The virtue of pig-headedness?

An interesting essay about intellectual humility:

Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character, whose exercise makes us flourish. To live well, says the virtue ethicist, is to cultivate and exercise just such excellences of character.

Part of living well, though, is thinking well. Our souls have an intellectual, as well as a practical, part; we cannot live fully flourishing lives unless we flourish intellectually. Are there, then, specifically intellectual virtues – excellences of intellectual character, whose exercise makes us good thinkers? Aristotle – whose works remain a touchstone for contemporary virtue theorists – certainly thought so. The intellectual part of the soul, he wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, strives to attain truth; accordingly, he thought, the intellectual virtues are just those dispositions that qualify it to perform this function. Where the virtue ethicist bids us to be generous and patient, temperate and brave, the virtue epistemologist bids us to be thoughtful and fair, to be diligent and open-minded. At their most ambitious, the virtue epistemologist argues not just that such traits are valuable for their own sake, or that the exercise of such virtues will (tend to) yield knowledge, but, further, that our grasp of what knowledge is, in the first place, parasitic on our understanding of such virtues. ....

Like everything else, virtues go in and out of style. One purported intellectual virtue in particular has recently become intensely fashionable. Philosophers, psychologists and journalists all urge us to be more intellectually humble. Different thinkers characterise intellectual humility differently, but there are some recurring themes. The intellectually humble have a keen sense of their own fallibility (‘I’ve been mistaken in the past’). They tolerate uncertainty (‘We might never know the full truth of what happened’). They recognise the partiality and ambiguity of their evidence, along with the limits of their ability to assess it (‘New information might come to light’; or ‘I might be misinterpreting this data’). ....

‘When citizens are intellectually humble,’ write the philosophers Michael Hannon and Ian James Kidd, ‘they are less polarised, more tolerant and respectful of others, and display greater empathy for political opponents.’ The intellectually humble, writes the psychologist Mark Leary, ‘think more deeply about information that contradicts their views’, and ‘scrutinise the validity of the information they encounter’.

But the empirical work that underwrites these glowing assessments is often questionable. Many studies assess the intellectual humility of their experiments’ participants via self-reports. Subjects are asked to rate their level of agreement with claims like ‘I am willing to admit it if I don’t know something’; those who rate high levels of agreement are classed as having a high level of intellectual humility. The worry is not just that we are often poor judges of our own strengths and weaknesses, but rather, more specifically, that it is precisely those who are lacking in humility who are likely to give themselves high scores. Humble people, after all, don’t go around talking about how humble they are. To say ‘I’m very humble’ makes for a comically self-undermining boast. ....

Even so, one might think, intellectual humility surely has an important role to play. Intellectual humility can temper some of our worst instincts. People often underestimate just how hard it can be to work out the truth. Equivocal, murky evidence is blotted out in favour of the tidy, familiar narrative. Expertise in one domain is illicitly projected onto others. Past failures – fallacious inferences, or snafus of spatial reasoning – are glossed over. Those who value intellectual humility, to their credit, beseech us to be on our guard against these all-too-human tendencies. ....

We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist’s claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues. Still, that’s compatible with thinking that intellectual humility makes for a genuine virtue, and, as such, that we should aspire to cultivate it.

But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? .... (more)

Rachel Fraser, "Against humility," aeon, Oct. 3, 2024

Cultural free-riders

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and a prominent one. But he is more widely known as one of the New Atheists. Consequently, a recent comment has received a bit of attention, for example:

...Professor Dawkins’ admission that he considers himself a “cultural Christian”, who is, at the very least, ambivalent about Anglicanism’s decline is an undeniably contradictory position for a man who in the past campaigned relentlessly against any role for Christianity in public life, railing against faith schools and charitable status for churches.

Before we start preparing the baptismal font, it’s worth noting that Dawkins says he remains “happy” with the UK’s declining Christian faith, and that those beliefs are “nonsense”. But he also says that he enjoys living in a Christian society. This betrays a certain level of cultural free-riding. The survival of society’s Christian undercurrent depends on others buying into the “nonsense” even if he doesn’t. ....

...[T]his feels like another staging-post on a journey towards the good Professor finally admitting that the New Atheism, of which he was such a shining light, was wrong in crucial respects. First, in its almost touching naivety that a post-Christian world would give way to a values-neutral space, rooted in reason. Second, in its semi-adolescent diagnosis of Christianity as a retardant upon cultural and intellectual progress. A New Atheist would generally cite the Spanish Inquisition or some wacky US creationist as representatives of the world’s largest faith – conveniently ignoring any contradictory examples. ....

