and Daddy were talking last night about getting a divorce, but we're not at all serious about it at this time." As another instance, it is frequently necessary for psychotherapists to withhold their own thoughts, opinions and insights from patients in the earlier stages of psychotherapy because the patients are not yet ready to receive or deal with them. During my first year of psychiatric training a patient on his fourth visit to me recounted a dream that obviously expressed a concern with homosexuality. In my desire to appear t9 be a brilliant therapist and make rapid progress I told him, "Your dream indicates that you are concerned with worries that you might be homosexual." He grew visibly anxious, and he did not keep his next three appointments. Only with a good deal of work and an even greater amount of luck was I able to persuade him to return to therapy. We had another twenty sessions before he had to move from the area because of a business reassignment. These sessions were of considerable benefit to him despite the fact that we never again raised the issue of homosexuality. The fact that his unconscious was concerned with the issue did not mean that he was at all ready to deal with it on a conscious level, and by not withholding my insight from him I did him a grave disservice, almost losing him not only as my patient but as anyone's patient.
So the expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in these and many other circumstances in the course of human affairs. What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one's map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another's needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another's needs is the assessment of that person's capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.
All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illumination and clarification. Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self~ discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Lying can be divided into two types: white lies and black lies. A black lie is a statement we make that we know is false. A white lie is a statement we make that is not in itself false but that leaves out a significant part of the truth. The fact that a lie is white does not in itself make it any less of a lie or any more excusable. White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones. A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely. The patient who neglected to mention that she had overdrawn the family bank account was impeding her growth in therapy no less than if she had lied directly~ Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.
White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings." Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial. For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent. Even husbands and wives who have been brave enough to be open with each other find it difficult often to be open with their children.
They do not tell their children that they smoke marijuana, or that they fought with each other the night before concerning their relationship, or that they resent the grandparents for their manipulativeness, or that the doctor has told one or both that they have psychosomatic disorders, or that they are making a risky financial investment or even how much money they have in the bank. Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries. Yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful. The children know anyway that Mommy and Daddy smoke pot, that they had a fight the night before, that the grandparents are resented, that Mommy is nervous and that Daddy is losing money. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation. The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage. For some parents the desire to "protect" their children is motivated by genuine albeit misguided love. For others, however, the "loving" desire to protect their children serves more as a cover-up and rationalization of a desire to avoid being challenged by their children, and a desire to maintain their authority over them. Such parents are saying in effect, "Look, kids, you go on being children with childish concerns and leave the adult concerns up to us. See us as strong and loving caretakers. Such an image is good for both of us, so don't challenge it. It allows us to feel strong and you to feel safe, and it will be easier for all of us if we don't look into these things too deeply."
Nonetheless, a real conflict may arise when the desire for total honesty is opposed by the needs of some people for certain kinds of protection. For instance, even parents with excellent marriages may occasionally consider divorce as one of their possible options, but to inform their children of this at a time when they are not at all likely to opt for divorce is to place an unnecessary burden upon the children. The idea of divorce is extremely threatening to a child's sense of security -indeed, so threatening that children do not have the capacity to perceive it with much perspective. They are seriously threatened by the possibility of divorce even when it is remote. If their parents' marriage is definitely on the rocks, then children will be dealing with the threatening possibility of divorce whether or not their parents talk about it. But if the marriage is basically sound, parents woul.d indeed be doing their children a disservice if they said with complete openness, "Mommy and Daddy were talking last night about getting a divorce, but we're not at all serious about it at this time." As another instance, it is frequently necessary for psychotherapists to withhold their own thoughts, opinions and insights from patients in the earlier stages of psychotherapy because the patients are not yet ready to receive or deal with them. During my first year of psychiatric training a patient on his fourth visit to me recounted a dream that obviously expressed a concern with homosexuality. In my desire to appear t9 be a brilliant therapist and make rapid progress I told him, "Your dream indicates that you are concerned with worries that you might be homosexual." He grew visibly anxious, and he did not keep his next three appointments. Only with a good deal of work and an even greater amount of luck was I able to persuade him to return to therapy. We had another twenty sessions before he had to move from the area because of a business reassignment. These sessions were of considerable benefit to him despite the fact that we never again raised the issue of homosexuality. The fact that his unconscious was concerned with the issue did not mean that he was at all ready to deal with it on a conscious level, and by not withholding my insight from him I did him a grave disservice, almost losing him not only as my patient but as anyone's patient.
So the expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in these and many other circumstances in the course of human affairs. What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one's map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another's needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another's needs is the assessment of that person's capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.
All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illumination and clarification. Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self~ discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Dedication to the Truth
Dedication to the Truth
The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world--the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions--the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and, accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many 'do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading.
By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.
But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them. The world itself is constantly changing. Glaciers come, glaciers go. Cultures come, cultures go. There is too little technology, there is too much technology. Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing. When we are children we are dependent, powerless. As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or an infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again. When we have children to care for, the world looks different. from when we have none; when we are raising infants, the world seems different from when we are raising adolescents. When we are poor, the world looks different from when we are rich. We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information.
Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.
Transference: The Outdated Map
This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference. There are probably as many subtle variations of, the definition of transference as there are psychiatrists. My own definition is: Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.
When problems of transference are involved, as they usually are, psychotherapy is, among other things, a process of map-revising. Patients come to therapy because their maps are clearly not working. But how they may cling to them and fight the process every step of the way! Frequently their need to cling to their maps and fight against losing them is so great that therapy becomes impossible.
Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
Openness to Challenge
What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts. For this reason psychiatrists are encouraged to receive their own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis as part of their training and development. Unfortunately, not all psychiatrists respond to this encouragement. There are many, psychiatrists among them, who stringently examine the world but not so stringently examine themselves. They may be competent individuals as the world judges competence, but they are never wise. The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. In the past in American culture, contemplation has not been held in high regard. In the 1950s people labeled Adlai Stevenson an "egghead" and believed he would not make a good President precisely because he was a contemplative man, given to deep thinking and self-doubts. I have heard parents tell their adolescent children in all seriousness, "You think too much." What an absurdity this is, given the fact that it is our frontal lobes; our capacity to think and to examine ourselves that most makes us human. Fortunately, such attitudes seem to be changing, and we are beginning to realize that the sources of danger to the world lie more within us than
outside, and that the process of constant self-examination and contemplation is essential for ultimate survival. Still, I am talking of relatively small numbers of people who are changing their attitudes. Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it. Yet when one is dedicated to the truth this pain seems relatively unimportant-and less and less important (and therefore less and less painful) the farther one proceeds on the path of self-examination.
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. Otherwise we live in a closed system--within a bell jar, to use Sylvia Plath's analogy, rebreathing only our own fetid air, more and more subject to delusion. Yet, because of the pain inherent in the process of revising our map of reality, we mostly seek to avoid or ward off any challenges to its validity. To our children we say, "Don't talk back to me, I'm your parent." To our spouse we give the message, "Let's live and let live. If you criticize me, I'll be a bitch to live with, and you'll regret it." To their families and the world the elderly give the message, "I am old and fragile. If you challenge me I may die or at least you will bear upon your head the responsibility for making my last days on earth miserable." To our employees we communicate, "If you are bold enough to challenge me at all, you had best do so very circumspectly indeed or else you'll find yourself looking for another job."
The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature--perhaps the one that makes us most human--is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.
For individuals and organizations to be open to challenge, it is necessary that their maps of reality be truly open for inspection by the public. More than press conferences are required. The, third thing that a life of total dedication to the truth means, therefore, is a life of total honesty. It means a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications--not only the words that we say but also the way we say them--invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it.
Taken from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world--the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions--the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and, accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many 'do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading.
By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.
But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them. The world itself is constantly changing. Glaciers come, glaciers go. Cultures come, cultures go. There is too little technology, there is too much technology. Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing. When we are children we are dependent, powerless. As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or an infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again. When we have children to care for, the world looks different. from when we have none; when we are raising infants, the world seems different from when we are raising adolescents. When we are poor, the world looks different from when we are rich. We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information.
Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.
Transference: The Outdated Map
This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference. There are probably as many subtle variations of, the definition of transference as there are psychiatrists. My own definition is: Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.
When problems of transference are involved, as they usually are, psychotherapy is, among other things, a process of map-revising. Patients come to therapy because their maps are clearly not working. But how they may cling to them and fight the process every step of the way! Frequently their need to cling to their maps and fight against losing them is so great that therapy becomes impossible.
Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
Openness to Challenge
What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts. For this reason psychiatrists are encouraged to receive their own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis as part of their training and development. Unfortunately, not all psychiatrists respond to this encouragement. There are many, psychiatrists among them, who stringently examine the world but not so stringently examine themselves. They may be competent individuals as the world judges competence, but they are never wise. The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. In the past in American culture, contemplation has not been held in high regard. In the 1950s people labeled Adlai Stevenson an "egghead" and believed he would not make a good President precisely because he was a contemplative man, given to deep thinking and self-doubts. I have heard parents tell their adolescent children in all seriousness, "You think too much." What an absurdity this is, given the fact that it is our frontal lobes; our capacity to think and to examine ourselves that most makes us human. Fortunately, such attitudes seem to be changing, and we are beginning to realize that the sources of danger to the world lie more within us than
outside, and that the process of constant self-examination and contemplation is essential for ultimate survival. Still, I am talking of relatively small numbers of people who are changing their attitudes. Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it. Yet when one is dedicated to the truth this pain seems relatively unimportant-and less and less important (and therefore less and less painful) the farther one proceeds on the path of self-examination.
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. Otherwise we live in a closed system--within a bell jar, to use Sylvia Plath's analogy, rebreathing only our own fetid air, more and more subject to delusion. Yet, because of the pain inherent in the process of revising our map of reality, we mostly seek to avoid or ward off any challenges to its validity. To our children we say, "Don't talk back to me, I'm your parent." To our spouse we give the message, "Let's live and let live. If you criticize me, I'll be a bitch to live with, and you'll regret it." To their families and the world the elderly give the message, "I am old and fragile. If you challenge me I may die or at least you will bear upon your head the responsibility for making my last days on earth miserable." To our employees we communicate, "If you are bold enough to challenge me at all, you had best do so very circumspectly indeed or else you'll find yourself looking for another job."
