What Comes After Darwin?

Recently a computer scientist of some note, David Gelernter, made some waves by announcing that he no longer believes in Darwinism. He came to this conclusion by reading critiques of the theory from prominent intelligent design theorists. He has not embraced intelligent design, but its core critique of Darwinism seems cogent to him: that random chance plus natural selection is mathematically insufficient at the molecular level to account for all the genetic information in complex organisms. I, too, find these arguments very persuasive. Coupled with the fact that I believe absolutely in God as the Creator of the universe and everything in it I have no trouble identifying who the Intelligent Designer might be.

Of course, Darwinism is still the mainstream theory. In fact, “mainstream” doesn’t quite capture it. Rare indeed is the working biologist who doesn’t believe evolution by natural selection explains all life on earth. However, there are thorny questions, and even rumblings of doubt in some corners. If Darwinism is wrong (which of course is what I believe) then it stands to reason that further research would eventually cause increasing doubts, and one day perhaps a crisis leading to a paradigm shift. What theory would take its place?

The problem with intelligent design for most scientists is that it "reeks" of religion. Intelligent design advocates can claim that it is not a religious theory, but they conveniently choose not to address the question of who the designer(s) might be. Apart from theism, you are still left with the need to explain the origin of the designers, and if we couldn't have evolved, neither could they. A secular scientist will not see intelligent design as a viable alternative to Darwinism. Their worldview is materialism, the idea that space-time, matter and energy are all there is. If Darwinism fails what is their fallback position?

Interestingly, Gelernter has settled on panpsychism - the idea that all matter in the universe is conscious at some level. He thinks that natural processes might tend to favor the development of higher consciousness, which would explain how we seemingly evolved against impossible odds. This idea clearly needs significant development to get beyond the hand waving stage. Although it strikes most people as highly implausible, it does have its adherents. But if not panpsychism, what other alternative might the scientific community turn to?

A few secular scientists, in response to the mathematical difficulties of natural selection, have settled on the theory of panspermia. Prominent adherents include the late Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA. Panspermia is the idea that life originated on some world other than earth and was seeded here, accidentally or on purpose. It doesn't necessarily imply that the source was an intelligent species. It might have been microbes hitching a ride on a rock blasted out from some other planet and landing here as a meteorite. But, like intelligent design, panspermia doesn't remove the origin of life problem, it just relocates it. If evolution couldn't work here, how could it work anywhere?

As I was thinking about this today, it occurred to me that the next secular origin story is likely to be the simulation hypothesis, which posits that the universe we live in is actually a simulation. While this idea has been around for a while as science fiction (think The Matrix), recently it has been popularized by Elon Musk and others as a serious theory. It's a bit like intelligent design, but without the religious implication. If we live in a simulation it is not necessary to explain how we came to exist by natural processes operating in the universe according to the observed natural laws. Of course, you must still explain where the designers came from, but their universe might have different physical laws that make evolution plausible.

At first blush, this idea of living in a simulation seems even more wildly implausible than panpsychism and panspermia. Why is it becoming popular? How could anyone believe they are not actually real? Simply because many computer scientists can imagine one day building such a simulation themselves.

Many computer scientists already embrace the idea that a true conscious intelligence could be hosted in a computer. This is called strong AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the exponential growth of computer power over the past few decades and the advent of quantum computing, many thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil not only think AGI is inevitable but is something to be embraced. They even imagine transferring their own consciousness into a future computer system and achieving a kind of secular immortality. To a materialist this is an intoxicating idea – eternal life without a pesky deity who must be obeyed.

If AGI is possible it suggests that a simulated world is possible. But if you grew up playing immersive computer games and you believe AGI is just around the corner, it's not so great a leap to consider that maybe this has already happened, and we are in fact already artificial minds in an artificial world. Musk believes it likely that this has already happened thousands of times, and we are living in a simulation of a simulation of a simulation, ad nauseum – on top of a stack of simulated worlds built by simulated beings.

Should we be persuaded? What is the evidence? I am skeptical. First, no one has yet created an AGI, or has any idea how to do so. It needs more than computer power; it needs an understanding of consciousness and how it arises. Notwithstanding this fact, many people are confident they will succeed in creating an AGI. They consider the recent advances in computing power, neuroscience and so-called weak or narrow AI (facial recognition, etc.) to represent a trend that will naturally result in AGI. With a sufficient understanding of consciousness and sufficiently powerful hardware they are confident AGI will happen.

Second, underlying this confidence in AGI is the assumption that consciousness is nothing more than a computational process. This is more of a philosophical position than a scientific theory. It’s called the computational theory of mind, and it is a popular idea rooted in materialism. If we are nothing more than a complex physical system and we are conscious, couldn’t a different type of mechanism also be conscious? And if we are merely a mechanism, wouldn't it be possible to simulate that mechanism based on known physical laws?

It should be noted that I have glossed over an important question: would an AGI actually be conscious, or just simulating the effects of consciousness? For Kurzweil, this is important because he still wants to be “Kurzweil” after he transfers his mind into a computer. This question has been debated for decades (e.g., John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment), but most AGI proponents believe AGI would be conscious because, under their worldview, there’s really no difference between consciousness and a simulation of consciousness. Again, this is not science – yet anyway. It remains a philosophical question.

My own position as a Christian is of course that we are more than a complex physical system. We have an eternal spirit that will live beyond the death of our bodies. The mind is more than just a physical process. I have argued earlier that our conscious experiences and decisions are something more than just the brain activity they are correlated with. If I am right, a simulated brain would not become a conscious mind, and a conscious mind could not exist in a simulated world.

The common thread underlying Darwinism, panspermia, panpsychism, and the simulation hypothesis is materialism.  Each of these theories is, in some ways, more fantastic than the previous one. If Gelernter and others could hold their materialist philosophy more lightly they might be able to see that intelligent design is a plausible alternative. I would argue only that they consider the possibility that God exists and see whether the brute fact of our existence as conscious, intelligent, free moral agents is more plausible under the God hypothesis than under any other. I believe it is.

New Blog!

Well, I've started another blog, but I'm not abandoning this one. I've been wanting for some time to start posting some of the meditations on Scripture which I've been recording in my journal. Many of them can pass as short little devotionals, and I keep thinking others might be blessed by them. It seemed like the best place would be a new blog dedicated to that purpose:

http://occasionaldevotional.blogspot.com

I have quite a backlog from the past year or so of journaling, so posting will probably be daily for a while. Eventually it will settle down to two or three a week, I think. Most of the earlier ones are quite short, but true to form I have become wordier as time goes on. :)

So now I have three blogs, which seems excessive, especially when you consider how rarely I've been posting for a while. But I think they each fulfill a separate purpose:

Believer's Brain – article length commentary on social and spiritual issues
Geekspiel – news and comments about the geekier things that hold my interest (space, etc.)
The Occasional Devotional – the new blog, dedicated to short Scripture meditations

I hope you enjoy them!

Why Health Care Is Expensive

With the whole country talking about the crisis in health care and Congress debating massive new programs, I feel the need to speak out. I’ve thought a lot about this issue over the years and I don't think most people are analyzing the situation very well. For that reason I would like to share some insights that I don’t often hear expressed in the national debate. I’ve said much of this before, in a long comment on another blog last year. It seems timely today to repeat it.

Complaints about health care in the U.S. are frequent and loud. The two that figure most prominently in today’s debate are that it is too expensive and not everyone has access to it. I would quibble a bit on the second point and say that everyone in this country has equal access to health care; they just don't have equal ability to pay. So it boils down to one major complaint: health care is too expensive. What I want to ask then is, why? Popular opinion tends to blame corporate greed, but this is, at most, a minor contributor.

Let's take pharmaceutical companies, for instance. How can they possibly justify charging as much as $200 a dose for some new drugs? Surely it is due to rapacious profits! It turns out that's not the main driver. Now, there's no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry has much higher profit margins than many other industries. In recent years they have averaged a net profit margin of about 25%. That's pretty high. Many other industries average well under 10%.

But there’s nothing nefarious about these high profits. Profits naturally tend to be higher in industries that are driven by technological innovation. In fact, high profits are what drive the innovation. No investor will settle for low returns in a risky, capital-intensive industry. Fortunately, companies can charge more for products that are new, unique, and dramatically better than what was available previously. In contrast, profits are low in industries that produce commodities. Innovation is also slower. In a commodity market companies can only compete on price and service because the products they sell are no different than their competitors. In the modern world health care is definitely a high tech industry.

Now let's suppose the pharmaceutical companies decided to operate as non-profits. What would that do to drug prices? Take away the profit margin and the price of that $200 drug would decline by 25%, but I think we would all agree that $150 a dose is still extremely expensive. So where is all that money going? It turns out that new drugs are exceedingly expensive to develop and bring to market. These companies spend billions on R&D, and many of the drugs they develop never even make it to market because they fail to meet the FDA's safety and efficacy standards.

