Not-So-Silly Scripture Tricks

This morning I heard a news story that made my skin crawl with embarrassment. CNN reported that a new movement has sprung up in mid-America. The gist of the story is that some apparently believe that this passage from Isaiah 35:8 -- “And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it” -- is a specific reference to modern America's Interstate 35 and that it will fulfill its prophetic status as a "holy highway" only through the dedicated prayers of the faithful.

While this scripture gives us the basis for the entire Light The Highway movement, it also specifically gives us direction for our own lighting of the highway, Interstate 35. I-35: Highway of Holiness is about coordinating our efforts as a people across the nation to reclaim for the Kingdom of God what the enemy thinks is his own.

The originator of the concept of "Light the Highway"...

... is a Texas minister named Cindy Jacobs. She says she can't be sure Interstate 35 really is what is mentioned in the Bible but says she received a revelation to start this campaign after "once again reading Isaiah, Chapter 35."

She "can't be sure." But then again, she seems to think the idea is reasonable. Wow.

To be fair, not all proponents of this cause believe that this passage in Isaiah 35 is a literal reference to the modern American version of Interstate highway I-35. That makes me feel a little better. But, here's what they do believe:

... we do believe that we can use this text in a symbolic way as a catalyst to begin praying, just like those who live in Interstate 40 can use Isaiah 40:3,

"The voice of him that cries in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God",

and those on Interstate 10 could use John 10:10,

"The thief comes not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

My beef is not with those who feel the need to find ways to encourage others to pray for our nation. God knows we need that. But why is it that some feel that they have to concoct the most convoluted, nonsensical reasons to do so?

The problem here is bigger than it seems. Beyond making followers of Christ look a little silly (no doubt the reason CNN chose to run this story), it also unveils an even more insidious practice that is all-too-common even among those who are not out there doing silly things on national TV. This is the practice of "finding new revelations" and personalized messages buried within the Scripture, then claiming them for ourselves. This practice is similarly revealed in the oft-asked Sunday School question, "What does this passage mean to you?"

May I politely suggest that it doesn't matter what the passage means to you?

Seriously. What matters is simply what the passage means.

Why is it so hard to understand that what really matters in our interpretation of Scripture is not what we think we can "discover" in the text, but what the author of the Scripture meant to convey when they wrote it? No, finding that meaning is not an easy task, nor are we to demand that we have done so exhaustively, but the point is that we at least have to give our best in the endeavor. This is hard work ... too hard apparently, because most of us just don't try.

Greg Koukl points out that the habit of finding personalized meanings in the text of Scripture is an incredibly new phenomenon -- one that has just popped up in the last 150 years. I don't think it is a coincidence that this habit has arisen at the same time that existential, human-centered, philosophical reasoning has become all the rage. If everything else in the universe revolves around me personally, surely it follows that the Scripture was written to me personally.

Notice that the defenders of the I-35 phenomenon insist that we could use Isaiah 40 or John 10 in the same way they are using Isaiah 35. Why could we? The connection is absolutely baseless and absurd. By insisting that we can do so however, these folks open the door for those who could yank any passage, any verse, or any phrase out of Scripture, and then invoke it to defend any idea or practice that "works for them."

This is not to deny that there are implications and applications we can derive from our understanding of Scripture. But we need to remember that the intended meaning precedes any ability we have toward personal application. When we try to connect Isaiah 35 to Interstate 35 we simply look goofy. But when we accept the practice behind the goofiness, we are unconsciously engaging in a dangerously destructive abuse of the Bible.

'Legends' In Our Own Minds

Our family just saw I Am Legend and I can't help it ... the worldview implications of the film compel me to comment. It was a tension-filled, entertaining movie no doubt. I enjoyed it. But the messages it sent speak directly to my mission here at TrueHorizon.

Without giving too much away, let me summarize: A British doctor announces that genetic manipulation of the measles virus has turned it into a virus that, instead of wreaking harmful havoc on people, can attack cancer cells. Testing of the genetically manipulated virus has produced a 100% cure rate in cancer patients. “So you have cured cancer,” the interviewer asks. “Yes … yes, we have.”

Three years later we see a barren New York City that we quickly learn has been devastated by the virus’ unintended ability to mutate into a human time bomb. We also see, on the refrigerator door of our hero, Will Smith, a three year-old newspaper article touting his status as a “Savior” who is working to stop the proliferation of the disease. He is a military officer and medical researcher who is tasked with developing a vaccine to fight the killer virus.

