CREATOR and CREATION: How Did God Make It Happen? part 2

Posted on May 16, 2013 by admin

Here’s the conclusion to part 1 of  CREATOR and CREATION: How Did God Make It Happen? published on Monday.

There was soon light enough for them to see one another’s faces. The Cabby and the two children had open mouths and shining eyes; they were drinking in the sound, and they looked as if it reminded them of something. Uncle Andrew’s mouth was open too, but not open with joy. He looked more as if his chin had simply dropped away from the rest of his face. His shoulders were stooped and his knees shook. He was not liking the Voice. If he could have got away from it by creeping into a rat’s hole, he would have done so. But the Witch looked as if, in a way, she understood the music better than any of them. Her mouth was shut, her lips were pressed together, and her fists were clenched. Ever since the song began she had felt that this whole world was filled with a magic different from hers, and stronger. She hated it. She would have smashed that whole world, or all worlds, to pieces, if it would only stop the singing. The horse stood with his ears well forward and twitching. Every now and then he snorted and stamped the ground. He no longer looked like a tired old cab horse; you could now well believe that his father had been in battles.

Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia imagine creationThe eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.

Digory had never seen such a sun. The sun above the ruins of Charn had looked older than ours; this looked younger. You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land, the travelers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in. It was a valley through which a broad, swift river wound its way, flowing eastward toward the sun. Southward there were mountains, northward there were lower hills. But it was a valley of mere earth, rock, and water; there was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass to be seen. The earth was of many colors; they were fresh, hot, and vivid. They made you feel excited, until you saw the singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.

It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright, it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song and it was about three hundred yards away.

Here is a short piece by Peter Kalkavage, from A Classical Conversation, that points to the relationship between music and math.

Jesuit Priest John Navone describes how beauty calls us to truth in Towards A Theology of Beauty: “The ‘glory’ of God is known wherever the truth and goodness and beauty of God attract, beckon, transform, and delight us. God’s beauty irradiates God’s truth and goodness, and draws all creation to itself.”

The best book I read in the first decade of the 21st century is Thomas Dubay’s, The Evidential Power of Beauty. Dubay was a Marist Priest and lover of the arts. In his remarkable book, he quotes physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians who recognize that beauty points to truth. Dubay narrates a fascinating scientific phenomenon about the correlation between truth and beauty. When these scientist, in their research, begin to see beauty, whether through the microscope or telescope or on the computer screen, they know they are closing in on objective truth.

For example, Dubay quotes Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist known for his work in quantum electrodynamics: “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” Similarly, consider this from The New Story of Science by Robert Augros and George Stanciu: “All of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth.”

Not all the scientists Dubay quotes are theist, but they all recognize truth when they see it.  Truth, Beauty, and Goodness cannot be separated. For more on this see the website God and Science .

Our dear friend Dr Elizabeth Youmans  puts it this way in her paper The Fine Arts and Literature:

In nations where the Bible has highly influenced language, law and culture, the fine arts reflect beauty, truth and moral goodness. When the Bible has not been an influence or has been removed as the seedbed of language and culture, the fine arts reflect the corruption and debasement of beauty, truth and moral goodness.

We get further help in understanding how God spoke creation into existence from mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William A Dembski. A Christian trained in multiple disciplines, Dembski brings a unique perspective to the study of creation. Many scientists are either dualist Christian or atheist, and thus “siloed” in their thinking. But Dembski, freed from both dualism and naturalism, can discuss math as the language of creation from an integrated mind.

The first thing that strikes us is the mode of creation. God speaks and things happen. There is something singularly appropriate about this mode of creation. Any act of creation is the concretization of an intention by an intelligent agent. Now in our experience, the concretization of an intention can occur in any number of ways. Sculptors concretize their intentions by chipping away at stone; musicians by writing notes on lined sheets of paper; engineers by drawing up blueprints; etc. But in the final analysis, all concretizations of intentions can be subsumed under language. For instance, a precise enough set of instructions in a natural language will tell the sculptor how to form the statue, the musician how to record the notes, and the engineer how to draw up the blueprints. In this way language becomes the universal medium for concretizing intentions.

In treating language as the universal medium for concretizing intentions, we must be careful not to construe language in a narrowly linguistic sense (for example, as symbol strings manipulated by rules of grammar). The language that proceeds from God’s mouth in the act of creation is not some linguistic convention. Rather, as John’s Gospel informs us, it is the divine Logos, the Word that in Christ was made flesh, and through whom all things were created. This divine Logos subsists in himself and is under no compulsion to create. For the divine Logos to be active in creation, God must speak the divine Logos. This act of speaking always imposes a self-limitation on the divine Logos. There is a clear analogy here with human language. Just as every English utterance rules out those statements in the English language that were not uttered, so every divine spoken word rules out those possibilities in the divine Logos that were not spoken. Moreover, just as no human speaker of English ever exhausts the English language, so God in creating through the divine spoken word never exhausts the divine Logos.

More of this may be found in Dembski’s 1989 paper, The Act of Creation and in his 2009 book, The End of Christianity.

Let there be no mistake, the atheistic materialism of moderns has no absolute foundation for Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. For them, all is relative. The same is true of the post-modern view of the worship of creation. Neither alternative paradigm has any foundation for absolute Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Their gods are small.

The universe came into existence through the conception,  will, and speaking of the infinite-personal Creator.