One reason for Dawkins’ change of heart might be good old-fashioned scientific observation. It doesn’t take the brains of an evolutionary biologist to work out that New Atheism was mistaken in its diagnosis of what would follow religion’s decline. The rational world we were promised hasn’t materialised and a nastier, less reasonable one is supplanting what was there before. ....

...[I]ncreasingly, the thesis of Tom Holland’s book Dominion seems to be winning out, via a growing recognition that the ethics we hold as natural and universal are, in fact, anything but. Much of what atheists ascribed to vague concepts of “reason” emerged out of the faith which informed the West’s intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life – a cultural oxygen we breathe but never see. .... (more)

Madeline Grant, "Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods," The Telegraph, April 3, 2024.

Hypochondria of the mind

A few days ago, in "Worry less. Ruminate less..." I quoted someone to the effect that an obsession with emotions is debilitating. Theodore Dalrymple makes a related case here:

What is mental health? The only definition I can think of is the absence of outright lunacy. Unfortunately, it has come to mean any deviance from a state of perfect equanimity and satisfaction. A long time ago, I noticed that the word ‘unhappy’ had disappeared from the everyday lexicon, in favour of the word ‘depressed’. For every person now who claims to be unhappy there are a thousand who say that they are depressed, and this is irrespective of the conditions that are making them so. ....

But the semantic change from unhappiness to depression, in so many cases absurd and even laughable, is not without its deleterious effects. If you are unhappy, you seek the causes and, if you have what used to be called inner resources, confront them. (Unfortunately, there are circumstances, truly tragic, in which this is not possible.) But if you claim to be depressed, you pass the responsibility over to professionals who are expected to do something to or for you that will remove the depression as a diseased appendix is removed. ....

Of course, there are fashions in diagnosis. A generation ago it was multiple personality – The Three Faces of Eve kind of thing – and the DSM 5 suggested that the prevalence might be as high as 1.5 per cent of the adult population, that is to say one in every 66 people. Multiple personality has since become very rare.

These days it is gender dysphoria that is fashionable, with child gender-identity referrals increasing from 210 per year in 2011 to 5,000 per year in 2021. Either there must be something new in the water supply, or we are dealing with a socio-psychological epidemic. ....

The ever-expanding gamut of psychiatric diagnosis encourages the belief that all departure from a desired state of mind is a medical condition susceptible to medical or some other technical solution. This results in a propensity to hypochondria of the mind, with people taking their mental temperatures, as it were, as hypochondriacs take their blood pressure. But it precludes honesty or genuine reflection and leads to the search for bogus cures of bogus diseases. A corollary is the neglect of those who genuinely require care, who drown in a sea of inflated need. ....

Theodore Dalrymple, "It’s time to eliminate the concept of ‘mental health’," The Spectator, March 2, 2024.

"Human defectives"

His name is all over Madison. The University has chosen not to remove it from one of its more prominent buildings but, instead, install a plaque. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this morning:

[Charles] Van Hise received four degrees from UW-Madison, including the first Ph.D. degree granted by the university. He is the university's longest serving leader, serving as president from 1903 until his death in 1918. During his tenure, UW-Madison established a graduate division, founded a medical school and increased its faculty from 200 to 750 professors. ....

[Van Hise's] interest in [eugenics] came from reading Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species. Letters between Van Hise and his wife show he was curious about how to apply the ideas of animal evolution and natural selection to the human race, according to Luccini Butcher.

Van Hise lectured on eugenics, gave public speeches and talked to legislators. In one of his speeches, he said “[h]uman defectives should no longer be allowed to propagate the race" and sterilization "might be the proper method."

In another speech, Van Hise said “[w]e know enough about the breeding of animals so that if that knowledge were applied to man, the feeble minded would disappear in a generation, and the insane and criminal class be reduced to a small fraction of their present numbers.”

Van Hise wasn't the only academic espousing eugenics during this time. Edward Ross, a UW-Madison sociologist, also advanced the idea.

UW-Madison in 1910 established the country's first department of experimental breeding, which was initially led by Leon Cole, another eugenicist. The department is today called the genetics department.

Academics gave the eugenics movement legitimacy and helped drive the Wisconsin sterilization law passed in 1913. The law forced sterilization for "undesirables" at the discretion of medical professionals. The state conducted nearly 2,000 sterilizations, the 11th highest in the country.

Wisconsin repealed its sterilization law in 1978. ....

Eugenics was not widely supported when the law was in place, Luccini Butcher said. Many people saw it as an overstepping by the state. The Catholic Church, in particular, opposed forced sterilization. .... (more)

Kelly Meyerhofer, "A UW-Madison building’s namesake supported eugenics. Campus reckons with legacy of Charles Van Hise," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 29, 2024.

Will the tide turn?

