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Francis and Edith Schaeffer pictured below

Recently I have been revisiting my correspondence in 1995 with the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who I was introduced to when reading a book by Francis Schaeffer called HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT written in 1968.

It took me over 20 years to figure out why Carl Sagan wrote these following words to me:

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? 

I had sent many articles to Carl Sagan but it wasn’t until today that I identified which one prompted Sagan to ask me this question. It must have been because Sagan was responding to these words below from the article by Greg Koukl “Sagan and Scientism,” that I sent him in 1994:

For hundreds of years, since the time of Kant, there has been an aggressive effort by scientists to prove and demonstrate that the universe is infinite. Part of the reason for that is that if the universe if infinite then they don’t have to acknowledge a creator.

It may be a little hard to explain this but simply put, if there is an infinite series of events like there would have to be in the universe if it was infinitely old, it would be akin to trying to start this process to trying to jump off an infinitely high building into an infinitely bottomless pit. The point is that there would be no place for you to even think about jumping because any place you would jump would be a type of terminus, a type of beginning and then it would not be infinite. Any point of departure would be a beginning. So there are serious problems with there even being an infinite chain of events like that or the material order of the universe being infinite…It’s kind of like if you were in the process of an infinite chain of events, if you tried to move forward in those events, one step forward would flip you one step backwards into eternity and you would never make any progress. There can’t be an actual infinite like in the universe. These are very strong arguments against the universe being infinite and if scientists would have taken this into consideration they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. It took them 150 years to finally come to the conclusion that there is no infinite universe, something philosophers could have told them for very good reasons a long time before that.

On Dec 5, 1995 Carl Sagan while suffering from cancer took time to finally answer the 4 letters I had written to him up to that point.(I don’t know if he ever listened to the tapes I had sent him.) in one of the letters I included the article “Sagan and Scientism” by Greg Koukl. Here is his response: 

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 responded with a two page letter on Jan 10, 1996 and I never heard back again from Dr. Sagan and he died on Dec 20, 1996. His wife Ann Druyan reported that many people of faith reached out to Sagan in last few months of his life, but he never left his agnosticism.

Below is the article by Greg Koukl in its entirety.

Sagan and Scientism

Greg Koukl

When science reasons it reasons inductively and it reasons basically the same way as we would reason about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I saw the Daily Breeze “Parade” and on the cover of the magazine is a picture of Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan. Carl Sagan you know, of course, is of the “billions and billions” fame talking about the cosmos. He has written a new book with Druyan called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors . When you turn the page there’s a picture of a chimpanzee. And the title of this excerpt is called “What Makes Us Different?” It’s really phenomenal reading through this piece and you will do yourself a favor in doing that.

What’s phenomenal in one way is the timing of this because this relates very closely to things we talked about yesterday and have been talking about the last couple of weeks in a couple of different ways. Most obviously the questions that have been raised about the nature of the human soul over the last couple of weeks and also Dr. Moreland’s remarks yesterday as we talked about his book Immortality and the Existence of the Soul. And not only that, but some comments I made a couple of weeks ago on the problem of the death of humanness and the trend, the philosophical trend that is happening in this country that is dehumanizing man. In other words, when asked the question “What does is mean to be human?” the answer increasingly is that it means absolutely nothing at all.

The profound significance of this particular article, and I guess of the book that this article is a portion of by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan, is that they not only come to the same conclusion that there is no fundamental difference between men and animals qualitatively only quantitatively–and I’ll get into that in a moment–but that they are making these pronouncements with the white coat on, so to speak, as the high priests of the new religion which is scientism. He is making a fundamental statement of truth about the nature of humanity. If that truth is believed then it has radical ramifications for a great variety of different issues in our culture, all that have to do with the nature of humanness at its very core.

I want to speak to this issue in a little more detail and talk about Carl Sagan’s presuppositions and his viewpoint about science. I can’t speak to the whole article, it’s too long, there’s a lot in there. I think those who have been listening to this show for any length of time have been gaining some tools I hope that will allow you to look at this article from a different light and to understand what is being said and why some of the things being alleged are not sound. I would invite you to get a hold of the article and peruse it.

Let me read how this starts. “What does it mean to be human? This question and an attempt to find an answer permeates and propels the important new work Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan.” Apparently published by Raymond House. “Pulling together a vast body of scientific information to trace the origins and evolution of life on earth, the authors address some of the fundamental questions of life itself. In this excerpt they examine the behavior of other animals and measure it against human ability.”

Carl Sagan then asks the question, “Why are we so different from animals? Or are we? Most of the philosophers,” and here’s the key paragraph for our discussion, “conventionally judged great thought that humans are fundamentally different from other animals because of an immaterial ‘something’ for which no scientific evidence has been produced, that resides somewhere in the body of humans and in no one else on earth. Only a few argue, as Charles Darwin did, that the differences between our species and others are only difference of degree.” He goes on then to argue that, in fact, the differences in our species are only differences in degree. Charles Darwin was right and the philosophers who speculated on some immaterial human force that resided in the body were wrong.

But why does he say they’re wrong? He says they’re wrong because science has not produced any evidence that justifies a belief in the soul. There are two questions that I have to ask regarding that statement because it underlies the rest of the article and quite possibly the rest of the book. Sagan is trying to be rigidly scientific in his analysis and he’s saying if we come up with truth in science then we have to accept that truth because it’s the prevailing truth and, even if it has unpleasant implications for the areas of morals and ethics and human value and the like, we still have to face up to the truth.

It assumes a couple of things. First of all, his comments and analysis assumes that science tells us true things. In other words, whatever science says is true. It corresponds to the world as it really is. And the second thing suggests that science is the only thing that gives us truth. Ergo his statement regarding the soul, this immaterial something, because scientific evidence has not been produced to demonstrate that.

Let me take the first point. Does science tell us true things? Now many people presume that that’s the case. I am not suggesting that a person cannot come to a reasonable assessment of something being true by using science. But the implication is that science, because of the scientific method, somehow refines information to a point and focuses it such that we can look at that point and say that this is something that is true and will not change.

You need to understand that there is a tremendous amount of debate within the area of philosophy of science, and it is philosophy of science that asks these kinds of questions, not science. Scientists don’t ask the question “What is science about and what can science do?” It is a second order discipline of philosophy of science that asks these questions. In the area of philosophy of science there’s a tremendous amount of debate as to whether science does tell us true things. As a matter of fact there’s a lot of debate as to whether science is one particular thing at all. Does the scientific method actually exist? And very trenchant arguments have been offered to demonstrate that the scientific method per se, or some particular methodology necessarily that identifies something as scientific, simply does not exist. Instead, what we have is a constellation of procedures and disciplines that when worked together and used inductively can help us to come to some reasonable understanding of truth. Those understandings may be wrong. They are not absolute. But they represent evidence that brings us to a reasonable conclusion.

As a matter of fact, when you look at the history of science it is really a history of replacement of scientific views rather than confirmation. Just a cursory look at the history of science shows that to be true. It seems like it’s not unusual at all to pick up your paper and find that what scientists believed at one time they now believe something entirely different. So if we look at the history of science it doesn’t demonstrate that what science has always presented to us is absolutely true because what science believes is continually changing. That’s one point.

I will make the point that when science reasons it reasons inductively and it reasons basically the same way as we would reason about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It brings different pieces of information to bear on a particular point and if the information is valid then the point is valid. But it’s the same procedure that we use to discuss lots of different things and there’s nothing sacrosanct about the so-called “scientific method” in itself. So don’t fall for the illusion that there is something inerrant about the scientific method and scientific ability at arriving at truth because it is not inerrant at all and there’s a tremendous amount of debate in the area of philosophy of science as to what exactly science can accomplish for us.

So for Carl Sagan, for example, to say with impunity that there must not be a soul because science has not demonstrated any proof for it and come to his other conclusions is a little bit overreaching his bounds in the terms of the limitations of science.

The second point is this, not only is there some question that science always tells us true things, but the second question and implication of his statements is that science is the only thing that gives us truth. People have suggested that there is a soul, philosophers have talked about that. Our conversation yesterday was a philosophical one about the existence of the soul. But then Carl Sagan says that this is something for which no scientific evidence has been produced. The implication is that if there is no scientific evidence then it’s not something worthy of being believed.