And there our cultural assumptions show through. It is science, human ingenuity and power that make the world work. Smith's heroic character is based in all three. The future of the human race rests on his shoulders.

In contrast, there are a few other nuances in the film. Smith’s wife and daughter pray for him and the sick before they are forced to leave him in NYC. Their prayers are quickly found wanting. A cross dangles from the rearview mirror of the Brazilian girl who later rescues him from certain death. But Smith later mocks her and any spiritual reality on which she claims to rely. In each case the religious overtones are soon contradicted by evil and suffering in the real world. Scientific research seems to be the only really reliable savior for the human race.

The irony rests in the seemingly overlooked fact that it was science run amok that caused all the pain and suffering in the first place. In our insatiable desire to construct a utopian answer to pain and suffering we inadvertently make it all worse.

I don't want to make too big a deal of it all because I really did enjoy the movie. I also don't want to suggest that the human effort to eradicate disease are somehow misplaced or futile. It is a noble cause for which God provided us reason, rationality and compassion. I just found the ways in which the movie reflected the human condition to be instructive.

We believe that human suffering is unfair at best, and proof of the non-existence or impotence of God at worst. It never occurs to us that pain and suffering serve a higher purpose than messing up our "right" to a comfortable existence. We never seem to realize that pain and suffering serve to perfect us and show us the frailty of our humanity absent any reliance on the perfection of a loving Creator. We always look for answers within ourselves and are then surprised when we get let down ... and when we make things worse in doing so. We have a hard time accepting that we can't save ourselves -- especially in the only sense that being saved really matters.

Totally. Cosmic. Man.

There is an assumption in our modern (postmodern) society that all of us have tacitly accepted whether we are openly "religious" or not. It is an assumption born in the Enlightenment and nurtured through three or four hundred years of modern philosophy, medical breakthroughs, and technological innovation. The assumption is this: That the physical world is all that really exists. The logical follow-on to that assumption is that science will eventually provide us answers to our most profound questions. This, as I have discussed many times, is the foundation of Naturalistic/Materialistic worldview. Though many of us claim not to accept this view, and though we may even vehemently argue against it, this is a difficult assumption to overcome because it is built into the fabric of our culture.

When we hear of an inexplicable healing, or an answered prayer, or an eerie "coincidence," our initial reaction is to seek a scientific explanation. Though we study and do our best to honor and defend a high view of Scripture, we secretly wonder if the walls of Jericho really just fell down; if the Red Sea really parted or (though we would be loathe to admit it) if Jesus really rose from the dead. We are hard-wired to be skeptical of claims like those.

"Test everything," Paul told us, and we take him up on it. That's OK. But in our knee-jerk reaction to do so we sometimes forget that the Christian view of the world is not limited to materialistic causes for things. Ultimate reality is not physical -- it is spiritual. Ours is a worldview that encompasses both the physical and the non-physical. Neither the physical nor the non-physical is, by itself, adequate to describe us as persons. Likewise, neither can explain the makeup of all we know and experience.

The modern, rational, naturalistic culture we have been steeped in disdains such a view and does its best to belittle and destroy it. The result is an ongoing battle of ideas in which we are perpetually engaged. The philosopher Francis Schaeffer addressed this conflict as being rooted in a post-Enlightenment split in the way we think. Though Schaeffer didn't originate this notion, he did popularized it in a form we all recognize when we talk about someone taking a "leap of faith."

Faith, Schaeffer said, is relegated by the secular to an "Upper Story" class of thought consisting of: values, spirituality, religion, faith and the like. The "Lower Story" ideas consist of the converse of the upper. In the lower story are facts, physical reality, science, and knowledge.

UPPER STORY: Values - Spiritual - Religion - Faith -- Private

LOWER STORY: Facts - Physical - Science - Knowledge -- Public

And here's the key: To the naturalistic, secular way of thinking, the lower story is the only place we can know true things. For that reason it is public and verifiable. It describes the only philosophically acceptable areas of our lives. Upper story ideas are private and subjective, having no business seeping into the "real world." To take a "leap of faith" is to ignore rational thought and the scientific method by leaping upstairs and believing on faith alone. While no one is permitted to question the thoughts or ideas of your "private world," neither are you free to allow those ideas to influence how you understand the lower story.

