Answering Dawkins Part 2

Yesterday I offered my answers to some stated questions on famed atheist Richard Dawkins' website for secularism. Yesterday's post examined questions about free will, morality and meaning.

Today is the second installment, and the questions again come directly from Dawkins' website:

Purpose. Do teleological concepts play a useful role in our description of natural phenomena?

Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?

(Skipped question on Emergence and reductionism) 

Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?

The question pertaining to purpose is more familiar to the rest of us as, "Why am I here?", and is strangely universal across humankind. The fact that we ask the question suggests, to me at least, that legitimate grounds exist  for our inquiry; that in fact, there really may be a 'why' element to our existence.  After all, do we ever ask about things that are completely unfamiliar and unknown to us?  We may ponder the plausibility of  life on other planets, because we observe life here, and its requirements, and are naturally inclined to wonder if those far away worlds might also be hospitable to life.  But this musing presumes that the possible life we contemplate will be recognizable to us as life, that it will be in some small way similar to what we know to be life. It will be familiar. I believe that all of our inquiries about 'unknowns' are  fixed in the familiar, even if quite distantly, thereby making them not so much unknowns, but rather as yet undiscovered, unexplored prospects.

So when we inquire as to our purpose the question stems from a context that is vaguely familiar to us, as if nearby, though not yet grasped.  It is familiar to us because it is coded by our maker into our very being.  Romans 1:19 says, "...since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."

God uses creation, from the tiniest, complex component of a microorganism to the vastness of the cosmos as a universal language that points to his own existence and primacy, that we might observe nature and look for the source of its genius.  We are here primarily to be loved by God, and to know and love him, and by extension, his creation.

Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?
Now there's a word I don't throw around on a weekly basis.  Basically, epistemology asks 'How do we know what we know is right and true?', and 'by what   avenues do we obtain knowledge, and are they valid?'

It is peculiar that the question on Dawkins' website is qualified with the adjective 'true' before the word knowledge. Because science is limited to the five senses, it is only interested in one kind of knowledge and it presumes that this one variety of knowledge represents the sum of all knowledge to be had, and anoints it as 'true' knowledge.

Yet consider civilization.  We tend to think of it as buildings and infrastructure and order and economy. But in reality, the civilized world exists because of an invisible and immaterial quality known as Integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing - the promised and principled thing, even at the expense of damage or peril to the doer.  The global economy is built upon words, written and spoken, that promise to repay borrowed monies.  If one day every corporation, government and individual with outstanding loans suddenly said, 'Nah, I'm not going to repay that debt', we witness total economic collapse and failure. Lending would cease, and each person, government or corporation would have only its own existing capital to work with. Economies and civilizations are built upon words, because words convey intent, and intent must be coupled with integrity, or we are left with just so much alphabet soup dancing on parchment.  Promises are down payments on integrity.  I am unclear as to how science could study a promise. And yet, the promise is a powerful 'thing' that is unseen, untouchable, unheard and unknown, until made good on. Up to that point it is merely believed.  And after that point, it is no longer a promise, but a fact.

Trust is another means of obtaining knowledge. We trust (rightly or wrongly) the words of others.  We trust their experiences when they witness events. Without this source of knowledge, life in the courtroom would be very dull and inconclusive. Scientists trust the words of other scientists, even in the absence of repeatable claims. Much of evolutionary science is by consensus, and highly subjective extrapolations are made with the best of intentions.  The Bible is God's revelation of himself,  written using human minds at God's own urging. It has been given to mankind as an unchanging record of who he is, and how he has interacted with humanity throughout history. Much of the Bible is a retelling of real people's personal experiences with God. Through their recorded experiences we obtain knowledge.

So while it is true that science seeks knowledge, it does not necessarily seek the truth.

Consciousness.  How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?  

The question seems to be asking, "How do mindless atoms manage to collect themselves  into arrangements capable of asking questions such as "why are we here?".

They don't, is the short answer.  Does anyone seriously look at a printout of computer code and think for a moment that the order and meaning inherent in the code is the product of random chance? Don't we intuitively know that a human being skilled in the language of computers organized the code into coherent strings that would be cogent to a computer?  And yet we want to look at a DNA molecule and attribute it to chance. So, who is this Chance guy? Chance is not a being, nor is it even a thing. Chance is a no-thing.... or we could shorten that to nothing. It is one of those things that science would be ill-equipped to study, because it is precisely what hasn't yet happened. It stands in the gap between two or more outcomes, ready to take credit for whichever one prevails. Chance is nothing.  Human beings, on the other hand, are really something.

Consciousness is the awareness we possess of our own existence. It facilitates our reaching beyond our own physical confines to obtain knowledge through inquiry - scientific and otherwise.  With it we examine our place in the cosmos as we think contextually and contemplate the effect of our behavior on others. In so doing, we exhibit an integral part of our humanness: our conscience. Without a conscience, our ability to perceive the existence of  good and bad, of right and wrong, does not exist.  Do away with conscience, and integrity is not possible. And as integrity goes, so goes civilization.