As Christians, let’s not cower at the alternatives. These are weak illusions which do not comport with reality. Let us push back at these lies with lives of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

- Darrow Miller

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CREATOR and CREATION: How Did God Make It Happen?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by admin

Over the years, as I have taught on the significance of worldview for our lives and for the creation of godly culture, I have always touched briefly on how God created. In fact Genesis 1 reveals that God created the universe by speaking words. He spoke words to create “And God said” – Genesis 1: 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26; He spoke words to identify what he had created – “God called”  – Genesis 1:5, 8, 19; And He spoke word to commission his vice regents for the Cultural Mandate – “God said”  - Genesis 1:28-29.

This theme is reflected in Psalm 33:9: “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” Note that the universe “came to be” through the word of God.   And again in Hebrews 11:3: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” (See also Psalms 147: 15, 18; 148: 5-6, and 2 Peter 3:5.)

creation came about by God speakingThe invisible God created the visible universe. To a materialist, who does not acknowledge the invisible world, this is impossible. By definition, nature is all that exists. And something cannot come from nothing. But the universe did not come from nothing. It was conceived in the mind, intended by the will and spoken into existence though the word of God. Before the universe there was not “nothing;” there was an infinite, personal God. And who exactly is the Word that was at the beginning and who made the universe? He is none other than Jesus Christ:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men…. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth John 1:1-4, 14.

People around the world who achieve secondary education are taught Darwinian science and the atheistic framework that forms the base of evolutionary or  naturalistic science. So when Christians witness to God speaking the creation into existence, secularists write them off as fools. This is a great loss. The secularists do not hear the arguments for the First Principle, i.e.that the invisible God produced the visible universe. In fact whole nations are impoverished and enslaved by their embrace of the modern and post-modern paradigms.

That introduction brings me to this question: what language did God use to speak the universe into creation? He used the language of mathematics. Physicists, chemists, astronomers, and now even biologists are discovering that the DNA code  is the language of the building blocks of the living organisms of our world.

Our friends Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton help us understand these things in their fine book, The Soul of Science where they write, “The history of mathematics was decisively shaped by its inter­action with Christianity” by the beliefs that “the world has an ordered structure because God made it; that humans made in God’s image can decipher that order.” The primary order, the language of creation, is mathematics.

Others have articulated the same concept.  Here is a post on the subject by Kate Deddens.

From the DNA and genome research, we now understand, empirically, that math is the language of creation. There can be no doubt that there is a Divine Code Maker, despite the weak objections of naturalistic science. In light of the evidence, it is the atheist and pantheist who must have the stronger faith.

A number of years ago, I was fascinated with the work people were doing to find a unity of art and science, and of math and music. I read two books on the subject that failed to discover  a unity of math and music … because they began with man and not God. Indeed, they could not have succeeded without a grasp of the trinitarian character of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty found in the Godhead. God is both the First Mathematician and the First Artist. This is reflected in human beings who are made imago Dei. The Bible speaks of head and heart. Neurological theory speaks of left brain and right brain. Left brain refers to objective reason and analysis, right brain to intuition, i.e. subjective reflection. In short, both biblical and neurological language supports human capacity for the analysis of math and science, on the one hand, and on the other, the creativity of music and art.

C.S. Lewis describes how God, at creation, established a unity of math and music, and art and science. In his book, The Magicians Nephew, Lewis captures the means of creation as Aslan, the  Christ figure, sings the universe into existence the mathematical language of a symphony. If you have read The Narnia Chronicles, you will understand why I uttered, when I read these stories in my mid twenties, “I have never lived until now!”

Here is how Lewis remarkably captures the account of creation in Genesis 1. He deftly grasps the intersection of math and music.

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinny a horse would give if, after years of being a cab horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar.

“Gawd!” said the Cabby. “Ain’t it lovely?”

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the Voice was suddenly joined by other voices, more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently, one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out: single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the first Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.

“Glory be!” said the Cabby. “I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.”

… to be continued

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Relativism: The DEATH OF GOD and the Death of Man

Posted on May 9, 2013 by admin

The hideous shadow of death looms over the West today, a death which is the fruit of relativism.

Francis Schaeffer once spoke about what he called the “curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.”  We live in the age of relativism. The only virtue is tolerance. Everything, including moral evil, is tolerated, with one exception – people who are certain there are absolutes.

Defining Relativism

Philosophically, relativism is any theory holding that truth or moral or aesthetic value, etc., is not universal or absolute but may differ between individuals or cultures.[1]

Relativism is the product of an ideology that denies God’s existence. If there is no God, there is no foundation for absolutes. In a universe without God, the only possibility is relativism: moral, metaphysical, and aesthetic. Without an absolute standard, we are left with subjectivism – doing whatever “feels right.”

The relativist is unable or unwilling to make moral judgments about right and wrong, metaphysical judgments about what is true and false – what is real and what is an illusion, or aesthetic judgments that distinguish between the hideous and the beautiful, between the glorious and the grotesque.

The prophet Isaiah warns, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (5:20)

The Impact of Relativism

Once again, relativism manifests itself morally, metaphysically, and aesthetically. Moral relativism regards good as evil and evil as good. We see this, for example, in the media and entertainment. Hollywood seems on a rampage to promote evil. (See the Wikipedia article Incest in Popular Culture.)

Metaphysical relativism makes truth and falsehood interchangeable. We seek to live in a world of illusion, denying reality. Many school districts in the US allow children to declare their own gender, against the reality of their biology. A boy who declares himself female may use the girls’ bathroom or play on a girls’ sports team. Gender confusion is growing rapidly, denying the reality of biology in favor of illusion. If we are so confused about something so basic to human existence, no wonder we are confused about lesser things.

