Last week I wrote about how dark green religion seeks to shut down humans by limiting access to energy. The elephant in the room is, in fact, the population question. The reason is, as environmentalists know too well, that poverty is a terrible recipe for a healthy environment. The examples I gave last week showed the stark contrast between the health and welfare of humans and other creatures in North and South Korea. The one is wealthy, the other impoverished and enslaved beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet, the Green Utopia of North Korea, where commissars are empowered to control the most fundamental decisions of each human being, is an environmental nightmare. The free and uber-capitalist South enjoys every increasing levels of health and welfare, due to an improving environment.

Yet increasingly in America, and for some time in Europe, the standard message is that we must stop seeking “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for otherwise the world will end, melted, or frozen, asphyxiated, or drowned, because human prosperity is fundamentally opposed to planetary welfare. Let the data be damned. Health and wealth go together. But data matters not to those followers of dark green religion and nature spirituality. What matters is fidelity to principles of ecospheric classlessness; we must become less, Mother Earth must become more. And the only way to become less – the ultimate way – is to reduce population. Dead humans leave no footprints. We are all Na’vi now.

Al Gore thinks that salvation requires that we

“redefine our relationship to the environment, stabilize human population, and use every possible means to bring the earth back into balance.”[i]

Every possible means? He is not super clear about the details of these means, but abortion and reeducation play a large role. The Sci-fi Channel even plays its part in increasing the volume via dramatic productions like Countdown to Doomsday, where narrator Matt Lauer (of The Today Show) says,

“The stark reality is that there are too many of us. And we consume too much…. The solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption.”[ii]

Someone more transparent is President Obama‘s handpicked director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the “science czar,” John Holdren. Holdren is a Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University and an acolyte of Paul and Anne Ehrlich, with whom he has produced many publications that parrot the environmentalist line. In their 1977 book Ecoscience, Holdren and the Ehrlichs proclaim their neo-Malthusian and Marxist goals of

“population limitation and redistribution of wealth.”[iii]

In another article, written two decades later, Holdren and co-authors say that “[e]xcessive population growth,” is “a condition now prevailing almost everywhere.”[iv] He believes that government pressure is warranted to force a limit of two children per family, writing,

“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.”[v]

The number 2.1 is magical for it represents the zero growth scenario. They consider anything above this irresponsible and selfish. I say that if people choose to make decisions that make their lives more difficult, let them. There are plenty of Christians eager to adopt the children that pagans choose to throw away.

Ehrlich

Population is a monomaniacal obsession for men like Ehrlich, who can hardly keep himself from referring to it on most pages of his voluminous writings. To his credit, none are so consistently honest or realistic as he. He does not flinch at the implications of his philosophy, as do the professing Christian Greens. Says he,

“Population growth is a nearly ubiquitous, but all too often ignored, driver of environmental and social problems.”[vi]

Like Holdren,[vii] several decades have done little to moderate Ehrlich’s views on population. In the late 1960s Ehrlich wrote,

“We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it go negative.”[viii]

In 1990, the Green tide continued to rise, but still seemed far from the shore. This was the year that Christopher Manes wrote, regarding environmentalist priorities: “most important, the reduction of the human population to an ecologically sustainable level.”^[ix] One wonders if Ehrlich in his wildest dreams ever imagined having the ear, via Holdren and others, of the President of the United States of America in 2009. Maybe it surprises him it took so long.

Though he admits it is hard to calculate the population optimum, he is willing to give it a shot, arriving at a maximum number of 2 billion.^[x] At our present numbers, this means that 4 billion need to go. According to Ehrlich and others, we have a full-blown planetary emergency on our hands, with the planet on life support, and declining each day. Compared to the terrible 1960s when he wrote Population Bomb, matters have only become more critical.

It is intriguing to note that Ehrlich has kindly rounded up his estimates; in 1968 he felt that 500 million would be best.[xi] So has Holdren; in 1973 he felt a number in the mid-200 million[xii] range would be best, but decades later gave his blessing to an upper limit at 10 billion.[xiii] This change of thinking reflects an interesting fact about the population question: it is hard, even for types like Ehrlich and Holdren, who have spent their entire adult life obsessing about these things, to come up with reasonable estimates. The simple reason is that their numbers are pure speculation, thus worthless and arbitrary. They really have no idea.

To end, here are a few more quotes from Dr. E:

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” – Paul Ehrlich, Butterfly Expert

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”- Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

[i]Gore, Earth in the Balance (2000), p. 318.

[ii]Countdown to Doomsday, Sci Fi Channel, NBC Media Productions, June 14, 2006.

[iii]Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren. Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977), p. 954.

[iv]John P. Holdren, Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich, “The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects,” in Defining and Measuring Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations, edited by Mohan Munasinghe and Walter Shearer (Washington: World Bank, 1995).

[v]Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren. Ecoscience , pp. 837-838.

[vi]Ehrlich and Ehrlich, One with Nineveh, p. 79.

[vii]John P. Holdren, “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being,” Science, vol. 319, no. 5862 (January 25, 2008), DOI: 10.1126/science.1153386, pp. 424-434, republished online at http://www.compete.org/images/uploads/File/ESIS%20Progressive%20Downloads/Holdren%20-%20Science%20and%20Technology%20for%20Sustainable%20Well-Being,%20Jan08%202.pdf, viewed 7/15/2010.

[viii]Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 131.

[ix]Manes, Green Rage, p. 34.

[x]Ehrlich and Ehrlich, One with Nineveh, p. 185.

[xi]Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 44.

[xii]John P. Holdren, Population and the American Predicament: The Case Against Complacency (Cambridge, MA: Daedalus, MIT Press, 1973), pp. 31-34.

[xiii]J. P. Holdren and R. K. Pachauri, “Energy,” in An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21^st Century, edited by J. C. I. Dooge, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 103.

The ultimate resource is the free human being, and the master resource is energy. Control energy, and control human beings. Humans become slaves when energy is denied them, as the green movement is so effectively doing through the world. The irony is that destroying human liberty does not help the environment. Unfortunately, politicians are almost always hungry for more sources of power over humans, hence the green funding juggernaut is hard to ignore. President Obama consistently embraces mad dark green policies, and so do his supposed opponents such as Mitt Romney, Newy Gingrich, and others who change their green platitudes depending on audience.

When we look at the present state of the world it is incontestable that pollution is also horrendous in many of the poorest countries with the lowest levels of political and economic freedom. By contrast, countries with the greatest levels of political and economic liberty tend to be the cleanest and the wealthiest. It was not always that way. During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, London was toxic and the great cities of Europe and the United States of America were not much better. Seoul, South Korea, of 15 years ago had air stale and brown as lukewarm coffee. By 2010, national energy use has almost tripled, the economy has swelled almost eightfold, yet the air quality is enormously improved and continues to improve. Like Japan this is now a relatively wealthy country with almost no natural resources, except the human resource.

Conversely, North Korea, with more abundant natural resources, began its socialist odyssey in a far more favorable position than the war-devastated south. Yet the North suffers disproportionate environmental pollution. An enslaved and increasingly impoverished people cause massive deforestation in efforts to eke out an existence in socialist utopia.[ii] One gulag survivor, an escapee of Yodok, wrote of children in the concentration camp, “We ate anything that moved.… By the time a group of prisoners finished working a field, no animal was left alive. Even earthworms were fair game.”[iii]

The green movement regularly fails to interact with the arguments against their irrational fears and prejudice. The usual argument I have had cast back in my face is that I am a puppet of the oil industry, I am a prostitute paid for by big oil, I am not a scientist, all I want is to rape and pillage the earth, I don’t care about a healthy environment, and so on. All of these are false, but they are the resort of scared and weak minds who either have no idea how to conduct logical, reasoned conversation, or demagogues who seek simply to demonize their opponents with lies. Christians rely on truth, the ultimate sanitizer. In the interests of further exposing the anti-human policies of those snared by dark green religious thought, I offer this video.

Ending access to energy

[i]Ehrlich and Ehrlich, One with Nineveh, p. 24.

[ii]Tenenbaum, David J., International Health: North Korean Catastrophe, Environ. Health Perspect., vol. 113(1), January 2005, A26.