The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature--perhaps the one that makes us most human--is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.
For individuals and organizations to be open to challenge, it is necessary that their maps of reality be truly open for inspection by the public. More than press conferences are required. The, third thing that a life of total dedication to the truth means, therefore, is a life of total honesty. It means a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications--not only the words that we say but also the way we say them--invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it.
Taken from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Flight
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
10. Flight
“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Stanley Milgram
65% continued shocking when the subject pounded on the wall.
62% continued shocking when the subject’s cries could be heard.
40% continued shocking when the subject was in the same room.
30% shocked the subject even when they had to force his hand onto the shock plate, and still shocked the subject up to 450 volts.
Virtually all of hem, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them they had no choice.
Living Tools
Human beings’ tendency to obey helps keep order and stability in society but can also be transformed into a tool of evil.
When a person is in a hierarchical structure he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but an agent of others, an instrument or a tool, not a responsible moral agent.
When he finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, he cannot find a good, clean place to break off.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, trained men to become ruthless by giving officers more difficult assignments, such as the mercy killing of nursing home patients, and when they began to balk he would remind them of what they had already done. Finally, his loyalty to the Nazi party would be questioned and he would be threatened with the same fate of the prisoners if he refused. Obedience got him his position, and cowardice pinned him to it.
A German priest absolved Stangl of all his guilt: “Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Franz’s place I would have done the same. I absolve him of all guilt.”
Rudolf Höss, ordered to carry out mass exterminations at Auschwitz, later stated, “I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”
Multiple Evasions
Conforming
Lakewood, CA 1993 and the “Spur Posse” that sexually exploited a large number of girls in a contest for who could have sex with the most girls. Parents didn’t blame the boys at all.
Conniving
To shut one’s eyes to an injustice, to look the other way, to pretend ignorance of evil, is to connive.
Kitty Genovese, March 13, 1964 in Queens was brutally raped and murdered and no one helped.
Leaving Town
Winston Churchill could not convince Europe’s leaders to take action to oppose Hitler.
Specializing
In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, some people dealt with the stress by doing their task with the utmost care in order to avoid the moral dilemma.
Minimizing
Apologize instead of repent, show kindness instead of love, seek happiness instead of joy, talk instead of do.
Going Limp
Making a career of nothing robs the community of our gifts and energies and shapes life into a yawn at the God and savior of the world, and in effect says to God, “You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.”
Cocooning
Some people retreat into the small world of their friends, work, church, and family.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Our flights of amusement cost us more than time and money. They also may cost us our grasp of the general distinction between reality and illusion.
Neil Postman says, on TV, “everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
The Flight from Shalom
At the heart of all evasions lies two others: He has turned his back on his neighbor and his God, and in some way, on himself. By refusing his calling, he extracts his own core, hollowing himself out to a shell of a human being, without weight or substance. He has made himself an alien to the gospel and a stranger to Jesus Christ. To sell a neighbor short is to sell God short.
The gifts of God—vitality, love, forgiveness, courage, joy, and everything that flows the work of Christ—may be found only in the company of God. And we keep company with God only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so.
Many people have fallen into a “functional godlessness.”
Life with God is not mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior. Rather, we trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
We must trust and obey to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants form us not numb obedience but devoted freedom creativity, and energy. In short, we are to become responsible beings, people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
God has called us, graced us, to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. We have to find the emotional and spiritual energy for these tasks from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces to God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, revitalized by it. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, empowered by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.
Epilogue
Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good.
Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still.
God wants Shalom and will pay any price to get it back.
Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
10. Flight
“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Stanley Milgram
65% continued shocking when the subject pounded on the wall.
62% continued shocking when the subject’s cries could be heard.
40% continued shocking when the subject was in the same room.
30% shocked the subject even when they had to force his hand onto the shock plate, and still shocked the subject up to 450 volts.
Virtually all of hem, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them they had no choice.
Living Tools
Human beings’ tendency to obey helps keep order and stability in society but can also be transformed into a tool of evil.
When a person is in a hierarchical structure he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but an agent of others, an instrument or a tool, not a responsible moral agent.
When he finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, he cannot find a good, clean place to break off.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, trained men to become ruthless by giving officers more difficult assignments, such as the mercy killing of nursing home patients, and when they began to balk he would remind them of what they had already done. Finally, his loyalty to the Nazi party would be questioned and he would be threatened with the same fate of the prisoners if he refused. Obedience got him his position, and cowardice pinned him to it.
A German priest absolved Stangl of all his guilt: “Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Franz’s place I would have done the same. I absolve him of all guilt.”
Rudolf Höss, ordered to carry out mass exterminations at Auschwitz, later stated, “I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”
Multiple Evasions
Conforming
Lakewood, CA 1993 and the “Spur Posse” that sexually exploited a large number of girls in a contest for who could have sex with the most girls. Parents didn’t blame the boys at all.
Conniving
To shut one’s eyes to an injustice, to look the other way, to pretend ignorance of evil, is to connive.
Kitty Genovese, March 13, 1964 in Queens was brutally raped and murdered and no one helped.
Leaving Town
Winston Churchill could not convince Europe’s leaders to take action to oppose Hitler.
Specializing
In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, some people dealt with the stress by doing their task with the utmost care in order to avoid the moral dilemma.
Minimizing
Apologize instead of repent, show kindness instead of love, seek happiness instead of joy, talk instead of do.
Going Limp
Making a career of nothing robs the community of our gifts and energies and shapes life into a yawn at the God and savior of the world, and in effect says to God, “You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.”
Cocooning
Some people retreat into the small world of their friends, work, church, and family.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Our flights of amusement cost us more than time and money. They also may cost us our grasp of the general distinction between reality and illusion.
Neil Postman says, on TV, “everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
The Flight from Shalom
At the heart of all evasions lies two others: He has turned his back on his neighbor and his God, and in some way, on himself. By refusing his calling, he extracts his own core, hollowing himself out to a shell of a human being, without weight or substance. He has made himself an alien to the gospel and a stranger to Jesus Christ. To sell a neighbor short is to sell God short.
The gifts of God—vitality, love, forgiveness, courage, joy, and everything that flows the work of Christ—may be found only in the company of God. And we keep company with God only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so.
Many people have fallen into a “functional godlessness.”
Life with God is not mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior. Rather, we trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
We must trust and obey to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants form us not numb obedience but devoted freedom creativity, and energy. In short, we are to become responsible beings, people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
God has called us, graced us, to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. We have to find the emotional and spiritual energy for these tasks from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces to God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, revitalized by it. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, empowered by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.
Epilogue
Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good.
Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still.
God wants Shalom and will pay any price to get it back.
Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.
Attack
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
9. Attack
“He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” Iago in Othello.
The complex character of Lyndon Baines Johnson who was both one of our greatest politicians and our greatest liars. He not only had trouble “telling” the truth but in “seeing” it. He was a master of using lies to attack his opponents.
Attack and Flight
Sin alternates between attack and flight. Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They invade somebody else’s life or they flee their responsibility for it. They transgress God’s prohibitions and avoid God’s requirements. They may even treat themselves with self-abuse or self-neglect.
This approach/avoidance pattern lies deep within Scripture. There are those who attack the light of God, and are consumed by his heat, and there are those who turn their backs on the light of God, and freeze in the cold darkness.
We use lies to avoid our responsibilities and to assault other human beings.
A Select History of Envy
In Iowa, Miss Harvest Queen strangled Miss Homecoming Queen with a leather belt.
High school yearbook editor in Indiana draws facial hair, underarm hair, blackens teeth of girls she envies just before sending it to the printer.
An African-American girl in Oakland works hard to get into medical school but is ridiculed and scorned by her peers.
In Chicago, subordinates spread lies about a publishing executive that cause him to be fired.
In Texas a mother of a thirteen-year-old cheerleader hired a hit man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader to disrupt her ability to do well at tryouts.
An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped into your lap; to an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way.
Envy is nastier than covetousness in that what envy wants is not what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly that one is tempted to steal it while envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.
Resentment, Pride, and Destruction
The advantages of others makes the envious angry. Envy is a corrupted form of anger. Resentment is a protracted form of anger.
The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
The envier usually resents someone that is slightly superior to him or equal to him.
The proud envier keeps running for the office of God.
Enviers also rejoice in the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude).
Envy poisons the envier and introduces gangrene into his own soul.
Enviers want to be envied.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
9. Attack
“He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” Iago in Othello.
The complex character of Lyndon Baines Johnson who was both one of our greatest politicians and our greatest liars. He not only had trouble “telling” the truth but in “seeing” it. He was a master of using lies to attack his opponents.
Attack and Flight
Sin alternates between attack and flight. Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They invade somebody else’s life or they flee their responsibility for it. They transgress God’s prohibitions and avoid God’s requirements. They may even treat themselves with self-abuse or self-neglect.
This approach/avoidance pattern lies deep within Scripture. There are those who attack the light of God, and are consumed by his heat, and there are those who turn their backs on the light of God, and freeze in the cold darkness.
We use lies to avoid our responsibilities and to assault other human beings.
A Select History of Envy
In Iowa, Miss Harvest Queen strangled Miss Homecoming Queen with a leather belt.
High school yearbook editor in Indiana draws facial hair, underarm hair, blackens teeth of girls she envies just before sending it to the printer.
An African-American girl in Oakland works hard to get into medical school but is ridiculed and scorned by her peers.
In Chicago, subordinates spread lies about a publishing executive that cause him to be fired.
In Texas a mother of a thirteen-year-old cheerleader hired a hit man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader to disrupt her ability to do well at tryouts.
An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped into your lap; to an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way.
Envy is nastier than covetousness in that what envy wants is not what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly that one is tempted to steal it while envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.