Now let's take a step back and try to look at the big picture. What is driving the health care cost spiral? It’s our collective demand for better health care. The bottom line is that everybody wants the best possible health care they can get. There's no such thing as "good enough" when it comes to me or my loved ones. This understandable desire has driven astonishing advances in medicine over the past few decades, and nowhere is that more true than in the United States. As a people we have gotten wealthier and healthier. There are so many more treatments available now than there were, say, when our grandparents were children. And many of those treatments involve sophisticated, high tech equipment or drugs that cost billions to develop. So if you look at the really big picture the reason health care costs so much more than it used to is that there is so much more of it. If everything your doctor could do for you would still fit in a little black bag he brought to your house, I can assure you there would be no crisis in health care costs.

The dilemma we face is that the total societal cost of providing the best available health care to all our citizens is growing at a pace that outstrips even the sizable growth in our societal wealth. Therefore health care accounts for a large and ever growing percentage of our GDP. At some point that trend is unsustainable. It doesn't matter how we structure the system, our society will simply not be able to afford to pay for the best available health care for everyone. Many of you probably think some form of government administered universal health care is the "answer". That will redistribute the cost, but it doesn't change the cost. Taxes and insurance premiums will need to rise dramatically to cover all the people who are not currently getting the best available treatment. And they will have to continue rising as the state of the art in health care advances.

Another alternative is to ration health care. This is effectively what other countries do with their universal health care systems. I am not familiar with every system, but I have talked to friends who are from Canada and the U.K. What they describe are ever lengthening waiting lists for non-emergency surgery and ever tightening requirements to qualify for expensive treatments. Some very expensive treatments are effectively unavailable in these countries. Even routine services are in short supply. A colleague of mine in the U.K. recently went to his doctor about a knee injury. He was told that he will have to wait months just to get an x-ray!

I know this sounds really depressing. I have thought about this a lot and personally I don't think there are any easy answers. There are some things we can do to help the situation, perhaps, but nothing that will satisfy everybody. I think the politicians are being egregiously deceptive on this topic. The easy sound bites are nothing more than lies. So what to do?

We should definitely try to improve the efficiency of the system, of course. The question is how. One thing I would definitely NOT do is give the government a bigger role. That's the last thing you should do if efficiency is your goal. Among the other proposals I’ve heard recently, tort reform stands out in my mind as one item with the potential for substantially reducing costs. I’m not sure how much interstate competition in health insurance would help, but it can’t hurt.

The most important thing, however, is figuring out how to incentivize the industry to focus more R&D on developing cheaper, as opposed to better, treatments. I’m not sure how you do that, but part of the answer is putting more of a price signal back into the health care market. One way to do that is to make sure everybody pays something for their health care, even if they can’t afford to pay much. Another way is to get rid of fixed co-pays and go back to having patients pay a fixed percentage of the cost. Yes, that would often force some painful, difficult choices. But as a society, that’s exactly what we’re facing. And I would rather make my own difficult choices than cede that role to a faceless bureaucrat.

Faithful Fathers

Yesterday we took our youngest son to college at the University of Texas at Austin. It is quite an operation to receive all the new freshmen and to deposit them and all their stuff in their dorm rooms. I was quite impressed with how well the dorm staff had organized the activity. After checking in you were given a number and waited pleasantly in the cafeteria before it was your time to drive up to the curb to unload all your stuff. Students and staff members helped unload everything, put it on carts and haul it to the student’s assigned room. While everyone waited their turn the cafeteria staff even served complimentary drinks and snacks. I had plenty of time to look around at the other families who were bringing their children to college. One surprising observation struck me. I saw students of every hue and description, but each one was accompanied by an intact family: father and mother, and in many cases siblings as well.

If you are familiar with colleges in Texas, you will no doubt realize that the University of Texas at Austin is the highest ranked and most selective public university in the state. It is no mean feat to be admitted to UT Austin. Around us yesterday were some of the best students in Texas. Knowing the statistics for single-parent households, it was no surprise to see each student accompanied by his or her mother. But I was amazed and gratified to see, in every case, the father there as well.

This can be no accident, I’m sure. All the statistics also point out that an involved father is one of the most important contributors to successful and well adjusted children. Now I’m sure that some of the families I saw yesterday were blended families. But in every one there was still a man who was willing to step up and be a father to the children in his home – whether they were his flesh and blood or not.

We often hear the phrase “faithful husband” but it is just as important to be a faithful father as well. When will the men in our society wake up? When will they accept their God-given responsibility? How long must the social devastation of their selfishness continue? I am proud to be a faithful father to my two sons. If God gives them families of their own I hope they continue that legacy. I pray that they will.

Too Far From the Farm

Several lines of thought lately have led me to contemplate the impact on our society of the decline in rural life. I’m talking about the fact that fewer and fewer people live on a farm anymore, and fewer and fewer city dwellers know anyone who does. This has changed our culture in many ways. But the particular effect that has intrigued me lately is a modern city dweller’s relationship to nature.

Urbanites typically have one of several attitudes toward nature. Some simply want nothing to do with it. The local park is about all of it they’re interested in experiencing, or perhaps the zoo. Otherwise they are happy to live in high rise apartments and work in office buildings and spend their leisure hours in clubs or museums or theatres.

Then there are the outdoor sports enthusiasts. For them, nature is something to conquer, as in climbing a mountain or snowmobiling through Yellowstone National Park. These people sometimes cross paths with another group, the wilderness lovers, but they’re very different in their outlook toward nature. The wilderness lovers worship those remnants of nature untouched by humans. They long for nothing more than to experience such places, but they feel their own presence there is an intrusion – and they resent the presence of the sports enthusiasts, who don’t share their reverence.

None of these has the same perspective on nature as the farmer. He enjoys the outdoors like the sports enthusiast, and he loves nature like the wilderness lover. But his love for it is more intimate and more connected than the others because he is part of it, not an invader or outside observer. The farmer gives his time and labor to the land and receives back from it his livelihood. He participates fully in the natural cycle.

The city dweller is part of this cycle, too, but feels disconnected from it. He drinks water from a river or well he might never have seen. He eats produce that he wouldn’t recognize if he saw it growing in a field. He likes meat but doesn’t like to think about how it got to his table. To the disinterested city dweller nature is a distant memory. To the sports enthusiast it is a playground, and to the wilderness lover it is an icon of lost innocence. But for the farmer nature is a resource. It is also his home.

I was fortunate enough to have grandparents who lived in the country and my favorite thing to do as a child was to visit them. My grandparents grew up in rural East Texas, but when they got married in 1925 they moved to Houston. He became a shop foreman for Hughes Tool making drill bits for the Texas oil fields. She raised their three daughters. When he retired they moved back to the farm she grew up on, and began to practice all the skills they had learned growing up but had long left behind. They planted a garden. It was almost an acre and my grandfather plowed it with a tractor. They raised cattle and pigs and chickens. My grandmother canned the fruits and vegetables they raised. She even tried her hand a few times at churning butter and making lye soap, but it was so much easier to drive into town and go to the grocery store for some things. During the summer weeks I spent with them I got to experience all aspects of rural life.

I think the general lack of such experiences today has some disturbing consequences. For one, we have become squeamish. People don’t like to get their hands dirty. Kids won’t pick up a caterpillar. Parents are embarrassed if their children see one dog mounting another. Many adults decide to become vegetarians.

This last observation is emblematic of the transformation I’m talking about. It is perfectly natural for humans to kill and eat animals. It’s been going on for all of human history. And for almost all that time, if you ate it you probably killed it and cleaned it. Our grandfathers moved to the city and started buying their meat at the butcher’s shop, but they remembered where steaks and fried chicken came from. Their children knew this too, but not having grown up with it weren’t comfortable thinking about it. Their grandchildren are so removed from it some think it is evil and have decided not to eat meat at all.

I remember when I was about ten there was a calf on my grandparent’s farm whose mother for some reason couldn’t suckle it. They bottle-fed it until it could be weaned. My grandmother even named it: Carnation. My sister and I enjoyed feeding and petting Carnation. Then one weekend we went to visit them and Carnation was gone. I remember how my sister reacted when she learned where the steaks we were eating had come from. My grandparents tried to console her, but to no avail.

Attitudes towards guns have undergone a similar transformation. As they became less familiar to people they seemed at first scary, and then later evil. I contrast this again with my own experience. When we used to visit my grandparent’s farm there was always a loaded .22 rifle leaning in the corner of their bedroom. There were other guns, too. They were used for hunting birds or deer, so there was no reason to keep them loaded. The .22 was sometimes used for squirrel hunting, but it was kept loaded and handy to dispatch certain nuisance animals that occasionally made their appearance. Armadillos would dig up the yard and the garden. Raccoons would rip open every ear of corn in an entire row and only eat a few bites. Rattlesnakes were dangerous to people and livestock.

