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OPPENHEIMER PARENT GUIDE

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Release date July 21, 2023

Theaters: During World War 2 J. Robert Oppenheimer works on a team to develop a weapon to end the war, if it doesn’t end the world.

Why is Oppenheimer rated ? The MPA rated Oppenheimer

Run Time: 180 minutes

Violence: The creation of nuclear weapons is a significant part of the film. A character has terrifying visions of a nuclear holocaust, complete with burned bodies and radiation sickness. It is implied that a woman is deliberately drowned in her bathtub. There are frequent mentions of bombing raids and associated deaths and injuries. It is suggested that a suicide is not what it appears to be. 
Sexual Content: There are two sex scenes that include visible breasts and buttocks. Breasts are also visible in non-sexual contexts. 
Profanity: There are over a dozen uses of profanity, including sexual expletives, scatological curses, and terms of deity.
Drugs/Alcohol: Alcohol is consumed in social situations and in an addictive context. Alcoholism is a recurring issue in the film. Characters frequently smoke cigarettes, as is historically accurate for the time period.

On Science and Culture by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Encounter (Magazine) October 1962 issue, was the best article that he ever wrote and it touched on a lot of critical issues including the one that Francis Schaeffer discusses in this blog post!

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OPPENHEIMER and EINSTEIN

Passage from chapters 3 and 4 from Francis Schaeffer book HE IS THERE AMD HE IS NOT SILENT:

This is where Leonardo da Vinci is so  important. He was the first modern mathema-  tician, and he really understood this dilemma. It  is not that I am reading back into him our  dilemma of modern cynicism. He really under-  stood it. He understood, in the passage of all  these hundreds of years between himself and  modern man, where rationalistic man would  end up if man failed to find a solution. This is  what real genius is—understanding before your  time—and Leonardo da Vinci did understand.  He understood that if you began on the basis  of rationalism—that is, man beginning only from himself, and not having any outside  knowledge—you would have only mathematics  and particulars and would end up with only  mechanics. In other words, he was so far ahead  of his time—that he really understood that  everything was going to end up only as a ma-  chine, and there were not going to be any univ-  ersals or meaning at all. The universals were  going to be crossed out. So Leonardo really be-  came very much like the modern man. He said  we should try to paint the universals. This is re-  ally very close to the modern concept of the  upper-story experience. So he painted and  painted and painted, trying to paint the univer-  sals. He actually tried to paint the universal just  as Plato had had the idea that if we were really  to have a knowledge of chairs, there would have  to be an ideal chair somewhere that would  cover all kinds of chairs. Leonardo, who was a Neo-Platonist, understood this, and he said,  “Let man produce the universals.” But what  kind of man? The mathematical man? No, not  the mathematical man but the painter, the  sensitive man. So Leonardo is a very crucial  man in the area of humanistic epistemology.  

At this point in Escape from Reason, I devel-  oped the difference between what I call “mod-  ern science” and the “modern modern sci-  ence.” 

 In my earlier books I have referred to  Whitehead and Oppenheimer, two  scientists—neither one a Christian—who insisted that modern science could not have been  born except in the Christian milieu. Bear with  me as I repeat this, for I want in this book to  carry it a step further, into the area of knowing.  As Whitehead so beautifully points out, these  men all believed that the universe was created by a reasonable God, and therefore the universe  could be found out by reason. This was their  base. Modern science is the original science, in  which you had men who believed in the unifor-  mity of natural causes in a limited system, a  system which could be reordered by God and  by man made in the image of God. This is a  cause and effect system in a limited time span.  But from the time of Newton (not with Newton  himself, but with the Newtonians who followed  him), we have the concept of the “machine”  until we are left with the only machine, and you  move into the “modern modern science,” in  which we have the uniformity of natural causes  in a closed system, including sociology and  psychology. Man is included in the machine.  This is the world in which we live in the area of  science today. No longer believing that they can  be sure the universe is reasonable because created by a reasonable God, the question is  raised that Leonardo da Vinci already under-  stood and that the Greeks understood before  that: “How does the scientist know; on what  basis can he know that what he knows, he really  knows?”  

So rationalism put forth at this point the  epistemological concept of positivism. Posi-  tivism is a theory of knowing which assumes  that we can know facts and objects with total  objectivity. Modern “scientism” is built on it.  

It is a truly romantic concept, and while it  held sway, rationalistic man stood ten feet tall  in his pride. It was based on the notion that  without any universals to begin with, finite man  could reach out and grasp with finite reason  sufficient true knowledge to make universals  out of the particulars. 

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau is crucial at this point, because he changed the formulation  from “nature and grace” to “nature and free-  dom,” absolute freedom. Rousseau and the  men around him saw that in the area of “na-  ture,” everything had become the machine. In  other words, “downstairs” everything was in the  area of positivism, and everything was a ma-  chine. “Upstairs” they added the other thing,  namely, absolute freedom. In the sense of  absolute freedom upstairs, not only is man not  to be bound by revelation, but he is not to be  bound by society, the polis, either. The concept  of autonomous freedom is clearly seen in Gau-  gin, the painter. He was getting rid of all the re-  straints, not just the restraint of God, but also  the restraint of the polis, which for Gaugin was  epitomized by the highly developed culture of  France. He left France and went to Tahiti to be  rid of the culture, the polis. In doing this, he practiced the concept of the noble savage that,  of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had previ-  ously set forth. You get rid of the restraints, you  get rid of the polis, you get rid of God or the  gods, and then you are free. Unhappily, though  not surprisingly, this did not turn out as he ex-  pected.  

So what we have is not a destructive free-  dom only in morals (though it shows itself very  quickly in morals, especially quickly, perhaps,  in sexual anarchy), but in the area of knowledge  as well. In metaphysics, in the area of being, as  well as morals, we are supposed to have abso-  lute freedom. But then the dilemma comes:  How do you know and how do you know you  know?  

We may imagine the Greeks and Leonardo  da Vinci and all the Neo-Platonists at the time  of the High Renaissance coming in and asking Rousseau and his followers, “Don’t you see  what you have done? Where are the universals?  How are you going to know? How are you  going to build enough universals out of partic-  ulars, even for society to run, let alone build  true knowledge, knowledge that you really know  and are sure that you know?” 

 It is only a step, really, from men like Gau-  gin to the whole hippie culture, and as a matter  of fact, to the whole modern culture. In one  sense there is a parenthesis in time from  Rousseau until the birth of the hippie culture  and the whole modern culture that is founded  on the view that there are no universals  anywhere—that man is totally, hedonistically  free; the individual is totally, hedonistically  free—not only morally, but also in the area of  knowledge. We can easily see the moral  confusion that has resulted from this, but the epistemological confusion is worse. If there are  not universals, how do we know reality from  non-reality? At this point, we are right in the lap  of modern man’s problem, as I will develop  later.  

Now let us go back to the period immedi-  ately after Rousseau, to Immanuel Kant, and  Hegel, who changed the whole concept of  epistemology. Before this, in epistemology,  man always thought in terms of antithesis; the  methodology of epistemology had always been  antithesis. That is, you learn by saying “a” is  not “non-a.” That is the first step of classical  logic. In other words, in antithesis, if this is  true, then its opposite is not true. You can  make an antithesis. That is the classical  methodology of epistemology, of knowing. But  Hegel argued that antithesis has never turned  out well on a rationalistic basis, so he proposed to change the methodology of epistemology.  Instead of dealing with antithesis, let us deal  with synthesis. So he set up his famous  triangle—everything is a thesis, it sets up an  antithesis, and the answer is always synthesis.  The whole world changed in the area of morals  and political science, but it changed more pro-  foundly, though less obviously, in the area of  knowing and knowing itself. He changed the  whole theory of how we know. 

 In my books I move quickly to Kierkegaard,  who took this a step further. He set up, as I  have indicated, the absolute dichotomy be-  tween reason and non-reason. Kierkegaard, and  especially Kierkegaardianism that followed him,  teaches that that which would give meaning is  always separated from reason; reason only  leads to knowledge downstairs, which is  mathematical knowledge without any meaning, but upstairs you hope to find a non-rational  meaning for the particulars. This is  Kierkegaard’s contribution.  

All of this flows from four  men—Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and  Kierkegaard—and their thinking in the area of  epistemology. From Hegel, this kind of think-  ing has replaced antithesis with synthesis, so  turning the whole theory of knowledge upside  down. Today, existentialism has three forms:  the French, Jean-Paul Sartre; the German, Hei-  degger; and that of Karl Jaspers, who is also a  German but lives in Switzerland. The distinc-  tions between the forms of existentialism do  not change the fact that it is the same system  even though it has different expressions with  these different men, namely, that rationality  only leads to something horrible in every area,  including knowledge. Indeed, not including knowledge, but first of all  knowledge—principally knowledge. To these  men as rationalists the knowledge we can know  with our reason is only a mathematical formula  in which man is only a machine. Instead of rea-  son they hope to find some sort of mystical  experience “upstairs,” apart from reason, to  provide a universal.  

Here we can feel again the whole drift of  the hippie movement and the drug culture as  well. Man hopes to find something in his head  because he cannot know certainly that anything  is “out there.” This is where we are. I am con-  vinced that the generation gap is basically in  the area of epistemology. Before, man had a  romantic hope that on the basis of rationalism  he was going to be able to find a meaning to  life, and put universals over the particulars. But  on this side of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, this hope no longer exists; the  hope is given up. Young people today live in a  generation that no longer believes in the hope  of truth as truth. That is why I use the term  “true truth” in my books to emphasize real  truth. This is not just a tautology. It is an  admission that the word “truth” now means  something that before these four men would  not have been considered truth at all. So, in  desperation, I have coined the expression “true  truth” to make the point, but it is hard to make  it sharp enough for people to understand how  large the problem is.  

  After Kierkegaard, rationality is seen as  leading to pessimism. We can have mathe-  matical knowledge, but man is only a machine,  and any kind of optimism one could have concerning meaning would have to be in the  area of the non-rational, the “upstairs.” So  rationality, including modern science, will lead  only to pessimism. Man is only the machine;  man is only a zero, and nothing has any real  meaning. I am nothing—one particular among  thousands of particulars. No particulars have  meaning, and specifically, man has no  meaning—specifically the particular of myself. I  have no meaning; I die; man is dead. If stu-  dents wonder why they are treated like IBM  cards, it is for no less reason than this. 

 So man makes his leap “upstairs” into all  sorts of mysticisms in the area of  knowledge—and they are mysticisms, because  they are totally separated from all rationality.  This is a mysticism like no previous mysticism.  Previous mysticisms always assumed  something was there. But modern man’s mysticisms are semantic mysticisms that deal  only with words; they have nothing to do with  anything being there, but are simply concerned  with something in one’s own head, or in lan-  guage in one form or another. The modern tak-  ing of drugs began as one way to try to find  meaning within one’s head.

  The present situation is one where we have  in the area of the rational positivism for “scien-  tific fact,” that which leads to mathematical for-  mulae and man as a machine; and in the non-  rational area we find all kinds of non-rational  mysticisms. 

 Now we must turn our attention again to  the “downstairs” positivism. This was the great  hope of rationalistic man, but gradually posi-  tivism has died. I remember when I first lec-  tured at Oxford and Cambridge, one had to  change gears between the two great universities because in Oxford they were still teaching log-  ical positivism, but in Cambridge it was all lin-  guistic analysis. Today it is linguistic analysis  almost everywhere in the world. Gradually,  positivism has died. For a careful study as to  why this has happened, I would recommend  Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge: An  Introduction to Post-critical Philosophy. Polanyi is  a name that hardly ever appears in the popular  press, and he is unknown by many, but he is  one of the dominant thinkers in the intellectual  world. His book shows why positivism is not a  sufficient epistemology, and why the hope of  modern science to have any certain knowledge  is doomed to failure. And truly there is probably  not a chair of philosophy of importance in the  world today that teaches positivism. It is still  held by the undergraduate and by the naive  scientist who, with a happy smile on his face, is building on a foundation that no longer exists.  Now we must notice where we have come. The  first of the modern scientists—Copernicus,  Galileo, up to Newton and Faraday, as White-  head pointed out—had the courage to begin to  formulate modern science because they be-  lieved the universe had been created by a rea-  sonable God, and therefore, it was possible to  find out that which was true about the universe  by reason. But when we come to naturalistic  science, that is all destroyed; positivism is put  in its place, but now positivism itself is de-  stroyed.  