Now this notion that only the physical world exists–in our case only the brain exists in regards to personhood, there are no unseen vital forces–is kind of a kid sister to the concept of scientism. Scientism states this: only that which can be proved by science is true. Science can only prove things about the physical world, therefore if it doesn’t prove something about the nonphysical world, which it’s really not equipped to do, then the only rational belief is that only physical things exist and non-physical things like the mind or the soul don’t exist. That is the doctrine of scientism and let me give you two thoughts on that. (Everything is coming in twos here today.)

With regards to his statement that scientific evidence is the thing that really makes something true or not, which is the heart and soul of the concept of scientism, I just learned a little earlier talking to Dr. Moreland that science has after a fashion demonstrated the soul. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount of evidence there but this is an interesting thing to ponder. When the brains of some people are opened they can touch the brain with electrodes to stimulate different memories and the like. This is why some people have argued that memories are merely a chemical kind of response and don’t have any relationship to a self, a separate soul, a person other than the brain. But when scientists have stimulated part of the brain and the patient is conscious, the patient can actually tell whether a memory is being stimulated by the scientist or whether the memory is being brought forward out of their own consciousness. They say, “Hey, you did that. I didn’t.”

This makes a very powerful point. “You stimulated that memory, I didn’t.” Who’s the “I?” The “I” was the person inside there, the “I” is the soul. So there’s a distinction between a chemical response that produces a memory and a volitional response that produces a memory. So it is not entirely true that there is not scientific evidence for the existence of the soul because there is some.

But there’s another point that’s actually quite a bit more important. That’s the fundamental point of whether science is the only road to truth. And there are actually three different ways to refute that. And it’s very straight forward. You can almost sum them up under one concept. The idea is that if science is the only way to truth then science itself is self-refuting because science is built on a series of truths that cannot be demonstrated by science but must be in place even for science to be valid.

For example, is orderliness in the universe an illusion or is that real? Is the external world knowable at all? Are the intellect and the five senses reliable tools to examine the world? Are values like “be objective” or “report data honestly” appropriate in the scientific endeavor? Is nature basically uniform? Do numbers in truth exist? Do the laws of logic apply to reality? All of these things are non-scientific questions but they relate to the issue of truth that must necessarily be in place for science even to be practiced.

So the point I’m making is that if you hold the belief that science is the only thing that is a measure of truth, then science is in hot water because science can’t justify itself. Science is not the sole arbiter of truth. Ethics is another source of truthful information. Philosophy is another source of truthful information. History…Do you know that even mathematics is not scientific? Math is used in science, it underlies science, but you cannot prove math scientifically. So the point is this, its an empty claim by Dr. Sagan that the soul can’t exist because no scientific evidence has been produced to support the idea that there is a soul. There can be other kinds of evidence that are not merely scientific yet be very valid.

What’s really amazing, my friends, is that these things I’m telling you are not new. These are things that have been hashed out by great thinkers for a long time. These are very sound and powerful conclusions that philosophers of science have arrived at when discussing the nature of science. What is unfortunate is that this discussion has by and large been missed by the population and this allows people like Carl Sagan, who should know better, to make statements like he has in this article and book. It’s misleading about the nature of science but people believe it. This is one unfortunate thing about the treatment of scientific issues because people simply aren’t honest about the philosophic issues behind the science. I don’t know if Carl Sagan is trying to mislead here or he doesn’t accept the arguments in the philosophy of science or maybe he just doesn’t know them. Scientists characteristically are not specialists in trying to tell you what science is, they just do it.

I’ll give you one example of what I was talking about with scientism and whether there are other sources of truth outside of science. For hundreds of years, since the time of Kant, there has been an aggressive effort by scientists to prove and demonstrate that the universe is infinite. Part of the reason for that is that if the universe if infinite then they don’t have to acknowledge a creator. This is a self-conscious enterprise, by the way. I’m not reading in motives that aren’t there. These people were aware of what they were doing so much so that at one point even Albert Einstein suggested a universal constant which was completely invented because what he’d been doing up to that time seemed to indicate without any doubt that the universe had a beginning. He introduced this thing that didn’t exist to change his equations to imply that the universe had no beginning at all and was infinite. He later said that that was the worst mistake of his career and abandoned it. Now we all know that the universe had a beginning and that’s what the whole Big Bang is about. I want to make the point that for a hundred years or so there was a strong effort to try to demonstrate that the universe was infinite.

A point that Dr. Moreland made yesterday from a philosophic perspective is really helpful in dealing with this particular issue. There may be things like possible infinites. We think about the numbers that could be infinite. But whether there’s an actual infinite or not is another problem. Can we actually count an actual infinite amount of numbers? Or could there be an infinite amount of time in which matter existed? And Dr. Moreland argued yesterday that was not possible.

It may be a little hard to explain this but simply put, if there is an infinite series of events like there would have to be in the universe if it was infinitely old, it would be akin to trying to start this process to trying to jump off an infinitely high building into an infinitely bottomless pit. The point is that there would be no place for you to even think about jumping because any place you would jump would be a type of terminus, a type of beginning and then it would not be infinite. Any point of departure would be a beginning. So there are serious problems with there even being an infinite chain of events like that or the material order of the universe being infinite.

It’s kind of like if you were in the process of an infinite chain of events, if you tried to move forward in those events, one step forward would flip you one step backwards into eternity and you would never make any progress. There can’t be an actual infinite like in the universe. These are very strong arguments against the universe being infinite and if scientists would have taken this into consideration they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. It took them 150 years to finally come to the conclusion that there is no infinite universe, something philosophers could have told them for very good reasons a long time before that.

One other thought about Carl Sagan and the application he argues in this piece. It has to do with the difference between man and animals qualitatively. He suggests there is no difference and he makes an argument for animal rights. If man is just a highly developed animal and there is no substantial qualitative difference then animals should have the same rights as humans. Now this you might think would be good because it elevates animals to the level of human. But I want to tell you something, it does not work that way. The other way of saying it is that human have no more rights than animals. So this would not be the ascent of animal rights. It would be the descent and the destruction of human rights.

There’s a very important reason why this is the case. It’s because one always needs to ask the question if one has the right to something else, where do these rights come from? A right is a just claim to something. To suggest that a person has a just claim to something he must make a reference to some standard of justice. Justice is an appeal to a higher authority of some sort. If animals and man are the same and there is just the physical world, it’s fruitless to appeal to any higher order of justice that transcends the physical world that then would give us rights. If we are just merely animals, then nothing would have any rights because there is no transcendent standard that anyone can appeal to in order to justify their right claims. Logic requires them to absolutely abandon the concept of rights.

What’s ironic in this whole discussion is the analysis for man and what ends up happening here. Man become merely material. He becomes a determined individual caught in the flow of cause and effect. As Dr. Francis Schaeffer put it, man becomes “cosmic junk.” The modern analysis of man takes one of two extreme positions. Either man is god, which is the New Age way of looking at things, or man is an animal, he is cosmic junk. In other words, he is everything or he is nothing. The Christian message puts man rights in the middle. He has transcendent value but he is not God Himself.

Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

Anyway that’s some thoughts on Carl Sagan. I encourage you to take a look at the article, especially in light of our recent conversations.ARTICLE | TOPICSAPOLOGETICSSCIENCE

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The First And Primary Cause

Christian apologists—defenders of the Christian faith—have used a number of arguments in order to demonstrate the ra-tionality of belief in God. One of the most popular of these is the cosmological argument, which defends the existence of God on the basis of cause and effect. Since every effect must have a cause, there must be one cause that started everything. One eternally exist-ing cause set everything in motion, creating effects that then caused other effects that then caused other effects and so on. This eternally existing cause is God.

We have already seen that chance cannot be this cause because chance has no causal power. The universe’s self-creation is likewise impossible because something cannot come from nothing. Confront-ed by this dilemma, some have persisted in denying the existence of God by denying the reality of cause and effect itself.

The work of philosopher David Hume is often cited to justify the denial of cause and effect. Hume used the illustration of the pool table to argue that we cannot know for certain which causes produce which effects. Although we strike a cue ball with a pool stick, he said, we cannot prove that the striking of the ball with the stick makes the ball move. All we have seen for certain is a relationship of contiguity—a relationship where one event follows after another. We may assume that the stick made the ball move, but we cannot be certain of that. It could be that an unseen force actually caused the movement. Hume’s thinking here can lead to a radical skepticism, and as Christians we say that the unseen force of God’s decree, the pool stick, the player’s movement of the stick, and perhaps something else all made the ball move. In any case, Hume was not denying cause and effect outright; he just believed we cannot identify causes with certainty.