Resentment, Pride, and Destruction
The advantages of others makes the envious angry. Envy is a corrupted form of anger. Resentment is a protracted form of anger.
The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
The envier usually resents someone that is slightly superior to him or equal to him.
The proud envier keeps running for the office of God.
Enviers also rejoice in the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude).
Envy poisons the envier and introduces gangrene into his own soul.
Enviers want to be envied.
The Tragedy of Addiction
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”
The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.
The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.
Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.
Overlapping Circles
Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”
The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.
The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.
Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.
Overlapping Circles
Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”
Masquerade
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”
The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.
A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”
The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.
A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.
Sin and Folly
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
7. Sin and Folly
When we say an act was senseless, stupid, tragic, shortsighted, mistaken, unfortunate, miscalculated, erring, regrettable, or out of line, we are agreeing with the Bible that it was “foolish.”
Fitting into the World
Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it.
The Bible is a book about the way the world really is, not merely the way it should be.
To be wise is to discern reality, to love it, and then to live according to it.
To discern realities at their deeper levels we have to become engaged with them.
The wise accommodate themselves to reality.
Against the Grain
Borneo: government used DDT to kill houseflies, geckos got sick from eating poisoned flies, cats died from eating poisoned geckos, rats infested the houses and brought the plague.
Folly is the lack of understanding of the world and living contrary to reality.
Intelligence and education are only the raw materials for good judgment.
Folly includes poor judgment, lack of discernment, inattentiveness.
The Main Event
Not all that is folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Sin is finally futile.
Pride is futile because self-fascination is so often unrequited. The more self-absorbed we are the less there is to find absorbing.
Idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile.
People hungry for love, people who want to “connect,” will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.
Folly is swimming against the stream of the universe.
It is not only wrong but foolish to offend God because God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless heats come to rest.
Those who turn their back on God can find only “black-market substitutes”: instead of joy, they only get excitement; instead of self-giving love they get sex with strangers; instead of unconditional acceptance they get a professional therapist.
Rebellion against God and flight from God only remove us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.
Sin is a form of self-abuse. It disqualifies us from the true good: promiscuity keeps us from enjoying intimacy, lack of trust means we condemn ourselves to social superficiality, cheating brings distrust, enmity and suspicion, envy traps us in torment, pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship and communion.
Pride renders fools unteachable. Folly causes a great deal of misery and also prevents the fool from escaping from it.
A proud person tries to reinvent reality.
A fool is essentially out of touch with reality.
Only a fool would describe a meeting with God as “fun.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
7. Sin and Folly
When we say an act was senseless, stupid, tragic, shortsighted, mistaken, unfortunate, miscalculated, erring, regrettable, or out of line, we are agreeing with the Bible that it was “foolish.”
Fitting into the World
Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it.
The Bible is a book about the way the world really is, not merely the way it should be.
To be wise is to discern reality, to love it, and then to live according to it.
To discern realities at their deeper levels we have to become engaged with them.
The wise accommodate themselves to reality.
Against the Grain
Borneo: government used DDT to kill houseflies, geckos got sick from eating poisoned flies, cats died from eating poisoned geckos, rats infested the houses and brought the plague.
Folly is the lack of understanding of the world and living contrary to reality.
Intelligence and education are only the raw materials for good judgment.
Folly includes poor judgment, lack of discernment, inattentiveness.
The Main Event
Not all that is folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Sin is finally futile.
Pride is futile because self-fascination is so often unrequited. The more self-absorbed we are the less there is to find absorbing.
Idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile.
People hungry for love, people who want to “connect,” will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.
Folly is swimming against the stream of the universe.
It is not only wrong but foolish to offend God because God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless heats come to rest.
Those who turn their back on God can find only “black-market substitutes”: instead of joy, they only get excitement; instead of self-giving love they get sex with strangers; instead of unconditional acceptance they get a professional therapist.
Rebellion against God and flight from God only remove us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.
Sin is a form of self-abuse. It disqualifies us from the true good: promiscuity keeps us from enjoying intimacy, lack of trust means we condemn ourselves to social superficiality, cheating brings distrust, enmity and suspicion, envy traps us in torment, pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship and communion.
Pride renders fools unteachable. Folly causes a great deal of misery and also prevents the fool from escaping from it.
A proud person tries to reinvent reality.
A fool is essentially out of touch with reality.
Only a fool would describe a meeting with God as “fun.”
Parasite
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.
Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.
Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.
Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.
Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.
The Progress of Corruption
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
4. The Progress of Corruption
Mesillat Yesharim: “If a man is allured by the things of this world and is estranged from his Creator, it is not he alone who is corrupted, but the whole world is corrupted with him.”
One moral misstep leads to another.
Sin yields more and more sin; each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
Sin is a plague that spreads its contagion.
People rarely commit single sins.
Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing the very death of the soul.
History Echoes
Sin is both fatal and fertile.
Like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.
Victims of crime are dangerous because they are unlikely to exercise self-control in their attempt to get even.
Most people believe they are a victims and are merely returning fire, never firing the first shot.
Motives, Contexts, and Causes
People have long memories and short fuses when it comes to grievances.
Injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful.
Those who have been abused are more likely to abuse others.
It is easier to chose the short-term stress reliever, that puts long-term stress on our hearts and bodies.
Human beings want security, and our main problem is that we seek security in the wrong places and in the wrong ways because we fail to trust God to take care of us.
Unbelief produces anxiety which produces pride and sensuality.
“The heart wants what it wants.”
The human heart, when it ignores God, turns in on itself, trying to lift itself, please itself, and ends up debasing itself. When we want God’s gifts without God, we end up sagging and contracting into a little wad.
Motives may be mixed, making it difficult to discern them.
There are also social contexts to consider. Society must take some of the blame for sins committed because of injustice and abuse.
Even if we could understand all the motives, contexts, and forces, we would still not be able to fully understand why a certain sin was committed.
Failure to blame people for their sins is dehumanizing. In the Soviet Union the concept of blame disappeared and people were no longer treated as fully human.
The Great Law of Returns
Paul called this “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7)
At the bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and it has its reasons that even reason does not know.
“The heart is sinful and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
People not only reap what they sow, they also sow what they reap.
George F. Will: “America’s slide into the sewer is greased by praise.”
Other Causes?
Secrecy fertilizes evil.
God created us to live Shalom and to please Him, but we mysteriously live against the purpose of our existence.
Satan does not take any ground that we do not give him.
Satan seduces only those who want to be seduced.
Sin is not only personal but also interpersonal and suprapersonal.
Sin becomes a living, powerful force with a life all its own.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
4. The Progress of Corruption
Mesillat Yesharim: “If a man is allured by the things of this world and is estranged from his Creator, it is not he alone who is corrupted, but the whole world is corrupted with him.”
One moral misstep leads to another.
Sin yields more and more sin; each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
Sin is a plague that spreads its contagion.
People rarely commit single sins.
Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing the very death of the soul.
History Echoes
Sin is both fatal and fertile.
Like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.
Victims of crime are dangerous because they are unlikely to exercise self-control in their attempt to get even.
Most people believe they are a victims and are merely returning fire, never firing the first shot.
Motives, Contexts, and Causes
People have long memories and short fuses when it comes to grievances.
Injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful.
Those who have been abused are more likely to abuse others.
It is easier to chose the short-term stress reliever, that puts long-term stress on our hearts and bodies.
Human beings want security, and our main problem is that we seek security in the wrong places and in the wrong ways because we fail to trust God to take care of us.
Unbelief produces anxiety which produces pride and sensuality.
“The heart wants what it wants.”
The human heart, when it ignores God, turns in on itself, trying to lift itself, please itself, and ends up debasing itself. When we want God’s gifts without God, we end up sagging and contracting into a little wad.
Motives may be mixed, making it difficult to discern them.
There are also social contexts to consider. Society must take some of the blame for sins committed because of injustice and abuse.
Even if we could understand all the motives, contexts, and forces, we would still not be able to fully understand why a certain sin was committed.
Failure to blame people for their sins is dehumanizing. In the Soviet Union the concept of blame disappeared and people were no longer treated as fully human.
The Great Law of Returns
Paul called this “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7)
At the bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and it has its reasons that even reason does not know.
“The heart is sinful and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
People not only reap what they sow, they also sow what they reap.
George F. Will: “America’s slide into the sewer is greased by praise.”
Other Causes?
Secrecy fertilizes evil.
God created us to live Shalom and to please Him, but we mysteriously live against the purpose of our existence.
Satan does not take any ground that we do not give him.
Satan seduces only those who want to be seduced.
Sin is not only personal but also interpersonal and suprapersonal.
Sin becomes a living, powerful force with a life all its own.
Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”
Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.
Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.
Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”
Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.
Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.
Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”
Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
2. Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Oliver Stone: “I don’t want integrity to block my creative growth.”
Sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God has joined together.
Sin despoils: it removes that which preserves integrity. (The Nazis not only tried to kill the body but also the spirit, and not only to slay the spirit but to corrupt it so that it would recriminate and slay itself. They tried to strip away everything that holds a being together and what joins other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice and delight.)
Spiritual Hygiene
A spiritually whole person longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ, for Christ-likeness, for the Holy Spirit, for spiritual maturity, for other human beings, for love, for justice, for nature, for beauty.
Spiritually whole people long for character, virtue and goodness.
Most of what we long for cannot be had by trying to get it. The more we pursue these things the more elusive they become. We will find what we long for only when we seek for God.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
2. Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Oliver Stone: “I don’t want integrity to block my creative growth.”
Sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God has joined together.
Sin despoils: it removes that which preserves integrity. (The Nazis not only tried to kill the body but also the spirit, and not only to slay the spirit but to corrupt it so that it would recriminate and slay itself. They tried to strip away everything that holds a being together and what joins other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice and delight.)
Spiritual Hygiene
A spiritually whole person longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ, for Christ-likeness, for the Holy Spirit, for spiritual maturity, for other human beings, for love, for justice, for nature, for beauty.
Spiritually whole people long for character, virtue and goodness.