Polanyi argues that positivism is inade-  quate because it does not consider the knower  of what is known. It acts as though the knower  may be overlooked and yet have full knowledge  of certain things, as though the knower knew  without actually being there. Or you might say positivism does not take into account the  knower’s theories or presuppositions. You can  assume that he approaches the thing without  any presuppositions, without any grid through  which he feeds his knowledge.  

But there is the dilemma, as Polanyi  shows, because this simply is not true. There is  no scientist in the positivistic position who  does not feed knowledge through a grid—a the-  ory or worldview through which he sees and  finds. The concept of the totally innocent,  objective observer is utterly naive. And science  cannot exist without an observer.  

When I was younger, people would always  say that science is completely objective. Then,  some years ago in Oxford, it began to be in-  sisted that this is not true, that there is no such  thing as science without the observer. The  observer sets up the experiment and then the observer observes it—then the observer makes  the conclusions. Polanyi says the observer is  never neutral; he has a grid, he has presuppo-  sitions through which he feeds the thing that he  finds. 

 I would go a step further. I have always in-  sisted that positivism has an even more basic  problem. One must always judge a system in  its own total structure; you cannot mix systems,  or you get a philosophical chop suey rather  than any real thought. Within positivism as a  total structure there is no way of saying with  certainty that anything exists. Within the system  of positivism itself, by the very nature of the  case, you simply begin nakedly with nothing  there. You have no reason within the system to  know that the data is data, or that what is reach-  ing you is data. Within the system there is no  universal to give you the right to be sure that what is reaching you from outside is data. The  system of positivism itself gives you no cer-  tainty that anything is there, or that there is re-  ally in the first move any difference between  reality and fantasy. 

 There is a further problem. Not only does  the positivist not know certainly that anything is  there, but even if it is there, he can have no rea-  son to think he knows anything truly nor any-  where near truly. There is no reason within the  system to be sure that there is a correlation be-  tween the observer—that is, the subject—and  the thing—that is, the object. 

 To bring it further up to date, Karl Popper,  who is another of the well-known thinkers of  our own day, has until recently argued that a  thing is meaningless unless it is open to verifi-  cation and falsification. But in a recent book he  has taken a step backwards. He now says there is no possibility of verification. You cannot verify  anything—only falsify. That is, you cannot say  what a thing is; you can only say certain things  that it is not. When Polanyi finished destroying  logical positivism so beautifully, he was left  with total cynicism in the area of epistemology  concerning knowing; in his new book Karl Pop-  per has really come to the same place. In sci-  ence the same problem is involved with much  of the “model” concept. One often finds that  the objective reality is getting dim, and all that  remains is the model in the scientist’s head.

  We are left then with this. Positivism died  and has been replaced everywhere by linguistic  analysis. Positivism did not leave one with  knowledge but only with a set of statistical aver-  ages and approximations, with no certainty that  anything was there finally and no certainty of  continuity in the things that were there. 

One can relate this to Alfred Korzybski’s  and D. David Bourland’s “General Semantics,”  which would not allow the verb “to be” ever to  be used. All their books are written without the  use of the verb “to be.” Why? Because they say  there is no certainty of continuity. I would add  that it seems to me also to be related to the  stream-of-consciousness psychology that ends  up with nothing but a stream-of-consciousness  because it is not sure that an “I” is there. 

 I should like to turn to the philosopher  Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is in many ways the  key to this whole matter. There is an early  Wittgenstein, and there is a later Wittgenstein,  but in his Tractatus, to which we refer here, we  are concerned with the early Wittgenstein. Later  he moved into linguistic analysis, but in this  early stage, he argued that down here in the  world (in the area of reason) you have facts: 

you have the propositions of natural science.  This is all that can be said; it is all that you can  put into language. This is the limit of language  and the limit of logic. “Downstairs” we can  speak, but all that can be spoken is the mathe-  matical propositions of natural science. Lan-  guage is limited to the “downstairs” of reason,  and that ends up with mathematical formu-  lations.

  But, as Bertrand Russell emphasizes,  Wittgenstein was a mystic. Even in his early  days, there were already the elements of mysti-  cism. In the “upper story” he put silence, be-  cause you could not talk about anything out-  side of the known world of natural science. But  man desperately needed values, ethics, mean-  ings to it all. Man needs these desperately, but  there is only silence there. It was at this point  that the title of this present book was born. It is Wittgenstein’s word “silence” that has given me  this title. Wittgenstein says that there is only si-  lence in the area of the things man desperately  needs most—values, ethics, and meanings.  Man knows it needs to be there, he argues, but  he cannot talk or even think about it. Values,  ethics, meanings are all upstairs. No matter  how much we need them, there is only silence.  

From this he plunged into linguistic anal-  ysis, which is now the dominant philosophy all  over the world. It was born at this place in the  desperation that followed when positivism was  seen to be inadequate. The “old” Wittgenstein  and the existentialist really are very, very close  at this particular point, though if you move  from England to the Continent in the study of  philosophy you find that people usually assume  that they are completely at variance. Yet there is  a way of looking at them in which they are very close: at the moment when Wittgenstein says  there is no real value or meaning in all these  things, only silence. 

 For those who know Bergman’s film The  Silence, this will ring a very familiar bell.  Bergman is a philosopher who came to the  place where he decided that there would never  be anything spoken from this upper level, that  God (even as the existentialist would use that  word) was meaningless. At that point he made  the film The Silence, and Bergman himself  changed from that point onward. In other  words, he agreed with what Wittgenstein, the  brilliant philosopher, had said many years be-  fore. So really Bergman and Wittgenstein must  be seen together, and the film The Silence was a  demonstration of this particular point.  

What we are left with, let us notice, is an  anti-philosophy, because everything that makes life worthwhile, or gives meaning to life, or  binds it together beyond isolated particulars, is  in an “upstairs” of total silence.  

Thus we are left with two anti-philosophies  in the world today. One is existentialism, which  is an anti-philosophy because it deals with the  big questions but with no rationality. But if we  follow the later Wittgenstein’s development, we  move into linguistic analysis, and we find that  this also is an anti-philosophy, because where  it defines words in the area of reason, language  leads to language, and that is all. It is not only  the certainty of values that is gone but the cer-  tainty of knowing.  

Speaking of Wittgenstein and his moving  into the area of language, as we have seen, it is  well to mention at this point the later Hei-  degger, who also dealt with language, though in  a very different way. Heidegger was originally an existentialist who believed that there was  only the angst toward the universe that gave the  hope that something was there. But later he  moved on into the view that because there is  language in the universe, we may hope that  there is something there, a nonrational hope of  an ultimate meaning to it all. So Heidegger  says, “Just listen to the poet,” not the content of  the poet who is speaking. In other words, be-  cause there is a being—that is, the poet—who  speaks, we can hope that Being—that is,  existence—has meaning. He adds a different  note in an attempt to make his position empir-  ical and not just abstract. What he did was to  claim that there was, in the far past, in the pre-  Socratic age before Aristotle, a great, golden  language when there was a direct, “first-order  experience” from the universe. This was purely  hypothetical. It had no base historically, but he proposed it as an act of desperation in an at-  tempt to lay a historical foundation on or under  an otherwise purely hypothetical and nebulous  concept.

  We must understand that these things are  not just theoretical in their effects. The later  Heidegger is crucially important in theology, in  the new hermeneutics. These things have their  effect in the student world as well. They are not  abstract. They are changing our world.  

Let us at this point note an important fac-  tor. Whether we are dealing with Heidegger say-  ing, “Listen to the poet,” and offering an upper-  story semantic mysticism that seems to give  hope, or with Wittgenstein who moves in the  opposite direction and is more honest in saying  that there is only silence upstairs, and there-  fore, all we can do is define words, which will  never deal finally with meanings or values; whether we look at Heidegger or Wittgenstein,  who move in opposite directions at the point of  language, the interesting thing is that modern  man has come to conclude that the secret of  the whole thing lies somehow in language. This  is the age of semantics at this very basic point.  

Notice what this means to us. The whole  question with Heidegger and  Wittgenstein—and with Bergman—is whether  there is anyone adequately there in the universe  to speak. We are surrounded by a sea of anti-  philosophy. Positivism, which was an opti-  mistic rationalism and the base of naturalistic  science, has died. It has been proved to be an  insufficient epistemology. But the remaining  alternatives—existentialism on the one hand,  and linguistic analysis on the other—are anti-  philosophies that cause man to be hopeless  concerning ethics, values, meaning, and the certainty of knowledge. So in epistemology we  are surrounded by a sea of anti-philosophy.  Polanyi, for example, who was so magnificent  in destroying logical positivism, ends up with  pure cynicism in the area of epistemology and  knowing. So, as we have seen, does Karl Pop-  per. Modern man is stuck right here. Positivism  is dead and what is left is cynicism as to know-  ing. That is where modern man is, whether the  individual man knows it or not.  

Those who have been raised in the last  couple of decades stand right here in the area  of epistemology. The really great problem is  not, for example, just drugs or amorality. The  problem is knowing. This is a generation of  anti-philosophy people caught in an uncer-  tainty of knowing. In the downstairs area that  modern man ascribes to rationality, and  concerning which he talks with meaningful language, he can see himself only as a ma-  chine, a totally determined machine, and so has  no way to be sure of knowing even the natural  world. But in the area of the upstairs, which he  ascribes to nonrationality, modern man is com-  pletely without categories, for categories are re-  lated to reason and antithesis. In the upstairs  he has no reason to say that this is right as op-  posed to that being wrong (or non-right, per-  haps, to use the more modern idiom). In the  area of morals, in the upstairs he has no way to  say one thing is right as opposed to another  thing being non-right. But notice it is more pro-  found and more horrible. Equally, living up-  stairs he has no way to say that this is true as  opposed to that which is non-true. Don’t you  feel the desperation? This means that he has no  control (and I use the word “control” with the  French meaning, the possibility of checking something), he has no way of having such con-  trol in the upstairs.  

Now we see this vividly in the cinema. I  have dealt with this already at some length in  Escape from Reason and elsewhere, but it is a  necessary part of the picture here, too, and so I  am going to repeat myself. Antonioni’s film  Blowup is an example of this. The main char-  acter is the photographer. He is a perfect  choice because what he is dealing with is not a  set of human values but an impersonal photo-  graphic lens. The camera could be just as easily  hooked up to an impersonal computer as to  this photographer. The photographer runs  around taking his snapshots, a finite human  being dealing only with particulars and totally  unable to put any meaning into them, and the  cold camera lens offers no judgment, no  control in any of what it sees. We recall the posters advertising Antonioni’s film: “Murder  without guilt, love without meaning.” In other  words, there are no categories in the area of  morals—murder is without guilt; but equally,  there are no categories in the human  realm—love is without meaning. So Antonioni  pictures the death of categories. 

 In the area of morality, there is no uni-  versal above; we are left only with particulars.  The camera can click, click, click, and we are left  with a series of particulars and no universals.  That is all that rationalistic man can do for him-  self, Antonioni says, and he is absolutely right.  All the way back to the Greeks, we have for two  thousand years the cleverest men who have  ever lived trying to find a way to put meaning  and certainty of knowledge into the area of  rationalistic man, but man, beginning with  himself with no other knowledge outside of himself, is a total failure, and Antonioni points  it out beautifully in his film.  

But the modern cinema and other art  forms go beyond the loss of human and moral  categories. They point out quite properly that if  you have no place for categories, you not only  lose categories where moral and human values  are concerned, but you also lose any categories  that would distinguish between reality and fan-  tasy. This is seen in many modern films and  novels, for example, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the  Spirits, In the Balance, Rendezvous, and—closest  to our own moment as I write this, and very  well done—the film of Bergman, The Hour of  the Wolf.  

The drug culture enters into this, too. At  the very heart of the thing is the loss of distinc-  tion between reality and fantasy by the taking of  drugs. But even if modern man does not take drugs, he has no categories once he has moved  out of the lower area of reason. Downstairs he  is already dead; he is only a machine, and none  of these things have any meaning. But as soon  as he moves upstairs, into the area of the  upper-story mysticism, all that is left is a place  with no categories with which to distinguish the  inner world from the outer world with any cer-  tainty or to distinguish what is in his head from  that which is in the external world.  