Unfortunately, most of us accept these notions without even realizing it. We tacitly accept the idea that our personal faith or religion should be disallowed from addressing public issues because private values have little relevance to a fact-based world. But this is a bifurcated understanding of what we know and experience in our lives. It is a corruption of the Christian view of the world which sees: facts and values, the spiritual and physical, religion and science, faith and knowledge; as all comprising a total, integrated view of reality.Though in our hearts we know this is true, the culture continues to denounce it. We know we should fight the battle but sometimes we don't know how. Sometimes we get no help. Some of our thinking assimilates. Some of our leaders and scientists accommodate. Some of our churches capitulate. And with each baby step in the naturalistic direction, the idea of the miraculous diminishes into a faintly held belief we have little hope of defending.

And then Christmas comes ...

Though it took me a bit to get here, I believe the ultimate message of Christmas is the cosmic-sized revelation that human-centered ways of thinking are inadequate to address the human condition. It is humanistic thinking that created our earthly problems from the beginning. It is humanistic philosophy that has exacerbated those problems by manufacturing a "two-story" view of the world -- a view that denies ultimate reality by dividing that which was made to be indivisible.

At Christmas we are reminded that it all can be fixed in only one way. We are shown an ultimate example on a cosmic scale of how the world was meant to work. At Christmastime, the floor joists are shattered and a thundering shock wave pierces the night. The ceiling above our human-centered world collapses and the ghosts who have been rattling around in our attics come crashing into our living rooms.

The divine is united with the human in one person -- a person who offers us the perfect example of how we were made in the divine image and meant to function as an integrated whole. That person offers us a way out of our self-made morass of idiotic ideas and worldly wisdom. The infinitely perfect man bridges an infinite gap between divine perfection and human failing.

Only He can do such a thing. And when He does, the world all makes sense again.

We Need More Of These Guys!

Yes, we (Navy) won the Army-Navy game handsomely. That requires no comment. With a son at West Point I think it would be piling on to point out that Navy has won the last 6 in a row and currently leads the series between the two rivals by 3 games (52-49-7). It would also be rude to point out that Navy will be participating in its 5th Bowl game in as many years. So I won't even mention any of those things. It just wouldn't be right.

What I really want to point out is a quote I just uncovered by Naval Academy senior Adam Ballard in National Review. It is reported in the December 3, 2007 issue that Ballard, a big, bruiser of a power fullback, has been asked if he will attempt to forgo his military service obligation and pursue the interest that has been shown in him by the NFL. Here's what he said ...

"Being a Marine fits my mentality," he said, explaining why he's seeking a commission that would deny him a shot at a professional [football] career. "I don't see myself as someone who sits back. I like to be down in the dirt with a gun in my hand ... When I'm older, I want to be able to look at my kids and tell them why they can go to any church and why your mom doesn't have to wear a burqa."

Oo- rah

Thinking Allowed

Because I try my best to adhere to the principle of being "tolerant of people, but intolerant of (bad) ideas," I will not identify the author of the following. I only quote said author to make a point about the self-defeating consequences of anti-intellectualism in the church. Check out this excerpt (sorry it is so long) from a book which contains a chapter entitled, "Confused Mind":

Reasoning Leads to Confusion

...O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves? ... Matthew 16:8 (KJV)

A large percentage of God's people are admittedly confused. Why? As we have seen, one reason is wondering. Another is reasoning. The dictionary partially defines the word reason in the noun form as an "underlying fact or motive that provides logical sense for a premise or occurrence" and in the verb form as "to use the faculty of reason: think logically."

A simple way to say it is, reasoning occurs when a person tries to figure out the "why" behind something. Reasoning causes the mind to revolve around and around a situation, issue or event attempting to understand all its intricate component parts. We are reasoning when we dissect a statement or teaching to see if it is logical, and disregard it if it is not.

Satan frequently steals the will of God from us due to reasoning ... What God leads a person to do does not always make logical sense to his mind. His spirit may affirm it and his mind may reject it ...

Don't Reason in the Mind, Just Obey the Spirit

... the realization of how easily we can be led by our heads and allow reasoning to keep us out of God's will provoked in me a "reverential" fear of reasoning.