No one gave a thought to the danger of having a loaded rifle there with kids in the house, because we had all been taught to handle guns and shoot from an early age. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to shoot a gun. My grandfather taught each of his grandkids how to shoot that .22 as soon as we were old enough to hold it. I must have been only three or four years old. We would sit on the back porch and shoot at a tin can resting against an old tree stump in the yard. It was absolutely my favorite thing to do. When I was little he would always be sitting right at my elbow. But by the time I was eleven or twelve he would let me shoot it by myself.

Part of the problem with guns in the city today is that kids know only a Hollywood fantasy of them, not the reality of them. Guns are the forbidden fruit that adults tell them never to touch. But that rifle leaning in the corner of the bedroom wasn’t dangerous to anyone because, first of all, we all knew proper gun safety. We had an excellent appreciation for what a gun can do to a person or an animal. Secondly, I knew that if I ever wanted to shoot it all I had to do was ask. It was as familiar to me as my baseball glove. I taught my kids to shoot a pellet gun when they were little because I wanted them to have the same familiarity and healthy respect that I had. I wonder if accidental shootings wouldn’t be rarer if more parents did that.

If you grew up on a farm or knew someone who did, you realize that nature doesn’t have to be kept completely pristine, either. It is a resource without which humanity couldn’t survive. We must care for it and be good stewards of it, but the idea of leaving all of it completely untouched is, literally, suicidal for the human race. Between the extremes of destroying it and not touching it there is plenty of room for developing it and benefiting from it responsibly.

In East Texas we have oil wells. My grandparents weren’t fortunate enough to have one on their property, but many of their neighbors and kin did. Back in the sixties, the oilmen sometimes made a mess when they drilled a well, and they didn’t always clean up after themselves perfectly, either. They’re much better now, of course. But even then the land recovered and nothing was permanently destroyed. All of us as a society have benefited from the oil pumped out of those wells, and the landowners benefited financially as well. It would have been silly to leave it all in the ground.

Growing up in Houston, we have often gone to the beach in Galveston and seen the oil rigs offshore. It never bothered me to see them. It didn’t spoil the experience for me. It was kind of cool, actually. Sometimes tar balls washed up on the beach and that wasn’t pleasant. But again, they’re much more careful about it now, and in any case the benefits to everyone far outweighed the inconvenience to a few. I don’t think most people minded that much. Nobody has to freeze in the dark on our account.

As I reflect on all these things I realize that it is the typical urban attitudes toward nature that are unrealistic and unsustainable, not the attitudes of those who would cultivate it as a resource. Whatever ideals we might hold about nature, the very cities we live in would be impossible without the large scale transformation of the land that farming, ranching, mining and other productive activities entail. And you know what? It’s not all that bad. There is a beauty to a well-tended world as well as to the pristine wilderness. We can have both. It is God’s gift to us. We are not alien to nature; we are part of it. We cannot deny our dependence on it and our inevitable effect on it. Let us both embrace it and harvest from it, without apologies.

Born to Believe

I have mentioned before that belief in God is an almost universal element of human culture. As the pastor of my church has said, we are all born to belief. It takes years of training to become an atheist. When secular scientists note this tendency they remark at how evolution has disposed us to believe such things, and they debate the survival value of such beliefs. But I ask, isn’t it just possible that our first instincts are correct, and that they are instilled by God?

Now a new study has been published which says that humans may be naturally disposed to believe in Creation. More precisely, these psychologists have discovered that everyone has an instinctive tendency to ascribe a sense of purpose to the events around them. They have discovered (surprise!) that it is not normal to believe life is a random chain of natural causes with no purpose, no meaning and no direction. Again, they have found that the most highly educated people are the ones least likely to make this "mistake." Yes, they directly call it a mistake. You can almost hear the condescension dripping from their statements. We who are educated "know" that this is a foolish misconception. Naturally, they lump children, the religious and the uneducated together, noting that they are more inclined to this "erroneous" thinking.

I don't have access to the original paper, but in the New Scientist article I linked to above not once do these scientists speak to the possibility that the inborn belief in purpose might be correct. Nor do they realize when they have stepped outside of their field and are discussing philosophy and theology rather than science. It is a testament to their own indoctrination into a particular worldview that they overlook these things. It is more evidence, if we needed any, that the prevailing intellectual mindset today has completely confused natural science with philosophical materialism, according the latter an unassailable position as "fact" that it does not deserve.

Black Power for Real

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what it must feel like to be an African-American contemplating the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. I think I would be almost giddy. I know at least one friend from church who said she was up partying all night after the election. You might think that I would be dismayed to find Obama supporters of any color at my conservative Southern Baptist church, but I think I understand. Even some black conservatives, knowing that Obama’s politics are well to the left of their own, could not resist the allure of voting for the first black President. I can imagine how they probably felt: How could I live with myself if I let this opportunity pass? How long would I have to wait for a major party to nominate an African-American again? It might not happen again in my lifetime!

As much as I disagree with his politics, Obama’s election is a true testament to the greatness of our democracy. As many have noted, fifty years ago Barack Obama couldn’t even have sat at Woolworth’s lunch counter. I was born in 1956, so I barely remember segregation. I certainly wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Looking back, however, I have a vivid memory of visiting the courthouse downtown and seeing the separate water fountains and bathrooms labeled Colored. It seemed strange but I didn’t understand what it meant. How different my memories would be if I were black!

Just because we have reached this milestone does not mean that racism is a thing of the past. Its power is broken, but it still persists to cause trouble for those whose skin is not the color of the majority. This, too, I have tried to wrap my head around. I think we can be very proud of the progress we have made. But if you are white, think about this. Even if 95% of all white people are not even slightly racist, that would still leave 5% who are. That’s more than enough to be a problem. Sometimes it will be an overt act or comment that reminds you of the prejudice you face. Other times nothing is said, but you wonder what they might be thinking. Such experiences cannot help but affect your frame of mind and must require strength of character to overcome.

The best thing about having an African-American President is the message it sends to young people of every color: You, too, can grow up to be President. Anything is possible in this great country of ours. Every young generation needs hope. This country was founded and built on hope – hope for a better future for ourselves and our children. The engine of our progress is a firm conviction that if you work hard and make the right choices you can succeed. Upward mobility is in our DNA. Belief in the possibility of advancement is how we have avoided the destructive class conflicts of other countries. We believe that All Men Are Created Equal. There it is, right on the first page of the document that began this great nation. We have not always lived up to that ideal, but in every generation we draw closer to it. And that’s something we all can celebrate.

Prayer for Barack Obama

Lord, last night our nation chose a new President: Barack Obama. This morning he woke up to that exhilarating and doubtless sobering reality. I pray that he would turn to you in humility for the wisdom that he will need in the days to come. Give him the energy and determination to execute his duties to the utmost of his abilities. May he govern this nation with great honor and integrity. When temptations come to abuse his power and position, as surely they must to anyone who holds such an office, I pray that he will turn to you for the strength of character to resist. May he seek comfort, wisdom and guidance from your holy Word.

Lord, I pray that President Obama will surround himself with wise counselors and listen carefully to their advice. Help him use his quick mind and deep intellect to find the very best solutions to our nation’s problems. Help him use his great skill as a communicator to bring together Democrats and Republicans alike to make those solutions a reality. I pray that he will be a trustworthy leader, and so earn the trust of all the people.

Lord, how marvelous it is that in our day we have come so far as to see an African-American elected President of the United States! May he govern us so well that never again is skin color even an issue in our politics. May we finally put the last vestiges of racism behind us. We are all your creatures: men and women whom you loved so much that you were willing to die for us on the cross. Teach us all to know you, to love you and to serve you, for your honor and your glory forever.

Amen.

My Take on the Election

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last couple of years it will come as no surprise to you that I’m voting for John McCain for President on Tuesday. I am a conservative, and while I don’t think McCain is the ideal candidate, in my view he is definitely preferable to Barack Obama. In the area of character and patriotism John McCain clearly shines. He has devoted his entire adult life to serving his country with honor and distinction. In contrast, Barack Obama’s past raises many more questions. I do believe that associations matter. You can explain away some things, but the cumulative pattern of Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Tony Rezko, Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said indicate a man who has circulated for years in the radical left fringes of American politics. Although Obama presents himself in this campaign as a left-center moderate, his voting record and his past associations strongly indicate otherwise.

Now let’s look at some specific policy issues.

Economic Recovery
Neither candidate inspires much confidence here. Both seem to have only a tenuous grasp of economic principles. McCain talks about cracking down on Wall Street greed and corruption. Obama talks about the problem being lax regulation. Both are somewhat wide of the mark. The mortgage crisis which spawned the recent market collapse is the result of banks making risky loans to people who shouldn’t have been borrowing. Both parties are culpable – it takes two to tango. So how do you convince people to be prudent in their personal financial decisions? Unfortunately, that’s not something the government can do. Wisdom is learned from parents and churches, not government agencies.