Aesthetic relativism affirms that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” No distinction is made between the beautiful and the hideous. Consider the misogynist lyrics in gangsta rap. Edward Armstrong’s research of thirteen gangsta rap “artists” and their 490 songs found that “22% of gangsta rap music songs contain violent and misogynist lyrics.” Yet we are to regard this genre as the aesthetic equivalent of a Handel aria! Another, macabre, example is Dr. Hagen’s Body Works, a display of human bodies that have been “plastinated” to create a work of “art.” In today’s value system, Hagen’s work is to be acknowledged at the level of Rembrandt’s.

A couple of generations before such atrocities, Francis Schaeffer declared, “I believe that pluralistic secularism [relativism], in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.”

The Progression

Consider the logical progression  (or should we say digression) from the Death of God in the 19th century to the Culture of Death in the 20th century to the Death of Mankind in the 21st century. This devolution can be diagrammed as follows:

Death of God Man

Ideas have consequences!  The slope is indeed slippery.

Neither an individual nor a society can declare God to be dead and still hold on to that which has its basis in His existence – love, human dignity, purpose in life, goodness, beauty, truth, et al. If God is dead, all that flows from his existence is dead, including humanity. The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, announced the consequences of the death of God in The Brothers Karamazov (1880): “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

In the end, a world without God surrenders to the Darwinian cry, “Survival of the fittest!” Or, as Mao Tse-Tung put it, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Death of God

Fredrick Nietzsche predicted the death of God in 1882 in his book, Joyous Wisdom.

I read Nietzsche 40 years ago at a time when I was trying to understand the changes being  unleashed in our world.  This was during the Vietnam war. The world’s youth, perhaps more than usual, were seeking answers to life’s basic questions: “Is there truth? Is there any purpose in life? In my life?” It was an invigorating time to be alive. Today, as I reflect on Nietzsche’s prediction, I wonder if anyone cares. Have the last few generations numbed themselves so deeply that they no longer ask such questions? I believe the proclamation of the death of God has changed all of life radically.

Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s “death” came in the rant of the Madman before a crowd of skeptics:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God!  I am looking for God!”

As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

The Madman continues by answering the question who has killed God?  He shouts “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers.”

After the announcement, the Madman turns his attention to the consequences of this action.

We have loosed everything from its moorings.

But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

Nietzsche mimics Isaiah (29:16): the world is being turned upside down. Darkness comes at the dawn and as the Madman understands we will now need to light lamps in the day time.

Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?

Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose.

Then the Pronouncement:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

And where will we find atonement for what have we done?

How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?

With God being dead, what must we do now?  Man must become the center of the universe, man must become God. Man must define reality. There is no God to save us, we must save ourselves. Here Nietzsche is proposing the coming of the superman.

Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.

If God is dead, than those who killed him must become God. It is man who now reserves for himself to define what is True, Good and Beautiful. Thus is created the trinity of cultural illusion. Everything is relative. Reality is now a kaleidoscope of illusions. This is what some have called the atheist’s delusion.

Of course, we cannot kill God. What Nietzsche is announcing is that in man’s disbelief, the West is cutting herself off from her Judeo-Christian roots, the worldview that made the Western civilization all that she became.  A new worldview, Atheist Materialism, will in fact turn the world on its head. Roman Catholic philosopher, Peter Kreeft, writing in C.S.Lewis  for the Third Millennium , says “faith in God is dead as a functional center for Western civilization … we are now a planet detached from its sun.”

Culture of Death

God, who created the universe, breathed the breath of life into human beings. We are made in his image. There is a Culture of Life, a culture of flourishing.  But with the Death of God, a Culture of Death is born. We have seen this culture penetrate the 20th century and lay the framework for the literal Death of Man in the 21st.

“Godlessness is always the first step to the concentration camp.” So writes Chris Banescu,  an Orthodox Christian attorney, and university professor in his recent article When Men Forsake God, Tyranny Always Follows.

The  20th century was Nietzsche’s.  Fundamentalist atheism – the hard atheists that want to rid the world of any notion of the transcendent God, have flourished. We see this in the rise of Adolph Hitler. It can be argued that here is an organic connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the policies of the Third Reich. The death of God also led to the rise of Communism and the social experiments of Stalin and Mao.

While atheists decry Islam and Christianity for the bloodshed they have brought to the world, they are loathe to connect their own secular philosophy with the two bloodiest wars in human history: World Wars I and II.  Fundamentalist atheists are now seeking to stamp out the last vestiges of Judeo-Christian theism and the culture it produced in the West

In addition to the fundamentalist atheists are their cousins, the soft atheists. These are the non-thinking, emoting narcissists who put themselves at the center of the universe. All of life is bent to their own well-being and pleasure, to their “feeling good.”  They are marked by an extreme self-centeredness and vanity. Narcissists may be 40 or 50 years old but function from the mentality and emotions of a teenager.

Death of man

The 21st century will be marked by the climax of the Death of God in the Death of Man.  This has two expressions, one metaphorical and one literal.

Metaphorically, we can think of the warnings of two prophetic giants in the 20th century: C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer.  

The great Oxford don and Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis,  writes in The Abolition of Man  that the modern educational system is stripping human beings of their humanity: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

What happens when human beings are chronically no longer virtuous?  We enter a post-human world. The atheistic and materialist worldview frames a universe of relativism. Steven Loomis and Jacob Rodriquez writing in C.S. Lewis: A Philosophy of Education, state:

The day is rapidly approaching when a single model of thought will dominate the entire world and its institutions, above all the institution of education. No one understood or anticipated this better than C.S. Lewis. Already some sixty years ago Lewis was warning the public about the dire effects of this model, arguing forcefully that it would prove irresistible and inevitably bring about a world of post-humanity, a world “which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present laboring to produce.”