Let me point out that this author "has been teaching the Word of God since 1976 and in ministry since 1980." This author is the prolific writer of "more than 70 inspirational books" and has "released thousands of audio teachings as well as a complete video library." This author can be heard on national radio broadcasts, seen on national TV programs almost every day, and travels nationwide speaking and doing teaching conferences. This author has influenced a whole lot of people. I don't want to disparage the writer. I'm sure the writer has helped many people and is motivated to do so for all the right reasons. But, in this specific case, this person is just plain off-base. The teaching offered here is deeply flawed and destructive to any Christ-follower who adheres to it. Unfortunately, many new and vulnerable minds do just that.

Where do I even begin with this one?

First, the Bible verse quoted in the section heading (shown above: Matthew 16:8) is taken completely out of context. In keeping with the precept that you should be leery of anyone using a single Bible verse to prove their point (for a great discussion of this precaution go here: "Never Read a Bible Verse"), I would challenge you to look up the actual passage from which this quote was lifted. When you do, you will find it in the middle of a chapter devoted to the story of Jesus' continuing confrontations with the religious leaders who felt his ministry threatened them and their base of power.

Having just performed a miraculous feeding of four thousand seekers from a few scraps of fish and bread, Jesus tells his disciples to "be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees." The disciples, who having once again forgotten to bring bread with them (they are obviously slow learners -- like me), attribute Jesus' warning as being in reference to their failure in that regard. Exasperated when he overhears their discussion, Jesus utters the lifted quote. But let's look at the entire passage:

Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, "You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread? Do you still not understand? Don't you remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered? How is it you don't understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees." Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Does this passage in any way attribute confusion to the use of reason? Absolutely not! In fact, it does just the opposite. Jesus is admonishing his disciples to remember what has actually occurred, then think through what he said. Three times he challenges their understanding of his words. Finally, after thinking it through, they realize what he meant them to guard against -- the fallacious teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The entire story is an exhortation to examine the evidence, think carefully about his words, and from that deduce that actual meaning of what Jesus said.

In the words of the Christian philosopher Augustine, and completely contrary to the so-called insight of the author I quote above, this is a textbook example of "faith seeking understanding."

Second, the writer implies that wondering and reasoning are anti-Biblical. This has absolutely no basis in Scripture. Would Cornelius, a "God-fearer," ever have been compelled to ask for Peter's intervention had he not been inquisitive about the vision he reported in Acts 10:3-4? Would Peter ever have recognized his commission to reach the Gentiles without his own vision (Acts 10:9-21)? This passage reports that Peter "was wondering about the meaning of the vision" as Cornelius' couriers approached his home. Why would God encourage Isaiah (Isaiah 1:18) to "let us reason together"? Why would Paul challenge those (1 Thessalonians 5:21) who questioned his teachings to "test everything. Hold on to what is good"? These are not tangential comments. They are at the heart of the Biblical worldview. Try to think of a character in either testament who is not given evidence and reasons for believing in and trusting God. I can't think of any. I do, however, know that we are called to engage the world in a certain way ...

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

We are engaged in a battle of ideas. The Christian worldview is the most robustly evidenced-based, intellectually defensible, reality-coherent worldview that exists. Our call is to know, live, and defend that worldview. We do so because, in our humanity, we recognize that without a God who created and sustains the world, we are doomed to a meaningless existence. Though we may not know immediately why that is, we know that something is wrong. We wonder why that is. We seek answers. We pursue God with the mind he gave us. And though we will never know Him exhaustively in this life, we can reason our way to His truths and trust His answers because they are always aligned with the way the world He created really is.

Third, the writer implies that logic and clear thinking are destructive and contrary to "the will of God." To say this is to say that the Apostle Paul's entire life mission was contrary to the will of God. Take a look at Paul's missionary journeys. In nearly every town he visited, the first thing he did was approach the cultural and/or religious leaders (in most cases the Jewish leadership) and "reason with them from the Scriptures." In Romans 12, we are told to be "transformed by the renewing of [our] minds." This, Paul tells us, is our "spiritual act of worship." The word "spiritual" here is the Greek logikos which is (quite ironically) translated: "agreeable to reason, following reason, reasonable, logical."

The only way to defend the notion that clear, logical thinking is contrary to the will of God is to be caught up in the contemporary notion that faith and spiritual issues have been relegated to solitary confinement as "matters of the heart." Banished there, faith is left to flounder as a feelings-based inclination that is personal, private and beyond the reach of intellectual discernment. But the "heart" in a Biblical sense is much more than that. It is the core of our being; the place where our will resides and our choices are made. For that reason, the fashionable trend of separating the heart from the mind is not only unbiblical, but dangerous. It leads to vacuous pronouncements like these (from the same writer, in the same book) ...