The more peculiar thing about the recent crisis is why anyone in their right mind would loan money to someone who probably can’t pay it back, or buy such a loan from the bank that made it. If normal economic incentives were operating no rational investor would do that. Here is where government intrusion into the market distorted the normal economic incentives that guide business policies. The very existence of quasi-governmental institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac implied some level of government guarantee for these loans. On top of that was misguided social engineering in the form of Congressional pressure to encourage minority home ownership by relaxing lending rules.

I’m not against government ever intervening in the economy. Some rules are clearly necessary, but they should generally focus on promoting honesty, transparency and accountability between the private parties doing business with each other. When government tries to engineer a particular outcome by heavy-handed pressure on the market, the Law of Unintended Consequences virtually guarantees an unpleasant outcome.

Health Care
Again, in my view neither candidate is being realistic about the health care situation in this country. However, I strongly prefer McCain on this topic because I believe Obama’s plan will be ruinously expensive in the long run. I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the government can or should guarantee universal access to health care in this country. Obama’s plan doesn’t go that far, but he envisions more tax credits, more coercive government regulations and generally greater government involvement in health care than today. McCain also proposes a tax credit, but his overall program is directed at greater individual control over health care choices and insurance.

Unfortunately, neither candidate seems to recognize and address the structural issues that are driving health care costs higher. Fundamentally, costs are rising because of the availability of ever more powerful and ever more expensive treatments. It is the advance of technology. If everything your doctor could do for you could still be carried to your house in a little black bag, I guarantee you there would be no crisis in health care costs. It’s the development of new drugs, new diagnostic tests, new medical devices, new surgical techniques and the like that makes health care cost more. An ideal health care policy would focus on harnessing market incentives to drive health care technology toward greater cost efficiency, while not shutting down the technological progress to ever more effective treatments. I don’t know exactly what that policy might look like, but I don’t see it in either candidate’s proposal. McCain comes closer by putting more emphasis on competition.

National Security
Hands down it’s McCain on this one. Obama is naïve about the value of negotiating with evil regimes and about the consequences of a rapid pullout from Iraq. He is far too concerned about what the Europeans think about us instead of what is best for America. McCain is much more knowledgeable about foreign affairs and military strategy. Furthermore, I don’t believe the accusations that McCain is trigger happy. I will rest far sounder at night with McCain as Commander-in-Chief than Obama.

Environment
On environment, both candidates take positions I’m not too happy about. I oppose a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, which both candidates support. The massive reductions in greenhouse gases necessary to have a significant impact on the climate will cost a significant percentage of the world GNP. We must be very, very sure that the benefits outweigh the costs before we undertake a program of the scale that would be necessary. To be effective, any such program will also have to include the rapidly growing economies of developing nations such as China and India. Half measures enacted individually by the developed nations will cost huge amounts of money and will be unlikely to affect the global climate significantly.

Energy
I like McCain on this issue. Of course, everyone’s for increasing domestic energy supplies. These days it’s like being for Mom and apple pie. The question is how you go about it. I believe that the government can and should fund research into a wide variety of alternate energy sources. But it is a mistake to enact subsidies for those energy sources. In the long run it is an unsustainable drag on the economy. McCain understands this and famously opposed ethanol subsidies even while campaigning in Iowa during the primaries. Obama wants to treat alternative energy like a jobs program. McCain is for offshore drilling, but alas not in ANWR. Obama supports some offshore drilling, but he wants to put a lot of restrictions on the oil companies that will not encourage utilization of these resources.

Education
Again, advantage McCain. I really don’t think the Federal government should be directly involved in education at all. Education is fundamentally a parental responsibility. Government policies should encourage local control and parental choice in education.

Social Issues
The headliner here is abortion. Obama could not be more pro-abortion than he is. McCain has been consistently pro-life. As a Christian, I strongly believe in the sanctity of human life, including the life of unborn children, so I favor McCain on this issue.

Conclusion
There are so many other issues I don’t have time to cover, but to me the verdict is clear: John McCain should be the next President of the United States.

The Perfect McCain Platform

Bill Whittle wrote an article for National Review last week summarizing the appeal of McCain and Palin's well received acceptance speeches. I think Whittle is spot on. If McCain and Palin can bottle that stuff the election is theirs. You can take what Whittle wrote and distill it down to a simple campaign strategy for Sen. McCain:

• To those who worry about your age...remind them your mother is 96.
• Use the story of your family's tradition of military service to remind people that some things are more important than politics.
• Remind us that it's a dangerous world out there, and you have the experience and the good judgment to be commander-in-chief.
• Admit that we Republicans lost the confidence of the people because we weren't true to our principles: personal integrity, fiscal responsibility and individual liberty.
• Commit to returning Washington to these principles and remind everyone that you and Gov. Palin have a track record of reform and independent thinking.
• Let Gov. Palin continue to demonstrate that she understands the lives of ordinary Americans because she is one of them.
• Be humble.
• Be hopeful.
• Be patriotic.
• Remind us that we live in the greatest country in the world, prosperous and strong, a defender of freedom and justice, a bulwark against tyranny and oppression.

I don't think the Democrats help their cause by always talking about how terrible things are and how bad the United States is. Most Americans are patriots. We don't like it when the Europeans criticize and belittle and scold us. Obama and Biden need to avoid that Euro-tone of elitist condescension like the plague. McCain and Palin can capitalize on the Democratic tendency by being unabashedly patriotic. "Sure there are some problems and when we're elected we're going to tackle them head on. But this is still the greatest country in the history of the world, and we are proud to be Americans!"

Community Organizers

For a while now I've been wondering what a "community organizer" is. Obama's official bio on his website doesn't explain it very well. I found a long article on Wikipedia, but I was still a bit confused. It seems to be some form of liberal political activism, but I couldn't quite get a good picture in my mind of what it would look like as a day to day activity. Luckily Iowahawk (via Transterrestrial Musings) has come to the rescue. Here, finally, is a detailed list of duties for a community organizer:

• reach out and work with communities in various ways.
• liaison with, and for, community agencies for service within affected areas.
• fight to make a difference.
• raise awareness.
• deal with community issues.
• raise awareness in the community of how we are making differences about undealt-with issues.
• when necessary, refer inquiries to outreach coordinators.
• help coordination agency administrators identify and address outreach opportunities.
• model timetables and conceptualize benchmarks.
• issue guidelines for poster contests and interpretive dance festivals.
• gather voter registrations, win valuable prizes.

Clear now? :-)

Letter to the Candidates

Dear Senator Obama and Senator McCain:

Ok, the conventions are over and the election is finally in sight. I’m listening now. Unlike you, I haven’t been eating, breathing and sleeping this campaign for a year and a half. So if there’s anything you really want me to hear you will probably want to repeat it. Oh, I tuned in briefly six months ago to vote in the primary, but now I’m back. The first time I listened to either of you at length was the Saddleback forum a couple of weeks ago. I also made it a point to hear your acceptance speeches. I’ll be looking at your web sites, and I’ll start reading more news articles about you and your campaigns. One thing I won’t be doing is watching much TV. I hardly ever watch TV. So don’t bother with those expensive TV ads on my account. But then, you aren’t particularly targeting the middle-aged evangelical geek vote, are you? I didn’t think so!

Let me tell you what I care about, anyway. I’m looking for substance. I dislike partisan attacks that misrepresent your opponent. Character and integrity are important. I will scrutinize what you say and do, looking for clues that you are not who you present yourself to be. I will look for things that illuminate your worldview, by which I mean your underlying values and assumptions. I’m interested in your policy proposals, yes, but I’m more interested in your philosophy of government, because that tells me more about what you will say and do in the future.

Please don’t promise things you can’t deliver. Please don’t treat us like children. Please don’t say one thing to one group and another thing to another group. And never, ever lie to us. In four months one of you will be the most powerful man in the world. Show us you deserve it.

Respectfully,
Bill Hensley

Vera Hensley, 1926-2008

Vera and Bill Hensley

Each of us knew Vera Hensley in different ways: mother, sister, aunt, friend, neighbor, long-time church member. Some of us knew her very well indeed, while others were only acquaintances. But everyone who met her was quick to realize what a special person she was. Many of you have shared your personal recollections about her with my sister Betty and me. Your kind words about her have filled our hearts with pride. You have told us that Vera Hensley was gracious, elegant, beautiful, kind, intelligent and compassionate. She had a fine appreciation for beauty, which was expressed in her love of antiques, painting, flower arranging, and home decorating. Not to mention her tasteful and elegant wardrobe!