What we are left with today is the fact that  modern man has no categories to enable him  to be at all sure of the difference between what  is real and what is only in his head. Many who  come to us at L’Abri have suffered this loss of  distinction between reality and fantasy.  

There are four groups of categories in-  volved here. We have considered three of these:  first, the moral category; second, the human; third, the categories of reality and fantasy. The  fourth, which we examine now, concerns our  knowing other people.  

The third group of categories is concerned  with moving from inside the head to outside  the head with certainty, and being sure that  there is any difference between reality and fan-  tasy. The fourth group is the reverse: how can  two people meeting ever know each  other—moving from outside their heads into  each other’s heads? How do we have any cate-  gories to enable us to move into the other per-  son’s thought world? This is the modern man’s  alienation; this is the blackness that so many  modern people face, the feeling of being totally  alienated. A couple can sleep together for ten or  fifteen years, but how are they going to get in-  side each other’s heads to know anything about  the other person as a person, in contrast merely to a language machine? It is easy to know the  façade of a language machine, but how can you  get in behind the language and know the per-  son in this kind of setting? This is a very special  modern form of lostness

.  I had this brought strongly to my attention  a number of years ago when a very modern  couple came to L’Abri. We put them in one of  the chalets. They keep everyone awake night  after night because they would talk all the way  through the night until morning—talk, talk, talk.  They were driving everyone crazy. Naturally, I  became intrigued. I wondered what they were  talking about. These people had been together  for a long time; what did they talk about all the  time? When I got to know them, I found out,  and it turned on a new dimension for me as it  dawned on me what the dilemma really is. I  found out that they talked because they were trying desperately to know each other. They  were really in love, and they were talking and  talking in order to try to find one sentence or  one phrase that they could know exhaustively to-  gether so that they could begin to know each  other and to move inside of each other’s heads.  They had no universals in their world, and thus  they had to make a universal by a totally ex-  haustive point of contact. Being finite, they  could not reach this. 

 So how do you begin? You are left with  only particulars. Moving outward, you have no  certainty that there is anything there, outside.  Moving inside, inward, you are trying to move  into somebody else’s head. How do you know  you are touching him? In this setting, human  beings are the only ones who are there. There is  no one else there to speak—only silence. So if  you do not have the exhaustive phrase, how do 
you begin? You just cannot begin by knowing  something partially; it must be exhaustive be-  cause there is no one else anywhere to provide  any universals. The universal, the certainty,  must be in your own conversation, in one ex-  haustive sentence or one exhaustive phrase to  begin with. The problem is in the area of episte-  mology, and it centers on language. 

 Modern man is left either downstairs, as a  machine with words that do not lead either to  values or facts but only to words, or he is left  upstairs, in a world without categories in regard  to human values, moral values, or the differ-  ence between reality and fantasy. Weep for our  generation! Man, made in the image of God  and intended to be in vertical communication  with the One who is there and who is not silent,  and meant to have horizontal communication  with his own kind, has, because of his proud rationalism, making himself autonomous,  come to this place.  

I would end this chapter with a quotation  from Satyricon of Fellini. Toward the end of the  film, a man looks down at his friend, who is  dying a ridiculous death, an absolutely absurd  death. With all his hopes, he has come to a  completely absurd end. Modern man, made in  the image of God and meant to be in communi-  cation with God and then with his kind, has  come to this place of horrible silence. In the  film Fellini has the voice say, “O God, how far  he lies from his destination now.” There was  never a truer word. 

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CHAPTER 4    THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL NECESSITY

    THE ANSWER    

There is a Christian answer to the epistemo-  logical problem. Let us begin by remembering  that the High Renaissance had a problem of na-  ture and grace: their rationalism and humanism  had no way to bind nature and grace together.  They never achieved an answer to the problem, and the dilemma of the twentieth century really  springs from this. Rationalistic and humanistic  men, brilliant as they were, could never find the  way to bind nature and grace together. How-  ever, at about the same time, as I have empha-  sized in my earlier books, the Reformation was  taking place, and the Reformation had no prob-  lem of nature and grace. This is really a tremen-  dous distinction. Nature and grace arose as a  problem out of the rationalistic, humanistic Re-  naissance, and it has never been solved. It is  not that Christianity had a tremendous problem  at the Reformation, and that the reformers  wrestled with all this and then came up with an  answer. No, there simply was no problem of na-  ture and grace to the Reformation, because the  Reformation had verbal, propositional reve-  lation, and there was no dichotomy between  nature and grace. The historic Christian position had no nature and grace problem be-  cause of propositional revelation, and reve-  lation deals with language. 

 In our own generation, we have reached  the core of the problem of language. We have  already discussed the later Heidegger’s use of  language, and also Wittgenstein’s use of lan-  guage and linguistic analysis. But the difference  is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein realized that  there must be something spoken if we are  going to know anything, but they had no one  there to speak. It is as simple and as profound  as that. Is there anyone there to speak? Or do  we, being finite, just gather enough facts,  enough particulars, to try to make our own  universals?

  In the Reformation and the Judeo-Christian  position in general, we find that there is  someone there to speak, and that he has told us about two areas. He has spoken first about  himself, not exhaustively, but truly; and second,  he has spoken about history and about the cos-  mos, not exhaustively, but truly. This being the  case, and as he has told us about both things  on the basis of propositional, verbalized reve-  lation, the Reformation had no nature and grace  problem. They had a unity, for the simple rea-  son that revelation spoke to both areas, thus  the problem simply did not exist. Rationalism  could not find an answer, but God, speaking,  gives the unity needed for the nature and grace  dilemma.  

This brings us to a very basic question. Is  the biblical position intellectually possible? Is it  possible to have intellectual integrity while  holding to the position of verbalized, proposi-  tional revelation? I would say the answer is this:  It is not possible if you hold the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed  system. If you do, any idea of revelation be-  comes nonsense. It is not only that there are  problems in such a case, but that it becomes  absolute nonsense if you really believe in the  uniformity of natural causes in a closed system,  namely, that everything is a machine. Whether  you begin with a naturalistic view in philosophy  or a naturalistic view in theology makes no dif-  ference. For the liberal theologian, it is quite  impossible to think of real propositional reve-  lation. Discussion only about detail is not  going to solve the problem. The big thing has  to be faced, the question of the presuppo-  sitions. If I am completely committed, without  question, to the uniformity of natural causes in  a closed system, then, whether I express myself  in philosophical or religious terms,  propositional, verbalized revelation—knowledge that man has from  God—is a totally unthinkable concept. This is  because by definition everything is a machine,  so naturally there is no knowledge from  outside—from God. If this is your worldview,  and you refuse to consider the possibility of  any other, even though your naturalistic world-  view leads to the dehumanization of man and is  against the facts that we know about man and  things, you are a dead end. You must remem-  ber you can only hold the uniformity of natural  causes in the closed system, which is the  monolithic consensus today, by denying what  man knows about man. But if you insist upon  holding this view, even though it dehumanizes  man, and even though it is opposed to the evi-  dence of what man knows about man, then you  must understand there is no place for  revelation. Not only that, but if you are going to hold to the uniformity of natural causes in the  closed system, against all the evidence (and I  do insist it is against the evidence), then you  will never, never be able to consider the other  presupposition, which began modern science  in the first place: the uniformity of natural caus-  es in a limited system, open to reordering by  God and by man. 

 There is an interesting factor here, and that  is that in modern, secular anthropology (and I  stress secular), the distinction of man against  non-man is made in the area of language. It was  not always so. The distinction used to be made  in the area of man as the toolmaker, so that  wherever you found the toolmaker, it was man  as against non-man. This is no longer true. The  distinction is now language. The secular an-  thropologists agree that if we are to determine  what is man in contrast to what is non-man, it is not in the area of toolmaking, but in the area  of the verbalizer. If it is a verbalizer, it is man. If  it is a non-verbalizer, it is not man.  

We have now concluded that what marks  man as man is verbalization. We communicate  propositional communication to each other in  spoken or written form in language. Indeed, it  is deeper than this because the way we think in-  side of our own heads is in language. We can  have other things in our heads besides lan-  guage, but it always must be linked to language.  A book, for example, can be written with much  figure of speech, but the figure of speech must  have a continuity with the normal use of syntax  and a defined use of terms, or nobody knows  that the book is about. So whether we are talk-  ing about outward communication or inward  thought, man is a verbalizer.  

Now let us look at this argument from a non-Christian view, from the modern man’s  view of the uniformity of natural causes in a  closed system. Here all concept of proposi-  tonal revelation, and especially verbalized,  propositional revelation, is totally nonsense.  The question I have often tried to raise in con-  nection with this presupposition of the unifor-  mity of natural causes in a closed system is  whether it is viable in the light of what we know.  I would insist it is not. It fails to explain man. It  fails to explain the universe and its form. It fails  to stand up in the area of epistemology.

  It is obvious that verbalized propositional  revelation is not possible on the basis of the  uniformity of natural causes. But the argument  stands or falls upon the question: Is the pre-  supposition of the uniformity of natural causes  really acceptable? In my earlier books, and in  the previous chapters of this book, we have considered whether this presupposition is in  fact acceptable, or even reasonable, not upon  the basis of Christian faith, but upon the basis  of what we know concerning man and the uni-  verse as it is.  

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Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, 1947: Flickr, James Vaughn

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Francis Schaeffer above

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Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – August 6 and 9, 1945

From left to right: Robertson, Wigner, Weyl, Gödel, Rabi, Einstein, Ladenburg, Oppenheimer, and Clemence

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Oppenheimer hailed as ‘spectacular’ and ‘epic’ in rave first reviews 

The anticipated Christopher Nolan movie lands next week (July 21) 

By Nick Reilly

On Science and Culture by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Encounter (Magazine) October 1962 issue, was the best article that he ever wrote and it touched on a lot of critical issues including the one that Francis Schaeffer discusses in this blog post!

The first reactions to Oppenheimer have praised the forthcoming film as “spectacular” and one of Christopher Nolan’s best films to date. 

The film, which charts J.Robert Oppenheimer ‘s path to creating the first atomic bomb, premiered last night in Paris to rave early reactions.

As well as Cillian Murphy, who plays the titular theoretical physicist, the film also stars Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife, biologist Kitty Oppenheimer ; Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Lt Leslie Groves Jr, Robert Downey Jr as Atomic Energy Commission boss Lewis Strauss and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s ex-fiancee, Jean Tatlock.

Praising the film, Telegraph critic Robbie Collin wrote on Twitter: “Am torn between being all coy and mysterious about Oppenheimer and just coming out and saying it’s a total knockout that split my brain open like a twitchy plutonium nucleus and left me sobbing through the end credits like I can’t even remember what else.”

He added: “And for all those who’ve groused about the lack of sex in Christopher Nolan’s earlier work…boy oh BOY, are you getting some sex as only Nolan could stage it in this one.”

Similarly full of praise was The Sunday Times’ Jonathan Dean, who wrote: “Totally absorbed in OPPENHEIMER, a dense, talkie, tense film partly about the bomb, mostly about how doomed we are. Happy summer! Murphy is good, but the support essential: Damon, Downey Jr & Ehrenreich even bring gags. An audacious, inventive, complex film to rattle its audience.”

He added: “The downside? The women are badly served – Emily Blunt only once gets out of her stressed mother role. But it’s straight into my Nolan top three, alongside Memento & The Prestige.”

Associated Press writer Lindsey Bahr also described the film as “a spectacular achievement in its truthful, concise adaptation, inventive storytelling and nuanced performances from Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon and the many, many others involved”.