From a review of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (by Justin Brierley with a foreward by N.T. Wright):

...[T]he implosion of the New Atheism was more than just an ironic farce. It revealed an important fallacy. The movement exalted science as the replacement for religion. But whereas science can tell us about physical reality, it cannot be a guide to moral values, as the atheist schism itself demonstrates.

The New Atheism had unintended consequences. “I thank God for Richard Dawkins,” says Brierley. “New Atheism has revitalized the intellectual tradition of the Christian church in the West.”

The church, he says, had been woefully unprepared for this frontal attack on the faith. “With the four horsemen at their heels, the church was forced to put down its tambourines and guitars and pick up its history and philosophy books again.” As a result, “Arguably, the last two decades have seen the greatest revival of Christian intellectual confidence in living memory as the church has risen to the challenge.” ....

Whereas the New Atheists insisted that religion is the source of everything bad in the world, recent historical research has proved the opposite. Classicist Tom Holland documented the casual and pervasive cruelty of the Greeks and Romans, who considered pity to be a weakness and who most emphatically did not believe in the innate human dignity of all. His book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World shows that beliefs such as the equal worth of all human beings and our duty to help the vulnerable cannot be found in the ancient world—or anywhere else, really, much less as a result of naturalistic evolution—and are unique to Christianity, which has spread them even to the secularists. This has powerful apologetic implications. When the New Atheists bring up atrocities committed by Christians—at which the ancient Greeks and Romans would not have batted an eye—they are appealing to a distinctly Christian ethic! Those who criticize the ethics of the Bible are presupposing the ethics that the Bible has given them! Similarly, when progressives demand social justice, racial equality, the rights of women, and respect for the marginalized, they are drawing on the Christian heritage they tend to repudiate. .... (more)

Gene Edward Veith, "Is the Tide Turning on Religious Belief?," Acton Institute, Sept. 13, 2023.

Not Christianity at all

My denomination experienced the conflict between "modernism" and "fundamentalism" in the early 20^th century. My grandfather, I think, was among the "modernists." Unlike many Protestant denominations the conflict didn't result in a split, but it did result in many prospective pastors choosing to attend a seminary other than ours.

I identify with Machen's argument. From the Introduction to J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism:

...[T]he great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. This modern non-redemptive religion is called "modernism" or "liberalism." Both names are unsatisfactory; the latter, in particular, is question-begging. The movement designated as "liberalism" is regarded as "liberal" only by its friends; to its opponents it seems to involve a narrow ignoring of many relevant facts. And indeed the movement is so various in its manifestations that one may almost despair of finding any common name which will apply to all its forms. But manifold as are the forms in which the movement appears, the root of the movement is one; the many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism—that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity. The word "naturalism" is here used in a sense somewhat different from its philosophical meaning. In this non-philosophical sense it describes with fair accuracy the real root of what is called, by what may turn out to be a degradation of an originally noble word, "liberal" religion. ....

What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age?

It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve. Admitting that scientific objections may arise against the particularities of the Christian religion—against the Christian doctrines of the person of Christ, and of redemption through His death and resurrection—the liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting "the essence of Christianity." ....

...[I]t may appear that what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category. It may appear further that the fears of the modern man as to Christianity were entirely ungrounded, and that in abandoning the embattled walls of the city of God he has fled in needless panic into the open plains of a vague natural religion only to fall an easy victim to the enemy who ever lies in ambush there. ....

...[O]ur principal concern just now is to show that the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene. In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend. Here as in many other departments of life it appears that the things that are sometimes thought to be hardest to defend are also the things that are most worth defending. ....

In setting forth the current liberalism, now almost dominant in the Church, over against Christianity, we are animated, therefore, by no merely negative or polemic purpose; on the contrary, by showing what Christianity is not we hope to be able to show what Christianity is, in order that men may be led to turn from the weak and beggarly elements and have recourse again to the grace of God.

Christianity and Liberalism is now in the public domain, and can be downloaded as a pdf here. There is also a new edition with a foreward by Carl Trueman that can be ordered at Amazon.

The same you

I became an opponent of abortion while in high school, some years before Roe, not because of my religious convictions, but because of what I had learned about biology. Since then my faith has certainly reinforced my belief that the lives of unborn human beings ought to be protected, but I think I would hold the same moral and political position if I were an unbeliever. Ryan T. Anderson and Andrew Walker:

.... Regardless of the unborn child’s stage of development, whether he is four weeks old or thirty-three weeks old, abortion kills the same person. Abortion ends a life—a human life, the life of a distinct and unique human being. The science couldn’t be clearer, nor could the ultrasound photos shared when couples happily announce a new baby is on the way. ....