[iii]Kang, Chol- Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 104.

This seminar was presented at the Creation Study Group, Greenville, SC in February 2012. In it I talk about how the love of death, so apparent in the green movement and dark green religion, is a logical consequence of the belief that humans are animal, different in no significant way from pond scum. Once one accepts that our ancestors are bacteria, it is not a big step to argue that humans’ position as Lords of Planet Earth is terrible hubris. The result – cut back the growth, to manageable levels. At this point the suicides begin. As we shall see, faith in terrible twins leads to suicide.

The video is found here: http://creationstudygroup.org/index.php/dvds/167-james-wanliss-the-green-dragon-and-the-evolutionary-paradigm

A new sociological study by Gordon Gauchat claims there has been, in the past four decades, a dramatic decline in churchgoers’ faith in science. The study, published last week in the American Sociological Review, finds that “public trust in science has not declined since the 1970s except among conservatives and those who frequently attend church.”

Written by James A. Wanliss
Published online at World Magazine  on April 3, 2012, 9:57 AM

A new sociological study by Gordon Gauchat claims there has been, in the past four decades, a dramatic decline in churchgoers’ faith in science. The study, published last week in the American Sociological Review, finds that

“public trust in science has not declined since the 1970s except among conservatives and those who frequently attend church.”

No doubt Pastafarians of the world (for those of you who don’t know, those are members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—founded as a gibe at religion as irrational) will titter with glee at this “I-told-you-so” moment. The study plays into the popular trope that Christians are inclined by their religion to oppose science.

Regardless whether Gauchat’s paper has credibility from a purely empirical view (sociological studies being notoriously “soft”), it does offer opportunity for learning.

As a member of the scientific community, and a conservative Christian, perhaps I can add some insight into why churchgoers might be much less trustful of “science” than decades ago. I have all the qualifications usually claimed as proof of credibility: a Ph.D. (in physics), a consistent record of government-funded research for more than a decade, and an extensive list of peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals.

Yet my scientific credentials have been called into question several times. Why? Because, according to the paper,

“conservatives are far more likely to doubt scientific theories of origins,”

and,

“In 2010, only a third of conservatives believed that global warming is occurring.”

To be skeptical of these things is, according to the paper, “anti-science.”

In the 1970s, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman became publicly critical of so-called “social sciences.” He called them pseudo-science, bereft of basic honesty and experimental controls, yet having researchers who ostensibly go through the motions of scientific rituals, even wearing lab coats, but without actually doing science.

In contrast, experiment first, conclusions later is the basis of scientific inquiry. The post-normal science Feynman criticized predetermines its conclusions. Intentionally or not, it perverts normal scientific practice. And it is crowding out normal science.

Mike Hulme, a professor of climate change, explains,

“The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. … It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change … to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic, and personal projects over the decades to come.”

So, at least for Hulme—who in addition to his influential work with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a high-ranking professor at the University of East Anglia (of Climategate emails fame)—global warming “science” is not essentially about science but politics. Then science becomes not about seeking to understand and control our world, but about activism and controlling our neighbors.

For the sake of full disclosure, I am an expert reviewer for the IPCC, though in light of its history I doubt its lead authors will take my concerns seriously.

Lest we forget, the cultural authority of science, drawn from marvels like rocket ships and cancer cures, is born from the biblical view that nature is the orderly work of a personal Creator who governs nature in rational terms that humans, created in His image, can grasp in some measure.

The irony is that post-normal science, even such as Gauchat’s paper, is destructive of the normal science everyone knows and appreciates. Objective truth is not a major concern of post-normal scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration on mere power, has been the result.

It is not that Christians reject science, but that they, who are lovers of truth, increasingly recognize that what is sold as “science”—a search for truth—really isn’t any longer; it’s bogus post-normal science. That is what conservatives and Christians distrust, and what anyone who cares about science should also distrust.

As the eminent philosopher of science Robert K. Merton wrote,

“Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.”

And that makes Christians, and anyone else who is skeptical of post-normal science, virtuous.

James A. Wanliss, Ph.D., is associate professor of physics at Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C.; author of Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death; and a senior fellow of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He is a speaker and author for Apologia Educational Ministries.

Should God get tenure?

(ed.) David W. Gill

Eerdmans, 1997.

Introduction: Should God Get Tenure?

David W. Gill

p. 4

For Marsden, the premises of secular naturalism that once justified the exclusion of religious and theological perspectives are no longer adequate.

p. 5

Because religion continues to play a vital role in our culture, “to be liberally educated students must hear the religious voices that are part of our cultural conversation; indeed, critical thinking requires the ability to be reasonable about contending points of view” (p. 377).

p.6

Along with the study of such traditional religions, our students need to learn to use the tools of cultural, sociological, and psychological study to assess the roles of new religions, including “civil religion” and “secular religion” (such as Marxism, Stalinism, scientism, technologies and, and other “isms” – which function in the role formerly occupied by traditional religions).

Second, in addition to such formal courses, “God-talk” and religious perspectives ought to be given their due, whenever appropriate, in courses in history, literature, philosophy, and many other fields.

p.7.

If our colleges and universities are to fulfill their higher aspirations of educating whole persons for the real world in all of its diversity and challenges, we need these days to go bravely against the flow and “give God tenure.”

On Being a Professor: The Case of Socrates

Bruce R. Reichenbach

p.9.

Is it not the case that being a Christian professor is inimical to the educational process?

p. 12.

To be a Christian is to espouse as true a particular worldview. All truth is grounded in or consonant with the wisdom of God.

p. 15.

But though non-Christian and nonreligious professors are free from Christian presuppositions, they bring their own unique worldviews to the subject matter and to the classroom. They are no more free from presuppositions and biases than the Christian; it is only that they possess a partially differing set. They cannot be any more (or less) objective.

.

.

.

integration of faith and learning.

Alvin Plantinga has argued persuasively that there is a mistaken assumption in education that all must adhere to or be held accountable to the standards set by the secular community, as if these provide some sort of neutral ground on which to conduct discussion.

Page 16.

… empty jugs can pour no water.

Page 17.

… it was acceptable to the group ignorance possible knowledge. After all, what was of primary importance was to share one’s beliefs. There was no truth to be sought after, only feelings and opinions to be expressed.

…

But as we discovered, this is not education. Indeed, pooling ignorance can be diseducation. To reiterate one’s ideas without any challenge, to solicit acceptance on the grounds that you believe it sincerely, is to reinforce the wrong elements.

Page 22.

… professors should stake out a thesis regarding the issue.

…

Third, profession, when properly grounded, should provide students with reasons for thinking that what is professed is true or probably true.

Page 23.

Our vision is flawed, imperfect, limited, imprecise, skewed. Accordingly, we need the help of others to see the path of knowledge.

Page 24.

Put another way, the obligation to profess is not equivalent to the obligation to convert.

Page 25.

Professors put their beliefs out into the marketplace of ideas. They do not cast pearls before swine, but pearls before the jewel merchants, who must themselves decide what the wares are worth.

Academic Excellence: Cliché or Humanizing Vision?

Merold Westphal

Page 28.

Thus a friend of mine who is deeply committed to the ideal of liberal education recently spoke to me about students taking courses in math, physics, and the liberal arts.

A mutual friend of this friend and mine once referred to these as the “ancillary disciplines.” Why he chooses to teach at a liberal arts college while holding a view so diametrically opposed to its ideals I do not know.

Page 31.

Foundationalism may be dead and with it the confident, even arrogant, humanism of the Enlightenment. But Christian humanism has powerful resources for drawing less destructive conclusions from the genuine insights of postmodernism than does postmodernism itself. It’s understanding of human finitude and fallenness provides an alternative interpretation of the limits of human access to truth, while its theology of creation and redemption makes it possible to keep human thought related to a divine truth which it never possesses finally, fully, or without distortion.

Page 32.

For postmodern critiques have shown the secular humanism of the Enlightenment to be a particular faith and not the universal voice of a reason too pure to be shaped by special interests and contingencies. Christian faith need not be intimidated by appeals to such a “Reason,” once this Wizard of Oz has been found out.