The law of causality is one of those axioms that is indisputable. Every effect must have a cause, for an effect, by definition, is some-thing that is caused. Thus, for anything to exist, an uncaused some-thing—or someone—must exist. This “uncaused cause,” as it were, must have the power of being in itself and must be the first, primary cause of everything else. It must depend on nothing else. It must not be an effect, for if it is an effect of something else, it cannot be the very first cause that brought everything into existence. Nothing created qualifies as this first, primary cause. Only God, the eternal Creator, can be the reason why there is something rather than nothing.

Coram Deo

It is logically necessary that God exists. Because anything exists, there must be a first, primary cause of all else, and only the self-existent God of Scripture can fill that role. Only Christianity can offer true, ultimate meaning to people because only Christianity reveals to us the first, primary cause of all things. We are blessed to know this God, who gives life and meaning to His people.

Passages for Further Study

Daniel 6:26
John 5:2

First published in Tabletalk Magazine, an outreach of Ligonier. For permissions, view our Copyright Policy.

Question Evolution

Greg Koukl

Evolution is dancing on the Titanic.

The current evolution/creation controversy is based on two fundamental errors. First, the issue is cast as a conflict between the indisputable facts of science and the dogmatic faith of religious fundamentalists. Second, two entirely different definitions of science are used interchangeably, obscuring the true nature of the discussion.

Facts vs. Faith

Douglas Futuyma opens Science on Trial, his compelling polemic against creationism, with these words: “Fifty-seven years after the Scopes trial, fundamentalist religion and evolutionary biology are again fiercely at odds, and science is still on trial.” Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 1983), p. 4.

Futuyma’s words echo the sentiments of the academic rank and file: Creationists are obscurantist flat-earthers whose commitment to superstition keeps them in darkness. The verdict of science is clear. Darwinian evolution is an indisputable fact.

This characterization is simply false.

Following the complete failure of the Origin of Life Conference in Berkeley in the late 80’s to produce a plausible scenario for how life itself chemically evolved, Dr. Robert Shapiro wrote a book entitled Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth. (“Creation” here refers to biochemical evolution.) Shapiro is an educated skeptic, an eminent chemist from New York University and an expert in his field. In his book he decimates the reigning ideas of how life could have evolved from non-life.

Michael Denton wrote Evolution: A Theory in Crisis to show that the original scientific objections to evolution that faced Darwin–and were argued powerfully by his contemporaries–still apply after more than 100 years of scientific research and progress.

Both of these books were written by non-religious people raising scientific objections to evolution. Shapiro remains an evolutionist, hoping that the future will turn up more evidence for biochemical evolution than the past has been able to produce. Denton ends his analysis with this statement: “The Darwinian theory is the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century,” and then adds, “like the Genesis-based cosmology which it replaced.”

You have no friends of religion here. These men are inside of the established scientific community, not outside of it. Yet each offers scientifically rigorous and compelling arguments against the idea that known natural processes are adequate to explain the biological complexity of our world.

Michael Behe is a cellular biologist with impeccable credentials. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, he shows that the irreducible complexity of life can’t be explained by Darwinian gradualism.

James Shapiro of the University of Chicago, a molecular biologist and a deeply committed evolutionist, made this candid remark in response to Behe’s work:

There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject–evolution–with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity.  James Shapiro, “In the Details…What?,” National Review, September 19, 1996, pp. 62-65.

Niles Eldridge, one of the world’s leading experts in vertebrate fossils, describes the actual situation paleontologists face:

No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yield zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change–over millions of years, at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.”  Niles Eldridge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 95.

This problem is so severe it has spawned an entirely new school of evolutionary thinking–punctuated equilibrium, championed by Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. It’s also spawned a bitter feud between Gould’s camp and traditional Darwinists like Richard Dawkins who still hold to gradualism in spite of the paucity of fossil evidence for it.

Phillip Johnson has made a fair observation when he states, “If eminent experts say that evolution according to Gould is too confused to be worth bothering about, and others equally eminent say that evolution according to Dawkins rests on unsubstantiated assertions and counterfactual claims, the public can hardly be blamed for suspecting that grand-scale evolution may rest on something less impressive than rock-solid, unimpeachable fact.”

We are within our rights to question the stability of the entire enterprise. But the minute we do, we run into a second problem.

Two Faces of Science

Science has two definitions. The first is the most well known. Science is about a methodology–observation, experimentation, testing, etc.–that allows researchers to discover the facts about the world. Presumably, this is what evolution is about–the facts of science. Science in this sense has prompted the litany of concerns expressed above by evolutionists.

The second definition of science involves the philosophy of naturalistic materialism: matter and energy governed by natural law. Any view that doesn’t conform to this definition is not scientific.

These two definitions are not always compatible. Evolution is a case in point. At first blush it seems like evolution is about scientific facts. But when facts suggest design, the second definition is invoked. The philosophy always trumps the methodology. That is, any scientific methodology (first definition) that supports intelligent design is summarily disqualified by scientific philosophy (second definition) as “religion disguised as science.”

Futuyma says, “Where science insists on material, mechanistic causes that can be understood by physics and chemistry, the literal believer in Genesis invokes unknowable supernatural forces.” Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 1983), p. 12

Creationists claim, however, that these forces are knowable, at least in principle. Consider this analogy. When a dead body is discovered, an impartial investigation of the scene might indicate foul play and not accident. In the same way, evidence could, in principle, indicate an agent in creation rather than chance. This is not faith vs. evidence, but evidence vs. evidence.

Notice how Futuyma conflates these definitions in the following statement taken from Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, the most widely used college evolutionary textbook:

The fact is, in a scientific sense, there can be no evidence for supernatural special creation. Belief in special creation must rest on faith, on the authority of the Bible and its most literal interpreters. The fundamental conflict, then, is between two incompatible ways to knowledge. Science emphasizes evidence and logical deduction, and is forever uncertain. It deals not with irrefutable facts engraved on stone tablets, but with hypotheses that may be refuted by tomorrow’s experiments and concepts formulated by fallible human minds. The best scientific education encourages skepticism, questioning, independent thought, and the use of reason.”  Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 1983), p. 18

How does Douglas Futuyma know in advance there “can be no evidence for supernatural special creation”? Because it’s stipulated by definition. Even if evidence is available, it cannot be allowed. Further, no independent thought regarding the fact of evolution (as opposed to the method of evolution) is allowed either, in spite of Futuyma’s assertions to the contrary. Any denial of evolution is simply not “science.”

Darwinism as Dogma

Clearly, the paradigm is paramount and everything must be done to save it. Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin is very candid about this fact. In The New York Review of Books he makes this remarkable admission:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.[6] [emphasis in the original]

Here Richard Lewontin, distinguished Harvard Genetics Professor, admits that the apparatus of science is not geared to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, but rather to produce philosophically acceptable answers.

Phillip Johnson sums it up: “The reason for opposition to scientific accounts of our origins, according to Lewontin, is not that people are ignorant of facts, but that they have not learned to think from the right starting point.”

Presumed Guilty

Once one presumes evolution, many of the pieces seem to fit. If you simply presume someone associated with a crime is guilty, you’re bound to find some pieces of evidence that appear incriminating. But if your suspect produces an airtight alibi, you must rework your presumptions.

In the same way, Darwinism has fatal flaws, in spite of some circumstantial evidence for common ancestry. The mechanism (natural selection) is not adequate to do the work it needs to do. Behe and others have made this clear. The gradualist pathways from one transition to another cannot be reconstructed, as Gould has pointed out. Robert Shapiro of NYU admits there is no current evidence that life could come from non-life. Paleontologists can compare fossils all they want, but if evolutionary processes cannot even produce the most basic amino acid sequences necessary for life, then the game can’t even get started.

To label creationist efforts as “religious zealots conducting stealth campaigns,” as one editorial did, skirts the issue entirely. It is easier to dismiss any objections to evolution as flat-earth religion than to intelligently and fairly engage the facts in public discourse.

Three Errors

The view that “religious” theories should not intrude in science is guilty of a several of logical errors.

