In 1992 I began to write skeptics letters after reading their books and articles and watching their films and I was introduced to Carl Sagan’s name by a book published in 1968 by Francis Schaeffer.
Francis Schaeffer in his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT (Chapter 4) asserts:
Because men have lost the objective basis for certainty of knowledge in the areas in which they are working, more and more we are going to find them manipulating science according to their own sociological or political desires rather than standing upon concrete objectivity. We are going to find increasingly what I would call sociological science, where men manipulate the scientific facts. Carl Sagan (1934-1996),professor of astronomy and space science at Cornell University, demonstrates that the concept of a manipulated science is not far-fetched. He mixes science and science fiction constantly. He is a true follower of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). The media gives him much TV prime time and much space in the press and magazine coverage, and the United State Government spent millions of dollars in the special equipment which was included in the equipment of the Mars probe–at his instigation, to give support to his obsessive certainty that life would be found on Mars, or that even large-sized life would be found there. With Carl Sagan the line concerning objective science is blurred, and the media spreads his mixture of science and science fiction out to the public as exciting fact.
I was influenced by Francis Schaeffer’s books and films and Adrian Rogers’ sermons when I grew up. I want to make the point that no one influenced the pro-life movement more than Francis Schaeffer!!! Schaeffer energized the movement and that is why it is appropriate that on May 15, 1994, ten years the anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing I would mail a letter to Carl Sagan that get him to ultimately respond to Schaeffer’s views on abortion which I included 3 letters that followed.
Francis Schaeffer and Adrian Rogers
On August 30, 1995, in my letter to Carl Sagan I included my published letter to the editor in that very day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and it appeared under the title THE HUMANIST WORLD VIEW. This got Sagan’s notice and in his letter of December 5, 1995, Sagan disagreed with me concerning the close relationship between atheistic evolutionists and the abortion movement. Actually I wrote: Adrian Rogers, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has rightly said, “Secular Humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together.”
In another letter I noted that Nelson Price in THE EMMANUEL FACTOR (1987) tells the story about Brown Trucking Company in Georgia who used to give polygraph tests to their job applicants. However, in part of the test the operator asked, “Do you believe in God?” In every instance when a professing atheist answered “No,” the test showed the person to be lying. My pastor Adrian Rogers used to tell this same story to illustrate Romans 1:19 and it was his conclusion that “there is no such thing anywhere on earth as a true atheist. If a man says he doesn’t believe in God, then he is lying. God has put his moral consciousness into every man’s heart, and a man has to try to kick his conscience to death to say he doesn’t believe in God.” Sagan’s December 5, 1995 letter to me included the sentence “You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness,” and this may have been his short to this story above possibly.
I disagree with his assertion that there is a widespread ”Problem of Radicals Killing Abortion Doctors.” I know that Sagan included a radical evangelical killer in his book CONTACT, but in reality those are hard to find and I have provided a more detailed response in a past post. Let me briefly respond today with a picture:
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Sagan rightly noted, “New knowledge of embryology, the physicians said, had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening.” This brings me to Bernard Nathanson’s powerful testimony on why he gave up his abortion activities and spent the rest of his life in the pro-life promoting his film THE SILENT SCREAM because of the technology of ultrasound and how, for the first time ever, we could actually see inside the womb.
On January 10, 1996, I wrote my response letter to Carl Sagan and I included an additional insert from Francis Schaeffer that showed The humanist base leads to meaningless and The Bible is God’s revealed truth and it tells us about our origin.
Sagan in 1980
This is the third portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Carl Sagan and last week I posted the second portion and next week I will post the fourth portion.
SECTION #2 If there is no Afterlife, how can there be any lasting meaning to our lives?Should people be asking themselves these types of Questions???
Albert Camus:The fundamental question about life is meaning, anything else is secondary and until that question of meaning is dealt with I really cannot for what the answers are for the other queries.George H. Smith – Religions are successful, not because they provide the correct answers, but because they ask important questions—Questions that concern every human being. What is the nature of the universe? Is there a purpose, or plan, to human existence? …PESSIMISM FROM AGNOSTICS?Nathaniel Brandon: But twentieth-century philosophy has almost totally backed off from the responsibility of offering such a vision or addressing itself to the kind of questions human beings struggle with in the course of their existence. Twentieth-century philosophy typically scorns system building. The problems to which it addresses itself grow smaller and smaller and more and more remote from human experience. At their philosophical conferences and conventions, philosophers explicitly acknowledge that they have nothing of practical value to offer anyone. This is not my accusation; they announce it themselves.During the same period of history, the twentieth century, orthodox religion has lost more and more of its hold over people’s minds and lives. It is perceived as more and more irrelevant. Its demise as a cultural force really began with the Renaissance and has been declining ever since.But the need for answers persists. The need for values by which to guide our lives remains unabated. The hunger for intelligibility is as strong as it ever was. The world around us is more and more confusing, more and more frightening; the need to understand it cries out in anguish.The ENCYCLPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY on page 471 “When Fred Hoyle in his book THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE turns to what he calls ‘the deeper issues’ and remarks that we find ourselves in a ‘dreadful situation’ in which there is ‘scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has ourselves in a ‘dreadful situation’ in which there is ‘scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.’ He is using the word ‘significance’ in this comic sense.”
On Sunday April 11, 1920 in Chicago there was a debate on this question: Has life any meaning? The following 3 quotes were taken from that meeting:Percy Ward -How can life have any meaning at all, when all living things, along with the world on which they live, are doomed to destruction? What meaning can there be to life, when its dominant law is age-long and world-wide struggle for existence? What possible meaning can there be to life, when the chief experience of living things is suffering and pain? Percy Ward – “To what end is comic evolution moving? All this life which rises, step by step, from moneron to main is impotent effort; the road to nowhere. Imagine an artist devoting his entire life to the painting of a wonderful picture; and then, when his picture is completed, tearing it to ribbons, what could be the meaning of such a painter’s behavior? Arthur J. Balfour – “Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, history a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets…Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish, the uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a long space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, will be as though they had never been.”SHOULD TRUE HUMANISTS BE OPTIMISTS OR NIHILISTS?????????Paul Kurtz –
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“The universe is neutral, indifferent to man’s existential yearnings. But we instinctively discover life, experience its throb, its excitement, its attraction. Life is here to be lived, enjoyed, suffered, and endured…Again–one cannot ‘prove’ this normative principle to everyone’s satisfaction. Living beings tend instinctively to maintain themselves and to reproduce beyond ultimate justification. It is a brute fact of our contingent natures; It is an instinctive desire to live.”
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J.P. Moreland – “2 Objections to optimistic humanism: #1 There is no rational justification for choosing it over nihilism. As far as rationality is concerned, it has nothing to offer over nihilism. Therefore, optimistic humanism suffers from some of the same objections we raised against nihilism. Kurtz himself admits that the ultimate values of humanism are incapable of rational justification!!!!!! #2 Optimistic Humanism really answers the question of the meaning of life in the negative, just as nihilism does. For the optimistic humanist life has no objective value or purpose; It offers only subjective satisfaction, one should think long and hard before embracing such a horrible view. If there is a decent case that life has objective value and purpose, then such a case should be given as good a hearing as possible.
R.C. Sproul:Nihilism has two traditional enemies–Theism and Naive Humanism. The theist contradicts the nihilist because the existence of God guarantees that ultimate meaning and significance of personal life and history. Naive Humanism is considered naive by the nihilist because it rhapsodizes–with no rational foundation–the dignity and significance of human life. The humanist declares that man is a cosmic accident whose origin was fortuitous and entrenched in meaningless insignificance. Yet in between the humanist mindlessly crusades for, defends, and celebrates the chimera of human dignity…Herein is the dilemma: Nihilism declares that nothing really matters ultimately…In my judgment, no philosophical treatise has ever surpassed or equaled the penetrating analysis of the ultimate question of meaning versus vanity that is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes
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J. Kerby Anderson– “The cynicism and skepticism in the arts, politics, commerce, and the media all testify to the futility of trying to find wisdom and meaning in a world without wisdom based on ‘the Fear of the Lord’ is folly.
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Ravi Zacharias – “Having killed God, the atheist is left with no reason for being, no morality to espouse, no meaning to life and no hope beyond the grave.”Arthur Ashe – (born in 1943, won U.S.Open in 1968, and Wimbledon in 1975) “If I am just remembered as an exceptional tennis player then my life really was not much.”The next two quotes by Kai Nielson and the next quote by J.P. Moreland were taken from a debate held at Ole Miss on March 24, 1988. This debate was later published by Prometheus Books by the title DOES GOD EXIST? Does death ultimately take away the love we feel for others?Kai Nielson – “If you love someone, whether there is a God or not, that love can go on. It remains intact. It might even be more intact, because if death ends it all, the love relationships between people in life are all the more precious because that is all there is in that respect. So that’s perfectly intact, God or no God. Indeed, as I have just argued, it may even become more important.”
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Clarence Darrow – “I love my friends, but they all must come to a tragic end. Death is more terrible the more one is attached to things in the world.” Do we need a lasting purpose to our lives?Kai Nielson – “There are all those intentions, purposes, goals, and the like that you can figure out and can have. They are what John Rawls called life plans. You can have all these purposes in life even though there is no purpose to life. So life doesn’t become meaningless and pointless if you were not made for a purpose.”
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Francis Schaeffer – “The struggle for modern man is to begin with himself and find a meaning in life. Not just plans in life. It is nothing to have plans in life. Anybody can find plans in life. A child can fill up his time with plans of building tomorrow’s sand castle when today’s have been washed away. There is a difference between finding plans in life and purpose.”J.P.Moreland – “James Rachels says that we don’t need purpose in the sense of an over arching objective purpose to life, but we can have purpose in life, as Nielson says. And he means by that ‘subjective satisfaction,’ things that we find worthwhile to us. Now if this is true, what’s the difference, let’s say between becoming a doctor and feeding the poor and sitting around pinching heads off rats or being a Sisyphus and pushing a rock up and down a hill, or giving your time to flipping tiddlywinks? There is no difference since each of these options could be satisfying and worthwhile to someone.”Marvin Kohl – (Taken from an article in FREE INQUIRY, Spring 81 issue, article entitled, “The Meaning of Life and belief in God” ) “….Belief in beneficent providence is untrue. It is untrue because there is no evidence to warrant the claim that there is a benevolent force behind nature. Not only does the secular humanist deny that we have knowledge about a friend behind the universe; He also denies that we have knowledge about divine or cosmic purpose. The argument in its essential form is simple and, I believe, decisive. Purposes can only be correctly assigned to sentient beings; And since man does not have knowledge that God or other sentient beings govern the universe, He cannot on a cognitive level maintain that the universe has any purpose…The facts also indicate that many, like lady Katharine (Bertrand Russell’s Christian daughter who was quoted earlier in the article), are given insight about the meaning of life, about the chief end of human living, when they believe God makes a disclosure about his own nature and purpose and gently embraces them in his absolute love. In short, it appears to be true that belief in God has had and still has the power to give comfort and consolation to millions of devout believers. Largely because of this, two important claims cannot be easily, if at all, dismissed. They are: (1) that in addition to other basic human needs, there is a need for psychological security, which includes the need to believe in God, or at least believe that the cosmos is guided by a loving purpose; and (2) that this need is often successfully met if a man genuinely recognizes that his goal for living is in, and given to him by, God.”Aldous Huxley – “Science does not retain the sovereignty over metaphysical pronouncements…Science does not have the right to give to me my reason for being and my definition for existence, but I am going to take science’s view because I want this world not to have meaning because it frees me to my own erotic and political desires.”
Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …
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Francis Schaeffer the Founder of the L’Abri community
The Cosmos Is All That Is
Francis Schaeffer wrote in 1981 in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO chapter 3 The Destruction of Faith and Freedom:
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age
FEATURED ARTIST IS AF KLINT
HILMA AF KLINT (1862-1944)
A pioneer of abstract art, Hilma af Klint was a painter who remained – by her own wish – outside any organized artistic movement, and she never exhibited her now famous works during her lifetime. Nevertheless, in recent years she has achieved unanimous recognition as one of the most original figures of modernism.
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]
At the end of this post is a message by RC Sproul in which he discusses Sagan. Over the years I have confronted many atheists. Here is one story below: I really believe Hebrews 4:12 when it asserts: For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the […]
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 […]
In this post we are going to see that through the years humanist thought has encouraged artists like Michelangelo to think that the future was extremely bright versus the place today where many artist who hold the humanist and secular worldview are very pessimistic. In contrast to Michelangelo’s DAVID when humanist man thought he […]
_________ Antony Flew on God and Atheism Published on Feb 11, 2013 Lee Strobel interviews philosopher and scholar Antony Flew on his conversion from atheism to deism. Much of it has to do with intelligent design. Flew was considered one of the most influential and important thinker for atheism during his time before his death […]
Carl Sagan asserted, “Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? What does it mean to be human?” Sagan May not always have the correct conclusions but he did ask some very perceptive questions!
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Anonymous/AP/REX/Shutterstock (6543198a) Sagan Astronomer Carl Sagan is seen in 1986 Carl Sagan 1986, USA
This article first appeared in the Volume 17 / Number 3 Winter 1995 issue of the Christian Research Journal. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org
Pro-lifers in the United States have always assumed that if they could demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the fetus is a human person, then it would be only a matter of time before the courts and legislatures would declare nontherapeutic abortion — the willful destruction of a living fetus — unjustified homicide. Thus the pro-life view would be vindicated and nontherapeutic abortion would once again be illegal.
Even pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973), agrees with this assumption: “If the suggestion of personhood [of the unborn] is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth Amendment].”2 The scholarly and popular literature produced by evangelicals on the issue of abortion seems to make this assumption as well.3
In 1985, however, evangelical philosopher Robert Wennberg4 defended a moderate pro-choice position employing an argument first presented in 1971 by M.I.T. philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. Thomson argued that even if the fetus is a human person, abortion — at least in the early months of pregnancy — is still morally justified.5 Unfortunately, nearly all the books published by evangelical opponents of abortion since the release of Wennberg’s6 — with the exception of recent works by John and Paul Feinberg,7 Keith J. Pavlischek,8 and this writer9 — have failed to address this important argument. This is so despite the fact that this argument — though nearly a quarter of a century old — is now being suggested by a number of legal scholars as a way to circumvent the problems of fetal personhood which they believe were mishandled in Roe v. Wade.
THOS PERSONHOOD DOES NOT MATTER
In her 1971 article, which by 1986 had become “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy,”10 Professor Thomson argued that even if the fetus is fully a human person with a right to life, this does not mean a woman must be forced to use her bodily organs to sustain its life. It is much the same, we are told, as the case in which one does not have a right to use another’s kidney if one’s kidney has failed. Consequently, a pregnant woman’s removal of a fetus from her body, even though it will probably result in its death, is no more immoral than an ordinary person’s refusal to donate his or her kidney to another in need of one, even though this refusal will probably result in the death of the prospective recipient. Thomson illustrates her position with the following story:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you — we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or still longer? What if the director of the hospital says, “Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine that you would regard this as outrageous…(emphasis in original)11
Thomson’s argument makes some very important observations that have gone virtually unnoticed. She is asking, “What happens if, for the sake of argument, we allow the premise [that the unborn are fully human or persons]? How, precisely, are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion that abortion is morally impermissible?”12 That is to say, from the fact that a certain living organism is fully a human person, how does it logically follow that it is never permissible to kill that person?
Although a near unanimous number of ethicists maintain that it is prima facie wrong to kill an innocent human person, a vast majority agree that there may be some circumstances in which taking a human life or letting a human being die is justified, such as in the event of a just war, capital punishment, self-defense, or withdrawing medical treatment. Thomson’s argument, however, includes abortion as one of these justified circumstances. She maintains that, since pregnancy constitutes an infringement by the fetus on the pregnant woman’s personal bodily autonomy, the ordinary abortion — though it results in the death of an innocent human person — is not prima facie wrong.
One can immediately appreciate the appeal of this argument, especially in light of what is arguably the most quoted passage from Roe: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate.”13 The Court, however, did not choose to employ Thomson’s argument, though there is little doubt that it was brought to its attention. Consequently, the Roe Court assumed the major premise of the pro-life position: If the fetus is a person, then abortion in almost every case is unjustified homicide. This, according to a growing number of scholars, was a fatal mistake — a mistake that energized the right-to-life movement.
It appears that the first leading legal scholar to have recommended Thomson’s argument to the judiciary was Michigan Law School professor, Donald Regan, in a law review article that appeared in 1979.14 More recently, Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, whose influence on the Court’s liberal wing is well-known, suggested in a 1990 book on abortion that the Court should have seriously considered Thomson’s argument. Tribe writes: “Perhaps the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe, by gratuitously insisting that the fetus cannot be deemed a ‘person,’ needlessly insulted and alienated those for whom the view that the fetus is a person represents a fundamental article of faith or a bedrock personal commitment…The Court could instead have said: Even if the fetus is a person, our Constitution forbids compelling a woman to carry it for nine months and become a mother” (emphasis in original).15
In his highly acclaimed book, The Culture of Disbelief (1993), Stephen Carter of Yale Law School also recommended Thoinstead of an approach that denies that humanity under cover of the pretense that the definition is none of the state’s business. The conclusion of fetal humanity by no means ends the argument; it simply forces the striking of a balance….My point is that the only fair way around a successful legislative effort to define the fetus as human — the only option that does not deride religiously based moral judgments as inferior to secular ones — is to argue for a right to abortion despite it. And an argument of that kind does not require an attack on the religious motivations of any abortion opponents. (emphasis in original)16
In addition to what has already been mentioned, a subtle philosophical shift seems to have occurred on the Supreme Court as well as society at large, which would indicate an openness to Thomson’s argument. First, in a 1985 article Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recent Clinton appointee to the Supreme Court, chided the Court for appealing to the right to privacy rather than the equal protection clause in its grounding of abortion rights. She argued that since women are unique in their ability to be burdened by pregnancy — giving men a distinct advantage in social and political advancement — women should have the right to abortion based on the constitutional principle that all people, regardless of gender, deserve equal protection under the law. Thus, Ginsburg argued, by permitting women to undergo abortions on the basis of the equal protection clause, the Court would have made a clear stand for gender equity on firm constitutional grounds rather than basing its decision on the controversial and constitutionally vague right to privacy.17
Second, consider the recent physician-assisted suicide cases in Washington state and Michigan, in which a judge in the first case and a jury in the latter acquitted physicians who had killed consenting patients by appealing to an almost absolute principle of personal autonomy. The judge in Washington claimed she could find this principle in the 14th Amendment, the same place Justice Blackmun found the right to privacy in order to constitutionally ground Roe.
Third, in the 1992 case that upheld Roe as precedent, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the Court asserted the following about the meaning of the 14th Amendment:
Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, family relationships, child rearing, and education….These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion by the State.18
Evidently the Supreme Court has chosen to abandon a rigorous defense of philosophical argument in the free marketplace of ideas only to replace it with a New Age mantra (“define your own reality”) in the convenience store of slogans.
In any event, there is little doubt that a shift is occurring in the abortion debate. This shift should be addressed by those who oppose abortion as well as those who, regardless of their stand on abortion, see Thomson’s argument as a threat to the moral force of parental obligations. Let us, therefore, take a critical look at Professor Thomson’s argument.
WHY FETAL PERSONHOOD MATTERS
Although there are a number of problems with Thomson’s argument, the following five are sufficient for the judiciary to reject it from consideration.
(1) Thomson assumes that all moral obligations are voluntary. By using the violinist story as a paradigm for all relationships, Thompson implies that moral obligations must be voluntarily accepted in order to have moral force. Thus she mistakenly infers that all true moral obligations to one’s offspring are voluntary.
Consider the following story. Suppose a couple has a sexual encounter that is fully protected by several forms of birth control short of abortion (condom, the Pill, IUD, and so forth), but nevertheless results in conception. Instead of getting an abortion, the mother of the conceptus decides to bring it to term, although the father is unaware of this decision. After the birth of the child the mother pleads with the father for child support. Because he refuses, she seeks legal action and takes him to court. Although he took every precaution to avoid fatherhood — thus showing that he did not wish to accept such a status — according to nearly all child support laws in the United States he would still be obligated to pay support precisely because of his relationship to this child.19
As Michael Levin points out, “All child-support laws make the parental body an indirect resource for the child. If the father is a construction worker, the state will intervene unless some of his calories he extends lifting equipment go to providing food for his children.”20
For this reason, Keith Pavlischek argues that “given the logic of” Thomson’s argument, “the most reasonable course to follow would be to surrender the defense of paternal support laws for those children whose fathers would rather have had their children aborted.” This “will lend some credence not only to the pro-life insistence on the corollary — that an intimate connection exists between the way we collectively relate to the unborn and the way we relate to our children after birth — but also to the claim made by pro-life feminists that the abortion mentality simply reaffirms the worst historical failings, neglect, and chauvinism ofmales.”21
(2) A case can be made that the unborn does have a prima facie right to her mother’s body. Assuming there is such a thing as a special obligation to one’s children that does not have to be voluntarily accepted to have moral force, it is not obvious that the unborn entity in ordinary circumstances (that is, with the exception of significant life-endangerment to the mother) does not have a natural prima facie claim to her mother’s body. There are several reasons to suppose that the unborn entity does have such a natural claim.