Page 35.

This brings us to a crucial point, for liberal education is so often contrasted with vocational education. Such a contrast often leads us to speak of students taking courses in physics, math, and the liberal arts, since the vocational marketplace is more interested in people with training in physics and math than in those who have studied literature or art history.

Page 36.

This will serve as a reminder that education is not only designed to make us marketable but also to contribute to our moral sensitivity.

Page 38.

But this is only one indication of the tension between the ideal of liberal education and contemporary American culture. Because of our national preoccupation with matters economic (our materialism, to speak frankly), we are a society inclined toward a philosophy of education that tilts heavily, at times even exclusively, toward the production of technical know-how.

Page 40.

It may be that the religious context is the only one in which the tradition of liberal arts education can survive in today’s world. But this requires Christian institutions that are willing and able to articulate and to implement a philosophy of education in keeping with their Christian identities.

Religion, Science, and the Humanities in the Liberal Arts Curriculum

H. Newton Malony

Page 43.

I resonated completely with Snow’s anecdote about the president who, after noting that diners at a Cambridge College high table were not conversing with a visitor, said “Oh, those are mathematicians! We never talk to them.” This lack of conversation among the sciences, the humanities, and religion was definitely true when I went to college even though it claimed to be a liberal arts institution where interdisciplinary conversation was the norm.

Page 44.

Science, like religion and the humanities, begins with assumptions. And this is true of the natural as well as of the social sciences. Further, it is generally recognized today that the very act of study changes the object of study. Kant was right. We never know “the thing as such.” The wave-particle distinction in the study of light convinced new spore that there was no objective reality….

I don’t think I agree with this

Page 45.

Liberal arts colleges should be most pleased that their students are broadly, not narrowly, educated. They should take pride that they trained persons who are prepared to face a world in which the boundaries of the three cultures have become blurred. They should boast that they are preparing those who will function not as specialists, but as extensively informed generalists; citizens who, while continuing to seek new knowledge, need never take another course for credit to be educated persons.

Page 46.

Often, in the moratorium of late adolescence, religion is the first thing that students critique.

Page 52.

The inclusion of religion in liberal arts education has a long history. During the Middle Ages, theology was the umbrella discipline for the seven liberal arts.

Page 53.

The relegation of religion to a mere elective within the humanities has been a significant departure from the tradition and the loss of one of the prime motivators for ethical living. Religion’s demise has probably been as much due to the ascendance of the culture of disbelief within the Academy as to the assignment of religious belief to private opinion in the general public.

Religious Toleration and Human Rights

Paul A. Marshall

Page 74.

Strongly held in public expressed religious views are usually thought to be damaging to a tolerant society. As Allan Bloom put it, there is an all too common opinion that “the study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past: men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism.” Richard Rorty remarks: “I take religious toleration to mean the willingness of religious groups to take part in discussions without dragging religion into it.”

Page 75.

For most human beings religion is the core of existence.

…

This increased attention to religious toleration has not always been edifying. Much discussion has assumed the form of an attack on what are called “fundamentalists” – a word dredged up from the American past, and of dubious meaning and provenance even then, and now put to use in service of a dubious psychosociology.

…

Consequently there is a continuing refusal to take religion seriously.

…

Toleration means refraining from prohibition or persecution, and so it necessarily implies disapproval or dislike of the thing tolerated.

Page 76.

But toleration concerns how you react to something that you really do care about.

Page 78.

But anyone who has never disapproved of another’s religion is not open-minded but simply treats religion as trivial, as if religious differences do not matter at all.

Diversity, Christianity, and Higher Education

Robert G. Clouse

Page 106.

It is difficult to express in a succinct manner all that is included in the multicultural and diversity creed. This is due to the origin of these ideas in the works of several French writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bordieu, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, these authors taught that the individual is not free to make his or her own decisions but rather is under the control of hidden, giant, impersonal structures. The major force that permeates everything is language.

Page 109.

Incidents such as these reveal of basic anti-Christian bias in the diversity movement. Perhaps this is because of the exclusive claims of the gospel (John 14:6; Acts 4:12), or the identification of Christianity with Western civilization.

Page 111.

This leads to the recognition of a crucial, self-defeating aspect of multiculturalism, namely, it’s futile attempt to combine relativism with basic ethical principles.

Page 112.

In fact the apostle Paul suggested that in Christ neither race or nationality nor gender or social class should make any difference (Gal. 3:28).

Evangelical Civility and the Academic Calling

Richard J. Mouw

Page 119.

Academic activities are not performed by isolated individuals…

…

The great universities that were founded on European and North American soil were established and sustained over the centuries by people who believed that the academic calling had a profound religious significance.

Page 125.

One very important way of bearing witness to a biblically grounded worldview in the academic setting is to demonstrate what it is like to love the reality that we are studying.

…

Christians have a deep interest in keeping the lines of communication open because they are convinced that there is an underlying unity to the reality being studied by diverse disciplines and subdisciplines: Jesus Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

ETHICS WITH AND WITHOUT GOD

David W. Gill

Page 145.

As a Christian I can say that, for me, ethics without the God of Jesus Christ seems a pale and weak substitute for the Jesus-centered approach. This is my viewpoint and I think it is true.

C. S. Lewis on Eros As a Means of Grace

Corbin Scott Carnell

Page 148.

Luther commended marriage as a way toward chastity, for since the sexual impulse is so strong and few have the power to sublimate it completely, a married man may be more chaste than a monk in that he is free from the obsession of sex.

Page 150.

Lewis believes Christianity to be “almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body – which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.”

Faith and Imagination

Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

page 162.

What happens when the imagination fails? When that happens, faith is no longer a possibility.

What We Can Learn about Higher Education from the Jesuits

W. Ward Gasque

Page 181.

First, the Jesuits demonstrate the value and power of the clearly stated, continually repeated, and consistently reinforced mission.

…

The mission of the Society of Jesus is a unique mission encapsulated in particular documents: the spiritual vision of the Exercises, the strategic thinking of the Constitutions, and the educational program of the Plan of Studies (Ratio Studiorum).

…

Second, the Jesuits much more than their Protestant counterparts, developed a global perspective.

Page 184.

The third lesson from the Jesuits concerns the importance of spiritual formation in the educational mission.

Page 185.

… to take the commitment to the integration of faith, thought, and life seriously!

…

At the heart of the Spiritual Exercises is conversion to Christ.

Page 186.

This worldview is “focused squarely on the central marvel or ‘mystery’ in God’s revelation: God’s plan for the creation and redemption of humankind.”

…

Ignatius and the early Jesuits took the best of the older scholastic education that had originated in the thirteenth century, with its emphasis on contemplative theology and philosophy and knowledge for its own sake – and combined this with the best of the new humanism of the sixteenth century, which stressed education for character development and the application of knowledge in the service of the common good.

…

Few members of college and university faculties today are able to integrate Christian and secular perspectives.

Page 190.

The integration of faith and learning in North American higher education is an important and worthy goal.

The Evangelical Mind in America

Mark A. Noll

Page 196.

… constituted one of the most important alternatives to the burgeoning sweep of state-sponsored higher education.

Page 201.

One of the reasons that this new class of wealthy Americans funded education was to encourage more of the practical science and managerial theory coming from the new universities and less of the moralism coming from the old colleges.

Page 206.

… they took for granted a full Christian participation in artistic and cultural life.

So sorry – We really don’t want to control every aspect of your life. We have no choice. It is just that to keep you safe, because you are so irresponsible and infantile in your thinking, and because the world is such a dangerous place, and because we are so clever (much more than you), we must control everything. You will work, and we will tell you how, when, and where. We will tell you what you may use your money for.

Of course, it is your money. Don’t fret, and don’t complain. Only terrorists and ignorant people complain. We know best. This is essentially the message I get in reading the latest on world government from Scientific American Magazine. There Gary Stix, in “Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe,” explains why the stupid people need to be grateful that experts have everything under control. Seems to me that the word progressive is simply a smokescreen that totalitarians run to choke and blind the better senses of gentler people.

