Cultural Relativism: The Path To A Cultural Murder/Suicide

In his book, "Relativism -- Feet Firmly Planted In Midair," Greg Koukl points out that one "way to assess the validity of a moral system is to see what kind of person it produces" ...

Given a particular standard of morality, the person who is most moral is the one who practices the specific system's key moral rule consistently ... the one who most closely lives the ideal -- indicates the quality of the moral system

... the quintessential relativist is a sociopath, one with no conscience. This is what relativism produces.

This week, the sad story from Virginia Tech offered us sickening proof that Koukl's assertion is true.

Consider the facts in this case:

• Seung-Hui Cho was deemed mentally ill by professionals who, reluctant to render a moral judgment against his warped state of mind and thereby stigmatize him, failed to inform his roommates that they were living with a madman.
  


• Cho's English professor, after reading the disturbing rantings he passed off as plays, "said she notified authorities about Cho, but was told that there would be too many legal hurdles to intervene. She said she asked him to go to counseling, but he never did."


• Cho was given one-on-one tutoring regarding his "creative writing" but no one dared suggest that his so-called "creativity" was anything more than the disgusting, profane, deluded, and morally reprehensible garbage that it was. Who were they to judge someone's "creativity"?


• There has been some speculation, especially among online forums, that Cho may have been inspired by the South Korean movie "Oldboy." One of the killer's mailed photos shows him brandishing a hammer — the signature weapon of the protagonist — and in a pose similar to one from the film. The film won the Gran Prix prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

Human Hens?

Cathy Ruse, a Senior Fellow of Legal studies at the Family Research Council, puts abortion-choice feminists on the defensive today in her Washington Times column, "Human Hens and Stem Cells." While we rightly focus on the moral issue of destroying human life with ESCR, Ruse offers specifics about the effects the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (S. 5) would have on women themselves.

Ruse points out that only a small fraction of the so-called "leftover" embryos would ever have any chance of actually being made available for research and that this fact has severe repercussions. "Only 2.8% of the estimated 400,000 frozen embryos have been designated by their parents for use in research ... this small fraction could only produce 275 new embryonic stem cell lines at most." Because the industry would require millions of embryos, Ruse calls this bill...

a farce: [it] is not about getting tax funding for several dozen stem cell lines; it's about laying the groundwork for cloning human embryos for research, the only way the biotech industry can get a virtually unlimited supply of embryos.

[the bill] is a deceptive bait-and-switch campaign to get big biotech into the taxpayers' pockets and to lay the groundwork for massive cloning of human embryos.

In fact, researchers don't really know how many eggs would be needed to establish even a single stem cell line. The 2004 case in South Korea exposed the fraudulent claims of a scientist there who failed to create a single line after obtaining 2,221 eggs. The demand inherent in attempting to manufacture the millions of embryos needed would inevitably lead to the exploitation of young women -- examples of which are already available and serve to expose the dangerous nature of the practice toward those women.

• Advanced Cell Technology has already admitted to paying young women $4000 for their eggs
• Ads in California and Massachusetts college papers offer $5000/surgery
  

The risks associated with ovarian stimulation and extraction and Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome include respiratory distress, kidney failure, ovarian torsion and can lead to infertility, blood clots, stroke, heart attack and even death.

In other words, ESCR is not just morally unacceptable for the destruction of human life inherent in its practice, it is also morally unacceptable for the insidious danger it poses to the women who would be given incentive to support it.

Meanwhile Senators Norm Coleman (MN) and Johnny Isakson (GA) have offered alternative legislation (S. 30) that purports to:

(1) intensify research that may result in improved understanding of or treatments for diseases and other adverse health conditions; and

(2) promote the derivation of pluripotent stem cell lines without the creation of human embryos for research purposes and without the destruction or discarding of, or risk of injury to, a human embryo or embryos other than those that are naturally dead.

where "naturally dead" is defined as:

having naturally and irreversibly lost the capacity for integrated cellular division, growth, and differentiation that is characteristic of an organism, even if some cells of the former organism may be alive in a disorganized state.