First, it commits the either/or fallacy by asserting that a view is either scientific or religious. Design models might have some factual support. We see the blending, for example, in near-death experience (NDE) research, or conclusions about the existence of a Creator based on Big Bang cosmology.

Second, it commits the straw-man fallacy by assuming that creationists make no use of scientific methods. This is not the case. Creationists are happy to present an abundance of scientific evidence for their view, if they’re allowed. This evidence needs to be addressed instead of disqualified.

Third, it assumes that the reigning scientific views do not have religious significance. This is false. All cosmological views have metaphysical significance. If evolutionary naturalism is true, the only place for God is in the imagination of the faithful.

Read This Book!

I want to recommend a book that gets right to the heart of this issue in a clear and accessible way. It’s called An Easy-to-Understand Guide for Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds by Phillip Johnson.

You’ll get first-rate advice on how to be a player in this discussion without getting bogged down in unnecessary details. You don’t need a technical background, just a simple game plan. It’s an easy read and a powerful tool that will help you expose the real issue in this debate.

The evolution/creation controversy is not about evidence. It’s about the power of an academic elite to enforce a philosophy. This fact is becoming increasingly obvious to the public. Once this becomes clear, then evolution will have to stand on its own merits and it won’t be able to do so.

Evolutionists are dancing on the Titanic. If it were not for philosophical strong-arming in the field of science, Darwinism would have become an historical curiosity long ago. It’s only a matter of time before the iceberg hits.

Related posts:

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part F “Carl Sagan’s views on how God should try and contact us” includes film “The Basis for Human Dignity”

April 8, 2013 – 7:07 am

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)

Carl Sagan v. Nancy Pearcey

March 18, 2013 – 9:11 am

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)

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 4 of series on Evolution)

May 24, 2012 – 1:47 am

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 4 of series on Evolution) The Long War against God-Henry Morris, part 5 of 6 Uploaded by FLIPWORLDUPSIDEDOWN3 on Aug 30, 2010 http://www.icr.org/ http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWA2http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWASGhttp://www.fliptheworldupsidedown.com/blog _______________________ I got this from a blogger in April of 2008 concerning candidate Obama’s view on evolution: Q: York County was recently in the news […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Current Events, President Obama | Edit| Comments (0)

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 3 of series on Evolution)

May 23, 2012 – 1:43 am

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 3 of series on Evolution) The Long War against God-Henry Morris, part 4 of 6 Uploaded by FLIPWORLDUPSIDEDOWN3 on Aug 30, 2010 http://www.icr.org/ http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWA2http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWASGhttp://www.fliptheworldupsidedown.com/blog______________________________________ I got this from a blogger in April of 2008 concerning candidate Obama’s view on evolution: Q: York County was recently in the news […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Current Events, President Obama | Edit| Comments (0)

Carl Sagan versus RC Sproul

January 9, 2012 – 2:44 pm

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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted, Current Events, Francis Schaeffer | Tagged Bill Elliff, Carl Sagan, Jodie Foster, RC Sproul | Edit | Commen

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I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s favorite cities!!!!

Hugh Hefner attends with a few Playmates the Los Angeles Lakers vs New Orleans Hornets game

 Feb 7, 2017 letter C on Jazz and Proverbs 7

February 7 letter C     Hugh Hefner Playboy Mansion 16236 Charing Cross RoadLos Angeles, CA 90024   Dear Hugh, There is so much in this chapter 7 that I had to write you a THIRD letter today!! I know that you love Jazz and there is plenty of good Jazz here. It is hard for me to believe that you met Louis Armstrong. Today is Feb 7 so I want to quote from Proverbs 7. Good advice today from anyone in New Orleans like me:     24 And now, O sons, listen to me,
    and be attentive to the words of my mouth.
25 Let not your heart turn aside to her ways;
    do not stray into her paths,
26 for many a victim has she laid low,
    and all her slain are a mighty throng.
27 Her house is the way to Sheol,
    going down to the chambers of death. —– A stern warning for sure!!!   Check out Romans 3:23; 5:8; 10:9-10. Best wishes, Everette Hatcher Xxxxx

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

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King Solomon and his many wives above and Hef and his many girls below:

These comments below are from Francis Schaeffer’ study on Ecclesiastes and they reminded me of Hugh Hefner who was the closest person to a modern day King Solomon:

Now we are to his conclusions UNDER THE SUN.

Ecclesiastes 9:10

¹⁰ Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (King James Version)

What is this? It is as modern today as the left bank of Paris and the Soho of London. It is as modern as the businessman who tries to lose himself in executive detail. It is as modern as the thinking can be. It is as eternal thinking can be if it is framed as only UNDER THE SUN. It is a life, a philosophy of desperation. This is not something grand and glorious. It is accepted as desperation because other things have failed. 

Ecclesiastes 7:16-17

¹⁶ Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? ¹⁷ Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool.Why should you die before your time?

This is a philosophy of desperation. Leonardo never arrived here because he never really accepted the dilemma because he hadn’t been forced to it yet because time hadn’t brought him there, but modern man has came here, the extension of Leonardo. This is existentialism in a very real sense. A philosophy or theology of desperation because nothing else stands. 

It is the commitment to absurdity. It is living at this split moment in a vacuum PERIOD FULL STOP!! But it is not new!!! It is the conclusion to which Solomon  came: IF THIS IS ALL THERE IS THEN THIS MUST BE ALL THERE IS!

Ecclesiastes 2:24-25

²⁴ There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, ²⁵ for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?

The best translation is “should eat and drink and delight his senses.” Also with the phrase “from the hand of God” Solomon doesn’t really mean this is from God but this is just an expression. This is statement of desperation when he says that one “should eat and drink and delight his senses.”

Ecclesiastes 8:15

¹⁵ And I commend joy, for man has nothing better UNDER THE SUN but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.

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. Isaiah picks up this theme.

Isaiah 22:10-14

¹⁰ and you counted the houses of Jerusalem, and you broke down the houses to fortify the wall. ¹¹ You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to him who did it, or see him who planned it long ago.

¹² In that day the Lord God of hosts
    called for weeping and mourning,
    for baldness and wearing sackcloth; [ INSTEAD OF WEEPING THIS NEXT VERSE TELLS WHAT THEY DID.]
¹³ and behold, joy and gladness,
    killing oxen and slaughtering sheep,
    eating flesh and drinking wine.
“Let us eat and drink,
    for tomorrow we die.”
¹⁴ The Lord of hosts has revealed himself in my ears:
“Surely this iniquity will not be atoned for you until you die,”
    says the Lord God of hosts.

God brings it together here. Solomon’s words, Isaiah’s words and Paul’s words are one message. What is occurring in Isaiah? They are under siege and they have strengthened the wall but they have turned away both from the creator of the world and the one who laid the foundation of the walls in Jerusalem, David himself, and his teaching. They have said since it is hopeless let’s just eat and drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. In a little while the walls will be overthrown and the enemy will sweep across us and we will be slain. Let’s fill our stomachs today. Let’s eat and drink and be merry.

God is saying through Isaiah, don’t you understan that isn’t the call now. The call is not to eat and drink and be merry and try to blot yourself out. It is day for being sad. Not because you are going to be destroyed but because you must understand that the reason you are in this circumstance is because you have revolted against the GOD WHO IS THERE. The reason for the dilemma is a moral question. They have revolted against the God who exists. The solution is being sorrowful and saying to God I AM SORRY. But instead of that because they turned their back from the real problem and only look to the forces without, so they make their wall strong and they eat and drink and be merry for tomorrow they die. The only time it would make sense for them to live this way would be if they were living under Solomon’s framework UNDER THE SUN which looking at human life alone seen only between birth and death and if that is all there is.

Solomon would say it really doesn’t make any difference if the enemy is at the gate today  versus the day after in the form of death. Nevil Shute in ON THE BEACH says the human will eventually go this way too!!!

The difficulty is they refuse to come as sinners and because they haven’t there is one thing left and that is despair if they are consistent.

Now turning back to I Corinthians 15:32 we can understand more the force of what Paul is talking about here and more of the depth of what he is saying.

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.”