Propaganda fail – In spite of massive efforts to indoctrinate young people into Dark Green Religion, there is some dark cloud on the horizon, small as a fist. They have a reputation for being environmentally minded do-gooders. But an academic analysis of surveys spanning more than 40 years has found that today’s young Americans are less interested in the environment and in conserving resources – and often less civic-minded overall – than their elders were when they were young.

$7 per gallon – That appears to be the goal of the Obama administration. I provide evidence in Resisting the Green Dragon. With the rise of the price in petroleum products, comes an increase in the price of all things. In a green world, that is a good. That means people will engage in less fruitful, productive activity, and Earth Mother will be properly revered.

Kill those birds – Just wow! To help out the spotted owl, the Obama administration is moving forward with a plan to shoot barred owls, a rival bird. If only the barred owls could get some of those lawyers Cass Sunstein, the administration’s regulatory Czar, has been promising. This sounds like a Chicago crime family shoot out.

Clouds cause cooling – As reported in Geophysical Research Letters, it appears that cloud tops are lowering, a totally unforeseen cooling feedback on carbon dioxide-induced warming. University of Auckland’s Roger Davies and Matthew Molloy conclude this could be a “significant measure of a negative cloud feedback to global warming”. Average cloud height is related to global average surface temperature: the higher the cloud height the higher the average temperature and vice versa. Despite predictions of rising temperatures cloud levels are lowering. “In addition, the GRACE satellite found that total ice loss outside of Greenland and Antarctica was previously estimated 30% too high, another reinforcement of the ‘lukewarm’ synthesis of climate change.”

What happens when one intentionally rations power? – The answer? Blackout like during WWII. Green Germany with its revival of its pagan teutonic nature religions, seen in the powerful policical clout of the ‘green’ parties, is starting to experience those blackouts.

Earthquakes and global warming – Seriously folks, are we this stupid? What a splendid paradigm—it is a catchall, seemingly able to explain anything from the blasé to the banal. Let’s look at a few news reports. Who would have thought Bulgarian brothels would suffer barren business because of balmy weather? Global warming, this greatest of environmentalist peccadilloes, will not only lengthen the day by slowing Earths’ rotation, but has already apparently caused the death of the Loch Ness Monster, increased Italian suicide rates, and birthed two-headed turtles. The ability to explain everything is a characteristic of Cargo Cult Science. So it is not surprising that more (and less) rainfall is caused by global warming, but now also earthquakes.

More green subsidies – I propose to rename Black Hole to something far more certain: the Green Hole. This is the pit into which governments are throwing the hard earned sweat and labor of the people. The green jobs is making a few people enormously wealthy (think Al Gore), but intentionally impoverishing everyone else.

No need to lose your head – In an age of neuroses, leading scientists encourage people to have a stiff upper lip. No need to hit the bottle, take anti-psychotic drugs, or cope in other dangerous ways. Global warming is not really much to worry about.

Misleading claims about shale gas development serve dogma but not the public interest

by Paul Driessen

The Sierra Club and other environmental pressure groups are redoubling their efforts to “stop fracking in its tracks.” No wonder. The technology is an existential threat to fundamental “green” dogmas.

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing is a true “game changer.” In less than two years, this proven but still rapidly advancing technology has obliterated longstanding claims that we are running out of petroleum. Instead, the USA now finds itself blessed with centuries of oil and gas.

Thankfully, much of it is on state and private lands, which cannot easily be locked up by federal diktat.

Poland and Estonia are using it, China has invited companies to the Middle Kingdom, Britain, Israel and Jordan are evaluating their shale deposits, and other nations are following suit – coaxing oil and natural gas from shale and other rock formations that previously had refused to yield their hydrocarbon riches.

By making more natural gas available, fracking has reduced the US price for this clean-burning fuel to under $3 per thousand cubic feet (or million Btu), compared to a peak of $8 a few years ago.

Natural gas is also supplanting coal for electricity generation. Due to excessive, mostly unnecessary new Environmental Protection Agency regulations, many US coal-fired power plants are shutting down. Replacement plants are far more likely to be gas-powered than nuclear, especially in the near term.

Natural gas makes heating and electricity more affordable for families, hospitals, government buildings and businesses; feed stocks less expensive for makers of plastics, paints, fabrics and other petrochemical products; and the prospect of natural gas-power vehicles more enticing, without mandates or subsidies. That translates into thousands of jobs created or saved.

Companies are keeping chemical plants open that were slated to close, due to soaring prices for oil that they now can readily replace with cheap natural gas. Shell plans to build a $2-biillion ethane “cracking” plant near Pittsburgh – creating 10,000 construction jobs and 10,000 permanent jobs – thanks to abundant gas from Marcellus Shale. Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and other states are reporting subsidy-free employment and revenue gains from shale gas development. More are likely to follow, as companies seek new ways to capitalize on access to abundant, inexpensive, reliable gas.

Natural gas also provides essential backup power for wind turbines. Without such backup, electricity generation from these projects would plummet to zero 70-80% of the time, affecting assembly lines, computers, televisions, air conditioners and other electrical equipment dozens of times every day. 

Even harder for environmentalists to accept, cheap natural gas also makes it harder to justify building redundant wind turbines that require large subsidies to generate far more expensive electricity only 5-8 hours a day, on average, while killing large numbers of raptors, migratory birds and bats. It makes more sense to simply build the gas turbines, and forget about the mostly useless wind turbines.

Fracking is also unlocking oil in the vast Bakken Shale formations beneath Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. Oil production there has shot from 3,000 barrels a day in 2006 to nearly 500,000 today – creating thousands of jobs … and a growing need for the Keystone XL pipeline to Texas.

In response, eco-activists are spreading unfounded fears about this proven technology. Using words like “reckless,” “dangerous” and “poisonous,” they say unregulated fracking companies are operating with little concern for ecological values and causing cancer, earthquakes and groundwater contamination.

The claims have fanned borderline hysteria in some quarters and prompted Maryland, New York and other states to launch drawn-out studies or impose moratoria that will postpone drilling and the benefits it would bring. Facts are sorely needed.

Drilling and fracking have been carefully and effectively regulated by states for decades. As studies by the University of Texas and various state agencies have documented, there has never been a confirmed case of groundwater contamination due to fracking. Even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged that to a congressional panel.

These analysts, drilling companies and even an Environmental Defense expert now say fracking has not played a role in any of the rare cases where methane has gotten into drinking water. 

Instead, the cause has generally been a failure of “well integrity” – the result of improper cementing between the well borehole and the steel “casing” and pipes that go down through aquifers and thousands of feet deeper into gas-laden shale formations. Similar failures occur in water wells drilled through rock formations containing methane (natural gas).

The solution is straightforward: better standards and procedures for cementing vertical pipes in place, and testing them initially and periodically to ensure there are no leaks.

Similarly, fracking fluids fail to match the “toxic” and “cancerous” opprobrium alleged by anti-drilling campaigns. Over 99.5% of the fluids is water and sand. The other 0.5% is chemicals to keep sand particles suspended in the liquid, fight bacterial growth and improve gas production.

Although industrial chemicals were once used, almost all of today’s are vegetable oil and chemicals used in cheese, beer, canned fish, dairy desserts, shampoo, and other food and cosmetic products.

As to “earthquakes,” barely detectable “tremors” have occasionally been measured near fracking operations and wastewater disposal injection wells. However, calling these snap, crackle and pop noises and movements “earthquakes” is akin to screaming “Earthquake!” when a cement truck goes by.

Despite these facts, EPA is nevertheless trying to invent problems and inject itself into already vigilant and responsive state regulatory efforts. The agency has conducted a roundly criticized study in Wyoming and is conducting water tests in Pennsylvania, where state officials view its activities as unnecessary meddling.

Additional over-reach and over-regulation would be hugely detrimental to US and global well-being. Fracking could help create numerous jobs and provide a far more secure, affordable, dependable and lower-pollution future than would ever be possible with wind or solar power.

By expanding oil and gas development, it could make North America the world’s new energy hub. Middle East sheiks, mullahs and OPEC ministers would lose economic, political and strategic power. Threats of Russian pipeline closures would no longer intimidate Eastern European countries. Politicians everywhere would waste less money on “renewable” energy T-Boonedoggles.