First, unlike Thomson’s violinist, who is artificially attached to another person in order to save his life and is therefore not naturally dependent on any particular human being, the unborn entity is a human being who is by her very nature dependent on her mother. This is how human beings are at this stage of their development.
Second, this period of a human being’s natural development occurs in the womb. This is the journey we all must take and is a necessary condition for any human being’s post-uterine existence. And this fact alone brings out the most glaring disanalogy between the violinist and the unborn: the womb is the unborn’s natural environment whereas being artificially hooked-up to a stranger is not the natural environment for the violinist. It would seem, then, that the unborn has a prima facie natural claim upon its mother’s body.
Third, this same entity, when it becomes a newborn, has a natural claim upon her parents to care for her, regardless of whether her parents “wanted” her (see the above story of the irresponsible father). This is why we prosecute child abusers, people who throw their babies in trashcans, and parents who abandon their children.
Although it should not be ignored that pregnancy and childbirth entail certain emotional, physical, and financial sacrifices on the part of the pregnant woman, these sacrifices are also endemic of parenthood in general (which ordinarily lasts much longer than nine months). And these sacrifices do not justify the execution of troublesome infants and younger children whose existence entails a natural claim to certain financial and bodily goods that are under the ownership of their parents. If the unborn entity is fully human, as Thomson is willing to grant, why should the unborn’s natural prima facie claim to her parents’ goods differ before birth from what it will be after departing her mother’s womb?
Of course, a court will not force a parent to donate a kidney to her dying offspring. But, as in the case of the unconscious violinist, this sort of dependence on another’s body is highly unusual and is not part of the ordinary parental obligations associated with the natural process of human development.
Professor Stephen Schwarz points out that “the very thing that makes it plausible to say that the person in bed with the violinist has no duty to sustain him; namely, that he is a stranger unnaturally hooked up to him, is precisely what is absent in the case of the mother and her child.” That is to say, the mother “does have an obligation to take care of her child, to sustain her, to protect her, and especially, to let her live in the only place where she can now be protected, nourished, and allowed to grow, namely the womb.”22
It is evident that Thomson’s violinist illustration undermines the deep natural bond between mother and child by making it seem no different than two strangers artificially hooked-up to each other so that one can “steal” the service of the other’s kidneys. Rarely if ever has something so human, so natural, so beautiful, and so wonderfully demanding of our human creativity and love been reduced to such a brutal caricature.
This is not to say that the unborn entity has an absolute natural claim to her mother’s body, but simply that she has a prima facie natural claim. For one can easily imagine a situation in which this natural claim is outweighed by other important prima facie values, such as when a pregnancy significantly endangers the mother’s life.
(3) Thomson ignores the fact that abortion is indeed killing and not merely the withholding of treatment. Thomson makes an excellent point in her use of the violinist story; namely, there are times when withholding and/or withdrawing medical treatment is morally justified. For instance, one is not morally obligated to donate his kidney to Fred (one’s next-door neighbor) simply because Fred needs a kidney in order to live. In other words, one is not obligated to risk his life so that Fred may live a few years longer. Fred should not expect that. If, however, one donates a kidney to Fred, one will have acted above and beyond the call of duty, since he will have performed a supererogatory moral act. But this case is not analogous to pregnancy and abortion.
Levin argues that there is an essential disanalogy between abortion and the unplugging of the violinist. In the case of the violinist (as well as one’s relationship to Fred’s welfare), “the person who withdraws [or withholds] his assistance is not completely responsible for the dependency on him of the person who is about to die, while the mother is completely responsible for the dependency of her fetus on her. When one is completely responsible for dependence, refusal to continue to aid is indeed killing.”
For example, “if a woman brings a newborn home from the hospital, puts it in its crib and refuses to feed it until it has starved to death, it would be absurd to say that she simply refused to assist it and had done nothing for which she should be criminally liable.”23 Just as the withholding of food kills the child after birth, in the case of abortion it is the abortion that kills the child. In neither case is there any ailment from which the child suffers and for which highly invasive medical treatment (with the cooperation of another’s bodily organs) is necessary in order to cure this ailment and save the child’s life.
Or consider the case of a person who returns home after work to find a baby at his doorstep (as was the case in the film Three Men and a Baby, starring Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg). Suppose that no one else is able to care for the child, but this person only has to care for the child for nine months. (After that time a couple will adopt the child.) If we assume with Thomson that the fetus is as much a person as you or me, would “withholding treatment” (i.e., nourishment and protection) from this child and its subsequent death be justified on the basis that the homeowner was only “withholding treatment” from a child who could not benefit him, and for whom he did not ask? Is any person, born or unborn, obligated to sacrifice his life because his death would benefit another person?
Is it accurate to think of abortion as the withholding of support or treatment? Professors Schwarz and R. K. Tacelli make the important point that although “a woman who has an abortion is indeed ‘withholding support’ from her unborn child….abortion is far more than that. It is the active killing of a human person — by burning him, by crushing him, by dismembering him.”24 Euphemistically calling abortion the “withholding of support or treatment” makes about as much sense as calling suffocating someone with a pillow the withdrawing of oxygen.
(4) Thomson’s argument ignores family law. Thomson’s argument is inconsistent with the body of well-established family law, which presupposes parental responsibility of a child’s welfare. And, of course, assuming as Thomson does that the unborn are fully human, this body of law would also apply to parents’ responsibility for their unborn children. According to legal scholars Dennis J. Horan and Burke J. Balche, “All 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have child abuse and neglect statutes which provide for the protection of a child who does not receive needed medical care.” They further state that “a review of cases makes it clear that these statutes are properly applied to secure emergency medical treatment and sustenance (food or water, whether given orally or through intravenous or nasogastic tube) for children when parents, with or without the acquiescence of physicians, refuse to provide it.”25 Evidently, “pulling the plug” on a perfectly healthy fetus, assuming that it is a human person, would clearly violate these statutes.
In a case in New York, for example, the court ruled that the parents’ actions constituted neglect when they failed to provide medical care to a child with leukemia: “The parent…may not deprive a child of lifesaving treatment, however well-intentioned. Even when the parents’ decision to decline necessary treatment is based on constitutional grounds, such as religious beliefs, it must yield to the State’s interests, as parens patriae, in protecting the health and welfare of the child.”26 The fact is that the “courts have uniformly held that a parent has the legal responsibility of furnishing his dependent child with adequate food and medical care.”27
It is evident, then, that child-protection laws reflect our deepest moral intuitions about parental and community responsibility and the utter helplessness of infants and small children. These moral scruples are undoubtedly undermined by “brave new notions” of a socially contracted “voluntaristic” family (Thomson’s view). Without such scruples the protection of children and the natural bonds and filial obligations that undergird family life (and, through it, society itself) will become a thing of the past. This seems too high a price to pay for “bodily autonomy.”
(5) Thomson’s argument implies a “macho” view of bodily control, which is inconsistent with true feminism. Some pro-life feminists have pointed out that Thomson’s argument and/or the reasoning behind it, which is supposed to be consistent with feminism, is actually quite anti-feminist.28 In response to a similar argument from a woman’s right to control her own body, one feminist publication asked the question, “What kind of control are we talking about? A control that allows for violence against another human being is a macho, oppressive kind of control. Women rightly object when others try to have that kind of control over them, and the movement for women’s rights asserts the moral right of women to be free from the control of others.” After all, “abortion involves violence against a small, weak and dependent child. It is macho control, the very kind the feminist movement most eloquently opposes in other contexts.”29
Professor Celia Wolf-Devine makes the observation that “abortion has something…in common with the behavior ecofeminists and pacifist feminists take to be characteristically masculine; it shows a willingness to use violence in order to take control. The fetus is destroyed by being pulled apart by suction, cut in pieces, or poisoned.” Wolf-Devine goes on to point out that in terms of social thought…it is the masculine models which are most frequently employed in thinking about abortion. If masculine thought is naturally hierarchical and oriented toward power and control, then the interests of the fetus (who has no power) would naturally be suppressed in favor of the interests of the mother. But to the extent that feminist social thought is egalitarian, the question must be raised of why the mother’s interests should prevail over the child’s….Feminist thought about abortion has…been deeply pervaded by the individualism which they so ardently criticize.30
Despite the recent suggestion in legal scholarship that fetal personhood ought not be the question that determines the morality of abortion, we have seen that if such a move is carried out by the courts the result would be morally and legally disastrous. For this reason, opponents of abortion ought to master the contents of this article and be prepared to engage this old philosophical, though new legal, challenge to human dignity.
Francis J. Beckwith, Ph.D. is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as well as Professor at Large, Simon Greenleaf University (Anaheim, CA) and Senior Research Fellow, Nevada Policy Research Institute. He is the author of Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Baker) and co-editor of The Abortion Controversy: A Reader (Jones & Bartlett). He is on the North American editorial board of the journal Ethics and Medicine.
NOTES
1This article, under a different title, was presented at the conference, “The Christian Stake in Bioethics” (May 19-21, 1994), at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. Another version of this article (titled “From Personhood to Bodily Autonomy: The Shifting Legal Focus in the Abortion Debate”) will be published in Bioethics and the Future of Medicine, ed. Nigel Cameron, David Schiedermayer, and John Kilner (Cumbria, UK: The Pasternoster Press, 1995).
2Justice Harry Blackmun, “The 1973 Supreme Court Decisions on State Abortion Laws: Excerpts from Opinion in Roe v. Wade,” in The Problem of Abortion, 2d ed., ed. Joel Feinberg (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984), 195.
3See, for example, Harold O.J. Brown, Death Before Birth(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1977); Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1979); and John Warwick Montgomery, Slaughter of the Innocents: Abortion, Birth Control, and Divorce in the Light of Science, Law, and Theology (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1981).
4Robert Wennberg, Life in the Balance: Exploring the Abortion Controversy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).
5Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” in The Problem of Abortion, 173-87. This article was originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47-66. All references to Thomson’s article in this article are from the Feinberg book.
6See, for example, R.C. Sproul, Abortion: A Rational Look at an Emotional Issue (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1990); Randy Alcorn, Pro Life Answers to Pro Choice Questions (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1992); and F. LaGard Smith, When Choice Becomes God (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1990).
7John S. Feinberg and Paul D. Feinberg, Ethics in a Brave New World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1993), 66-69.
8Keith J. Pavlischek, “Abortion Logic and Paternal Responsibilities: One More Look at Judith Thomson’s ‘A Defense of Abortion,’” Public Affairs Quarterly 7 (October 1993):341-61.
9Francis J. Beckwith, Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1993), chapter 7.
10According to her editor, William Parent, in Judith Jarvis Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), vii.
11Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” 174-75.
12Ibid., 174.
13Blackmun, 195.
14Donald Regan, “Rewriting Roe v. Wade,” Michigan Law Review 77 (1979).
15Laurence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 135.
16Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 257-58.
17Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade,” University of North Carolina Law Review (1985).
18Justice O’Connor, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Souter in “Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992),” in The Abortion Controversy: A Reader, eds. Louis P. Pojman and Francis J. Beckwith (Boston: Jones & Bartlett, 1994), 54.
19See In the Best Interest of the Child: A Guide to State Child Support and Paternity Laws, eds. Carolyn Royce Kastner and Lawrence R. Young (n.p.: Child Support Enforcement Beneficial Laws Project, National Conference of State Legislatures, 1981).
20Michael Levin, review of Life in the Balance by Robert Wennberg, Constitutional Commentary 3 (Summer 1986):511.
21Pavlischek, 343.
22Stephen D. Schwarz, The Moral Question of Abortion (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1990), 118.
23Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987), 288-89.
24Stephen D. Schwarz and R. K. Tacelli, “Abortion and Some Philosophers: A Critical Examination,” Public Affairs Quarterly 3 (April 1989), 85.
25Dennis J. Horan and Burke J. Balch, Infant Doe and Baby Jane Doe: Medical Treatment of the Handicapped Newborn, Studies in Law and Medicine Series (Chicago: Americans United for Life, 1985), 2.
26In re Storar, 53 N>Y> 2d 363, 380-81, 420 N.E. 2d 64, 73, 438 N.Y.S. 2d 266, 275 (1981), as quoted in ibid., 2-3.
27Horan and Balch, 3-4.
28Although not dealing exclusively with Thomson’s argument, Celia Wolf-Devine’s article is quite helpful. “Abortion and the ‘Feminine Voice,’” Public Affairs Quarterly 3 (July 1989). See also Sidney Callahan, “Abortion and the Sexual Agenda,” Commonweal 113 (25 April 1986); and Janet Smith “Abortion as a Feminist Concern,” in The Zero People, ed. Jeff Lane Hensley (Ann Arbor: Servant, 1983).
29N.a., Sound Advice for All Pro-life Activists and Candidates Who Wish to Include a Concern for Women’s Rights in Their Pro-life Advocacy: Feminists for Life Debate Handbook (Kansas City, MO: Feminists for Life, n.d.), 15-16.
30Wolf-Devine, 86-87.
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Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)
I mentioned earlier that I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan. In his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):
For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.
The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.
Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.
In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?
Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.
Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?
As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?
We believe that many supporters of reproductive freedom are troubled at least occasionally by this question. But they are reluctant to raise it because it is the beginning of a slippery slope. If it is impermissible to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month, what about the eighth, seventh, sixth … ? Once we acknowledge that the state can interfere at any time in the pregnancy, doesn’t it follow that the state can interfere at all times?
Abortion and the slippery slope argument above
This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…
And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder. It would be a flimsy defense if the murderer pleads that this is just between him and his victim and none of the government’s business. If killing a fetus is truly killing a human being, is it not the duty of the state to prevent it? Indeed, one of the chief functions of government is to protect the weak from the strong.
If we do not oppose abortion at some stage of pregnancy, is there not a danger of dismissing an entire category of human beings as unworthy of our protection and respect? And isn’t that dismissal the hallmark of sexism, racism, nationalism, and religious fanaticism? Shouldn’t those dedicated to fighting such injustices be scrupulously careful not to embrace another?
Adrian Rogers’ sermon on animal rights refutes Sagan here
There is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has there been at any former time… : We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; kill deer and elk for sport, leopards for the pelts, and whales for fertilizer; entrap dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; club seal pups to death; and render a species extinct every day. All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we. What is (allegedly) protected is not life, but human life.
Genesis 3 defines being human
And even with that protection, casual murder is an urban commonplace, and we wage “conventional” wars with tolls so terrible that we are, most of us, afraid to consider them very deeply… That protection, that right to life, eludes the 40,000 children under five who die on our planet each day from preventable starvation, dehydration, disease, and neglect.
Those who assert a “right to life” are for (at most) not just any kind of life, but for–particularly and uniquely—human life. So they too, like pro-choicers, must decide what distinguishes a human being from other animals and when, during gestation, the uniquely human qualities–whatever they are–emerge.
The Bible talks about the differences between humans and animals
Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. Nor does human life begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain dating back to the origin of our species, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.
In some animals, an egg develops into a healthy adult without benefit of a sperm cell. But not, so far as we know, among humans. A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg–despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby–why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?
Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages? Many lower animals can be grown in a laboratory from a single body cell. Human cells can be cloned… In light of such cloning technology, would we be committing mass murder by destroying any potentially clonable cells? By shedding a drop of blood?
All human sperm and eggs are genetic halves of “potential” human beings. Should heroic efforts be made to save and preserve all of them, everywhere, because of this “potential”? Is failure to do so immoral or criminal? Of course, there’s a difference between taking a life and failing to save it. And there’s a big difference between the probability of survival of a sperm cell and that of a fertilized egg. But the absurdity of a corps of high-minded semen-preservers moves us to wonder whether a fertilized egg’s mere “potential” to become a baby really does make destroying it murder.
Opponents of abortion worry that, once abortion is permissible immediately after conception, no argument will restrict it at any later time in the pregnancy. Then, they fear, one day it will be permissible to murder a fetus that is unambiguously a human being. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers (at least some of them) are pushed toward absolutist positions by parallel fears of the slippery slope.
Another slippery slope is reached by those pro-lifers who are willing to make an exception in the agonizing case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. But why should the right to live depend on the circumstances of conception? If the same child were to result, can the state ordain life for the offspring of a lawful union but death for one conceived by force or coercion? How can this be just? And if exceptions are extended to such a fetus, why should they be withheld from any other fetus? This is part of the reason some pro-lifers adopt what many others consider the outrageous posture of opposing abortions under any and all circumstances–only excepting, perhaps, when the life of the mother is in danger.
By far the most common reason for abortion worldwide is birth control. So shouldn’t opponents of abortion be handing out contraceptives and teaching school children how to use them? That would be an effective way to reduce the number of abortions. Instead, the United States is far behind other nations in the development of safe and effective methods of birth control–and, in many cases, opposition to such research (and to sex education) has come from the same people who oppose abortions.continue on to Part 3
For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.
The attempt to find an ethically sound and unambiguous judgment on when, if ever, abortion is permissible has deep historical roots. Often, especially in Christian tradition, such attempts were connected with the question of when the soul enters the body–a matter not readily amenable to scientific investigation and an issue of controversy even among learned theologians. Ensoulment has been asserted to occur in the sperm before conception, at conception, at the time of “quickening” (when the mother is first able to feel the fetus stirring within her), and at birth. Or even later.
Different religions have different teachings. Among hunter-gatherers, there are usually no prohibitions against abortion, and it was common in ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the more severe Assyrians impaled women on stakes for attempting abortion. The Jewish Talmud teaches that the fetus is not a person and has no rights. The Old and New Testaments–rich in astonishingly detailed prohibitions on dress, diet, and permissible words–contain not a word specifically prohibiting abortion. The only passage that’s remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there’s a fight and a woman bystander should accidentally be injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine.
Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn’t look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. The Catholic Church’s first and long-standing collection of canon law (according to the leading historian of the Church’s teaching on abortion, John Connery, S.J.) held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already “formed”–roughly, the end of the first trimester.
But when sperm cells were examined in the seventeenth century by the first microscopes, they were thought to show a fully formed human being. An old idea of the homunculus was resuscitated–in which within each sperm cell was a fully formed tiny human, within whose testes were innumerable other homunculi, etc., ad infinitum. In part through this misinterpretation of scientific data, in 1869 abortion at any time for any reason became grounds for excommunication. It is surprising to most Catholics and others to discover that the date was not much earlier.
From colonial times to the nineteenth century, the choice in the United States was the woman’s until “quickening.” An abortion in the first or even second trimester was at worst a misdemeanor. Convictions were rarely sought and almost impossible to obtain, because they depended entirely on the woman’s own testimony of whether she had felt quickening, and because of the jury’s distaste for prosecuting a woman for exercising her right to choose. In 1800 there was not, so far as is known, a single statute in the United States concerning abortion. Advertisements for drugs to induce abortion could be found in virtually every newspaper and even in many church publications–although the language used was suitably euphemistic, if widely understood.
But by 1900, abortion had been banned at any time in pregnancy by every state in the Union, except when necessary to save the woman’s life. What happened to bring about so striking a reversal? Religion had little to do with it.Drastic economic and social conversions were turning this country from an agrarian to an urban-industrial society. America was in the process of changing from having one of the highest birthrates in the world to one of the lowest. Abortion certainly played a role and stimulated forces to suppress it.
One of the most significant of these forces was the medical profession. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, medicine was an uncertified, unsupervised business. Anyone could hang up a shingle and call himself (or herself) a doctor. With the rise of a new, university-educated medical elite, anxious to enhance the status and influence of physicians, the American Medical Association was formed. In its first decade, the AMA began lobbying against abortions performed by anyone except licensed physicians. New knowledge of embryology, the physicians said, had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening.
Their assault on abortion was motivated not by concern for the health of the woman but, they claimed, for the welfare of the fetus. You had to be a physician to know when abortion was morally justified, because the question depended on scientific and medical facts understood only by physicians. At the same time, women were effectively excluded from the medical schools, where such arcane knowledge could be acquired. So, as things worked out, women had almost nothing to say about terminating their own pregnancies. It was also up to the physician to decide if the pregnancy posed a threat to the woman, and it was entirely at his discretion to determine what was and was not a threat. For the rich woman, the threat might be a threat to her emotional tranquillity or even to her lifestyle. The poor woman was often forced to resort to the back alley or the coathanger.
This was the law until the 1960s, when a coalition of individuals and organizations, the AMA now among them, sought to overturn it and to reinstate the more traditional values that were to be embodied in Roe v. Wade.continue on to Part 4
If you deliberately kill a human being, it’s called murder. If you deliberately kill a chimpanzee–biologically, our closest relative, sharing 99.6 percent of our active genes–whatever else it is, it’s not murder. To date, murder uniquely applies to killing human beings. Therefore, the question of when personhood (or, if we like, ensoulment) arises is key to the abortion debate. When does the fetus become human? When do distinct and characteristic human qualities emerge?
Section 8 Sperm journey to becoming Human
We recognize that specifying a precise moment will overlook individual differences. Therefore, if we must draw a line, it ought to be drawn conservatively–that is, on the early side. There are people who object to having to set some numerical limit, and we share their disquiet; but if there is to be a law on this matter, and it is to effect some useful compromise between the two absolutist positions, it must specify, at least roughly, a time of transition to personhood.