Yes, Vera Hensley was a fine person who was widely admired. But to Betty and me she was so much more. She was our Mom. She brought us into this world through the pains of childbirth, and for her trouble spent the next twenty years or so bathing us, feeding us, clothing us, disciplining us, teaching us, encouraging us, nagging us, and carting us around to school, church, doctors, stores, swimming pools, summer camps and even job interviews. Yes, I did say “nagging”. We needed quite a bit of it and she was up to the task. Mom definitely bore the brunt of the parenting load. Dad’s job at NASA required that he travel a great deal, and he often worked late into the night even when he was in town. (They were sending rockets to the Moon, after all!) And through it all she never complained.

After twenty-something years we may have gotten married and moved out, but Mom never stopped mothering. That’s just what mothers do. I warn my sons about it now. I tell them, “Once a mother, always a mother. Don’t think that just because you grow up and move out your mother stops being your mother!” My Mom epitomized that saying. When I was well into my forties she was still telling me when she thought I needed a haircut. And she never did give up asking me to shave my beard.

Mom was more organized than anyone else I know, and she was a doer! She kept a mental to-do list at all times and she could never rest until every item had been checked off. She used to get her Christmas shopping done by September. She was half an hour early to her appointments. Her house was immaculate. Dinner was at 5:30 p.m. sharp every day.

I’ve always said Mom was a woman ahead of her time. She was very intelligent and had a head for business. If she’d been born a generation later she might have been the CEO of a major corporation. Instead, she went to Massey Business College after high school. She took bookkeeping classes and learned how to use the latest business machines (which at the time were mechanical adding machines and the like). She got a job at the Rupley Brake Company as a bookkeeping assistant where she met my Dad, who was working for his uncle Bob Rupley. It took him quite some time to convince her to marry him, but once they were married she quit her job and dutifully fulfilled the role of full time wife and mother to the best of her ability. Nevertheless, when Mom and Dad later invested in some real estate, Mom was a full partner with Dad in handling their rental properties. When Betty and I were older she was able to get her real estate license, too.

She applied herself with the same energy to her hobbies. Whether it was gardening, painting, flower arranging or antiquing, she took courses, bought books and studied to make herself an expert. She could recognize the different styles and periods in furniture, crystal, glassware and silver. She could turn over a piece and by recognizing the manufacturer’s mark tell you immediately where it was made, when and by whom. She had a fine eye for aesthetics and our home was always beautifully decorated.

Jesus said, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” Mom defined herself in terms of her service to others. She was a devoted mother, wife, daughter and friend. For most of the years we were growing up she was the primary caregiver for my paternal grandfather, who had Alzheimer’s. At first she would go over to his house in West University several times a week. Later he lived with us for a while. When he finally moved to a nursing home she went there every day to see that he was well cared for. If he needed to go to a doctor Mom took him. If he wandered off from the nursing home it was Mom they called. This went on all the way through my college years. Granddaddy’s funeral was on the same day as my college graduation.

By this time she was devoting more time to helping her own parents. With the help of her sisters, she handled their finances, their shopping, their doctor visits and their household affairs. Once again, she was spending many hours a week driving across town to their house attending to their needs. In the course of time each of them also needed nursing home care, and Mom faithfully oversaw the care they received. I don’t think she expected any special recognition for her efforts. To her, this is just what children do for their parents. She couldn’t imagine not being there for them in their time of need. Mom was truly servant-hearted.

When our time came to help Mom over the past several years, Betty and I had a very high standard to live up to. I’m sure we were not as devoted and attentive as she would have been. But she never ceased to be grateful for the help we gave her. She was always gracious, reluctant to impose, and never demanding.

As the visits to internists, cardiologists and neurologists multiplied, Mom never lost her sense of humor. She loved to repeat the joke that my uncle Eddie Youngblood used to tell. He would say, “I need to find a new doctor. This fellow I’m going to now doesn’t even know who the President of the United States is!” In the last several years, Mom saw many doctors who asked her to name the President of the United States. As many little strokes slowly took their toll on her memory and reasoning, she worked hard to compensate. Always an organized person, she redoubled her efforts to maintain a detailed calendar and write extensive notes. When she visited the neurologists they were often surprised at how sharp she seemed to be. She could tell them the date of her last check-up, the names and doses of all her medications, and when the last change had been made to the dosage. We had to assure them that she really was having memory troubles. Mom would compensate by keeping three ring binders full of notes, prescriptions, lab results and drug brochures. She studied her notes for hours and hours before each doctor visit, like she was cramming for a test.

It was difficult for us to watch as Mom’s health problems accumulated over the past few years. Knowing she had always been so sharp and on top of things, it was painful to see her struggling to compensate for her impairment. Eventually, all her compensation strategies began to fail her. For one who had always been in control of every situation, she was frustrated to find herself slipping so badly. The stroke that finally took her life was even more devastating, leaving her for over two weeks unable to move or speak. But God has a purpose in every difficulty he allows into our lives. He molds and shapes us into the person he wants us to be. You see, Mom was a Christian. I’ve described Mom as gracious, kind, compassionate and servant-hearted, which is true. But under all those qualities lay her faith in Christ.

Mom understood at an early age that we are all sinners in need of the salvation that only Christ can offer us through his death on the cross. She accepted Christ as her Savior at age seven, was baptized and attended Broadway Baptist Church until she got married. Later she and Dad joined the Presbyterian Church. When we moved to this area in the early sixties we joined St. John’s, and this is where Betty and I were raised. Even though Mom couldn’t get out much in recent years, this continued to be her church home for the rest of her life. Yet what counts is not the longevity of our church membership, it is the quality of our relationship with God. I saw Mom seek God all the years I knew her, and I saw her continue to grow spiritually to the very end of her life.

The Bible says that if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. Indeed, there is a transformation that occurs in our hearts the moment we are reborn, but the process of being conformed to his image takes a lifetime. The last Sunday of her life Mom and I listened to a sermon on TV from South Main Baptist Church. I don’t know if she could actually hear what was said, but it was the perfect message for that time and place. The text of the sermon was Philippians 1:6. “...being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” I am deeply gratified to report to you that God, as he promised in his Word, completed his work in Mom’s life.

Mom was not the sort of person who could see a task that needed doing and then sit by doing nothing. She felt as though she carried the burden of success in every situation, and so she drove herself as hard as she could. In the Bible story of Mary and Martha, Mom came down on the side of Martha. You can imagine how frustrated she was as she began to be slowed down by her impairments. This woman who had been so strong for everyone around her for so long now found herself increasingly dependent on others. Unaccustomed to being the one served rather than the servant, she learned to let God be in control of her life.

I cannot count how many times Mom told Betty and me in the past two or three years, “I just pray that I can fulfill all God’s purposes for my life. I am ready to go home whenever he calls me, but I just want to do God’s will.” She could not understand why God kept her here on Earth, but he used these years to finish the work in her that he began. Galatians 5:22-23 says, “...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” For Mom, the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place was patience.

Many have endured far worse trials than what Mom endured in her last few years. Yet I would not wish her troubles on anyone. What redeems them is the way God used them. Like the sculptor who chips away every flake of marble that is not part of the emerging masterpiece, God chips away all our flaws and rough edges, if only we let him. He uses each hardship for our benefit and his glory. Mom’s life is a testament to his saving grace and transforming power.

As wonderful as that is, it gets even better. For all who put their faith in Christ, this life on Earth is just a passing moment compared to the glorious life to come. Because Jesus died and rose again, the power and sting of death are broken. At this very moment Mom is standing in the presence of God, rejoicing with all the host of heaven. That is why, even though I love her dearly and miss her very much, I can still rejoice. I would like to close with a passage from Second Corinthians which has sustained us in the past few weeks.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

This service is titled, “A Service of Witness to the Resurrection.” I stand here in witness to that truth. For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And so will she. And so shall I, and all who are in Christ. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

Panspermia Expelled

If you saw the movie Expelled you will remember that Ben Stein had some fun at Richard Dawkins’ expense when Dawkins brought up the theory of panspermia. Stein took him to mean that aliens might be responsible for the origin of life on Earth and played it for a laugh. The theater audience at the screening I attended obligingly snickered and poked each other in the ribs. But panspermia is a serious scientific theory, although it has the misfortune to carry a name which evokes middle school giggles. I would suggest that if you don’t want people to giggle at your theories (e.g., intelligent design) then it is bad form to giggle at their theories. The irony is that advocates of panspermia, while admittedly few, are actually allies of a sort with creationists and others who doubt the plausibility of traditional evolutionary theories. This is one reason why panspermia is often greeted with derision by mainstream scientists. To admit this theory has any reason to exist is to admit there are doubts about evolution as normally understood. So let us examine briefly what panspermia is all about.