Unfortunately, though, fear campaigns are preventing some of America’s poorest counties and families from enjoying the economic benefits of Marcellus Shale development.

Baltimore’s Sage Policy Group calculated that fracking in western Maryland could reduce energy costs, create thousands of jobs, and generate millions of dollars annually in revenue for the state and Allegany and Garrett Counties. Similar studies in New York and elsewhere have reached similar conclusions.

Hydraulic fracturing technologies are proven. Regulations to protect drinking water are in place and improving steadily, as cementing and other legitimate concerns are recognized and addressed.

North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas, Poland and Israel are showing the way forward.

Communities that have not yet opened their doors to responsible drilling, fracking and production need to replace anti-hydrocarbon agendas and fears with facts, optimism and science-based regulations.

_______________

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.

As always Richard Feynman continues to dazzle me and challenge my thinking on physics. As I prepare lectures for a quantum mechanics course, these words from Feynman remain challenging to me.  Feynman is always wrestling with the implications of physics and epistemology. Of course, physics is natural philosophy; those practicing physics at the highest level have a Ph.D – they are doctors of philosophy.

“Let us consider briefly some philosophical implications of quantum mechanics . As always, there are two aspects of the problem: one is the philosophical implication for physics, and another is the extrapolation of the philosophical matters to other fields. When philosophical ideas associated with science are dragged into another field, they are usually completely distorted. Therefore we shall confine our marks as much as possible to physics itself.

Of course, Feynman means natural philosophy, which is the common name of physics prior to the  mid-nineteenth century.

He says, further,

First of all, the most interesting aspect is the idea of the uncertainty principle; making an observation affects the phenomenon.

I recently wrote on this a little, in reflections on science.  We are all familiar with the aphorism, “You can look, but you can’t touch.” Our limitations at the smallest scales implies that we can’t look without touching. As John Polkinghorne has said, we have reached a point in the quantum world where an irreducible amount of uncontrollable disturbance is made with each measurement. Polkinghorne,  past president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society makes a very lucid study of the principle. In his ‘Science and Theology’  he explains how far from being a dry equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was originally considered a statement of epistemology (what can we know?), then of ontology (the nature of being).

Here is one final comment from the inimitable Feynman.

We have already made a few remarks about the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. That is, that we are unable to predict what will happen in physics in a given physical circumstance which is arranged as carefully as possible.

Physics, the hardest of the sciences is certainly, if not the Queen of all science, the Queen of the Natural Sciences.   Physicists learn by their science that great humility is needed in the study of the world.  Ignorance should not breed arrogance, but humility.

Yesterday’s X5-class solar flare birthed a massive coronal mass ejection, expected to reach our planet on March 8th (Thursday) at 06.25 UT (+/- 7 hr); EST is 5 hours behind Universal Time(UT), meaning 1.25 am on Thursday, New York time. Expect beautiful northern, lights, and electromagnetic disturbances if you live in north America and are up late.

The sun imaged (courtesy NASA)

A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a massive burst of fast moving plasma, the fourth state of matter, along with embedded solar magnetic fields.

How fast does this plasma explore from the solar surface? We are talking about billions of kilograms, many billions of pounds, of matter slamming into our planet with large velocity (millions of miles per hour).

This is pretty awesome stuff. I last wrote about this kind of thing in more detail here and here.

Introduction

Presented at New Life Presbyterian Church, Escondido, CA in February 2012

 

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”^[i]

So writes Richard Dawkins, tail coiled out of sight, in The God Delusion.

I like Dawkins, very much. Not satisfied to have piety without content, audacious in his atheistic religion, he snarls and grumbles implications of his views of science and religion. I quote him, not least of all because he has a lot to say on the topic assigned me, and because he is a scientist – a biologist at Oxford University.

Queen of Sciences

Not long ago theology – the study of God – was counted the Queen of Sciences. Those indulging in the physical sciences did so largely as a hobby. Theology was the main business. The life of the mind and spirit, the world, the whole intellect, was the domain of the theologian.

In our age of extreme specialization, whether or not it is a fair opinion, Christian ministers are no longer seen to trade in truth. They give their opinions and audiences, if entertained, may sometimes offer polite applause. Ministers of the Gospel command neither authority nor respect in our culture.

When faced with serious problems and important questions, people no longer think of gospel ministers as their shepherds. If you have problems, physical or spiritual, who ya gonna call? You call the Ghostbusters. Even in the movies, maybe especially there, the ‘scientist’ or academician replaces the Christian minister as the ambassador of authority and truth. The new spiritual order is simply the scientific caste.

The ascent of man

Early Christians believed the Bible alone was God‘s Word and thus the ultimate source of truth. First this proposition was challenged, and then rejected as a needless stumbling block to unbelievers. Early Christians believed that God revealed himself in both the Bible and nature, but mostly in the Bible. Then science without reference to God was impossible. Now science with God is anathema. Far from being the source of truth, many no longer consider the Word of God a source of truth. Many see science putting the nail in the coffin of God.

Science and truth?

According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS):

“Religion and science are… separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief.”

Let me translate that. The word science stems from the Latin “scire” meaning ‘to know.’ One can think of science as the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Having mainly Christianity in mind, the NAS says there is no conflict between science and religion, because they are unrelated, one dealing with facts, the other with feelings. We can keep our faith unmolested by science if we will accept that objective (i.e. real) knowledge comes only through science. Securing peace needs only that we keep our faith purely personal, subjective, with no impact on how we live. We should not be so naïve to accept such peace offers.

This NAS statement flies a false flag for almost all scientists do, in practice if not in principle, treat religion and science as fields that connect intimately. The scientist Richard Dawkins is not anomalous, just more publicly consistent than others. Dawkins is a purveyor, a connoisseur, a bon vivant, of a search for knowledge that we call One-ism.

One-ism and Science

One-ist science, which I will now describe, is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding without reference to a personal God. We should recognize how few scientists are as daring as Dawkins in following One-ist assumptions to uncomfortable conclusions.

Christians imbibe too, sometimes thinking it humble to renounce certainty, choosing to poke themselves in the eye and interpret their theology through the latest theories of science. No sane person should admire the man who, after blinding himself, denies what he no longer is able to see.

One-ist science has at least two flavors, both of which remind me of my junior school in Cape Town. If we youngsters did poorly in a test our teacher, grinning like a shark, would pull out a few rulers, and allow us to exercise choice in the flavor of spanking rod – cream soda, or raspberry. I was not excessively fond of the flavors, even if they were safe, legal, and fair. Materialist and organic are names I give to the flavors of One-ist science. Both are poisonous and painful.

Materialist

According to Karl Pearson, in his Grammar of Science,

“The goal of science is clear-it is nothing short of the complete interpretation of the universe. … It claims that the whole range of phenomena, mental as well as physical-the entire universe-is its field. It asserts that the scientific method is the sole gateway to the whole region of knowledge.”

In place of the bogus neutrality offered by the NAS, quoted from previously, we see instead how many scientists view their craft as a platform from which to shake the fist at God.

The late Carl Sagan, a Black Knight of materialist science, occasionally found it convenient to represent the NAS view. But mostly, like Dawkins, he used the gravitas of science to undermine Christianity.

Each show in his government funded TV series ‘Cosmos’ began with this insulting aphorism: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” This deeply religious statement, a mockery of the Bible, deifies the cosmos. Sagan studied the stars. Blown away by the scope and grandeur of his observations, he decided that nothing could be greater. Only material mechanisms need explain his ‘material world’. The source of truth is to be found only in the observation and study of material things.

Sagan’s view is still sold as ‘scientific’. I would say it is the dominant understanding of what science is all about. You know, if one wants to find the truth about anything, avoiding kaleidoscopic cons and opinions, one goes to a scientist. If you would like to know where the moon comes from, who do you call?

Sagan and many modern scientists see themselves as Ghostbusters. It is interesting that according the Oxford English Dictionary, a Sagan is a deputy of the Jewish High Priest, the second highest functionary of the Temple. So perhaps ironically, Carl Sagan has performed the dramatic role of a deputy high priest of a new scientific mythology.