Though I am unqualified (and therefore reluctant) to attempt to decipher the political-speak implications of that definition, it does seem that S. 30 could possibly offer and acceptable alternative to S. 5. Cardinal Justin Rigali, archbishop of Philadelphia and chairman of the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, claims that the alternate bill...

includes a proposal to study the feasibility of banking amniotic and placental stem cells, modeled on the banking of bone marrow and cord blood stem cells that have saved the lives of patients with dozens of conditions. S. 30 also funds research in new techniques for deriving embryonic or embryonic-like stem cells without harming embryos

and "urge[s] support for that legislation as 'medical progress that we can all live with.'"

The jury is still out on whether or not there is any hope for success in "deriving embryonic or embryonic-like stem cells without harming embryos." But in the mean time, let me be clear. Though the peripheral issues Cathy Ruse exposes should carry weight with feminist pro-abortionists, they are not morally equivalent to defending the core issue -- the human personhood of the embryos researchers seek to destroy. That is the primary argument against ESCR. And that is why S.30 appears to be a morally superior piece of legislation.

Is There A Human In The House?!

This week's episode of House has ignited quite a discussion among those with wildly differing views on the subject of abortion. As is usually the case, the conversation gets heated, tempers flare, and not much useful comes of it all. I have no desire to enter that debate today. But I would like to register my support for the willingness of the show to tread where most in Hollywood never dare. This episode of House gave a rare positive outlook to the view that abortion is not just about a woman's right to choose. It is about the status of the unborn and whether or not we recognize it for what it is, not just for what it can do or how it affects the mother's life.

Let me reiterate that a reasoned pro-life position acknowledges and supports a "woman's right to choose." As my friend Scott Klusendorf says, I think a woman should be able to choose her husband, her job, her religion ... anything she wants ... unless that choice involves an immoral outcome. The abortion question is not about a woman's ability to choose, or about her privacy. It is about whether the unborn child in her womb is a human person. If it is not, abortion requires no justification. If it is, there is no possible way to condone it.

That said, this episode of House included the usual debate about how to prioritize whose life to save in the event the mother's life is in danger. In this particular episode, the dilemma that arose was how to save a dying, pregnant mother whose baby was labeled "not viable." Of course, the mother had been impregnated by the donated sperm of a homosexual co-worker. Though this fact played absolutely no part in the plot, it was jammed into the story for reasons only Hollywood could explain. But I digress...

There were several medical and moral issues involved in the story, especially after it was discovered that the baby was the source of the mother's rapidly deteriorating condition. Once that fact came to light, House's response was immediate and unrelenting: "Terminate the pregnancy to save the mother."

As the show progressed, several questionable decisions were made that unduly put the life of the mother at risk. These decisions were made for two reasons: 1) the mother's refusal to accept any treatment that might threaten her child, and 2) the fact that House's boss (another doctor) felt an emotional connection to the patient as both were older, unmarried, and desperately wanted to be a mothers. I want to be clear that I in no way condone these as justification for the decisions that were made. Where two lives are endangered, a morally justifiable solution to such a dilemma must center on saving every life that can be saved and not needlessly endanger either one.

Also, I don't want to overextend my "affection" for House's character. Let me be clear again. House is one of the most sardonic, abrasive characters on TV (as far as I can tell). I really can't stand the guy. He is an unethical, unprofessional, rude, obnoxious self-proclaimed drug addict. The show's writers go out of their way to make him so. He is also very much pro-abortion (as has been demonstrated in previous episodes) and this show did nothing to change any of that.

In his capacity as the head doctor on the case, House was doggedly insistent that the baby could only be referred to as a "fetus" for all the reasons many pro-lifers object to the insidious misuse of that term. Not only that, he took it further, later labeling the baby a "tumor" and a "parasite." To House, the very notion that the baby was anything more than a murdering invader to the mother was ridiculous and, in fact, constituted a morally reprehensible belief that would end with both a dead "fetus" and a dead mom.

But these facts overlook what I thought was the central point of the show, and one that we pro-lifers should applaud. During in-utero surgery meant to repair a defect in the baby and in turn save both the baby and the mother, House did his best, both verbally and physically, to end the dilemma -- at one point actually trying to cut the umbilical cord. During the procedure there was a poignant scene wherein the baby's tiny hand reached out of the open womb and grabbed House's finger. The loudmouth House was caught off-guard, obviously moved, and, for the first time I've ever seen -- speechless.