The film is set for release on July 21.

https://www.rollingstone.co.uk/film/news/oppenheimer-hailed-as-spectacular-and-epic-in-rave-first-reviews-31103/

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OPPENHEIMER and EINSTEIN

Passage from ESCAPE FROM REASON chapter 3 by Francis Schaeffer:

EARLY MODERN SCIENCE
Science was very much involved in the situation that has been outlined. What we have to realize is that early modern science was started by those who lived in the consensus and setting of Christianity. A man like J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, who was not a Christian, nevertheless understood this. He has said that Christianity was needed to give birth to modern science.1 Christianity was necessary for the beginning of modern science for the simple reason that Christianity created a climate of thought which put men in a position to investigate the form of the universe.
Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905) states that the great philosophic question is that something exists rather than nothing exists. No matter what man thinks, he has to deal with the fact and the problem that there is something there. Christianity gives an explanation of why it is objectively there. In contrast to Eastern thinking, the Hebrew-Christian tradition affirms that God has created a true universe outside of himself. When I use this term “outside of himself,” I do not mean it in a spatial sense; I mean that the universe is not an extension of the essence of God. It is not just a dream of God. There is something there to think about, to deal with and to investigate which has objective reality. Christianity gives a certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect, a certainty that is

strong enough to build on. Thus the object, and history, and cause and effect really exist.
Further, many of the early scientists had the same general outlook as that of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who said, in Novum Organum Scientiarum: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.”Therefore science as science (and art as art) was understood to be, in the best sense, a religious activity. Notice in the quotation the fact that Francis Bacon did not see science as autonomous, for it was placed within the revelation of the Scriptures at the point of the Fall. Yet, within that “form,” science (and art) was free and of intrinsic value before both men and God.
The early scientists also shared the outlook of Christianity in believing that there is a reasonable God, who had created a reasonable universe, and thus man, by use of his reason, could find out the universe’s form.
These tremendous contributions, which we take for granted, launched early modern science. It would be a very real question if the scientists of today, who function without these assurances and motivations, would, or could, have ever begun modern science. Nature had to be freed from the Byzantine mentality and returned to a proper biblical emphasis; and it was the biblical mentality which gave birth to modern science.
Early science was natural science in that it dealt with natural things, but it was not naturalistic, for, though it held to the uniformity of natural causes, it did not conceive of God and man as caught in the machinery. They held the conviction, first, that God gave knowledge to men—knowledge concerning himself and also concerning the universe and history; and, second, that God and man were not a part of the machinery and could affect the working of the machine of cause and effect. So there was not an autonomous situation in the “lower story.”
Science thus developed, a science which dealt with the real, natural world but which had not yet become naturalistic.

KANT AND ROUSSEAU
After the Renaissance-Reformation period the next crucial stage is reached at the time of Kant (1724-1804) and of Rousseau (1712-1778), although there were of course many others in the intervening period who could well be studied. By the time we come to Kant and Rousseau, the sense of the autonomous, which had derived from Aquinas, is fully developed. So we find now that the problem was formulated differently. This shift in the wording of the formulation shows, in itself, the development of the problem. Whereas men had previously spoken of nature and grace, by this time there was no idea of grace—the word did not fit any longer. Rationalism was now well developed and entrenched; and there was no concept of revelation in any area. Consequently the problem was now defined, not in terms of “nature and grace,” but of “nature and freedom”:
FREEDOM
NATURE
This is a titanic change, expressing a secularized situation. Nature has totally devoured grace, and what is left in its place “upstairs” is the word “freedom.”
Kant’s system broke upon the rock of trying to find a way, any way, to bring the phenomenal world of nature into relationship with the noumenal world of universals. The line between the upper and lower stories is now much thicker— and is soon to become thicker still.
At this time we find that nature is now really so totally autonomous that determinism begins to emerge. Previously determinism had almost always been confined to the area of physics, or, in other words, to the machine portion of the universe.
But, though a determinism was involved in the lower story, there was still an intense longing after human freedom. However, now human freedom was seen as autonomous also. In the diagram, freedom and nature are both now

autonomous. The individual’s freedom is seen not only as freedom without the need of redemption, but as absolute freedom.
The fight to retain freedom is carried on by Rousseau to a high degree. He and those who follow him, in their literature and art, express a casting aside of civilization as that which is restraining man’s freedom. It is the birth of the Bohemian ideal. They feel the pressure “downstairs” of man as the machine. Naturalistic science becomes a very heavy weight—an enemy. Freedom is beginning to be lost. So men, who are not really modern men as yet and so have not accepted the fact that they are only machines, begin to hate science. They long for freedom even if the freedom makes no sense, and thus autonomous freedom and the autonomous machine stand facing each other.
What is autonomous freedom? It means a freedom in which the individual is the center of the universe. Autonomous freedom is a freedom that is without restraint. Therefore, as man begins to feel the weight of the machine pressing upon him, Rousseau and others swear and curse, as it were, against the science which is threatening their human freedom. The freedom that they advocate is autonomous in that it has nothing to restrain it. It is freedom without limitations. It is freedom that no longer fits into the rational world. It merely hopes and tries to will that the finite individual man will be free—and all that is left is individual self-expression.
To appreciate the significance of this stage of the formation of modern man, we must remember that up until this time the schools of philosophy in the West, from the time of the Greeks onward, had three important principles in common.
The first is that they were rationalistic. By this is meant that man begins absolutely and totally from himself, gathers the information concerning the particulars, and formulates the universals. This is the proper use of the word rationalistic and the way I am using it in this book.
Second, they all believed in the rational. This word has no relationship to the word rationalism. They acted upon the basis that man’s aspiration for the validity of reason was well founded. They thought in terms of antithesis. If a certain thing was true, the opposite was not true. In morals, if a thing was right, the opposite was wrong. This is something that goes as far back as you can go in

man’s thinking. There is no historic basis for the later Heidegger’s position that the pre-Socratic Greeks, prior to Aristotle, thought differently. As a matter of fact it is the only way man can think. The sobering fact is that the only way one can reject thinking in terms of an antithesis and the rational is on the basis of the rational and the antithesis. When a man says that thinking in terms of an antithesis is wrong, what he is really doing is using the concept of antithesis to deny antithesis. That is the way God has made us and there is no other way to think. Therefore, the basis of classical logic is that A is not non-A. The understanding of what is involved in this methodology of antithesis, and what is involved in casting it away, is very important in understanding contemporary thought.
The third thing that men had always hoped for in philosophy was that they would be able to construct a unified field of knowledge. At the time of Kant, for example, men were tenaciously hanging on to this hope, despite the pressure against it. They hoped that by means of rationalism plus rationality they would find a complete answer—an answer that would encompass all of thought and all of life. With minor exceptions, this aspiration marked all philosophy up to and including the time of Kant.
MODERN MODERN SCIENCE
Before we move on to Hegel, who marks the next significant stage toward modern man, I want to take brief note of the shift in science that occurred along with this shift in philosophy that we have been discussing. This requires a moment’s recapitulation. The early scientists believed in the uniformity of natural causes. What they did not believe in was the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. That little phrase makes all the difference in the world. It makes the difference between natural science and a science that is rooted in naturalistic philosophy. It makes all the difference between what I would call modern science and what I would call modern modern science. It is important to notice that this is not a failing of science as science; rather that the uniformity of

natural causes in a closed system has become the dominant philosophy among scientists.
Under the influence of the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, the machine does not merely embrace the sphere of physics, it now encompasses everything. Earlier thinkers would have rejected this totally. Leonardo da Vinci understood the way things were going. We saw earlier that he understood that if you begin rationalistically with mathematics, all you have is particulars and therefore you are left with mechanics. Having understood this, he hung on to his pursuit of the universal. But, by the time to which we have now come in our study, the autonomous lower story has eaten up the upstairs completely. The modern modern scientists insist on a total unity of the downstairs and the upstairs, and the upstairs disappears. Neither God nor freedom are there any more—everything is in the machine. In science the significant change came about therefore as a result of a shift in emphasis from the uniformity of natural causes to the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
One thing to note carefully about the men who have taken this direction— and we have now come to the present day—is that these men still insist on unity of knowledge. These men still follow the classical ideal of unity. But what is the result of their desire for a unified field? We find that they include in their naturalism no longer physics only; now psychology and social science are also in the machine. They say there must be unity and no division. But the only way unity can be achieved on this basis is by simply ruling out freedom. Thus we are left with a deterministic sea without a shore. The result of seeking for a unity on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system is that freedom does not exist. In fact, love no longer exists; significance, in the old sense of man longing for significance, no longer exists. In other words, what has really happened is that the line has been removed and put up above everything—and in the old “upstairs” nothing exists.

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Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, 1947: Flickr, James Vaughn

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Francis Schaeffer above

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Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – August 6 and 9, 1945

From left to right: Robertson, Wigner, Weyl, Gödel, Rabi, Einstein, Ladenburg, Oppenheimer, and Clemence

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Oppenheimer’s Reviews Prove It Has the Thing We Love About All Nolan Films

Oppenheimer is all the buzz these days, and the early reviews from the Paris premiere are proving that the movie is all worth it.

Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer has just made its way to Paris, and critics are already loving it. According to the French crème de la crème of the film industry, the movie is “Nolan’s most dense film” to date, comparable only to 2017’s Dunkirk (via a Twitter fan account). 

Oppenheimer reportedly features quite a lot of insightful dialogue, various characters, and in the most Nolan-esque way, several timelines. Viewers would be shocked if the renowned filmmaker ever made a film that didn’t make their brains hurt on the first watch.

Speaking of which, the French critics confirm that Oppenheimer follows the traditional complexity that Nolan’s works are famous for. It does take at least two viewings to understand what is going on, which is why the audiences (us included) will absolutely love it. Honestly, are you even a Nolan stan if you get the message of a movie of his on the first try? Doubtful.

The reviews also compare Oppenheimer to masterpieces from the Golden Age of Hollywood, which was roughly the period between 1927 and 1969. Does this mean that the movie has some scenes in black and white or something?

Critics are praising the film’s casting and editing work, as well as the soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson, known for his work on The Mandalorian, Black Panther, and Venom. By the way, this is not the first time Goransson has worked with Nolan – they previously collaborated on 2020’s Tenet.

Still, there are some drawbacks to Oppenheimer too (not even Nolan is perfect). Lack of female character development and lack of emotion are among the ones that come up more often in the reviews.

You will be able to judge Nolan’s Oppenheimer for yourself soon enough. The biopic thriller is scheduled for release on July 21, 2023.

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OPPENHEIMER and EINSTEIN

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Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, 1947: Flickr, James Vaughn

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On Science and Culture by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Encounter (Magazine) October 1962 issue, was the best article that he ever wrote and it touched on a lot of critical issues including the one that Francis Schaeffer discusses in this blog post!

Francis Schaeffer above

CHAPTER 7 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?

7 The Rise of Modern Science    

Two eras in history came almost simulta-  neously: the High Renaissance and, in contrast  to it, the Reformation. A third phenomenon  which we must deal with began at approx-  imately the same time. It is often called the  Scientific Revolution.  

We can date the rise of modern science with  Copernicus (1475–1543), the Polish astronomer,  and Vesalius (1514–1564) who was Italian. But  this is not to say that nothing that could be  called science preceded them. The Greeks, the  Arabs, and the Chinese had a deep knowledge  of the world. The Chinese, however, developed  few general scientific theories based on their  knowledge, and medieval science largely ac-  cepted Aristotle as the ultimate authority. In the  Arabic world there was much discussion in this area, but it would seem that the principles by  which they comprehended the world were  formed under the combined influence of Aris-  totelianism and Neo-Platonism. The Arabic  scholars did remarkable work, especially in  mathematics—in trigonometry and algebra, for  example, and in astronomy. Omar Khayyam (c.  1048–c. 1122)—who is better known for his  Rubaiyat, in which he carries to its logical con-  clusion the Islamic concept of fate—calculated  the length of the solar year and carried algebra  further than it had been taken before. But with  the Arabs as with medieval Europeans, science  was considered one aspect of philosophy, with  the traditions of the philosophers, especially  Aristotle, ruling supreme. 

 That is, medieval science was based on au-  thority rather than observation. It developed  through logic rather than experimentation, though there were notable exceptions.  

The foundation for modern science can be  said to have been laid at Oxford when scholars  there attacked Thomas Aquinas’s teaching by  proving that his chief authority, Aristotle, made  certain mistakes about natural phenomena.  Roger Bacon (1214–1294) was a part of this Ox-  ford group, but the most important man was  Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) who laid the  philosophical foundations for a departure from  Aristotelian science. Of course other factors  were involved as well, but the challenge to the  authority of Aristotle opened the doors for less  restricted thought. This challenge to the con-  cepts of Aristotle developed fruitfully at the  University of Padua in the fifteenth and six-  teenth centuries.  

When the Roman Church attacked  Copernicus and Galileo (1564–1642), it was not because their teaching actually contained any-  thing contrary to the Bible. The church author-  ities thought it did, but that was because Aris-  totelian elements had become part of church  orthodoxy, and Galileo’s notions clearly con-  flicted with them. In fact, Galileo defended the  compatibility of Copernicus and the Bible, and  this was one of the factors which brought about  his trial.  