The pro-life point of view is based on the undeniable biological fact that a human being exists from conception. The human embryo and fetus, no less than the human infant or adolescent, is a living member of the species Homo sapiens—a human being. “Embryo,” “fetus,” “infant,” “child,” “adolescent,” and “adult” are not names for different kinds of beings, they are names for the same kind of being at different stages of their natural development. The adult you is the same you who at an earlier stage of his or her development was the adolescent you, the infant you, the fetal you, the embryonic you.

This is not a religious belief but a scientific fact. Pro-life laws are built on that biological reality and on a moral judgment about the intrinsic equal value of human life—regardless of size, developmental stage, or cognitive abilities. ....

Moral claims are either good or bad, true or false, regarding the dignity of the human person. There’s no escaping it. To be pro-life entails insisting that the law protect the unborn. To extend legal protection to persons according to some other criteria, such as self-awareness or the immediately exercisable capacity to reason, is to place human dignity on a spectrum, an arbitrary spectrum at that. Those who would deny human dignity to unborn human beings—and thus deny them the law’s protection—are the ones who rely on an indefensible ideology (it doesn’t deserve to be called “religious”) that views some human beings as non-persons. How it is that that ideological belief can serve as the basis of our laws, but the moral truth of human equality cannot, is never explained. ....

People are free to have sex or not, but individuals should not be free to kill the children they conceive—at any stage. The child’s right to life entails the adults’ (the parents’) duty to care and thus places limits on our liberties. As a result, there can be no real right to abortion. Rather, there is the right of every child not to be the object of a choice whose specific goal is to end his or her life..... (more)

Ryan T. Anderson and Andrew Walker, "No, Overturning Roe Would Not Establish Theocracy," First Things, May 23, 2022.

"Good science"

From an important essay, "Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?":

.... The Nazi euthanasia campaign was publicly justified with four main arguments. First, ridding Germany of the unfit was simply “good science.” Who better to determine what constituted good science than German physicians, who were already the best in the world? The experts knew what was best for the German body.

Second, euthanasia was deemed humane. Since it was supported and implemented by a profession with a long tradition of healing and caring, the argument was even more persuasive. Pediatric euthanasia was often supported by many parents of disabled children for this reason; yet, with mixed motivation, for many wanted to avoid the strong stigma of having a disabled child. This conflict of interest shows how medical culture can influence the ethics of both individuals and society at large. ....

By the end of the “T4” program to euthanize disabled adults and children, between 70,000 and 100,000 persons had lost their lives; stigma against the vulnerable in attitude and language had become codified in law. According to Proctor, these three programs—forced sterilization of the “unfit,” the Nuremberg Laws, and the euthanasia laws—were the primary means the Nazi physicians and scientists used to accomplish “racial hygiene,” and led directly to the technological and medical surge responsible for genocide at the death camps. ....

The physicians who actively aided the Holocaust believed that they were practicing “good science.” But scientific truth alone does not “grasp” the reality of life, and if we believe it so, we are further on the road to what the late Jean Bethke-Elshtain called “scientific fundamentalism.” Physicians and health care professionals must, therefore, remember the Holocaust, but remember, as Pope John Paul II said on his visit to Yad Vashem, to “remember with a purpose.” ....

...[S]ociety is created for the person, not the person for society, and hence the dignity and integrity of the person and her freedom cannot be sacrificed for the sake of society. No contingent factor—race, religion, economic status, disability, or actions of the past, present or future—can rob a person the dignity she is owed. ....

.... Targeted abortion for unborn children with genetic conditions such as trisomy 21 and cystic fibrosis have reduced populations by more than 90%, and are justified on utilitarian grounds. But if a person is the fundamental unit of value of our society, then no “other good” can eclipse her. Politically, legally, and medically, this would mean an expansive and firm definition of person, for it is a far smaller risk to give protection to an entity where personhood is possible, than to destroy the life a person who in the end deserved our protection. ....  (much more)

Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?

Relax

From today's Wall Street Journal review of Ingredients, the full title of the book: Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us:

.... In a slyly brilliant bait and switch, what is framed as a book about what we should eat becomes a thriller about the scientific method itself. For a gold standard about how we build a “bridge of truth” in health science, Mr. Zaidan explains the multiple strands of evidence we amassed to be absolutely sure that smoking causes lung cancer. As an example of “less certainty,” he then discusses sunscreen: It “unequivocally reduces your risk of sunburn,” he explains, but we are less sure that it reduces the risk of skin cancer, and wearing it every day might ultimately be bad for you because of the ingredients that can enter the bloodstream.

Things are still less certain in the field of diet and health. ....