Yes, the "video" of the baby's extended hand was quite obviously hoaky and stretched the truth. Anesthetized babies cannot reach out and touch someone in the way it was portrayed in the show. Yes, it was an emotional appeal. But so is all of television. That fact comes with living in a video culture. I understand all that.

But for me it was a remarkable scene, not just for House's character, but for the abortion debate in general. That House would show any such emotion is remarkable in itself. What was even more remarkable was that, after the event, he began to refer to the child as a "baby," much to his co-workers' amazement. At the end of the episode, the recovering mother thanked him for his professionalism. His reply: "Don't thank me, I would have killed your kid."

So, while the video may have been unrealistic, the message that came across from the event was House's realization that the entity formerly known only as a "fetus" (in the deliberately wrong way), a "tumor" and a "parasite," was actually a human person.

As one whose pro-life argument rests on this very fact, you will hear no complaints from me about that.

Debating Creationism

This is what passes for debate among those who cannot engage the actual claims made by Creationists. When your argument is weak it is easy to disparage your opponent instead of engaging his argument. I just hope that those who are in serious pursuit of the truth -- on either side -- don't resort to such sophomoric tactics ...

Fool's Bones?

Hollywood film producer James Cameron may have resurrected the Titanic, but he wants to keep Jesus forever in the grave. Unless you've been in a coma for the past month you cannot help knowing that Cameron, along with director Simcha Jacobovici, has produced a documentary film about the 1980 discovery of an ossuary in Jerusalem that they say contains the remains of Jesus and his family:

New scientific evidence, including DNA analysis conducted at one of the world's foremost molecular genetics laboratories, as well as studies by leading scholars, suggests a 2,000-year-old Jerusalem tomb could have once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. The findings also suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah. The DNA findings, alongside statistical conclusions made about the artifacts — originally excavated in 1980 — open a potentially significant chapter in Biblical archaeological history.

You think?!

There are plenty of places to read expert critiques of the specific scientific and archaeological issues surrounding this story. The most notable (in my humble opinion) come from resurrection expert Dr. Gary Habermas and the legendary Western Michigan University Professor of History, Paul Maier, whose 1994 novel ,"A Skeleton in God's Closet," was based on a parallel premise.

Because I am no expert on these subjects I will refrain from attempting to add some lame analysis of my own to the mix. Having said that though, I cannot help but smile as I point out that it is the same type of Jesus-was-not-divine thought process that offered us the DaVinci Code "proof" that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who now gives us The Lost Tomb. I have to wonder how they reconcile the fact that The Code says Mary is buried under the Louvre in Paris, while The Lost Tomb has identified her bones in a 2000 year-old Jerusalem crypt?

Details, details ...

Instead, I want to focus on what the response of clear-thinking Christians should be to The Lost Tomb claims.

Should we ignore them? No.
Should we take them seriously? Yes.
Should they make us question our faith? Absolutely!

Before you dismiss me as a flaming heretic for that third assertion, please note that I think the actual evidence James Cameron and company have produced is not only lacking but silly. I actually think Cameron has seriously damaged his credibility by associating himself with such a ridiculously hollow case. But that's not the question I want to address. The question is this: How should we respond to this, or any future, claim against our faith? I think we have three choices ...

Ignore it

This is by far the easiest response -- because it is mindless. Anyone can be mindless. But we are not called to be mindless. We are called to "always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks [us] to give the reason for the hope that [we] have. But do this with gentleness and respect" (1Peter 3:15).) Ignoring the issue hardly seems appropriate since the core of the issue goes directly to the authenticity and trustworthiness of the hope we claim to have.

