Evangelical Realism

Last week, we left Vox cackling gleefully amongst the flaming debris of what he thought was the wreckage of Dawkins’s Ultimate 747 argument—an argument that Vox “demolished” by the unexpected strategy of admitting that Intelligent Design is a self-defeating sham. This week, he serves heaven as well as he has served ID, in his presentation of the anthropic principle.

As we saw before, the flaw in the anthropic principle, as an argument for an intelligent Creator, is that it fails to distinguish between imaginable alternatives and those which are actually possible in the real world. As Vox correctly points out, there is not—so far—any conclusive scientific reason for supposing that any other configuration of the fundamental physical constants of the universe could actually occur in objective reality.

Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer.

If, however, the total number of actual possibilities is limited to one, then it is at least an exaggeration to refer to the 1:1 probability as “wildly improbable.” By Vox’s own argument, the anthropic “problem” is not so much an improbability as a misperception.

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As the saying goes, I’ve got good news and bad news. It doesn’t matter which you want first because it’s the same news either way: The Tribulation has already begun.

All the signs of the start of the period called The Tribulation — predicted in the Bible as a seven-year period before the return of Jesus the Christ — have already occurred. This is only part of the research that I’ve uncovered recently while working on a new book…

The original working title was Are We Already in the End Times?, but I recently changed the title from a question to a statement. The new title is Tribulation: 2008.

The writer is Tom Kovach, columnist at renewamerica.us. The bad news is that, according to Kovach, we’ve all been Left Behind, including the True Believers (who, as it turns out, have sadly misinterpreted certain Bible verses about the order of End Time events). The “good news,” of course, is that this means Jesus will return in the year 2015, and we’ll have a thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity. Right?

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What do you get when you cross neuroscience with superstition? One answer might be the word I made up for the title of this post. A somewhat longer answer, though, can be found in Chuck Colson’s latest post at townhall.com.

In a recent issue of the New York Times, respected columnist David Brooks described how what he calls a “revolution in neuroscience” is shaping “how people see the world.” I agree with him—up to a point…

Our brains are not “cold machines.” Rather, “meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.”

And Brooks is right when he says that research like this will turn the recent debates over atheism into a “sideshow.” There is simply no way to sustain a “hard-core” materialistic understanding of human consciousness and morality in light of the new research. Where does the consciousness and moral decision-making come from?

That’s a question with an interesting answer, but before we look into that, what shall we make of Colson’s triumphal declaration that recent neurological studies have sounded the death knell for materialism?

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Since we’re on the topic of evil in human behavior, let’s take a look at the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and/or the so-called “sin nature.” Some Christians make a distinction between Original Sin and the “sin nature,” but the two ideas have enough in common that we can treat them as being basically the same idea, which is that Adam’s sin caused all mankind to become sinful. Or, as Mr. Horvath puts it,

the Christian religion says that people are by nature sinful and fallen. So it isn’t any surprise to Christians- or it shouldn’t be- when humans do bad things to other humans. We shouldn’t even be surprised when Christians are mean to other Christians…

When liberal pacifist Reinhold Neibuhr was confronted with the realities that emerged after WW2, he had a change of heart and mind and realized that Original Sin was real. GK Chesterton wrote that Original Sin was the only Christian doctrine that can actually be empirically demonstrated.

But does the doctrine of Original Sin really explain evil behavior? Or is it merely a superstition that does nothing more than attribute evil to an indetectable and magical “cause”?

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Ed Brayton, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, quotes a Messianic Jewish leader as claiming that unless Dubya gives up his attempts to set up a Palestinian state (and incidentally bringing badly needed peace to the region), God will punish America by handing us over to a series of bad presidents. Ed sums up the situation pretty succinctly:

So let’s get this straight: If we don’t do what God says, God’s going to punish us by giving us bad leaders. How exactly will we tell?

Good question.

According to the WorldNetDaily, there were many Christians in the Denver-area ministries when a lone gunman showed up, but if you want to know which one God was with, look for the Christian with the gun.

The female security guard who shot and stopped a gunman at a Colorado Springs church yesterday is crediting God for helping her to resolve the threat by killing the assailant.

Jeanne Assam was hailed by Pastor Brady Boyd with saving many lives in her quick response to gunshots fired at the New Life Church.

“I give the credit to God, and I mean that, I say that very humbly, God was with me the whole time I was behind cover,” she told reporters. “It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God.”

Armed Christian security guards, Christian militias, Christians infiltrating and taking over the Air Force Academy–maybe David Koresh was just ahead of his time.

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Writing for townhall.com, Dinesh D’Souza, like so many others, wants to use Anthony Flew to promote his own agenda.

Flew now believes that the design of the universe requires a designer. He gives his reasons in a new book There Is a God which is co-authored with Roy Abraham Varghese.

In the book, Flew uses simple analogies to expose atheist illogic.

As has been documented elsewhere, Anthony Flew has admitted that he does not recognize what is written in much of the book being circulated under his name by Christian propagandist Roy Varghese. This implies that either Flew is not the author, or that he is no longer in command of his mental faculties. The “simple analogies to expose atheist illogic [sic]” stand in stark stylistic and analytical contrast to the incisive philosophical analysis for which Flew originally became famous, lending further weight to the conclusion that Flew, in his right mind, would not have written the Varghese book, and very likely didn’t.

Let’s look at D’Souza’s sample simple analogy to see how far short it falls from the kind of intelligent and insightful argument an Anthony Flew could have produced when he was at the top of his form.

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Zeno writes about Dinesh D’Souza’s argument for the soul, based on “free will.” Here is D’Souza’s reasoning argument.

[I]s the long-standing human belief in the soul a fiction? We can answer this question by examining the issue of free will. Let me illustrate. I am sitting at my computer with a cup of coffee on my desk. I can reach over and take a sip if I choose; I can knock the coffee mug onto the carpet if I choose; I can just leave the cup alone and let the coffee get cold. Now I ask: Is there anything in the laws of physics that forces me do any of these things? Obviously not.

This argument fails to take into account at least two things: Beanie Babies, and beer.

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God’s wrath seems to be in the news a lot. Fred Phelps is making himself notorious for claiming that the Iraq war (and its casualties) are God’s wrath upon America for not hating gays enough. Any number of pastors and evangelists have claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath on New Orleans for widespread sex, jazz, and other sinful activities. Right-wing evangelist/campaigners warn us about the future wrath God will deal down on us if we don’t vote for Republicans. And so on.

It occurred to me to ask, Where do we get the idea that God has wrath? Is it from observation, speculation, or superstition? Or something else?

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