Every one of us began from a dot. A fertilized egg is roughly the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The momentous meeting of sperm and egg generally occurs in one of the two fallopian tubes. One cell becomes two, two become four, and so on—an exponentiation of base-2 arithmetic. By the tenth day the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the walls of the uterus.By the third week, around the time of the first missed menstrual period, the forming embryo is about 2 millimeters long and is developing various body parts. Only at this stage does it begin to be dependent on a rudimentary placenta. It looks a little like a segmented worm.By the end of the fourth week, it’s about 5 millimeters (about 1/5 inch) long. It’s recognizable now as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks rather like a newt or a tadpole. This is the end of the first month after conception.By the fifth week, the gross divisions of the brain can be distinguished. What will later develop into eyes are apparent, and little buds appear—on their way to becoming arms and legs.By the sixth week, the embryo is 13 millimeteres (about ½ inch) long. The eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be.By the end of the seventh week, the tail is almost gone, and sexual characteristics can be discerned (although both sexes look female). The face is mammalian but somewhat piglike.By the end of the eighth week, the face resembles that of a primate but is still not quite human. Most of the human body parts are present in their essentials. Some lower brain anatomy is well-developed. The fetus shows some reflex response to delicate stimulation.By the tenth week, the face has an unmistakably human cast. It is beginning to be possible to distinguish males from females. Nails and major bone structures are not apparent until the third month.By the fourth month, you can tell the face of one fetus from that of another. Quickening is most commonly felt in the fifth month. The bronchioles of the lungs do not begin developing until approximately the sixth month, the alveoli still later.
So, if only a person can be murdered, when does the fetus attain personhood? When its face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first trimester? When the fetus becomes responsive to stimuli–again, at the end of the first trimester? When it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in the middle of the second trimester? When the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own in the outside air?
The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they’re arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely humancharacteristics–apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn’t stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.
Sagan’s conclusion based on arbitrary choice of the presence of thought by unborn baby
Other animals have advantages over us–in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought–characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That’s how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.
Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain–principally in the top layers of the convoluted “gray matter” called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn’t begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy–the sixth month.
By placing harmless electrodes on a subject’s head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy–near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this–however alive and active they may be–lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.
Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we’ve rejected the extremes of “always” and “never,” and this puts us–like it or not–on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.
It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973–although for completely different reasons.
Its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade changed American law on abortion. It permits abortion at the request of the woman without restriction in the first trimester and, with some restrictions intended to protect her health, in the second trimester. It allows states to forbid abortion in the third trimester, except when there’s a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. In the 1989 Webster decision, the Supreme Court declined explicitly to overturn Roe v. Wade but in effect invited the 50 state legislatures to decide for themselves.
What was the reasoning in Roe v. Wade? There was no legal weight given to what happens to the children once they are born, or to the family. Instead, a woman’s right to reproductive freedom is protected, the court ruled, by constitutional guarantees of privacy. But that right is not unqualified. The woman’s guarantee of privacy and the fetus’s right to life must be weighed–and when the court did the weighing’ priority was given to privacy in the first trimester and to life in the third. The transition was decided not from any of the considerations we have been dealing with so far…–not when “ensoulment” occurs, not when the fetus takes on sufficient human characteristics to be protected by laws against murder. Instead, the criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called “viability” and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe–no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It’s a very pragmatic criterion.
If the fetus at a certain stage of gestation would be viable outside the womb, the argument goes, then the right of the fetus to life overrides the right of the woman to privacy. But just what does “viable” mean? Even a full-term newborn is not viable without a great deal of care and love. There was a time before incubators, only a few decades ago, when babies in their seventh month were unlikely to be viable. Would aborting in the seventh month have been permissible then? After the invention of incubators, did aborting pregnancies in the seventh month suddenly become immoral? What happens if, in the future, a new technology develops so that an artificial womb can sustain a fetus even before the sixth month by delivering oxygen and nutrients through the blood–as the mother does through the placenta and into the fetal blood system? We grant that this technology is unlikely to be developed soon or become available to many. But if it were available, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? A morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.
And why, exactly, should breathing (or kidney function, or the ability to resist disease) justify legal protection? If a fetus can be shown to think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Do we value breathing more than thinking and feeling? Viability arguments cannot, it seems to us, coherently determine when abortions are permissible. Some other criterion is needed. Again, we offer for consideration the earliest onset of human thinking as that criterion.
Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester–except in cases of grave medical necessity–it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life.What do you think? What have others said about Carl Sagan’s thoughts on
END OF SAGAN’S ARTICLE
Carl Sagan with his wife Ann in the 1990’s
I grew up in Memphis as a member of Bellevue Baptist Church under our pastor Adrian Rogers and attended ECS High School where the books and films of Francis Schaeffer were taught. Both men dealt with current issues in the culture such as the film series COSMOS by Carl Sagan. I personally read several of Sagan’s books. (Francis and Edith Schaeffer pictured below in their home at L’ Abri in Switzerland where Francis taught students for 3 decades.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
nitially an associate professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell where he would spend the majority of his career as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books.[5] He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos, has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries.[6] The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the 1985 science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. His papers, containing 595,000 items,[7] are archived at The Library of Congress.[8]
In the 1st video below in the 45th clip in this series are his words and my response is below them.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
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CARL SAGAN interview with Charlie Rose:
“…faith is belief in the absence of evidence. To believe in the absence of evidence, in my opinion, is a mistake. The idea is to hold belief until there is compelling evidence. If the Universe does not comply with our previous propositions, then we have to change…Religion deals with history poetry, great literature, ethics, morals, compassion…where religion gets into trouble is when it pretends to know something about science,”
I would respond that there is evidence that Christianity is true. The accuracy of the Bible has been confirmed by archaeology over and over in the past and one of the amazing finds was in 1948 when the Dead Sea Scrolls had copies from every Old Testament Book except Esther! One of the most powerful recent discoveries involved the bones of the high priest Caiaphas who questioned Christ in 30 AD.
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.”
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“They are the natural outcome of a change from a Christian World View to a Humanistic one…
The result is a relativistic value system. A lack of a final meaning to life — that’s first. Why does human life have any value at all, if that is all that reality is? Not only are you going to die individually, but the whole human race is going to die, someday. It may not take the falling of the atom bombs, but someday the world will grow too hot, too cold. That’s what we are told on this other final reality, and someday all you people not only will be individually dead, but the whole conscious life on this world will be dead, and nobody will see the birds fly. And there’s no meaning to life.
As you know, I don’t speak academically, shut off in some scholastic cubicle, as it were. I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.” And I must say, that on the basis of what they are being taught in school, that the final reality is only this material thing, they are not wrong. They’re right! On this other basis there is no meaning to life and not only is there no meaning to life, but there is no value system that is fixed, and we find that the law is based then only on a relativistic basis and that law becomes purely arbitrary.
Originally formed as a jazz fusion ensemble under the name Mind Power,[5] Bad Brains developed a very fast and intense punk rock sound which came to be labeled “hardcore”, and was often played faster and more emphatically than many of their peers. The unique factor of the band’s music was the fact that they played more complex rhythms than other hardcore punk bands, also adapting non-punk style guitar riffs and solos into their songs.
Bad Brains have released nine studio albums (one of which is entirely composed of instrumental versions of their early material). The band broke up and reformed several times over the years, sometimes with different singers or drummers. Since 1994, the “classic” lineup of singer H.R. (Human Rights), guitarist Dr. Know, bassist Darryl Jenifer, and drummer Earl Hudson has reunited, albeit performing sporadically. In 2013 keyboardist Jamie Saft was recruited to play with the band, fulfilling both live and studio roles. Chogyi Lama performed with the group live 2016–17.
The band was first founded in 1976 as a jazz fusionensemble called Mind Power[5] in the mold of bands such as Chick Corea‘s Return to Forever and John McLaughlin‘s Mahavishnu Orchestra as well as R&Bmusician Stevie Wonder. In 1977, their friend Sid McCray introduced the band, who were already interested in bands such as Black Sabbath, to punk rock, including the Dickies, the Dead Boys, and the Sex Pistols. Mind Power became obsessed with punk rock and changed their name to “Bad Brains”,[5] after the Ramones song “Bad Brain.”[5]Despite their burgeoning punk sound, the early Bad Brains, after seeing Bob Marley in concert, also delved deep into reggae music and the Rastafari movement.[6] Sid McCray became their first singer but left in the early days of the group’s hardcore punk era, and guitarist H.R. became the band’s new singer.[7]
The band developed an early reputation in Washington D.C., due in part to the relative novelty of an entirely black band playing punk rock at the time, but also due to their high-energy performances and undeniable talent.[6]
In 1979, Bad Brains found themselves the subject of an unofficial ban among Washington D.C. area clubs and performance venues (later addressed in their song, “Banned in D.C.”). The band subsequently relocated to New York City, where they would serve as a catalyst for that city’s burgeoning hardcore scene. At first, the Brains stayed with their NYC friends in the bands The Mad and The Stimulators.[6][8]
In 1986, Bad Brains signed with SST Records and released I Against I,[1] which, in addition to their hardcore punk and reggae sounds, introduced a heavy metal/funk hybrid sound. H.R. provided the vocals for “Sacred Love” over the phone from the Lorton Reformatory while doing a bid for a cannabis charge. Also critically praised was H.R.’s performance: Rick Anderson wrote on AllMusic that, “[HR] digs deep into his bag of voices and pulls them all out, one by one: the frightening nasal falsetto that was his signature in the band’s hardcore days, an almost bel cantobaritone, and a declamatory speed-rap chatter that spews lyrics with the mechanical precision of a machine gun”.[9]The title track’s video was shown on MTV’s then-new 120 Minutes program, for which the band appeared in promotional footage.
Despite the success of I Against I, H.R. quit the band again, taking his brother Earl with him after spending most of 1987 touring. 1988 dates for the I Against Itour were done with Taj Singleton on vocals and Mackie Jayson on drums. In 1988, Bad Brains signed with Caroline Records, who released their fourth album Quickness the following year. Since vocalist H.R. and his brother, drummer Earl Hudson were unavailable for the recording sessions, Quicknesswas originally recorded with Taj Singleton on vocals and Mackie Jayson on drums but before Quicknesswas ready for mastering, H.R. returned, rewrote the lyrics and overdubbed the vocals for Quicknessreplacing Taj Singleton’s recorded lyrics and vocals.
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in the quest for the test to fulfill an achievement
everybody’s only in it for themselves
when the fact of the matter is they just don’t care
to extend a helping hand to anyone else
so tell me why, did you have to lie
and try to make me all confused about the U.S.A.
when the fact of the matter is you just don’t care
to comprehend or understand a single word I say
I don’t want to have I go against I
oh let me tell you
the same old story, no factual glory
I against I against I against I
and I say I don’t like it, and I know I don’t want it
I against I against I against I
almighty watching, almighty watching
I against I against I against I
and I say I don’t like it, and I know I don’t want it
I against I against I against I
I said who’s gonna tell the youth about the drugs
about the drugs, mugs, bugs, and the police thugs
about the rotten stinkin’ rackets and the fantasies
around the nation, around the nations
oh baby what you gonna do
I tell you the truth is looking straight at you
I got a brass continental with a 300 Z
two color t.v.s,now a video too
I got a rest home in Jamaica for my fantasty, for my family
around the nation
around the nations
what you gonna do.
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Notice all the possessions and luxuries mentioned at the end of “I Against I” but the song ends with the words “What you gonna do.” Sounds like they know that is not the answer!!!
In Ecclesiastes 5:11 Solomon again pursues this theme, “When good things increase, those who consume them increase. So what is the advantage to their owners except to look on?” Francis Schaeffer noted: Doesn’t that sound modern? It is as modern as this evening. Solomon here is stating the fact there is no reaching completion in anything and this is the reason there is no final satisfaction. There is simply no place to stop. It is impossible when laying up wealth for oneself when to stop. It is impossible to have the satisfaction of completion.
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OUTLINE OF ECCLESIATES BY SCHAEFFER
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William Lane Craig on Man’s predicament if God doesn’t exist
Read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. During this entire play two men carry on trivial conversation while waiting for a third man to arrive, who never does. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying; we just kill time waiting—for what, we don’t know.
Thus, if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.
Francis Schaeffer looks at Nihilism of Solomon and the causes of it!!!
Notes on Ecclesiastes by Francis Schaeffer
Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes and he is truly an universal man like Leonardo da Vinci.
Two men of the Renaissance stand above all others –Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and it is in them that one can perhaps grasp a view of the ultimate conclusion of humanism for man. Michelangelo was unequaled as a sculptor in the Renaissance and arguably no one has ever matched his talents.
The other giant of the Renaissance period was Leonardo da Vinci – the perfect Renaissance Man, the man who could do almost anything and does it better than most anyone else. As an inventor, an engineer, an anatomist, an architect, an artist, a chemist, a mathematician, he was almost without equal. It was perhaps his mathematics that lead da Vinci to come to his understanding of the ultimate meaning of Humanism. Leonardo is generally accepted as the first modern mathematician. He not only knew mathematics abstractly but applied it in his Notebooks to all manner of engineering problems. He was one of the unique geniuses of history, and in his brilliance he perceived that beginning humanistically with mathematics one only had particulars. He understood that man beginning from himself would never be able to come to meaning on the basis of mathematics. And he knew that having only individual things, particulars, one never could come to universals or meaning and thus one only ends with mechanics. In this he saw ahead to where our generation has come: everything, including man, is the machine.
Leonardo da Vinci compares well to Solomon and they both were universal men searching for the meaning in life. Solomon was searching for a meaning in the midst of the details of life.His struggle was to find the meaning of life. Not just plans in life.Anybody can find plans in life. A child can fill up his time with plans of building tomorrow’s sand castle when today’s has been washed away. There is a difference between finding plans in life and purpose in life. Humanism since the Renaissance and onward has never found it and it has never found it since. Modern man has not found it and it has always got worse and darker in a very real way.
We have here the declaration of Solomon’s universality:
1 Kings 4:30-34
English Standard Version (ESV)
30 so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt.31 For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations.32 He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005.33 He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.34 And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.
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Here is the universal man and his genius. Solomon is the universal man with a empire at his disposal. Solomon had it all.
Ecclesiastes 1:3
English Standard Version (ESV)
3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes.
(Added by me:The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.” )
Man is caught in the cycle
Ecclesiastes 1:1-7
English Standard Version (ESV)
All Is Vanity
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
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Solomon is showing a high degree of comprehension of evaporation and the results of it. Seeing also in reality nothing changes. There is change but always in a set framework and that is cycle. You can relate this to the concepts of modern man. Ecclesiastes is the only pessimistic book in the Bible and that is because of the place where Solomon limits himself. He limits himself to the question of human life, life under the sun between birth and death and the answers this would give.
Ecclesiastes 1:4
English Standard Version (ESV)
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
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Ecclesiastes 4:16
English Standard Version (ESV)
16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
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In verses 1:4 and 4:16 Solomon places man in the cycle. He doesn’t place man outside of the cycle. Man doesn’t escape the cycle. Man is only cycle. Birth and death and youth and old age. With this in mind Solomon makes this statement.
Ecclesiastes 6:12
12 For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?
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There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man. I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing and I felt as man as God. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.
THIS IS SOLOMON’S FEELING TOO. The universal man, Solomon, beyond our intelligence with an empire at his disposal with the opportunity of observation so he could recite these words here in Ecclesiastes 6:12, “For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?”
Lack of Satisfaction in life
In Ecclesiastes 1:8 he drives this home when he states, “All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor is the ear filled with hearing.” Solomon is stating here the fact that there is no final satisfaction because you don’t get to the end of the thing. THERE IS NO FINAL SATISFACTION. This is related to Leonardo da Vinci’s similar search for universals and then meaning in life.
In Ecclesiastes 5:11 Solomon again pursues this theme, “When good things increase, those who consume them increase. So what is the advantage to their owners except to look on?” Doesn’t that sound modern? It is as modern as this evening. Solomon here is stating the fact there is no reaching completion in anything and this is the reason there is no final satisfaction. There is simply no place to stop. It is impossible when laying up wealth for oneself when to stop. It is impossible to have the satisfaction of completion.
Pursuing Learning
Now let us look down the details of his searching.
In Ecclesiastes 1: 13a we have the details of the universal man’s procedure. “And I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven.”
So like any sensible man the instrument that is used is INTELLECT, and RAITIONALITY, and LOGIC. It is to be noted that even men who despise these in their theories begin and use them or they could not speak. There is no other way to begin except in the way they which man is and that is rational and intellectual with movements of that is logical within him. As a Christian I must say gently in passing that is the way God made him.
So we find first of all Solomon turned to WISDOM and logic. Wisdom is not to be confused with knowledge. A man may have great knowledge and no wisdom. Wisdom is the use of rationality and logic. A man can be very wise and have limited knowledge. Here he turns to wisdom in all that implies and the total rationality of man.
Works of Men done Under the Sun. A look at Solomon’s labor and his luxuries
After wisdom Solomon comes to the great WORKS of men. Ecclesiastes 1:14, “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is [p]vanity and striving after wind.” Solomon is the man with an empire at this disposal that speaks. This is the man who has the copper refineries in Ezion-geber. This is the man who made the stables across his empire. This is the man who built the temple in Jerusalem. This is the man who stands on the world trade routes. He is not a provincial. He knew what was happening on the Phonetician coast and he knew what was happening in Egypt. There is no doubt he already knew something of building. This is Solomon and he pursues the greatness of his own construction and his conclusion is VANITY AND VEXATION OF SPIRIT.
Ecclesiastes 2:18-20
18 Thus I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me.19 And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun. This too is vanity.20 Therefore I completely despaired of all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun.
He looked at the works of his hands, great and multiplied by his wealth and his position and he shrugged his shoulders.
Ecclesiastes 2:22-23
22 For what does a man get in all his labor and in his striving with which he labors under the sun?23 Because all his days his task is painful and grievous; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is vanity.
Man can not rest and yet he is never done and yet the things which he builds will out live him. If one wants an ironical three phrases these are they. There is a Dutch saying, “The tailor makes many suits but one day he will make a suit that will outlast the tailor.”
God has put eternity in our hearts but we can not know the beginning or the end of the thing from a vantage point of UNDER THE SUN
Ecclesiastes 1:16-18
16 I said to myself, “Behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge.”17 And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after wind.18 Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.
Solomon points out that you can not know the beginnings or what follows:
Ecclesiastes 3:11
11 He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
Ecclesiastes 1:11
11 There is no remembrance of earlier things; And also of the later things which will occur, There will be for them no remembrance among those who will come later still.
Ecclesiastes 2:16
16 For there is no lasting remembrance of the wise man as with the fool, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man and the fool alike die!
You bring together here the factor of the beginning and you can’t know what immediately follows after your death and of course you can’t know the final ends. What do you do and the answer is to get drunk and this was not thought of in the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KAHAYYAM:
Ecclesiastes 2:1-3
I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure. So enjoy yourself.” And behold, it too was futility.2 I said of laughter, “It is madness,” and of pleasure, “What does it accomplish?”3 I explored with my mind how to stimulate my body with wine while my mind was guiding me wisely, and how to take hold of folly, until I could see what good there is for the sons of men to do under heaven the few years of their lives.
You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Translation by Edward Fitzgerald)
A perfectly good philosophy coming out of Islam, but Solomon is not the first man that thought of it nor the last. In light of what has been presented by Solomon is the solution just to get intoxicated and black the think out? So many people have taken to alcohol and the dope which so often follows in our day. This approach is incomplete, temporary and immature. Papa Hemingway can find the champagne of Paris sufficient for a time, but one he left his youth he never found it sufficient again. He had a lifetime spent looking back to Paris and that champagne and never finding it enough. It is no solution and Solomon says so too.
——————
In 1978 I heard the song “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas when it rose to #6 on the charts. That song told me thatKerry Livgren the writer of that song and a member of Kansas had come to the same conclusion that Solomon had. I remember mentioning to my friends at church that we may soon see some members of Kansas become Christians because their search for the meaning of life had obviously come up empty even though they had risen from being an unknown band to the top of the music business and had all the wealth and fame that came with that. Furthermore, like Solomon and Coldplay, they realized death comes to everyone and “there must be something more.”
Livgren wrote:
“All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
Both Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope of Kansas became Christians eventually. Kerry Livgren first tried Eastern Religions and Dave Hope had to come out of a heavy drug addiction. I was shocked and elated to see their personal testimony on The 700 Club in 1981 and that same interview can be seen on youtube today. Livgren lives in Topeka, Kansas today where he teaches “Diggers,” a Sunday school class at Topeka Bible Church. Hope is the head of Worship, Evangelism and Outreach at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida.
The movie maker Woody Allen has embraced the nihilistic message of the song “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. David Segal in his article, “Things are Looking Up for the Director Woody Allen. No?” (Washington Post, July 26, 2006), wrote, “Allen is evangelically passionate about a few subjects. None more so than the chilling emptiness of life…The 70-year-old writer and director has been musing about life, sex, work, death and his generally futile search for hope…the world according to Woody is so bereft of meaning, so godless and absurd, that the only proper response is to curl up on a sofa and howl for your mommy.”
The song “Dust in the Wind” recommends, “Don’t hang on.” Allen himself says, “It’s just an awful thing and in that context you’ve got to find an answer to the question: ‘Why go on?’ ” It is ironic that Chris Martin the leader of Coldplay regards Woody Allen as his favorite director.