Let us return to the fact that the Renais-  sance and Reformation overlap the Scientific  Revolution. Let me emphasize that I am not  implying that the Reformation caused the rise  of modern science. All I am pointing out at this  point is that the High Renaissance, the Refor-  mation, and the Scientific Revolution were  simultaneous at that point in history. To put the  temporal relationship into perspective, let us  consider a few dates: Leonardo da Vinci lived between 1452 and 1519. Luther’s Ninety-five  Theses were hammered to the church door in  1517. Calvin’s Institutes were published in 1536.  In 1546 Luther died. Copernicus, the as-  tronomer, lived from 1473 to 1543 and gave a  preliminary outline of his theory in 1530—that  is, that the earth went around the sun, and not  the sun around the earth. In the 1540s, three  things happened: first, On the Revolutions of the  Heavenly Spheres by Copernicus was published  posthumously; second, Vesalius published his  book On the Structure of the Human Body (this  book is often spoken of as De Fabrica); third,  the first edition of a Latin translation of the col-  lected works of Archimedes (c. 287–212 B.C.)  was published in 1544 in Basel. This introduced  some of the mathematical methods essential to  the development of modern science. 

 Francis Bacon lived from 1561 to 1626. He was a lawyer, essayist, and Lord Chancellor of  England. Though historians now do not give  him as important a place as they used to, he  did, nevertheless, fight a battle against the old  order of scholasticism with its slavish depen-  dence on accepted authorities. He stressed  careful observation and a systematic collection  of information “to unlock nature’s secrets.” In  1609 Galileo began to use the newly invented  telescope and what he saw and wrote about  indicated that Aristotle had been mistaken in  his pronouncements about the makeup of the  universe. Galileo was not the first to rely on ex-  perimental evidence. Danish Tycho Brahe  (1546–1601) had come to similar conclusions  from observation, but Galileo articulated his  findings publicly in his lifetime and in his na-  tive tongue so that all could read what he wrote.  Condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1632, he was forced to recant; but his writings con-  tinued to testify not only that Copernicus was  right, but also that Aristotle was wrong.  

The rise of modern science did not conflict  with what the Bible teaches; indeed, at a crucial  point the Scientific Revolution rested upon  what the Bible teaches. Both Alfred North  Whitehead (1861–1947) and J. Robert Oppen-  heimer (1904–1967) have stressed that modern  science was born out of the Christian world  view. Whitehead was a widely respected math-  ematician and philosopher, and Oppenheimer,  after he became director of the Institute for Ad-  vanced Study at Princeton in 1947, wrote on a  wide range of subjects related to science, in  addition to writing on his own field on the  structure of the atom and atomic energy. As far  as I know, neither of the two men were  Christians or claimed to be Christians, yet both  were straightforward in acknowledging that  modern science was born out of the Christian  world view.  

Oppenheimer, for example, described this  in an article “On Science and Culture” in En-  counter in October 1962. In the Harvard Univer-  sity Lowell Lectures entitled Science and the  Modern World (1925), Whitehead said that  Christianity is the mother of science because of  “the medieval insistence on the rationality of  God.” Whitehead also spoke of confidence “in  the intelligible rationality of a personal being.”  He also says in these lectures that because of  the rationality of God, the early scientists had  an “inexpugnable belief that every detailed  occurrence can be correlated with its an-  tecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exem-  plifying general principles. Without this belief  the incredible labors of scientists would be without hope.” In other words, because the  early scientists believed that the world was cre-  ated by a reasonable God, they were not sur-  prised to discover that people could find out  something true about nature and the universe  on the basis of reason.  

This is a good place to emphasize some  things I am not saying. First, the reason-  ableness of the created order on the basis of its  creation by a reasonable God was not a distinc-  tive emphasis of the Reformation, but was held  in common by both the pre-Reformation  church and the Reformers. The belief White-  head describes would have been common to  both: the heavens and earth had been created  by God, and God is a reasonable God, as the  Bible says he is.  

Second (as was stressed when considering  the art which flowed from the Reformation but should be repeated here), it is not only a Chris-  tian who can paint beauty or who has creative  stirrings in the area of science. These creative  stirrings are rooted in the fact that people are  made in the image of God, the great Creator,  whether or not an individual knows or acknowl-  edges it, and even though the image of God in  people is now contorted. This creativeness—  whether in art, science, or engineering—is a  part of the unique mannishness of man as  made in the image of God. Man, in contrast to  non-man, is creative. A person’s world view,  however, does show through. This includes  what happens to people’s creative stirrings in  science. The world view determines the direc-  tion such creative stirrings will take, and  how—and whether the stirrings will continue or  dry up.  

Third, not all the scientists to be considered in this section were individually consistent  Christians. Many of them were, but they were  all living within the thought forms brought  forth by Christianity. And in this setting man’s  creative stirring had a base on which to con-  tinue and develop. To quote Whitehead once  more, the Christian thought form of the early  scientists gave them “the faith in the possibility  of science.”  

Living within the concept that the world was  created by a reasonable God, scientists could  move with confidence, expecting to be able to  find out about the world by observation and ex-  perimentation. This was their epistemological  base—the philosophical foundation with which  they were sure they could know. (Epistemology  is the theory of knowledge—how we know, or  how we know we can know.) Since the world  had been created by a reasonable God, they were not surprised to find a correlation between  themselves as observers and the thing ob-  served—that is, between subject and object.  This base is normative to one functioning in  the Christian framework, whether he is observ-  ing a chair or the molecules which make up the  chair. Without this foundation, Western mod-  ern science would not have been born.  

Here one must consider an important ques-  tion: Did the work of the Renaissance play a  part in the birth of modern science? Of course  it did. More than that, the gradual intellectual  and cultural awakenings in the Middle Ages  also exerted their influence. The increased  knowledge of Greek thought—at Padua Univer-  sity, for example—opened new doors. Cer-  tainly, Renaissance elements and those of the  Greek intellectual traditions were involved in  the scientific awakening. But to say theoretically that the Greek tradition would have been in it-  self a sufficient stimulus for the Scientific Revo-  lution comes up against the fact that it was not.  It was the Christian factor that made the differ-  ence. Whitehead and Oppenheimer are right.  Christianity is the mother of modern science  because it insists that the God who created the  universe has revealed himself in the Bible to be  the kind of God he is. Consequently, there is a  sufficient basis for science to study the uni-  verse. Later, when the Christian base was lost, a  tradition and momentum had been set in mo-  tion, and the pragmatic necessity of technology,  and even control by the state, drives science  on, but, as we shall see, with a subtle yet  important change in emphasis. 

 Francis Bacon, who could be called the  major prophet of the Scientific Revolution, took  the Bible seriously, including the historic Fall, the revolt of man in history. He said in Novum  Organum Scientiarum (1620), “Man by the Fall  fell at the same time from his state of inno-  cence and from his dominion over creation.  Both of these losses, however, can even in this  life be in some parts repaired; the former by  religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sci-  ences.” Notice that Bacon did not see science  as autonomous. Man, including science, is not  autonomous. He is to take seriously what the  Bible teaches about history and about that  which it teaches has occurred in the cosmos.  Yet, upon the base of the Bible’s teaching, sci-  ence and art are intrinsically valuable before  both men and God. This gave a strong impetus  for the creative stirrings of science to continue  rather than to be spasmodic.  

To continue with the founders of modern  science: Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, lived between 1571 and 1630, the  same time as Galileo. He was the first man to  show that the planets’ orbits are elliptical, not  circular. Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), while a  young professor in his twenties at Cambridge  University, came to the conclusion that there is  a universal force of attraction between every  body in the universe and that it must be calcu-  lable. That force he called gravity. He set this  forth later in The Mathematical Principles of Nat-  ural Philosophy (1687). This became one of the  most influential books in the history of human  thought. By experimenting in Neville’s Court in  Trinity College at Cambridge University, he was  also able to work out the speed of sound by  timing the interval between the sound of an ob-  ject which he dropped, and the echo coming  back to him from a known distance.  loyal to what he believed the Bible teaches. It  has been said that seventeenth-century scien-  tists limited themselves to the how without  interest in the why. This is not true. Newton,  like other early scientists, had no problem with  the why because he began with the existence of  a personal God who had created the universe.  

In his later years, Newton wrote more about  the Bible than about science, though little was  published. Humanists have said that they wish  he had spent all of his time on his science.  They think he wasted the hours he expended on  biblical study, but they really are a bit blind  when they say this. As Whitehead and Oppen-  heimer stressed, if Newton and others had not  had a biblical base, they would have had no  base for their science at all. That is not to say  that one must agree with all of Newton’s  speculations on either metaphysics or doctrine.  

Throughout his lifetime, Newton tried to be But the point is that Newton’s intense interest  in the Bible came out of his view that the same  God who had created the universe had given  people truth in the Bible. And his view was that  the Bible contained the same sort of truth as  could be learned from a study of the universe.  Newton and these other scientists would have  been astonished at a science obsessed with  how the universe functions, but professionally  failing to ask the question “Why?” 

 Though later he became disillusioned with  science, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) made the  first successful barometer and did important  work on the equilibrium of fluids. He was not  content to work only in a laboratory, but took a  tube of mercury up the mountain Puy de Dôme  (in central France) and thus recorded the  changes in the mercury level according to  altitude. He was also a mathematician of note whose work hastened the development of dif-  ferential calculus. By some he is also consid-  ered the greatest writer of French prose who  ever lived. An outstanding Christian, he empha-  sized that he did not see people lost like specks  of dust in the universe (which was now so  much larger and more complicated than people  had thought), for people—as unique—could  comprehend something of the universe. People  could comprehend the stars; the stars compre-  hend nothing. And besides this, for Pascal,  people were special because Christ died on the  cross for them.  

René Descartes (1596–1650) was important  for his emphasis on mathematical analysis and  theory of science. I personally would reject his  philosophic views. But he regarded himself as a  good Catholic, and it was his religion which, in  light of his philosophic views, saved him from solipsism—that is, from living in the cocoon of  himself.  

In the early days of the Royal Society of Lon-  don for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded  in 1662, most of its members were professing  Christians. George M. Trevelyan (1876–1962) in  English Social History (1942) writes, “Robert  Boyle, Isaac Newton and the early members of  the Royal Society were religious men, who repu-  diated the sceptical doctrines of Hobbes. But  they familiarized the minds of their countrymen  with the idea of law in the Universe and with  scientific methods of enquiry to discover truth.  It was believed that these methods would never  lead to any conclusions inconsistent with Bib-  lical history and miraculous religion; Newton  lived and died in that faith.” We must never  think that the Christian base hindered science.  Rather, the Christian base made modern science possible. 

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41 Sir Isaac Newton engraved by Freeman (top)  and Blaise Pascal by Philippe de Champagne.  “… early scientists had no problem with the  why.” Photos courtesy Radio Times London.    

The tradition of Bacon and Newton and the  early days of the Royal Society was strongly  maintained right through the nineteenth cen-  tury. Michael Faraday (1791–1867) made his  great contributions in the area of electricity. His  crowning discovery was the induction of elec-  tric current. Faraday was also a Christian. He  belonged to a group whose position was:  “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where  the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” In the  conviction that knowledge concerning God’s  creation is for all people to enjoy, and not just a  professional elite, he gave famous public  demonstrations of his pioneering work in electricity. James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879),  who, like Faraday, worked with electricity, was  also a believer in a personal God. Indeed, the  majority of those who founded modern sci-  ence, from Copernicus to Maxwell, were func-  tioning on a Christian base. Many of them were  personally Christians, but even those who were  not, were living within the thought forms  brought forth by Christianity, especially the be-  lief that God as the Creator and Lawgiver has  implanted laws in his creation which man can  discover.  

But we may ask, “Isn’t science now in a new  stage, one in which the concept of an orderly  universe is passé?” It is often said that relativity  as a philosophy, as a world view, is supported  by Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) theory of rela-  tivity. But this is mistaken because Einstein’s  theory of relativity assumes that everywhere in the universe light travels at a constant speed in  a vacuum. In other words, we must say with the  utmost force that nothing is less relative  philosophically than the theory of relativity. Ein-  stein himself stood implacably against any  such application of his concepts. We can think  of his often quoted words from the London Ob-  server of April 5, 1964: “I cannot believe that  God plays dice with the cosmos.” 