Writing in The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer warns of the dangers of relativism:

But if I live in a world of nonabsolutes and would fight social injustice on the mood of the moment, how can I establish what social justice is? What criterion do I have to distinguish between right and wrong so that I can know what I should be fighting? Is it not possible that I could in fact acquiesce in evil and stamp out good? The word love cannot tell me how to discern, for within the humanistic framework love can have no defined meaning.

In the post-human world, we have lost sight of what it means to be human.  Man is reduced to an “evolved” animal without any transcendent nature. In some cultures (communist societies, for one, and hedonistic capitalist civilizations for another) man is reduced to a machine that produces and an animal that consumes. The spirit of man is gone. Only things are left. Human beings are objectified, becoming part of the cosmic machine that is the universe according to atheist doctrine.

As an example, we witness the loss of the feminine, and it its place, we have the objectification of women. Women become a commodity to use in advertising to sell other commodities. They become sex objects in the multifaceted sex industry.  Even little girls are sexualized.

These are examples of the metaphorical death of man. But the Death of God leads to a Culture of Death that results in a literal death of man as well. Writing in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin could foresee a future where groups of people will be exterminated.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [3]  as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Ideas have consequences. Darwin’s theory of evolution is not only poor science, it leads to a devastating social science and the culture of death.  And it is not simply the intermediate races that Darwin envisioned.  The century of post-humanity has arrived.   Human beings are currently being treated as non-human throughout the world. Do you doubt that? Consider the global plagues of ..

  • Gendercide: 200,000,000 females in our world are dead because females are viewed as less human than males.
  • Abortion: 40,000,000-50,ooo,ooo babies are killed each year before they are born, simply because they are not wanted. They are inconvenient.  Media personalities and government leaders actually promote such wholesale carnage as “enlightened.” We do not recognize that what a women carries in her womb is both human and alive.
  • Infanticide: Mentally or physically handicapped children are allowed to die, or even killed, after birth. Today, some advocate for allowing healthy but unwanted children to die (or be killed) as well. CAN WE DOCUMENT THAT? and   The current President of the United States, Barak Obama, has been a proponent of infanticide.
  • Euthanasia: Increasingly, adults who are no longer “productive” are being encouraged to “get out of the way” in order to save scarce medical resources. This represents  another growing example of the  literal death of humans

Just as there is a slippery slope from the Death of God to the death of humanity, the world of the 21st century is experiencing a similar descent in marriage and sexuality.  Dostoevsky’s prophecy–”If God does not exist, everything is permitted”–is proving  true in the arena of sexuality. The moral relativism of the “LGBT” worldview will inevitably lead to pedophilia and bestiality, as captured in the diagram below. We have no anchor to hold against this tide. It does not take long to move from the reality of God’s created order – the sacredness of sexual intimacy within a covenantal marriage, to a world of illusion that degenerates into the ultimate animal behavior: bestiality.

moral slide

The Place of Hope

The world looks bleak; but hope lives. The 21st century can break the pattern of the death of man. God is waiting to heal the land. The key lies in his people leading a movement of repentance -  2 Chronicles 7:14.

First, Christ followers must repent and restore true worship of the living God. That repentance requires, among other things, a “new mind.” We must abandon relativism and restore the Judeo-Christian worldview as the moral, metaphysical, and aesthetic grid of the church. God’s people need to affirm that God is alive and sovereign and reaffirm the Biblical worldview for all of life.

Second, we must restore a culture that affirms life and builds institutions that support human life from conception to natural death. We need to practice an apologetic of hope – Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

We must flee the relativist’s standard “Does it feel good?” We must ask and answer the questions, “Is it true?” “Is it Good?’ “Is it Beautiful?” And then increasingly live the answer.

This will require a faith that moves from worship to the creation of culture and then the building of a civilization. We will need to trust God for the impossible. It will require Christians to live counter culturally, to be willing to pay any price needed to reverse the growing tide of darkness and evil.

May it be so.

- Darrow Miller

 

 

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How Civilized Barbarians Treat Babies [warning: graphic images and story]

Posted on May 6, 2013 by admin

Two weeks ago we published CIVILIZED BARBARISM: China’s Abortions and Your Face Cream. The piece touched a nerve; it’s already the fourth most-viewed post (of 800) since we launched this blog 4½ years ago. The article was about what is happening to babies in China, but it also referenced the Kermit Gosnell story here in the US, an account of which many Americans are ignorant. Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortionist charged with unspeakably violent murder of babies and the death of at least one mother. Yet the trial has received scant news coverage. Why? For reasons at multiple levels. Clearly a political agenda lies behind the news blackout: the nation’s politically correct establishment—including many media outlets—have too much invested in what they call “a woman’s right to choose” to risk making abortion look bad. There’s also the related economic dimension, given the billions of dollars in profits generated in the nation’s abortion clinics. Neither the politics or the economics is defensible. But there’s another dimension of this cover-up, related to our earlier Civilized Barbarism post. We Americans are refined. Sophisticated. The Gosnell story doesn’t fit that narrative. It’s the barbarian underbelly that must not be exposed. Roe v Wade legalized abortion without restriction in the first three months of pregnancy. States were permitted to regulate abortion during the second trimester, but only to insure the mother’s safety. Third-trimester abortions could be restricted by a state, but no woman could be denied an abortion if a doctor deemed it necessary for her health.