Lets sum up the final conclusions of these gentlemen: Coldplay is still searching for that “something more.” Woody Allen has concluded the search is futile. Livgren and Hope of Kansas have become Christians and are involved in fulltime ministry. Solomon’s experiment was a search for meaning to life “under the sun.” Then in last few words in the Book of Ecclesiastes he looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.”
You can hear Kerry Livgren’s story from this youtube link:
(part 1 ten minutes)
(part 2 ten minutes)
Kansas – Dust In The Wind
Ecclesiastes 1
Published on Sep 4, 2012
Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider
Biden’s border policies are burdening taxpayers everywhere but especially in big cities. Costs are rising for housing, education, and health care. And how long can America keep providing “free” services to more and more illegal aliens? (Photo: Ariel Skelley/Getty Images)
Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
———————————————————
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” used to be American folk wisdom (and inspired a book by economist Milton Friedman). The greatest trick the American Left has played on young people is to convince them that free stuff is actually free. In fact, tax credits, student debt “relief,” COVID-19 stimulus, rent control, and other giveaways simply redistribute existing wealth or borrow money that must be repaid by taxpayers.
Relative to illegal immigration, it doesn’t matter how much you put aside for a rainy day if the rain never stops. Biden’s policies have locked in an unlimited flow of illegal immigration at the border. Many of those coming now have no U.S. relatives or employment waiting for them. They will continue to head for “sanctuary” megacities that offer free housing and benefits. Local authorities there seem to only now begin to understand the scale of demand with which they are dealing. Our open borders have resulted in housing shortages, closed schools, commandeered public spaces, and hospitals catering to patients no one voted to admit into the country while everyday taxpaying Americans wait in line.
It’s not as if all Americans are rich and can absorb the costs of paying for these people who aren’t paying for themselves—particularly in the places where illegal aliens are amassing.
At James Madison High School, which New York City closed down to house illegal immigrants for a few days due to bad weather, “73% of students are economically disadvantaged.” And as schools in New York and across the country absorb thousands more “limited English proficiency” students, they must hire more specialist teachers at additional cost.
Only a few months ago, New York Mayor Eric Adams was talking about a mere $4 billion to cope with illegal immigrants over the next couple years. Now, he says it will be more like $10 billion. Gov. Kathy Hochul included $2.4 billion in the state budget to help, but it will never be enough.
In announcing her budget, Hochul said she would focus on “fighting crime, fixing our mental health system, and protecting New Yorkers’ hard-earned money.” And yet, she plans to spend as much on supporting illegal immigrants as on mental health programs for the entire state.
Already, 39% of New York state’s population is eligible for Medicaid, which is jointly funded by the state and the federal government. The state also offers free or subsidized health care to some illegal immigrants, and starting this year, will allow those who are older than 65 to enroll in Medicaid. Far from “protecting” her taxpayers’ hard-earned money, Hochul seems to be locking them into rising costs.
The city of Philadelphia is best known as the place the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Today, its Kensingtonneighborhood was described by a French news site as “devastated by opioids.” Philly is also known for notoriously bad public schools and far-left activism.
Continuing its activism trend, the city council just voted to end “medical deportations,” banning hospitals from sending illegal immigrants to their home countries “without consent, consideration of health insurance eligibility, or consideration of health risks to the patient.” What does this mean for residents? If they pay health insurance premiums, they may pay more. If they rely on various free government programs, they will wait longer in line for services, as illegal aliens often consume them first and for free.
According to local public radio station WHYY, “Hospitals will have clearly defined guidelines to prevent deportation and ensure immigrant patients and their families are informed of all possible choices.” One of those choices is to remain in the U.S., regardless of their ability to pay, and even if there is free health care available in their home country.
“Advocates,” WHYY tells us, believe that illegal immigrants “deserve … basic human rights, which includes long-term health care.” Unilaterally declaring that health care is a “basic human right” is a breathtaking arrogation of other people’s money that the city of Philadelphia, states like Illinois and California, and the federal government will come to regret. Without a dedicated revenue source to pay for it and some kind of limit on new entrants, programs promising universal, lifetime, free care will slowly become bad checks that can’t be cashed.
Health care for American citizens and legal residents will become collateral damage. As a consular officer in Ghana 20 years ago, I received a visa application from a man who had returned home for a funeral and wanted to go back to New York, where he had lived illegally for many years. While evaluating his case, I discovered that he had received over a million dollars in free health care from the city and state of New York—after arriving on a tourist visa. Of course, he wanted to go back, but allowing unlimited access to our expensive health care system to people who did not pay into it doesn’t add up.
In Brunswick, Maine, the state government is renting 60 apartments for two years to house illegal aliens while they await immigration court decisions, which will take a lot longer than that—should they even bother to apply for asylum or fight the deportation process into which the Department of Homeland Security placed them when they were released after illegally entering the country.
The director of the state’s subsidized housing program said “We have thousands of folks coming … who want to make Maine home. We’re doing everything we can to help that situation.” He has no idea of the worldwide demand for free housing, even in frosty Maine.
Meanwhile in Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker wrote to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “plead for mercy” and ask that illegal aliens not be bused to Chicago during storms because of lack of shelters to put them in. “While action is pending at the federal level,” he wrote, “please … do not send more people to our state.”
Pritzker’s claim that “action is pending at the federal level” is a stretch. Serious immigration reform hasn’t been legislated since 1996. If Abbott took the bait and suspended busing illegal aliens to Illinois until Washington produced a consensus, he might wait forever.
Education, housing, and health care cost money. Every service has a price, and there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
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.
In Part I of this series, I explained why it’s absurd to think illegal immigration can be stopped by sending foreign aid to less-developed countries, such as many of those in Central America.
Like most libertarians, I want to solve the problem by getting rid of the welfare state.
Immigrants are a big net plus so long as they are coming to work and be productive.
Indeed, because of their entrepreneurial skills and work ethic, immigrants from many nations wind up earning more than native-born Americans.
That’s something to celebrate. The American Dream in action!
But will that story of success continue if the welfare state is expanded?
Two advocates of increased immigration are worried. First, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journalrecently explained that Biden’s agenda is a recipe for immigrant dependency.
…it is a growing belief on the political left that people should be allowed to enter the U.S. on their terms rather than ours, and that it is our collective responsibility to take care of them if they can’t take care of themselves. Milton Friedman said that open immigration and large welfare states are incompatible, and today’s progressives in Congress and the White House are eager to test that proposition.…Another concern is the left’s determination to sever any connection between work and benefits, something all the more worrisome since it is occurring while destitute foreign nationals with little education are being lured here en masse. …Earlier this month, the Biden administration quietly announced that it would no longer enforce a policy that limited the admission of immigrants who were deemed likely to become overly dependent on government benefits. What could go wrong? …In countries like Italy and France, generous aid programs have attracted poor migrants who are more likely than natives to be heavy users of welfare and less likely to be working. It’s a mistake to think it can’t happen here.
In a column last year for Reason, Shikha Dalmia warned that welfare programs undermine support for immigration.
…economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva…administered online questionnaires to 24,000 respondents in six countries: U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. The explicit aim was to study attitudes toward legal, not illegal, immigration. …restrictionists have succeeded most spectacularly is in depicting immigrants as welfare queens. …In America, over 25 percent of respondents said the person with the ..immigrant-sounding name would pay less in taxes than he collected in welfare… The study’s findings pose a particular dilemma for Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who wants to combine grandiose welfare schemes like free health care, pre-K, and college for everyone with generous immigration policies, because the mere mention of immigration reduces support for such schemes. Respondents who were asked about immigration became less concerned about inequality and less supportive of soak-the-rich schemes. …as long as immigrants are seen as succeeding through their own grit, natives may have no real objection to them. What is most likely to sour the public on immigration are the grandiose universal freebies… Immigrants should be wary of Democrats bearing gifts.
Both Riley and Dalmia raise good points.
My modest contribution to this discussion is to provide a practical example.
In his so-called American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden included a huge giveaway program that will shower $3,000-$3,600 to non-rich households for every kid they have.
This is a one-year, one-time handout, but many Democrats (and some Republicans!) want to make these enormous per-child payments a permanent part of America’s welfare state.
If that happens, the incentive to move to the United States almost surely will skyrocket.
Here’s a map I made, showing the annual handout for two children in the United States and the average per-capita incomein some nearby nations.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there will be a huge incentive to migrate to America – but not for the right reasons. And my little example doesn’t include the value of any of the dozens of other redistribution programs in Washington.
The bottom line is that we shouldn’t have a welfare system that rewards dependency, whether for people in the country legally or illegally.
And if you like immigration in theory, you should be especially opposed to handouts that will undermine public support for newcomers in practice.
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas. By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life.Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on co nstruction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions. Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that was both compassionate and tough. My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and Americans losing jobs,few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress..And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.
Milton Friedmanwisely noted, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” Is it prudent to allow illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs? I don’t think so either!
FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part
The essence of what Milton Friedman is saying in this episode is found in this statement:
“The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”
L. WILLIAMS: Dr. Friedman and Walter Williams go back in history and they take a look at a situation where America was empty, where we didn’t have anything like the sophisticated industrial economy we have today, but had a much more agricultural and rural kind of economy and of course when the __ when the impoverished peasants of Europe, my ancestors and most of our ancestors, except for the slaves, which is another situation, but when these people came from Europe and came to a wide open continent with the most fertile soil then available to anyone in the world, naturally there was progress; and I or any of us would be mad to deny progress. But as that developed and as population increased and as we moved into a much more sophisticated industrial economy, we moved then into the situation in the 1930s, or earlier than that , at the end of the century. As some of the more skilled jobs came along, the labor movement didn’t happen by accident. Didn’t happen because there wasn’t a need there. The results of this development, even with all the wealth available in America, the results of this development was that many working people were not having anything like, by standards of civilization or whatever, anything like their fair share in this progress.
MCKENZIE: Now you’re arguing that in a free market, for labor, everyone benefits. Does that mean that you would favor abolition of all immigration restrictions?
FRIEDMAN: The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.
MCKENZIE: But this is true of every western industrialized country.
FRIEDMAN: That’s right and that’s why today __
MCKENZIE: Yeah.
FRIEDMAN: __ under current circumstances you cannot, unfortunately have free immigration. Not because there’s anything wrong with free immigration, but because we have other policies which make it impossible to adopt free immigration.
MCKENZIE: Well I’d like other reactions. Is it at all feasible to open the door of the labor market internationally now? Bill Brady?
BRADY: I would __ I would say yes providing they open the door to us. I think that the door to not only the labor market, the door to all markets should be __ should be open. That is the product markets.
W. WILLIAMS: My feelings about the undocumented workers of Mexican-Americans are inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. I think that the people should have the right to come to this country. Now, those who would say, you know, I hear a number of people saying that, well the immigrants are contributing to our unemployment problem. And I point this out to some people, I said, “look, you know, this is the same rhetoric that the Irish used when the blacks were coming up from the north, ” you know, they’re using blacks as scapegoats. They’re saying, “get those people back where they came from so that our members can get jobs, ” you know. Unions were as well doing this, you know, they called them scabs, strikebreakers, etcetera, etcetera. So I do not wish for Mexican-Americans to become the new scapegoats of our particular national problems. They are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __
(Several people talking at once.)
GREEN: I think that this country cannot have a group of workers to remain outside the framework of our laws and our protection. And as long as we have workers who are attracted to the United States because of the standards of living; and I think minimum wages play a part in that as part of that attraction. But it seems to me to have undocumented workers without providing either a means of protection for them and it seems to me that we’ve got to go to the question of providing the amnesty for those generations of workers who have come here over a period of time, now two, three, maybe four generations. We have to see that they have the same rights and protection of all other workers. And as it stands now, large numbers of them live outside the framework of the laws and statutes that we have on the __ on our books.
MCKENZIE: Comment Milton.
FRIEDMAN: They do and the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do. What Lynn Williams said before is again a travesty on what was actually going on. The real boost to the trade union movement came after the Great Depression of the 1930s; that Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism; it was not a failure of the private market system as we pointed out in another one of the programs in this series; it was a failure of government. It was not the case that somehow or other there was a decline in the conditions of the working class that produced a great surge of unionism. On the contrary __ unions have never accounted for more than one out of four or one out of five of American workers. The American worker benefited not out of unions, he benefited in spite of unions. He benefited because there was greater opportunity because there were people who were willing to invest their money because there was an opportunity for people to work, to save, to invest. That’s still the case today. You say, we have to provide them with something or other Ernest. Who are the “we”?
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
HOW CAN GOD ALLOW 20,000 Polish soldiers did in 2 days?
BBC ANNOUNCER …with the destruction of the entire Polish Air force by the Luftwaffe. Military and civilian casualties are already estimated to be over 20,000, a number certain to rise as German bombing continues. King George will address the Commonwealth from Buckingham Palace within the hour. Until then, we return to our musical program. The BBC Orchestra begins to play. Freud shuts the music off.
LEWIS (shaken) Twenty thousand killed in two days. It’s nearly impossible to take in. Freud, in pain, seething from his doctor’s delay, paces.
FREUD More of God’s “Mysterious Ways. I wonder what would your “Inklings” say to that?
LEWIS A hundred things. Simultaneously.
I have read articles for years from Dan Barker, but recently I just finished the book Barker wrote entitled LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which was prompted by Rick Warren’s book PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE which I also read several years ago.
Dan Barker is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, And co-host of Freethought Radio and co-founder of The Clergy Project.
On March 19, 2022, I got an email back from Dan Barker that said:
Thanks for the insights.
Have you read my book Life Driven Purpose? To say there is no purpose OF life is not to say there is no purpose IN life. Life is immensely meaningful when you stop looking for external purpose.
Ukraine … we’ll, we can no longer blame Russian aggression on “godless communism.” The Russian church, as far as I know, has not denounced the war.
db
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In the next few weeks I will be discussing the book LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which I did enjoy reading. Here is an assertion that Barker makes that I want to discuss:
A universe with a god is more complicated than one without it. In order to fix all the bugs in the God task—the absence of evidence, the problem of evil, the lack of agreement among believers, the lack of a coherent definition, the uncertainty of the interpretation of unreliable holy books, the oppression of women and minorities and heretics, the failure of prayer (flag not being reset?), the dangers of sectarian divisiveness, and so on—believers need to cobble together inelegant Rube Goldberg kluges, apologetics, theologies, and theodicies to keep it clunking along. But if we can excise the God task and simply say, “No thanks, I’ll handle it myself,”
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Humanist Manifesto 2 lists the Wards as signers: Ward Tabler, Visiting Professor, Starr King School Barbara M. Tabler. I had the privilege of corresponding with them and they brought up this issue of the problem of evil shortly after the Oklahoma Bombing by Timothy McVey.
Mrs. Tabler’s obituary in 1996 noted:
Six years ago, Mrs. Tabler and her husband, Ward, a retired University of California at Berkeley professor, left the Bay Area for Santa Barbara to be closer to their two sons and their families.
Mrs. Tabler was born Barbara Marie Carteron Halloween in Oakland in 1915. She studied speech, English and music at UC Berkeley.
Besides singing, Mrs. Tabler was deeply committed to various social and political issues. She was a longtime advocate for Planned Parenthood. She served as president, vice president and a board member for the Alameda-San Francisco chapter.
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On October 16, 1995 I sent a letter to Ward and Barbara Tabler concerning the problem of evil which I had been corresponding with them about. Here is a portion of my letter:
Dear Tablers,
Thank you for sending me the article by Kaz Dziamka which appeared in the July/August 1995 Issue of the FREE MIND. You stated that this article properly represented your views. I would agree with James W. Sire who said this issue concerning the problem of evil is the toughest question thoughtful Christians ever have to answer. Kaz Dziamka starts off by saying, “If I were a Christian I would like to believe in a god of mercy, of love, of compassion — of compassion, in particular. If I were a Christian, I would be left dubfounded, paralyzed, speechless by the horro of the Oklahoma City bomb explosion.” Kaz Dziamka puts forth the classical argument that if God is absolutely powerful and ultimately good, He would deal with evil now and not allow the mad bombers of the world to exist. I also feel the pain as I watch those tragic scenes on T.V. . in fact, my pastor’s brother performed 3 funerals for children in his church who died in that blast. However, Kaz Dziamk is incorrect in the assumption that just because evil is not destroyed now that it will never be destroyed. God is all=good therefore He will destroy evil one day in the future. Romans 5:12 sheds some light on this issue of evil. It states, “Wherefore as by one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death by in, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Maybe Kaz Dziamka doesn’t believe in sin. May humanists believe man is born in a state of moral neutrality. R.C. Sproul asks, How then can we account for the universality of human imperfection? Surely some percentage of persons would be able to make it through life without sinning. There would be no reason why anyone would ever sin, not to mention the majority or, worse yet, everybody. How did society become corrupt in the first place? Why are there no morally perfect societies or even societies where half of the peoples are perfect? Diagenes” quest for the honest man continues to this day. If the Bible never mentioned original sin, we could easily postulate it from a study of history and human society.” Francis Schaeffer has rightly said, “Christianity’s answer (to the problem of evil) rests in the historic, spacetime, real and complete Fall. “the True Christian position is that, in space and time and history, there was an unprogrammed man who made a choice, and actually rebelled against God…without Christianity’s answer that God made a significant man in a significant history with evil being the result of Satan’s and then man’s historic space-time revolt, there is no answer but to accept Baudelaire’s answer [‘If there is a God, He is the devil’] with tears.” Evidently kaz Dziamka sees Christianity’s answer as lacking because the recommendation given in the last paragraph is to just that– cry!!!! Kaz Dziamka states, “If I were a Christian, I would never say to a mother whose little girl had just been blown to pieces that Jesus loves her and that god knows what he is doing. If I were a Christian, I would be ashamed of my god. I would shut up, walk away, and cry.” (Notice that Kaz Dziamka fails to substitute an adequate humanist reply because there is no future hope in the humanist worldview like there is in the Christian worldview.) Maybe Kaz Dziamka doesn’t fully understand that God, the Creator, did not begin the population of planet earth with a suffering human race. He created a perfect man and woman, and placed them in a perfect paradise, the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1:26-31; 2:7-9). It was like heaven on earth; with no sin, no pain, no sorrow, no suffering, and no death. But man sinned and his paradise was lost. Not only did the first man (Adam) sin, but all men have ratified that rebellion by their own actions (Romans 5:12). Before the fall, God’s universe was without suffering. Therefore, God is not the cause of these things, they are the result of man’s fall into sin, affecting the whole universe. Does Kaz Dziamk disagree with the idea of man’s Freewill? We shouldn’t blame God for the existence of evil, and we should be comforted to know that He will eventually destroy evil. My God takes evil seriously. He will judge sin (evil). Exodus 34:7 states, “God does not leave the guilty unpunished.” (That includes those like O.J. that think they have got off unpunished. The books will be balanced one day.) Yet Romans 5:8 tells us that “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus took our place on that cross. John 3:16 makes it clear that “God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” My God is merciful. He has provided a way to avoid judgment. He is a God of love and compassion also!!! Revelation 21″3-4 states, “God Himself will be with them and be their God. he will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Yes, Christians do have an answer to this question of evil, but there is an even tougher question for the naturalist to answer. James W. Sire has said, “Naturalists who deny the existence of any transcendent, personal God cannot successfully solve the problem of good. They can not explain why there is a difference between right and wrong.”—- AT THIS POINT I WANT TO SHARE AN ARTICLE FROM GREG KOUKL:
Greg Koukl responds to a letter to the editor of the L.A. Times in which the writer’s pain causes him to ask the age-old question of why God allows evil to exist.
I was reading the L.A. Times today in the letters to the editor section and there was a letter written by a gentleman in Newport Beach that was a response to a tragic story that the Times had carried a few days ago. Maybe some of you had seen that story or have read about it in the local papers about not just the rank and file tragedy in Bosnia-Herzegovena, not about the general tragedy of war. The article was about the problems of the refugees and also of women being victimized by soldiers.
This respondent writes, “Glancing at your April 10 paper my eyes fell upon the tragic story ‘Ordeals Put Off Bosnia Rape Victim’s Healing.’ My heart ached for Amira, the 35 year old Muslim woman, mother of two children, suffering the loss of her husband, wandering about the countryside begging to survive. Placed in a detention camp, raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers acting as animal pigs rather than humans, the woman became another tragic victim of human wickedness. Where is mankind headed? My thoughts turn to God and ask, ‘Why, God? Why did you create such monsters? God, are you for real?’ If this is God’s way of teaching or testing my faith”, he continues, “then my beliefs and faith are being shattered with contempt instead. Having just lost my wife to cancer, maybe my feelings are more prone and fragile to be torn apart and my feelings turn more intensely to those who are suffering also.” It’s signed Victor Jashinski in Newport Beach.
… work from the known to the unknown.
There’s probably hardly a person listening to this account that does not feel the same emotion with him. First of all, we feel the sense of horror as we read about the kinds of things that other people do to each other. Just a couple of days ago was the last of a five part series of ‘The Holocaust’ that was on the Family Channel which was re-aired for the first time in fifteen years. But in any event, seeing again in vivid portrayal what man is capable of doing, our hearts and our minds are taken with this situation. Not only that, but we are also touched by evil in the world ourselves as we look at circumstances and we’re horrified. We also look at pains in our own life as this man has reflected and we say, “Why, God? Why me? Why this pain? Why this difficulty?” And this is really one of the most thorny problems and one of the most complex problems that anyone, regardless of their philosophical avocations or persuasions, has to address.