Paul sweeps this all together, Solomon’s conclusions and the case in Isaiah, and Paul says that would be consistent if this [If the dead are not raised] is not so. This same message is found in I Corinthians 15:19,  ^“If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” How would you word that for the 20th century? IF CHRIST IS A BARE WORD TO WAVE AS A FLAG, IF CHRISTIANITY IS ONLY THAT TO INTEGRATE INTO INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGICALLY AND SOCIETY AS SUCH, IF THAT IS ALL CHRIST IS, PAUL SAYS LET’S PLEASE BE CONSISTENT ABOUT IT, THROW DOWN THE WORD “CHRIST” AND WALK UPON IT. Don’t play with this and have the courage of a Solomon.

I Corinthians 15:19-20

¹⁹ If in Christ we have hope  in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

²⁰ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Christ is raised. We will be raised. Therefore, a consistent despair that rests in the other line of thinking is not really consistent in the light of what is. The people in Isaiah’s day were eating and drinking and waiting for death and it was folly because the real solution was turning back to God. There is a total framework here that Paul is presenting and it tells us why it is folly to accept Solomon’s solution (eating and drinking and being merry because tomorrow we die).

I Corinthians 15:21-22

²¹ For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. ²² For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

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. The problem in Isaiah’s day was not that the enemy was coming to kill them, but it was the revolt of man against the creator.

Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

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Hugh Hefner and the evil heart | Opinion

Updated on October 2, 2017 at 8:21 PMPosted on October 2, 2017 at 6:54 AM

160     180shares

By Tim Morris, Columnist

tmorris@nola.com,

NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. … I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 2: 1,10-11

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died last week and will, according to reports, be buried next to actress Marilyn Monroe at the Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

Reports say Hefner bought the crypt next to Monroe’s for $75,000 in 1992, almost 40 years after he featured the actress on the cover of Playboy’s first-ever issue in 1953. The issue sold 50,000 copies and launched a media empire and Hefner’s legend

“Jay Leno suggested that if I was going to spend that kind of money, I should actually be on top of her,” Hefner said in an interview with his own magazine in 2000. “But to me there’s something rather poetic in the fact that we’ll be buried in the same place. And that cemetery also has other meanings and connections for me. Friends like Buddy Rich and Mel Torme are buried there. So is Dorothy Stratten.”

Perhaps all that makes a fitting epitaph for Hefner: A crude sexual joke, followed by a conscious reference to his taste for jazz and the finer things in life and then a mention of 1980 Playmate of the Year Stratten, who was murdered at the age of 20 by her estranged husband and manager in a revelation of the seamier side of the Playboy lifestyle and philosophy.

Does Hugh Hefner’s legacy deserve to be celebrated?

Hefner’s critics say his crowning achievement was the objectification of women in today’s society.

A major figure of America’s 20th century, Hefner’s obituary appeared prominently in most of the nation’s major publications. But he was not universally mourned as a great patron of the arts. He was just as often portrayed for what he was: a smut peddler.

No one did a better job of capturing the damage Hefner did than New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

“Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist…aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies,” Douthat wrote.

“Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.”

Hefner’s greatest evil was convincing so many people that his view of life — the “Playboy philosophy” — was the next step in our evolution, the natural product of our enlightenment. He waged war on the last vestiges of America’s puritanism with claims that we were too hung up on modesty. The human body is beautiful, Hefner lectured, and not something to be ashamed of.

The bodies Playboy celebrated, however, were mostly blonde and thin and amply endowed — naturally or otherwise. While claiming to be a feminist, Hefner and his magazine were the greatest objectifiers of women until hard-core porn became easily available on the internet. How many girls resorted to diets and purging and plastic surgery in an attempt to meet the ideal that was crafted by talented photographers and airbrushing?

As Jill Filipovic writes at Time, “Hefner claimed to ‘love women.’ He certainly loved to look at women, or at least the type of women who fit a very particular model. He loved to make money by selling images of women to other men who ‘love women.’ He certainly met a lot of women, had sex with a lot of women, talked to a lot of women. But I’m not sure Hefner ever really knew any of us. And he certainly did not love us.”

No, Hefner didn’t love women. He lusted for them. He only loved himself and a hedonistic life that was mostly an adolescent fantasy.

Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner dies at 91

Playboy magazine founder and sexual revolution symbol Hugh Hefner has died. He was 91.

And the damage continues. Again, Douthat gets to the heart of the matter:

“Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause. Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.”

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. — Ecclesiastes 9:3

Tim Morris is an opinions columnist at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at tmorris@nola.com. Follow him on Twitter @tmorris504.

Featured artist is Beryl Korot

Beryl Korot was born in 1945 in New York, where she continues to live and work. An early video-art pioneer and an internationally exhibited artist, her multiple-channel (and multiple-monitor) video-installation works explored the relationship between programming tools as diverse as the technology of the loom and multiple-channel video. She has commented: “Just as the spinning and gathering of wool serve as the raw material for a weave, so the artist working with video selects images to serve as the basic substance of the work.” For most of the 1980s, Korot concentrated on a series of paintings that were based on a language she created that was an analogue to the Latin alphabet. Drawing on her earlier interest in weaving and video as related technologies, she made most of these paintings on handwoven and traditional linen canvas.

More recently, she has collaborated with her husband, the composer Steve Reich, on Three Tales, a documentary digital-video opera in three Acts and a Prologue. It began in 1998 with Act 1, Hindenburg. While the Prologue contains biblical text about human creation, Act 1 begins with documentary footage of Paul von Hindenburg, the last president of the Weimar Republic (who named Hitler Chancellor in 1933), and ends with footage of the Hindenburg zeppelin and its explosion at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Act 2, Bikini, is based on footage, photographs, and text from the atom bomb test on Bikini Island and the subsequent removal of the Bikini people. Act 3, Dolly, explores the issues revolving around the first cloning of a sheep in Scotland, in 1997.

Together, the three individual acts form a progressive investigation of the way technology creates and frames our experience. In the context of Korot’s body of work, which began with her early video tapestries, Three Tales extends and deepens her interest in both technology as a material in which to make work—video, weaving—and as a relevant exploration of history in which to base her work. She lives in Vermont and New York.

Links:
Dachau 1974 on PBS.org

Related posts:

Ecclesiastes 2 — The Quest For Meaning and the failed examples of Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner

June 27, 2013 – 12:49 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 162 A look at the BEATLES Breaking down the song ALL WE NEED IS LOVE Part C (Featured artist is Grace Slick)

May 4, 2017 – 1:40 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 158 THE BEATLES (breaking down the song WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?) Photographer Bob Gomel featured today!

April 6, 2017 – 12:25 am

___________________ Something happened to the Beatles in their journey through the 1960’s and although they started off wanting only to hold their girlfriend’s hand it later evolved into wanting to smash all previous sexual standards. The Beatles: Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? _______ Beatle Ringo Starr, and his girlfriend, later his wife, […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 142 Marvin Minsky Part G (Featured artist is Red Grooms)

December 15, 2016 – 7:18 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 118 THE BEATLES (Why was Tony Curtis on cover of SGT PEP?) (Feature on artist Jeffrey Gibson )

June 30, 2016 – 5:35 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 101 BEATLES,(MANY CHRISTIANS ATTACKED THE BEATLES WHILE FRANCIS SCHAEFFER STUDIED THEIR MUSIC! Part B) Artist featured today is Cartoonist Gahan Wilson

March 3, 2016 – 12:21 am

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10 YEARS AGO ADRIAN ROGERS WENT TO GLORY BUT HIS SERMONS ARE STILL SHARING CHRIST LOVE TODAY!!!

November 16, 2015 – 9:33 am

On 11-15-05 Adrian Rogers passed over to glory and since it is the 10th anniversary of that day I wanted to celebrate his life in two ways. First, I wanted to pass on some of the material from Adrian Rogers’ sermons I have sent to prominent atheists over the last 20 years. Second, I wanted […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers | Tagged (Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Bette Chambers (1930-), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), George Wald (1906-1997), Gordon Stein (1941-1996), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), John Hospers (1918-2011), John J. Shea (1969-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Matt Cartmill (1943-), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Michael Martin (1932-)., Milton Fingerman (1928-), Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Warren Allen Smith (1921-) | Edit | Comments (0)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 65 THE BEATLES ( The 1960’s SEXUAL REVOLUTION was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s!) (Featured artist is Pauline Boty)

June 25, 2015 – 7:04 am

Looking back on his life as a Beatle Paul  said at a  certain age you start to think “Wow, I have to get serious. I can’t just be a playboy all of my life.” It is true that the Beatles wrote a lot about girls!!!!!! The Beatles – I Want To Hold your Hand [HD] Although […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Tagged Diana Dors, Hugh Hefner, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich | Edit | Comments (0)

_________

I have read over 40 autobiographies by ROCKERS and it seems to me that almost every one of those books can be reduced to 4 points. Once fame hit me then I became hooked on drugs. Next I became an alcoholic (or may have been hooked on both at same time). Thirdly, I chased the skirts and thought happiness would be found through more sex with more women. Finally, in my old age I have found being faithful to my wife and getting over addictions has led to happiness like I never knew before. (Almost every autobiography I have read from rockers has these points in it although Steven Tyler is still chasing the skirts!!).