 One may then ask if Einstein’s views have  not been proven old-fashioned by Werner  Heisenberg’s (1901–1976) principle of uncer-  tainty, or indeterminacy principle (1927), and by  the wide acceptance of the concept of quantum.  The answer again is no. The principle of indeter-  minacy has to do with a certain area of obser-  vation, namely, the location of an object and its  velocity. For example, if we try to establish the  exact position and speed of two atomic particles which are going to collide, we will  never be able to determine exactly how they will  rebound. The physicist cannot have an accurate  observation of both their location and their  velocity simultaneously. The quantum theory of  either light or particles does not lead to the  concept of chance or random universe either.  For example, whether viewed as a wave or a  particle, light does not function at random and  it is an effect which brings forth causes. Even  the far-out theoretical existence of “black holes”  in space, as set forth by John G. Taylor (1931–),  is based on the concept of an orderly universe  and calculations resting on that concept. 

42 Michael Faraday conducting a public exper-  iment. “God’s creation is for all people to  enjoy.” Photo courtesy of The Royal Institution.  

  If an airplane is to fly, it must be con-  structed to fit the order of the universe that ex-  ists. People, no matter what they have come to  believe, still look for the explanation of any happening in terms of other earlier happenings.  If this were not possible, not only would expla-  nations cease, but science could not be used  reliably in technology. It is possible to so func-  tion in our universe that, because there is a uni-  formity of natural causes, a man may travel  hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon  and land within a few feet of his planned desti-  nation, or he may aim an atomic weapon at a  target on the other side of our planet and land it  within ten feet of that target. We know we live in  a universe that is much more complex than  people, including scientists, once thought it to  be, but that is much different from the concept  of a random universe.  

On the Christian base, one could expect to  find out something true about the universe by  reason. There were certain other results of the  Christian world view. For example, there was the certainty of something “there”—an objec-  tive reality—for science to examine. What we  seem to observe is not just an extension of the  essence of God, as Hindu and Buddhist think-  ing would have it. The Christian world view  gives us a real world which is there to study  objectively. Another result of the Christian base  was that the world was worth finding out about,  for in doing so one was investigating God’s cre-  ation. And people were free to investigate na-  ture, for nature was not seen as full of gods and  therefore taboo. All things were created by God  and are open for people’s investigation. God  himself had told mankind to have dominion  over nature, and as we saw from the quotation  from Francis Bacon, to him science had a part  in this. There was a reason for continuing one’s  interest and pressing on. 

43 Assembly of a satellite at the Kennedy Space  Center. “… science could not be used.” Photo  by Mustafa Arshad.   

 In this setting, people’s creative stirrings  had a base from which to develop and to con-  tinue. To quote Bacon again, “To conclude,  therefore, let no man out of weak conceit of  sobriety, or in ill applied moderation, think or  maintain, that a man can search too far or be  too well studied in the book of God’s word, or  in the book of God’s works.” “The book of  God’s word” is the Bible; “the book of God’s  works” is the world which God has made. So,  for Bacon and other scientists working on the  Christian base, there was no separation or final  conflict between what the Bible teaches and sci-  ence. 

 The Greeks, the Moslems, and the Chinese eventually lost interest in science. As we said  before, the Chinese had an early and profound  knowledge of the world. Joseph Needham  (1900–), in his book The Grand Titration  (1969), explains why this never developed into  a full-fledged science: “There was no confi-  dence that the code of Nature’s laws could ever  be unveiled and read, because there was no  assurance that a divine being, even more ratio-  nal than ourselves, had ever formulated such a  code capable of being read.” But for the scien-  tists who were functioning on a Christian base,  there was an incentive to continue searching for  the objective truth which they had good reason  to know was there. Then, too, with the biblical  emphasis on the rightness of work and the dig-  nity of all vocations, it was natural that the  things which were learned should flow over  into the practical side and not remain a matter of mere intellectual curiosity and that, in other  words, technology, in the beneficial sense,  should be born.  

What was the view of these modern scien-  tists on a Christian base? They held to the con-  cept of the uniformity of natural causes in an  open system, or, as it may also be expressed, the  uniformity of natural causes in a limited time  span. God has made a cause-and-effect uni-  verse; therefore we can find out something  about the causes from the effects. But (and the  but is very important) it is an open universe be-  cause God and man are outside of the unifor-  mity of natural causes. In other words, all that  exists is not one big cosmic machine which in-  cludes everything. Of course, if a person steps  in front of a moving auto, the cause-and-effect  universe functions upon him; but God and  people are not a part of a total cosmic machine. Things go on in a cause-and-effect sequence,  but at a point of time the direction may be  changed by God or by people. Consequently,  there is a place for God, but there is also a  proper place for man.  

This carries with it something profound—  that the machine, whether the cosmic machine  or the machines which people make, is neither  a master nor a threat—because the machine  does not include everything. There is some-  thing which is “outside” of the cosmic ma-  chine, and there is a place for man to be man. 

—

Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – August 6 and 9, 1945

From left to right: Robertson, Wigner, Weyl, Gödel, Rabi, Einstein, Ladenburg, Oppenheimer, and Clemence

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In today’s news you will read about Kirk Cameron taking on the atheist Stephen Hawking over some recent assertions he made concerning the existence of heaven. Back in December of 1995 I had the opportunity to correspond with Carl Sagan about a year before his untimely death. Sarah Anne Hughes in her article,”Kirk Cameron criticizes […]

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My correspondence with George Wald and Antony Flew!!!

May 12, 2014 – 1:14 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 41 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Featured artist is Marina Abramović)

January 8, 2015 – 5:23 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 40 Timothy Leary (Featured artist is Margaret Keane)

January 1, 2015 – 4:14 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 39 Tom Wolfe (Featured artist is Richard Serra)

December 25, 2014 – 5:04 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 38 Woody Allen and Albert Camus “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” (Feature on artist Hamish Fulton Photographer )

December 18, 2014 – 4:30 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 37 Mahatma Gandhi and “Relieving the Tension in the East” (Feature on artist Luc Tuymans)

December 11, 2014 – 4:19 am

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December 4, 2014 – 4:10 am

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Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System – Failures in Educatio…

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School Choice and Civil Rights, Part I

In 2009, I groused that modern Democrats were repeating George Wallace’s awful policy of blocking educational opportunities for minority children. Based on this video, the folks at Unleash Prosperity Now are even more upset.

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That’s a hard-hitting video, but opponents of school choice deserve scorn. Especially the hypocrites who send their own kids to private school while fighting against that option for less-advantaged families.

Let’s take a closer look at how school choice is a civil rights issue.

I decided to write about this topic because of the video, but also after seeing this tweet from David Frum, in which he correctly observes that it makes little sense to advocate racial preferences for college admissions while ignoring the fact that minority kids have fallen way behind by the time they are thinking about college.

I’m sure David is right about the importance of a good home environment, but it’s also important to offer minority kids better K-12 schools.

Marc Thiessen shares this concern and, in hisWashington Post column, specifically recommends school choice to help narrow the achievement gap.

But while racial preferences were the wrong solution, the underlying problem is real: We have horrific racial disparities in elementary and secondary education in this country that make it harder for poor Black and Hispanic students to gain admission to, and succeed in, college. And that is because millions are trapped in failing public schools that do not prepare them for college, much less for life — and because their parents do not have the same choices as affluent White parents do to send them to good schools. …Instead of trying to help kids at the end of the process by lowering admissions standards, we should be helping them at the start of the process by giving them access to better schools… Fortunately, conservatives have…been…taking affirmative action of their own to help these kids — passing school choice laws across the country that address the systematic discrimination in our public schools.

By the way, there is already plenty of academic evidence that school choice leads to better academic outcome…and more racial integration.

By contrast, there’s also plenty of evidence that government school do a terrible job with minority students.

Thiessen’s column has some of the grim data.

The state of education for poor minority students in the United States is a disgrace. An analysis of 2021-22 data by Fox News’s Project Baltimore found that 93 percent of students in Baltimore public schools could not do math at grade level, including 23 schools where not a single student could do so. In Illinois, data showed 53 schools — most of them in Chicago — where not a single student could do math at grade level, and 30 where not a single student can read at grade level. In Minnesota, there were 19 schools where not one student could do math at grade level — half of them in Minneapolis-St. Paul — while half of all students in the public school system could not read at grade level. There is simply no excuse for keeping kids trapped in schools like these. …Blame for this debacle lies in large part with teachers’ unions.

Yes, teacher unions deserve much of the blame. But let’s not overlook the role of politicians (including some Republicans) who have made horrible and immoral decisions to put the interests of teacher unions above the interests of poor children.

The School Choice Momentum Continues Nationwide

Jason Bedrick  / @JasonBedrick / May 01, 2023

Man protesting in front of the Minnesota Department of Education to stop the masking and vaccines for the children going to school, St. Paul, Minnesota. November 3, 2021. (Photo: Michael Siluk/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Jason Bedrick@JasonBedrick

Jason Bedrick is a research fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

Education choice is on the march.

So far this year, four states have enacted education choice policies that will be available to all K-12 students. Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, and Utah have now joined Arizona and West Virginia in making every child eligible for education savings accounts (ESAs) or ESA-like policies that allow families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children.

The education choice movement has already made more progress this year than ever before—and the year is far from over. Late last week, three state legislatures gave final approval to bills that would create new education choice policies or significantly expand existing ones.

States With Newly Passed Bills

Indiana

The final budget deal struck by the Republican majorities in both chambers of the Indiana state legislature will expand eligibility for the state’s school voucher program to nearly every K-12 student.

The bill increases the income eligibility threshold from 300% of the free-and-reduced-price lunch program’s income limit to 400%, which means that more than 95% of K-12 students in Indiana will now be eligible.

The budget will also expand eligibility for Indiana’s two other education choice programs, a tax-credit scholarship and an education savings account policy. Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, said that he would “gladly sign” the budget, which passed along party lines.

Montana

The Montana legislature sent the Students with Special Needs Equal Opportunity Act to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk. The bill would create an ESA for students with special needs worth between $5,000 and $8,000.

“Every parent knows each child is unique,” said Gianforte  during his State of the State address in February, “Let’s ensure each child’s education best meets his or her individual needs.”

Gianforte is expected to sign the bill.

South Carolina

The South Carolina legislature sent Republican Gov. Henry McMaster a bill to create the Education Scholarship Trust Fund, which will make ESAs available to low- and middle-income families.

By year three, families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty line (currently $120,000 for a family of four) will be eligible for ESAs worth up to $6,000 that they can use for a wide variety of education expenses, including private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculum, online learning, and more. McMaster is expected to sign the legislation.

“It gives the parent an option,” said the bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Larry Grooms, “It lets the parent decide what is best for their child instead of the government deciding what is best for a child based on the zip code in which you happen to live.”

States Where Progress Is Being Made

Several other states are also making progress toward enacting new education choice policies or significantly expanding existing ones, including:

Nebraska

Earlier this month, Nebraska’s unicameral legislature passed a bill to create a tax credit scholarship policy by a vote of 33-16.

The bill will need to clear one additional legislative hurdle before heading to the desk of Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, who said that the Opportunity Scholarships Act would “give parents, who have kids with the greatest needs, the means to choose a school that serves them best and allows them to thrive.”

New Hampshire

The New Hampshire House of Representatives passed a bill raising the income eligibility threshold for the state’s Education Freedom Accounts from 300% of the federal poverty line to 350%.

The bill is expected to pass the state senate and has the support of Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who declared in his state of the state address in February that the accounts are “finally ensuring that the system works for families and that the system meets the needs of the child — not the other way around.”

North Carolina

On Wednesday, the North Carolina Senate Education Committee passed a bill that would expand the state’s ESA policy to all K-12 students.

“This legislation is about kids first, about families being able to make the best decisions for their child,” declared the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Tricia Cotham, who recently switched her party registration from Democrat to Republican.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has threated to veto the ESA bill, but all of the North Carolina General Assembly’s Republicans have signed onto the bill—enough to override a veto.

If enacted, North Carolina would become the seventh state to make education choice available to the families of all K-12 students.

Oklahoma

After months of negotiations, amendments, and not infrequent recriminations, on Wednesday the Oklahoma House of Representatives passedRepublican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s compromise education plan.