Proclaim a piously dismissive confidence in our faith

I have heard some respond to The Lost Tomb by essentially saying, "I don't care if they are the bones of Jesus. It wouldn't make a bit of difference in what I believe." Here's an example from a letter to the editor in the March 19th issue of Newsweek:

As a Christian who religiously reads Newsweek, I must admit to a little uneasiness when I came upon "Raiders of the Lost Tomb." Not because of the possibility of its shaking my faith, but because of the debate it will prompt in both the secular and Christian communities. I'm not looking forward to the media overcoverage or the emotionally charged emails from my fellow believers. It's all a waste of time. For those of us who believe, the physical cannot change the spiritual. For those who don't, they still won't believe.

First, maybe I'm weird but I do not think it a "waste of time" and I do look forward to the public debate on this subject. What better way is there to get people talking about the most important topics we could ever address?! Most of us -- partly because we insist on separating our "Christian community" from the "secular" one (and thereby relegate our faith to a matter of personal preference instead of Truth) -- never discuss such issues. We avoid them. I think our society is the worse for it and I don't understand why anyone wants to talk about anything else. But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Second, I reject the passive acceptance of the notion that those who don't currently believe never will. Says who? I also reject the notion that the "physical" and the "spiritual" are mutually exclusive. This is modernist, humanist view, not a Biblical one.

While such a view sounds holy and confident, this kind of response amounts to nothing more than a more self-righteous way to ignore the claim. This is a retreat to a fideism that says, in effect, "don't bother me with facts, I already know what I believe." But this is not a demonstration of Biblical faith. As I have discussed elsewhere, a true Biblical faith is based on historically accurate and philosophically consistent reasoning. It is not only that, but it is grounded in that. It is a trust that comes from confidence in knowledge gained by observing the way the world works and a correspondence with the way the world is. This is what makes Christianity unique among the world religions. We have evidence to back up the truthfulness of our faith claims.

It would be radically inconsistent for me to call on the Darwinian Evolutionists (for instance) to examine their theory in light of the actual evidence if I am not willing to do the same. It would be hypocritical for me to dismiss the denial of reality inherent in a New Age or Hindu worldview while I avoid defending the reality of my own view. My faith rests on my confidence that I believe what I claim to believe because it is true and corresponds to the "real" world.

Engage it

This is the only appropriate response to any challenge to our faith. We are told to "demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God ..." and I believe we should each be prepared and poised to do just that. In this specific case the stakes are clearly defined. The Lost Tomb calls into question the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is not just some tangential, anti-religious mudslinging. This goes to the core of Christian belief. In fact, if James Cameron and company prove to be correct in the assertions they make in this documentary, I will reject Christianity tomorrow. I would be a fool not to.

That may sound like a radical and extravagant statement coming from someone who claims to be so enamored with Christians apologetics. And it is. But I am dead serious when I make it because I am in good company in doing so ...

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile ... If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men (1 Corinthians 15:14-17)

Like the Apostle Paul, I have no use for a useless faith. I have no desire to engage in an activity so futile as to follow an imposter to deity whose bones really sit in a Jerusalem burial ossuary. I have no penchant for reaping the pity I would deserve if my only reward for following Christ was the empty promise of feeling good about myself in this life.

I will engage this issue and all others like it with a spirit of humility and an intellectually honest dedication to the pursuit of the truth. Anything less is a waste of my time -- and His.

The Classroom: No Place For Questions

The world is flat; Marxism works; the Earth is at the physical center of the universe; man was not meant to fly, and Darwinian Evolution explains the origination and diversity of all life.

Some day all these ideas will be relegated to the same dustbin of history -- but it won't be today. No, today Kris Helphinstine, a part-time high school biology teacher was fired. Why?

Helphinstine, 27, said in a phone interview with The Bulletin newspaper of Bend that he included supplemental material to teach students about bias in [biology text book] sources, and his only agenda was to teach critical thinking.

That was enough for the Sisters, Oregon School Board, which fired the teacher Monday night for deviating from the curriculum on the theory of evolution.

You'll notice that Helphinstine was not doing anything illegal or immoral. He wasn't selling crack cocaine to students. He wasn't having sex with his students. He didn't bring guns and ammo to school. Those kind of offenses just get you put on "administrative leave" while an investigation is launched regarding your "alleged" conduct.

No, Helphinstine was fired on the spot for having the audacity to suggest that students should learn to investigate truth claims for themselves.