I once asked the Lord why so many people are confused and He said to me, "Tell them to stop trying to figure everything out, and they will stop being confused." I have found it to be absolutely true. Reasoning and confusion go together.

... There is a big difference in head knowledge and revelation knowledge ... I don't know about you, but I want God to reveal things to me in such a way that I know in my spirit that what has been revealed to my mind is correct. I don't want to reason, to figure and to be logical, rotating my mind around and around and issue until I am worn out and confused. I want to experience the peace of mind and heart that come from trusting in God, not in my own human insight and understanding.

Here you notice a couple of things. The author claims direct, personal communication with God. Claiming this personal, two-way chat line serves to not only further entrench the idea that faith is a private matter, it also becomes a convenient asset in making the claim irrefutable. Who would dare question such a thing?! Any skepticism automatically renders the questioner a bad guy while simultaneously absolving the claimant of any requirement to defend themselves.

But, for the sake of argument, let's say the author is being absolutely truthful -- God has spoken audibly. Why then, would the hearer need to resort to "knowing things in the spirit" or "experiencing peace of mind and heart"? Neither of these is required if one actually hears the voice of God audibly. This leads to a follow-on objection ...

Fourth, the author's use of the slogan "Just Obey in the Spirit," is one of many similar (and all-too-familiar in Christian circles) exhortations that contains no actual meaning. Like others I could name, this phrase has become part of a kind of Christian-speak that is thrown around but that no one outside the church (or inside it, for that matter) can define. It is an empty slogan.

Humor me for a second and think about it ... how does one "obey in the Spirit" without engaging the mind? I welcome comments from those who can explain to me just how that is done.

This is not just a trivial objection to the author's view. It is a dangerous precedent to set. If "obeying in the Spirit" requires nothing but an inner, peaceful feeling, it can be used to justify any belief, thought, or action. There is no way to critique such a thing ... unless one uses reason and logic to do so. But that, we are told, is not allowed. Do you see how adhering to such a view is not only self-serving, but can be disastrous for those who hold to these ideas?

Being that I have listed the problems I find with this kind of teaching in logical order, and made a reasoned case why I believe it to be not only wrong but destructive, I'm sure that some would point out that my thinking is exactly the kind of thing the author is talking about. I am a living, breathing incarnation of the flaws the author is addressing. But in doing so critics, like the author they defend, help me make the fifth and final point I would like to address.

Fifth, the author has written a book meant to make a logically persuasive case for the point of view being defended. It always amazes me when folks write books meant to convince us all that there is no such thing as truth (so is their book true or not?); or that there is no such thing as an unbiased point of view (except theirs, of course); or that no one's "story" is any more authoritative than anyone else's (this is the strong-postmodern case for relativism); or, as in this case, that we shouldn't be using logic and reason. The idea that reason and logic are bad is dashed on the rocks of the very premise for which the author wrote -- or, for that matter, the reason anyone writes any book in the first place -- they want to convince you that what they are saying is true by logically and persuasively arguing their case!

I do not critique the author quoted here lightly. I used to subscribe to some of the ideas myself. But once one sees the fallacies and dangers in this type of thinking, it is hard to ignore it and look the other way. This type of mindset is destructive to the church. It makes us look foolish to the world and it needs to be stopped. Not because we are capitulating to the ways of the world, but because we are defying the faculty of reason God gave us when He created us in His image.

More Pesky Evidence For The Naturalists

While the Naturalists go on making cartoons like this one, science just keeps marching along gathering data. Just a quick post to highlight a few news tidbits I've run across lately that serve to undermine the tenets of Naturalism -- and to show that the headings in the cartoon above should be reversed.

As has always been the case, and no matter how much they deny it, the actual evidence serves only to support the case for Theism in general, and the God of the Bible in particular. Just a couple of recent examples ...

"Junk" DNA has a purpose -- The Boston Globe reports that a kind of revolution is taking place in the scientific community as more information is gathered about the human genome.

... genes were assigned an almost divine role in biological "dogma," thought to govern not only such physical characteristics as eye color or hair texture, but even much more complicated characteristics, such as behavior or psychology. Genes were assigned blame for illness. Genes were credited for robust health. Genes were said to be the source of the mutations that underlay evolution.

