God. Real. Right.

Here are three paragraphs to introduce or perhaps only exemplify why I believe new evangelicals, the evangelical left, and those who claim to be theologically conservative but socially liberal (in the current sense) are actually either just plain liberal-leftist or somewhere between simple and simply confused. I should acknowledge up front that this post is really just an outline of something which would require half a book to defend in the way I believe each line and link both ought to be and can be defended. But such it is, and such it must be, at least for now.

First paragraph—what I’d like to see as a holistic conservative: I’d like to see a free and virtuous society. Because I value freedom of religion I’d like to see freedom of conscience. Because freedom of conscience includes choices about the value of scarce resources, I’d like to see economic freedom (not the same as economic power) as well. A free market is the venue within which economic freedom exists. Of course, that rosy chain of liberty looks cankered when its necessary corollaries, personal responsibility and risk, are included in the picture. And it is true. I want to see a society where freedom, responsibility, and risk are all present. I don’t want to see any of the downside of risk realized, but it will be. So it is true that if I want to see a society with risks present, I must also acknowledge that my ideal society would have hurting people in it as well—cancer victims who did not buy insurance and widows and orphans whose departed provider did not save them any money. But I’m not quite finished with this paragraph. Because I’d also like to see a society where people invite neighbors and strangers into their homes and where they personally help those who are in need. As I said, I don’t just want a free society, but a free and virtuous one.

Second paragraph—why the free and virtuous society appears inadequate to the left: All the idealism of the first paragraph sounds great as long as everyone is virtuous and suffering people don’t fall through the cracks. But not everyone is virtuous, not every person who suffers will be cared for, and therefore people will fall through the cracks. A society in which people’s suffering is so systemically tolerated is simply unacceptable. So we need a systemic approach to sealing the cracks. Economic principles did not seal the cracks, so the only means remaining are non-economic. Well the only non-economic powers over economic resources are virtue (missing in this scenario; hence the problem) and coercion. Coercive power can be either anarchical or centralized. Since anarchy surely will not provide for the suffering, the only coercive power capable of sealing those cracks is a centralized power; that is, a centralized government. Hence, government ought to be given authority over private property so that it can be redistributed as necessary to prevent people from falling below a certain standard of living deemed to be above the cracks. It is true that the freedom to value things other than that “certain standard of living” will be gone; but so will much of the risk—really, all of the risk if things are carried out ideally.

Third paragraph—the value exchange the left has actually made: The second paragraph’s conclusion is a society where there is no room for virtuous benevolence. If a suffering soul’s care ever did fall into the hands of an observant and benevolent person, it would be evidence that the system (the bureau of benevolence) had failed. So the left’s society is one in which material needs would be met (not really, but in their ideal world) and the exercise of personal care—actually voluntarily sharing resources with a person about whom the giver cares—would be impossible. To be clear: the evangelical left sacrifices virtue (morality) for the sake of material security.

Perhaps those three paragraphs call for a footer, even if only a question: “Or what is the point if a person gains the whole material world, but loses his own soul?”

Share on Facebook

This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally both (3) that it is possible that there is a free will, and (4) that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.

3.2.2 That people should not have the creativity and power of God does not change the possibility that they are free.

The uncomfortable implications of such a freedom include at their head that the will appears to be miraculous in its nature, and that Joe seems to be strangely imbued with divine creativity. There is something right about that assessment and something wrong about it.

It is true that the kind of freedom described in this argument allows humanity to insert into the universe that which cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of prior causes. And it is true that the same insufficiency of explanation applies to God.

But, as with every aspect of humanity bearing God’s image, the image is limited. Compare consciousness as an attribute of humanity and of God. God is conscious. Man is conscious. Saying so does not in any way imply that man is God. In the same way, man partakes of an attribute of God, free will, only because God chooses for man to do so, and only to the extent which God allows. There is no assault on the uniqueness of God. So there is nothing strangely divine about humans imbued with the creativity of free will.

Share on Facebook

I highly recommend the recent white paper by the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) as a starting point for a rational discussion about immigration. (Richard Land, the head of the ERLC, has a briefer statement about the issue here.) I believe the statements about immigration coming out of the ERLC right now are the sanest and most transparent of any I hear from either side.