Engaging The Belief Police

Two recent books on the NY Times Best Seller list share a common thesis -- that religion in general, and Christianity specifically, is not just wrong, or off-base, or a subject worth debating -- but evil, deluded, dangerous, and the righteous target of the thinking man's scorn. Sam Harris', "Letter To A Christian Nation," (# 31 on the list) and Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion," (# 14 and on the list for 24 weeks) don't just want to appeal to their atheistic brethren, but want to question the sanity of religious belief itself and suggest that we would all be more safe if religion were forcibly banished from the public square.

This view of religion is nothing new to Dawkins who, blasting the intolerance of Creationists in his 1986 book, "The Blind Watchmaker," claimed that ...

It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

With an incredibly ironic inability to see the intolerance of those two ideas existing in parallel, Dawkins denies any respect to those who happen to disagree with him -- and instead offers them nothing but contempt. Disgusted by the proselytizing of religious folk, he engages in a little proselytizing of his own when, on the fifth page of his most recent book he claims that, "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down."

For all the bluster these two claim about their own "healthy" and "vigorous" minds as compared to the mental midgets who oppose them, it is a little too convenient that they fail to even mention the significant input to science and philosophy that has been contributed by theists throughout history. It is a little too convenient that they make no mention of the fact that most of the greatest scientific minds -- Newton, Galileo, Pascal, Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler -- were all devout men who studied the physical universe because they believed it was ordered and a reflection of the mind of God. It is a little too convenient that they make no mention of the great philosophers throughout history -- Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, C.S. Lewis -- who were not only Christian theists, but that began as atheists and reasoned their way to faith. It is a little too convenient that they make no mention of the fact that the Bible itself challenges us to "test everything" and that the scientific revolution began with Christian scientists who did just that.

Instead they offer false dichotomies and accusations like the one Harris offered in a Newsweek column promoting his book:

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago.

While this statistic may in fact be true, it is a complete evasion of the reality that there are differing views among those Harris is quick to lump together under the "creationist" label. I find it hard to believe he doesn't know this. It is much easier, and more convenient, to generalize that Creationist = young earth creationist. But its is a false equation. There are plenty of intellectually rigorous defenses of the notion that accepting the age of the universe to be 14 Billion years (as I assume Harris does) is perfectly compatible with the Biblical creation account. This is notable -- especially for someone who claims intellectual superiority as the high ground from which he chastises religious belief. A fair and confident debater will always take on his opponent's best argument. Harris is apparently unwilling, or unable, to do that.

Harris goes on to say that ...

... much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable and incompatible with genuine morality. One of the worst things about religion is that it tends to separate questions of right and wrong from the living reality of human and animal suffering.

It doesn't occur to Harris that lumping all his opponents together under a single, generalized umbrella, calling them closed-minded, stupid, deluded, and dangerous, or suggesting that they are evil for holding their beliefs -- none of that should be considered "divisive." But what is really astounding is his claim that "religion ... is incompatible with genuine morality."

I wonder how Harris goes about determining what is "genuinely" moral? On his view, there is no rational basis for morality. We (and our animal friends) are nothing but a more highly evolved outcome of an irrational, deterministic process. We, and our brains, just "are." What is, is what is. There is no basis for saying what "ought" to be. Though he would never admit it, Harris' notion of morality is vacuous -- unless he borrows it from theism. Without an objective moral standard Harris can make no claim about good or bad, right or wrong, nice or evil. As for his claim that "religion ... tends to separate questions of right and wrong from the living reality of human and animal suffering," this is just plain false.

Some religions do this. Hinduism in particular denies the existence of evil and suffering as being a simple ignorance about human separation from the divine Maya. But all religions are not created equal. In fact, Christianity is the only religion that takes this admitted problem head-on and offers an explanation for the existence, reality and solution to the problem of evil in the world. We Christian theists call it the "problem" of evil for a reason. We don't like it. We admit that the explanation we offer has difficulties that make us uncomfortable. But to say that we separate this issue from "living reality" is utter nonsense. It is a question that Christian theologians and philosophers have been conscientiously struggling with for centuries.