Answering Dawkins

On his website, "Innovating for a Secular World", iconic atheist Richard Dawkins posits the following:

"We would like to understand how to construct meaningful human lives in a world governed by the laws of nature. Some specific questions include:
(And I am including only the first three in this installment).

Free will. If people are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics, is it sensible to say that they make choices?

Morality. What is the origin of right and wrong? Are there objective standards?

Meaning. Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?


Well, just for fun, I will offer some responses.

To the question of free will. His question includes a premise which is exclusionary: "If people are collections of atoms..." Using an unproven premise as the platform for the question negates the question, in my opinion. It is no longer pure inquiry, but rhetoric. The answer is, of course, if we are nothing more than a collection of atoms, we are mindless slaves to the laws of physics and free will is not even a notion we are capable of contemplating.

To the question of morality. He asks about the origins of right and wrong. By asking the question, he seems to be implying these two benchmarks 'exist', though to do so they must, by definition, exist outside of the scope of the natural world, since the laws of nature are what they are. Period. They are neither good, nor bad.

How can qualities such as 'right' and 'wrong' exist in a cosmos spawned by chance and governed by heartless, value-neutral natural laws? Answer: right and wrong do not even exist in such a place, because they are immaterial. The laws of nature act upon the material world. Ideology is not self-existent in nature. Humanity exists in a fallen state, i.e. not as designed, and with a propensity for wrongdoing. Yet God has not abandoned us in our fallenness, but has revealed, literally manifested, his nature perfectly in Jesus. He tells us in Micah 6:8 what we are to be about, "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

His morality follow up question is "are there objective standards?" (for right and wrong). Well, what is a standard? A 'standard', according to Merriam-Webster.com,  is "something considered by an authority or by general consent as a basis of comparison; an approved model."  That definition, at least, is fraught with subjectivity.  'general consent'... 'basis'... 'comparison'...'approved'....  In the purely secular realm of scientific naturalism, just how much tolerance is there for such speculative reasoning?  None, one would think.  I would have supposed there could only be objective standards in such an environment.

Dawkin's list then moves on to the question of meaning. 'Why live'? he asks.  In the secularists' realm, that's a good question.  It is perhaps best answered by asking about the ramifications of death, not for the deceased, but upon those who 'loved' them. Why are we more grieved by the death of a child than by totaling our car?  Are not both just collections of atoms, held in temporary arrangements in the space-time fabric?

When you boil it all down, what people most value in life, the thing that imparts meaning to their existence, is relationship. We treasure our relationships above all else, and the love that is cultivated within them. When death terminates a relationship, and our love can no longer be given to, and received by, the one we love, we are left devastated, crippled by a gaping wound in the heart. This is not the happenstance result of evolution. It occurs because we are made for relationships, first and foremost with God.  Our very propensity for relationships is a reflection of God's purpose for us, that we might experience His unfailing, unflinching, unending love in relationship with him.

"Meaning" and "life" are co-dependents living under the shelter of love.  Death stings because of the damage it inflicts upon the living.  Mere atomic bundles do not suffer the way human beings suffer in the soul when a loved one dies. Period.

When he further asks, "Is there a rational justification  for  finding meaning in human existence?",  I must ask, what is rational? And who gets to define meaning?  Rational in this context must refer to making a logical argument for or against the idea of meaning, but an argument is nothing but a hypothetical set of contexts and premises, because if they were already proven, there would be nothing to argue about.  So what choice does an argument have but to follow the laws of nature? And it seems to me that things go all Darwinian at that point, survival of the fittest, etc.  That's where meaning must be found, if it exists at all, in the naturalistic worldview.  Meaning is equated with surviving long enough to pass along ones genes. That would seem to me, at least, to be the epitome of meaningless.

Next time I will offer answers to a few more of Mr. Dawkins questions.

The Last Tomorrow

What would you have done differently, had yesterday been your last day?

I think the question has two answers, based on two different premises.

Premise one is that you had no knowledge that tomorrow would not come.  You lived yesterday as if today was lurking around the corner, replete with its own set of pending circumstances ranging from problematic to exhilarating. So you trudged through the day, naively jettisoning its hours off into the past like prayers from a Tibetan prayer wheel.

Its what we do with Tomorrow.  We treat it as if it were a faithful dog that will come at our beck and call, reporting dutifully, awaiting our command.

But Tomorrow has its own Master.

What would you have done differently, had yesterday been your last day?

Premise 2 allows that we know today is our last day, that we have already contemplated our last tomorrow.  Finis.

How might you live differently today, knowing tomorrow will go on without you?

God knows our tendency to rely on tomorrow as either our helping hand, our excuse, our hope, if not all three simultaneously at times.

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.'  Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.…" (James 4:13)

We are not guaranteed tomorrow. What we really know is that today is our last chance to make a difference, both in the lives of others, and in our own. And there are realizations to be made before our last tomorrow.