The kicker to Mr. Zaidan’s witty and clever analysis is that, even if we assume that the nutritional studies are totally right, their worst-case scenarios are still not that bad. The strongest claim is that a diet high in ultraprocessed foods is associated with a 14% higher risk of death. That sounds alarming. But for most people it’s a 14% increase in a very low baseline number. And the risk of death gets steadily higher as we age, anyway. Simply turning 20 increases a person’s risk of death by “almost exactly” 14%, even if he consumes nothing but kale, blueberries and Himalayan glacier water. ....

...[T]he author’s health advice is refreshingly simple: Don’t worry so much. Do some exercise. Go on a diet if you want to (any diet will do). “If you decide to cut out all ultra-processed food, that’s totally fine,” he concludes. “It might make you feel better, whether from the placebo effect or, just as likely, because you’ll have to replace all the ultra-processed food with fruits, veggies, and other stuff most diets would tell you to eat anyway.”

But mainly his counsel boils down to this: “Relax, dude.” .... (more, perhaps behind a subscription wall)

‘Ingredients’ Review: Let Us Eat Cake - WSJ

Recklessness, courage, and cowardice

In "Coronavirus, Courage, and the Second Temptation of Christ" David French responds to those Christians who refuse to take precautions in the face of pandemic, for instance "a pastor encouraged people to greet each other and said that his Bible school was open because they’re 'raising up revivalists, not pansies.'"

.... Even within those churches that have chosen to comply with public health warnings and temporarily cancel services, there are rumblings of dissent and discontent. You see it all over social media. And whether sophisticated or simple, these impulses toward defiance are virtually all grounded in a similar question: Why should Christians surrender to fear? People of faith should reject the guidance of public officials. Our gatherings are different. After all, isn’t it true that “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control”? ....

There exists within Christianity a temptation to performative acts that masquerade as fearlessness. In reality, this recklessness represents—as the early church father John Chrysostom called it—“display and vainglory.” Look how fearless we are, we declare, as we court risks that rational people should shun. In the context of a global pandemic followers of Christ can actually become a danger to their fellow citizens, rather than a source of help and hope.

Or, put another way, reckless Christians can transform themselves from angels of mercy to angels of death, and the rest of the world would be right to fear their presence.

But just as Christ rejected performative displays, [Matthew 4:5-7] he also rejected cowardice. He demands sacrifice even unto death. Yet taking up one’s cross in imitation of Christ means engaging in purposeful sacrifice. This is the risk of the doctor or the nurse who possesses the courage to continually expose himself or herself to deadly disease to care for the sick and dying. This is the risk of the faithful believer who sheds personal protection to care for the least of these so that they are not alone. ....

Shun performative recklessness. Do not presume that our faith makes us immune to the laws of biology and viral transmission. At the same time, believers should not shrink from purposeful and sacrificial personal risk. There may come a time when you must care for those who are sick. Do so without reservation, but do so prudently with the knowledge that you should not impute your risks to others. ....

Coronavirus, Courage, and the Second Temptation of Christ

"For Thine is the Kingdom"

I've been reading a lot about Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World and what I've read interests me, especially as I am an erstwhile history teacher who is Christian. Dwight Longenecker's review, "For Thine is the Kingdom," may overcome my resistance to adding another hefty volume to my already too large library.

.... I love reading history, but there are few things more tedious than a historian who is a prisoner in his ivory tower—never venturing beyond the safety of his footnotes, his research, and his “objective findings.” So worried about the approval of his peers and so cautious for his tenure in the fantasy land of academia that he never ventures a daring opinion (if he even has one). So obsessive about “objectivity,” he never risks his reputation by voicing a view. ....

Like a queen who rides a bicycle, Tom Holland’s Dominion is both majestic and down to earth. From antiquity to modernity, Mr. Holland traces a sneaky thesis that Christianity has changed the world—transforming it from the inside out. For those who love symmetry, Mr. Holland breaks down his sprawling history of the West (and from there the whole world) into three sections of seven chapters each. ....

The first section is “Antiquity” in which Mr. Holland traces the germination of Christian thought among the Greeks before spreading through Jerusalem and across the Roman Empire. Part two deals with the flux and influence of Christendom from the ninth to seventeenth centuries, while the third section takes us through the enlightenment, the revolutions of the modern age, and the contemporary modern malaise. In each chapter Mr. Holland shows how a particular advance, philosophy, humanistic development, or philosophical insight was inspired and driven by the core tenets and worldview of Christianity. ....

The development of science springs from a Christian theology that the natural world is real, and that it is ordered and structured and can therefore be studied and analyzed. The idea that one can take initiative and change one’s life and change the world springs from the empowerment that comes from the doctrine of free will. Human rights would never have been thought of without the belief in the innate dignity of each human being created in God’s image and likeness. Justice is possible because of the belief in an objective law—which would be impossible without a divine lawgiver, and even the atheistic rebellions of Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Marx would have been impossible without a higher belief in the values of truth and personal integrity that undermine hypocrisy, humbug, and injustice. ....