First let’s review a little background on the theory of evolution. It is important to realize that evolution is not actually a theory about the origin of life but the origin of species. It states that natural selection operating on random genetic variation will produce, over time, new species better adapted to their environment than previously existing species. This process requires self-replicating organisms on which to operate, so it cannot explain how life began. You need another theory for that. The first organisms would have been much simpler than current life forms. Exactly how simple is a matter of some debate, but they couldn’t be too simple because they would need some sort of genetic code and the ability to both replicate and mutate.

Since no one knows how simple a self-replicating organism can be, no one knows how long you might have to wait for one to form by spontaneous chemical reactions in the presumed primordial soup. And no one knows how many mutations would be required for it to evolve into the simplest single-celled creatures we observe today. Therefore, no one knows the time required for such a chain of events to occur by random processes. It seems undeniable, however, that it would take a very, very long time. It is therefore convenient that modern scientists believe the Earth is very ancient indeed – about 4.5 billion years old. Of course, if you believe in a young Earth based on Genesis there’s no time for anything but a miracle. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept the old Earth chronology since we are seeking to understand competing naturalistic theories of origin.

Geologists have discovered fossilized cyanobacteria in rocks which they estimate are 3.5 billion years old. This gives a window of about a billion years for the origin of life. However, it is thought that due to heavy meteor bombardment in the early years the Earth might not have been habitable until about 3.9 billion years ago. The very oldest sedimentary rocks also contain some chemical evidence of photosynthetic life forms existing about 3.8 billion years ago. This narrows the window considerably, to as little as 100 million years. That’s still a very, very long time, but it seems uncomfortably short when you contemplate how many improbable steps might be required to produce cyanobacteria. These bacteria are the simplest life forms in existence today, but they are still exceedingly complicated.

There are three possible responses to such a short window. You can either 1) take it as evidence that life spontaneously develops quickly and easily given the right conditions, 2) assume we got really, really lucky, or 3) start casting about for another theory. Most mainstream scientists accept some form of 1) or 2). Advocates of panspermia take the third position. They ask, “What if life originated elsewhere in the universe and was seeded here on Earth?” These scientists still believe in a naturalistic origin of life occurring somewhere in the universe. They just think the odds are low it happened here in only 100 million years. The universe is estimated to be about 13 billion years old. If life originated elsewhere then the window opens back up to almost 10 billion years. This hypothesis bolsters the plausibility of natural origins in two ways. First, it considerably increases the time available for life to originate, because there are presumably many solar systems in the universe which are billions of years older than ours. Second, it means that life only needed to develop on one planet out of millions or billions. Then it could spread to all the others.

Contrary to Ben Stein’s humorous questions, panspermia doesn’t imply intelligent aliens arriving in flying saucers to farm the ancient Earth. Rather, it hypothesizes that some forms of microscopic life were hardy enough to hitch a ride on meteors and cosmic dust. They survived for many millions of years before falling by chance to the Earth and finding here a hospitable environment in which to reproduce. This strikes most scientists as very far-fetched, but not quite as far-fetched as you might think. There is evidence that dormant bacteria and spores can survive incredibly harsh conditions for thousands of years. There is also evidence that rocks blasted from the surface of Mars and the Moon by meteor strikes have landed on the Earth as meteorites. However, it seems much less likely such material would wind up on Earth from a distant solar system, or that even a hardy spore could survive such a long trip. The times and distances are a million times greater.

So in the competition between origin theories, scientists have to decide whether it is more plausible that life originated and evolved on Earth in 100 million years, or that organisms traveled interstellar distances and survived millions of years. Most hold the former position. You can see now why panspermia proponents are in a strange way allies with creationists. They do repudiate the divine origin of life, but they also challenge the plausibility of the traditional evolutionary timeline, and on the latter point I am in complete agreement. At the present state of knowledge it is impossible to put evolution on a quantitative basis. A very large, unknown sequence of improbable events had to occur to produce complex life forms. Proponents of evolution are reduced to little more than hand waving when it comes to justifying the assumption that all these unknown events could reasonably have occurred by chance in the time available, or even in 10 billion years on one in a billion planets.

In the face of such uncertainty we must fall back on our presuppositions. If you are philosophically convinced that life must have naturalistic origins you say to yourself, “Gee, I don’t know the mechanism and I can’t calculate the probability, but it must have happened or we wouldn’t be here, right?” On the other hand if you are a Christian like me you have another alternative. I believe that God created life and created us. I’m not sure exactly how he did it but I know he wasn’t limited to naturalistic processes. So I can look at the postulated sequence of improbable events and comfortably conclude it is more plausible to believe in miracles.

[Update - July 4, 2008] This recent article reports the discovery of chemical evidence for life on earth as early as 4.25 billion years ago. Mineralogists have discovered ancient rocks in Australia which contain an anomalously high ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13, normally considered an indicator of organic matter. If true (and it's really only suggestive) this puts an even greater squeeze on the time available for life to have evolved on Earth.

Expelled

We went to see the movie Expelled this weekend. I enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Sometimes this sort of thing is too polemical for my taste, even though I might agree with the premise. I had read several reviews from the evolutionist perspective that were complaining about several aspects of the film. For one thing, some of the evolutionists who were interviewed in the film complained that the nature of the project was misrepresented and that they were quoted out of context. Well, I don’t know whether they were lied to or not, but perhaps if they had understood that this movie was going to be strongly pro-Intelligent Design they might have declined. On the other hand, from what I have read of their positions I don’t think their views were distorted at all or taken out of context. I can see they might be mad because interviewer Ben Stein sometimes tried to make them look a bit foolish, but nowhere near as bad as what you see every week on 60 Minutes.

Another complaint I read was about interspersing the interviews with old film clips. I was prepared to cringe at this, but I discovered that mostly it was done for humorous effect and so was not as annoying as I expected. The one exception was Stein’s use of the debating H-bomb: comparing your opponent to Hitler. The reviewers complained that being an evolutionist doesn’t make you a Nazi. And while that’s true, it is also true that evolution was the inspiration for the eugenics movement, which Hitler followed to its chillingly logical conclusion. Stein’s tour of the Nazi death camps and his interview with the curator at Hadamar were sobering. While the evolutionists are right to point out that the eugenics movement does not logically constitute a disproof of evolution, it is nevertheless a testament to the evil influence a bad idea can have.

I had also read a complaint that the film never even defines the terms evolution and intelligent design, much less musters any evidence for or against them. Actually, in the course of the film a pretty good one sentence definition of each term is given, but they are correct that no evidence is offered. However, that wasn’t the point of the movie. It specifically attempts to show that anyone who speaks favorably of intelligent design in the sciences is systematically denied tenure or even employment. Now you can debate the particulars of each case, but I doubt that evolutionists really want to be defending the right of intelligent design supporters to be tenured science professors. I’m fully prepared to believe that making statements in favor of intelligent design will engender a strong prejudice from most tenure committees. How could it not? They have defined intelligent design as “non-science” - or maybe “nonsense.” Why not let them study it? Why not let them try to get papers published about it? It rings hollow to complain there’s no peer-reviewed literature on it and then fire anybody who tries.

There is one event surrounding the release of this movie which was very poorly handled. One of the scientists interviewed in the movie, PZ Meyers, was not allowed to attend a pre-release screening of the movie. I don’t think it matters whether he was invited or not, or whether it was supposed to be a private screening or not. This was a really rude and stupid thing to do. Throwing him and his family out of the theater was against the very point of the documentary, not to mention lacking in Christian hospitality. Predictably, the evolutionist blogs have been having a field day with this event. I hope that somebody connected with the film will try to contact Dr. Meyers and apologize. It won’t undo the public relations fallout, but it’s the right thing to do.

I doubt this movie will contribute much in the long run to resolving the debate over intelligent design. It probably has about as much chance of changing the minds of university faculties as a Michael Moore film has of turning Republicans into Democrats. This is not a debate between theories, but a debate between worldviews. Such issues do not get resolved by scientific evidence.

Light into Darkness

Today is a special day for me. Of course it is Good Friday, which is special because on this day we commemorate Christ’s death for us on the cross. But for me, personally, March 21 is special for a different reason. This is the day when I remember God’s amazing grace that he showed in rescuing me, a scoffer and a blasphemer, from the path of destruction. This is the day when I was born again.

I was fourteen, which might seem a tender age to be considered a scoffer and a blasphemer. What can I say? In this respect I was quite precocious. I had always been interested in science. From the time I learned to read I devoured every science book and magazine I could get my hands on. I watched science TV shows, and whenever I had the chance went to science museums. When I attained the age of reason, which for me was about age twelve, I began to question the Christian upbringing my parents had given me. At that age, in seventh grade, I also came under the influence of a young and energetic science teacher. In my sheltered Bible Belt childhood, he was the first adult I ever met who freely admitted he didn’t believe in God.