"You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart."  Those are the words of God as spoken by the prophet Jeremiah (29:13). To seek Him with all of our heart is to let go of some things that obscure our view of Him. Like pride.  He is not far from the humble, not far at all. In fact... He's right there.

Jesus said, "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." (Mt 11:28). Who are the humble among the great collective of humanity? Is it not those who stagger and struggle under the true weight of the human condition. The spiritual condition is the human condition. We labor and struggle under our imperfection.  God is the standard of perfection written on our hearts, which is why we are able to speak in terms of superlatives at all... we innately know they exist, somewhere, in some form and are  grieved by our incompetence at fulfilling them.

Jesus said, "Truly I say to you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter into it." (Luke 18:17)  The station of children is one of  vulnerability and inherent lack of authority, which is the human spiritual condition before God. As adults gain status and position, whether in a community or a corporation, in academia or a body politic, they grow more and more detached and insulated from the consequences of social vulnerability - which can serve as a window to our spiritual vulnerability. Eventually they are propped up by the accolades and kudos of the icons of influence in their respective field, making dependence upon God, indeed even recognizing the existence of God, increasingly difficult.

Jesus said in Matthew  7:7 , "Ask and it will be given to you;seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you."  The truths of God await  our discovery, we just need to look.

Today might be a good day to begin.

What is Trust?

In nature invisible forces are in play without which the entire physical world ceases to exist. These largely mysterious forces act collectively to create the scaffolding upon which all matter, including you and me, is formed. Why these forces , and the laws governing them, exist is a matter of consternation for any thinking person, since without the laws, the forces either do not exist, or do not behave consistently and predictably enough to become the foundation for the entire cosmos. Conversely, without the forces, the laws remain invisible and unknown.

Nature's inorganic constituents are governed by the laws of nature and the forces those laws control. A rock perched atop a large hill will, when its footings are sufficiently eroded, obeys gravity's call and rolls down the hill, trussed and directed by an assemblage of physical laws. Likewise the moon obediently idles its way around the Earth day after day, age after age, never once contemplating a move to Venus's orbit. Nope. Around and around the Earth it goes, and will continue to do so until some other force dislodges it.

In the organic world - land of the living- things change considerably, especially as one ascends the pyramid of animal complexity. Simple protozoa can certainly react to stimuli in their environment, but it doesn't involve thought; just an off the rack operating system that aids in keeping the thing viable. Insects make 'decisions' as to which way to respond to a physical stimulus, (move toward it, move away from it). Birds and mammals must evaluate an array of stimuli in order to eat, reproduce, shelter and survive. But these stimuli all have one thing in common: they are without deceit. Light is light, dark is dark, movement is movement, water is wet, snow is cold, and so forth. The world which confronts life forms from amoebas to zebras is eerily simple, more of a 'face value' proposition, despite the myriad of difficulties inherent in their fight for survival.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the apex of the complexity pyramid. For there we are, iconic in our conspicuous place at the top, all of creation beneath our feet forged into some sort of organic pedestal upon which we resolutely bask in the glory of our free will and opposable thumb. From our vantage point, we witness the dullness of the amoeba, the creepiness of the arachnid and the silliness of the chimpanzee. We dissect them, grow them, study them, entrap and confine them. We make every creature subject to our collective will, either directly or indirectly as we seek to influence their survivability and ours. And they let us do it! It is nothing short of astounding. With scarcely a dissenting outcry, we subjugate every kingdom taxonomists have divined with little fear of revolt. It is but one facet of our free will on display - the desire to rule over the natural world - a desire that goes horribly wrong in the absence of an inner moral compass.

Any discussion of free will would have to be lengthy. But painting in broad strokes, we can illustrate it as the difference between merely walking across a deposit of limestone beneath the soil in blissful ignorance, versus quarrying that limestone and harnessing the laws of physics to turn it into cities. It is the force that has allowed civilizations to flourish and add layer upon layer of comfort and luxury to our existence.

On an intangible level we see that the entire domain of civilization owes its existence to a pair of linked intangibles existing only within the aura of free will: Trust and trustworthiness. The whole of human progress can be summed up as the effect of the promise, whether it be Pharaoh's promise of death to slacker slaves building his kingdom, or the promise of financial remuneration to architects, engineers, laborers and bond purchasers in exchange for raising a city. Since the majority of the actions required for civilization to come into existence are predicated upon promises, the critical element in the ascent of human civilization has been, and continues to be, trust. Trust comes into play because free will is in play. And where the free will of human beings is in motion, all bets are off, precisely because humans can -and do - choose to either reveal or obfuscate known truths. Unlike the environments of the rest of the animal kingdom, human interactions deal with words, spoken and written, which convey information that will force others to make a decision. It boils down to information being offered up as fact, or at the very least, theory with a probable outcome, and those encountering the information deciding to act on it by either believing it, or not.