Grace Slick wrote a fine autobiography and my only criticism of it is that it could have been longer. I enjoyed every word of it. She discussed her good friend Marty Balin in it very often.

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Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit (1967) HQ

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_______

Grace Slick on Late Night, January 10, 1983

Marty Balin emailed on 2-10-16

Emailed on 2-10-16

contact@martybalinmusic.com

To Marty Balin, From Everette Hatcher, I love your music, Today I put up a blog post on your good friend  Grace Slick.

Francis Schaeffer is one of my favorite writers and he was constantly talking about modern culture and art in his books and that really got me interested in finding out what it was all about.  Actually on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I devote my blog every Thursday to the series called FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE  and I examine the work of a modern day artist.

Today I put up a blog post on your good friend  Grace Slick.  Here is an alphabetical list of those I have featured so far:

Marina Abramovic, Ida Applebroog,Matthew Barney, Aubrey Beardsley, Larry Bell, Wallace Berman, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Brenda Bury,  Allora & Calzadilla,   Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Heinz Edelmann,  Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Jan Fabre, Makoto Fujimura, Hamish Fulton, Ellen Gallaugher, Ryan Gander, Francoise Gilot,  John Giorno, Rodney Graham,  Cai Guo-Qiang, Brion Gysin, Jann Haworth, Arturo Herrera, Oliver Herring, David Hockney, David Hooker,  Nancy Holt, Roni Horn, Peter Howson, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Martin Karplus, Margaret Keane, Mike Kelley, Peter Kien, Jeff Koons,  Annie Leibovitz, John Lennon, Richard Linder, Sally Mann, Kerry James Marshall, Trey McCarley, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney, Paul McCarthy, Josiah McElheny, Barry McGee, Richard Merkin, Nicholas Monro, Yoko Ono, Tony Oursler,John Outterbridge, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, George Petty, William Pope L., Gerhard Richter, Anna Margaret Rose,  James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg, Georges Rouault, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Raqub Shaw, Thomas Shutte, Grace Slick,  Saul Steinberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stuart Sutcliffe, Mika Tajima,Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Alberto Vargas,  Banks Violett, H.C. Westermann,  Fred Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ronnie Wood, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Bill Wyman, David Wynne, Andrea Zittel,

Back in 1980 I read a book  that mentions your band JEFFERSON AIRPLANE. In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:

This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.

Francis Schaeffer had a lot to say about Rock and Roll, but today I wanted to share with you some comments he made about King Solomon’s BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES.

Ecclesiastes 7:2 “Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies–so the living should take this to heart.”

In the last years of his life King Solomon took time to look back and then he wrote the BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES. Solomon did believe in God but in this book he  took a look at life “under the sun.” Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has 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.”

Francis Schaeffer comments on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of death:

Ecclesiastes 9:11

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.

Chance rules. If a man starts out only from himself and works outward it must eventually if he is consistent seem so that only chance rules and naturally in such a setting you can not expect him to have anything else but finally a hate of life.

Ecclesiastes 2:17-18a

¹⁷ So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind. ¹⁸ I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun…

That first great cry “So I hated life.” Naturally if you hate life you long for death and you find him saying this in Ecclesiastes 4:2-3:

² And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. ³ But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

He lays down an order. It is best never have to been. It is better to be dead, and worse to be alive. But like all men and one could think of the face of Vincent Van Gogh in his final paintings as he came to hate life and you watch something die in his self portraits, the dilemma is double because as one is consistent and one sees life as a game of chance, one must come in a way to hate life. Yet at the same time men never get beyond the fear to die. Solomon didn’t either. So you find him in saying this.

Ecclesiastes 2:14-15

¹⁴ The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I perceived that the same event happens to all of them. ¹⁵ Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity.

The Hebrew is stronger than this and it says “it happens EVEN TO ME,” Solomon on the throne, Solomon the universal man. EVEN TO ME, even to Solomon.

Ecclesiastes 9:12

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.

Death can come at anytime. Death seen merely by the eye of man between birth and death and UNDER THE SUN. Death too is a thing of chance. Albert Camusspeeding in a car with a pretty girl at his side and then Camus dead. Lawrence of Arabia coming up over a crest of a hill 100 miles per hour on his motorcycle and some boys are standing in the road and Lawrence turns aside and dies.

 Surely between birth and death these things are chance. Modern man adds something on top of this and that is the understanding that as the individual man will dies by chance so one day the human race will die by chance!!! It is the death of the human race that lands in the hand of chance and that is why men grew sad when they read Nevil Shute’s book ON THE BEACH. 

By the way, the final chapter of Ecclesiastes finishes with Solomon emphasizing that serving God is the only proper response of man. Solomon looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture.  Here is his final conclusion concerning the meaning of life and man’s proper place in the universe in Ecclesiastes 12:13-14:
13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

Marty Balinhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Balin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to search

Balin performing at a concert in Hallandale, Florida

Marty Balin (/ˈbælɪn/; born Martyn Jerel Buchwald; January 30, 1942 – September 27, 2018) was an American singer, songwriter, and musician best known as the founder and one of the lead singers and songwriters of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship.^[1]

Contents

• 1Early life
• 2Career
  • 2.1Early musical work
  • 2.2Jefferson Airplane
  • 2.3Jefferson Starship
  • 2.4Solo work, and reunion projects
• 3Honors
• 4Personal life
• 5Death
• 6Discography
  • 6.1Solo singles
• 7References
• 8External links

Early life[edit]

Balin was born Martyn Jerel Buchwald in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Catherine Eugenia “Jean” (née Talbot) and Joseph Buchwald.^[2] His paternal grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe. His father was Jewish and his mother was Episcopalian.^{[citation needed]} Buchwald attended Washington High School in San Francisco, California.^[2]

Career[edit]

Early musical work[edit]

In 1962, Buchwald changed his name to Marty Balin,^[2] and began recording with Challenge Records, releasing the singles “Nobody But You” and “I Specialize in Love”.^[3] By 1964, Balin was leading a folk music quartet called The Town Criers.^[2]

Jefferson Airplane[edit]

Balin was the primary founder of Jefferson Airplane, which he “launched” from a restaurant-turned-club he created and named the Matrix,^[2] and was also one of its lead vocalists and songwriters from 1965 to 1971. In the group’s famous 1966–1971 iteration, Balin served as co-lead vocalist alongside Grace Slick.

While his output diminished after Surrealistic Pillow (1967) as Slick, Kantner, and lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen matured as songwriters (a process compounded by Balin’s eschewal of the group’s burgeoning “ego trips”), his most enduring songwriting contributions—which were often imbued with a romantic, pop-oriented lilt that was atypical of the band’s characteristic forays into psychedelic rock—include “Comin’ Back to Me” (a folk rock ballad later covered by Ritchie Havens and Rickie Lee Jones), “Today” (a collaboration with Kantner initially written on spec for Tony Bennett that was prominently covered by Tom Scott), and again with Kantner, the topical 1969 top-100 hit “Volunteers.” Although uncharacteristic of his oeuvre, the uptempo “3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds” and “Plastic Fantastic Lover” (both written for Surrealistic Pillow) remained integral components of the Airplane’s live set throughout the late 1960s.^[3][4]

Balin played with Jefferson Airplane at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and at the Woodstock Festival in 1969.^[5]

In December 1969, Balin was knocked unconscious by members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club while performing during the infamous Altamont Free Concert, as seen in the 1970 documentary film Gimme Shelter.^[6] In April 1971, he formally departed Jefferson Airplane^[1] after breaking off all communication with his bandmates following the completion of their autumn 1970 American tour. He elaborated upon this decision in a 1993 interview with Jeff Tamarkin of Relix:^[4]

I don’t know, just Janis‘s death. That struck me. It was dark times. Everybody was doing so much drugs and I couldn’t even talk to the band. I was into yoga at the time. I’d given up drinking and I was into totally different area, health foods and getting back to the streets, working with the American Indians. It was getting strange for me. Cocaine was a big deal in those days and I wasn’t a cokie and I couldn’t talk with everybody who had an answer for every goddamn thing, rationalizing everything that happened. I thought it made the music really tight and constrictive and ruined it. So after Janis died, I thought, I’m not gonna go onstage and play that kind of music; I don’t like cocaine.