A recent government funded IMAX movie highlighting the space sciences, explains how, through the ages, intolerant Christianity has been the enemy of science but materialistic science, a candle in the dark, has won the war:

“The Cathedrals of the New Age were the Cathedrals of Science.”

Given the Sagan’s position of respect in the pantheon of modern science it appears that science is the ultimate guide to truth for many – perhaps most – of its academic practitioners. Science has become an idol of power.

One-ist science designs to rid man of a soul, and the universe of a personal God. The conflict then, between modern atheistic science and Christianity is due to the different view of the source and nature of truth. Atheism, at least the atheism of a Sagan, holds that man or matter is the source of truth, or at least the medium mediating truth. Until relatively recently, most Christians, said that truth lives in the person of Jesus the King, revealed in the Bible.

The goal of the Darwinian view of life espoused by Sagan, Dawkins and many others goes beyond proving that naturalistic mechanisms alone can account for the physical world. The Darwinian view seeks to show that materialism accounts for all we observe and experience. This reminds me of Peter Jones’ earlier comments on Yuri Gagarin. There is a denial of what we often call spiritual reality. Ironically, rather than ending faith, such audacious goals promote a large degree of blind faith, for atheism is blind, deaf, and dumb.

Materialist scientists do not so much believe that God is dead. They believe that science proves he was never alive. But even the atheists are not consistent and need, in their weaker moments, a more nurturing ideology. A group of notable scientists, signed this statement, authored by Carl Sagan:

“As Scientists, many of us have had profound personal experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We understand that what is regarded as sacred is more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so regarded. Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment should be infused with a vision of the sacred.”^[ii]

This was one of the first such ‘sacred’ statements issued by a distinguished group of atheist scientists, but not the last. One cannot deny much of what exists in human experience and still expect coherence. Just as the world began fully and more consistently to absorb the materialist science, quantum mechanics and special relativity unmanned the minds of the new atheists. Comrade Gagarin, meet Lady Gaga.

Postmoderns Rockin your world: Quantum Mechanics and Cosmic Rays

This leads to the second flavor of One-ist science, which is essentially postmodern. I call it organic One-ism because it recognizes that much more exists in the world than just physical phenomena. Seeing how materialist science inexorably leads to a hopeless life of utter insignificance and barren despair, organic One-ism offers something more nurturing.

Old time Newtonian physics believed in an objective world, which does not blush and change when scoped and poked. But the quantum world suggests it is impossible to see reality, at least sub-microscopic reality, without changing it.

After Newton, understanding the deepest complexities of the cosmos was thought to be within human grasp. Deep space was no longer the furtive fairy playground of gods, a mysterious demon haunted world. It reduces to a mechanical law relating motion of matter, from smallest atom to prodigious galaxy. Science became omnipotent. Atheistic materialists latched onto this mechanistic view. It provided, they thought, justification for their view of life. Ironically, it was physics that exploded it all.

First, the quantum world tore atoms apart, like the bomb tore apart the dark silk of heaven. Atoms were not, as the Greeks insisted, the true essence, just the appearance. Consider an ellipse in the center of a garden. Or is it an ellipse? As we approach it, the shape appears less elliptical and more circular.  The solid ring is the essence, and the ellipse is the appearance. Many layers of perception seem to show us the circle is the reality. By combining many views of the object reality slowly comes into sharper focus.

Further research suggests the essence is the atoms comprising the circle. Perception is a dynamic process serving to increase certainty the more layers one adds to sensual data. Sensual observation gives us information, data that is some way relates to reality.

But as the ellipse is not the essence, neither are atoms. Quantum physics suggests atoms are mostly empty space. And no one has ever observed an atom. Quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg wrote:

“But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

Our planet bathes in high-energy radiation, originally deemed to spring from the ground beneath our feet. But in 1912 physics experiments on a balloon flight found radiation increasing with altitude, rather than the expected decrease. The obvious explanation is that much of the radioactivity was not coming from earth, but showering from the heavens.

Decay of elementary particles

In passing through a chamber of vapor, high-energy cosmic radiation leaves microscopic tracks. These tracks reveal even more shockingly weird things than protons, neutrons, and electrons. Strange particles like neutrinos that can pass through the earth from one side to the other without hitting anything.

Just when we thought we might have figured out what things were really made of physicists discovered evidence for another entire zoo of particles, called quarks, and more. There are up-quarks, down-quarks, charm-quarks, strange-quarks, particles with teeny mass, and (hold your breath) … particles with zero mass.

Time and again over the past hundred years scientific observations of the minuscule quantum world contradict what common sense might expect or predict. Einstein’s E=mc², relating energy to matter to light, challenges the materialist understanding of physical reality.

Each one of us is glowing, each one putting off 100 Joules of infrared light radiation every second. Each one is radioactive, blasting out about one gamma ray each second. This room is a cup running over with the light that we are burning off. We are whirlwinds of tempestuous fire.

Diamonds are some form of concentrated carbon. Our bodies are some form of concentrated light radiation.

It was Einstein whose special theory of relativity merged space and time, showing that our observation of reality depends, at the very least, on how we move. The theory explains nicely such bizarre experimental observations as the increasing mass of an object as its speed rises. That doesn’t make sense. We have nothing in our direct experience to compare to this strange behavior detected in the quantum cosmos.

And superstring theory unites space, time, and matter into vibrations of quantum loops of invisible string. Thus a proton is not a tightly squashed bit of matter but a short trembling filament, like a silken guitar string. When a guitar string vibrates it produces different tones. In string theory quantum guitar strings vibrate to produce different particles. The experiments of quantum physics undermine materialism because they show how matter is far less solid than we normally assume.

The cosmic music of twentieth century science shakes the foundations of overweening atheistic One-ist science. Physicist Paul Davies, author of “The matter Myth” writes,

“Many people have rejected scientific values because they regard materialism as a sterile and bleak philosophy, which reduces human beings to automatons…. These people can take heart: materialism is dead.”

A brief critique

The standard model dominating science teaching is not organic, but mechanical One-ism, so eloquently recommended by biologist Richard Dawkins, preening and posing as a monkey’s uncle:

“We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.”^[iii]

Can it be true? If true, then is my religion, felt so personally, untrue? Dawkins writes:

“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”[iv]

This is the consensus view implied by most of what is taught as science. As a teenager I read postmodern books, presenting the organic view, and they thrilled me because they clearly poked their finger right in the eye of imperious materialist science, whose implications had flummoxed me. I found it hard to argue against the view that we humans were, in essence advanced from simpler animals. Man evolved out of inorganic atoms that slowly coalesced into life, and then moved through the multi-billion year spectrum of less to more complex animals. Perhaps it could be true.

Scientists like Davies argued, correctly, that the Emperor really had no material clothes. There really is meaning to life! What I failed to realize was that this new reading of science could equally lead to One-ism, with the evolutionary creation mythology left intact. Einstein believed in God, but not the personal God of the Bible, whom he dismissed reflexively. For almost one hundred years the despair of materialist One-ism has lost ground to the irrational hopes of the organic One-ists. Purveyors of One-ism, no matter whether atheistic or theistic, have in common a creation myth.

William Provine, professor of biology at Sagan’s Cornell University, embraces the One-ist creation myth. He sees it as a universal leveler, a potent solvent of all fond wishes, utterly indifferent to our views of God:

“… belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”[v]

This is the connection. Materialist One-ists argue that nothing is sacred. Organic One-ists argue that all is sacred. The United Nations codifies the latter position in their Earth Charter, arguing that acting as Earth’s bodyguard “is a sacred trust,” that humans must identify themselves “with the whole Earth community,” and that we should “live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature.”^[vi] And what is true for Earth is true for the entire cosmos. But when all is sacred then nothing is. Provine’s point is that when all is one, as in evolution, atheism is inescapable.