On this topic Harris also fails to acknowledge or account for the tens (100s?) of millions executed at the hands of the totalitarian regimes built on an the atheistic philosophy (Mao, Stalin, Pol-Pot etc.) during the twentieth century alone.

Next, Harris chastises Christians (and President Bush directly) for their narrow-minded opposition to Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) for no other reason than that "religious dogmatism impedes genuine wisdom and compassion." We Christians apparently thrive on the notion that others will suffer while we stand on our idiotic "unjustified religious belief." So what is Harris' justified argument to the contrary? He is glad to tell us:

A case in point: embryonic-stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer therapeutic breakthroughs for every human ailment … A 3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all.

Here Harris parrots the demagogic claims of those who prey on the hopes of the sick and dying. There is not a shred of evidence that ESCR will be successful in curing any disease, let alone the horrific ones for which Harris promises a cure. There are expense, rejection, tumor-forming, and uncontrollability issues that combine to make ESCR seem more hollow every day. At the same time, adult stem cell research has shown enormous potential for success yet Harris never mentions it at all. He never mentions that President Bush (nor any other religious zealot for that matter) has no ethical or moral objection to it. His only goal it seems, is to construct a straw man to bolster his personal case against religion.

Along the same lines, Harris informs us that a "3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly." Perhaps Harris is not as bright as he claims. Perhaps he is uninformed. Perhaps he believes he is enlightening all the religious morons about the extent of his vocabulary regarding a blastocyst. But his regurgitation of the same old argument surrounding stem cell research is so lame and so overused it almost seems like a parody. Yes, Mr. Harris, a blastocyst is small. Yes, at three days it has fewer cells than the brain of a fly. But what does that prove?

Nothing.

In case Mr. Harris is not aware, a blastocyst is not a thing -- it is a stage in the development of a thing. And that "thing" is what he himself labeled a "human embryo." Not a fly embryo, or the embryo of a horse. A human embryo. In other words, that thing he so callously wants to destroy is a fully integrated, complex, self-replicating human person who just happens to be in the earliest stages of its development. Someone just you or me, or Mr. Harris. Surely we cannot claim that the worth of a human person is dependent on their level of development, their size, their location, or their degree of dependency. And though Harris claims that a person cannot "suffer their destruction in any way at all" I would like to know how he rationalizes the destruction of a human person as not inflicting moral harm upon their personhood.

The difference between Mr. Harris' view and the views of the religious folks he vilifies is that the religious folks value human persons for what they are intrinsically, not for what they can do. To the religious among us, ontology trumps function.

All these points stem from a central belief that Harris and Dawkins share:

Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs.(Harris)

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.(Dawkins)

I cannot blame either of these men for understanding faith as an "excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence." Frankly, that view is shared by many in the church. The problem with such a view where it affects Christians in particular is that it has no basis in Scripture. Nowhere is there an example of someone demonstrating faith without evidence to support it. As Greg Koukl points out, "faith is not wishing" in Biblical Christianity. The Biblical model for faith starts with evidence which leads to knowledge, which in turn leads to an active trust that is faith. Faith is always built on evidence. The Bible gives no indication that claiming faith gives us license to disengage our brains. Quite the contrary.

Though I had never noticed it before, Michael Novak, in his review of these two books, gives brilliant historical evidence that this understanding is not new and that it is demonstrated in Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel's ceiling where the "cloud behind the Creator's head is painted in the shape of the human brain. Imago Dei, yes indeed."

So while I understand the underpinning of Harris' and Dawkins' inaccurate picture of faith, I do not accept their conclusion that:

In a world brimming with increasingly destructive technology, our infatuation with religious myths now poses a tremendous danger. And it is not a danger for which more religious faith is a remedy.

History has proven that atheism poses the greatest tangible danger to humanity. The remedy is faith -- a faith that is properly understood. A faith that engages its brain before it opens its mouth. A faith that is not afraid to face any issue, whether it is scientific, philosophical, political or otherwise, because it knows that the fountainhead of faith is Truth. None of us should be afraid of the Truth. The question that faces us is whether or not we, and those like Msrs. Harris and Dawkins, have minds big enough, and open enough, to engage the Truth head on.