Aware of modern man’s antipathy towards organized religion, Mr. Holland simply lays out his case for the power and fecundity of the Christian worldview. Aware of our boredom with dull politically correct lectures, he portrays the dominion of Christianity as a series of surprises and a great adventure. Aware also of modern man’s distrust of establishment authority figures, he manages to portray the dominance of Christian thought as the subversive strain in society that it always has been. .... (more)

For Thine is the Kingdom: Tom Holland’s "Dominion" ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Stupid ethical questions

When does life begin?

It isn't a religious question. It is a question of scientific fact. The religious or philosophical issue would be "when is it right to take a life?" This is fascinating: "I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn't Popular":

.... I found that most Americans believe that the question of “when life begins” is an important aspect of the U.S. abortion debate (82%); that most believe Americans deserve to know when a human’s life begins in order to give informed consent to abortion procedures (76%); and that most Americans believe a human’s life is worthy of legal protection once it begins (93%). Respondents also were asked: “Which group is most qualified to answer the question, ‘When does a human’s life begin?’” They were presented with several options—biologists, philosophers, religious leaders, Supreme Court Justices and voters. Eighty percent selected biologists, and the majority explained that they chose biologists because they view them as objective experts in the study of life. ....

.... I emailed surveys to professors in the biology departments of over 1,000 institutions around the world.

As the usable responses began to come in, I found that 5,337 biologists (96%) affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization, with 240 (4%) rejecting that view. The majority of the sample identified as liberal (89%), pro-choice (85%) and non-religious (63%). In the case of Americans who expressed party preference, the majority identified as Democrats (92%). .... (more)

I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn't Popular - Quillette

"The vernacular is the real test"

From a good review of The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case against Scientism:

...Aeschliman’s target is the regrettable tendency of scientism — the ideology that exaggerates the role of empirical science in forming our view of the world — to “destroy the vision of man as imago Dei by picturing and perceiving him instead as a creature driven and primarily determined by laws of matter and force.”

And while he is criticizing that scientism, Aeschliman gives us a reading of C.S. Lewis — anchored in Lewis’s minor classic The Abolition of Man (1943) — that shows Lewis to be at once philosophically astute and rhetorically potent. On the point in question — the primacy of ordinary language — Lewis expressed himself with matter-of-fact eloquence: “Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”

.... From whom are we to learn how to speak again? From the “great central tradition” of classical and Christian civilization which is Aeschliman’s second great concern in The Restoration of Man. While he chronicles the spread of scientism since the Enlightenment, he also tells the tale of those who have opposed it every step of the way, from Pascal and Swift in the early years, to Newman and Dostoevsky in the 19^th century, to Chesterton, Lewis, and Solzhenitsyn in more recent decades. These were the writers and witnesses who strove to “revive, nourish, and protect the common human reason against specialists and fanatics who would reduce it to sense perception only.” They were the prophets who insisted that science “depends upon philosophy for the validity of its terms and procedures and to guide the uses to which scientific knowledge will be put.” And they were the true philanthropists, who sought to nourish the souls of men and women with something more substantial than what engineers can produce. They wrote satires, poetry, novels, biographies, essays, and even plays, because they knew that “some more popular form than rational argument” would be “necessary to counteract scientific materialism’s more immediately tangible and visible appeals.”

By placing C.S. Lewis within this great tradition, Michael Aeschliman has reminded us that if we would regain our purchase on the true meaning of words, we must have recourse to the very fonts of wisdom, in the works of Augustine and Aristotle, Jane Austen and the Psalms, St. Paul and soon-to-be-saint John Henry Newman. The Restoration of Man is a book marked by tremendous learning worn lightly, deployed vigorously, and offered generously to a generation that has forgotten how to think because it has lost its grip on the meaning of words.

'The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case against Scientism' Book Review | National Review

Monkey trial

Movies and history:

.... Almost all of the “conventional wisdom” concerning the Scopes trial is false. Contrary to the impression created by Inherit the Wind and other popular accounts (including the sensational reportage of H.L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun, one of the leading journalists of his day), the trial was not a fundamentalist inquisition, but an ill-conceived publicity stunt by Dayton businessmen who were trying to attract tourists to the small town—to put Dayton on the map. To generate a test case challenging the statute, the American Civil Liberties Union had offered to defend any teacher charged with violating the Butler Act, gratis. Dayton businessmen recruited Scopes to agree to serve as the defendant, even though he was unsure he had actually taught evolution. Nonetheless, Scopes volunteered to be charged. The trial—for a misdemeanor offense—was staged. Celebrity lawyers were solicited to participate for the sole purpose of increasing public interest in the case. The Baltimore Sun paid part of the defense’s expenses because it knew that the spectacle would sell newspapers, and it did. A lot of them.