The plan includes a refundable personal-use tax credit worth $5,000 per student in the first year, with priority going to families earning less than $250,000 per year.

A total of up to $200 million in tax credits would be available. By year thee, the tax credits would be worth $6,500 per pupil and the caps on income and total tax credits available would be eliminated. As a part of the deal, the state would spend about $600 million more on public schools, including funds earmarked for teacher pay raises.

Once again, the Oklahoma Senate responded with their own plan. On Thursday, the senate passed a similar proposal that would give larger tax credits (up to $7,500) to lower-income families, which are reduced as income rises to $5,000 per pupil, with a household income cap of $250,000.

In an effort to pressure the legislature to reach a compromise, Stitt has vetoed 20 unrelated bills. In a veto message, Stitt explained his reasoning:

[U]ntil the people of Oklahoma have a tax cut, until every teacher in the state gets the pay raise they deserve, until parents get a tax credit to send their child to the school of their choice, I am vetoing this unrelated policy and will continue to veto any and all legislation authored by Senators who have not stood with the people of Oklahoma and supported this plan.

The Conservative Case Is the Way to Win

The massive wins and tremendous momentum are a vindication of a key shift in advocacy strategy.

Previously, the school choice movement almost exclusively made its case in terms that appealed to libertarians (freedom, markets, competition, etc.) or liberals (equity, expanding opportunity for the most disadvantaged, etc.), but avoided making values-based arguments that appealed to conservatives out of a fear of alienating potential allies on the left.

However, the teachers’ unions’ lock on the Democratic party prevented the school choice movement from garnering meaningful support from Democratic legislators. In years past, Democratic support for choice legislation has rarely been decisive. Moreover, attempting to appeal to the Democrats came at a significant policy cost as it often entailed proposing relatively small school choice programs targeted toward low-income families or other disadvantaged groups.

Meanwhile, the school choice movement was not doing enough to appeal to conservative rural Republicans who were skeptical of school choice. As my colleague Jay P. Greene and I observed recently in National Review, “the best prospects for additional universal programs this year are all in states with Republican governors and legislatures.”

As we explained, the school choice movement could not afford to continue ignoring conservatives:

The main opposition to these programs in Republican-dominated states has come from rural superintendents, who remind their representatives that the local public school is often the largest employer in small towns. They threaten that anything that undermines the biggest industry in their district is politically dangerous for rural legislators.

The solution to this political challenge is to help inform and organize families in suburban and rural areas who are concerned about the kinds of values their children are being taught in public schools. Radical academic content and school practices are not confined to large urban school districts on the coasts. Even in small towns across America’s heartland, public-school staffs have become emboldened to impose values on students that are strongly at odds with those preferred by parents.

Highlighting the ways in which public schools are pushing values and ideas that are anathema to the median red-state parent has increased public support for policies that allow all families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and have public education funding follow their child.

The greater GOP voter intensity in support of education choice has translated into the most massive wave of choice victories ever.

As in years past, nearly all the bills passed in any legislative chamber this year have been with strong Republican support and few if any Democrats. The difference is that there is now sufficient Republican support to pass robust education choice legislation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

A Good Year for Milton Friedman = a Bad Year for Teacher Unions

Back in 2013, I shared some research showing how school choice produced good results. Not just in terms of student achievement, but also benefits for taxpayers as well.

Since then, I’ve shared additional research showing how school choice generates good outcomes.

It seems that some lawmakers have learned the right lessons from these studies. Over the past three years, statewide school choice has been enacted in West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida.

In his Wall Street Journal column, Bill McGurn celebrates this wave of victories.

It’s been a good year for Milton Friedman. The Nobel Prize-winning economist has been dead for nearly two decades. But the moment has come for the idea that may prove his greatest legacy: Parents should decide where the public funds for educating their children go. Already this year, four states have adopted school choice for everyone—and it’s only April.…Florida is the most populous state to embrace full school choice. It follows Iowa, Utah and Arkansas, which passed their own legislation this year. These were preceded by West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022. More may be coming. Four other states—Oklahoma, Ohio, Wyoming and Texas—have legislation pending. …Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, says the mood has shifted. …“I wish Milton Friedman were alive today to see his ideas finally come to fruition,” Mr. DeAngelis says. “The dominos are falling and there’s nothing Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions can do about it.”

My fingers are crossed that Texas approves school choice in the few days, but rest assured I’ll celebrate if Oklahoma, Ohio, or Wyoming is the next domino.

P.S. I’m writing today about school choice in part because I’m in Europe as part of the Free Market Road Show and one of the other speakers is Admir Čavalić, who is both an academic and a member of parliament from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Along with two other scholars, Damir Bećirović, and Amela Bešlagić, he did research on support for school choice in the Balkans. Here are some of the responses from parents.

It’s very encouraging to find Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians agreeing on an issue. Maybe their governments eventually will adopt school choice, thus joining  Sweden, Chile, Canada, and the Netherlands.

A Major Victory for Students in Florida

I almost feel sorry for the union bosses at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

They were upset when West Virginia adopted statewide school choice in 2021 and they got even angrier when Arizona did the same thing in 2022.

So you can only imagine how bitter they are about what’s happened so far in 2023.

• Iowa has approved statewide school choice
• Utah has approved statewide school choice
• Arkansas has approved statewide school choice

But notice I started this column by stating that “I almost felt sorry” for union bosses.

In reality, I’m actually overjoyed that they are having a very bad year. Teacher unions are the leading political force in trying to keep kids trapped in bad schools, an approach that is especially harmful to minorities.

Their bad year just got much worse.

That’s because Florida just expanded its school choice program so that all children will be eligible.

Here’s some of the coverage from Tampa.

A massive expansion of Florida’s school-choice programs that would make all students eligible for taxpayer-backed vouchers is headed to Gov. Ron DeSantis… DeSantis already has pledged to sign the proposal, which includes removing income-eligibility requirements that are part of current voucher programs. …Under the bill, students would be eligible to receive vouchers if they are “a resident of this state” and “eligible to enroll in kindergarten through grade 12” in a public school.

And here’s a report from Orlando.

The Florida Senate gave final approval Thursday to a bill creating universal school vouchers… Republican state lawmakers, who hold a supermajority in the Legislature, want to open state voucher programsthat currently provide scholarships to more than 252,000 children with disabilities or from low-income families to all of the 2.9 million school-age children in Florida… The bill would give any parent the choice to receive a voucher for their child to be used for private school tuition or homeschooling services and supplies — as long as that student was not enrolled in public school. DeSantis has been a supporter of the programs.

Let’s conclude with some excerpts from a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Florida has long been a leader on K-12 choice, vying with Arizona to offer the most expansive options in the nation. On Thursday Florida caught up with Arizona’s universal education savings account program by making its existing school choice offerings available to any student in the state.…The legislation…would remove income eligibility limits on the state’s current school voucher programs. It would also expand the eligible uses for the roughly $7,500 accounts to include tutoring, instructional materials and other education expenses, making these true ESAs rather than simply tuition vouchers. The bill prioritizes lower-income families and provides for home-schooled students to receive funds. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has greatly advanced school choice in his state, is expected to sign.

By the way, the WSJ notes that Georgia may fall short in the battle to give families better educational options. As a rabid Georgia Bulldog who likes nothing better than stomping on the Florida Gators, it galls me that a handful of bad Republican legislators in the Peach State are standing in the proverbial schoolhouse door.

I’ll close by noting that there already are many reasons for Americans to migrate to Florida, such as no state income tax.

School choice means that there will be another big reason to move to the libertarian-friendly Sunshine State.

P.S. I can’t wait to see what this map looks like next year.

Milton Friedman – Educational Vouchers

Censorship, School Libraries, Democracy, and Choice

A big advantage of living in a constitutional republicis that individual rights are protected from “tyranny of the majority.”

• Assuming courts are doing their job, it doesn’t matterif 90 percent of voters support restrictions on free speech.
• Assuming courts are doing their job, it doesn’t matter if 90 percent of voters support gun confiscation.
• Assuming courts are doing their job, it doesn’t matter if 90 percent of voters support warrantless searches.

That being said, a constitutional republic is a democratic form of government. And if government is staying within proper boundaries, political decisions should be based on majority rule, as expressed through elections.

In some cases, that will lead to decisions I don’t like. For instance, the (tragic) 16th Amendment gives the federal government the authority to impose an income tax and voters repeatedly have elected politicians who have opted to exercise that authority.

Needless to say, I will continue my efforts to educate voters and lawmakers in hopes that eventually there will be majorities that choose a different approach. That’s how things should work in a properly functioning democracy.

But not everyone agrees.

A report in the New York Times, authored by Elizabeth Harris and Alexandra Alter, discusses the controversy over which books should be in the libraries of government schools.

The Keller Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, passed a new rule in November: It banned books from its libraries that include the concept of gender fluidity. …recently, the issue has been supercharged by a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups.The organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. …“This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” said Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group focused on education… The restrictions, said Emerson Sykes, a First Amendment litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union, infringe on students’ “right to access a broad range of material without political censorship.” …In Florida, parents who oppose book banning formed the Freedom to Read Project.

As indicated by the excerpt, some people are very sloppy with language.

If a school decides not to buy a certain book for its library, that is not a “book ban.” Censorship only exists when the government uses coercion to prevent people from buying books with their own money.

As I wrote earlier this year, “The fight is not over which books to ban. It’s about which books to buy.”

And this brings us back to the issue of democracy.

School libraries obviously don’t have the space or funds to stock every book ever published, so somebody has to make choices. And voters have the ultimate power to make those choices since they elect school boards.

I’ll close by noting that democracy does not please everyone. Left-leaning parents in Alabama probably don’t always like the decisions of their school boards,just like right-leaning parents in Vermont presumably don’t always like the decisions of their school boards.

And the same thing happens with other contentious issues, such as teaching critical race theory.

Which is why school choice is the best outcome. Then, regardless of ideology, parents can choose schools that have the curriculum (and books) that they think will be best for their children.

P.S. If you want to peruse a genuine example of censorship, click here.

More Academic Evidence for School Choice

Since teacher unions care more about lining their pockets and protecting their privileges rather than improving education, I’ll never feel any empathy for bosses like Randi Weingarten.

That being said, the past couple of years have been bad news for Ms Weingarten and her cronies.

Not only is school choice spreading – especially in states such as Arizona and West Virginia, but we also are getting more and more evidence that competition produces better results for schoolkids.

In a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Professors David N. Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart & Krzysztof Karbownikfound that school choice led to benefits even for kids who remained stuck in government schools.

They enjoyed better academic outcomes, which is somewhat surprising, but even I was pleasantly shocked to see improved behavioral outcomes as well.

School choice programs have been growing in the United States and worldwide over the past two decades, and thus there is considerable interest in how these policies affect students remaining in public schools. …the evidence on the effects of these programs as they scale up is virtually non-existent. Here, we investigate this question using data from the state of Florida where, over the course of our sample period, the voucher program participation increased nearly seven-fold.We find consistent evidence that as the program grows in size, students in public schools that faced higher competitive pressure levels see greater gains from the program expansion than do those in locations with less competitive pressure. Importantly, we find that these positive externalities extend to behavioral outcomes— absenteeism and suspensions—that have not been well-explored in prior literature on school choice from either voucher or charter programs. Our preferred competition measure, the Competitive Pressure Index, produces estimates implying that a 10 percent increase in the number of students participating in the voucher program increases test scores by 0.3 to 0.7 percent of a standard deviation and reduces behavioral problems by 0.6 to 0.9 percent. …Finally, we find that public school students who are most positively affected come from comparatively lower socioeconomic background, which is the set of students that schools should be most concerned about losing under the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.

It’s good news that competition from the private sector produces better results in government schools.

But it’s great news that those from disadvantaged backgrounds disproportionately benefit when there is more school choice.

Wonkier readers will enjoy Figure A2, which shows the benefits to regular kids on the right and disadvantaged kids on the left.

Since the study looked at results in Florida, I’ll close by observing that Florida is ranked #1 for education freedom and ranked #3 for school choice.

P.S. Here’s a video explaining the benefits of school choice.

P.P.S. There’s international evidence from Sweden, Chile, Canada, and the Netherlands, all of which shows superior results when competition replaces government education monopolies.

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Milton Friedman chose the emphasis on school choice and school vouchers as his greatest legacy and hopefully the Supreme Court will help that dream see a chance!