What Does Christa Think?

Today it is being reported that a Colorado woman, who suffered a heart attack and stroke in 2000, suddenly awoke after almost 7 years in a coma. Today Christa Lilly conducted an interview with CBS affiliate KKTV in Colorado Springs.

Recently British scientists also reported that another woman in a “vegetative state” shows signs of awareness by her apparent ability to respond to speech commands. When told to “imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house ... motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people to whom she was compared.” Though researchers were quick to point out that…

"This is just one patient. The result in one patient does not tell us whether any other patient will show similar results, nor whether this result will have any bearing on her"

"It raises the questions of ethics and experience of these patients, I think, to a new level," said neuroscientist Joy Hirsch of New York's Columbia University Medical Center. "It raises the tension about how we treat these patients."

But, "making medical decisions based on this information at this point in time we say is not appropriate.”

“Not appropriate?” It seems to me it is very appropriate; especially in light of the ongoing debate in both Europe and New Jersey regarding easing restrictions on brain death criteria to allow for increased organ donations.

It seems appropriate in light of the Australian issue regarding patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). There, bioethicists are debating "the potential use of patients with non-responsive brain function for such medical experiments as animal organ transplants—to bypass ethic prohibitions against using a living human being for medical experimentation, some even suggested designating such patients as "dead," saying their cognitive impairments justified treating them as cadavers."

Those in a PVS will not ever wake up, they feel no pain or discomfort and have no continuing interest in their own survival…”

While making the argument that PVS patients have no right to mental autonomy since they have no apparent functioning mental capacity, Dr. Curry excused the medical “use” of their bodies by suggesting such patients should be allowed to choose to donate their bodies for the good of science, saying, “…these patients must also have a right to risk that life for the common good.”

On this view, Christa Lilly could have been designated a "cadaver" and her body used for experimentation just minutes before she granted her interview in Colorado Springs.

Serge can shed more technical/medical light on this subject but the fact that similar stories pop up from time to time is a reminder that the value of human persons is not just in question at the beginning of life – and that it still centers on the most vulnerable in our society.

To those who would deem medical decisions surrounding these issues as being “inappropriate,” I suggest they ask Christa Lilly for her opinion on the matter.

No Wings

… a further continuation of No Engines, No Wings – Won’t Fly

Earlier I compared Darwinian Evolution to a simulator that gives us what seems to be a reasonable explanation of life on Earth but, when exposed to further scrutiny, turns out to be a fraudulent. It looks good but it won’t fly. First, the Darwinian model has no power to get started because it lacks an explanation for the Origin of Life. But that’s not all.

Flying Blind

Research psychologists are digging deeper into a phenomenon that first entered the psychology lexicon in 1998 when they published the book, “Inattentional Blindness.” Their book, named for the phenomenon they uncovered, exposed some striking discoveries regarding how the mind actually perceives what the eyes see.

Mack and Rock's standard procedure was to present a small cross briefly on a computer screen for each of several experimental trials and asked participants to judge which arm of the cross was longer. After several trials, an unexpected object, such as a brightly colored rectangle, appeared on the screen along with the cross.—busy paying attention to the cross—often failed to notice the unexpected object, even when it had appeared in the center of their field of vision. When participants' attention was not diverted by the cross, they easily noticed such objects.

There are three reasons this study got my attention. The first is personal.

… aviation psychologist Christopher Wickens, PhD, at the University of Illinois at Urbana­ Champaign, has examined how pilots in flight simulators perform while using head-up displays—equipment that projects information such as airspeed and altitude onto the windshield. The research has shown that when experimenters put something unexpected but important in pilots' field of vision, such as an airplane on the runway, pilots often miss such objects.

“Because pilots have such an incredibly high visual attention load, the issues of what causes breakdowns in attentional allocation become critically important,” Wickens notes. “Now we know that just superimposing images on a head-up display does not guarantee that events both on the display and in the world beyond the aircraft will always be detected.”