Duplicity is the dark shadow cast by the corruption of man's free will. One need only scan the history books or the morning newspaper to come to terms with the ramifications of broken promises, blurred truths and outright lies. Duplicity is known by other names: deceit; guile; fraud; deception; hypocrisy; and trickery. Duplicity is the intent to deceive, and is always practiced as a means of self-gratification. It is the intentional abuse of trust through the issuance of a false promise. In this manner we find the world of lower animals to be less nuanced and more mechanistic than that of humans. A tree squirrel, for instance, leaves its nest and encounters a world comprised of finding nuts, remembering where he hid the nuts, and chasing girl squirrels up and down the nut tree. Squirrel society is overt and far less duplicitous than human society, simply because the desire to deceive is not wired into the squirrel and its environment. The human environment is a construct of intangible, interrelated relationships which ride the rails of truth and deception, sometimes intersecting with powerfully destructive outcomes. So if the promise is the currency, and thus ultimately the wealth of human society, duplicity is its cancer, and the arbiter of its demise.

Trust cannot be seen, touched, smelled, heard or tasted (and therefore, according to science, cannot exist.) No one will ever study a sample of trust in a Petri dish or under an electron scanning microscope. What then, is trust, this non-existent non-entity powerful enough to create the civilized world? What does it share in common with the invisible laws of nature and the forces those mysterious, supposedly self-existent laws create?

Maybe it is this: the things that ultimately make life possible, and rich and wonderful, invisible 'things' such as trust, love, compassion, and mercy, will never be identified by science and its narrowly focused searchlight of inquiry. (Pity that this has become the anointed alter upon which all truth is divined and bestowed upon the people.) But these invisible qualities ceaselessly resonate within us, invisible fingers strumming the strings of our heart or tapping across the keyboard of our soul, deep calling to deep, beckoning that we incline an ear of a different sort toward the melodious murmuring playing within.

It is a whisper we can trust.

Left vs Right: A Common Denominator

A Facebook friend recently reposted an image from the Facebook page of a group called The Christian Left. Their mission statement reads, in part: "See, it wasn’t just Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection that matter. It was his life too! The life he lived is a huge part of the deal, and he asked us to do a few things if you look at his words. Not only is what Jesus said the Word of God, but what Jesus DID is also the Word of God. Looking at the life of Jesus we see that Jesus made room for those cut off from the rest of society. Jesus put a name and a face on all who had been forgotten or pushed aside, even the dead. Jesus called us to carry our cross daily and follow him. That’s what Social Justice means."

I do not disagree with the above, in fact it's all good - at least until that last little statement on Social Justice. Here's why: Social Justice is an ideology conceived and advanced by man. Inherently it seeks to externally force society to behave in a certain manner, i.e. to compel all of society to manifest the social justice ideology (which at any rate would seem to be forcing to society to embrace tenants of a religious belief, but that is for another time). Jesus, on the other hand, makes it quite clear that the first cause of society's ills lies inherently in the heart of man, in his sin nature. This sin nature will result in eternal separation from God if not redeemed by a personal belief in Christ as the only atonement before God for our own sin. To foist Social Justice upon a society is to blind members of that society to their inherent personal need of Christ's redemptive work, and falsely encourage a salvation by works attitude.

Adherents of the Christian Left/Social Justice ideology are no less hateful toward their detractors as the those claiming to be of the Christian Right are towards them. That is how we know an individual member or an entire 'faith group' has lost its moorings in God and joined the political fray: the love of power obscures the light of love. All of politics is but a field of battle upon which the illnesses and indiscretions of the human heart are laid bare. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9

The cinematic productions of J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series cast a superlative portrayal of the darkness - and its effects - that inhabits the heart of man. Our God-given free will, imprisoned by sin, continually aspires to elevate self will, refusing to take a knee of submission before the throne of God.

"So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members." Romans 7:21-23

Paul finally asks, " Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

When we remedy the first cause - the heart of man - society will be just.

But honestly, that whole 'first cause' issue doesn't seem to be very high on any priority list, Left or Right. Perhaps because it involves something far more difficult than simply taking a stand against what ails society. It is coming to terms with a deeply personal defect of a non-material nature, the latter of which we have been re-educated to believe does not even exist.

Good News: "All You Need is Love"

Ah, those Beatles.  What couldn't they answer about Life's multiple dilemmas?

I've been reading Timothy Keller's book titled Counterfeit Gods.  It is a fascinating look at what motivates the human creature to elevate other forms of 'dust' to the status of idols.  At the core of his discussions is the built-in capacity for worship which we humans possess. 

He quotes from C.S. Lewis at one point, and I have gone to Mere Christianity to expand the quote more fully.

Lewis writes:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage."  (Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis).

The Beatles weren't so far off course with their hit song - since love is a requirement for the human spirit to thrive. It may be safe to say that love is the common ground in the human experience.  We have a capacity to love, and a hardwired need to be loved.  Lewis is saying the reality of this powerful desire points to a probability that love exists, outside of ourselves and of humans in general. And that is why we crave it.  We are designed to receive love. And we endeavor to give love, to, in fact, love others, because we are made for love. 