Educational Choice, the Supreme Court, and a Level Playing Field for Religious Schools

The case for school choice is very straightforward.

• Monopoly government school systems cost a lot of moneyand do a bad job.The interests of the education bureaucracy rank higherthan the educational needs of kids. Poor families are especially disadvantaged.
• School choice puts parents in charge. Lots of evidence, including from overseas, shows choice improves educational outcomes. And private schools cost less, so taxpayers also win.

The good news is that there was a lot of pro-choice reform in 2021.

West Virginia adopted a statewide system that is based on parental choice. And many other states expanded choice-based programs.

But 2022 may be a good year as well. That’s because the Supreme Court is considering whether to strike down state laws that restrict choice by discriminating against religious schools.

Michael Bindas of the Institute for Justice and Walter Womack of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference make the case for a level playing field in a column for the New York Times.

In 2002, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution allows school choice programs to include schools that provide religious instruction, so long as the voucher program also offers secular options. The question now before the court is whether a state may nevertheless exclude schools that provide religious instruction. The case, Carson v. Makin, …concerns Maine’s tuition assistance program. In that large and sparsely populated state, over half of the school districts have no public high schools. If a student lives in such a district, and it does not contract with another high school to educate its students, then the district must pay tuition for the student to attend the school of her or his parents’ choice. …But one type of school is off limits: a school that provides religious instruction. That may seem unconstitutional, and we argue that it is. Only last year, the Supreme Court, citing the free exercise clause of the Constitution, held that states cannot bar students in a school choice program from selecting religious schools when it allows them to choose other private schools. …The outcome will be enormously consequential for families in public schools that are failing them and will go a long way toward determining whether the most disadvantaged families can exercise the same control over the education of their children as wealthier citizens.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized on this issue earlier this week.

Maine has one of the country’s oldest educational choice systems, a tuition program for students who live in areas that don’t run schools of their own. Instead these families get to pick a school, and public funds go toward enrollment. Religious schools are excluded, however, and on Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear from parents who have closely read the First Amendment.…Maine argues it isn’t denying funds based on the religious “status” of any school… The state claims, rather, that it is merely refusing to allocate money for a “religious use,” specifically, “an education designed to proselytize and inculcate children with a particular faith.” In practice, this distinction between “status” and “use” falls apart. Think about it: Maine is happy to fund tuition at an evangelical school, as long as nothing evangelical is taught. Hmmm. …A state can’t subsidize tuition only for private schools with government-approved values, and trying to define the product as “secular education” gives away the game. …America’s Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote the First Amendment to protect religious “free exercise.”

What does the other side say?

Rachel Laser, head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, doesn’t want religious schools to be treated equally under school choice programs.

Here’s some of her column in the Washington Post.

…two sets of parents in Maine claim that the Constitution’s promise of religious freedom actually requires the state to fund religious education at private schools with taxpayer dollars — as a substitute for public education. This interpretation flips the meaning of religious freedom on its head and threatens both true religious freedom and public education.…The problem here is even bigger than public funds paying for praying, as wrong as that is. Unlike public schools, private religious schools often do not honor civil rights protections, especially for LGBTQ people, women, students with disabilities, religious minorities and the nonreligious. …If the court were to agree with the parents, it would also be rejecting the will of three-quarters of the states, which long ago enacted clauses in their state constitutions and passed statutes specifically prohibiting public funding of religious education. …It is up to parents and religious communities to educate their children in their faith. Publicly funded schools should never serve that purpose.

These arguments are not persuasive.

The fact that many state constitutions include so-called Blaine amendments actually undermines her argument since those provisions were motivated by a desire to discriminate against parochial schools that provided education to Catholic immigrants.

And it’s definitely not clear why school choice shouldn’t include religious schools that follow religious teachings, unless she also wants to argue that student grants and loans shouldn’t go to students at Notre Dame, Brigham Young, Liberty, and other religiously affiliated colleges.

The good news is that Ms. Laser’s arguments don’t seem to be winning. Based on this report from yesterday’s Washington Post, authored by Robert Barnes, there are reasons to believe the Justices will make the right decision.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court seemed…critical of a Maine tuition program that does not allow public funds to go to schools that promote religious instruction. The case involves an unusual program in a small state that affects only a few thousand students. But it could have greater implications… The oral argument went on for nearly two hours and featured an array of hypotheticals. …But the session ended as most suspected it would, with the three liberal justices expressing support for Maine and the six conservatives skeptical that it protected religious parents from unconstitutional discrimination.

I can’t resist sharing this additional excerpt about President Biden deciding to side with teacher unions instead of students.

The Justice Department switched its position in the case after President Biden was inaugurated and now supports Maine.

But let’s not dwell on Biden’s hackery (especially since that’s a common affliction on the left).

Instead, let’s close with some uplifting thoughts about what might happen if we get a good decision from the Supreme Court when decisions are announced next year.

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think we’re getting close to a tipping point. As more and more states and communities shift to choice, we will have more and more evidence that it’s a win-win for both families and taxpayers.

Which will lead to more choice programs, which will produce more helpful data.

Lather, rinse, repeat. No wonder the (hypocritical) teacher unionsare so desperate to stop progress.

P.S. There’s strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

Free To Choose 1980 – Vol. 06 What’s Wrong with Our Schools? – Full Video
https://youtu.be/tA9jALkw9_Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx6-PHKzHvMu0026t=1024s

Why Milton Friedman Saw School Choice as a First Step, Not a Final One

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Kerry McDonald

EducationMilton FriedmanSchool ChoiceSchooling

Libertarians and others are often torn about school choice. They may wish to see the government schooling monopoly weakened, but they may resist supporting choice mechanisms, like vouchers and education savings accounts, because they don’t go far enough. Indeed, most current choice programs continue to rely on taxpayer funding of education and don’t address the underlying compulsory nature of elementary and secondary schooling.

Skeptics may also have legitimate fears that taxpayer-funded education choice programs will lead to over-regulation of previously independent and parochial schooling options, making all schooling mirror compulsory mass schooling, with no substantive variation.

Friedman Challenged Compulsory Schooling Laws

Milton Friedman had these same concerns. The Nobel prize-winning economist is widely considered to be the one to popularize the idea of vouchers and school choice beginning with his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education.” His vision continues to be realized through the important work of EdChoice, formerly the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, that Friedman and his economist wife, Rose, founded in 1996.

July 31 is Milton Friedman’s birthday. He died in 2006 at the age of 94, but his ideas continue to have an impact, particularly in education policy.

Friedman saw vouchers and other choice programs as half-measures. He recognized the larger problems of taxpayer funding and compulsion, but saw vouchers as an important starting point in allowing parents to regain control of their children’s education. In their popular book, Free To Choose, first published in 1980, the Friedmans wrote:

We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther. (p.161)

They continued:

The compulsory attendance laws are the justification for government control over the standards of private schools. But it is far from clear that there is any justification for the compulsory attendance laws themselves. (p. 162)

The Friedmans admitted that their “own views on this have changed over time,” as they realized that “compulsory attendance at schools is not necessary to achieve that minimum standard of literacy and knowledge,” and that “schooling was well-nigh universal in the United States before either compulsory attendance or government financing of schooling existed. Like most laws, compulsory attendance laws have costs as well as benefits. We no longer believe the benefits justify the costs.” (pp. 162-3)

Still, they felt that vouchers would be the essential starting point toward chipping away at monopoly mass schooling by putting parents back in charge. School choice, in other words, would be a necessary but not sufficient policy approach toward addressing the underlying issue of government control of education.

Vouchers as a First Step

In their book, the Friedmans presented the potential outcomes of their proposed voucher plan, which would give parents access to some or all of the average per-pupil expenditures of a child enrolled in public school. They believed that vouchers would help create a more competitive education market, encouraging education entrepreneurship. They felt that parents would be more empowered with greater control over their children’s education and have a stronger desire to contribute some of their own money toward education. They asserted that in many places “the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location” and suggested that voucher programs would lead to increased integration and heterogeneity. (pp. 166-7)

To the critics who said, and still say, that school choice programs would destroy the public schools, the Friedmans replied that these critics fail to

explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn’t, why anyone should object to its “destruction.” (p. 170)

What I appreciate most about the Friedmans discussion of vouchers and the promise of school choice is their unrelenting support of parents. They believed that parents, not government bureaucrats and intellectuals, know what is best for their children’s education and well-being and are fully capable of choosing wisely for their children—when they have the opportunity to do so.

They wrote:

Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else. Social reformers, and educational reformers in particular, often self-righteously take for granted that parents, especially those who are poor and have little education themselves, have little interest in their children’s education and no competence to choose for them. That is a gratuitous insult. Such parents have frequently had limited opportunity to choose. However, U.S. history has demonstrated that, given the opportunity, they have often been willing to sacrifice a great deal, and have done so wisely, for their children’s welfare. (p. 160).

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Voucher Programs Today

Today, school voucher programs exist in 15 states plus the District of Columbia. These programs have consistently shown that when parents are given the choice to opt-out of an assigned district school, many will take advantage of the opportunity. In Washington, D.C., low-income parents who win a voucher lottery send their children to private schools.

The most recent three-year federal evaluationof voucher program participants found that while student academic achievement was comparable to achievement for non-voucher students remaining in public schools, there were statistically significant improvements in other important areas. For instance, voucher participants had lower rates of chronic absenteeism than the control groups, as well as higher student satisfaction scores. There were also tremendous cost-savings.

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has served over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools.

According to Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and a prolific researcher on the topic, the recent analysis of the D.C. voucher program “reveals that private schools produce the same academic outcomes for only a third of the cost of the public schools. In other words, school choice is a great investment.”

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created in 1990 and is the nation’s oldest voucher program. It currently serves over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools. Like the D.C. voucher program, data on test scores of Milwaukee voucher students show similar results to public school students, but non-academic results are promising.

Increased Access and Decreased Crime

Recent research found voucher recipients had lower crime rates and lower incidences of unplanned pregnancies in young adulthood. On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

According to Howard Fuller, an education professor at Marquette University, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and one of the developers of the Milwaukee voucher program, the key is parent empowerment—particularly for low-income minority families.

In an interview with NPR, Fuller said: “What I’m saying to you is that there are thousands of black children whose lives are much better today because of the Milwaukee parental choice program,” he says. 
“They were able to access better schools than they would have without a voucher.”

Putting parents back in charge of their child’s education through school choice measures was Milton Friedman’s goal. It was not his ultimate goal, as it would not fully address the funding and compulsion components of government schooling; but it was, and remains, an important first step. As the Friedmans wrote in Free To Choose:

The strong American tradition of voluntary action has provided many excellent examples that demonstrate what can be done when parents have greater choice. (p. 159).

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

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Defending Milton Friedman

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What a great defense of Milton Friedman!!!!   Defaming Milton Friedman by Johan Norberg This article appeared in Reason Online on September 26, 2008  PRINT PAGE  CITE THIS      Sans Serif      Serif Share with your friends: ShareThis In the future, if you tell a student or a journalist that you favor free markets and limited government, there is […]

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Film Review – Oppenheimer

• Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
• Jul 13, 2023

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.”Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

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OPPENHEIMER and EINSTEIN

On Science and Culture by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Encounter (Magazine) October 1962 issue, was the best article that he ever wrote and it touched on a lot of critical issues including the one that Francis Schaeffer discusses in this blog post!

Beginning of Chapter 4 of POLLUTION AND THE DEATH OF MAN:

The beginning of the Christian view of nature is the concept of creation: that God was there before the beginning of the space-time continuum and God created everything out of nothing. From this, we must understand that creation is not an extension of the essence of God. Created things have an objective existence in themselves. They are really there. 

Whitehead, Oppenheimer, and others have pointed out that modern science was born out of a surrounding consensus of historic Christianity. Why? Because, as Whitehead has emphasized, Christianity believes that God has created an external world that is really there, and because He is a reasonable God, one can expect to be able to find the order of the universe by reason. Whitehead was absolutely right about this. He was not a Christian, but he understood that there would never have been modern science without the biblical view of Christianity. 

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Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, 1947: Flickr, James Vaughn

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Francis Schaeffer above

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Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – August 6 and 9, 1945

From left to right: Robertson, Wigner, Weyl, Gödel, Rabi, Einstein, Ladenburg, Oppenheimer, and Clemence

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