Under these influences I decided I didn’t believe in God either. I became an agnostic. I wasn’t actually willing to state that God did not exist; I simply believed that it was impossible to know whether or not he exists. I had decided that I would only believe what could be scientifically proven. It seemed to me that if God exists he is by definition supernatural, so it is impossible by natural means to discover any evidence of his existence. You can’t see him. He doesn’t register on any scientific instruments. His existence is effectively undiscoverable. And though I didn’t say it explicitly, by implication his existence is irrelevant. What I did say, explicitly, is that anyone who does believe in God is a fool or an idiot.

My parents still made me go to church and Sunday School, although I argued with them about it. I also argued with my Sunday School teachers. Later, while sitting in the church service, I would occupy myself by looking around scornfully at all the foolish, and hypocritical, people around me in the pews. You probably have a pretty good picture by now that besides being an agnostic I was also an arrogant little twerp. It was a wonder I had any friends at all, but I travelled in a circle of friends who thought and acted just about the same way I did.

In ninth grade I had two godly women as Sunday School teachers. I was very rude to them. I told them I wouldn't believe in God without hard evidence. I ridiculed their faith, but they were very patient and loving. Their heart's desire was to lead each of us into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. One week they invited the class to attend a youth evangelistic service at another church. I only went because a couple of cute girls in the class asked me to.

At the service I saw hundreds of teenagers excited about Christ. The speaker presented the Gospel in a clear and moving way. He kept saying to give God a chance. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I despised hypocrites. So I quietly prayed, “God if you’re real, show me.” At that moment I felt an incredible rush of joy and ecstasy flow through my body. I was amazed. I realized that God had answered my prayer. Yet I began immediately to rationalize what had happened. I must be doing that to myself, I thought. It must be some sort of subconscious wish fulfillment. But the experience was so real and so obviously from outside of me that I could not easily dismiss it. So I prayed the same prayer again and it happened a second time – less intense, but accompanied by an absolute conviction that God is real, that everything the preacher had said about Jesus was true, and that my whole life had just changed. I was thunderstruck. I knew immediately that the foundations of my worldview had been overturned, not leaving a single stone on top of another. It was Sunday, March 21, 1971 at about 8:00 pm.

Tonight I remember that moment thirty-seven years ago, when the boundless grace of God miraculously rescued another miserable sinner, whom he loved even when I was unlovable.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:6-8 NIV)

The Real Problem in Education

The real problem with public schools is not poor funding. It’s not obstructive teachers unions. It’s not an overemphasis on standardized testing. It’s not a lack of innovative programs. Helpful changes could be made in all these areas, but we would just be dancing around the edges. The real problem in education is the social chaos created by two generations of disintegrating families, entitlement attitudes, failed discipline and misguided attempts to use public schools for social engineering. The failings of our schools reflect deep dysfunction in our society.

My wife began teaching in public schools over 25 years ago. She has taught at both the middle school and high school levels. The district she taught in for most of that time transitioned from a middle class suburban community to a poor, high-crime, heavily minority community. Gangs, drugs and teen pregnancy are significant problems, even among seventh and eighth graders.

Teaching in this environment is not for the faint of heart. Mustering the optimism, the energy and the courage to face the daily challenge for the 4000th time requires more dedication and fortitude than the average person possesses. It is, as Samuel Johnson once said about remarriage, “the triumph of hope over experience.” It’s true that many burned out teachers stay a few more years just to finish out the years of service needed for retirement. But most are still committed to doing what they can to make a difference. They press on, hoping to make an emotional connection with another hurting student, buoyed by the spark of learning in the eyes of the ones who rise above their environment.

The deck is stacked against success. Easily a third of classroom time, sometimes more than half, is devoted to dealing with discipline problems. It’s no wonder the school districts keep trying to add extra class time for remedial work on the basics like reading. But they’re trying to fill a leaky bucket because every year sees fewer classroom minutes spent on instruction.

What kind of discipline problems? Students put their heads down on their desks and sleep. Students get up out of their seats and wander around the room to talk to their friends. Students cheat on tests, vandalize books and equipment, steal supplies, get in fist fights, shout at the teacher and make threats. Most of the troublemakers have no interest in learning and they make sure no one else can, either. They are failing all their classes but they simply don’t care so they don’t try. They are angry, disillusioned and hurting. Sometimes an empathetic teacher can make a connection, but most of the time they can’t.

How did we get into this mess? First and foremost is the disintegration of the family. Most of these students either have no father in the home, or they have a stepfather with whom they have a strained relationship. This affects boys and girls in different ways. The moms lament that they can’t control their sons. Many of the boys join gangs. The girls are often sexually promiscuous. They want to have a baby as soon as possible because they feel that’s what makes you a real woman. In this they have their own mothers as role models.

Today’s students are now the grandchildren of the boomers. They are the third generation of those who made rebellion against authority their defining issue. Parents no longer support the schools on discipline issues. It never occurs to them that their child might be lying or might actually be in the wrong. They leap to their child’s defense and the children learn to have an adversarial attitude toward teachers and administrators. The schools, for their part, are afraid of being sued. They abandoned corporal punishment long ago and will even back down on something as simple as issuing detention if the parent complains.

Overwhelmed administrators dictate elaborate discipline processes teachers must follow before they can send a disruptive student to the principal’s office. Instead of getting the source of disruption out of the classroom as soon as possible so instruction can resume, teachers are giving repeated warnings, documenting misbehavior in writing, taking students aside for verbal correction and phoning their parents, all while the rest of the class waits.

In the name of inclusiveness schools try to “mainstream” special education students as much as possible rather than segregating them in special classes. While this is a laudable goal, when those students are disruptive it is not fair to the other students. Many students are designated special ed not because of learning disabilities but because of behavior problems. Every year my wife sees more special ed students in her classroom. She has had classes in which as many as a third of the students were in this category. When the number of special ed students is high enough a teacher’s aide is supposed to be assigned to the classroom, but due to resource limitations this does not always happen.

The cult of self esteem is so strong in our society that we have raised our children to expect they will always be successful, whether they try their best or not. Students are unwilling to work hard, and they feel victimized if the result is a low grade. They feel victimized if their misbehavior results in negative consequences, like being disqualified to play sports. Instead of understanding that they are being held accountable for their behavior, they imagine that their teachers are “out to get them.”

I don’t know how to solve all these problems. They reflect deeper societal problems that go beyond anything under the control of the schools. What the schools should do, I submit, is focus on educating the educatable. We need to recover the idea that a free public education is a privilege and not a right. We need to clearly articulate to students and their parents what the rules and expectations are for those who want to take advantage of this privilege. Students who cannot sit in a classroom without being disruptive need therapy more than they need instruction. School isn’t going to do them any good until they are sufficiently in control of themselves to listen and learn.

As individuals, we must teach our children the importance of marriage, the need to respect authority and the value of hard work. There is nothing new in that. But too many of us have lost sight of these core values. We thought there might be a shortcut, but it turns out we were wrong.

It’s not enough just to get our own houses in order, either. As Christians we need to be reaching out to the hurting people in our communities. We need to be coming alongside single parents whose kids need positive role models. We need to help families who struggle to feed and clothe their children. We shouldn’t expect the government to step in with billions of dollars and solve all of society’s problems. The biggest problems aren’t solved with money. They are matters of the heart.

Lessons from Lost

I hope you literary types don’t laugh at this post. I was a junior in college before I took a literature class that made sense to me. I think people who like to read novels and look for deep meaning and symbolism just have a completely different way of thinking than engineers do. You pretty much need to spell it out for us, and nobody ever did till that professor I had in my junior year. We engineers are kind of dense in that way, I suppose.

Anyway, I had a profound insight watching Lost last week. (Ok, I am definitely starting to hear some snickering now. Please bear with me.) Like about a hundred million other people I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to figure out what the heck is going on in that show. How can you explain all the weird things that happen on that island, and what is the smoke monster? Maybe there are aliens with advanced technology on the island. Maybe the place is haunted. Maybe the island itself is sentient. How can you decide? The interesting thing is that each of those answers is plausible within a different worldview. If you are a techno-geek who doesn’t believe in the supernatural you might go for the alien technology explanation. If you are superstitious you might believe it’s haunted. If you are a new age Gaia type you might decide the island itself is alive.

When thinking about Lost I realized a long time ago that to guess the right answer you have to guess the writers’ worldview. Or at least you have to guess what type of reality they decided to portray in their fictional world. I’ve been leaning toward the sentient island hypothesis for quite a while, and one big reason is that a lot of Hollywood seems to be pretty taken with new age thinking. So this would be the most “plausible” or satisfying explanation from their perspective.