Most of what we long for cannot be had by trying to get it. The more we pursue these things the more elusive they become. We will find what we long for only when we seek for God.
Vandalism of Shalom
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Introduction
Walker Percy: Boredom is “the self being stuffed with itself.”
The main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix; sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.
1. Vandalism of Shalom
Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary about the hunger in Ethiopia and found that the government required the aid workers to pay a tariff on the emergency food relief they were bringing in for the starving people.
Shalom
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.
A universal flourishing, wholeness and delight.
Sin: A Definition
Sin is both a religious and a moral concept.
It is a breaking of the Law as well as the breaking of the Covenant
Sin is first and foremost a Godward force; any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed that displeases God and deserves blame.
Includes both acts and dispositions.
Sin is a culpable and personal affront to God.
Sin violates Shalom and interferes with the way things are supposed to be.
Sin is unoriginal in that it disrupts the good and harmonious like an intruder.
Sin offends God because it bereaves or assaults God directly or what God has made.
If there is no God, then there is no violation of God’s Law or an affront to Him.
Interscholastic and Intramural Distinctions
Crime is statute-relative while sin is not.
The relationship between sin and immorality is knotty and complex.
We need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases.
Do not confuse sin with mere error.
Sin is both objective and subjective; objective sin breaks the peace while subjective sin is when we feel we have broken the peace, whether we have or not.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. The badness of a sin depends partly on what kind and how much damage it has done.
There may be mitigating circumstances that need to be taken into account, but involuntariness may mitigate but it doesn’t necessarily excuse. If the sin was acquired in some way through some fault of our own, then we are culpable.
Evil social structures and habits may contribute to a sin, making it more difficult to assess the culpability of a sin.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Introduction
Walker Percy: Boredom is “the self being stuffed with itself.”
The main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix; sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.
1. Vandalism of Shalom
Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary about the hunger in Ethiopia and found that the government required the aid workers to pay a tariff on the emergency food relief they were bringing in for the starving people.
Shalom
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.
A universal flourishing, wholeness and delight.
Sin: A Definition
Sin is both a religious and a moral concept.
It is a breaking of the Law as well as the breaking of the Covenant
Sin is first and foremost a Godward force; any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed that displeases God and deserves blame.
Includes both acts and dispositions.
Sin is a culpable and personal affront to God.
Sin violates Shalom and interferes with the way things are supposed to be.
Sin is unoriginal in that it disrupts the good and harmonious like an intruder.
Sin offends God because it bereaves or assaults God directly or what God has made.
If there is no God, then there is no violation of God’s Law or an affront to Him.
Interscholastic and Intramural Distinctions
Crime is statute-relative while sin is not.
The relationship between sin and immorality is knotty and complex.
We need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases.
Do not confuse sin with mere error.
Sin is both objective and subjective; objective sin breaks the peace while subjective sin is when we feel we have broken the peace, whether we have or not.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. The badness of a sin depends partly on what kind and how much damage it has done.
There may be mitigating circumstances that need to be taken into account, but involuntariness may mitigate but it doesn’t necessarily excuse. If the sin was acquired in some way through some fault of our own, then we are culpable.
Evil social structures and habits may contribute to a sin, making it more difficult to assess the culpability of a sin.
Monday, July 25, 2022
How Did Life Begin?
How Did Life Begin?
Introduction
1. Purpose of apologetics
2. The biggest problem facing evolutionists is molecular biology and the rise of life out of non-living matter.
I. Prescientific Theories of Spontaneous Generation
A. Aristotle
1. Aristotle even believed that under the proper conditions putatively “simple” animals such as worms, fleas, mice, and dogs could spring to life spontaneously from moist ”Mother Earth."
2. Others believed that life had existed on earth for ever. This view is not supported by scientific observation today.
B. Middle Ages
1. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.
2. Maggots were thought to spontaneously generate from rotting meat
C. The death of spontaneous generation
1. Francesco Redi (1668) proved that maggots came from eggs laid by flies on the meat. The invention of the microscope only served to enhance this belief. Microscopy revealed a whole new world of organisms that appeared to arise spontaneously.
2. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1745) replicated experiements which were thought to prove spontaneous generation, but sealed the flask, not allowing outside microorganisms in.
3. The young French chemist, Louis Pasteur (1859) boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.
II. Abiogenesis
A. What is abiogenesis?
1.
1 Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced. .
2 Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells. .
3 Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals. .
4 The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population (adapted from Wynn and Wiggins, 1997, p. 172).
2. The major links in the molecules-to-man theory that must be bridged include
(a) evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules,
(b) evolution of complex molecules into simple organic molecules,
(c) evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules,
(d) eventual evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and
(e) eventually evolution into the first cells. This process requires multimillions of links, all which either are missing or controversial.
B. Primordial Soup
1. Four and a half billion years ago the young planet Earth... was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began... The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms... From these one- celled organisms evolved all life on earth (from the Emmy award winning PBS NOVA film The Miracle of Life
2. History of the theory
a. Russian scientist A.I. Oparin in the 1920s. The theory held that life evolved when organic molecules rained into the primitive oceans from an atmospheric soup of chemicals interacting with solar energy.
b. Later Haldane (1928), Bernal (1947) and Urey (1952) published their research to try to support this model, all with little success.
c. Then came what some felt was a breakthrough by Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller in the early 1950s. The most famous origin of life experiment was completed in 1953 by Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago.
The Miller/Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with methane, ammonia, hydrogen gases (representing what they thought composed the early atmosphere) and water vapor (to simulate the ocean). Next, they used a spark-discharge device to strike the gases in the flask with simulated lightning while a heating coil kept the water boiling. Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a reddish stain on the sides of the flask. After analyzing the substances that had been formed, they found several types of amino acids. Eventually Miller and other scientists were able to produce 10 of the 20 amino acids required for life by techniques similar to the original Miller/ Urey experiments.
For example, equal quantities of both right- and left-handed organic molecules always were produced by the Urey/Miller procedure. In real life, nearly all amino acids found in proteins are left handed, almost all polymers of carbohydrates are right handed, and the opposite type can be toxic to the cell.
The reasons why creating life in a test tube turned out to be far more difficult than Miller or anyone else expected are numerous and include the fact that scientists now know that the complexity of life is far greater than Miller or anyone else in pre-DNA revolution 1953 ever imagined. Actually life is far more complex and contains far more information than anyone in the 1980s believed possible.
3. Problems:
a. Assumes that the atmosphere of the early earth was different from our present atmosphere. Very little scientific evidence exists for this assumption; it is postulated simply because it is necessary for the theory to work.
b. It is a theory that is based upon assumption, not observation. Life is assumed to have arisen from non-living matter, so a mechanism is sought to validate that assumption.
c. No geological evidence exists to support this theory.
d. No experiment has been conducted that has even been able to produce the building blocks of living matter, such as proteins. All experiments so far have fallen way short.
e. Even if an experiment could produce protein molecules, it would not prove that it actually happened. In fact, it would prove that intelligence is needed to produce protein molecules.
f. It is not enough to show that the building blocks of life can be created in a scientific experiment. Life is more than random molecules just as a house is more than a pile of bricks. There must be information, an intelligence that arranges those molecules and animates them. Then these entities need to be able to grow and reproduce. This is an incredible feat that could not happen by mere chance.
3. Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that “the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously.” (Newman, 1967, p. 662). Most major discoveries about cell biology and molecular biology have been made since then.
4. Cytologists now realize that a living cell contains hundreds of thousands of different complex parts such as various motor proteins that are assembled to produce the most complex “machine” in the Universe—a machine far more complex than the most complex Cray super computer. We now also realize after a century of research that the eukaryote protozoa thought to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin in Darwin’s day actually are enormously more complex than the prokaryote cell. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals... In terms of their basic biochemical design... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
5. We now realize that the Urey/Miller experiments did not produce evidence for abiogenesis because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information (Pigliucci, 1999; Dembski, 1998). Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines and similar) abound in nature, but this does not help us to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespear’s plays) because this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to translate that information into symbols. What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines.
6. Yet another difficulty is, even if the source of the amino acids and the many other compounds needed for life could be explained, it still must be explained as to how these many diverse elements became aggregated in the same area and then properly assembled themselves. This problem is a major stumbling block to any theory of abiogenesis: ...no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial Earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation.
7. The warm pond and hot vent theories also have been seriously disputed by experimental research that has found the half-lives of many critically important compounds needed for life to be far “too short to allow for the adequate accumulation of these compounds” (Levy and Miller, 1998, p. 7933). Furthermore, research has documented that “unless the origin of life took place extremely rapidly (in less than 100 years), we conclude that a high temperature origin of life... cannot involve adenine, uracil, guanine or cytosine” because these compounds break down far too fast in a warm environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in the first place, nor exist for a significant amount of time (Levy and Miller, p. 7933). III. Did Life Come from Another Planet?
C. The probability of life arising by chance
1. A major issue then, in abiogenesis is “what is the minimum number of possible parts that allows something to live?” The number of parts needed is large, but how large is difficult to determine. In order to be considered “alive,” an organism must possess the ability to metabolize and assimilate food, to respirate, to grow, to reproduce and to respond to stimuli (a trait known as irritability).
2. As Coppedge (1973) notes, even 1) postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary for life, 2) speeding up the bonding rate so as to form different chemical combinations a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion—a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion- year-old earth and 4) using all atoms on the earth still leaves the probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10,261. Using the lowest estimate made before the discoveries of the past two decades raised the number several fold. Coppedge estimates the probability of 1 in 10119,879 is necessary to obtain the minimum set of the required estimate of 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life form. At this rate he estimates it would require 10119,831 years on the average to obtain a set of these proteins by naturalistic evolution (1973, pp. 110, 114). The number he obtained is 10119,831 greater than the current estimate for the age of the earth (4.6 billion years). In other words, this event is outside the range of probability. Natural selection cannot occur until an organism exists and is able to reproduce which requires that the first complex life form first exist as a functioning
3. It appears that the field of molecular biology will falsify Darwinism. An estimated 100,000 different proteins are used to construct humans alone. Furthermore, one million species are known, and as many as 10 million may exist. Although many proteins are used in most life forms, as many as 100 million or more protein variations may exist in all plant and animal life.