Balin remained active in the San Francisco Bay Area rock scene, managing and producing an album for the Berkeley-based sextet Grootna^[7] before briefly joining funk-inflected hard rock ensemble Bodacious DF as lead vocalist on their eponymous 1973 debut album.^[8]The following year, Kantner asked Balin to write a song for his new Airplane offshoot group, Jefferson Starship. Together, they wrote the early power ballad “Caroline”, which appeared on the album Dragon Fly with Balin as guest lead vocalist.^[3]

Jefferson Starship[edit]

Rejoining the team he had helped to establish, Balin became a permanent member of Jefferson Starship in 1975; over the next three years, he contributed to and sang lead on four top-20 hits,^[1] including “Miracles” (No. 3, a Balin original), “With Your Love” (No. 12, a collaboration between Balin, former Jefferson Airplane drummer Joey Covington, and former Grootna/Bodacious DF lead guitarist Vic Smith), Jesse Barish‘s “Count on Me” (No. 8), and N.Q. Dewey’s “Runaway” (No. 12).^[9][3] Ultimately, Balin’s relationship with the band was beleaguered by interpersonal problems, including Slick’s longstanding alcoholism and his own reluctance toward live performances. He abruptly left the group in October 1978 shortly after Slick’s departure from the band.^[3]

Solo work, and reunion projects[edit]

In 1979, Balin produced a rock opera entitled Rock Justice,^[10] about a rock star who was put in jail for failing to produce a hit for his record company, based on his experiences with the lawsuits fought for years with former Jefferson Airplane manager Matthew Katz.^[3] The cast recording was produced by Balin, but it did not feature him in performance.

Balin continued with EMI as a solo artist and in 1981 he released his first solo album, Balin, featuring two Jesse Barish songs that became top-40 hits, “Hearts” (#8) and “Atlanta Lady (Something About Your Love)” (#27). There was in 1983 a second solo album, Lucky, along with a Japan-only EP produced by EMI called There’s No Shoulder. Balin’s contract with EMI ended shortly thereafter.^[3]

In 1985, he teamed with Paul Kantner and Jack Casady to form the KBC Band.^[3] After the breakup of the KBC band, a 1989 reunion album and tour with Jefferson Airplane followed.^{[citation needed]}

Balin continued recording solo albums in the years following the reunion, and reunited with Kantner in the latest incarnation of Jefferson Starship.^[3]

Balin had intended to record lead vocals for two tracks for Jefferson Starship’s album, Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty. However, his art touring schedule conflicted with studio sessions, and instead, the track “Maybe for You”, from the German release of Windows of Heaven, was included.^[11][12]

On July 2, 2007, the music-publishing firm Bicycle Music, Inc. announced that it had acquired an interest in songs written or performed by Balin, including hits from his days with Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship.^[13]

Honors[edit]

Balin, along with the other members of the 1966-1970 line-up of Jefferson Airplane, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.^[14] As a member of Jefferson Airplane, he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.^[5]

Personal life[edit]

Balin enjoyed painting all his life. He painted many of the most influential musicians of the last half of the 20th century. Marty Balin’s Atelier is located at 130 King Fine Art in Saint Augustine, Florida, Balin’s permanent signature collection gallery.^[15]

Balin resided in Florida and San Francisco with his wife, Susan Joy Balin, formerly Susan Joy Finkelstein. Together, they had Balin’s daughters Jennifer Edwards and Delaney Balin, and Susan’s daughters Rebekah Geier and Moriah Geier.

Jennifer was born later in the year of his 1963 marriage to Victoria Martin. Balin married Karen Deal, Delaney’s mother, in 1989. Karen died in 2010.^[16]

While on tour in March 2016, Balin was taken to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York City after complaining of chest pains. After undergoing open-heart surgery, he was transferred to an intensive-care unit to spend time recovering. In a subsequent lawsuit, Balin alleged that neglect and inadequate care facilities on the hospital’s behalf had resulted in a paralyzed vocal cord, loss of his left thumb and half of his tongue, bedsores, and kidney damage.^[17]

Death[edit]

Balin died on September 27, 2018 at the age of 76.^[18]

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–

12,283 viewsJun 5, 2013, 09:38am

What Reagan’s Greatest Economic Adviser Thought About Austerity

Pascal-Emmanuel GobryContributor

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Conservatives agree the government should be smaller and spend less. The question is how to get there–how hard and how fast to cut?

No one knows better about it than the greatest economic adviser that conservative hero Ronald Reagan ever had: Milton Friedman. Friedman refused to work in Reagan’s White House so as not to lose his ability to speak out independently, but he was a key advisor to Ronald Reagan, especially in his presidential campaign.

Conservatives should listen to Friedman for a few important reasons:

• Friedman was one of the very greatest economists of the 20th century. Even among Nobel Prize Winners, he stands head and shoulders above almost anyone else.
• Friedman couldn’t be intellectually dishonest even if he’d tried. He didn’t dissemble about what he believed, and only went where the facts led him. And he certainly didn’t play politics. So when he said something, you could be sure he meant it, and that was his carefully considered view.
• Friedman was no squish. No one believed in small government more than Milton Friedman. He is rightfully seen as a hero by small government conservatives. He believed in freedom with every fiber of his being.

Given Friedman’s tremendous talent as an economist, honesty and unquestionable small government bona fides, we should pay attention to what he says.

So, Milton Friedman was asked about it, and he gave an answer, on the Donahue Show in 1979. Here’s a link to the clip, which starts at the right point, 33:10.

Friedman is asked what he would do to put the economy back on track. He says the number one thing is to cut government spending.

But how? This is the crucial part. Here’s the quote: “Cut down government spending–to hold down the rate of growth of government spending in dollars and to cut it in terms of purchasing power.”

This is absolutely crucial. Friedman says the right way to shrink government is NOT immediate spending cuts. The right way to shrink government is to hold down the rate of growth of government so that it shrinks in real terms, over time.

It’s important to keep in mind the context. This is 1979. Ronald Reagan was already running for President, and Milton Friedman was one of his key economic advisers. Right before answering on government spending, he noted that he wanted to stay out of government to keep being able to say what he honestly meant–in other words, what he’s saying is not “shrinking the growth rate is the politically more convenient way” to cut government, he is saying “shrinking the growth rate is the right way” to cut government.

It’s also important that he’s saying this in 1979 because this was before the IMF-imposed austerity programs of the 1990s which weakened the case for austerity even further among academic economists. Friedman would have been well within the libertarian and conservative mainstream AND the academic economist mainstream if he’d called for deep immediate spending cuts. And yet that’s not what he called for. Because he thought it was wrong–not wrong politically, but wrong on the merits.

Why, because like it or not, deep immediate spending cuts are bad for the economy. For the exact same reason that tax cuts are good for the economy. (Here’s Friedman in 1999: “I am in favor of reducing taxes under any circumstances, for any excuse, for any reason whatsoever.”) No one believed in small government more than Milton Friedman, and yet he couldn’t endorse austerity and immediate spending cuts.

We’ve seen this all over the world. Governments that implement austerity tank their economy, become unpopular and are voted out. In the US, even if a pro-austerity majority could be elected (very tall order) and actually followed through on its promise, it would very quickly lose the future elections, because the economy would tank and the economy drives elections. The cause of small government would be discredited for a long time. And a lot of unnecessary human suffering would occur as people lose their jobs.

Milton Friedman understood this. He loved small government, but he wouldn’t endorse austerity.

Milton Friedman was perhaps the greatest small government thinker of the 20th century, and he understood economics better than anyone. Conservatives and libertarians should see Friedman as their lodestar and remember his views on austerity. If we actually want to shrink government instead of just posturing, we have to reject austerity and take the longer view. 