The popular secular culture of our society, and many that have proceeded us, is bent on pursuing romantic love as the ultimate fulfillment, as the defining reason for our existence. And yet at every turn, human love disappoints, because human love flows from conflicted human beings who battle an unrelenting impulse to see 'self' elevated.  Keller writes about Ernst Becker's book The Denial of Death, which explains the "various ways secular people have dealth with the loss of belief in God." He continues, " Now that we think we are here by accident and not made for any purpose, how do we instill a sense of significance in our lives?.... We look to sex and romance to give us the transcendence and sense of meaning we used to get from faith in God."

There's a reason we love. There's a reason we desperately need to be loved.  Love is the currency of our souls. Love is not a contrived thing, though we do disfigure it greatly.  Love exists apart from us, and is the outflow of a self-existent, loving God.

That's the Good News in a nutshell.




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Dad Sayings

Been thinking about my Dad, and some of the many 'sayings' he had.  He didn't lecture with them... more like he subtly taught with them.  As sentences, they were simple and to the point, which no doubt contributes to their effectiveness as teaching agents.  Many will be familiar to people of my generation, such as:

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

"Buyer beware."

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

"A fool and his money are soon parted." 

I probably muttered silently to myself on more than one occasion upon hearing these, even  innocuously offered as they were.  But they stuck.  And they taught me real lessons about life, and about human nature.  And while everyone of them is still true today, because human nature does not change, I am stunned by their disappearance from the American lexicon, and their demise as inheritable wisdom.  The greatest gift we pay forward to the next generation is not material or monetary in nature, it is the accumulated wisdom of the ages.  Wisdom equips us to engage the world.

Consider:

How much of the Housing Crisis could have been prevented by listening to my Dad say, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."?  Or for that matter, "A fool and his money are soon parted."

How many politicians would be patently unelectable if "There's no such thing as a free lunch" were the standard grid through which the electorate filtered political speak? 

What would Food Assistance Program enrollment figures look like if people confidently embraced, deep down, that "When the going gets tough, the tough get going", secure in the knowledge that they can in fact manage their own destiny?

Maybe we need to believe more in ourselves, our own abilities and gifts, heed more of the wisdom collected in the lives of our family members and close friends, and through that process rely less on sweet sounding promises offered from the lips of strangers.

My Dad passed away in 2000.  But the lessons he learned from his life - and it was not an easy life, are his bequest to me. I count them amongst my greatest treasure.

Thanks Dad!

Dreamer or Doer?

Two young boys were out inspecting their community in the aftermath of a powerful hurricane.  Devastation and disorder greeted them at every juncture, every turn.  As they drew near to their favorite beach, they noted the near complete obliteration of "Harley's", their favorite snow cone and snack shack.  For a moment they stood in silence, each inwardly recalibrating their own 'reality' compass.  As they approached the debris heap, Ned kicked through the debris, his thoughts darkened and overwhelmed by the loss of so much that had been familiar.  Zeke drifted off to the edge of the rubbish pile that had once been Harley's, and began digging in the sand and rubble.  After several minutes, Ned urged Zeke to leave, but Zeke declined. Ned bid him goodbye, not caring to gaze any longer upon the jumbled heap that had once been the symbol of so many fond and glorious memories. 

Zeke nodded, and kept at his digging. He used shattered lumber to drag the sand smooth.  He found one gallon  plastic buckets that had once held flavoring for snow cones, and five gallon containers full of pretzels and sand.  Zeke worked for hours, until his concerned parents showed up to check on his well-being.  This is what they found:

We are not defined by the circumstances that life hurls at us; rather it is our response to circumstances that defines us.... some would even say, shapes us.

What is Reality?

If you were to ask random people on the street, 'What is reality?', what answers might you expect?  It is instructive to mull over these expectations, to get your thoughts geared up for  the reality track.

Now, for some sort of baseline, let's go to the dictionary.  Dictionary.com defines reality, in its philosophical context, as:   

(Philosophy)   
a. something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
b. something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
6.   something that is real.
7.  something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent

Now it is likely that, if you actually were to follow through and do random street interviews, a high percentage of the responses would not be a, b or number 7.  Good chance that number 6, 'something that is real', could surface with some frequency.  Another possible frequent response might be, "does it matter?".  Time will tell.

For me, the real question seems to be, "Is reality real, or is it just a perception that has been formulated, predicted and subsequently projected for retrospective interpretation based upon the combination of inputs from our sensory and neuro-chemical apparati?"  Is Reality an objective or a subjective entity? My premise is that it cannot be both, or contradictions would arise.

In our everyday life, we tend to make use  of some common, generic parameters with which we triangulate a reality. For instance, someone might describe their immediate reality as:  "I am married, have 2 children, a career at Apex industries, college fund started, yearly family summer vacation, member of the garden club and actively engaged in a church family.  I am surrounded by a small  circle of close friends, which is ringed by a larger more distant  set of friendships. My spouse and I plan on raising our kids to become responsible citizens equipped to make good moral choices. They will probably attend college, get married, and at some point we will have some healthy grandchildren to spoil."  