Even using an unrealistically low estimate of 1,000 steps required to “evolve” the average protein (if this were possible) implies that many trillions of links were needed to evolve the proteins that once existed or that exist today. And not one clear transitional protein that is morphologically and chemically in between the ancient and modern form of the protein has been convincingly demonstrated. The same problem exists with fats, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and the other compounds that are produced by, and necessary for, life.
4. Abiogenesis is only one area of research which illustrates that the naturalistic origin of life hypothesis has become less and less probable as molecular biology has progressed, and is now at the point that its plausibility appears outside the realm of probability. Numerous origin-of-life researchers, have lamented the fact that molecular biology during the past half-a-century has not been very kind to any naturalistic origin-of-life theory.
III. Did life come from outer space?
A. Popular ideas
1. Mission to Mars, War of the Worlds, UFOs
2. Asteroids, meteorites and space dust
B. Problems with this view
1. It merely pushes the problem further back in time, but it doesn’t solve it
2. If life can’t spontaneously arise here, it can’t anywhere else
Conclusion
1. How life arose from non-living matter is the greatest problem faced by evolutionists today. Very few talk about how life began because they know that they have no answers. This is the weakest point in the argument of naturalism and I feel that it is insurmountable. It takes more faith to believe that life was generated from non-living matter than to believe that God created life.
2. Life is a gift from God. God breathed into man and he became a living being. The spark of life is the result of God’s touch. All life bears the special mark of God.
3. You are alive because God gave you life. Your life is totally in his hands. You are dependent upon him for your very existence. Every breath you take is a gift from God. Don’t take life lightly but realize how precious it is and live it for the glory of God.
Introduction
1. Purpose of apologetics
2. The biggest problem facing evolutionists is molecular biology and the rise of life out of non-living matter.
I. Prescientific Theories of Spontaneous Generation
A. Aristotle
1. Aristotle even believed that under the proper conditions putatively “simple” animals such as worms, fleas, mice, and dogs could spring to life spontaneously from moist ”Mother Earth."
2. Others believed that life had existed on earth for ever. This view is not supported by scientific observation today.
B. Middle Ages
1. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.
2. Maggots were thought to spontaneously generate from rotting meat
C. The death of spontaneous generation
1. Francesco Redi (1668) proved that maggots came from eggs laid by flies on the meat. The invention of the microscope only served to enhance this belief. Microscopy revealed a whole new world of organisms that appeared to arise spontaneously.
2. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1745) replicated experiements which were thought to prove spontaneous generation, but sealed the flask, not allowing outside microorganisms in.
3. The young French chemist, Louis Pasteur (1859) boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.
II. Abiogenesis
A. What is abiogenesis?
1.
1 Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced. .
2 Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells. .
3 Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals. .
4 The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population (adapted from Wynn and Wiggins, 1997, p. 172).
2. The major links in the molecules-to-man theory that must be bridged include
(a) evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules,
(b) evolution of complex molecules into simple organic molecules,
(c) evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules,
(d) eventual evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and
(e) eventually evolution into the first cells. This process requires multimillions of links, all which either are missing or controversial.
B. Primordial Soup
1. Four and a half billion years ago the young planet Earth... was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began... The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms... From these one- celled organisms evolved all life on earth (from the Emmy award winning PBS NOVA film The Miracle of Life
2. History of the theory
a. Russian scientist A.I. Oparin in the 1920s. The theory held that life evolved when organic molecules rained into the primitive oceans from an atmospheric soup of chemicals interacting with solar energy.
b. Later Haldane (1928), Bernal (1947) and Urey (1952) published their research to try to support this model, all with little success.
c. Then came what some felt was a breakthrough by Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller in the early 1950s. The most famous origin of life experiment was completed in 1953 by Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago.
The Miller/Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with methane, ammonia, hydrogen gases (representing what they thought composed the early atmosphere) and water vapor (to simulate the ocean). Next, they used a spark-discharge device to strike the gases in the flask with simulated lightning while a heating coil kept the water boiling. Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a reddish stain on the sides of the flask. After analyzing the substances that had been formed, they found several types of amino acids. Eventually Miller and other scientists were able to produce 10 of the 20 amino acids required for life by techniques similar to the original Miller/ Urey experiments.
For example, equal quantities of both right- and left-handed organic molecules always were produced by the Urey/Miller procedure. In real life, nearly all amino acids found in proteins are left handed, almost all polymers of carbohydrates are right handed, and the opposite type can be toxic to the cell.
The reasons why creating life in a test tube turned out to be far more difficult than Miller or anyone else expected are numerous and include the fact that scientists now know that the complexity of life is far greater than Miller or anyone else in pre-DNA revolution 1953 ever imagined. Actually life is far more complex and contains far more information than anyone in the 1980s believed possible.
3. Problems:
a. Assumes that the atmosphere of the early earth was different from our present atmosphere. Very little scientific evidence exists for this assumption; it is postulated simply because it is necessary for the theory to work.
b. It is a theory that is based upon assumption, not observation. Life is assumed to have arisen from non-living matter, so a mechanism is sought to validate that assumption.
c. No geological evidence exists to support this theory.
d. No experiment has been conducted that has even been able to produce the building blocks of living matter, such as proteins. All experiments so far have fallen way short.
e. Even if an experiment could produce protein molecules, it would not prove that it actually happened. In fact, it would prove that intelligence is needed to produce protein molecules.
f. It is not enough to show that the building blocks of life can be created in a scientific experiment. Life is more than random molecules just as a house is more than a pile of bricks. There must be information, an intelligence that arranges those molecules and animates them. Then these entities need to be able to grow and reproduce. This is an incredible feat that could not happen by mere chance.
3. Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that “the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously.” (Newman, 1967, p. 662). Most major discoveries about cell biology and molecular biology have been made since then.
4. Cytologists now realize that a living cell contains hundreds of thousands of different complex parts such as various motor proteins that are assembled to produce the most complex “machine” in the Universe—a machine far more complex than the most complex Cray super computer. We now also realize after a century of research that the eukaryote protozoa thought to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin in Darwin’s day actually are enormously more complex than the prokaryote cell. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals... In terms of their basic biochemical design... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
5. We now realize that the Urey/Miller experiments did not produce evidence for abiogenesis because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information (Pigliucci, 1999; Dembski, 1998). Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines and similar) abound in nature, but this does not help us to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespear’s plays) because this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to translate that information into symbols. What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines.
6. Yet another difficulty is, even if the source of the amino acids and the many other compounds needed for life could be explained, it still must be explained as to how these many diverse elements became aggregated in the same area and then properly assembled themselves. This problem is a major stumbling block to any theory of abiogenesis: ...no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial Earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation.
7. The warm pond and hot vent theories also have been seriously disputed by experimental research that has found the half-lives of many critically important compounds needed for life to be far “too short to allow for the adequate accumulation of these compounds” (Levy and Miller, 1998, p. 7933). Furthermore, research has documented that “unless the origin of life took place extremely rapidly (in less than 100 years), we conclude that a high temperature origin of life... cannot involve adenine, uracil, guanine or cytosine” because these compounds break down far too fast in a warm environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in the first place, nor exist for a significant amount of time (Levy and Miller, p. 7933). III. Did Life Come from Another Planet?
C. The probability of life arising by chance
1. A major issue then, in abiogenesis is “what is the minimum number of possible parts that allows something to live?” The number of parts needed is large, but how large is difficult to determine. In order to be considered “alive,” an organism must possess the ability to metabolize and assimilate food, to respirate, to grow, to reproduce and to respond to stimuli (a trait known as irritability).
2. As Coppedge (1973) notes, even 1) postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary for life, 2) speeding up the bonding rate so as to form different chemical combinations a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion—a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion- year-old earth and 4) using all atoms on the earth still leaves the probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10,261. Using the lowest estimate made before the discoveries of the past two decades raised the number several fold. Coppedge estimates the probability of 1 in 10119,879 is necessary to obtain the minimum set of the required estimate of 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life form. At this rate he estimates it would require 10119,831 years on the average to obtain a set of these proteins by naturalistic evolution (1973, pp. 110, 114). The number he obtained is 10119,831 greater than the current estimate for the age of the earth (4.6 billion years). In other words, this event is outside the range of probability. Natural selection cannot occur until an organism exists and is able to reproduce which requires that the first complex life form first exist as a functioning
3. It appears that the field of molecular biology will falsify Darwinism. An estimated 100,000 different proteins are used to construct humans alone. Furthermore, one million species are known, and as many as 10 million may exist. Although many proteins are used in most life forms, as many as 100 million or more protein variations may exist in all plant and animal life.
Even using an unrealistically low estimate of 1,000 steps required to “evolve” the average protein (if this were possible) implies that many trillions of links were needed to evolve the proteins that once existed or that exist today. And not one clear transitional protein that is morphologically and chemically in between the ancient and modern form of the protein has been convincingly demonstrated. The same problem exists with fats, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and the other compounds that are produced by, and necessary for, life.
4. Abiogenesis is only one area of research which illustrates that the naturalistic origin of life hypothesis has become less and less probable as molecular biology has progressed, and is now at the point that its plausibility appears outside the realm of probability. Numerous origin-of-life researchers, have lamented the fact that molecular biology during the past half-a-century has not been very kind to any naturalistic origin-of-life theory.
III. Did life come from outer space?
A. Popular ideas
1. Mission to Mars, War of the Worlds, UFOs
2. Asteroids, meteorites and space dust
B. Problems with this view
1. It merely pushes the problem further back in time, but it doesn’t solve it
2. If life can’t spontaneously arise here, it can’t anywhere else
Conclusion
1. How life arose from non-living matter is the greatest problem faced by evolutionists today. Very few talk about how life began because they know that they have no answers. This is the weakest point in the argument of naturalism and I feel that it is insurmountable. It takes more faith to believe that life was generated from non-living matter than to believe that God created life.