“Dark matter” or “dark energy” are names scientists give to explain those motions in the cosmos that contradict the present lore of physics. A kind of universal glue or primal matrix holding everything together, is a something that we cannot see, something immaterial and without mass in any conventional sense. Christian pantheists skip in delight,^[vii] for they imagine they are seeing God face-to-face in the corners of creation, and there is a fundamental unity to the cosmos imposed by a touch of divinity of which we and the cosmos share.

Many Christians applaud, when feeling how physics, having discredited the modernistic, enlightenment program, offers a warmer explanation of life, perhaps based on Jesus’ resurrection. And they believe they salvage intellectual respectability by appealing to evolutionist theories as scientific fact.

Science, they believe, portrays matter moving in spiritual ballet with tender, mystical qualities like energy. Life flows from, and through, and to cosmic ripples of organic energy and quantum fields of green upon which they gaze out into Milton’s “wide womb of uncreated night.”^[viii]

Christian view of Science

It is a sweet thing, for Christians, to do science to the glory of God. The objects of science include knowledge of our world, satisfaction of inborn curiosity, love of truth, and observation of His power and divine excellence. By its very definition, since God is the God of truth, the pursuit of science is a pursuit of God.

“I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions,” says the Word (Proverbs 8:12). The Word shows how the inventions of science should all trace a burning arc to the glorious God, the source of all wisdom. It is God who grants these blessings to sow. Farmers, for instance, know the place and time and method of such as wheat and barley and rye, it says (Isaiah 28:24-29), “For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him.”

Mostly, when surveying Scripture, we find sparse data related to the general and special sciences. The basic content of physics, or farming, and other sciences, largely draws from nature rather than from Scripture. How should we then do science?

One-ist science is impoverished. One can appreciate the extent of this poverty by considering what a Biblical view of science looks like, with One-ist science forming a black as ebony background. Pursuit of knowledge – that is, science – must always uphold, and not oppose, foundational biblical principles that make science possible and good. Let me list a few propositions that should guide twenty-first century science. You will see, I hope, how these militate in many places against all aspects of One-ism.

1. Deity

In the alleged war between Christianity and science it is not wise, I believe, for Christians to obsess over creation. It is not, I believe, the principle of creation that is primary. “In the beginning God…” (Genesis 1:1) is what Christians know to be true. We begin with Him, and the reality that He speaks out to us.

One-ist science begins with creation. But, as Calvin wrote,

“the whole order of nature is everted and overthrown, if the same God which is the beginning of all things be not also the end.”[ix]

Science, to be science, can never be atheistic in principle, or in practice. Science worthy of the name is that which instructs us in the confidence and fear of God; that is, in godliness.

God reveals Himself as personal, not some mechanical force, nor some nebulous energy field. The Scripture teaches also that God is eternal, but all else had a beginning. This is contrary to the view that the world, or at least the stuff of the world, was eternal, as the Egyptians, Hindu’s, and Chinese mythologies state. As to direct applications of this principle to the practice of science, we see that God reveals Himself to us, as somehow beyond the context of created time in which we function. Scientific ideas that speak of the eternity of any part of creation, in any way, are wild speculations, and a dangerous pest.

Some Christians think that one should embrace the Big Bang theory because it suggests there was a creation zero point. It might be consistent with Biblical data showing God created all things of nothing. But they should man up and honestly admit that this One-ist model argues for a universe that creates and continuously recreates itself. But we know (Isaiah 44:24) that creation is God’s work, and we are to prefer Biblical data. It had a distinct beginning.

The Big Bang also forces one to accept a sequence of events incompatible with Biblical revelation (e.g. earth after sun instead of earth before sun). Biblical data, which the wise trust above our best explanations of the material world, conflict with Big Bang theory. Biblical data tell of a cosmos created in the space of six days, a few thousand years before the birth of Christ.

2. Trinity

Romans 1:20 is one of many passages uncovering another clear principle without which science is hamstrung. True science must harmonize with, and certainly not contradict, the truth of the Godhead. Creation reveals the Trinitarian nature of God. Jesus Christ, eternally proceeding from the Father, is immanent in Creation from the beginning. The world was framed by God’s Eternal Word, His only begotten Son, and by Him were all things created. His Holy Spirit is sent forth in the work of Creation and renewal. One need only think about how the world would be without His direct intervention after the fall; everything would decay and be reduced to nothing (Psalm 104:29,30).

Organic One-ists see, particularly in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, what physicist David Bohm called an “unbroken wholeness.”[x] Indeed, quantum founder Erwin Schrödinger, a man straddling the modern and postmodern world, believed that “the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real.”[xi]  However, the Trinitarian nature of reality puts the lie to organic One-ism – God in the one person of the cosmos. We know that things are real. We know that there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.

3. Decree

Third, we see that there is a principle of God’s intimate determination of world events. Nothing comes into being without His consent. Not even a hair may fall to the ground without His consent. Of course, I do not mean to imply that second causes do not exist, such that the hair misbehaves because of gravity, curvature of space-time, or something else. Seeking those second causes is the precise concern of science. But, in seeking, one must never dare pretend second causes are independent from God’s careful arrangement.

The Tower of Babel

I hesitate to call this careful arrangement ‘law’, since the Bible does not seem to represent the cosmos as being governed by laws independent of the King (Psalm 104:24; Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 11:33-36). Miracles are not God’s violating this or that law. The “laws” of nature quite simply express the direct commands of God, in revealing His nature.

Because the human mind, being in the image of God, naturally loves truth and reaches for it, science reflects the human need to stretch towards God. It is pitiful to observe One-ist scientists – like Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins – gasp in wonder at the glory of God speaking to their hearts, exhausting themselves building castles in the sky, secretly fretting that it may all be an illusion. God’s intimate involvement with each aspect of reality implies that we need not reach for the sun, or other distant stars, to find God. He is close to each one of us, revealing Himself clearly in the Scriptures, and in whatsoever comes to pass. We need not build a tower to reach out to God in heaven.

4. Creation/Transcendence

Hebrews 11:3 and other passages teach the further limits of natural science. It says, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”

That means, clearly, that natural science is incapable of discovering the manner of creation. It is an object of faith. It is one of the Unseen things. Is the cosmos made of pre-existent materials? I know that God created all things of nothing. I know it because God has told me, and I believe Him.

It is profane and vain babbling, and opposition of science falsely so called (1 Timothy 6:20) to speculate on eternal matter or infinite parallel universes containing every possible quantum state. Such fantasies make it possible to believe, falsely, that now anything can happen. God declares that He made the singular material cosmos, and that He is invisible. Unaided human faculties can never see nor comprehend Him.

True science teaches that God is outside His creation. He created everything – matter, time, space – from nothing. Therefore His transcendent divine nature shares nothing in common with us, cows, cancer, or Cassiopeia. In our looking at the world, in our science, we ought never to succumb to perverse, pathetic pantheistic parodies of Creation.

5. Law and Order

Well-formed and beautiful worship approaches God (1 Corinthians 14:40) “decently and in order.” God’s commands reflect His nature. Therefore we know that He too, who governs by Law and order, does all things decently and in order.

In the very beginning there was not order and beauty. Even the earth was “formless and void.” God’s Holy Spirit sustained the world in its primordial shapelessness. In shaping and crafting the cosmos, in six days, God shows the time, place, and order that each part must possess. So in science, while we reach out to learn and know, we have every expectation that we will uncover an ordered cosmos, ordered by the decree of God.

Physicist Eugene Wigner became perplexed when pondering the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”[xii] in uncovering the structure of the physical world. We are not perplexed. As God is three in one He has a numerical nature. Since the Godhead is revealed in the Creation (e.g. Romans 1:20), and acts in Creation, the cosmos also has a numerical nature. And since we are the image of God we can recognize, in some measure, that divine nature.

Christians alone can speak of the reasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Scientific investigation would be absurd were there no such design. Absent reasonable faith that the football is really going to be there, a reasonable scientist would not keep coming back for more punishment. Only Biblical Two-ism rescues the scientific enterprise from irrationality and absurdity, showing that observations of design and order are objective reality.

6. Unity/Symmetry

That special kind of sweet pain touching our mind when encountering beauty reveals in us needs not satisfied in this world.