There is no way that I’m going to resolve this in ten minutes because this problem in its fullness, in its entirety resists a thorough resolution. I think there’s some good responses, but for the most part it is something that we kind of have to live with. But I would like to give some thoughts that may provide a few guidelines for you in dealing with this yourself and people like this gentleman as they face these circumstances both outside of their life and inside of their life.
My policy in dealing with a difficult, tricky problem that defies a thorough-going solution is to work from the known to the unknown. There are some things I think we can know about this issue. We can draw some conclusions that will at least clear the deck a bit and help us to focus on those things that are less clear and less resolvable, and maybe demystify the question for us, and maybe make our hearts feel a little better about the issue.
One of the things I need to say at the outset, by the way, is that’s it’s very important to distinguish between the issue of evil and suffering as a philosophic problem and the problem of evil from a pastoral perspective. Actually, both were raised in this letter. Why does God allow evil in the world such that a female Bosnian refugee might be subjected to repeated rape by Serbian soldiers? Why does the problem happen out there (which is the philosophic question) but why does evil hurt me? That’s a different kind of question because that’s an emotional response. Even people who have resolved the issue of evil philosophically still shudder under its impact when it hits them. Even though their mind may have answers their heart still asks ‘Why?’ when they become victimized by evil in the world. So we see both kinds here.
I’m going to start out by trying to deal with the philosophic problem and then make a comment about the pastoral problem. They are distinct questions.
if there is no God, there can’t be any evil, only personal likes and dislikes
By the way, when someone comes to you with the pastoral issue, you can’t resolve that by giving them a philosophic answer. It just doesn’t work. That’s not their need. Their need isn’t their mind at that point or their intellect; their need is their heart, the grief they are going through. There’s a different kind of approach there. I’m actually better at the first than the second. I’m better at the intellectual part than the pastoral part. That’s why I’m a radio talk show host and not a church shepherd as many pastors are. My gifts are different. In any event, let me try to deal with the philosophic problem first and then briefly address the pastoral issue.
One thing to note, by the way, is that this man presumes that God made man this way (“Why, God, why did you create such monsters?”). Now if you are thinking from a Biblical perspective, you know that that is not the case. The Bible does not teach that God created monsters. It teaches that He created human beings that were not monsters at all but were good. They didn’t have this propensity and proclivity for evil. He didn’t make man with that. But He did make man with the possibility of going wrong and the writer’s response here is really a response questioning the character of God. “How could You do this? What kind of God are you? Are you for real?” are other questions which show the approach that most people usually take when struggling with evil. In other words, when they see this kind of thing they don’t question the character of man, which in my point of view would be a sensible response. (You’ll understand why I say that in just a moment.) Instead they attack the existence of God. In other words, they say since there is evil in the world then God can’t exist. This is not a reasonable response. It is not a rational response. It is not a fruitful answer to the philosophic problem of evil and I’m going to tell you why that just can’t work.
What doesn’t make sense is to look at the existence of evil and question the existence of God. The reason is that atheism turns out being a self-defeating philosophic solution to this problem of evil. Think of what evil is for a minute when we make this kind of objection. Evil is a value judgment that must be measured against a morally perfect standard in order to be meaningful. In other words, something is evil in that it departs from a perfect standard of good. C.S. Lewis made the point, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call something crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”[1] He also goes on to point out that a portrait is a good or a bad likeness depending on how it compares with the ‘perfect’ original. So to talk about evil, which is a departure from good, actually presumes something that exists that is absolutely good. If there is no God there’s no perfect standard, no absolute right or wrong, and therefore no departure from that standard. So if there is no God, there can’t be any evil, only personal likes and dislikes – what I prefer morally and what I don’t prefer morally.
This is the big problem with moral relativism as a moral point of view when talking about the problem of evil. If morality is ultimately a matter of personal taste – that’s what most people hold nowadays – then it’s just your opinion what’s good or bad, but it might not be my opinion. Everybody has their own view of morality and if it’s just a matter of personal taste – like preferring steak over broccoli or Brussels sprouts – the objection against the existence of God based on evil actually vanishes because the objection depends on the fact that some things are intrinsically evil – that evil isn’t just a matter of my personal taste, my personal definition. But that evil has absolute existence and the problem for most people today is that there is no thing that is absolutely wrong. Premarital sex? If it’s right for you. Abortion? It’s an individual choice. Killing? It depends on the circumstances. Stealing? Not if it’s from a corporation.
The fact is that most people are drowning in a sea of moral relativism. If everything is allowed then nothing is disallowed. Then nothing is wrong. Then nothing is ultimately evil. What I’m saying is that if moral relativism is true, which it seems like most people seem to believe – even those that object against evil in the world, then the talk of objective evil as a philosophical problem is nonsense. To put it another way, if there is no God, then morals are all relative. And if moral relativism is true, then something like true moral evil can’t exist because evil becomes a relative thing.
An excellent illustration of this point comes from the movie The Quarrel . In this movie, a rabbi and a Jewish secularist meet again after the Second World War after they had been separated. They had gotten into a quarrel as young men, separated on bad terms, and then had their village and their family and everything destroyed through the Second World War, both thinking the other was dead. They meet serendipitously in Toronto, Canada in a park and renew their friendship and renew their old quarrel.
Rabbi Hersch says to the secularist Jew Chiam, “If a person does not have the Almighty to turn to, if there’s nothing in the universe that’s higher than human beings, then what’s morality? Well, it’s a matter of opinion. I like milk; you like meat. Hitler likes to kill people; I like to save them. Who’s to say which is better? Do you begin to see the horror of this? If there is no Master of the universe then who’s to say that Hitler did anything wrong? If there is no God then the people that murdered your wife and kids did nothing wrong.”
If God wiped out all the evil in the world tonight at midnight, where would you and I be at 12:01?
That is a very, very compelling point coming from the rabbi. In other words, to argue against the existence of God based on the existence of evil forces us into saying something like this: Evil exists, therefore there is no God. If there is no God then good and evil are relative and not absolute, so true evil doesn’t exist, contradicting the first point. Simply put, there cannot be a world in which it makes any sense to say that evil is real and at the same time say that God doesn’t exist. If there is no God then nothing is ultimately bad, deplorable, tragic or worthy of blame. The converse, by the way, is also true. This is the other hard part about this, it cuts both ways. Nothing is ultimately good, honorable, noble or worthy of praise. Everything is ultimately lost in a twilight zone of moral nothingness. To paraphrase the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer, the person who argues against the existence of God based on the existence of evil in the world has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.
No, the existence of the problem forces us into some kind of theistic solution. This is a good thing, which brings me to my third point. If atheism is a self-defeating philosophic solution to the problem, and some kind of theism is necessary, then it seems to me that theism is one of the only satisfying pastoral solutions to the problem.
Let’s say for example that you are suffering with some kind of pain and evil in your life and you come to the conclusion that there is no God. What is the solution to the problem of your personal pain? The only solution I can think of is that your personal pain and suffering are meaningless. They are useless. They are helpless. And, in fact, it reminds me of Os Guiness in his fine book The Dust of Death , which has just been re-released, where he makes the point in regards to eastern religion that many eastern religions hold that the world is just an illusion – Hinduism characteristically. He quotes from a poet of the Eastern tradition who had just experienced tremendous tragedy in his life. He went to his avatar to get some comfort from his religious leader after his wife and children had been killed. His religious leader simply said to him in the face of this terrible anguish, “The world is dew.” His point was that it’s all an illusion anyway. The poet went back and he wrote this poem, a simple poem, only four lines: “The world is dew. The world is dew. And yet…. And yet….” In other words the religious answer of his religious leader was that the evil simply didn’t exist. But he knew personally that it wasn’t dew, that it wasn’t an illusion. It was there. It was real and it was impacting his life. But what comfort was there in that – nothing whatsoever.
If there is no God then there is no answer to the pastoral question of personal suffering and evil. It’s not there – your suffering is meaningless. But if there is a God, and if that God is the God of the Bible, then at least we have the potential of an answer. There’s some kind of comfort there. God is ultimately good and just, and one day the accounts will be perfectly balanced. We can place ourselves in the hands of a powerful Creator who, by all other evidence, loves us, cares for us and comforts the afflicted. One Who will not break off a bent reed and Who will not put out a smoldering wick. One Who will hold us close to Himself. There is at least the possibility that this suffering and pain can make sense because God can use it for good in our lives.
We might ask ourselves the question, Why does God put up with this kind of evil in the world? The rapes, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovena, for example? My response is that God puts up with that kind of evil for the same reason he puts up with your evil and with my evil for the time being. I’m not going to try to explain what that reason is now. The point I’m making is that this justice issue cuts both ways.
If God wiped out all the evil in the world tonight at midnight, where would you and I be at 12:01? See, the fact is that God’s going to do a complete job when he finally deals with evil. C.S. Lewis makes the point when he says, “I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does … When the author walks on the stage the play is over.”[2] Evil deeds can never be isolated from the evil doer. Our prints, yours and mine, are on the smoking gun.
What’s curious to me in dealing with this issue is that no one raises the issue of whether one ought to continue to believe in the goodness of man after these kinds of tragedies. We see things like the Holocaust, the crime level, the innocent suffering at the hands of other human beings more often than not, and instead of shaking our fists at humankind who perpetrate the action we shake our fists at God. I don’t get it.
Dennis Prager says, “Whenever I meet someone who claims to find faith in God impossible, but who persists in believing in the essential goodness of humanity, I know that I have met a person for whom evidence is irrelevant.” (Ultimate Issues , July- September, 1989) I like that. I think that hits the nail on the head.
The last thought I will offer is just another curious one from my perspective as I hear these kinds of responses. We live our lives in rebellion to God, constantly disobeying Him, constantly disregarding him, refusing to live according to His precepts and according to His rules, and then we wonder where He is when things go wrong.
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 7 | The Age of Non-Reason
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 8 | The Age of Fragmentation
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 1 | Abortion of the Human…
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human D…
1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaefer
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GORKY
ARSHILLE GORKY (1905-1948)
Armenian-born American painter, Gorky was a surrealist painter and also one of the leaders of abstract expressionism. He was called “the Ingres of the unconscious”.
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]
At the end of this post is a message by RC Sproul in which he discusses Sagan. Over the years I have confronted many atheists. Here is one story below: I really believe Hebrews 4:12 when it asserts: For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the […]
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 […]
In this post we are going to see that through the years humanist thought has encouraged artists like Michelangelo to think that the future was extremely bright versus the place today where many artist who hold the humanist and secular worldview are very pessimistic. In contrast to Michelangelo’s DAVID when humanist man thought he […]
_________ Antony Flew on God and Atheism Published on Feb 11, 2013 Lee Strobel interviews philosopher and scholar Antony Flew on his conversion from atheism to deism. Much of it has to do with intelligent design. Flew was considered one of the most influential and important thinker for atheism during his time before his death […]
On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:
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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:
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Kath: You are an atheist?
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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.
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Freud’s Last Session — Christian Movie Review | C. S. Lewis
FREUD We all are {terrified}!!!!! And you?! When the siren sounded earlier you didn’t behave like a man who “took comfort” this was his last day. WHERE IS YOUR GREAT FAITH? Your precious “Joy” in meeting your maker? It disappears, because you know under all your self-protective lies he does not exist! YOU BURY YOUR DOUBTS AS YOU DO YOUR MEMORIES OF THE WAR, BECAUSE AT YOUR CORE YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A COWARD!
June 22, 2020 Ricky Gervais
Dear Ricky,
This is the 66th day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE.
As you know I am writing you a series of letters on Solomon’s efforts to find a meaning and purpose to life. Solomon tried to find a meaning and purpose to life UNDER THE SUN in the Book of Ecclesiastes in all of the 6 “L” words and looked into learning(1:16-18),laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20).
Tony and his wife Lisa who died 6 months ago of cancer
The new emphasis in the beginning of season 2 is the paranormal. Episode 1 in season two starts off with Tony going to a yoga session with Matt and it turns out to be a disaster. Next at a person wants to tell the newspaper how he got raped by the spirit of Liberace. Of course, we can’t leave our Kath who brings up the paranormal and the idea that she can tell when an angel enters a room.
Why do so many people throughout the world believe in God and an afterlife? Ecclesiastes 3:11 “God has planted eternity in the heart of men…” (Living Bible).
Even Tony seems to feel this in episode 4 of the first season of AFTER LIFE when Tony talks about being with his wife in the future.
Matt: Tony that doesn’t even make sense. You are a rational man. You don’t even believe in an afterlife.
Tony: I know she is nowhere. Alright. But get this through your head. I would rather be no where with her then somewhere without her.
Ricky Gervais plays bereaved husband Tony Johnson in AFTER LIFE
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Tony’s whole world collapsed when his wife died and it is admirable that Tony has such a good marriage, but if your self image is wrapped up in someone else then your world will self-destruct if that person dies. Take a look at Tim Keller’s story below comparing JIM and SAM:
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A New Motivation
This is neither the traditional nor the modern way with the self. Ordinary moralistic religion operates on this principle: “I live a good and moral life; therefore God accepts me.” Gospel Christianity operates in the opposite way: “God accepts me unconditionally in Jesus Christ; therefore I live a good and moral life.” In the first case you live a good life out of the hope of a reward, with all the insecurity and self-doubts that go with it. Will you ever be good enough for the reward? How will you know if you are, and how will you keep it up even if you are? In the Christian approach the motivation is one not of fear but of grateful joy. You live to please and resemble the one who saved you at infinite cost to himself by going to the cross. You serve him not in order to coerce him to love you but because he already does. Now, for example, you pursue your career not to get a self and achieve self-worth. You do it to serve God and the common good.Your work is still part of your identity, as are your family, your nationality, and so on. But they are all relieved of the terrible burden of being the ultimate source of your self and value. They no longer can distort your life as they do when they are forced into that role. They are, as it were, demoted to being just good things. Work is no longer something you use desperately to feel good about yourself. It becomes just another good gift from God that you can use to serve others. The internal psychological and motivational dynamics of the personality are profoundly transformed by faith in Christ. Some years ago there were two young men attending my church, exploring Christianity and also trying to make it in acting. I’ll call them Sam and Jim. Sam was moving toward faith in Christ while Jim was moving away. As Jesus became more real to Sam, he stopped looking to his stage career as the measure of his worth. Then Sam and Jim found themselves auditioning for the same role. It was a very big part in a very big production. If
either of them had gotten the job, it would have propelled him to great heights. So they performed at the audition, but neither of them was chosen. They both were turned down. Jim, the one whom most people would have considered the more self-confident, was simply devastated, while Sam was just disappointed. Sam went out and got a job in business, and after that he kept one foot in acting. Over the years he became very active in the church and was reasonably successful in business. Opportunities for stage or screen acting occurred occasionally, but he engaged in them only as an avocation. His life thrived. Jim, however, went into a tailspin. He was angry at himself and the industry and left acting altogether, but he hated any other job he took. He seldom remained in a job for more than a year, drifting from place to place. What happened? Originally, both men had acting as the core of their identity. It was the main factor in their self-regard. But then Sam had an identity shift. Acting became a good thing but not an ultimate thing. His love of the stage was not evicted from his life, but its stranglehold on his self-image and worth was broken. It became part of who he was but not the essence of who he was. That’s why the rejection of not getting the role could not get at his identity. It was safe, impervious, hidden in Jesus Christ (Colossians 3: 1–3). Jim, however, had a highly vulnerable modern identity. His failure was an ax blow to his psychological tree. The rejection went right to the root of what made him feel he counted, what made him significant. If you believe the Gospel and all its remarkable claims about Jesus and what he has done for you and who you are in him, then nothing that happens in this world can actually get at your identity. Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to believe this. Consider what a sweeping difference it would make.
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Francis Schaeffer comments on ECCLESIASTES below:
Ecclesiastes 9:7-12
7 Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.
8 Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.
9 Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, (DOES IT SOUND OPTIMISTIC? NOW COMES THE BACKLASH) all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.12 For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
Solomon when at work takes off his hat and he stands by the grave of man and he says, “ALAS. ALAS. ALAS.”
But interestingly enough the story of Ecclesiastes does not end its message here because in two places in the New Testament it is picked up and carried along and put in its proper perspective.
Luke 12:16-21
16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, 17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ 18 And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax,eat, drink, be merry.”’ [ALMOST EVERYONE WHO HAS PROCEEDED HERE HAS FELT CERTAINLY THAT JESUS IS DELIBERATELY REFERRING TO SOLOMON’S SOLUTION.]20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
Christ here points out the reason for the failure of the logic that is involved. He points out why it fails in logic and then why it fails in reality. This view of Solomon must end in failure philosophically and also in emotional desperation.
We are not made to live in the shortened environment of UNDER THE SUN in this life only!!! Neither are we made to live only in the environment of a bare concept of afterlife [ignoring trying to make this life better]. We are made to live in the environment of a God who exists and who is the judge. This is the difference and that is what Jesus is setting forth here.
I Corinthians 15:32
32 What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
There is no doubt here he is reaching back to Solomon again and he is just saying if there isn’t a resurrection of the dead then let’s just follow Solomon and let’s just eat and drink for tomorrow we die!!!! If there isn’t this full structure [including the resurrection of the dead] then just have the courage to follow Solomon and we can eat and drink because tomorrow we die and that is all we have. If the full structure isn’t there then pick up the cup and drink it dry! You can say it a different way in the 20th century: If the full structure is not there then go ahead and be an EXISTENTIALIST, but don’t cheat. Drink the cup to the end. Drink it dry! That is what Paul says. Paul the educated man. Paul the man who knew his Greek philosophy. Paul the man who understood Solomon and the dilemma. Paul said it one way or the other. There is no room for a middle ground. IF CHRISTIANS AREN’T RAISED FROM THE DEAD THEN SOLOMON IS RIGHT IN ECCLESIASTES, BUT ONLY THEN. But if he is right then you should accept all of Solomon’s despair and his conclusions.
Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)
I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events |Tagged Bible Prophecy, john macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)
Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (1)
John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Great article by Adrian Rogers. What evidence is there that the Bible is in fact God’s Word? I want to give you five reasons to affirm the Bible is the Word of God. First, I believe the Bible is the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (0)
Is there any evidence the Bible is true? Articles By PleaseConvinceMe Apologetics Radio The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy Jim Wallace A Simple Litmus Test There are many ways to verify the reliability of scripture from both internal evidences of transmission and agreement, to external confirmation through archeology and science. But perhaps the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)
Here is some very convincing evidence that points to the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeological and External Evidence for the Bible Archeology consistently confirms the Bible! Archaeology and the Old Testament Ebla tablets—discovered in 1970s in Northern Syria. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | E
129 129 Lewis watches with relief. INT. FREUD’S STUDY – CONT. 130 130 Freud watches Lewis step back inside.
LEWIS Transport planes. Ours. Freud takes this in.
FREUD I was afraid.
LEWIS So was I.
FREUD What were we thinking? It was madness to think we could solve the greatest mystery of all time.
LEWIS There’s a greater madness. Not to think of it at all.
Letter May 4 Letter (Part#5 ) woody distraction / Schaeffer Distraction/ Ricky /Lenny Distraction / Solomon /Cycle
May 4, 2020
Woody Allen c/o Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor New York, NY 10018
Dear Woody,
You got to take the time to watch the film series AFTERLIFE on Netflix since Ricky Gervais, you and Solomon in ECCLESIASTES talk about so many of the same nihilistic themes on life!!!
On page 390 of your autobiography you assert:
For students of cinema, I have nothing of value to offer. My filming habits are lazy, undisciplined, the technique of a failed, ejected film major. As for writing, for those interested, I rise and after breakfast, work in longhand on yellow pads lying across my bed. I work all day and usually work at least part of every day of the week. This is not because I am a workaholic but because work keeps me from facing the world, one of my least favorite venues.
Woody you are saying that there is nothing left with this Godless, meaningless universe but to only DISTRACT ourselves. (Francis Schaeffer shown below)
Francis Schaeffer two months before he died made the following comments in Knoxville, TN in 1984:
If you take away the biblical view of who God is and man being made in his image then there is no basis for a distinction between human life and other forms of life… (L’Abri in Switzerland pictured below)
What I’m saying is without the Bible it isn’t just that you don’t know how to go to heaven, but without the Bible you don’t know who people are and you don’t know what this world is. When you watch the birds fly across the sky if you really don’t have the Bible to tell you who created this world and what the world is even the birds flying across the sky is very different. We have many people that come to L’Abri that have thought this out to the very end properly and that is there is no meaning to life, no meaning to life, no meaning to human life. They are not wrong. They are right.
The younger generation who grab the needle and shoot it up because they can’t find any meaning to life, they are not wrong. They are right. if you take the Bible away it is not just that people are lost for eternity, but they are lost now. They have no meaning to life…. If I was talking to a gentleman I was sitting next to on an airplane about Christ I wouldn’t necessarily start off quoting Bible verses. I would go back rather to their dilemma if they hold the modern worldview of the final reality only being energy, etc., I would start with that. I would begin as I stress in the book THE GOD WHO IS THERE about their own [humanist] prophets who really show where their view goes. For instance, Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize winner from France, in his book NECESSITY AND CHANCE said there is no way to tell the OUGHT from the IS. In other words, you live in a TOTALLY SILENT universe.
