Category: Evangelism

“Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work-in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think. To make boys and girls, or men and women, think-and through thinking really undergo the transformation of learning-educational agencies of every sort must work against the grain, not with it….

Not only must we honestly announce that pain and work are the irremovable and irreducible accompaniments of genuine learning, not only must we leave entertainment to the entertainers and make education a task and not a game, but we must have no fears about what is “over the public’s head.” Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles. The school system which caters to the median child, or worse, to the lower half of the class; the lecturer before adults-and they are legion-who talks down to his audience; the radio or television program which tries to hit the lowest common denominator of popular receptivity-all these defeat the prime purpose of education by taking people as they are and leaving them just there.”

Mortimer Adler
Invitation to the Pain of Learning

Adlerian Psychology is utter tripe. I just wanted to get that out of the way before I made commentary on this quote.

In God’s providence the article that this quote came from was sent to me after spending a day studying the history of psychotherapy and propaganda in America. In that study I was introduced to Edward Bernays (1891-1995), considered one of the most influential men in America in the 20th century. Bernay’s propaganda techniques emphasized bypassing people’s reason and manipulating them by going after their unconscious fears. Now, I give no tuck to the Freudian idea (Bernays was Freud’s nephew) of the “unconscious,” but Bernays’ used that idea to transform America’s political conversation as well as its approach to advertising. What I think was really happening in Bernays’ work was not the capturing and manipulation of unconscious fears but rather Bernays was using symbols that were already packed with a great deal of a-priori conscious but un-articulated meaning that Americans embraced. By manipulating symbols Bernays was able to bypass the explicit nature of communication for a implicit communication and thus created a whole new era of social manipulation in the fields of advertising and political conversation. In short what Bernays was doing is he was taking the symbols of America that non-epistemologically self conscious Americans embraced and he was playing with them to achieve mass propaganda and mass manipulation.

The cure for Bernays’ manipulative technique, which is still a tool that is used to manipulate, is found in Adler’s quote. The reason that Bernays could succeed is that Americans don’t want to engage in the hard working of thinking — and if that was true in early 20th century America (Bernays hayday) how much more true is it today. Only the hard work of thinking can aid Americans in seeing through the smoke and mirrors legerdemain that modern propagandists (and their name is legion) use to continue to manipulate people.

As long as we continue to be a people who think that education should be “edutainment” (a combination of entertainment and education) and that reading should be FUNdmental (a recent slogan to get kids to read) or that our news should be “infotainment” (a combination of entertainment and information) we will continued to be cork-screwed as a people. Thinking and education is hard work, as Adler tells us and anybody who doesn’t realize that or that can’t accept that is testifying that they are not educated nor do they spend any time thinking.

To finish, I also want to use this quote to make a couple of points about the Church.

First, all that money you are paying your minister is being paid to him so he can engage in the hard work of learning God’s truth and thinking God’s thoughts after Him. He isn’t being paid to be a social butterfly or a CEO of a growth industry. He isn’t being paid so he can be one of the entertainers who give you “relgiotainment,” and he is not doing his job if he doesn’t make your head hurt by insisting that you think. Part of the reason the Church is floundering is that Bernays’ techniques have come into the Church. The Church has become a propaganda center where people are manipulated into supporting a product that can’t give what it promises.

Second, if you have a Pastor, who makes you break out your dictionaries then break out your dictionaries and thank God for him. It is true that the Pastor has a responsibility to help you understand. He should take the time to explain thoroughly difficult concepts and words but he should explain them as if he is explaining them to adults. As such you must do the work of helping the Pastor help you understand. The Church in America has spent the last 100 years serving as a co-dependent upon the School systems dumbing down of America. The only way that this dumbing down process is going to be reversed is if Pastors quit talking baby talk in the pulpit. Remember, Adler’s words, “nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles.”

Laymen if you want to see through the manipulation and propaganda that is going on in this culture you must learn how to think and be willing to do the hard work of thinking. One way to aid you in this is to find a Church and Pastor that is willing to treat you like adults and who are already engaged in the hard work of thinking.

Dear friends

Greetings to you all from Zimbabwe. We have been finding it difficult to communicate because of some LAN problems.

At least now we have the Government of national unity in place so we hope for the better but it is still unclear how the belligerents will work together. Things are still tough but products are beginning to be available but strictly in forex. All rates and bills are quoted in forex also. All school fees are also in forex. However, workers have not been paid in forex so its still a confusing situation.

We would like to send you some Family and Church photos but due to the less internet connection speed we might not be able to do that now, but when we get the slightest opportunity we’ll do so.

Vimbai and Rumbie cannot get into college because of the high fees required. The college is requiring $1500 for each of them before they can register. It is a mammoth task.

We hope you were spared from the global financial crisis. May the Lord shield you from its serious effects.

Greeting to all

Amos and the family

“The conscience is not to be healed, if it be not wounded. You must preach and press the law, condemnation, the judgment to come, with much earnestness and importunity. He which hears, if he be not terrified, if he be not troubled, is not to be comforted.”

