We are facing two opposing models of Epistemology. This matters. More than one knows. The question is if all is relative, or if there are truths. If all is relative, and all subjective, then one can believe what one wants: one has then got to deal not as much with a problem of pain (that is just random chance) or a problem of pain (that assumes there is a just and caring God) but a problem of order.
The standard way to deal with the problem of order is to pervert that poor Biologist Charles Darwin. He was trying to understand the issue of speciation: of variety, and proposed a theory of what we would now call micro-evolution. But he did not make a philosophy of this: he did not think might made right. But modern teachers fall right into that trap.
Shermer’s view of morality is “what is best for the greatest number of people”. That view does away with inalienable human rights because inalienable human rights can be easily dismissed if they go against the desires of the majority. Shermer has no objection to anything that the majority has decided in any time or in any place. If he were there, he would agree that whatever they decided was morally right.
Two hundred years ago, Shermer would have endorsed slavery. And if her were in Germany 50 years ago, he would have endorsed the Holocaust. If he lived in a Pakistan today, he would endorse stoning women for wearing the wrong clothes. On atheism, the universe is an accident, so might makes right, and the might is always with the majority. Atheists always think that what the majority is doing in a particular time and place is right for them. There are no inalienable human rights that exist regardless of human opinions, on atheism. And the morality of atheism is always changing based on the majority – and who has the strength to push their view onto the minority.
Another problem is that Shermer is constantly making moral judgments when his own view is that morality is constantly changing. He condemns the moral values of other times and places without any standard in his worldview that can decide between different moral values and duties. It is like saying that lunch is better than breakfast because lunch is here and now, and breakfast was then and there. That is literally what atheists do when they make moral judgments. They have no standard that applies to different times and places, just the ever evolving opinions of the majority of people in different times and places.
Contrast that set of ideas with those of Christian philosophy, and indeed, natural philosophy. Science is based on the idea of order: as Neal Stephensen wrote at the end of this discussion of cybernetics. You cannot get away from the fact that there is order: this is not random. So you end up with something baroque. To quote:
In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I’ve ever read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing–a dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that’s not a dud–that has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life–is to get the basic numbers just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for every universe like ours it would produce 10^229 duds.
Though I haven’t sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is Smolin’s criterion for interestingness.
Not only that, but it’s beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size–way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory–the universe can’t be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature.
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27….
and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes–and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.
But we do not live outside the universe, we live in it. And this universe has order, and justice, and a sense of truth and beauty: these are what the old theologians called general grace, (and the more unwise built a theology around this that veered into the heretic idea that all would be saved). As there is truth, we need to reflect truth. As there is beauty, so we need to reflect it.
In our lives, in our worship, and in how we think. For us, truth is not relative. Righteousness is not something you can negotiate. And human traditions are suspect, for they are all too often flawed.
Whenever Christians meet, they will follow certain traditions and rituals in their services of worship. Such traditions are inescapable because of how God created the world. Our only choice, therefore, is between Biblical traditions and traditions of men. We do not have the option of “no tradition.” Schaeffer has confused this basic dichotomy, thinking of it rather as a choice between modern traditions of men and ancient traditions of men. What would we rather present to God, he argues, an ancient venerable tradition of worship or our modern evangelical treacle?
What this question amounts to is this: If someone wants to observe extra-Biblical traditions in worship, then it only makes sense to opt for a tradition that is ancient. Why abandon the Bible for a tradition that was established in the early 70’s somewhere in Cleveland?
But for the classical Protestant, there is another question. Why abandon the Bible at all? The Reformation tradition of sola Scriptura does not stand for the rejection of tradition. It stands for the rejection of man-made traditions. This principle of worship is known as the Regulative Principle of Worship, i.e. “Whatever is not commanded for worship is forbidden.” Schaeffer has left modern evangelicalism, which does not know what that principle is, for the Eastern Orthodox Church, which denies it.
But in holding onto the truth we are cross grained. We are not saying the majority are correct, or those who hold the arms of the state and the violence inherent in those forces are correct. We are saying that the kings and priest and prophets of this age are wrong.
And that has always been called blasphemy, and the payback for that will come.
I think it’ll start slow, with what Mark says – end of tax-exempt / charitable status for churches that don’t toe the prog line on homos. It will be interesting to see how many evangelicals stand firm, and how many capitulate… Hopefully most of the more solid churches – Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformational Protestant – will stand firm, and forego charitable status…
I think the progs will wait and see how many ‘Christians’ (i.e. churchians) end up capitulating, before deciding what to do next about the recalcitrant reactionary Christians like us. But no doubt, corporations will help do the government’s nasty work for it, by refusing to hire and promote / firing any Christians who refuse to sign on to new mandatory progressive position statements put out by companies…
Then, after that, the government may bring more pressure to bear on the few Christians left…
We will live, as we already are living, in ‘interesting times’, as per the old Chinese curse…
Well yes. In this time we have many blessings. One of which is sufficient enemies to make our choices obvious.