The men like Monod and Sartre or whoever the man might know that is his [humanist] prophet and they point out quite properly and conclusively what life is like, not just that there is no meaningfulness in life but everyone according to modern man is just living out some kind of game plan. It may be knocking 1/10th of a second off a downhill ski run or making one more million dollars. But all you are doing is making a game plan within the mix of a meaningless situation. WOODY ALLEN exploits this very strongly in his films. He really lives it. I feel for that man, and he has expressed it so thoroughly in ANNIE HALL and MANHATTAN and so on.
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(Seen above: Ricky Gervais plays bereaved husband Tony Johnson in AFTER LIFE)
What does a person who holds to the nihilist point of view have to do with useless life but to try and distract himself?
In the first episode of season one of AFTERLIFE is the following conversation:
Matt: Tony this is Sandy’s day. Could you take her under your wing and show her what’s what?
Tony: Here’s what’s what, humanity is a plague. We’re a disgusting, narcissistic, selfish parasite, and the world would be a better place without us. It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves. I could do it now. Quite happily just go upstairs, jump off the roof, and make sure I landed on some c**t from accounts.
Matt: Lenny could you do it?
Lenny: Sure.
Tony: Let me guess the bullet points: Get in and eat in front of the computer. Go to the pub and eat in front of the quiz machine. Go home and eat in front of the Television. Go to bed and I assume you eat in bed?
Lenny: There are emergency snacks around. (Tony gets up to leave.) Tony: Do you want anymore donuts fat boy?
Lenny: Yes please. Sandy: Do you mind him talking to him like that? Lenny: He is a mate. It distracts him.
In another place Tony says he drinks all night to fill up the time! The goal is to just pass the time. In Solomon’s day he saw man caught in endless cycles and not making any progress but just chasing after the wind!!
Francis Schaeffer discusses King Solomon’s words in ECCLESIASTES below:
Solomon is the universal man with a empire at his disposal. Solomon had it all.
Ecclesiastes 1:3
English Standard Version (ESV)
3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes.
(Added by me:The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.” )
Man is caught in the cycle
Ecclesiastes 1:1-7
English Standard Version (ESV)
All Is Vanity
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
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Solomon is showing a high degree of comprehension of evaporation and the results of it. Seeing also in reality nothing changes. There is change but always in a set framework and that is cycle. You can relate this to the concepts of modern man. Ecclesiastes is the only pessimistic book in the Bible and that is because of the place where Solomon limits himself.He limits himself to the question of human life, life under the sunbetween birth and death and the answers this would give.
Ecclesiastes 1:4
English Standard Version (ESV)
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
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Ecclesiastes 4:16
English Standard Version (ESV)
16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
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In verses 1:4 and 4:16 Solomon places man in the cycle. He doesn’t place man outside of the cycle. Man doesn’t escape the cycle. Man is only cycle. Birth and death and youth and old age. With this in mind Solomon makes this statement.
Ecclesiastes 6:12
12 For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?
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There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man. I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing and I felt as man as God. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.
THIS IS SOLOMON’S FEELING TOO. The universal man, Solomon, beyond our intelligence with an empire at his disposal with the opportunity of observation so he could recite these words here in Ecclesiastes 6:12, “For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?”
Woody, the common theme between you, Ricky and Solomon is you all are looking for the big answers to life in a limited area and that is restricted to life UNDER THE SUN. Let me another suggestion:
Rom. 3:10, “As it is written, ‘There is none righteous, not even one . . . “
Rom. 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Rom. 5:12, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”
Rom. 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Rom. 5:8, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Rom. 10:9-10, “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”
Rom. 10:13, “For whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Woody Allen (left) and Owen Wilson discuss a scene during one of the film’s many night shoots.
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Kindred Spirits
Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson are offered suggestions by director Woody Allen.
Says Cotillard: “Woody Allen in a way found his kind of spiritual son. It was like it was meant to be. Owen fits so perfectly in Woody’s universe, it was really organic and made total sense.”
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CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
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WOODY ALLEN, MIA FARROW, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, 1989
– Image ID: BPD7JK
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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask)
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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask)
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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask)
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(Cliff learns that Professor Levy has committed suicide)
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Woody directing CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS below
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JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS, WOODY ALLEN, MATCH POINT, 2005
Cannes Film Festival 2005 – ‘Match Point’ Photocall – Palais des Festival
– Image ID: G8853G
(Match point)
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a-midsummer-nights-sex-comedy
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Woody Allen as Andrew in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S SEX COMEDY
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Hannah and her sisters
(Annie Hall below)
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Woody Allen in Manhattan
Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in “Manhattan.” The film has taken on new meaning in recent months.Credit…Getty Images
Manhattan opens in breathtaking style: we are immediately blessed with shots of the finest sights of New York- the city skyline, the Queensboro bridge, the interior of the Guggenheim. A
Manhattan
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Irrational Man
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Woody Allen on the set of Blue Jasmine. Photograph: Warner Bros
Woody Allen wrote the lead in Blue Jasmine with Cate Blanchett in mind
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LOVE AND DEATH (1975) WOODY ALLEN (DIR) LADT 001 VS
– Image ID: BKDHRK
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Love And Death
The 5th film written and directed by Woody Allen
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wasp2015_day_01-0213.CR2
(Cafe Society)
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You-Will-Meet-a-Tall-Dark-Stranger-movie-image
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Deconstructing Harry
‘Deconstructing Harry‘ is the 27th film written and directed by Woody Allen.
LEWIS:There is also the dictatorship of pride. Why does religion make room for science but science refuses to make room for religion?
FREUD How roomy was Galileo’s cell when he first told the Pope the sun did not move around the earth?
LEWIS The stupidity of church leaders is too easy a target.
83.FREUD They hide behind their ignorance! How can we understand? We are small, he is mighty! Freud bears down on Lewis. FREUD (CONT.) (CONT’D)
LEWIS And I don’t pretend to. It’s the most difficult question of all, isn’t it? If God is good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy. But we aren’t. So God lacks goodness, or power, or both. Freud pauses, at a loss.
FREUD Finally. We are making progress. More irritated, he takes out his handkerchief and adjusts his prosthesis.
LEWIS What if God wants to perfect us through suffering? Make us realize that real happiness, eternal happiness, can only come through him? If pleasure is his whisper, pain is his megaphone. Freud, growing more frustrated, paces around Lewis.
FREUD I’m sure Hitler, the little altar boy who served at Church every Sunday, would agree with you. But I cannot. (dismissive) We speak different languages. You believe in revelation. I believe in science, the authority of reason. There is no common ground. LEWIS
FREUD And if good is to be chosen, then your God who created it also created evil. Allowed Lucifer to live, to flourish, even when he logically should have been destroyed. Freud raises a handkerchief to his mouth, dabbing at it.
LEWIS God gave Lucifer free will, which is the only thing that makes goodness possible. A world filled with choice-less creatures is a world of machines. It’s men, not God, who created prisons, slavery, bombs. Man’s suffering is the fault of man.
FREUD Is that your excuse for pain and suffering? Did I bring about my own cancer? Or is killing me God’s revenge? Lewis hesitates.
LEWIS I don’t know. Freud is taken aback.
FREUD You “don’t know?!”My Daughter Sophie died of Spanish Flu at Twenty-Seven! A Wife, a Mother! Tuberculosis killed my Grandson at five years old! Freud, furious, is now in Lewis’ face. FREUD: FIVE! What a brilliant plan of God’s to murder him! I wish cancer had attacked my brain, instead. Then, perhaps, I could hallucinate there is a God and seek vengeance.
Sigmund Freud’s family in 1898 – front row: Sophie, Anna, and Ernst Freud; middle row: Oliver and Martha Freud, Minna Bernays; back row: Martin and Sigmund Freud. Mathilde, the eldest child, is not included
On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:
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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.
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July 1, 2020 Ricky Gervais
Dear Ricky,
This is the 75th day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate from the book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Francis Schaeffer and C.Everett Koop.
As you know I am writing you a series of letters on Solomon’s efforts to find a meaning and purpose to life. Solomon tried to find a meaning and purpose to life UNDER THE SUN in the Book of Ecclesiastes in all of the 6 “L” words and looked into learning(1:16-18),laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20).
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Most people are all right. They’re just having a bad day. Sometimes they don’t think, they get caught up in their own lives. They’re just trying to survive. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, and sometimes it’s just no one’s fault.[to Tony]
Since the age of about 15 or 16 I have been an agnostic. In later years I converted from being an agnostic to a somewhat dogmatic atheist. I think my personal attitudes to religion were actually hardened by doing the Banaras Study (about death)…. A lot of the ideas that were underlying what people were saying were really rather deeply disturbing and frankly personally unpleasant. You would meet a man whose son had died in some tragic circumstances and the Priest would be going on about the fruits of Karma and so on. I found this personally unattractive.
Quote from Raymond Tallis:
In the You Tube video “A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3),” Dr. Tallis asserted:
My main reason for being an atheist is that the concept of God is totally illogical. Any attempt to bring together all the qualities that are ascribed to God lead to contradictions. For example, God is separate from His creation but is also infinite and boundless which is contradiction number 1.
There is the obvious contradiction that people have often talked about is that He is omnipotent and all-good and yet allows a world in which terrible things happen. Whatever way you square it the concept of God is a logical impossibility.
“If God is an omnipotent omniscient agent he can do what he likes. Okay, so what kind of world world would you expect Him to create/ What is the kind of evidence that would indicate that one kind of divine being is at work rather than another? Well its the goodness. That is the crucial thing. The problem of evil shouldn’t be called the problem of evil, but the problem of the empirical evidence. The world doesn’t match up to what you would expect from a perfect God.”
…it is “monstrous” to believe that “God would create a world where, let’s say, a two-year-old child would die a slow and lingering death from hunger and thirst…” because of Adam and Eve’s sin committed thousands of years before. Even if one thinks that baby’s suffering is “deserved,” “what about the suffering on non-human animals?”
3,000 years ago Solomon looked at the issue of the existence of pain and suffering in his Book of Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes 4:1
Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them.
Francis Schaeffer: Between birth and death power rules. Solomon looked over his kingdom and also around the world and proclaimed that right does not rule but power rules.
Ecclesiastes 7:14-15
14 In the day of prosperity be happy, but in the day of adversity consider—God has made the one as well as the other so that man will not discover anything that will be after him.
15 I have seen everything during my lifetime of futility; there is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness.
Ecclesiastes 8:14
14 There is futility which is done on the earth, that is, there are righteous men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked. On the other hand, there are evil men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I say that this too is futility.
Francis Schaeffer: We could say it in 20th century language, “The books are not balanced in this life.”
Francis Schaeffer: There is only one reason that viewing life UNDER THE SUN from birth to death causes despair and that is because we live in an abnormal world [since the fall in Genesis 3 when sin entered the world because of rebellion]. It is a legitimate despair if viewed only in the context of UNDER THE SUN,but it is an abnormal despair if it is seen in its proper setting.
Quote from Yujin Nagasawa:
:
They might say that heaven is different from earth because in heaven the environment is different so maybe people are not tempted to commit sin in heaven, but then you wonder why on earth is not like that, why we don’t live in this kind of environment where we are not tempted to perform morally wrong.
How can a good God allow evil and suffering? Here is an explanation from the Evangelism Explosion leader’s guide: Their thinking is that either God is not powerful enough to prevent evil or else God is not good. He is often blamed for tragedy. “Where was God when I went through this, or when that happened.” God is blamed for natural disasters, Even my insurance company describes them as “acts of God.” How to handle this one- (O.N.E.)a. Origin of evil— man’s choice- God created a perfect world…b. Nature of God—He forgives, I John 1:9—He uses tragedy to bring us to Himself, C.S. Lewis, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to arouse a deaf world.”c. End of it all—Bible teaches that God will one day put an end to all evil, and pain and death. “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).As Christians we have this hope of Heaven and eternity. Share how it has made a tremendous difference in your life and that you know for sure that when you die you are going to spend eternity in Heaven. Ask the person, “May I ask you a question? Do you have this hope? Do you know for certain that when you die you are going to Heaven, or is that something you would say you’re still working on?”How could a loving God send people to Hell?(O.N.E.)a. Origin of hell—never intended for people. Created for Satan and his demons. Jesus said, “Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt 25:41). Man chooses to sin and ignore God. The penalty is death (eternal separation from God) and, yes, Hell. But God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, we choose it by refusing or ignoring God in attitude and action. b. Nature of God—“ God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). He is so loving that He sent His own Son to die and pay the penalty for our sin so that we could avoid Hell and have the assurance of Heaven. No one in Hell will be able to blame God. He doesn’t send people there, it’s our own choice. We must choose to repent, to stop ignoring God in attitude and action, accepting His salvation and yielding to His leadership.c. End of it all—Bible teaches that God will one day put an end to all evil, pain, death, and penalty of Hell. “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).As Christians , we need not worry about Hell. The Bible says, “these things have been written . . . so that you may know you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). I have complete confidence that when I die, I’m going to Heaven
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Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there.
Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.
Here is a testimony of a Nobel prize winner who left Christianity behind like you did, but has he considered the evidence that I have sent you concerning the Bible’s historical accuracy?
Sir John Walker comments:
Had an early association with the church but like most people who become interested in science there is a conflict between the Christianity you were brought up with and has become part of you and the logic of science and that has to be resolved. It took slightly longer than some people to resolve it. I came under fire and I tried to protect my position as a believing Christian as an undergraduate from other people who made me think about it and ultimately decided they were incompatible, so lost my religion and that is my current position; however, I still enjoy going to Chapel and taking part in the service, though not participating properly, but participating in a ritual that is part of me but which I cannot resolve; now decided that I don’t want to resolve it. I think Richard Dawkins would give me pretty short shrift for retaining those views, but I think it is part of my make up and I don’t want to get rid of it. ; I do get some spiritual satisfaction in a way that I can’t fully explain, so don’t apologise for going to Chapel in Sidney where we now have very fine music;
Ricky you said you left Christianity in your youth because you did not think there was evidence indicating it was true, but did you consider this info below?
TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnotes #97 and #98)
A common assumption among liberal scholars is that because the Gospels are theologically motivated writings–which they are–they cannot also be historically accurate. In other words, because Luke, say (when he wrote the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts), was convinced of the deity of Christ, this influenced his work to the point where it ceased to be reliable as a historical account. The assumption that a writing cannot be both historical and theological is false.
The experience of the famous classical archaeologist Sir William Ramsay illustrates this well. When he began his pioneer work of exploration in Asia Minor, he accepted the view then current among the Tubingen scholars of his day that the Book of Acts was written long after the events in Paul’s life and was therefore historically inaccurate. However, his travels and discoveries increasingly forced upon his mind a totally different picture, and he became convinced that Acts was minutely accurate in many details which could be checked.
What is even more interesting is the way “liberal” modern scholars today deal with Ramsay’s discoveries and others like them. In the NEW TESTAMENT : THE HISTORY OF THE INVESTIGATION OF ITS PROBLEMS, the German scholar Werner G. Kummel made no reference at all to Ramsay. This provoked a protest from British and American scholars, whereupon in a subsequent edition Kummel responded. His response was revealing. He made it clear that it was his deliberate intention to leave Ramsay out of his work, since “Ramsay’s apologetic analysis of archaeology [in other words, relating it to the New Testament in a positive way] signified no methodologically essential advance for New Testament research.” This is a quite amazing assertion. Statements like these reveal the philosophic assumptions involved in much liberal scholarship.
A modern classical scholar, A.N.Sherwin-White, says about the Book of Acts: “For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming…Any attempt to reject its basic historicity, even in matters of detail, must not appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken this for granted.”
When we consider the pages of the New Testament, therefore, we must remember what it is we are looking at. The New Testament writers themselves make abundantly clear that they are giving an account of objectively true events.
(Under footnote #98)
Acts is a fairly full account of Paul’s journeys, starting in Pisidian Antioch and ending in Rome itself. The record is quite evidently that of an eyewitness of the events, in part at least. Throughout, however, it is the report of a meticulous historian. The narrative in the Book of Acts takes us back behind the missionary journeys to Paul’s famous conversion on the Damascus Road, and back further through the Day of Pentecost to the time when Jesus finally left His disciples and ascended to be with the Father.
But we must understand that the story begins earlier still, for Acts is quite explicitly the second part of a continuous narrative by the same author, Luke, which reaches back to the birth of Jesus.
Luke 2:1-7 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
2 Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all [a]the inhabited earth. 2 [b]This was the first census taken while[c]Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. 4 Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, 5 in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. 6 While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a [d]manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
In the opening sentences of his Gospel, Luke states his reason for writing:
Luke 1:1-4 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things[a]accomplished among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those whofrom the beginning [b]were eyewitnesses and [c]servants of the [d]word, 3 it seemed fitting for me as well, having [e]investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellentTheophilus; 4 so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been[f]taught.
In Luke and Acts, therefore, we have something which purports to be an adequate history, something which Theophilus (or anyone) can rely on as its pages are read. This is not the language of “myths and fables,” and archaeological discoveries serve only to confirm this.
For example, it is now known that Luke’s references to the titles of officials encountered along the way are uniformly accurate. This was no mean achievement in those days, for they varied from place to place and from time to time in the same place. They were proconsuls in Corinth and Cyprus, asiarchs at Ephesus, politarchesat Thessalonica, and protosor “first man” in Malta. Back in Palestine, Luke was careful to give Herod Antipas the correct title of tetrarch of Galilee. And so one. The details are precise.
The mention of Pontius Pilate as Roman governor of Judea has been confirmed recently by an inscription discovered at Caesarea, which was the Roman capital of that part of the Roman Empire. Although Pilate’s existence has been well known for the past 2000 years by those who have read the Bible, now his governorship has been clearly attested outside the Bible.
Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)
I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events |Tagged Bible Prophecy, john macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)
Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (1)
John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Great article by Adrian Rogers. What evidence is there that the Bible is in fact God’s Word? I want to give you five reasons to affirm the Bible is the Word of God. First, I believe the Bible is the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (0)
Is there any evidence the Bible is true? Articles By PleaseConvinceMe Apologetics Radio The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy Jim Wallace A Simple Litmus Test There are many ways to verify the reliability of scripture from both internal evidences of transmission and agreement, to external confirmation through archeology and science. But perhaps the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)
Here is some very convincing evidence that points to the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeological and External Evidence for the Bible Archeology consistently confirms the Bible! Archaeology and the Old Testament Ebla tablets—discovered in 1970s in Northern Syria. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | E
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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:
LEWIS Oh yes. But I won’t presume to ask them. I will only remind you of your earlier observations. Psychoanalysis is inherently sexual. And what people say is less important than what they cannot.
FREUD’S ANSWER is to turn on the RADIO. SOUND OF BBC ORCHESTRA PLAYING, Freud turns it off.
LEWIS (CONT’D) You do that every time.
FREUD We’re waiting for news.
LEWIS Then why not just turn the music down? Why off?
FREUD I object to being manipulated. To me, it’s all church music.
LEWIS My objection to church music is that it trivializes emotions I already feel. I think you’re afraid to feel them at all. Freud glares at him offended.
FREUD Is that your diagnosis? Doctor?
LEWIS Not all of it. Lewis comes closer to Freud. LEWIS (CONT’D) I also think you’re terribly selfish, putting your own pain above the pain of those you love. (MORE)
You lie to yourself, thinking you can control death like you control your world and your daughter. You believe you can out-think your fear by hiding behind your desk of dead gods, but the truth is that you’re terrified.
FREUD We all are! And you?! When the siren sounded earlier you didn’t behave like a man who “took comfort” this was his last day. WHERE IS YOUR GREAT FAITH? Your precious “Joy” in meeting your maker? It disappears, because you know under all your self-protective lies he does not exist! Freud puts his handkerchief to his lips, but doesn’t let up. FREUD (CONT.) (CONT’D) YOU BURY YOUR DOUBTS AS YOU DO YOUR MEMORIES OF THE WAR, BECAUSE AT YOUR CORE YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A COWARD!
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Francis Schaeffer
Debating from 2015-2020 Darwin’s great grandson (Horace Barlow) about Francis Schaeffer’s 1968 critique of Darwinism!
The autobiography of Charles Darwin read by Francis Schaeffer in 1968 was not the same one originally released in 1892 because that one omitted the religious statements of Charles Darwin
. LOSS OF AESTHETIC TASTES:
Below is a portion of my February 11, 2015 letter to Dr Barlow which he responded to in his November 22, 2017 letter.
Horace Barlow: At the 25:18:12 mark in the You Tube video you noted, “At Winchester I was interested in photography; I was also interested in music but not good enough at it; I was taught piano to begin with but only reached about grade three; we had an aunt whom I later liked very much; she used to sing folk songs and I couldn’t stand that; I later took up the flute and played in orchestras; I still play; music has been important in my life;
Your love of music and of photography and of nature made me think of you when I read the book Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published lettersbecause of what Darwin said about science causing him to lose hisaesthetic tastes and enjoyment of the beauty of nature. These are two things you still seem to enjoy. I am going to quote some of Charles Darwin’s own words and then include the comments of Francis Schaeffer on those words….