Babies are routinely killed right up to the moment of birth … and now after birth

That was the law. But even from that barbaric benchmark, protection to unborn babies has eroded. Babies are routinely killed, not just after viability (about 24 weeks) but right up to the moment of birth. How many babies have exited the birth canal feet first, only their head remaining in their mom’s body, and been slaughtered, with impunity, in the United States of America? one of the babies reportedly aborted by GosnellNow Gosnell (and not him only) has crossed even that threshold. He is on trial for the murder of four babies who were born alive. Gosnell and his staff literally butchered already-born babies. They cut off their limbs and put them in jars. They snipped the spinal cords of living infants, in effect cutting off the babies’ heads. One was old enough that, according to a witness, Gosnell joked, “This baby is big enough to walk … me to the bus stop.” The US Supreme Court and President have maintained that abortion is acceptable before viability. But these are just words. It’s not about the law, nor about viability. It’s about the “woman’s right to choose.” Her right to choose takes precedence over the law and over the baby’s right to life. Judged by US practices, a baby in the womb is not a baby, and a born-alive baby is not human. USA Today reporter Kristen Powers wrote a column on April 11 titled “We’ve forgotten what belongs on Page One.” The Gosnell story should be front-page news all over the USA and every “civilized” country. But it is not, because we do not want to know. We are too civilized to acknowledge such barbarism. Want another example? Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country, yet 55% of Americans don’t even know they do abortions. Why? Because the Planned Parenthood brand is so well marketed and because we are so civilized. We do not want to know. We see no evil because we will not look. Not only Gosnell is on trial. Eight members of his staff have already pleaded guilty to charges in the case. One, 49-year-old Steven Massof, pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree murder and to conspiracy to commit murder. He testified to the grand jury that he witnessed snipped neck of one of the babies who survived abortionmore than 100 babies’ spines being “snipped” after they were born alive. He testified that severing the spinal cords of moving, breathing babies outside their mothers’ wombs was “standard procedure,” as was suctioning out the brains of born-alive babies. In recent years, opposition to abortion has been growing. Praise God for the efforts of pro-life organizations and activists. Yet even now more than 3,000 babies are aborted in the United States every day. This is a travesty not only against the innocent babies, but also against the 3,000 mothers who have been sexualized and objectified by our society. The Gosnell case involves the murder of babies born alive after an abortion attempt. The facts are too ghastly to conceive, but the story must never obscure this truth: there is no moral distinction between killing a baby who is out of the womb and one who is still in the womb.

There is no moral distinction between killing babies out of the womb and killing babies still in the womb.

Having said that, here’s our point. Even for Americans largely insensible about the evil of abortion, the Gosnell images cannot fail to evoke powerful emotion. But, so far, relatively few Americans have seen the images or heard the story because most of the press has refused to tell that story or show those images. One journalist, Twitter handle jdmullane, tweeted this press not interested in story of babies murderphoto of the virtually empty media seats at the Gosnell trial. Why has such a sensational murder case received so little press coverage? Contrast this silence with the media explosion late last year after the Sandy Hook massacre of precious children in school. Twenty 6-7 year-old school children, as well as six teachers and school administrators, were gunned down without mercy. For weeks, front-page headlines around the world covered the story. And to be sure, that story deserved coverage. So does the Gosnell story. Any thinking person would agree. For decades, Gosnell and his staff have murdered babies. Why has the trial received so little coverage? Marc Lamont Hill, a “pro-choice” news commentator and professor at Columbia University, had the courage to answer the question with what many in the pro-life community already knew:

For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the Left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the Left.

In addition, the President of the United States has remained silent on the issue. He was asked about it on the Today show. After speaking repeatedly about the Sandy Hook story, when asked about the Gosnell horrors, Barack Obama had no comment. Why is the President so silent on this modern Hannibal Lecter? Perhaps because he led the fight against The Born Alive Infant Protection act in the Illinois State Legislature that would have prevented Gosnell’s “procedures” on live babies. As a state senator, Mr. Obama championed the effort in the Illinois legislature to protect the right of the mother to have a dead baby at the end of an abortion procedure. The legislature was considering a bill to protect the life of a baby that had survived an abortion. State Senator Obama almost single handedly stopped the legislation. In 2001 he argued,

Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a – a child, a nine-month-old – child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it – it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.

As we published in a previous post,

This is chilling, for at least two reasons. First, he is essentially arguing that a baby born before nine months is not viable. Yet recent medical advances have proven otherwise. Research from 2003-2007 on premature babies shows the viability rates of six percent at 22 weeks and ninety-two percent at 28 weeks. Most infants 24 weeks or older survive. So State Senator Obama was being deceptive when he spoke of babies being “pre-viable” up to nine months.

Second, Senator Obama was saying that a baby is human if it is wanted and brought to term. If the baby is born alive after an abortion, the baby is not human. Given the intention of the mother and the doctor to kill the baby, the baby is not entitled to equal protection under the law. In this worldview, the human nature of a baby is defined not by the reality of biological science, or moral philosophy, or the Creator, but by the will of another person, the mother.

In 2002 State Senator Obama continued the fight, this time against a second version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill.

I just want to be clear because I think this was the source of the objections of the Medical Society. As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child – however way you want to describe it – is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that its nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just out limp and dead, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved. Is that correct?

What is this if not civilized barbarism? If a doctor has already decreed that a viable baby in the womb is not viable, can he be trusted to protect that baby after it is born? This is all words and semantics, raging against reality and the Creator.