Inherent and unstated elements of reality are, "I live on planet Earth, a small planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of several hundred billion galaxies known to exist in the universe. Earth is, so far, unique in its ability to support life, and as a higher life form, I am able to contemplate questions such as, 'What is reality?' "  

The scenario outlined above is sort of a middle class American template, and certainly the specifics will deviate from those named above, but probably some similar benchmarks will be entered into the equation defining  our construct of reality. 

When we scrutinize our reality construct, though, we notice some things.  What we attribute as framework in our reality are some very plastic, dynamic elements and characters. This reality is largely defined by and highly dependent upon, relationships.  There is nothing static or fixed about the reality matrix we grow attached to, and yet we begin to embrace it and meld with it as though it is overtly reliable.

And so we strive and labor and pour ourselves into creating a reality that we find decent and nice and secure. We start believing that we can, in fact, generate a reality for ourselves and our loved ones. 

And then we are totally, utterly shocked and derailed when the phone call comes. "Mr. Smith? County Sheriff's Department.... there's been an accident. Can you get to the hospital to identify the body?"  Or when the husband comes home from work one evening and announces to his wife, "I just don't love you anymore. I am moving out. I want a divorce."  Or when the once happy child enters the doldrums of adolescence and finds his salvation in drugs, alcohol, and dismally dark music, until finally he quits  school, happy to mooch off of his parents for food and shelter, but otherwise consumed with disdain for them while  simultaneously engrossed with his own,  rarefied view of reality, and his very significant role in it.  And of course there's always that ridiculous projection of the collective mood of human beings around the globe: the stock market. Who hasn't seen their college fund decimated lately?

So, is reality real? Shouldn't something with as grandiose sounding a name as REALITY be a little more reliable, a little more rock solid and enduring,  underpinned by something other than the capricious moods and whims of both chance and man?    

The first definition from Dictionary.com under the philosophy heading is "something that exists independently of ideas concerning it." So back to our example, the happy marriage, the two children, the college fund and the successful launching of the children into independence suddenly become mere myth, a simple projection of what we desire. Because as we've seen, the happy marriage was in transition, the happy children were in transition, the stock market was in transition. Even money is not real in the sense of possessing any inherent power implied by the number stamped on its face. The practical, inherent value of currency is better assessed by the heat it releases when burned on a cold winter's night.When our reality triangulations predict outcomes which then fail to materialize, disappointment ensues. We are very prone to living our whole lives in the future tense, as though all that we do is an investment in some future outcome which we can make into a reality if we practice due diligence. And yet every single element of what we tend to esteem as reality is hinged upon frail, finite carbon-based life forms possessed of limited knowledge and free will, and eager to execute the latter. 
To recap: Because we believe we can guide our ship toward the shores of particular outcomes, we tend to think of reality in terms of compass points, time and rate of travel. We believe that what we have constructed around us is real, firmly anchored to some unseen bedrock reality, existing with a high probability of persistence, owing in part to our own due diligence. As building blocks of this construct, we point to any of our collection of 'real' things and 'real' relationships, and deploy them into our reality equation.

We have only one assurance in life if this is our view of reality: we are assured of disappointment. We are guaranteed a good measure of dissatisfaction, a hearty meal of sadness, and a life lived in the future tense. We are certain to become entrenched in a lifestyle that precludes us from even inquiring about existential reality because we are laboring in vain to create one of our own design. We weave together a tapestry with threads of fragile hopes and ephemeral dreams, and determine to live our lives upon it. But we are completely unaware that our tapestry is but a flimsy mat of dried grasses and chopped straw, set adrift on the great expanse of sea that is the real Reality, the unchangeable and fixed Reality, whose powerful, unseen impulses and upheavals jar us from time to time, calling to us through the mists of our ignorance, imploring us to lift up our eyes from our frail and fading tapestry and behold the one true vibrant Reality, the Creator, who has said,

“For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s;
on them he has set the world. (1 Samuel 2:8)

And again,

"My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together." (Isaiah 48:13)

That same Creator, the  true Reality, has also said,  

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8) Further He declares:

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”   Deut 31:6

Now there's a Reality to carry the ages. An eternal Reality, a guaranteed outcome, the product of the grace of the God of the universe, who has known those hundreds of billions of galaxies since their inception. And while God has known the galaxies since their inception, He has loved you since the beginning of time itself.

But God didn't stop at just making the promise. He guaranteed it, sealed it with the blood of Christ, who chose to serve humanity, to suffer and die for the sins that would otherwise separate us eternally from God's presence.  Christ's resurrection dealt an absolute defeat to Satan's unmitigated death pillaging.  

Christ says to us, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life."  John 5:24

Reality 1.0.  The first, the last, the one true Reality.

And yes, Reality really does matter.

Change the world

Some say our world today is running short of certain things, such as courage, compassion and conviction. We who agree that the world would benefit from an increase in these qualities must commit to being a source for them.

That is, of course, a far larger dilemma.