But the picture now emerging is more complicated, one in which illness, health, and evolutionary change appear to be the work of almost fantastical coordination between genes and swaths of DNA previously written off as junk.

Scientists, and Philosophers of Science, like: Michael Behe, Fuz Rana, Stephen Meyer and William Dembski; have been predicting this exact idea for at least a decade, while Darwinists wrote off "Junk" DNA as the necessary but useless byproduct of evolutionary genetic mutations.
The Floral "Big Bang" -- Two papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences address the fact that flowering plant life appeared almost instantaneously in the Earth's history.

these bloomers went through an evolutionary "Big Bang" of sorts some 130 million years ago, a brief era of explosive floral diversification at a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

The origin of flowering plants called angiosperms has long baffled scientists, with Charles Darwin famously referring to the plant puzzler as an "abominable mystery."

"One of the reasons why it's been hard to understand evolutionary relationships among the major groups of flowering plants is because they diversified over such a short time frame," said researcher Robert Jansen, professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin.

To calculate these things, the teams looked at "known rates of genetic change, [then] estimated that three lineages went through a major diversification in an evolutionary 'blink of an eye.'"

This is yet another example of Naturalistic presuppositions demanding only certain types of conclusions -- the exact practice for which they accuse and demean "Creationists" of being ridiculously mindless. Darwinists calculate "known rates of genetic change" by assuming gradualistic Evolution is true, and are then confounded when the data doesn't fit with the theory. Meanwhile, the actual evidence fits perfectly well with the phrase "... Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so ..." (Genesis 1:11).

This is not to say we should accept a "God of the Gaps" explanation by saying "God did it" and calling it a day. We should, as always, examine the evidence and do our best to understand how, where, and when the Creator involved Himself in the creation. What it does show -- for the umpteenth time -- is that the actual scientific evidence does nothing to undermine or eliminate the Theistic Hypothesis from consideration. It only supports it.

It always has.

A Great Resource

For those who want some quick, concise answers to some common apologetic questions, may I recommend a new resource. These are short (it looks like most are 1-4 minutes) video clips of Greg Koukl offering answers during a series of interviews. Click below to go to the Stand To Reason YouTube site:

Stand To Reason on YouTube

For those who don't know him, Greg is the President and founder of Stand To Reason. He has a local radio show in Southern California and travels the world doing debates, lectures and apologetic training of all kinds ... the kind of thing I'd love to do when I grow up.

Enjoy!

Don't Ask Your Brain, Ask Your Mind

This November 15, 2007 Scientific American news story, "Are You A Liar? Ask Your Brain," prompted me to re-address a related article from over a year ago in the journal Discover, which reported on the work of:

"researchers [who] wanted to see whether brain scans can even pick up a significant difference between brain activity during lying versus when telling the truth."

The new research claims that ...

The act of lying or suppressing the truth triggers activities in the brain that send blood to the prefrontal cortex (located just above the eye sockets), which controls several psychological processes, including the one that takes place when a person crafts a new rather than a known response to something. "Lying is an example of this type of executive response, because it involves withholding a truthful response," says Sean Spence, a professor of general adult psychiatry at the University of Sheffield in England. "When you know the answer to a question, the answer is automatic; but to avoid telling me the true answer requires something more."

My contention is that that connection can only be explained by the actual existence of a non-physical entity called your mind. That there is also activity registered in the physical brain does not entail a physical cause. Those activities may be correlated but, as we have discussed before, correlation does not equal causation. Though the claims all sound very technical, a cursory analysis of the facts brings up some fairly obvious questions (that haven't changed since the last time this subject came up) regarding the connection between abstract ideas like truth and the purely physical neuron activity in your brain.

First, one is compelled to ask the materialist scientist on what premise this research is based. After all, if the human mind is nothing but a complicated mass of meat which has come to be what it is through an irrational, physical process, why would they expect to detect any physical reaction to such an abstract idea as truth?There seems to be no reason why unguided evolutionary mutation would in any way connect physical reactions with abstract notions. Yet …

"the brain scans revealed unique areas that only lit up during lying. However, the researchers point out that there isn't one telltale spot in the brain that can automatically indicate a lie. "There really is no one lying center," Faro says. "There are multiple areas in the brain that activate because there are a lot of processes that have to take place."