The current news story out of Philadelphia really began in Illinois in 2002.

State Senator Obama voted against the bill four times for reasons of “principle.” His argument is that the intention of the mother (the mother’s right to choose) takes precedence over the life of the baby both before it is born and after it is born. In the US, since 1973 the life of a baby in utero has not equaled the weight of the mother’s right to choose. Today, the baby once born is still subject to the mother’s right to choose. The current news story out of Philadelphia really began in Illinois in 2002. Dr. Gosnell is simply following the logic of President Obama’s argument. The blog Downshore Drift (April 15, 2013) summarizes  where we are as a culture.

So, what do we make of this? The facts are that Obama voted FOUR times against a bill that would have better protected babies born alive after abortions because of an assertion that it would have weakened abortion rights. Obama weighed the survival of live babies against the possibility of weakening the ability to abort babies in utero. While this might fall short of advocating for infanticide, it most definitely shifts priority from a live baby to the desire of the mother to have that baby killed. That is the philosophical jump necessary for Infanticide to be accepted in our society and our president made that jump and voted for it officially FOUR times.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell in his “House of Horrors,” according to testimony, killed over 100 “born-alive” babies who survived the initial abortion attempt under the philosophy that the intent of the mother was to abort the child so that made it acceptable.

Some who are pro-abortion insist that Gosnell is an aberration. But this is false. The “good doctor” is merely the tip of the iceberg, as shown by two undercover videos recently released by Live Action. -          Gosnell is not alone -          Inhuman As long as a nation’s citizens “see no evil and hear no evil” we can continue to think of ourselves as civilized. That’s why President Obama won’t address the issue and the American press won’t cover it. To admit what is happening and do nothing about it would make them complicit with barbarians. If you are as horrified as we are, please circulate this post to your friends, so they become aware of this barbarism. Let us call our churches and our nation to repentance that God might heal our land. -          Darrow Miller and Gary Brumbelow

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An EMERGING AGENDA of the “Marriage Equality” Promoters

Posted on May 2, 2013 by admin

What’s the “marriage equality” debate really about?

The current docket of the US Supreme Court includes two high-profile cases dealing with marriage: the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. A few fundamentalist secularists–the radical fringe of the “LGBT” community–want to use political force and intimidation to rewrite centuries-old codes about the nature of the family. They want to bring down the Judeo-Christian framework and the civilization it has created. And the fingers of this threat now have a global reach.

For a long time, traditional societies (in Africa and Latin America, for example) were more protected while the battle was confined to the “progressive” West: North America and Western Europe. But the rest of the world is quickly catching up with us. In my international travel I hear more and more stories that indicate how far the debate has carried. That includes a recent three weeks spent in three countries of South America. And it includes Africa, as our friend and co-laborer Stephen Langa spelled out two years ago in his post exposing sexual colonialism.

But to return to my opening question, What’s really at stake here? What’s the fundamental concern? Are defenders of biblical marriage just being hateful? Are Christians just being uncharitable? Why disallow two men to marry just because you disagree with it?  No doubt that question comes from some hearts that are sincere. My concern is from those with a destructive agenda.

Masha Gessen, a lesbian journalist, candidly admitted recently that aims of some in the “LGBT” community include eliminating the institution of marriage. She admits that this goal will require deception. 

It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.

That causes my brain some trouble. And part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there – because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.

For more on this question see J. Richard Pearcey’s excellent article The Revolt of Intelligence Against “Marriage Equality.

- Darrow Miller

 

 

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HAITI, AMERICA, and the Effects of Biblical Thinking

Posted on April 29, 2013 by admin

If you want to see the  impact of a Biblical worldview, consider the differences between Haiti and the US. That’s the gist of the exchange below.

Haiti will prosper to the degree she embraces biblical thinkingWe recently received a note from our friend Mike Bell, national director of Hungry for Life USA.  We have captured his questions, and Darrow’s responses in bullet points.

“I was teaching some students last weekend, and pointing out the difference between a country like Haiti and ours, talking about lies and Biblical truth … and some of the students understood me to be saying that “America is more biblical”

  • Was more Biblical, but is not now.
  • America was founded by Christians (not today’s dualistic evangelicals and charismatics) who thought, functioned, and built a nation framed by a Biblical worldview.
  • America is totally secular today. Some are still living from a memory of a Biblical worldview. But most Americans, including many Christians, are functioning from an atheistic and materialistic paradigm.
  • We need to make a clear distinction between America’s founders/founding and the nation today.

“and better than countries like Haiti”

  • We need to be very clear that Americans are not inherently better than any other people. Sometime we make people feel this way. And sometimes people think they are inferior to Americans. Both are wrong
  • The fact is that all human beings are “created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights …..”
  • Americans are not better than Haitians and Haitians are not better than (North) Americans.
  • In fact it was the American founders’ understanding of the above quote that made America what she became and is now fast losing.
  • Any society that begins with a Biblical worldview and Biblical principles will move toward a state of flourishing. Any that begins with a lie or illusion will suffer poverty. It is not the people that are better or worse; the ideas are better and worse.

“as seen in the fact that we are richer.”

  • The test of a nations success is not found in her material wealth.
  • It is found in her wisdom and in her personal and public righteousness – goodness.
  • Material wealth is an incomplete benchmark of the health of a nation.
  • A nation that “obeys all that Christ has commanded” will move toward flourishing in all areas of life, including economic. A people that does not obey “all that Christ has commanded” will tend to deteriorate and suffer.