I’m a writer and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. I most recently worked as an analyst, and before that at Business Insider, where I co-created BI Intelligence, the company’s market research service. I live in Paris with my beloved wife and daughter.

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“Friedman Friday” (“Free to Choose” episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 5 of 7)

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“Friedman Friday” (“Free to Choose” episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 4 of 7)

January 6, 2012 – 12:18 am

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“Friedman Friday” (“Free to Choose” episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 3 of 7)

December 30, 2011 – 12:12 am

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“Friedman Friday” (Part 16) (“Free to Choose” episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 2 of 7)

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“Friedman Friday” (“Free to Choose” episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1of 7)

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STARMUS panel announces ground-breaking Stephen Hawking Medals for Science Communication at the The Royal Society Featuring: Professor Sir Harry Kroto, Alexei Leonov, Dr Richard Dawkins, Dr Brian May, Professor Stephen

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

__

(Harry Kroto pictured below)

__S

In  the first video below in the 15th clip in this series are Hawking’s words and  my response is was given in an  earlier post.

In the popular You Tube video “Renowned Academics Speaking About God” Professor Hawking made the following statement:

“M-Theory doesn’t disprove God, but it does make him unnecessary. It predicts that the universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing without the need for a creator.” –Stephen Hawking, Cambridge theoretical physicist

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)

This is the fourth part of the letter to Stephen Hawking, but the third part was posted last week on my blog.

The 5 Conclusions of Humanism according to King Solomon of Israel in the Book of Ecclesiastes!!!!!

The Humanistic world view tells us there is no afterlife and all we have is this life “under the sun.”

SECTION 3 A Study in the Book of Ecclesiastes done by Francis Schaeffer (Christian Philosopher). Solomon limits himself to “under the sun” – In other words the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death. It is indeed the book of modern man. Solomon is the universal man with unlimited resources who says let us see where I go. Ravi Zacharias –

“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 us (Matter)”

1st Conclusion: Nothing in life truly satisfies and that includes wisdom, great works and pleasure. A) Will wisdom satisfy someone under the sun? We know it is good in its proper place. Take a look at this quote by Mike Malone: “Knowing God is the deepest longing of the human heart. It is knowledge so high and lofty that it transcends language, which can never exhaust the glorious reality of God. The wise man would take you by the hand and lead you to the fountain, where you may drink to your heart’s content, never tasting enough, yet never failing to be satisfied.” But what did Solomon find out about wisdom “under the sun”? Ecclesiastes 1:16-18 (Living Bible): I said to myself, ‘Look, I am better educated than any of the kings before me in Jerusalem. I have greater wisdom and knowledge.’So I worked hard to be wise instead of foolish[c]—but now I realize that even this was like chasing the wind. For the more my wisdom, the more my grief; to increase knowledge only increases distress.”

B) Do great works of men bring satisfaction?Ecclesiastes 2:4-6, 18-20: Then I tried to find fulfillment by inaugurating a great public works program: homes, vineyards, gardens, parks, and orchards for myself, and reservoirs to hold the water to irrigate my plantations.And I am disgusted about this—that I must leave the fruits of all my hard work to others. ¹⁹ And who can tell whether my son will be a wise man or a fool? And yet all I have will be given to him—how discouraging! So I turned in despair from hard work as the answer to my search for satisfaction.C) Does pleasure give lasting satisfaction?

KJV and Living Bible Ecclesiastes 2:1-3, 8, 10, 11: I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity.² I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? ³ I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly,And then there were my many beautiful concubines.¹⁰ Anything I wanted I took and did not restrain myself from any joy…¹¹ But as I looked at everything I had tried, it was all so useless, a chasing of the wind, and there was nothing really worthwhile anywhere…
2nd Conclusion: Power reigns in this life and the scales are not balanced!!!!!Ecclesiastes 4:1 (King James Version): So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.
Ecclesiastes 7:15 (King James Version) All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.If you are a humanist you must admit that men like Hitler will not be punished in the afterlife because you deny there is an afterlife? Right?

3rd Conclusion – Death is the great equalizer. Just as the beasts will not be remembered so ultimately brilliant men will not be remembered. Ecclesiastes 3:20 “All go unto one place; All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Here Solomon comes to the same point that Kerry Livgren came to in January of 1978 when he wrote the hit song DUST IN THE WIND. Can you refute the nihilistic claims of this song within the humanistic world view? Solomon couldn’t but maybe you can.

4th Conclusion – Chance and time plus matter (us) has determined the past and it will determine the future.By the way, what are the ingredients that make evolution work? George Wald – “Time is the Hero.”

 Jacques Monod – “Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.”

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 I can not think of a better illustration of this in action than the movie ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute. On May 4, 1994 I watched the movie for the first time and again I thought of the humanist who believes that history is not heading somewhere with a purpose but is guided by pure chance, absolutely free but blind. I thought of the passage Ecclesiastes 9:10-12 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.¹¹ I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.¹² For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

5th Conclusion – Life is just a series ofcontinual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death.
Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16). How do you want your life to go the next million years? The humanist world view has no answer (see H. J. Blackham earlier quote). Ecclesiastes2:15-16: ¹⁵ Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.¹⁶ For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.(Also refer to the lyrics of the song DUST IN THE WIND by the group KANSAS).Can you refute any of the conclusions of Solomon? Will you ridicule this material. In 1988 in the September-October of the HUMANIST MAGAZINE a 3 page article was devoted to cutting Schaeffer down to size, but even in that article which was called FRANCIS SCHAEFFER: A LOOK AT ONE OF THE FOREMOST FIGURES IN THE CRUSADE AGAINST HUMANISM the writer gave Schaeffer his due by saying “Schaeffer’s books are not the typical hodge-podge of newspaper headlines and obscure  Biblical prophecies, as in Hal Lindsey’s books. Schaeffer demonstrates a familiarity with the major theologians and some understanding of philosophy, art and literature. His books are clearly in a different league from the typical evangelical Christian reading matter…:” Why did I write about the meaning of life in this letter addressed to you?????? The answer is very simple: You have a spiritual need that must be met, and only Christ can meet it!!!! In the introduction of the book A SHATTERED VISAGE, Ravi Zacharias said this “The most telling aspect of the afternoon I spoke to a group of scientists at the Bell Lab in Holmdel, NJ was the nature of the questions that were raised following the address. None had to do with the technical or scientific expertise that the audience represented. They all had to do with the heart searching questions of men and women in pursuit of meaning of life. I have found these same questions asked time and time again in a variety of settings. After the intellectual that comes to the fore.” Ecclesiastes 3:11b “God has planted eternity in the hearts of men.” 

Charles Spurgeon “The soul is insatiable till it finds the savoir.”I want to finish with a prediction: There is coming a time in your life that the most important thing to you will be to get your prayer answered by God. When I was ridden in a hospital many years ago I was told that I may not live. My thoughts turned to spiritual things. Does it take a tragic situation for you to wake up? I will pray that you see the humanistic worldview for what it is, and that you would honestly pursue the Bible. Thank you for your time

Finally I have enclosed a copy of my letter published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Newspaper on April 22, 1994:

A BANKRUPT WORLDVIEW

Brian Bolton, the ordained humanist minister, asserted that humanism deserves out respect in his March 27 article. Does it really?

Humanism is the belief that we are limited to human life standing alone between birth and death. There is no belief in God and the afterlife. Three thousand years ago, Solomon took a look at this humanistic world view in the Book of Ecclesiastes when he limited himself to examining life “under the sun.”

Humanists will tell you that the world evolved, and just as time and chance have determined the human race’s past, it will also determine the human race’s future. Ecclesiastes says, “I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Solomon saw that the humanistic world view was bankrupt because without God in the picture man’s future was left up to time and chance.

When I play with my two children, they constantly are saying, “Daddy, watch me!” Their hearts long for my personal attention just as my heart longs for a daily personal relationship with a God who cares about me.

Why respect a religion like humanism that hands your future over to time and chance instead of a God who created you for a purpose? Humanism tells you that you are just a face in the crowd, and 1 million years from now it will be as though you never existed. Is Bolton a naive humanist who has avoided this conclusion?

Everette Hatcher III

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