An American Cause: The Violence in Mexico

Do you deplore the violence in Mexico and on the border? Hopefully not a single drug user will dare to answer that question with a 'Yes'.

The raging violence and systemic corruption in Mexico, the murders of innocent citizens on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, is the product of the American drug user. Each and every drug user, from the homeless junkie to the elites in Hollywood and corporate America, can hold their hands before their eyes and see the blood of the border war trickling down. The corruption and violence that exist in Mexico are the products of the American drug users' ravenous cravings to feel good. It turns out that the price of drug use is measured not in dollars, but in human lives and the suffering experienced by surviving family members of those who bear the title 'casualty' in the overall equation of making rich Americans 'feel good'. (And for the record, if you can afford to purchase drugs, a non-essential luxury item, that is the new definition of rich.)

The darkness and emptiness of America's soul craves filling. A gnawing sense of hunger and want, misguided and unchecked, has morphed into a sensuous craving for euphoria, for heaven on earth. Seeking a utopia where hardship, suffering and despair are shoved to the furthermost recess of our collective mind. For all our wealth (now being revealed as the illusion that it has always been), Americans are restless, dissatisfied, always on the prowl for 'more', be it possessions, food, luxuries, or just plain pleasure, we are relentless in our hunger. But because we are seeking to fuel a dying fire not with oxygen and timbers, but with water, the craving only grows.

Wealth and status do not impact drug use; emptiness does. The advantage of opulence, prestige and materialism is insufficient to prop up even the icons of the privileged world. The root of drug use and euphoria is selfishness: it is extreme preoccupation with self and the pleasuring of self. It is narcissistic and toxic, as evidenced by the unchecked hunger for drugs in this country in spite of the desperate consequences it has for those in an economically underdeveloped country. The impact of drug- affiliated corruption on poverty levels in Mexico is simply the compounded interest of the destructive investment made by drug using Americans bent on retreating from the real canvas of life into a make believe world of amusement and pleasure. And so they flee into a cave of neurons and synapses and there they suckle the nectar of self-indulgence, momentarily escaping the reality that stands ready to confront them when they dare leave the honey cave.

Americans are long on possessions, on fluff and bling and other perishable 'assets', but far too short on spiritual vision and substance. Bankrupt comes to mind. Principles, values and virtues are vanishing from the life accounts of Americans, and America the Nation can be no greater than Americans, the human beings of the nation. A nation comprised of soulless, selfish people cannot through some strange alchemy become a Nation of stalwart fortitude and a beacon of hope for the huddled masses across the globe. Afterall, what can the cowering lost offer to the one who has learned through hardship and trial that intangible principles and abiding faith are the foundation upon which a life, a meaningful life, is built.

Time

TIME is more precious than gold, so spend it wisely, and invest for the long haul.

What is Truth?

“What is truth?”. Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Jerusalem in the first century AD, asked this question as he stared into the face of a prisoner brought before him on charges of sedition against the ruling religious leaders of his day. And while Pilate failed to grasp the truth, at the very least, he asked the question.

In today’s post-modern world the situation is much bleaker, particularly In the Western world, where we seem to make little inquiry as to what the truth of a matter is, any matter. Truth does not matter. Truth is relative and has become a commodity leveraged for its political or economic sway. Truth exists to whatever degree we manage to make it, market it and influence with it. Relativism has become so entrenched in the DNA of Western society that it is easy to believe that there is no such thing as truth in the absolute sense of the word; there's only 'your truth' and 'my truth' and 'their truth'.

But the ramifications of such reckless handling of so seeming a passive entity as truth are far reaching. Humans know that to craft a lie is to aim for deceiving someone, with a desired end result in view. Meanwhile, the truth, more often than not, sits mutely on the sidelines, awaiting discovery, always ready to be revealed, but rarely, if ever, the subject of the grandiose production that goes into the manufacture of the lie.

In 2007 the Kansas state school board was involved in a shooting match vis-à-vis the state’s science standards. During the debate Kansas became fruitful fodder for late night television hosts and scientific opinion journals alike. The world lined up courtside to denigrate or congratulate the wheat state, depending upon their personal worldview.

But the missing link in this debate would seem to be none other than Pilate's query, ‘What is the truth?’ Because in the end this debate was not about seeking and discovering the truth, but about promoting agendas and worldviews.

The science standards implemented in 2007 are a move away from broader inquiry and toward the narrower view of naturalism. Naturalism, commonly known as materialism, is a worldview in which everything can be explained in terms of natural causes. Physical matter, i.e. the atomic world, is presumed to be the only reality, so everything can in fact be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena. By definition, Naturalism excludes any supernatural agent. It is not a stretch to say that naturalism is atheism, and the natural moral climate in the absence of God is moral relativism.