Then last week we saw the character Miles do some sort of ghost-busting séance thing with the murdered kid and then with Naomi’s body. This was presented totally straight, as though we are expected to believe that people can really do such things. It was jarring to me. For one thing, I don’t believe that’s possible. For another, it didn’t jibe with my guess about the writers’ worldview. And that got me thinking. Actually, all of the explanations I mentioned above belong to worldviews I don’t share. I’m so used to that I don’t even notice. There are almost zero movies and TV shows that present a reality consistent with the Christian worldview. Why is that?

As I reflected on that, I started thinking about my ninth grade English class. No kidding. I wrote a short story that year which contained a pretty explicit moral. It was about the survivors of a plane crash in the remote jungles of Guatemala. (I shall await my royalty check from J.J. Abrams.) In my story, the characters who decided to “trust God” and wait to be found were rescued. The ones who took matters into their own hands and tried to hike out were never found. My English teacher took me aside and explained that whenever one dealt with religion in literature, it is important to not be too explicit or heavy-handed. In real literature the ending has to be ambiguous enough to support an alternate, nonreligious explanation. Otherwise it is a “mere religious tract”, which is how he described my short story. He reminded me of a novel we had read that year, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, the ending of which was admirably ambiguous. I recall we also read Barabbas by Par Lägerkvist, at the end of which the title character might or might not have been redeemed.

My teacher meant well and I took his criticism to heart, resolving not to be a “mere tract writer” again. But why, exactly, was what I did wrong? Just who gets to decide what worldview is appropriate for serious literature? The question is whether the audience is willing to enter into the reality that the author creates. In the case of a Christian reality, the answer is that the self-appointed guardians of serious literature are not willing to enter in. That’s a pity when almost every other sort of worldview is accepted without a whimper. I think if I ever write a short story again, I will not worry about it being a “mere religious tract.”

Intelligent Design

I watched the Nova special on PBS last night. It was very interesting and helped me understand the Dover School Board case better than I had understood it from the news coverage of the time. It does seem fairly clear that some members of the school board were looking to balance the teaching of evolution with mention of some more faith-friendly alternative. As explained in the show, judicial precedent has determined such an intention to be unconstitutional. I don’t agree with that interpretation of the Constitution, but I’m not on the Supreme Court, am I? (Many of you are breathing a huge sigh of relief, no doubt.) That’s a topic for another post, perhaps. What I would like to do today is return to the issue of how we define science and look at where Intelligent Design might fit into that picture.

In an earlier post I wrote that science has not always been defined to exclude God as it generally is today. Modern science is about 500 years old. It was not until about 200 years ago, around the beginning of the 19th century, that a number of practitioners began to see it as a purely and essentially secular pursuit. That point of view did not completely prevail until near the end of the 19th century. Earlier scientists such as Newton saw themselves as explicating the wonders of God’s Creation. They saw the regularities in nature as reflecting the logical mind of God. In this view there is still plenty of room for the possibility that God might sometimes perform miracles that are outside the normal flow of natural events.

As I explained in a later post, the new idea that invaded science a couple of centuries ago is materialism, the philosophical belief that the supernatural does not exist. Nature is all there is, so all natural phenomena have a purely natural explanation. There are no miracles because there are no supernatural agents to cause them. It is sometimes granted that this idea is provisional: we proceed as if there were no miracles in order to avoid stopping too soon in our search for natural explanations. In this form the idea is termed methodological materialism and is even accepted by many Christians in the field of science. Judge Jones incorporated this principle explicitly in his Dover decision, citing testimony from Dr. Kenneth Miller (a Christian and an evolutionist).

My concern is with the possibility that we have erred in the other direction. We surely would like to avoid stopping too soon in our search for natural explanations, but how will we determine if we have gone too far? The problem is that philosophical materialism is not science any more than Christianity is. From the perspective of science it is simply a presupposition which informs how we conduct our science. If our presuppositions are wrong our conclusions may be, as well.

Let us consider what would happen if a modern scientist were seeking a scientific explanation for a phenomenon that was actually a miraculous act of God. There may be a number of potential explanations for the phenomenon, both natural and supernatural, but in this case the correct explanation is supernatural. The scientist who rigorously follows the dictates of methodological materialism will select the best explanation from among the potential natural explanations. It may be a poor fit to the data but it is better than the other natural explanations. There is no mechanism for science conducted in this way to recognize when it has made such a mistake. In practice, then, there is no important difference between the supposedly provisional assumption of methodological materialism and true philosophical materialism, i.e., the extra-scientific precommitment to the nonexistence of the supernatural.

I want to suggest that Intelligent Design theory might be at least a partial answer to this problem. I’m not talking about ID as a stalking horse for Biblical creation. I’m talking about the appealing idea that there may be some characteristics of the actions of intelligent agents which allow us to distinguish them from purely natural phenomena. From the criticisms I have read it seems that ID theory may not yet be formulated with sufficient rigor to be useful in practice for this purpose. I would like to suggest that instead of shouting the ID folks out of the room with cries of “That’s not science!” we let them attempt to work through the details and see if it can yield useful insights.

I see the bottom line as the need for a measure of humility in our scientific pursuit of knowledge. Are we willing to acknowledge there might be some limits to the knowledge that can be gained from science? We want to avoid stopping too soon in our search for natural explanations of the world around us, but this desire does not in itself justify the assertion that everything in fact has a natural explanation. If it is possible that God exists and that he is a worker of miracles, then it is possible that some events have no scientific explanation in the normal sense of the word. An open minded person must admit no less.

The Scandal of Grace

If you could sum up the very core of Christianity in one word, it would be grace. Grace is what sets Christianity apart from any other belief system. It has been the central theme of the Christian message for the past 2000 years. Grace is good news. It is the Good News. It defines who we are as Christians.

Surprised?

It’s a sad fact that we Christians haven’t done a very good job lately of communicating grace to the world around us. That’s actually a huge understatement. Let’s be blunt: collectively Christians in this country have done a terrible job of communicating grace to our fellow citizens.

What is grace? Grace is showering blessings on those who don’t deserve them. Grace is a kind word to those who speak harshly. Grace is giving to those who don’t give back. Grace is forgiving without waiting for an apology. Grace is caring more for another person’s needs than for your own.

Why is grace the one word that defines Christianity, that sets it apart from every other religion? Because Christianity began with the greatest act of grace that can ever be conceived: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Christianity has always been a good news/bad news story. The bad news is that nothing you can ever do will make up for the sins you have committed. There is no way you can make yourself good enough to be acceptable to God. The good news is that no matter what you have done or how bad you have been, God has provided a way for you to be forgiven. Jesus took the punishment you deserve so that you can have peace with God. And that’s Grace – with a capital G.

Somehow we haven’t gotten the message across. I have rarely met a non-Christian who understands this aspect of Christianity. Somehow what people hear is, “You are a bad person because you do lots of bad things. You better straighten up or God will send you to hell. We Christians are better than you so God is going to let us go to heaven.”

What a horrible distortion of the Gospel! How can we have been so misunderstood? I know this is not the message that is preached from the pulpits of America every Sunday. A Christian is not someone who is better than everyone else. Christians are simply people who have realized what terrible sinners they are and have accepted God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

Alas, I think I know one reason our message has been so misunderstood. Over the past few decades we have become defined in the national consciousness primarily by what we disapprove of. As the nation has moved away from a Christian moral consensus, Christian groups have risen in protest. We protest abortion. We protest gay rights. We protest handing out birth control pills to middle schoolers. We protest Harry Potter. Before you know it everyone thinks of Christians as people who spend their lives following a long list of rules. But we aren’t content with that. We want everybody else to follow those rules, too. We have become the national nags.

My Christian friends will ask, “Is that wrong? Isn’t it important that we take a stand for what’s right?” I’m not sure I know the answer. As citizens of a democracy we have a right for our voices to be heard. And we have an obligation to protect the young and innocent in our society, born and unborn. But by focusing on the behavior of others instead of the condition of their hearts we have sent the wrong message. We seem to be saying that the most important thing is following the rules. But we know that’s not true, because just trying to follow the rules didn’t save us and it will never save anyone else, either.

Theologians talk about the “scandal of grace.” From the earliest days of Christianity people were afraid that God’s grace might be misunderstood. When people find out that salvation is by faith in Christ alone, and not by living a holy life, they may be tempted to give lip service to God and keep right on sinning. That’s certainly possible. The Gospel might indeed be misunderstood as giving license to sinful living. But the greater danger today is that people will never hear about God’s grace at all. This is the true scandal of grace in our generation.

If you are not a Christian, please hear this from me today: God loves you, right now, regardless of what you’ve done or what you’re doing. Maybe there are some things you think are good and he thinks are bad, but there’s time later to work that out. You know deep in your heart you’re not the person you ought to be. God knows that, too, but he still loves you. He wants to cleanse your heart and make peace with you. There’s no price for you to pay because Jesus has already paid it by dying for you on the cross. Now God is waiting for you with open arms.