If the goal was to generate interest in Dayton, it worked. For eight days, the town was the focus of worldwide attention. During the trial, the population of Dayton swelled from about 1800 to about 5000, with a raucous carnival atmosphere. Yet the trial was cut-and-dried; the jury deliberated only nine minutes before rendering a guilty verdict. Scopes was fined $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court promptly reversed the conviction on a technicality, and the state chose not to retry the case. Tennessee eventually repealed the Butler Act.

The eight-day show trial was a media circus, but little else. It resolved no factual disputes, established no new law, and settled no constitutional issues. It was a purely manufactured controversy—a radio-era precursor to reality TV and cable news. Bizarrely, Bryan died in his sleep (at age 65) five days after the trial ended. Instead of putting Dayton on the map in a positive way, the case left the town in undeserved ignominy.

Many plot features of Inherit the Wind—which was conceived during the Cold War as an anti-McCarthyism allegory—were entirely fabricated. Scopes (Bertram Cates) was not arrested in class and was never jailed; there was no unhinged fundamentalist preacher (Rev. Jeremiah Brown) exhorting the town; the trial was not accompanied by lynch mobs; Scopes/Cates was never burned in effigy and had no conflicted fiancée; and Bryan (Matthew Harrison Brady) was not a deranged buffoon or hysterical fanatic. Whatever one thinks about Bryan’s political or economic views, scholars regard him as one of the most important figures of the Progressive Era, and even as one of the most influential American politicians who never served as president. His portrayal in Inherit the Wind (by Fredric March) as an incompetent windbag is a disgraceful farce. .... (more)

Inheriting the Wind, or Reaping the Whirlwind?

Why?

An interesting response to a New York Times op-ed:

“Why is there anything rather than nothing?” Accept the question as a koan, not a challenge to debate, and you will have a mystical experience, although you may need to walk away from your screen, still your mind, and sit alone quietly in your room for a few minutes before the strange wonder that the question points to begins to register.

The “answer” to the question is not a proposition. It’s an experience — of astonishment, as you stop in your tracks before the inscrutable reality that things .... exist, your own self being the thing you feel most keenly. You didn’t will yourself into existence. How did you get here? Look to your parents, and from there to their parents, and so on, back to...primordial dust? The Big Bang? Bracket for a moment the question of what we should call the thing where that regression into the past comes to its final stop. Bracket the question of what the thing is exactly. That it was there, rather than not there — that’s the stubborn mystery.

Give a non-theistic cosmologist that one free miracle, the mystery of being, and he’ll explain the rest. The rest is what he’s interested in anyway. Those who dwell on the one free miracle, meanwhile, are liable to find that it never gets old, that it moves them on occasion to blurt, mentally or out loud, something like “Oh my God.”

Did someone say “God”? Here we go. .... (more)

Atheism: Philosopher Peter Atterton Sidesteps the Heart of the Matter | National Review

"The end product of a blind, unguided process"

I don't believe I'd ever heard of this apologist. From "John Lennox: Oxford Math Professor Defends Christianity":

.... By the time Lennox arrived at Cambridge University as an undergraduate in 1962, he already had devoured many of Lewis’s writings. He couldn’t resist sneaking out of his math lectures to hear Lewis lecture on John Donne before a packed auditorium.

More than any other thinker, it was Lewis — an atheist who converted to Christianity with the help of J.R.R. Tolkien — who gave Lennox the conceptual tools to confront the materialist objections to faith in God. “I thought it was very important to try to walk inside the shoes of someone who knew atheism from the inside, and Lewis provided that guide to me,” he says. “In all his questioning, there was the slow development of his impression that there was a God who could be taken seriously. All of that became very important to me.”

Now, at 75, Lennox has distinguished himself internationally for his intellectual defense of Christianity. He has debated — and, according to his admirers, bested — celebrated atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer. A fellow in the philosophy of science at Oxford, he writes books that explore the essential compatibility between the scientific quest, rightly understood, and religious belief. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo: All believed in a God who created and sustained the universe. “Instead of the founders of modern science being hindered by their belief in God,” Lennox reminds me, “their belief in God was the motor that drove their science.” ....

Lennox discerns in this a self-defeating materialism. In books such as God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? he argues that the scientist’s confidence in reason ultimately depends on the existence of a rational and purposeful Creator. Otherwise, our thoughts are nothing more than electro-chemical events, the chattering of soul-less synapses. “If you take the atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic view, you’re going to invalidate the reasoning process,” he says, “because in the end you’re going to say that the brain is simply the end product of a blind, unguided process. If that’s the case, why should you trust it?” .... (more)

John Lennox: Oxford Math Professor Defends Christianity | National Review

Pseudoscience

From the beginning of an informative column by Matt Ridley in The Spectator, "Lying with science: a guide to myth debunking":

‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong.

Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to make the scares up. More and more headlines about medical or environmental panics are based on published scientific papers, but ones that are little more than lies laundered into respectability with a little statistical legerdemain. Sometimes, even the exposure of the laundered lies fails to stop the scare. Dr Andrew Wakefield was struck off in 2010 after the General Medical Council found his 1998 study in the Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism to be fraudulent. Yet Wakefield is now a celebrity anti-vaccine activist in the United States and has left his long-suffering wife for the supermodel Elle Macpherson. Anti-vax campaigning is a lucrative business.

Meanwhile, the notion that chemicals such as bisphenol A, found in plastics, are acting as ‘endocrine disruptors’, interfering with human hormones even at very low doses, started with an outright fraudulent study that has since been retracted. .... (much more)

Lying with science: a guide to myth debunking | Spectator USA

Science and the faith

Philip Jenkins v. a myth:

If you shine powerful flashlights into the more benighted corners of university humanities departments, you can probably find people who still believe that Christianity historically opposed scientific inquiry, and actually held back human progress. ....

We think for instance of the popular vision of Columbus insisting that the world was round, to the derision of ignoramus monks who warned that he would fall off the edge. In reality, Christian scholars had known for a thousand years that the world was round. Their quarrel with Columbus was that the upstart navigator thought it was much smaller than they believed, and the Church consensus was dead right. Nobody could sail three thousand miles west of Spain and hit Japan. Still, the myth of Christian backwardness and superstition is too useful to be discarded because it just happens to be bogus.

I quote a valuable article by Philip Ball from the British Guardian, a left-oriented paper that is not noted for its religious sympathies. But as the author says,

Historians of science oscillate between exasperation and resignation at the fact that nothing they say seems able to dislodge these convictions. They can point out that Copernicus’ book, published in 1543, elicited little more than mild disapproval from the Church for almost a century before Galileo’s trial. They can explain that [Giordano] Bruno’s cosmological ideas constituted a rather minor part of the heretical charges made against him. They can show that it was Galileo’s provocative style and personality – his readiness to lampoon the Pope, say – that landed him in trouble, and that he was wrong anyway in some of his astronomical theories and disputes with clerics (on tides and comets, for example). They can reveal that the conventional narrative of science versus the Church was largely the polemical invention of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White in the late nineteenth century. It makes no difference. In the “battle for reason”, science must have its heroic martyrs.

In response, we can easily point to all those great scientists who were Christian—if not always orthodox—and who worked to glorify God. It was Sir Isaac Newton whose Principia proclaimed that

This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God. ....

....For Christians, then, science is not the enemy but something closer to a form of worship. For centuries, the world’s greatest Christian church was Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, which commemorated not an obscure “Saint Sophia,” but the creative Holy Wisdom through which the world was made. .... (more)

The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation | Philip Jenkins

The Church is not a therapist

Carl Trueman at First Things on the incompatibility of Christianity with the spirit of our age:

.... The abiding—perhaps dominant—myth of this present age is that personal authenticity requires that I be able to perform for the world that which I feel I am inside. From Rousseau to Reich and beyond, this nonsense grips the popular imagination. If I am to be recognized as me, no thought can go unarticulated, no desire unrealized, no personal idiosyncrasy unexpressed. This is transforming the meaning and purpose of those institutions that have traditionally conducted and transmitted culture. No longer do institutions train us to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Rather they are there to support me in my acts of self-expression.

If I feel I am a woman, albeit trapped in a body of cells coded with XY chromosomes, then I must be allowed to perform in public as such. Medical professionals must aid me in this ambition. Scientists who demur from applauding my performance must be marginalized or expelled from the (formal or informal) guilds that give them status and authority. Schoolteachers who hinder my self-expression must be excoriated as abusive, bigoted, or incompetent. Medicine, education—you name it, it must now facilitate my performances.

This is where the modern mindset crashes into Christianity and the church. Christianity is not a religion of self-creation and the church is not an institution intended to provide a stage upon which I can perform in a safe and affirming environment. On the contrary—it is the conduit of God’s grace. It is not there to tell me that I am OK or to make me happy. It is there to assure me that in myself I am very much not OK, and to make me utterly miserable by confronting me with my dramatic shortcomings and need of a Savior. Only then can I find happiness—in God’s grace, not in the applause of an audience. .... (more)

Is the Church a Cage? | Carl R. Trueman | First Things