My approach to the issue itself is simple. I believe any real solution to immigration reform must involve three things (which I will get to in just a moment), whether anyone in particular likes them or not. I don’t mean that statement as an arrogant disregard for public or private opinion. Rather, I mean by it that this problem, once properly defined, will neither simply go away because we build a bigger fence or stop offering ballots in Spanish, nor because we grant amnesty to everyone here illegally and open the borders completely. And for the problem to become something other than just that, we are going to have to be smarter than we have been for the past hundred years—on both political sides. Liberals have tried amnesty and other floods of illegal immigration have followed. Some conservatives have at times raised the ugly face of misoxeny. Yet the problem has persisted, partially because each side only acknowledges half of the problem from the outset.

So what is the problem? It is NOT simply that millions of people have entered the country illegally and that many if not most have stayed. And it is NOT simply that the illegal immigrants who are here are taken advantage of as they live on the fringes of society. It is rather BOTH the influx of immigrants who are neither fully accountable to nor fully protected by the law AND the things in our society which attract them and keep them here—basically economic interests. It doesn’t matter how big a fence we build as long as employers are motivated to pay sub-minimum wages to people who regard dirt-cheap work as so much better than what they can do at home that they leave everything else behind to get to it. Both sides of the issue must be addressed in order to effect real improvement. That is, laws must be BOTH enforced and morally and economically sane. The current law is neither enforced nor is it either morally or economically sane.

So here are the three components Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook

Most people are familiar with self-fulfilling prophecies. Tell a groom he’s going to trip on the first step up to the platform during his wedding and he’ll focus so much effort on that step that it will no longer be natural and, voila, the prophecy is fulfilled. Built into many of those kinds of scenarios is this truly ironic fact about human nature, particularly the relational component of that nature: people tend to produce exactly what they want to avoid.
A woman focused on finding a man who is non-abusive or non-alcoholic will more often than not end up with an abusive or alcoholic husband.
Well, this administration’s efforts for the government to distribute wealth has the goal of ameliorating if not eliminating class distinctions in American culture. But the result will be anything but the desired goal.
Here are two independently caused but mutually reinforcing reasons that class division and conflict will rise under the current administration’s policies:

1. Some people are more productive than others. That productivity is naturally associated with Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook

This post comes from Joseph Wooddell, Ph.D., my friend and colleague at Criswell College.

Editor of American Atheist magazine, David Smalley, made the case in a recent interview with Dr. Barry Creamer (Associate Professor of Humanities, Criswell College), that if Jesus is now with God the Father, then His sacrifice (presumably Jesus’ sacrifice, but perhaps also what Mr. Smalley takes to be some sort of sacrifice on the part of God the Father) doesn’t amount to much of a sacrifice. That is, to be in “heaven” or in the presence of God or whatever, more than makes up for any temporal suffering on the part of God the Son (or perhaps also God the Father). In terms of a propositional argument, it might look something like this:

Premise 1: Temporal, earthly suffering is not all that significant if the sufferer (or those who love him) end up spending eternity in heaven with God.
Premise 2: While Jesus (or perhaps also Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook

Education has its pluses and its minuses. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m an educator and believe very strongly in the benefits of what I do. But I constantly see the downside of academics as well. If enlightenment, circumspection, and maturity typify the benefits of education, then disenchantment, aloofness, and either lethargy or skepticism typify its curses.

One of the most important benefits of education is in the application of hermeneutics, the discipline of interpretation. The significance of being able to interpret texts accurately should be obvious to any text-believing follower of Jesus. Scripture is a text, after all. There are incoming students in the habit of reading a passage and reacting to it purely Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook

February 12, 1809: Abraham Lincoln is born in Hardin County, Kentucky, Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. The profound significance of what each contributes to the world’s current makeup is matched only by the breadth of the divergence of what each man’s ideological heritage implies.

In short: the difference is ethical.