Second, if evolutionary processes could explain a physical reaction to a moral standard of behavior, it would seem logical to assume that that reaction would be centralized to the specific area in which evolution had brought about the divergent speech pattern. There seems to be no reason that this would involve multiple areas of the brain – unless those areas were holistically connected in some way. This, however, is exactly what one would expect to find on the Christian worldview – that moral awareness resides in the soul so that breaching a moral boundary would effect the entire being of the person who did so.

Third, why would researchers care about such a thing? What would cause a scientist to have any notion of what lying is, unless that researcher was aware of an objective standard by which one determines right or wrong – a standard that cannot exist on the naturalistic worldview. The very fact that these scientists are compelled to study such a thing is evidence that objective morality is real and that its effects are inescapable.

Finally, and a little humorously, the research showed that …

"'In the group that lied there were two times the number of areas throughout the brain that showed activation compared with the group that was telling the truth,' Faro says. '‘That's because to lie, you have to actively suppress memories that are triggered by the question, which takes more effort than simply asserting the truth,' he says."

And that …

"One of the most important of these is that the brain has to work much harder to lie than to tell the truth."

On the naturalistic worldview, there is absolutely no explanation for these findings. The state of the human brain is just the way it is because of a chain of deterministic evolutionary events that brought it to its current form. On this view there is no right or wrong so there should be no impetus for the brain to have to "work harder" to achieve any one outcome rather than another. After all, no one outcome is in any way superior to another.

The only way to make sense of this research, or to understand why the research was even done in the first place, is to accept the fact that the human mind is more than just a clump of gray matter.

I am currently reading Beauregard and O'Leary's, The Spiritual Brain. When I finish I hope to be able to post some more insights from their research about the actual existence of the human mind and soul.

Take Me To Your Seeder

NASA made headlines yesterday, when it was reported that the space agency may have uncovered evidence that life on Earth actually originated on Mars. Here's an excerpt from the story:

"It may not be likely," NASA researcher David Morrison told National Geographic News, "but we cannot exclude the possibility that we are, in effect, all Martians."

Panspermia, or the idea that Earth was "seeded" by life from outer space, is centuries old but until lately has not had much scientific evidence to support it.

I have mentioned the concept of panspermia before, but let me offer a quick review. First of all, this idea is anything but "new," as even the author notes. What is new, is the reason that Naturalistic scientists promote it. And that reason is stunning.

Michael Behe points out, in his book, Darwin's Black Box, that peer-reviewed articles and research in the area of the origin of life is almost non-existent.

More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.

The subject is so lacking any naturalistic explanation, the scientific community has punted it by splitting off origin of life studies from the rest of the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian Evolutionary models.

There are two basic forms of the panspermia in play. The first is labeled Directed Panspermia and basically sees life on Earth as an ongoing zoo experiment in which life was planted here by advanced aliens whose technological abilities go well beyond our ability to imagine or reproduce. Though it sounds goofy on the surface, that one is eerily similar to the Theistic Hypothesis. After all, we theists have no problem with the idea that a super-intellect not only planted us here but -- in the infamous words of atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle (he of Big Bang naming fame) -- that He has also "monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology."

The second form, and the one being championed here by NASA, is labeled Non-directed Panspermia. This is the notion that some primitive life form (bacteria etc.) evolved elsewhere but was transported to Earth by piggy-backing aboard a comet or meteor. This could be explained by the collision of such an entity with a life-inhabited planet, the force of which would expel debris that escaped the planet's gravitational field. Having escaped, the rock on which the bacteria was riding collides with Earth and serves to "seed" it for further evolution.

There are big problems with this theory. Not the least of which is the ability of the life form to survive such a journey. In the study cited we find that:

A team led by John Parnell from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland embedded fossilized microbes into a fake meteorite strapped to the exterior of the Russian Foton M3 scientific-research probe, which went into orbit on Sept. 26 and came back to Earth 12 days later.

"In the bit of rock we got back, some biological compounds have survived," Parnell told National Geographic News.

Please note: The embedded microbes returned 12 days later, while only some survived. Though this data doesn't preclude the possibility of non-directed panspermia, it does highlight the utter improbability that any form of life could survive the thousands, if not millions, of years it would take for such a cosmic hitchhiker to reach the Earth -- even from our closest neighbors outside the solar system.