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.
This curious and lamentable loss of the higher æsthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Francis Schaeffer commented:
This is the old man Darwin writing at the end of his life. What he is saying here is the further he has gone on with his studies the more he has seen himself reduced to a machine as far as aesthetic things are concerned. I think this is crucial because as we go through this we find that his struggles and my sincere conviction is that he never came to the logical conclusion of his own position, but he nevertheless in the death of the higher qualities as he calls them, art, music, poetry, and so on, what he had happen to him was his own theory was producing this in his own self just as his theories a hundred years later have produced this in our culture. I don’t think you can hold the evolutionary position as he held it without becoming a machine. What has happened to Darwin personally is merely a forerunner to what occurred to the whole culture as it has fallen in this world of pure material, pure chance and later determinism. Here he is in a situation where his mannishness has suffered in the midst of his own position.
Francis Schaeffer noted that in Darwin’s 1876 Autobiography that Darwin he is going to set forth two arguments for God in this and again you will find when he comes to the end of this that he is in tremendous tension. Darwin wrote,
At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons.Formerly I was led by feelings such as those just referred to (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.
Francis Schaeffer remarked:
Now Darwin says when I look back and when I look at nature I came to the conclusion that man can not be just a fly! But now Darwin has moved from being a younger man to an older man and he has allowed his presuppositions to enter in to block his logic. These things at the end of his life he had no intellectual answer for. To block them out in favor of his theory. Remember the letter of his that said he had lost all aesthetic senses when he had got older and he had become a clod himself. Now interesting he says just the same thing, but not in relation to the arts, namely music, pictures, etc, but to nature itself. Darwin said, “But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…” So now you see that Darwin’s presuppositions have not only robbed him of the beauty of man’s creation in art, but now the universe. He can’t look at it now and see the beauty. The reason he can’t see the beauty is for a very, very , very simple reason: THE BEAUTY DRIVES HIM TO DISTRACTION. THIS IS WHERE MODERN MAN IS AND IT IS HELL. The art is hell because it reminds him of man and how great man is, and where does it fit in his system? It doesn’t. When he looks at nature and it’s beauty he is driven to the same distraction and so consequently you find what has built up inside him is a real death, not only the beauty of the artistic but the beauty of nature. He has no answer in his logic and he is left in tension. He dies and has become less than human because these two great things (such as any kind of art and the beauty of nature) that would make him human stand against his theory.
“I am glad you were at the Messiah, it is the one thing that I should like to hear again, but I dare say I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it as in old days; and then I should feel very flat, for it is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest, which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach.’
Francis Schaeffer summarized:
So he is glad for science because his stomach bothers him, but on the other hand when I think of what it costs me I almost hate science. You can almost hear young Jean-Jacques Rousseau speaking here, he sees what the machine is going to do and he hates the machine and Darwin is constructing the machine and it leads as we have seen to his own loss of human values in the area of aesthetics, the area of art and also in the area of nature. This is what it has cost him. His theory has led him to this place. When you come to this then it seems to me that you understand man’s dilemma very, very well, to think of the origin of the theory of mechanical evolution bringing Darwin himself to the place of this titanic tension.
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The response Letter from Horace Barlow on 11-22-17 indicated that Dr. Barlow had taken time to read my previous 7 letters and emails and you can tell that from his following response:
Many thanks for your copious and charmingly expressed correspondence about Charles Darwin’s religious views, and about his descriptions of losing his sense of reverence, awe, and beauty in his old age.
Notice, however, that he clearly did not lose his sense of the value of truth, and of the importance of forever searching it out.
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On May 1, 2017 in letter to Dr. Barlow I did give some evidence concerning the accuracy of the Bible. Barlow rightly pointed out in his November letter of 2017 that “Notice, however, that he [Charles Darwin] clearly did not lose his sense of the value of truth, and of the importance of forever searching it out.” I was also hoping that Barlow had that same motivation:
SINCE CHARLES DARWIN’S DEATH WE NOW HAVE LOTS OF HISTORICAL RECORDS AND MUCH EVIDENCE FROM THE FIELD OF ARCHAEOLOGY THAT SHOW THE BIBLE IS HISTORICALLY ACCURATE.
Just like Darwin you need to ask yourself this same question but you will be doing it almost a century and a half later: Is the Bible historically accurate and have I taken the time to examine the evidence? Obviously Darwin was hoping that archaeology would provide some hope for the accuracy of the Bible. Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject and if you like you could just google these subjects: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription.3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism),
pictured below with his eldest child William:
Notice this statement below from the Freedom from Religion Foundation:
(Nora Barlow pictured below)
Charles Darwin wrote the Rev. J. Fordyce on July 7, 1879, that “an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” Darwin penned his memoirs between the ages of 67 and 73, finishing the main text in 1876. These memoirs were published posthumously in 1887 by his family under the title Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, with his hardest-hitting views on religion excised. Only in 1958 did Darwin’s granddaughter Nora Barlow publish his Autobiography with original omissions restored D. 1882. ——-
Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882) had 10 children and 7 of them survived to adulthood.
Sir Horace Darwin, KBE, FRS (13 May 1851 – 22 September 1928), the fifth son and ninth child of the British naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, the youngest of their seven children who survived to adulthood.
(Horace Darwin pictured below)
Emma Nora Barlow, Lady Barlow (née Darwin; 22 December 1885 – 29 May 1989) Nora, as she was known, was the daughter of the civil engineer Sir Horace Darwin and his wife The Hon. Lady Ida Darwin (née Farrer),
Horace Darwin married Emma Cecilia “Ida” Farrer (1854–1946) pictured below.
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Francis Schaeffer
Horace Barlow was the son of Nora Barlow. From February 11, 2015 to July 1, 2017, I wrote 7 letters to Dr. Horace Barlow because I wanted to discuss primarily the views of his grandfather CharlesDarwin and Francis Schaeffer’s 1968 critique of Darwinism!
In December of 2017, I received a two page typed letter from Dr. Barlow reacting to several of the points made in the previous letters and emails. Over the next few weeks I will be posting the 32 letters I wrote to Dr. Barlow from February 11, 2015 to April 18, 2020 one per week every Tuesday and below is a list of those letters. Sadly Dr. Barlow passed away on July 5, 2020 at age 98. However, I want to summarize some the issues we discussed in the next few days.
Franicis Schaeffer
If you wish to hear Francis Schaeffer’s 1968 talk on Darwin’s autobiography then you can access part 1 at this link and part 2 at this link.
I found Dr. Barlow to be a true gentleman and he was very kind to take the time to answer the questions that I submitted to him. In the upcoming months I will take time once a week to pay tribute to his life and reveal our correspondence. In the first week I noted:
Today I am posting my first letter to him in February of 2015 which discussed Charles Darwin lamenting his loss of aesthetic tastes which he blamed on Darwin’s own dedication to the study of evolution. In a later return letter, Dr. Barlow agreed that Darwin did in fact lose his aesthetic tastes at the end of his life.
In the second week I look at the views of Michael Polanyi and share the comments of Francis Schaeffer concerning Polanyi’s views.
In the third week, I look at the life of Brandon Burlsworth in the November 28, 2016 letter and the movie GREATER and the problem of evil which Charles Darwin definitely had a problem with once his daughter died.
On the 4th letter to Dr. Barlow looks at Darwin’s admission that he at times thinks that creation appears to look like the expression of a mind. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words in 1968 sermon at this link.
My Fifth Letter concerning Charles Darwin’s views on MORAL MOTIONS Which was mailed on March 1, 2017. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning moral motions in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
6th letter on May 1, 2017 in which Charles Darwin’s hopes are that someone would find in Pompeii an old manuscript by a distinguished Roman that would show that Christ existed! Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning the possible manuscript finds in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
7th letter on Darwin discussing DETERMINISM dated 7-1-17 . Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning determinism in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
Thanks 8th letter responds to Dr. Barlow’s letter to me concerning the Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning chance in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
Thanks 9th letter in response to 11-22-17 letter I received from Professor Horace Barlow was mailed on 1-2-18 and included Charles Darwin’s comments on William Paley. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning William Paley in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
10th letter in response to 11-22-17 letter I received from Professor Horace Barlow was mailed on 2-2-18 and includes Darwin’s comments asking for archaeological evidence for the Bible! Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning His desire to see archaeological evidence supporting the Bible’s accuracy in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
11th letter I mailed on 3-2-18 in response to 11-22-17 letter from Barlow that asserted: It is also sometimes asked whether chance, even together with selection, can define a “MORAL CODE,” which the religiously inclined say is defined by their God. I think the answer is “Yes, it certainly can…” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning A MORAL CODE in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
12th letter on March 26, 2018 breaks down song DUST IN THE WIND “All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
In 13th letter I respond to Barlow’s November 22, 2017 letter and assertion “He {Darwin} clearly did not lose his sense of the VALUE of TRUTH, and of the importance of FOREVER SEARCHING it out.”
In 14th letter to Dr. Barlow on 10-2-18, I assert: “Let me demonstrate how the Bible’s view of the origin of life fits better with the evidence we have from archaeology than that of gradual evolution.”In 15th letter in November 2, 2018 to Dr. Barlow I quote his relative Randal Keynes Who in the Richard Dawkins special “The Genius of Darwin” makes this point concerning Darwin, “he was, at different times, enormously confident in it,and at other times, he was utterly uncertain.”In 16th Letter on 12-2-18 to Dr. Barlow I respond to his letter that stated, If I am pressed to say whether I think belief in God helps people to make wise and beneficial decisions I am bound to say (and I fear this will cause you pain) “No, it is often very disastrous, leading to violence, death and vile behaviour…Muslim terrorists…violence within the Christian church itself”17th letter sent on January 2, 2019 shows the great advantage we have over Charles Darwin when examining the archaeological record concerning the accuracy of the Bible!In the 18th letter I respond to the comment by Charles Darwin: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive….The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words on his loss of aesthetic tastes in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.In 19th letter on 2-2-19 I discuss Steven Weinberg’s words, But if language is to be of any use to us, we ought to try to preserve the meanings of words, and “God” historically has not meant the laws of nature. It has meant an interested personality.
In the 20th letter on 3-2-19 I respond to Charles Darwin’s comment, “At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep [#1] inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons...Formerly I was led by feelings such as those…to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that [#2] whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. [#3] But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning his former belief in God in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In the 21st letter on May 15, 2019 to Dr Barlow I discuss the writings of Francis Schaeffer who passed away the 35 years earlier on May 15, 1985. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words at length in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In the 22nd letter I respond to Charles Darwin’s words, “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe…will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words about hell in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link
In 23rd postcard sent on 7-2-19 I asked Dr Barlow if he was a humanist. Sir Julian Huxley, founder of the American Humanist Association noted, “I use the word ‘humanist’ to mean someone who believes that man is just as much a natural phenomenon as an animal or plant; that his body, mind and soul were not supernaturally created but are products of evolution, and that he is not under the control or guidance of any supernatural being.”
In my 24th letter on 8-2-19 I quote Jerry Bergman who noted Jean Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. A founding father of the modern American scientific establishment, Agassiz was also a lifelong opponent of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Agassiz “ruled in professorial majesty at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.”
In my 25th letter on 9-2-19 I respond to Charles Darwin’s assertion, “This argument would be a valid one if all men of ALL RACES had the SAME INWARD CONVICTION of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning MORAL MOTIONS in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In my 26th letter on 10-2-19 I quoted Bertrand Russell’s daughter’s statement, “I believe myself that his whole life was a search for God…. Indeed, he had first taken up philosophy in hope of finding proof of the evidence of the existence of God … Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it”
In my 27th letter on 11-2-19 I disproved Richard Dawkins’ assertion, “Genesis says Abraham owned camels, but archaeological evidence shows that the camel was not domesticated until many centuries after Abraham.” Furthermore, I gave more evidence indicating the Bible is historically accurate.
In my 28th letter on 12-2-19 I respond to Charles Darwin’s statement, “I am glad you were at the Messiah, it is the one thing that I should like to hear again, but I dare say I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it as in old days; and then I should feel very flat, for it is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning MORAL MOTIONS in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In my 29th letter on 12-25-19 I responded to Charles Darwin’s statement, “I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dullthat it nauseated me…. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness…” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning his loss of aesthetic tastes in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In my 30th letter on 2-2-20 I quote Dustin Shramek who asserted, “Without God the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. There is no reason for which it exist. As for man, he is a freak of nature–a blind product of matter plus time plus chance. Man is just a lump of slime that evolved into rationality. There is no more purpose in life for the human race than for a species of insect; for both are the result of the blind interaction of chance and necessity.”
In my 31st letter on 3-18-20 I quote Francis Schaeffer who noted, “Darwin is saying that he gave up the New Testament because it was connected to the Old Testament. He gave up the Old Testament because it conflicted with his own theory. Did he have a real answer himself and the answer is no. At the end of his life we see that he is dehumanized by his position and on the other side we see that he never comes to the place of intellectual satisfaction for himself that his answers were sufficient.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning his loss of his Christian faith in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In my 32nd letter on 4-18-20 quoted H.J. Blackham on where humanism leads “On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility“
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TRIBUTE TO HORACE BARLOW:
Abhi Banerjee @abhi_mit
Lovely piece on Horace Barlow (1921–2020) in @CurrentBiology by Simon Laughlin and David Burr bit.ly/2Ph6smp
Horace Barlow.View Large ImageDownload Hi-res imageHorace Barlow was one of the truly great neuroscientists of his time, in the Cambridge tradition of quantitative neurophysiology and psychophysics. His fundamental theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of brain function have inspired and influenced generations of neurophysiologists, psychologists and computational neuroscientists and are certain to endure for generations to come.Horace Basil Barlow, FRS, was born in 1921 in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire, son of Sir Alan Barlow and Lady Nora Barlow (née Darwin). He was educated at Winchester College and studied medicine during the war years, first at Cambridge and then at Harvard Medical School, which awarded him an MD in 1946. He completed medical training at University College Hospital, London, before commencing research in neurophysiology with E.D. Adrian at the Cambridge Physiology Laboratory. After various positions at Cambridge University, he became Professor of Physiological Optics and Physiology at UC Berkeley. In 1974, he returned to Trinity College and the Cambridge Physiology Department to take the Royal Society Research Chair of Physiology, where he continued to make important contributions to neuroscience well after his formal retirement. Horace was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and won their Royal Medal in 1993. He was awarded the Australia Prize in the latter year and several others, including the Ferrier Medal in 1980 and the Ken Nakayama Prize from the Vision Sciences Society in 2016.Many interesting and charismatic people impacted on the young Horace. The first — and arguably most important — was his mother, granddaughter of Charles Darwin. She held no formal degree but worked as a biologist and later, as Darwin’s biographer, founded scholarly research into his life and achievements. Her example, together with his abilities and preference for maths over the humanities, veered Horace towards science. His contemporaries at Winchester College, Christopher Longuet-Higgins, Freeman Dyson and James Lighthill, all of whom became prominent scientists, played an influential role. During his university years there was no shortage of creative minds: his supervisor, the eminent Lord Adrian, and his tutor William Rushton, as well as Pat Merton and Tommy Gold. These latter three were part of the Ratio Club, a London-based club of about 20 carefully selected young neurobiologists, neurologists, psychologists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists, who periodically met in Queen’s Square to discuss cybernetics, information theory and brain function (see group photo). Cybernetics and information theory were central planks in Horace’s conceptual framework throughout his lifetime.Horace started his scientific career early, publishing three papers before he completed his MD: one (in Nature) with Rushton during his Cambridge undergraduate days and two with fellow students at Harvard. His next project, assigned to him by Adrian, was to investigate the proposal of Marshall and Talbot that small scanning eye-movements serve a fundamental role in vision. Horace devised a novel method for measuring eye position precisely (photographing a small spot of mercury placed on the cornea) and found that, between rapid gaze shifts, the eyes were essentially still. He concluded that the fixations rather than scanning eye-movements were fundamental to vision, dismissed Marshall and Talbot’s idea and moved on. However, the importance of the dynamics of perception, including ‘temporal interpolation’ of moving stimuli, remained central to his thinking, emerging clearly in his Ferrier lecture in 1980.Adrian’s supervision style was quite liberal, in the Cambridge tradition, described by Horace as “incisive, but economical, guidance”. Thus, Horace was free to pursue his own scientific curiosities, such as how neurons integrate information. He observed that Sherrington’s classic preparations used artificial stimuli, electric shocks applied to spinal roots, whereas applying light to the retina allows for behaviourally relevant natural stimuli. He developed a preparation for recording spikes from single ganglion cells in frog retina — no mean feat at the time — to study the most basic element of integration, signal summation. Inspired by Rushton, Horace took a quantitative approach and, by measuring thresholds as a function of stimulus area, discovered that integration was not uniform over the receptive field but that there were clear inhibitory surrounds forming separate ‘on’ and ‘off’ regions. More surprisingly, one type of ganglion cell could be a feature detector whose spike discharge anticipates the future position of a fly.This study initiated 30 years of ground-breaking collaborative work on retinal ganglion cells. Horace joined Stephen Kuffler, who had independently described the inhibitory surround in cat retina. Together with Fitzgerald, they discovered that ganglion cells adapt their receptive fields to cover the full range of light levels, switching from cones to rods at low light levels and losing the inhibitory surround. In 1963, Horace and Richard Hill discovered motion-sensitive cells in rabbit retina. Working with the most exacting of retinal physiologists, Bill Levick, Horace revealed further hidden complexities in retinal processing: a motion-sensitive ganglion cell is driven by an array of subunits. Then, in classic experiments, they established the first physiologically informed model of the underlying mechanism: the Barlow and Levick model of elementary motion detection.In 1964, Horace accepted a professorship at the Berkeley School of Optometry, where he continued his neurophysiological experiments, investigating integration by neurons in primary visual cortex (V1). One particularly influential study was conducted with former student Colin Blakemore (in Berkeley on a Harkness Fellowship) and the enthusiastic and charismatic young Australian Jack Pettigrew. Following leads from Jack’s undergraduate work in Sydney, they demonstrated that cells in cat primary visual cortex were selective to binocular disparity, the signals that support binocular depth perception. This was important and unexpected, as stereoscopic depth was thought to be a high-level perceptual property emerging late in processing. However, the results meshed well with Béla Julesz’s demonstrations in the early 1960s of ‘random-dot stereograms’, showing that depth can emerge from point-by-point disparities in otherwise random patterns. The discovery reinforced Horace’s conviction that single sensory neurons coded meaningful information.His work on retinal and cortical neurons brought home to Horace the fundamental realisation that physiological experiments could answer questions of psychological interest. Much of the sensory apparatus for complex behavioural patterns (like detecting and catching flies) may lie in the retina rather than ‘mysterious centres’ too difficult to study by physiological means. Furthermore, the lateral inhibition mechanism that he discovered in frog retina had been postulated by Ernst Mach and others to account for perceptual phenomena, such as simultaneous contrast and Mach Bands. This line of thought culminated in ‘A neural doctrine for perceptual psychology’, published in the fledgling journal Perception in 1972. The provocative formulation of ‘dogmas’ stimulated much important debate, theorising and experimental work, and the central idea of that paper, that perception corresponds to the activity of specific cells, has been hugely influential to physiologists and psychologists alike. Indeed, Horace’s doctrine is still relevant, as it goes far beyond ‘lock and key’ feature detectors. His doctrine incorporates the concepts of statistical inference, efficiency and redundancy that he formulated earlier in his career and suggests the far-reaching idea that he subsequently pursued: single neurons use synaptic plasticity to capture the redundancy that is knowledge.Horace started thinking about signals, noise and perceptual judgements when as an undergraduate he presented a new paper to a discussion group. The landmark study of Hecht, Shlaer and Pirenne demonstrated that the absolute threshold of human vision is limited by noise: quantal fluctuations whose effects can be determined psychophysically by testing the predictions of statistical models. Horace also discussed the problem of signal and noise in the Ratio Club (it was one of their chosen topics), especially with his Cambridge colleague Tommy Gold (later Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University). After his experiments on frog retina, Horace revisited Hecht et al. with a penetrating statistical analysis of published data. He found that the number of quantal events required to reach threshold is elevated by the presence of background noise that he attributed to the thermal activation of visual pigment molecules. This novel conclusion was confirmed a quarter of a century later by recording from rods. His theoretical findings prompted Horace to consider that “thresholds are efficient statistical judgements of constant fallibility”, and he quickly confirmed this more general principle with new psychophysical experiments.The young Horace Barlow (bottom right) in May 1952, together with members and guests of the Ratio Club, outside Peterhouse College, Cambridge: Back row (partly obscured): H. Shipton, J. Bates, W.E. Hick, J. Pringle, D. Sholl, J. Westcott and D. Mackay. Middle row: G. Brindley, T. McLardy. W.R. Ashby, T. Gold and A. Uttley. Front row: A. Turing, G. Sutton, W. Rushton, G. Dawson and H. Barlow.View Large ImageDownload Hi-res imageHorace’s scientific approach, to try to understand the principles guiding brain function, was uncommon among physiologists. His 1961 paper on ‘Possible principles underlying the transmission of sensory messages’ (in Sensory Communication, W.D. Keidel, U.O. Keidel, M.E. Wigand and W.A. Rosenblith, eds) opens with, “a wing would