Abraham Lincoln’s heritage is nowhere better reflected than in what may be the greatest speech in American History, the Gettysburg Address. (It took around two minutes to deliver, by the way, a fact which should not be lost on those of us always crying for another portion of an hour to finish our weekly church-speeches.) Here it is in its entirety, with emphasis on the portion most poignantly opposed to what will come from Darwin below.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln identifies the purpose of the Civil War with the cause of promoting the equality of men. The question for any society defending the equal worth of all individuals is whether it can survive rather than perish.

Although it is not in the direct purview of the Gettysburg Address, there is a consequence to regarding all humans as of equal worth which does not appear to promote the survival of the society which holds it. That is, it is hard to see how protecting the less intelligent, the weaker, the inferior in this way or that, will not lead to the ultimate decline of the society, not only in the specific areas of weakness being preserved by the moral laws of the land, but also by the economic drain on those who are the strongest producers.

But it takes Darwin’s theory to make that point. Hence the difference. Darwin publishes The Origin of Species in 1859. These few lines from the final paragraph of that work will suffice:

These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Again, I have italicized the most relevant lines. Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism is integrally dependent on the extinction of less-improved forms. And he certainly does not believe evolution is finished, implying that the extinction of less-improved forms goes on. While there is not a directly moral claim here—for instance, that the less-improved forms ought to perish while the stronger ought to prosper—there is an axiological (very closely related to moral) claim about the “beauttiful” and “wonderful” product of the process.

Again, it is not the direct intent of Darwin’s original document which is in question here, but rather its implications and the developments which arise from it. It is Darwin’s theory, after all, which leads to every form of eugenics as “guided evolution”. Noxious as Margaret Sanger’s claims about the mentally deficient and inferior races needing to be removed from the human genetic tree are, they are hardly unique to her. The ideology of everything from Nietzsche’s superman to early Twentieth Century American textbooks to the Nazi’s Arian supremacy is strongly rooted in Darwin’s provision of a mechanism of struggle for survival.

I am well aware that attempts to root evolution at the tribal or social level instead of the individual level claim to have found a basis for ethical development in evolution. But they do not. I have written a bit more on that topic here.

The point for this moment is simply how wildly divergent the ideas of two men born on the same day actually are. But the divergence should not be surprising. Lincoln’s idea of the equal worth of all humans is rooted in religious and philosophical concern for what is eternally the same (for instance, Plato’s world of being), while Darwin’s idea of struggle for survival is rooted in a secular concern for whatever may come (for instance, Plato’s world of becoming).

Well it’s my birthday, too. And I choose to care about what is eternal. So happy birthday to Lincoln and Darwin. But thanks—only to Lincoln.

Share on Facebook

Not long ago I interviewed TK and Deidrea Laux (pronounced “LOX”) about the birth of their son, Thomas. The story of their love and respect for their son and for life is recounted in the photojournalism of the Dallas Morning News linked through the picture on the left. The story of Thomas’ brief life but persistent significance is undeniably moving.

During the interview I had with the Lauxes Deidra was pregnant with another child. Linked from the photo to the right is the Dallas Morning News’ record of the new life from that blessed event.

Kudos to the Dallas Morning News for meaningful, uplifting, and beautiful work with an equally beautiful family.

My interview with them on “Live from Criswell with Barry Creamer” is here.

Share on Facebook

The pro-life position is not simply anti-abortion. Being against abortion is not sufficient to encompass what it is to be pro-life; there are, after all, still issues like eugenics and euthanasia. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, trying to define the pro-life position in terms of enmity with abortion fails for a different reason.

Here’s an e-mail I received from a listener after a recent broadcast illustrating precisely this point. My response follows. (Oh, and the “next week” to which he refers is January 18-22, 2010, Sanctity of Life week, in observance of the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision.)

Subject: Abortion…

I thought that subject line would get your attention. I did want to get your point of view on something, though, and maybe you can comment on it next week when you’ll be on-topic anyway. I would like to note before I begin that I agree with you that abortion for convenience of the parents is wrong without question.

Years ago, my mother Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook

Live Action is a youth-led pro-life organization. Here’s a video they created based on a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin in September. You can view this video and more at their website, http://liveaction.org.

Share on Facebook