“At first I thought ‘Oh dear, I need to clarify this’”

  • Yes, it does need to be clarified.

“but then I realized, on the face of it, I WAS making the point that our affluence is an indicator of the underpinnings of Biblical ethics, the rule of law, a work ethic … even though these things are not universally held by our culture now.”

  • Again, I would not use the word affluence. This has the connotation of mere material wealth. The health of a nation is much more than material. We are currently an affluent nation that is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This bankruptcy, uncorrected, will inevitably lead to our economic demise.
  • You are correct in that some of the things that you have listed will lead to a nation’s flourishing.  Other influences include the dignity of all human beings, justice, truth, beauty, et al.

“How else would you clarify or modify what I was attempting to communicate (which was much more nuanced than simply America is more biblical and better than countries like Haiti as seen in the fact that we are richer). For example, would you make the distinction that you are not talking about “God blessing religious behavior” or any sort of health-and-wealth thinking?”

  • This is not about religious behavior and religious fervor. It is not even about “believing in God.” It is about believing God. It is about living in the reality that he has created, not in the illusions that we have made.
  • It is certainly not about health-and-wealth, name-it-and-claim-it theology. That is magical thinking and only reinforces the mindset that has made Haitians impoverished in the first place.
  • It is about what we call the “cultural trinity”: Truth, Goodness (Justice), and Beauty. We are to live within the circle of the cultural trinity. We are to live in the reality of creation, within the framework of the Biblical worldview and principle.

“Also, if someone points out the affluence of countries that do not (nor have not) had a strong Biblical background, what is your typical response?”

  • God has made the universe to function in a certain way. A person or people does not have to be saved to function within that frame work. The law of gravity works!
  • Truth is self-authenticating, lies are self-destructive.
  • Many people who are saved do not function within the reality that God has made. They function in a materialistic frame. Some function in a super-spirituality framework.
  • It is Christians who have access to understand why the world functions in a given way.

These are good questions, Mike. For a more complete answer see my book, Discipling Nations. This book is where I answer these questions.

- Darrow Miller

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How a Belief in the TRINITY Could Transform Society

Posted on April 25, 2013 by admin

One truth of scripture–the Trinity–could make a profound difference in our society.

We live in a world of sexual confusion.

  • the family is disintegrating,
  • men are being feminized and women masculinized,
  • global power brokers are trying to redefine marriage in principle and national policy
  • the embarrassment of being a mother is bringing nation after nation to the place of cultural suicide.

All this because we refuse to orient our lives around the Creator of the universe and the Order of Creation – TRUTH.

In his new book, Delighting in the Trinity, British historian, theologian, pastor and author, Michael Reeves, writes of the beauty of God’s being Trinity and the His corresponding making us imago Dei – male and female. Please enjoy this excerpt, be encouraged and challenged.

Delighting in the Trinity

- Darrow Miller

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How Does YOUR CHURCH PROMOTE ART?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by admin

We often write about beauty and the arts on this blog. One of our burdens at the DNA is to call Christians gifted in the arts to become balladeers, i.e. to use their gifts to speak prophetically to culture.

As Christians we worship the God who is glorious. He is beautiful. As we have argued elsewhere, the church should be the wellspring for art. But sadly, few churches are. Seldom does a church create a platform to encourage artists. Furthermore, our places of worship are often designed for efficiency and utility rather than beauty and inspiration. Too often our musical and visual offerings are mediocre, drawing our eyes and ears down rather than up. When this happens, we neglect the apologetics of beauty which has the ability to draw people to Christ.

Roberta Green Ahmanson speaks about the value of artRecently our friend Roberta Ahmanson was featured at Q with a video presentation, The Christian’s Responsibility  For Art. Roberta calls the church to be the church. She challenges  Christians to take the lead in bringing beauty to a world which is visually and aurally impoverished.

As the introduction to the video states,

The Church today often struggles to engage in and support the arts, but such has not always been the case. Historically, the Christian church appreciated the arts and took seriously the role they could play in displaying truth and beauty in culture. As a philanthropist and patron of fine art, Ahmanson helps cast a vision for how the church can reclaim its civic duty of arts patronage.

Take a few moments to listen to Roberta. If you are a Christian who is an artist, or one who loves the arts, be encouraged. If you are a pastor, Roberta may challenge you in your calling.

- Darrow Miller

 

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LAMENT for Another Time … “Women and Children First”

Posted on April 18, 2013 by admin

Leon Panetta approves women in combatIn his last days in office Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pushed two new social policies into the heart of the US military establishment. On Jan 23, 2013 he lifted the ban on women serving in combat. On Feb 11, 2013 he expanded military benefits to gay and lesbian couples.

This is the fruit of Platonic monism, the view that the universe has only one kind of essential substance (as opposed to the Bible’s Three-in-One God). The monist’s concept of male and female as interchangeable is being driven deeper into policy and into the new norm of American life. (For more on this subject see Male or Female: Which Better Reflects God?)

One of the blog sites I frequent is the Front Porch Republic (named for a typical neighborhood gathering place of earlier generations). After Panetta lifted the combat ban on women , FPR Senior Editor Katherine Dalton wrote a thoughtful piece:  Woman At War.

Dalton’s reader responses included one from Robert M. Peters that took me back to another time. It was a time in which men and women were equal in dignity yet distinct as female and male, rather than interchangeable as Panetta’s dictum suggests. Western society was characterized by the motto immortalized  on the decks of the Titanic: “Women and children first!” Women were women, children were children, and men were responsible to protect women and children. To save their lives, at the cost of their own if necessary.