– Augustine of Hippo

“Many of the most prominent neo-Darwinists have written at one time or another that natural selection is a tautology, a way of saying the same thing twice. In this formulation the theory predicts that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring, and it defines the fittest organisms as the ones which produce the most offspring. It is important to document this point, because many Darwinists have convinced themselves that the tautology idea is a misunderstanding introduced into the literature by creationists and other uncomprehending faultfinders. But here are a few examples collected by Norman Macbeth:

J. B. S. Haldane (1935): ” … the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ is something of a tautology. So are the most mathematical theorems. There is no harm in saying the same truth in two different ways.

Ernst Mayr (1963): “… those individuals that have the most offspring are by definition … the fittest ones.”

George Gaylord Simpson (1964): “Natural selection favors fitness only if you define fitness as leaving more descendants. In fact geneticists do define it that way, which may be confusing to others. To a geneticists fitness has nothing to do with health, strength, good looks, or anything but effectiveness in breeding.”

The explanation by Simpson just quoted indicates why it is not easy to formulate the theory of natural selection other than as a tautology. It may seem obvious, for example, that it is advantageous for a wild stallion to be able to run faster, but in the Darwinian sense this will be true only to the extent that a faster stallion sires more offspring. If greater speed leads to more frequent falls, or if faster stallions tend to outdistance the mares and miss opportunities for reproduction, then the improvement may be disadvantageous.

Just about any characteristic can be either advantageous or disadvantageous, depending upon the surrounding environmental conditions. Does it seem that the ability to fly is obviously an advantage? Darwin hypothesized that natural selection might have caused beetles on Madeira to lose the ability to fly, because beetles capable of flight tended to be blown out to sea. The large human brain requires a skull which causes discomfort and danger to the mother in childbirth. We assume that our brain size is advantageous because civilized human dominate the planet, but it is far from obvious that the large brain was a net advantage in the circumstances in which it supposedly evolved. Among primates in general, those with the largest brains are not the ones least in danger of extinction.

In all such cases we can presume a characteristic to be advantageous because a species which has it seems to be thriving, but in most cases it is impossible to identify the advantage independently of the outcome. That is why Simpson was so insistent that ‘advantage’ has no inherent meaning others than actual success in reproduction. All we can say is that the individuals which produced the most offspring must have had the qualities required for producing the most offspring.

The famous philosopher of science Karl Popper at one time wrote that Darwinism is not really a scientific theory because natural selection is an all purpose explanation which can account for any thing, and which therefore explains nothing. Popper backed away from this position after he was besieged by indignant Darwinists protests, but he had plenty of justification for taking it. As he wrote in his own defense, ‘some of the greatest contemporary Darwinisits themselves formulated the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring,’ citing Fisher, Haldane, Simpson, ‘and others.’ One of the others was C. H. Waddington, whose attempt to make sense of the matter deserves to be preserved for posterity:

Darwin’s major contribution was, of course, the suggestion that evolution can be explained by the natural selection of random variations. Natural selection, which was at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable but previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population (defined as those which leave the most offspring) will leave the most offspring. This fact no way reduces the magnitude of Darwin’s achievement; only after it was clearly formulated, could biologists realize the enormous power of the principle as a weapon of explanation.

That was not an offhand statement, but a considered judgment published in a paper presented at the great convocation at the University of Chicago in 1959 celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Origin Of Species. Apparently, none of the distinguished authorities present told Waddington that a tautology does not explain anything. When I want to know how a fish can become a man, I am not enlightened by being told that the organisms that leave the most offspring are the ones that leave the most offspring.

It is not difficult to understand how leading Darwinists were led to formulate natural selection as a tautology. The contemporary neo-Darwinian synthesis grew out of population genetics, a field anchored in mathematics and concerned with demonstrating how rapidly very small mutational advantages could spread in a population. The advantages in question were assumptions in a theorem, not qualities observed in nature, and the mathematicians naturally tended to think of them as ‘whatever it was that caused the organism and its descendants to produce more offspring than other members of the species.’ This way of thinking spread to the zoologists and paleontologists, who found it convenient to asume that their guiding theory was simply true by definition. As long as outside critics were not paying attention, the absurdity of the tautology formulation was in no danger of exposure.

What happened to change this situation is that Popper’s comment received a great deal of publicity, and creationists and other unfriendly critics began citing it to support their contention that Darwinism is not really a scientific theory. The Darwinists themselves became aware of a dangerous situation, thereafter critics raising the tautology claim wer firmly told that they were simply demonstrating their inability to understand Darwinism….In practice natural selection continues to be employed in its tautological formulation.

… Although natural selection can be formulated as a tautology, and often has been, it can also be formulated in other ways that are not so easily dismissed.