This phenomenon explains how a USAir flight could have landed on an airplane sitting directly in front of it on the runway at LAX in 1991. The pilots of USAir flight 1493 never saw the SkyWest commuter airplane that had been cleared onto the runway ahead of them. Even the air traffic controller who allowed the SkyWest commuter onto the runway was confused and lost awareness of the airplane’s position because she had formed an incorrect mental picture about the actual situation on the ground.

That is scary professionally because it could happen to me tomorrow. Being aware of it may literally save my life. But there are two more profound reasons I was taken by this phenomenon.

The second goes to the "Mind-Body Problem" with which philosophers have wrestled for centuries. Here, an acceptance of Physicalism (a subsidiary of the Naturalistic worldview) entails that we should expect that all facts will be physical facts and that all phenomenon can be explained by material/physical causes, thus denying the existence, or even the possibility of the existence, of anything like a human soul. Given that, the “Mind-Body” problem arises from the notion that some real facts about our humanity seem to suggest that physicalism is not true. Sight is one of them. Listen to what the researchers say about inattentional blindness:

“This research is showing us something that we didn't think was the case—that we can fail to perceive very major things going on right in front of our eyes,” remarks cognitive psychologist Brian Scholl, PhD, of Yale University. “In contrast with a lot of research on visual perception, these studies are truly surprising for both scientists and lay people because they're so at odds with how we assumed vision worked.”

Research on inattentional blindness has come to the fore more recently. That work, showing people's inability to detect unexpected objects to which we aren't paying attention, raises other questions: How much visual input can the mind encode, consciously and unconsciously? What brings some visual objects to conscious awareness, while others remain unnoticed? What is the fate of information that is perceived only unconsciously?

These, it seems to me, are questions that physical explanations can’t address.

Suppose that you had a small video camera surgically attached to the side of your head – a video camera that was continuously in the “record” mode. The video camera is a purely physical, intricately-designed instrument that simply collects light input through a lens, registers that input on some medium (a tape, disc, or computer memory chip), and stores it there until you choose to retrieve it. Because the video camera is always “on” it will record everything that passes in front of it all day long. It doesn’t “miss” things. It physically cannot miss things. It just goes about robotically recording everything within the lens’s field of view. It follows therefore, that you could stop the recording at any point during the day and examine an actual, real-time snapshot of what had passed in front of the camera at any given point.

Physicalism wants us to understand our ability to see – our eyesight – as a biochemical video camera that does the same thing. But inattentional blindness seems to suggest that “seeing” entails more than just recording light input that comes to us through the lens of our eyeball’s cornea. Seeing requires something external to the video input we receive from our eyes. Further, it suggests that that “something” cannot be described in physical terms. Notice the researchers’ inclusion of findings that suggest that consciousness may be a factor involved in eyesight. In other words, they are invoking a non-physical explanation for seeing and that non-physical portion may be the most important aspect of that human faculty. Further, it suggests that something non-material does actually exist and that it helps to define the most critical aspects of our human personhood.

Naturalists will debate the idea that consciousness in not also a physical “epiphenomenon” but it seems illogical to suggest that non-physical effects (or faculties) can arise from purely physical causes. Strict Darwinism demands that this be true however, and that brings me to my final observation.

Thirdly, notice the researchers' surprise at uncovering findings that are "so at odds with how we assumed vision worked":

Inattentional blindness is one of two perceptual phenomena that have begun to change scientists' view of visual perception, from one of a videotape to something far less precise. Beginning in the 1970s researchers began to recognize a phenomenon called "change blindness", finding that people often fail to detect change in their visual field, as long as the change occurs during an eye movement or when people's view is otherwise interrupted.

I am suggesting that in assuming as they do, they have subjected themselves to change blindness of another kind – a philosophical perception that blinds them to a full view of reality. They need a paradigm shift that allows them to detect changes in their philosophical field of vision. Some of those changes are right in the middle of the road they are traveling yet they have missed them, and everyone following behind them is at risk as a result.

I realize that these findings are only meant to explain eyesight. But I cannot help but see a connection to human perceptions about ideas – in this case the idea of Naturalism in general (and Darwinism in particular). Hard core naturalists seek, and accept, only physical explanations for everything because their worldview demands it. It is the only paradigm under which they will even allow a discussion on any subject to take place.