Peters wrote,

In the tradition of the Christian Just War, the only just war is one in which those to be nurtured, children, and those who give the nurturing, mothers, and the means to be nurtured and nurture are threatened and that threat is met and hopefully eliminated by the proper means of force carried out by men who are endowed both physically and mentally, if they have not been emasculated, to kill and be killed so that mothers and children can live.

Do we still value the lives of our children? Or do our own lives–and lifestyles–take precedent over them?  Do we recognize the unique importance of the mother and her nurturing nature, not only for the well-being of our children but for the future of our nations?

Panetta’s policies will create a different world, one less inhabitable from that we have known.

Alas, it’s no longer “women and children first.”

- Darrow Miller

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CIVILIZED BARBARISM: China’s Abortions and Your Face Cream

Posted on April 15, 2013 by admin

PLEASE NOTE: this post contains graphic content and images of abortion.

We like to think of today’s world as civilized, “reclaimed from savage life and manners,” as  Webster’s 1828 defines it. Not cruel, savage, or brutal. We’re above such behavior today.

Or are we?

Occasionally, a story emerges to show what abominations lie just beneath the surface. Human acts of inhumanity to their fellow human beings remain among us, acts as dark as the world has ever seen. Secular fundamentalists want to lay such horrors at the feet of Theists. And, to be sure, we have seen brutality from both Christians and Muslims. We continue to see atrocity from Jihadists. But today, we are also looking into a pit of horrors which comprise the logical consequences of Atheism. May we not be so numb that we cannot respond appropriately. May we engage in the fight against the evil.

As we have said in this space before, ideas have consequences. Judeo-Christianity creates a culture of life. But Atheistic Materialism creates a culture of death and a narcissistic population. We have written before about Kermit Gosnell, currently on trial for seven counts of first-degree murder. Gosnell reportedly “joked about the large size of some of the infants he aborted.”

What drew my attention, again, to the world of the enlightened barbarian was an article, “Data reveal scale of China abortions” in the March 15, 2013 Financial Times by Simon Rabinovitch writing from Beijing.

Chinese doctors have performed more than 330m abortions since the government implemented a controversial family planning policy 40 years ago, according to official data from the health ministry.

The birth restrictions have also led to a severe gender imbalance because of a traditional preference for male children and the selective abortion of female foetuses. There are now 34m more men than women in China.

The “enlightened” Nazis were barbaric in their treatment of the Jews, Gypsies, and handicapped, and all the while, many Germans and others either averted their eyes or looked on, apparently without concern. Today, our “civilized” world supports the destruction of human life in the womb (abortion) and out of the womb (infanticide). Can we muster no reaction to the unspeakable horror of over 330,000,000 babies aborted in China alone in the last 40 years? (This is to say nothing about the social consequences to the resulting gender imbalance of the 34 million Chinese men who will not find a bride.)

China abortion

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted on me (Lamentations 1:12 NIV)

Not only do the Chinese abort babies, often the abortions are done against the will of the mother. After the abortion, the young mother is further brutalized by having the body of her dismembered baby placed beside her in the bed .

But this is still not the end of the horror. Steven Aden, a Senior Council with the United Defense Fund reports on the rise of the use of the aborted babies for commercial purposes in his Townhall.com article, Is it Cannibalism Yet?

There is an undeniable progression from bad to worse in the culture of death. Or, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, who was paraphrasing Jesus of Nazareth, “All things are possible to those who don’t believe.” Therefore, just when it seems we’ve seen man at his worst, a new example of his wickedness arises and reminds us that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Case in point—the news that certain citizens in China, no doubt numbed to the evil of abortion by their country’s one-child policy, have literally begun to place the corpses of aborted children in refrigerators in homes. From there, the bodies are “taken to clinics where they are placed in medical drying microwaves.”

In the microwaves, they are dried (cooked), and once their skin has become sufficiently dry it is ground into a powder which is used for quack “home remedies.”

And here’s the clincher: the powder—that is, the dried skin of an aborted human body—is poured into capsules which are then sold as energy supplements under the guise of “stamina boosters.”

Aden references a March 8, 2013 article in the British newspaper Mail Online, “Thousands of pills filled with powdered human baby flesh discovered by customs officials in South Korea.” (See also 101 uses for dead babies.)

Now another British newspaper, the Guardian, reveals that China is using the skin of executed Chinese prisoners for collegian in making beauty products. (You can shop at Chic galleria for beauty products with collagen.)

The Catholic News Agency reports that fetal collagen has been used in anti-aging creams. Actually, “fetal collagen” disguises the truth. It’s the cells of aborted babies.

Please do not just read this and move on. Please pass this story to your friends and church members. Or more. God raised up William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect to outlaw slavery in the British empire. Maybe He wants to raise you up to be a William Wilberforce for today.

May we who see these things shake off our numbness and replace it with righteous anger. We must not avert our eyes. We must engage. If you are willing, here some current avenues of action:

Or perhaps you will be so angry that you will respond to a call from God to found your own organization to fight these injustices.

Who will challenge the “beautiful” cosmetics companies that use human collagen in their cosmetics?

Who will challenge women to care enough to see if what they are rubbing on their faces is the pulverized skin of executed criminals?

Who will challenge people interested in their own fitness and vitality to ensure the pills they are taking do not contain the remains of aborted babies?

It is not merely the Chinese who are producing these products, it is consumers in Asia, Europe, and America who in their narcissism demand these products.

We are such beautiful and civilized barbarians.

- Darrow Miller

 

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