be a most mystifying structure if one did not know that birds flew”. Horace argued that we need first to understand the goals of the system to avoid being buried in a mass of irrelevant neurophysiological and neuroanatomical details while missing crucial observations. He reasoned that, because neurons have limited representational capacity, they should economise on impulses by forming efficient representations. According to information theory, this can be achieved by eliminating redundancy using lateral inhibition and adaptation, and because both are observed in retina this must be a goal of early sensory processing. Two decades later, Barlow’s efficient coding hypothesis was validated. This prompted a new round of theory, measurements and experiments, which explained the function of mechanisms in the earlier stages of vision, olfaction and audition. Efficiency and ‘the economy of impulses’ continue to guide our understanding of neural codes at all levels.Horace’s approach was intrinsically interdisciplinary, a popular buzzword in modern grant writing but less usual in his day. He looked for guiding principles of brain function without undue concern whether his supporting data came from psychophysics or physiology, humans or animals, vertebrates or invertebrates. He was always trying — and usually succeeding — to merge detailed observations into the big picture of brain function, following the example of his famous great-grandfather. He was very much a ‘hands-on’ scientist, in the Cambridge mould: he never led a large research group nor took on many graduate students. That was not his style. He led by example, and his example was highly influential. There are very few sensory neuroscientists who would claim not to have been influenced by Horace’s work, one way or the other.Horace never stopped trying to understand the brain. During his own Festschrift in 1987 he gave the most interesting and original talk of the workshop. Following his major theme of how the brain maximises efficiency, he advanced a novel explanation for ‘adaptation’ (the fact that cells reduce firing rate after repeated excitation), suggesting that it is a complex phenomenon serving to ‘decorrelate’ sensory input, reducing inherent redundancy to take full advantage of the limited dynamic range of neurons. This changed the way many people thought about adaptation and again led to new lines of research.The ideas of redundancy and correlated activity of sensory pathways also underlie his highly influential paper on ‘Unsupervised learning’ (Neural Comput. (1989) 1, 295–311). This paper was one of the first to draw attention to the importance of unsupervised learning as opposed to supervised or reinforced learning. Unsupervised learning is about how a nervous system (or indeed artificial intelligence) recognises ‘statistical regularities’, or patterns in its inputs, and is of fundamental importance for understanding the cortex. Horace connected old ideas, such as Tolman’s ‘cognitive maps’ and Craik’s ‘working models’, with modern concepts of entropy, concluding that redundancy in sensory signals provides the knowledge incorporated in those maps. Such knowledge enables unexpected discrepancies to be immediately identified and dealt with. Horace’s information theory-based approach underlies many modern approaches to unsupervised learning in neural networks and Bayesian learning.In the 30-odd years after his formal ‘retirement’, Horace continued to make highly original and creative contributions to the field. He published 56 articles during this period, many as the single author. His interests were very varied, including information redundancy, predictive coding, Bayesian inference, unsupervised learning, development and many others, but all were motivated by the common themes of information theory and neural efficiency. A recent example of his creative thinking was his talk at the symposium on ‘Turing Enduring: Information Processing by Brains and Machines’ (Rockefeller University, December 2012), published in the journal Visual Neuroscience. There, Horace challenged the traditional (and still prevalent) wisdom that orientation-tuned simple and complex cells in primary visual cortex act as ‘edge-detectors’. Looking for more general guiding principles of brain function, he claimed that “the prime role of V1 is to search for regularity or redundancy in the input”, leading to the hypothesis that simple cells perform cross-correlations between the retinal input and internal templates, while complex cells calculate auto-correlations in the retinal input. Characteristically, he did not leave this as a simple hypothesis but provided solid quantitative psychophysical data in favour of his theory.Horace was renowned for his intelligence and quick-wittedness. Neuroscientists presented their research to the Cambridge ‘Craik Club’ with some trepidation. But this was unwarranted, for besides being smart Horace was kind, especially to young researchers. He quickly understood the message of the talk and gave many useful suggestions, absolutely on point, and never intended to humiliate. But his clever quips could also be fun. At a dinner that he gave for a bunch of graduate students, he invited his friend Francis Crick, who held forth on several topics throughout the evening. At one stage, Francis brought up his lineage, lamenting that he could trace it back only to Elizabethan times. With a disarming smile, Horace instantly retorted, “oh yes Francis, and which Elizabeth is that?”Most of Horace’s ideas have survived the test of time, stimulating and motivating generations of neuroscientists and leading to a cascade of advancements far too extensive to summarise here. But if we are to apply his cherished information theory, we know that there is more information in the rare and unexpected event: so did he get anything wrong? Probably not seriously. One idea that clearly evolved over time was his intuition about information redundancy in the image. Initially, he emphasised the role of reducing redundancy for efficient neural coding and economy of neuron numbers as well as impulses, but later he realised the importance of redundancy in identifying structure and statistical regularities in the environment, as sensory redundancy is the main source of knowledge. But this was not a mistake, merely a change of emphasis. If we go right back to the beginning, to his experiments that led him to dismiss the importance of eye drift, perhaps we might say that his assessment was premature, as recent work is showing how the small eye-movements serve an important functional role, conditioning the spatio-temporal frequency spectrum of the image. But while he did not exactly predict this, his intuitions about the importance of temporal dynamics and interpolations, prominent in his Ferrier lecture, were not too far off the mark.The last scientific gathering with Horace was for his 95th birthday, in December 2016. This was a fun occasion for his scientific family, some 100-odd people whose professional lives had been touched by Horace and who had passed the legacy down to their students and students’ students. The celebrations were followed by a workshop, which Horace concluded with a first-rate scientific talk, highlighting the role of information processing in the brain and urging us to consider the importance of information and entropy. His scientific curiosity never escaped him.Horace leaves his wife Miranda, 7 children and 13 grandchildren. His extended scientific family will miss him dearly.Article InfoPublication HistoryPublished online: July 31, 2020
We spotlight a selection of our favourite artists’ autobiographies and biographies, from the empowering to the scandalous, for your summer reading inspiration
Summer is upon us and this year, more than ever, it feels pertinent to pick holiday reads that will uplift and inspire. Where better to turn to, then, than artists’ memoirs and biographies – filled as they are with tales of overcoming life’s hardships, fights for justice and recognition in and outside of the art world, the quest to forge a legacy through art, and, more often than not, a juicy scandal or two to keep the reader’s interest piqued. Here, we’ve selected 15 of our favourites for your perusal, spanning the empowering, the ephemeral, the political and the downright provocative (Diego Rivera, we’re looking at you
Amazing Grace paints a poignant picture of the celebrated African American artist Beauford Delaney, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and later – following a move to Paris in the 1950s – a noted abstract expressionist. Delaney’s tale is both remarkable and heartbreaking: he was a much loved character, who counted Henry Miller and James Baldwin among his close friends, yet he often felt isolated and underappreciated, struggling with mental illness throughout his life. His wonderfully vibrant paintings boast an extraordinary psychological depth, betraying the hardships he faced and his determination to keep going no matter what. “He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and the outer darkness,” Baldwin once wrote.
Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, 1967, oil on canvas, 39 1⁄4 × 31 3⁄4″.
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted, Current Events | TaggedBen Parkinson, Carl Sagan | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (2)
I was influenced by Francis Schaeffer’s books and films and Adrian Rogers’ sermons when I grew up. I want to make the point that no one influenced the pro-life movement more than Francis Schaeffer!!! Schaeffer energized the movement and that is why it is appropriate that on May 15, 1994, ten years the anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing I would mail a letter to Carl Sagan that get him to ultimately respond to Schaeffer’s views on abortion which I included 3 letters that followed.
Francis Schaeffer and Adrian Rogers
On August 30, 1995, in my letter to Carl Sagan I included my published letter to the editor in that very day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and it appeared under the title THE HUMANIST WORLD VIEW. This got Sagan’s notice and in his letter of December 5, 1995, Sagan disagreed with me concerning the close relationship between atheistic evolutionists and the abortion movement. Actually I wrote: Adrian Rogers, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has rightly said, “Secular Humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together.”
In another letter I noted that Nelson Price in THE EMMANUEL FACTOR (1987) tells the story about Brown Trucking Company in Georgia who used to give polygraph tests to their job applicants. However, in part of the test the operator asked, “Do you believe in God?” In every instance when a professing atheist answered “No,” the test showed the person to be lying. My pastor Adrian Rogers used to tell this same story to illustrate Romans 1:19 and it was his conclusion that “there is no such thing anywhere on earth as a true atheist. If a man says he doesn’t believe in God, then he is lying. God has put his moral consciousness into every man’s heart, and a man has to try to kick his conscience to death to say he doesn’t believe in God.” Sagan’s December 5, 1995 letter to me included the sentence “You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness,” and this may have been his short to this story above possibly.
I disagree with his assertion that there is a widespread ”Problem of Radicals Killing Abortion Doctors.” I know that Sagan included a radical evangelical killer in his book CONTACT, but in reality those are hard to find and I have provided a more detailed response in a past post. Let me briefly respond today with a picture:
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Sagan rightly noted, “New knowledge of embryology, the physicians said, had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening.” This brings me to Bernard Nathanson’s powerful testimony on why he gave up his abortion activities and spent the rest of his life in the pro-life promoting his film THE SILENT SCREAM because of the technology of ultrasound and how, for the first time ever, we could actually see inside the womb.
On January 10, 1996, I wrote my response letter to Carl Sagan and I included an additional insert from Francis Schaeffer that showed The humanist base leads to meaningless and The Bible is God’s revealed truth and it tells us about our origin.
Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …
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Francis Schaeffer the Founder of the L’Abri community
The Cosmos Is All That Is
Francis Schaeffer wrote in 1981 in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO chapter 3 The Destruction of Faith and Freedom:
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
This is the second portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Carl Sagan and last week I posted the first portion and next week I will post the third portion.
SECTION #1 Evolution is discussed by these scholars: H.G.Wells, Antony Flew, Neal Gillespie, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Joseph McCabe, Louis Russell, Leo Hickey, Francis Crick, Michael Ruse, Norman D. Newell, Robert C. Cowen, Jeremy Rifkin, Francis Schaeffer, H.J.Blackham, Paul Churchland, J.W.Burrow, Douglas Futuyma, William Provine, and Bertrand Russell!!!!____________________
__ I am trying in this letter to show that the following statements are true and can not be refuted logically.
.1. Theistic evolution is not rational
.2. Evolution has been considered a fact by the vast majority of leading scholars worldwide for many years now.
3. There has been a drift from belief to agnosticism caused by science in recent years
..4. The vast majority of leading scientists today do not consider creationism scientific.
5. There are philosophical implications of Darwinism.——————
‘If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which the current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house of cards.’—
–Antony Flew pictured below:
Antony FlewRegister
Antony Flew ”It is obviously impossible to square any evolutionary account of the origin of the species with a substantially literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis.”
2.Evolution has been considered a fact by the vast majority of leading scholars worldwide for many years now.—-
Humanist Manifesto II (1973): Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces.— (Paul Kurtz [below] put the Humanist Manifesto II together and I had the opportunity to read his book FORBIDDEN FRUIT and to correspond with him.)
Neal Gillespie “Darwin’s rejection of special creation was part of the transformation of biology into a positive science, one committed to thoroughly naturalistic explanations based on material causes and the uniformity of nature.”
(Carl Sagan pictured below was quoted in Francis Schaeffer’s first book in 1968 and many times by Adrian Rogers and I result I began reading his books myself out of a curiosity.)
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Carl Sagan asserts: ”Evolution is fact, not a theory.”
Lee Dembart of the Los Angeles Times commenting on the book by Richard Dawkins called “The Blind Watchmaker”:The book cuts through the nonsense about the origin of life and leaves it for dead….He demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution is the only possible explanation for the world we see around us. In this work Dawkins refutes the argument that the complexity of life cannot be random, this implying a designer or creator.—-
Richard Dawkins in 1976, around the time he published his first best-selling book. Credit: Terry Smith/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty
Joseph McCabe in a debate with George Mccready Price: Something over 50 years ago a great man of science launched the doctrine of evolution upon the world. Generation by generation , decade by decade, scientific men have fought out that issue. I say that there is not an university professor in the world today who does not emphatically endorse the doctrine of evolution ….100 years ago, in the days of Lamarck and Darwin, men looked across that broad river and there was nothing between (man and ape)….Now we men of the Stone Age carrying us nearer to the ape; the pilot down man, and one or two others, going as far again in the direction of the ape.—-Louis S Russell, director, Royal Ontario Museum, It’s completely false to say that there’s a lacking of transitional forms. We have plenty of them —-more than sometimes we can deal with.—-Leo Hickey, former director, Yale Peabody Museum, There are myriad transitional forms. There’s really no problem finding them.—-
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Francis Crick: The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is, in fact, to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.—-
3. There has been a drift from belief to agnosticism caused by science in recent years———————- Dr Huston Smith: One reason education undoes belief (in God) is it’s teaching of evolution; Darwin’s own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic.—-
Asa Gray
(Darwin’s longest running and most significant exchange of correspondence dealing with the subjects of design in nature and religious belief was with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray..The entire extant correspondence, consisting of about 300 letters written between 1854 and 1881.)
Asa Gray (1810-1888), a Harvard professor of botony was a supporter of theistic evolution. He tried to persuade Darwin to adopt the position of theistic evolution. Darwin quickly struck down Gray’s argument, “The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make natural selection entirely superfluous, and indeed takes the whole case of the appearance of new species out of the range of science. —(Charles Darwin below)
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
—Michael Denton “ today it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century…(It is) a theory that literally changed the world.”
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Vincent Sarich in a debate with Mr Gish said, “As far as I am concerned it was not God that created man, but quite clearly and obviously man that in ultimate example of his overwhelming pride created an omnipotent God in his own idealized image of himself and in doing so thought to make himself all powerful and independent of any laws but those of his own making.”—
–4. Leading scientists worldwide today do not believe creationism is scientific.
Michael Ruse – “And, I learnt what a hollow sham modern day creationism really is : crude, dogmatic, biblical literal-ism masquerading as genuine science.”
Norman D. Newell
American Museum of Natural History
January 27, 1909 – April 18, 2005
Norman D. Newell – “Finally I should like to define the word science, and explain why scientific creationism cannot be included in its definition. Science is characterized by the willingness of an investigator to follow evidence wherever it leads.”
Robert C. Cowen– It is this many-faceted on-going science story that should be told in public school biology courses. Creationists want those courses to include the possibility of – and the “scientific” evidence for – a creator as well. There is no such “scientific” evidence. The concept of a supernatural creator is inherently religious. It has no place in a science class.
(Jeremy Rifkin below)
Jeremy Rifkin – “Evolutionary theory has been enshrined as the centerpiece of our educational system, and elaborate walls have been erected around it to protect it from unnecessary abuse.”
5. There are philosophical implications of Darwinism.Francis Schaeffer in his book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? co-authored by C. Everett Koop in 1979 said this, “Humanism: 1. Rejects the doctrine of creation. 2. Therefore rejects the idea that there is anything stable or ‘given’ about human nature. 3. Sees human nature as part of a long, unfolding process of development in which everything is changing. 4. Casts around for some solution to the problem of despair that this determinist-evolutionist vision induces…
The humanist H. J. Blackham has expressed this with a dramatic illustration: “On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility“( H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967). Mr. Schaeffer comments, “One does not have to be highly educated to understand this. It follows directly from the starting point of the humanists’ position, namely, that everything is just matter. That is, that which has exited forever and in ever is only some form of matter or energy, and everything in our world now is this and only this in a more or less complex form.”
“Paul Churchland – “The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. If this is the correct account of our origin, then there seems neither need nor room to fit any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical accounts of ourselves. We are creatures of matter.”
J.W.Burrow – “Nature, according to Darwin, was the product of blind chance and a blind struggle, and man a lonely, intelligent mutation, scrambling with the brutes for his sustenance. To some the sense of loss was irrevocable; It was as if an umbilical cord had been cut, and men found themselves part of a cold passionless universe.”
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Douglas Futuyma – “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. And what evolution does is to remove humans from the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given rise to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in one sense there is nothing special about us.”
William B. Provine (Photo by Donald Dewsbury).
William B. Provine in “The End of Ethics?” article in HARD CHOICES (a magazine companion to the television series HARD CHOICES) wrote:Even though it is often asserted that science is fully compatible with our Judeo-Christian tradition, in fact it is not… To be sure, even in antiquity, the mechanistic view of life–that chance was responsible for the shape of the world– had a few adherents. But belief in overarching order was dominant; it can be seen as easily in such scientists as Newton, Harvey, and Einstein as in the theologians Augustine, Luther, and Tillich. But beginning with Darwin, biology has undermined that tradition. Darwin in effect asserted that all living organisms had been created by a combination of chance and necessity–natural selection.In the twentieth century, this view of life has been reinforced by a whole series of discoveries…Mind is the only remaining frontier, but it would be shortsighted to doubt that it can, one day, be duplicated in the form of thinking robots or analyzed in terms of the chemistry and electricity of the brain. The extreme mechanic view of life, which every new discovery in biology tends to confirm, has certain implications. First, God has no role in the physical world…Second, except for the laws of probability and cause and effect, there is no organizing principle in the world, and no purpose.
Bertrand Russell – “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age
FEATURED ARTIST IS Jackson Pollock
“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didn’t know it”
Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock – circa 1928
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was the leading figure of Abstract Expressionism, and a painter who, both during his lifetime and after his death, has provoked the most intense admiration and the harshest criticism. At his artistic peak, he voluntarily abandoned the style that made him “the most important living painter in America” (as “Life” magazine described him), in what many considered a betrayal of his artistic ideals. To add further fuel to his mystique, he died in a traffic accident, driving under the influence of alcohol, at the age of 44.
Image: Unknown: “Portrait of Jackson Pollock”, 1928.
As in the case of other “cursed” painters, such as Caravaggio or Modigliani, the figure of Pollock is fascinating for reasons that sometimes go beyond the purely artistic. In addition to his well-known alcoholism, which, as already mentioned, eventually led to his fatal accident, some historians add the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder. Famously, one evening the artist ended up urinating in the fireplace of Peggy Guggenheim’s living room. In his work, the most important of his output, that for which he deserves to be remembered as one of the great figures of twentieth-century art, is concentrated in a period of just four years. But, during this brief but intense heyday, his artistic influence was extraordinary, being “like a meteor from which everyone kept a respectful distance. He seemed to have discouraged in advance all his possible direct imitators” (Pierre Restany, “Abstract Expressionism”, 1984). Pollock, the meteor of Abstract Expressionism, abruptly burst into 20th century art, causing a brief but intense explosion, and disappeared, leaving an indelible mark on the art of the decades that followed.
Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Wyoming, but he grew up in Arizona and California. The influence of Native American culture and Mexican muralists is notable in his pre-1945 works, such as “Birth” (1941) at the Tate Modern, or “Mural” (1943) at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, possibly his most outstanding painting from this period. In 1945, Pollock married fellow painter Lee Krasner (1908-1984).
Between 1947 and 1950 the art world witnessed Pollock’s “drip” period, in which, pouring paint directly from the can onto the canvas -usually laid out on the floor- Pollock created works of impressive strength such as “Lucifer” (1947, Seattle Art Museum) or “Summertime: Number 9A” (1948, Tate Modern), concluding in 1950 with two extraordinary works: “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)“, from the Metropolitan Museum, and “Number 1: Lavender Mist“, from the National Gallery, Washington. Pollock himself described his creative process in these words:
“My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”
Pollock was almost certainly inspired by the Ukrainian American artist Janet Sobel, who was already using this technique in the mid-1940s. After this brief but intense period, Pollock abandoned the “drip”, and his later works lack the interest of his earlier ones, with notable exceptions such as “Blue Poles” (1952, National Gallery of Australia). Today, Pollock is one of the most coveted artists on the art market, and his “Number 5, 1948” was for some time the most expensive painting ever sold, having been acquired by a private collector for $140 million in 2006.
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]
At the end of this post is a message by RC Sproul in which he discusses Sagan. Over the years I have confronted many atheists. Here is one story below: I really believe Hebrews 4:12 when it asserts: For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the […]
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 […]
In this post we are going to see that through the years humanist thought has encouraged artists like Michelangelo to think that the future was extremely bright versus the place today where many artist who hold the humanist and secular worldview are very pessimistic. In contrast to Michelangelo’s DAVID when humanist man thought he […]
_________ Antony Flew on God and Atheism Published on Feb 11, 2013 Lee Strobel interviews philosopher and scholar Antony Flew on his conversion from atheism to deism. Much of it has to do with intelligent design. Flew was considered one of the most influential and important thinker for atheism during his time before his death […]
The young Horace Barlow (bottom right) in May 1952, together with members and guests of the Ratio Club, outside Peterhouse College, Cambridge: Back row (partly obscured): H. Shipton, J. Bates, W.E. Hick, J. Pringle, D. Sholl, J. Westcott and D. Mackay. Middle row: G. Brindley, T. McLardy. W.R. Ashby, T. Gold and A. Uttley. Front row: A. Turing, G. Sutton, W. Rushton, G. Dawson and H. Barlow.
The Daily Hatch 