2. Life is a gift from God. God breathed into man and he became a living being. The spark of life is the result of God’s touch. All life bears the special mark of God.
3. You are alive because God gave you life. Your life is totally in his hands. You are dependent upon him for your very existence. Every breath you take is a gift from God. Don’t take life lightly but realize how precious it is and live it for the glory of God.
How Did the Universe Begin?
How Did the Universe Begin?
Introduction
1. Cosmological Questions
1) Is the universe finite or infinite in content and extent?
2) Is the universe eternal or does it have a beginning?
3) Was the universe created?
4) If it wasn’t created, how did it get here?
5) If it was created, how was this creation accomplished, and what can we learn about the agent and the events of creation?
6) Who or what governs the laws and constants of physics?
7) Are such laws the product of chance or have they been designed?
8) How do these laws relate to the support and development of life?
9) Is there any noble existence beyond the known dimensions of the universe?
10) Is the universe running down irreversibly or will it bounce back?
2. Cosmological Argument: “The effect of the universe must have a suitable cause.”
1) Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore there must have been a cause for the universe.
I. Five Models of the Universe (Chart)
A. Eternal Universe
1. Steady State
2. Quantum Mechanical Model (Stephen Hawking)
B. Universe had a Beginning
1. Creation from something
2. Order out of chaos
3. Creation from Nothing (Genesis 1)
II. Evidence for the Big Bang
A. Why scientists resisted the Big Band
1. Arthur Eddington
“Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me. I should like to find a definite loophole. We must allow evolution an infinite amount of time to get started.”
2. Albert Einstein
He was threatened by the implications of his theory of relativity because it carries a threat of an encounter with God. Through the equations of General Relativity we can trace the development of the universe backward to its origin. He introduced the concept of the Cosmological Constant to avoid this implication by yielding a Static Model of the universe. He dreamed of a universe that was infinitely old. Later, Einstein considered this to be the greatest blunder of his career. He ultimately gave grudging acceptance to the necessity of a beginning and the presence of a superior reasoning power, though he never accepted the existence of a personal God.
B. Definition of the Big Bang Theory
1. George Gamow: “The Big Bang theory holds that the primeval fireball was an intense concentration of pure energy. It was the source of all matter that now exists in the entire universe. The Big Bang theory predicts that all the galaxies in the universe should be rushing away from each other at high speeds as a result of that initial Big Bang.”
C. Background Microwave Radiation and Big Bang Ripples
1. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Telephone Labs in 1965:
Observation of the background microwave radiation of the universe convinced most scientist of the validity of the Big Bang theory. Further observations of Big Bang Ripples in 1992 have made acceptance of the Big Bang theory nearly unanimous. The data points to a beginning of the universe about 14 billion years ago.
Arno Penzias in NY Times interview: “The best data we have concerning the big bang are exactly what I would have predicted if I only had the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible to go on.”
Why are some Cosmologists predisposed to an old universe? “Some people are uncomfortable with purpose. In order to come up with things that contradict purpose, they tend to speculate about things they haven’t seen.”
2. NY Times April, 1992: Big Bang Ripples discovered by COBE Satellite
“Most important discovery of the century.” Stephen Hawking
“It’s like looking at God.” Headline
“These findings make the hypothesis that God created the universe more respectable today than anytime within the last 100 years.” George Smoot, head of COBE team
3. Red Shift
Hubble and others realized that the most obvious explanation for the "red shift" was that the galaxies were receding from Earth and each other, and the farther the galaxy, the faster the recession.
All galaxies are accelerating away from each other, and the farther a galaxy is away from us, the faster it is accelerating away from us. This can only be explained if the universe began as a small point and exploded outwards.
III. Explanation of the Big Bang
A. Hugh Ross:
“By definition, time is that dimension in which cause and effect phenomenon take place. If there is no time, there is no cause and effect. If time’s beginning is concurrent with the beginning of the universe, as the space-time theorem suggests, then the cause of the universe must be some entity operating in a time dimension completely independent of and preexistent to the time dimension of the cosmos. This conclusion is important in our understanding of who God is, and who or what God is not. It tells us that the Creator is transcendent, operating beyond the dimensional limits of the universe. It tells us that God is not the universe itself, nor is God contained within the universe.”
B. Leon Lederman, The God Particle
“In the very beginning there was a void, a very curious vacuum, a nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the beginning of the universe and unfortunately there are no data for that beginning; none, zero. We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches a billionth of a trillionth of a second, a very short time after the creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe someone is making it up; we are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning.”
C. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
“The actual point of creation lies outside the scope of the presently known laws of physics.”
“It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without introducing the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws.”
Are science and Christianity competing philosophies? “Of course not. If that were true, then Isaac Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity.”
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes the universe to describe them?”
“The idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of a fallacy, pointed out by Saint Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created; presumably he knew what he intended when he set it up.”
John 17:24; Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8
IV. Stephen Hawking and the Quantum Mechanical Model
A. Explained
He takes a very simplified model of the universe that uses imaginary time. In his model, the universe does not have a sharp point of beginning but a rounded point, so that there is no single point of beginning.
B. Refuted
Imaginary time is useful for solving mathematical equations, but it cannot be used to describe the real world. It is not valuable scientifically because it has no empirical basis, makes no scientific predictions that are not made by simpler models, and it has no research agenda. It simply seeks to evade the cosmological argument, cause and effect, the fact that if there is a beginning of the universe there must be a creator.
“When we go back to the real time in which we live we will encounter singularities.”
V. Science and Christianity: Scientists speak out
A. Alan Sandage
“The nature of God is not to be found within any part of the findings of science; for that one must turn to the Bible.”
Can a person be a scientist and also a Christian? “Yes. I am a Christian. The world is too complex in all its parts and inner connections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life, with all of its order in each of its organisms, is simply too well put together. I am staggered by the high information content of even the simplest biological self-replicating biochemical system.”
B. Donald Paige:
“The mathematical simplicity of the universe is possibly a reflection of the personal simplicity of the gospel message, that God sent His Son Jesus Christ to bridge the gap between Himself and each of us who have rejected God or what He wants for each of us by rebelling against His will and disobeying Him. This is a message simple enough to be understood even by children, quantum cosmologists and the rest.”
C. Chris Eischam:
“The God of Christianity is not only the ground of being, He is also incarnate. Essential therein is the vision of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the new creation out of the old order and the profound notion of the redemption of time, through the life and death of Jesus Christ. I think it will be a very long time before particle physics has anything to add to that. What I have found in Jesus Christ is infinitely more profound than anything I have found in particle physics, or expect to find.”
Conclusion
1. The universe began at a point in time in the Big Bang. This was an immensely powerful, yet a very carefully controlled and planned release of matter, space, energy and time. It was very carefully fine-tuned and operated within the laws and constraints that govern the physical universe. The power and care of this explosion exceeds human ability and potential by multiple orders of magnitude.
2. A creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples, Red Shift, and Background Radiation point to a creation ex nihilo. The big Bang is consistent with the creation event described in the first few chapters of the book of Genesis.
3. This creator must have awesome power and wisdom. The quantity of material and energy within the universe are truly immense, and the information and intricacy manifested in any part of the universe, and especially in a living organism, is beyond our ability to comprehend. And what we do see is only what God has shown us within the four dimensions of space-time that we inhabit.
4. If the universe has been created, then there is a creator. If there is a creator, then we are his creatures, owned by him and subject to him. Therefore, the purpose of life is to know and love our creator and glorify him by living in conformity with his nature and will.
Introduction
1. Cosmological Questions
1) Is the universe finite or infinite in content and extent?
2) Is the universe eternal or does it have a beginning?
3) Was the universe created?
4) If it wasn’t created, how did it get here?
5) If it was created, how was this creation accomplished, and what can we learn about the agent and the events of creation?
6) Who or what governs the laws and constants of physics?
7) Are such laws the product of chance or have they been designed?
8) How do these laws relate to the support and development of life?
9) Is there any noble existence beyond the known dimensions of the universe?
10) Is the universe running down irreversibly or will it bounce back?
2. Cosmological Argument: “The effect of the universe must have a suitable cause.”
1) Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore there must have been a cause for the universe.
I. Five Models of the Universe (Chart)
A. Eternal Universe
1. Steady State
2. Quantum Mechanical Model (Stephen Hawking)
B. Universe had a Beginning
1. Creation from something
2. Order out of chaos
3. Creation from Nothing (Genesis 1)
II. Evidence for the Big Bang
A. Why scientists resisted the Big Band
1. Arthur Eddington
“Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me. I should like to find a definite loophole. We must allow evolution an infinite amount of time to get started.”
2. Albert Einstein
He was threatened by the implications of his theory of relativity because it carries a threat of an encounter with God. Through the equations of General Relativity we can trace the development of the universe backward to its origin. He introduced the concept of the Cosmological Constant to avoid this implication by yielding a Static Model of the universe. He dreamed of a universe that was infinitely old. Later, Einstein considered this to be the greatest blunder of his career. He ultimately gave grudging acceptance to the necessity of a beginning and the presence of a superior reasoning power, though he never accepted the existence of a personal God.
B. Definition of the Big Bang Theory
1. George Gamow: “The Big Bang theory holds that the primeval fireball was an intense concentration of pure energy. It was the source of all matter that now exists in the entire universe. The Big Bang theory predicts that all the galaxies in the universe should be rushing away from each other at high speeds as a result of that initial Big Bang.”
C. Background Microwave Radiation and Big Bang Ripples
1. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Telephone Labs in 1965:
Observation of the background microwave radiation of the universe convinced most scientist of the validity of the Big Bang theory. Further observations of Big Bang Ripples in 1992 have made acceptance of the Big Bang theory nearly unanimous. The data points to a beginning of the universe about 14 billion years ago.