Though directed panspermia poses an even more unlikely scenario (because the highly intelligent zookeepers would also have to survive for so long), even the undirected variety has to find a way to overcome the intense ultraviolet (and other forms of radiation) that permeates outer space, as well as the lack of a life-sustaining environment aboard its transporter through the interstellar vacuum. There are other reasons to doubt that such a thing could occur, but here's the clincher ...

Saying life "evolved" elsewhere and was then transported here does nothing to solve the origin of life problem! It only pushes the question back another level. One still has to overcome all the barriers that a naturalistic explanation for evolution has not been able to overcome here on Earth. Always remember, the smoke screen of panspermia is a tacit admission that Naturalistic scientists cannot answer the real question of the origin of life. Hiding behind this theory does nothing to remove them from that failure.

Remembering ...

Today, at my kids' school, they honored veteran's with a patriotic mix of music, reading and a skit meant to thank the invited attendees for their service to the nation. It was a moving event and good to see that in some circles the service of those who sacrifice to keep us free is greatly appreciated. There were parents and grandparents who were recognized and applauded individually. But for me, one of the most touching moments was when an elderly gentleman, who looked to be in his late eighties, asked to take the microphone from the school principal. "Thank you," he said, "for taking the time to remember us."

Is that the epitome of the citizen soldier, the servant leader, the veteran to which we all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude -- is that not the picture of why we hold these veterans so dear? He fought the war ... and he's thanking me for simply remembering.

The implication was obvious. With the possible exception of November 11, most people don't really remember. We go to the mall, or watch Monday Night Football, or start our Christmas shopping, or whatever it is we do ... without ever giving our ability to do those things a second thought. We take it all for granted. It made me think ...

I thought of the rag-tag gang of idealists who, without uniforms, banded together at Bunker Hill to begin a process that won a newly-birthed nation its independence.

I thought of the descendants of those idealists who, at Gettysburg, charged downhill at Little Round Top, out of ammunition but with bayonets fixed, and held the left flank of the Union Army. One of them, Colonel Strong Vincent, was my wife's great-great-great uncle. Just a mile or so to his north, General Lewis Armistead, mortally wounded at the infamous stone wall during Pickett's Charge, sent apologies to his best friend, General Winfield Scott Hancock, for his decision to fight against him on the Confederate side.

How are men compelled to perform such courageous acts?

I thought of the horrors of the "War To End All Wars" and the optimism the world shared when it ended on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the commemoration of which eventually became Veteran's Day in 1954.

I thought of another group whose missing or ragged uniforms left them a frozen, suffering gaggle of men who, somehow, still continued to fight during The Battle of the Bulge. And of the teenagers who left the landing craft at Omaha Beach, only to be mowed down by German machine gun fire. It was on that beach 50 years later, that Bill Clinton posed for a photo op as he placed a group of staff-planted stones into the shape of a cross.

How dare he even set foot on that beach for that purpose.

I thought of Frozen Chosin, and Pusan, and MacArthur, and Truman and the "Forgotten War" that my uncle, Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Francis Adams, never forgot because he suffered in the cold there. It haunted him until his end.

I thought of the two men I admire most who were sitting on either side of me during the ceremony today. My dad, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bob Perry, and my wife's dad, Army Colonel Joe Vincent, who fought, and watched friends die, in the most unpopular war in America's history -- Viet Nam.

I thought of all those things in an instant. The remembering brought pride and admiration for those who have gone before me. But more than anything, the thought that haunts me today is for the future.

In a time when our enemy wears no uniform but vows to obliterate the American way of life and all who hold it dear; in a time when they have attacked us on our own soil and vowed to do worse; in a time when rogue nuclear weapons lurk in places unknown with persons who would use them without a hint of conscious regret; in a time when too many of our leaders seem reluctant to defend our national moral purpose against those who defile it; in a time like that my son has willingly volunteered to defend the cause of freedom. At the same time, each of his younger brothers have either taken intentional action, or showed every inclination, to do the same.

How are such young men compelled to perform such courageous acts?

Yes, I served 8 years in the Marine Corps. But only for the selfish purpose to fulfill a childhood dream of flying jets. My dream came true without ever having to endure a day in combat. Without ever having to know the fear that someone nearby was doing their level best to kill me. I served in a time of comfort. The same cannot be said for the sons who follow me.

So today I simply thank all those who are so inclined for remembering in a different way than we practiced today at school. Don't just remember the past. Remember the future.

Remember to pray.