He has set eternity in our hearts. Arguments based on perfection, symmetry, beauty, and such must move us for they reflect the eternal character of the God who made the cosmos. Scripture calls “indescribable” the things that await Christians in glory, for then we will see our beautiful Lord face to face. But for now we see glimpses of His glory. When God the eternal put finishing touches to His work of art, He pronounced it “very good.” It was done; “there is in the symmetry of God’s works the highest perfection, to which nothing can be added”[xiii]

Who created this world? God did. And God is one God. One God! That is how we know that there is a unity found in creation. Before the majestic work of the six days of creation, the entire cosmos sprang into being not from the hand, but from the word, of one great architect.

Because He created all, upholds all, and is immanent, we know that from here to the furthest reaches of the cosmos there exists integrity, harmony, design. The cosmos is not made of disjointed jangling bits but is a system with fundamental structural unity and harmony of function. Without this, science would be impossible.

7. Diversity

God delights in Himself. In His unity and plurality He sits in heaven on the throne, where all is love, taking pleasure in His handiwork (Revelation 4:11). Like the body of the Church, we must see diversity in the Creation. Already in Genesis God made a variety of creatures to populate the earth. Denizens of the deep, eagles arrested in air, beasts of the field show God’s delight in genuine diversity. All is not one. With the Psalmist (104:24) we sing, “O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.”

Were one not anchored by the balance of Scripture, unity might well overwhelm diversity. Since we share the same place in space, one might argue that plants, beasts, and man share a collective terrestrial consciousness. Such an argument drives molecules to man evolution a little closer to our imaginations. “If there is a relationship God has to us living beings,” wrote eco-philosopher David Spangler, “then that relationship also extends to and includes the Earth. If we may participate in sacredness, then so does the Earth, not simply as a valued and cherished environment but as a fellow creature.”^[xiv]

Nevertheless, much as we cannot sing brother sun and sister moon with a straight face, neither can we appeal to geography or cosmography to allow us to sing of cousin cow or Mother Earth.

Apart from their terrestrial source, not much more light is shed on the creation of the animals. They are not star staff any more than we are; we are earth stuff. But our mode of creation is significantly different from the animals. God explicitly states the unity of the human race as all humans living today, male and female, spring from the same origin. All human life is fundamentally one, as the Bible teaches throughout, but not fundamentally one with all life. We descend from the one man and one woman (e.g. Genesis 2:22). There is no commingling of man and animal.

8. Sustenance

Laplace said of God,

“I had no need of that hypothesis.”

He invented a cold, lifeless, clockwork world in which things run just so, with no need of a super intelligence to manage the issue of all things.

But quite the contrary is true. God maintains the world, upholding and regulating its every part. He is not a distracted Creator. He is a most attentive lover. Because he sovereignly foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, it follows that He preserves and governs, upholds and regulates all things too.

9. Sin

Cosmic evolution requires death as a positive force for hope and change, but truth is that death is an upheaval against the original order. Death is unnatural and ugly, and Jesus knew it better than we do, better than we can, for He witnessed sin enter this world.

More than this, He came to die (John 12:27) to pay the wages of sin, for “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). And so we can understand why “Jesus wept,” when He beheld the grave of sin and this world holding the corpse of Lazarus (John 11:35). Adam‘s disobedience and rebellion, not evolutionary fairytales, brought calamity to the world.

Adam received visible tokens to contemplate the wrath of God, in the spoken curse, in the guilt and ruined relationships, in the change in his fundamental nature through the loss of his original righteousness and holiness, in the visible marring of the cosmos, and in the death of the animal whose skin he wore.

Even if there were no deficiency in our nature because of sin, we would still be finite creatures of an infinite God. We are finite, and this limitation means that, unlike God, our science – in other words, our knowledge – can never be exhaustive. Comprehensive knowledge is only found in the infinite God. This world, and the study of it, is not suited for the next, implying that our senses are highly limited. All things were created very good, but finitude, coupled with sin, enormously complicates and obscures the task of science.

All this implies that we should approach our scientific task with humility. This means that we should always recognize limits in our science. Natural science mines the world for data by means of our senses, asking questions, like a judge. And like a judge, carefully sifting data before coming to conclusions.

10. General revelation

The fact that God reveals Himself by a Word presupposes that human beings are rational creatures, capable of linguistic communication that is objective and relational. This we see repeatedly underscored in the Garden of Eden, as Adam speaks with God, names the creatures, and exercises reason.

That the same is true, though to a lesser degree, after the fall means that God has given to all mankind the ability to do science, to gain knowledge and understanding of the cosmos (Acts 14:17; Romans 1-2). Via Paul God encouraged the Athenians (Acts 17:27) to “feel after him, and find him,” and God encouraged the children of Israel to seek after knowledge, teaching by His prophets (Proverbs 18:15), “The heart of the prudent getteth knowledge; and the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge.”

Clearly, the pursuit of knowledge, in other words science, is not necessarily vain. And science – the quest for knowledge – is not just for Christians, but also for pagans, even atheists. It is for anyone with a mind made in the image of God.

11. Special revelation

Through the creation, as Romans 1 insists, even an atheist or Potatohead may at least apprehend, if not comprehend, the being of God. Tongues are necessary to taste, skin to touch, nose to smell, ears to hear, eyes to see. Each provides important evidences of what is. But the highest rule, with the best evidences, with reliable testimony, is God’s self-revelation in the word of God. The absolute standard both of thinking and speaking must derive from the Scriptures; it is the test of the thoughts of our minds (2 Corinthians 10:5), the words of our mouths (Matthew 12:36), and works of our hands.

Inspired statements of Scripture are decisive even for the pursuit of the various non-theological sciences (for example, Gen. 1:21-25 is important in respect of biology, and Ps. 104:5-8 in respect of geology). Nevertheless, unlike theology, the science of philosophy and the various special sciences do not derive the vast bulk of their actual content from Scripture. Like theology, these non-theological sciences can certainly be misused against truth, and to avoid such misuse, the correct pursuit of the sciences certainly requires that they harmonize with Scripture and draw principles from Scripture.

12. Redemption

The world, perverted and ruined by sin, groans (Romans 8:22). But the groaning, adding to the veiled nature of our physical science, is as the pains of birth, and not of death. Our science too must develop because God has given us, in Creation and our nature, the tools of dominion. Our minds are compatible with the character of the cosmos, because both come from the same source-our heavenly Father. We can describe the cosmos, little by little, in rational terms because God empowers humans to do so, and Christians above all. For we have the mind of Christ.

The cosmos groans in eager expectation, so to speak, watching us do our science. For reasons of His own, reasons that boggle the mind, almighty God chooses to set His saving love exclusively on our kind and on no other creatures. Yet they too will find renewal in the new creation. We know that, ultimately, His and our work is for His glory.

Conclusion

Science is the pursuit of knowledge, it is natural philosophy. Such a philosophy is a great gift of God by which He intends to exercise our minds to search out His glory. This is our scientific task. God chooses to glorify Himself chiefly through His intimate work of redeeming the Church. Only in intimate relationship with God do we come to express the true fulfillment of human existence.

“[W]hatsoever a man knows and understands is mere vanity, if it is not grounded in true wisdom; . . . a knowledge of all the sciences is mere smoke, where the heavenly science of Christ is wanting; and man, with all his acuteness, is just as stupid for obtaining of himself a knowledge of the mysteries of God, as an ass is unqualified for understanding musical harmonies”[xv]

(Proverbs 2:1-6): “My son, if thou wilt receive my words, and hide my commandments with thee; So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thy heart to understanding: Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; If though seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shall thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.”

Richard Dawkins single-mindedly and cunningly characterizes almighty God as a vicious bully. Rather, we see that the Lord is one who has concerns, intimate concerns, for the well-being of His creation. He urges us to prove, see, and feel what we have read and heard of Him. He urges us to taste and see that the Lord is good. Examine yourself, says God, implying from theology, the Queen of Sciences, that there is indeed experimental data from which we may draw true conclusions of our spiritual state. Is there discernible in your life and thought that spirituality, repentance, and love possessed by the true child of God? Rather than being anti-science, we see that Christ is both source and savior of science.