Arno Penzias in NY Times interview: “The best data we have concerning the big bang are exactly what I would have predicted if I only had the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible to go on.”
Why are some Cosmologists predisposed to an old universe? “Some people are uncomfortable with purpose. In order to come up with things that contradict purpose, they tend to speculate about things they haven’t seen.”
2. NY Times April, 1992: Big Bang Ripples discovered by COBE Satellite
“Most important discovery of the century.” Stephen Hawking
“It’s like looking at God.” Headline
“These findings make the hypothesis that God created the universe more respectable today than anytime within the last 100 years.” George Smoot, head of COBE team
3. Red Shift
Hubble and others realized that the most obvious explanation for the "red shift" was that the galaxies were receding from Earth and each other, and the farther the galaxy, the faster the recession.
All galaxies are accelerating away from each other, and the farther a galaxy is away from us, the faster it is accelerating away from us. This can only be explained if the universe began as a small point and exploded outwards.
III. Explanation of the Big Bang
A. Hugh Ross:
“By definition, time is that dimension in which cause and effect phenomenon take place. If there is no time, there is no cause and effect. If time’s beginning is concurrent with the beginning of the universe, as the space-time theorem suggests, then the cause of the universe must be some entity operating in a time dimension completely independent of and preexistent to the time dimension of the cosmos. This conclusion is important in our understanding of who God is, and who or what God is not. It tells us that the Creator is transcendent, operating beyond the dimensional limits of the universe. It tells us that God is not the universe itself, nor is God contained within the universe.”
B. Leon Lederman, The God Particle
“In the very beginning there was a void, a very curious vacuum, a nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the beginning of the universe and unfortunately there are no data for that beginning; none, zero. We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches a billionth of a trillionth of a second, a very short time after the creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe someone is making it up; we are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning.”
C. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
“The actual point of creation lies outside the scope of the presently known laws of physics.”
“It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without introducing the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws.”
Are science and Christianity competing philosophies? “Of course not. If that were true, then Isaac Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity.”
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes the universe to describe them?”
“The idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of a fallacy, pointed out by Saint Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created; presumably he knew what he intended when he set it up.”
John 17:24; Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8
IV. Stephen Hawking and the Quantum Mechanical Model
A. Explained
He takes a very simplified model of the universe that uses imaginary time. In his model, the universe does not have a sharp point of beginning but a rounded point, so that there is no single point of beginning.
B. Refuted
Imaginary time is useful for solving mathematical equations, but it cannot be used to describe the real world. It is not valuable scientifically because it has no empirical basis, makes no scientific predictions that are not made by simpler models, and it has no research agenda. It simply seeks to evade the cosmological argument, cause and effect, the fact that if there is a beginning of the universe there must be a creator.
“When we go back to the real time in which we live we will encounter singularities.”
V. Science and Christianity: Scientists speak out
A. Alan Sandage
“The nature of God is not to be found within any part of the findings of science; for that one must turn to the Bible.”
Can a person be a scientist and also a Christian? “Yes. I am a Christian. The world is too complex in all its parts and inner connections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life, with all of its order in each of its organisms, is simply too well put together. I am staggered by the high information content of even the simplest biological self-replicating biochemical system.”
B. Donald Paige:
“The mathematical simplicity of the universe is possibly a reflection of the personal simplicity of the gospel message, that God sent His Son Jesus Christ to bridge the gap between Himself and each of us who have rejected God or what He wants for each of us by rebelling against His will and disobeying Him. This is a message simple enough to be understood even by children, quantum cosmologists and the rest.”
C. Chris Eischam:
“The God of Christianity is not only the ground of being, He is also incarnate. Essential therein is the vision of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the new creation out of the old order and the profound notion of the redemption of time, through the life and death of Jesus Christ. I think it will be a very long time before particle physics has anything to add to that. What I have found in Jesus Christ is infinitely more profound than anything I have found in particle physics, or expect to find.”
Conclusion
1. The universe began at a point in time in the Big Bang. This was an immensely powerful, yet a very carefully controlled and planned release of matter, space, energy and time. It was very carefully fine-tuned and operated within the laws and constraints that govern the physical universe. The power and care of this explosion exceeds human ability and potential by multiple orders of magnitude.
2. A creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples, Red Shift, and Background Radiation point to a creation ex nihilo. The big Bang is consistent with the creation event described in the first few chapters of the book of Genesis.
3. This creator must have awesome power and wisdom. The quantity of material and energy within the universe are truly immense, and the information and intricacy manifested in any part of the universe, and especially in a living organism, is beyond our ability to comprehend. And what we do see is only what God has shown us within the four dimensions of space-time that we inhabit.
4. If the universe has been created, then there is a creator. If there is a creator, then we are his creatures, owned by him and subject to him. Therefore, the purpose of life is to know and love our creator and glorify him by living in conformity with his nature and will.
Privileged Planet
Intelligent Design in the Cosmos
1. Privileged Planet: Optimized for Life
A. The Denial of Privileged Status
• The Copernican Principle: “The earth occupies no preferred place in the universe”
• The Principle of Mediocrity: “Our position and status in the universe are mediocre, they are unexceptional.”
• Hubble Telescope: The magnificence of the Universe
• SETI: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• Astrobiology: Are habitable planets rare or common in the universe?
• But does life on earth really exist for no reason or purpose?
• The number of stars vs. the number of factors necessary for life…
B. Factors Necessary for Life
1) Liquid Water
2) A planet’s distance from its star: the circumstellar habitable zone
3) Orbiting main sequence G2 dwarf star
4) Protected by gas giant planets
5) Within galactic habitable zone
6) Nearly circular orbit
7) Oxygen-rich atmosphere
8) Correct mass
9) Orbited by large moon
10) Magnetic field generated by a liquid iron core
11) Plate tectonics
12) Ratio of liquid water and continents
13) Terrestrial planet
14) Moderate rate of rotation
All these factors have to be met at one place and time in the galaxy
N x fsg x fghz x fcr x fsp x fchz x np x fj x fc x fo x fm x fcp x fmn x fw x ft x fl x fi x fr x flc x flt
1011 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 = 10-15
1
1,000,000,000,000,000
Why did this happen? Is chance a reasonable explanation?
2. Privileged Planet: Optimized for Observation
• The factors that make observation possible coincide with the factors that make complex life possible
• “The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries.”
1) The relative size and distances of the sun and moon to the earth make life possible and also allow us to discover
2) The atmosphere of the earth supports life and allows us to see into space
3) The visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum essential for life also is most informative for discovery is abundantly produced by the sun and allowed to reach the surface of the earth by the atmosphere
4) The center of the galaxy is too hostile to life while the edge of the galaxy would not provide enough heavy elements necessary for life. Likewise, observation would be impossible at the center or edge of the galaxy.
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Albert Einstein
The laws and forces of the universe must be precisely balanced for complex life to exist:
1) Electron mass
2) Atomic mass
3) Proton mass
4) Strong nuclear force
5) Weak nuclear force
6) Electromagnetic force
7) Speed of light
8) Cosmological constant
9) Gravity
10) Mass of the universe
11) Panck’s constant
12) Boltzmann’s constant
The universe is the product of an intelligent mind
1. Privileged Planet: Optimized for Life
A. The Denial of Privileged Status
• The Copernican Principle: “The earth occupies no preferred place in the universe”
• The Principle of Mediocrity: “Our position and status in the universe are mediocre, they are unexceptional.”
• Hubble Telescope: The magnificence of the Universe
• SETI: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• Astrobiology: Are habitable planets rare or common in the universe?
• But does life on earth really exist for no reason or purpose?
• The number of stars vs. the number of factors necessary for life…
B. Factors Necessary for Life
1) Liquid Water
2) A planet’s distance from its star: the circumstellar habitable zone
3) Orbiting main sequence G2 dwarf star
4) Protected by gas giant planets
5) Within galactic habitable zone
6) Nearly circular orbit
7) Oxygen-rich atmosphere
8) Correct mass
9) Orbited by large moon
10) Magnetic field generated by a liquid iron core
11) Plate tectonics
12) Ratio of liquid water and continents
13) Terrestrial planet
14) Moderate rate of rotation
All these factors have to be met at one place and time in the galaxy
N x fsg x fghz x fcr x fsp x fchz x np x fj x fc x fo x fm x fcp x fmn x fw x ft x fl x fi x fr x flc x flt
1011 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 = 10-15
1
1,000,000,000,000,000
Why did this happen? Is chance a reasonable explanation?
2. Privileged Planet: Optimized for Observation
• The factors that make observation possible coincide with the factors that make complex life possible
• “The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries.”
1) The relative size and distances of the sun and moon to the earth make life possible and also allow us to discover
2) The atmosphere of the earth supports life and allows us to see into space
3) The visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum essential for life also is most informative for discovery is abundantly produced by the sun and allowed to reach the surface of the earth by the atmosphere
4) The center of the galaxy is too hostile to life while the edge of the galaxy would not provide enough heavy elements necessary for life. Likewise, observation would be impossible at the center or edge of the galaxy.
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Albert Einstein
The laws and forces of the universe must be precisely balanced for complex life to exist:
1) Electron mass
2) Atomic mass
3) Proton mass
4) Strong nuclear force
5) Weak nuclear force
6) Electromagnetic force
7) Speed of light
8) Cosmological constant
9) Gravity
10) Mass of the universe
11) Panck’s constant
12) Boltzmann’s constant
The universe is the product of an intelligent mind
Science vs. Faith 2
Science versus Faith
Introduction
1. “Science has disproved the Bible. Anyone who believes in the Bible is an idiot.”
2. How do you handle such claims? How do you stand firm when all your teachers, leaders and friends think you have lost your mind?