Phillip Johnson
Darwin On Trial — pp. 20-23

Recently, Christian Reformed Church flagship magazine, “The Banner” ran a three-page article on evolution arguing that theistic evolution (now called Evolutionary Creationists) is a viable alternative for Christians to embrace. The article was written by a couple who teaches at Calvin College and who work in the Physics and Astronomy departments. The article was excruciatingly basic and it was plugging a recent book that the Professor have recently written. I want to take a few minutes to examine some of the quotes in the article.

http://www.thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=1935

“For example, modern species of dogs and wolves and coyotes descended from some ancestral wolf-like species that no longer exists. Similarly, all dogs, cats, and other mammals descended from a common ancestor even longer ago.

Evolutionary Creationists combat evolutionism by attacking the first premise. They argue that God could work through biological evolution to create the species, just as God works through natural processes like evaporation and condensation to govern rainfall.”

From a Christian perspective of anthropology the statements of the Haarsma’s is fraught with grave danger. Indeed, the danger is so grave in these statements that the whole Christian faith could conceivably be overturned.

The Haarsma’s are telling us that it is acceptable to believe that all mammals (and keep in mind that man is a mammal) descended from (and so necessarily evolved from) a common ancestor. If this is true then the act of God in creating man as the piece de resistance of His creation is overturned. Likewise, any idea of man as uniquely bearing the image of God seems likewise overturned. The Haarsma’s are required to answer, if their supposition as evolutionary creationists is true that man has descended and evolved from a common ancestor, where in the evolutionary process man was stamped with the Imago Dei. When and where did God, in the evolutionary creationist myth, breathe into man the breath of life?

Also the Haarsma’s must answer in their evolutionary creationist paradigm when, where and how sin entered into the world.

Another problem in the Haarsma’s evolutionary creationism worldview is the presumption that all is evolutionary process. This presumption requires the belief that nature is going from something inferior to something superior (hence the term “evolution”). The problem though is that in Scripture the assumption is just the reverse. The assumption in scripture is not that everything is going from inferior to superior but rather that in creation we had the superior (the creation that was declared “good” and “very good”) which gave way to an inferior state (we might should call it devolution) called “The Fall.” The Christian story is Creation, Fall, Redemption, Glorification. For the Haarsma’s the Christian story seems to be Creation, evolution, Glorification.

Another problem in the Haarsma’s article is that in the Scriptures we clearly see man being distinct from the animals. Man is charged to name the animals thus showing his un-relatedness to the animals. And yet the Haarsma’s would have us believe that Man, having a common descendant with all animals has a basic relatedness to the animals.

Now, I’ve raised some questions here and to be fair to the Haarsma’s they did say in the article that there book attempts to answer questions that the article did not have space to address. But I will go out on a limb here and say, without reading their book, that evolutionary creationism can’t be harmonized with Scripture without doing serious damage to scripture.

The primary message to the ancient Hebrews was about the who and why of creation—that Israel’s God is the sovereign creator of all and humans are God’s image bearers—not the when and how of creation.

This is a HUGE assumption. Where in and from Scripture does Scripture teach that Scripture isn’t concerned with the when and how of creation? One just can’t assume these things without proving them so.

One could appeal to Jesus words in Matthew 19:4-5 that Jesus Himself believed that the when and how of the immediate and direct (hence non-evolutionary) creation of Adam and Eve was important. (We might also want to ask here if Jesus’ human nature was descended and evolved from a common ancestor.)

“If God’s purposes in Genesis 1 did not include teaching scientific information to the Israelites, then we should not look there for scientific information about the age of the earth or the formation of species. Instead, we can look at what God has revealed in nature itself to understand the when and how.”

The problem here is the assumption that general revelation can’t be read and interpreted properly apart from presupposing special revelation. It is true that God has given us two books wherein we can read His revelation but it is not true that we can read the book of nature correctly if we presuppose a theology other than Christianity.

Apart from presupposing what is taught in Scripture — that the Universe has order because of God’s providence — there is no consistent reason for the Scientist to believe that the Sun will rise regularly. The irrationality for believing that the sun will rise regularly is something David Hume pointed out. A science that begins without special revelation is a science that is autonomous and so can come up with everything from punctuated equilibrium to man being descended from animals.

It should be emphasized that evolution is only a theory. Embracing evolution is a blind leap of faith. There is no science that does or can prove it. Any evidence that is brought forth to support it is evidence that only proves evolution because it presupposes the truth of evolution. That is hardly a scientific approach. Therefore to appeal to nature as interpreted by science, as the way to determine the formation of species is a thin reed on which to rely.

The most significant problem I see with the Haarsma’s article is that it doesn’t take into account how theology informs science. Those who start with the theology of Hinduism, or Islam, or Communism (let us never forget Lysenkoism) or Humanism, or Christianity are going to develop significantly different sciences. Because that is so science can not be used to prove or disprove any metaphysical or theological construct since science depends upon those constructs for its existence.

Another significant problem I see with the Haarsma’s position is its implied Deism. It seems that for evolutionary creationists God starts the evolutionary / creation process and then kind of fades away to let the evolutionary process roll on.

I will continue to be mystified by those who desire to take a paradigm that was created and defended as a means of explaining this world without taking into consideration the God of the Bible and try to combine it with the God of the Bible.

The Haarsma’s article is fraught with severe difficulties. I trust people will not take their word on the issue.