I. Science grew out of Christianity
A. Non-Christian cultures did not develop a scientific mindset
1. Superstitious cultures viewed the world as chaotic and controlled by capricious forces
2. Since events were capricious and uncertain, it is impossible to determine how and why they occur
3. Magic, the occult and fortunetelling kept science from emerging as a way of understanding the world
B. Christians developed science based on a theistic world view
1. If God created the world, then it is orderly and follows fixed laws set up by God
2. The more I know about the world, the more I know about God
3. History is moving in a logical direction, directed by God, towards an end or goal
II. Some misguided Christians have made crazy statements
A. Some have misread the Bible and made dogmatic statements
1. Bishop Ussher dated the Bible and said the world was created in 4004 BC
2. Some Catholics refused to believe the earth revolved around the sun
B. Some have tied theology and Biblical interpretation to scientific theories
III. Some misguided Scientists have made crazy statements
A. You must distinguish between facts and interpretation; laws and theories
1. There are many ways to interpret scientific data; everyone is biased, especially scientists
2. Theories are working hypotheses while laws have been verified by repeatable experiments
3. Carl Sagan in U.S. News & World Report interview:
“The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Whatever significance we humans have is that which we make ourselves. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to worship the sun and the stars?”
B. Scientists cannot make credible statements outside their expertise
1. A biologist has no special credibility when making statements about geology
2. A scientist has no special credibility when making statements about theology or philosophy
3. Science cannot make value judgments
4. Explaining how something works is not the same as explaining why it works, nor does it mean we are capable of making it work
C. Science does not make faith irrelevant
1. Not all truth can be discovered by the scientific method
2. You cannot do experiments to discover truth about history, love, logic, existence of truth
3. All scientists have faith
a. The universe is orderly and understandable
b. Truth exists and is knowable
c. The senses are a reliable source of information about the external world
d. Laboratory experiments are repeatable and verifiable
4. William Paley and the watchmaker; everyone would assume a watch was made
5. Richard Dawkins:
“We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules (of DNA which survived) known as genes.” In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, he says of natural selection, “It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, It is the blind watchmaker.”
IV. Science and Faith should be able to exist side by side
A. All truth is God’s truth
1. Ultimately scientific truth and biblical truth will not conflict
2. We need both to develop a full understanding of the world and how to live in a way that is pleasing to God and ultimately fulfilling to us
3. Conflicts are the result of incomplete information on both sides
B. Humility and patience must be exercised by both sides
1. Christians must realize that we don’t have all the answers
2. When faith and science appear to conflict, be patient and wait for more evidence from science and better interpretation from Christians
In 1861 the French Academy of Science published a book stating 51 scientific facts that prove the Bible is wrong. Today, there isn’t a single scientist who believes any one of those 51 “scientific facts”.
3. Science is a developing field that only can produce probabilities, not absolute certainties and much is superceded or revised by later findings
Newton’s laws of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics
Conclusion
1. Jesus is the truth, speaks the truth and reveals the truth (John)
2. Rejecting God means turning your back on truth (Romans)
3. Those who truly desire to know the truth will find Jesus and believe in him
4. Don’t let anyone shake your faith in Jesus by saying science refutes faith; it doesn’t
5. Learn how to discern truth from error, fact from interpretation, laws from theories, opinions from truth
6. Faith is essential to life; the question is not, “Do you have faith?” but “What have you placed your faith in?”
7. Be humble and patient; wait until all the facts are in before making a final decision
8. Don’t be afraid of the truth; seek after it, love it, study it, commit to it. Jesus is Truth
Introduction
1. “Science has disproved the Bible. Anyone who believes in the Bible is an idiot.”
2. How do you handle such claims? How do you stand firm when all your teachers, leaders and friends think you have lost your mind?
I. Science grew out of Christianity
A. Non-Christian cultures did not develop a scientific mindset
1. Superstitious cultures viewed the world as chaotic and controlled by capricious forces
2. Since events were capricious and uncertain, it is impossible to determine how and why they occur
3. Magic, the occult and fortunetelling kept science from emerging as a way of understanding the world
B. Christians developed science based on a theistic world view
1. If God created the world, then it is orderly and follows fixed laws set up by God
2. The more I know about the world, the more I know about God
3. History is moving in a logical direction, directed by God, towards an end or goal
II. Some misguided Christians have made crazy statements
A. Some have misread the Bible and made dogmatic statements
1. Bishop Ussher dated the Bible and said the world was created in 4004 BC
2. Some Catholics refused to believe the earth revolved around the sun
B. Some have tied theology and Biblical interpretation to scientific theories
III. Some misguided Scientists have made crazy statements
A. You must distinguish between facts and interpretation; laws and theories
1. There are many ways to interpret scientific data; everyone is biased, especially scientists
2. Theories are working hypotheses while laws have been verified by repeatable experiments
3. Carl Sagan in U.S. News & World Report interview:
“The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Whatever significance we humans have is that which we make ourselves. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to worship the sun and the stars?”
B. Scientists cannot make credible statements outside their expertise
1. A biologist has no special credibility when making statements about geology
2. A scientist has no special credibility when making statements about theology or philosophy
3. Science cannot make value judgments
4. Explaining how something works is not the same as explaining why it works, nor does it mean we are capable of making it work
C. Science does not make faith irrelevant
1. Not all truth can be discovered by the scientific method
2. You cannot do experiments to discover truth about history, love, logic, existence of truth
3. All scientists have faith
a. The universe is orderly and understandable
b. Truth exists and is knowable
c. The senses are a reliable source of information about the external world
d. Laboratory experiments are repeatable and verifiable
4. William Paley and the watchmaker; everyone would assume a watch was made
5. Richard Dawkins:
“We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules (of DNA which survived) known as genes.” In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, he says of natural selection, “It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, It is the blind watchmaker.”
IV. Science and Faith should be able to exist side by side
A. All truth is God’s truth
1. Ultimately scientific truth and biblical truth will not conflict
2. We need both to develop a full understanding of the world and how to live in a way that is pleasing to God and ultimately fulfilling to us
3. Conflicts are the result of incomplete information on both sides
B. Humility and patience must be exercised by both sides
1. Christians must realize that we don’t have all the answers
2. When faith and science appear to conflict, be patient and wait for more evidence from science and better interpretation from Christians
In 1861 the French Academy of Science published a book stating 51 scientific facts that prove the Bible is wrong. Today, there isn’t a single scientist who believes any one of those 51 “scientific facts”.
3. Science is a developing field that only can produce probabilities, not absolute certainties and much is superceded or revised by later findings
Newton’s laws of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics
Conclusion
1. Jesus is the truth, speaks the truth and reveals the truth (John)
2. Rejecting God means turning your back on truth (Romans)
3. Those who truly desire to know the truth will find Jesus and believe in him
4. Don’t let anyone shake your faith in Jesus by saying science refutes faith; it doesn’t
5. Learn how to discern truth from error, fact from interpretation, laws from theories, opinions from truth
6. Faith is essential to life; the question is not, “Do you have faith?” but “What have you placed your faith in?”
7. Be humble and patient; wait until all the facts are in before making a final decision
8. Don’t be afraid of the truth; seek after it, love it, study it, commit to it. Jesus is Truth
Science vs. Faith
Science vs. Faith
1. A Brief History of Science
1600-1750 1750-1940 1940-1960 [WWII] 1960-Present
Discovery Control Use Consumption
“Think God’s thoughts” Manipulate and control Massive production Enjoy life-enhancing technologies
Worship Convenience Productivity
Efficiency Choice
Science is founded on the Christian worldview
Almost all scientists for the first 200 years were Christians
Christians began to abdicate their place and allowed non-Christians to take over
Modern World: Choice + Efficiency —> Convenience [no place for God]
2. Science vs. Scientism
Science: discovery based on careful observation and analysis
Scientism: philosophical and religious claims about science
Science Fiction: reconstructions and hypotheses that have no evidence
There are limits to scientific knowledge, things it cannot know
Scientific knowledge is probabilistic and not absolute
Be skeptical about “scientific” claims that are outside the realm of science
3. Don’t Fall for the False Dichotomy of Science vs. Faith
Truth is Truth no matter who finds it
Christians should never fear Truth no matter where it comes from
Differences between Science and Faith must be handled with care:
• Scientific data may be incomplete
• Interpretation of the Bible may be inaccurate
• Scientific theories may conflict with Biblical interpretation
The “War” between Faith and Science is a fabrication
Fight bad science with better science not with appeals to faith
4. We Need More Excellent Christian Scientists
Science is a calling just as important as a pastor or missionary
A Christian scientist can have more influence than a pastor or missionary
You need to have a Christian mindset if you are to be effective:
• A passion to know God and discover his creation
• A commitment to Truth even when it is not accepted
• The boldness to speak the Truth even opposed
1. A Brief History of Science
1600-1750 1750-1940 1940-1960 [WWII] 1960-Present
Discovery Control Use Consumption
“Think God’s thoughts” Manipulate and control Massive production Enjoy life-enhancing technologies
Worship Convenience Productivity
Efficiency Choice
Science is founded on the Christian worldview
Almost all scientists for the first 200 years were Christians
Christians began to abdicate their place and allowed non-Christians to take over
Modern World: Choice + Efficiency —> Convenience [no place for God]
2. Science vs. Scientism
Science: discovery based on careful observation and analysis
Scientism: philosophical and religious claims about science
Science Fiction: reconstructions and hypotheses that have no evidence
There are limits to scientific knowledge, things it cannot know
Scientific knowledge is probabilistic and not absolute
Be skeptical about “scientific” claims that are outside the realm of science
3. Don’t Fall for the False Dichotomy of Science vs. Faith
Truth is Truth no matter who finds it
Christians should never fear Truth no matter where it comes from
Differences between Science and Faith must be handled with care:
• Scientific data may be incomplete
• Interpretation of the Bible may be inaccurate
• Scientific theories may conflict with Biblical interpretation
The “War” between Faith and Science is a fabrication
Fight bad science with better science not with appeals to faith
4. We Need More Excellent Christian Scientists
Science is a calling just as important as a pastor or missionary
A Christian scientist can have more influence than a pastor or missionary
You need to have a Christian mindset if you are to be effective:
• A passion to know God and discover his creation
• A commitment to Truth even when it is not accepted
• The boldness to speak the Truth even opposed
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)