What is truth? The question is deep, and deserves much thought and reflection, and I will leave that part to you. But it is fair to state that those who genuinely seek The Truth have always fought uphill battles, have always encountered resistance. Because if someone is in the position of seeking the truth, than they are seeking something that is thought to be unknown at present, meaning they do not accept the prevailing wisdom or professional edict regarding the matter in question. Otherwise, why would they be seeking it? It would be plain as day and a known quantity. Galileo and Copernicus studied the heavens and arrived at a conclusion that rocked humanity’s belief about where the Earth sat relative to the sun and the remaining planets (hint: we are NOT the center of the universe), ending the 1000 year supremacy of the Ptolemaic premise that the Earth sits at the center of the solar system.

Newton pondered the fall of apples from a tree, and eventually uncovered the truth of one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, gravity. Yet today no one has seen gravity, held or smelled or heard gravity, let alone touched gravity, but no one denies it exists. Why? Because we see its effects all around us. Newtonian gravity is reliable and predictable… at least until we enter the world of quantum mechanics.

Van Leeuwenhoek refined the microscope of his day and discovered a world that had previously been invisible to humans. The twentieth century saw the invention of the electron microscope, enabling scientists to magnify objects otherwise invisible up to 2 million times, and alas, another previously unknown world was unveiled, a world where life's simplest manifestation, the single-celled microorganism, is found to be comprised of exceedingly complex molecular factories possessed of exquisite molecular-sized machinery.

The truth is always present, but it is not always detectable. And if the public education system teaches ‘truths’ that turn out not to be true at all, can such a belief system be undone spontaneously? Naturalism and evolutionary theory take on a worldview-shaping function, namely that there is no God; and worldviews shape values, and values shape people and their actions which in turn shape a society. What is reaped originates from what is sown.

If public policy is to be sculpted so as to forever eliminate anything that echoes even faintly of Judeo-Christian teachings, here are some further topics the school board may be forced to consider for removal: Love. Honesty. Honor. Kindness. Gentleness. Self control. Peace. Respect. Wisdom. Integrity. All of these concepts are taught extensively in the bible, from its beginning to its end. And all are taught as being traits of the God of the cosmos, traits which have been conveyed to humans as standards of behavior, rules for living, just as the atomic world is subjected to the laws of nature.

The bible instructs that murder is wrong, lying is wrong, abusive language is wrong, bigotry and prejudice are wrong, rape is wrong, battery is wrong, neglect is wrong. And yet, where there is a wrong, by definition must there not be a right, a quality that exists in opposition to these wrongs? But this quest is summarily absent from public discourse and education, precisely because it deviates from the underpinnings of scientific naturalism and its inherent atheism. Are we skewing the quest for knowledge away from the truth in our eagerness to presume against the existence of God? Why would anyone do that?

It is safe to say that as a society we covet the fruit of the bible, namely the decency and uprightness it prescribes, but we are loathe to attribute such traits to anything outside of the material world. Are we really so dull of mind that we never ponder what might lie beyond this veil of atoms which we have declared to be the sum of all reality? Who are the power brokers that have taken it upon themselves to dictate via the public education system that God is dead and the one who seeks Him is on a fool's errand? Who are you?

Truth or Veneer?

A brief conversation with a friend this past week got me to thinking about truth.

What concerns me is that we may largely be a people who do not seek truth so much as solutions.

The topic of conversation was Intelligent Design and Darwinism. The University of Kansas has been hosting a weekly or monthly forum that regularly invites icons of either school of thought: Intelligent Design (ID) or Neo-Darwinism. At one such meeting the renowned atheist Richard Dawkins was the guest icon for Neo-Darwinism and he was by all accounts quite eloquent and passionate in both his grievances against ID and support for Neo-Darwinism and atheism.

Because we have become a culture of veneer values, I suspect we are too easily smitten by such polished speech. President George W. Bush has revealed this penchant of ours in its negative form. I don't suppose there's a single late night comedian that doesn't denigrate Bush at least twice per show for his substandard delivery of the English language.

But to what extent are content and delivery related? Has our appetite for Oscar Award entertainment so deadened our minds that we cannot listen to and evaluate spoken ideas that are having a bad hair day? Do we really prefer the silver-tongued orator whose content and logic are flawed over plain (or even stammering) speech that is sincerely spoken?

Do we value polish and veneer, or truth?

I fear our expectations have begun to mirror the Hollywood gauntlet: those who would be stars must be flawless. Doesn't matter that it takes self-starvation, enough silicone to heremetically seal two Boeing 757's, and an ego the size of a small country to create the myth. No, what seems to matter is that they give the appearance of being this deity of perfection, and what they really are or are not is of no consequence.

So knowing that everything that glitters isn't gold, what about us still allows us to give a pass to the smooth,impeccable and passionate delivery of a speech whose content is evasive and nonsensical? Is it that a finely constructed fortress of words appears beyond breach, so no countermeasures (i.e. THOUGHT) are deployed, leaving the message to stand as approved and accepted?

Or is it that the dissenters cannot find print space?

It is imperative that we never cease pursuing the truth.

If we expect to find something of value in this life, then we had best be in the market for Truth. And if Truth is what we hope to find, then learning to identify false logic and empty but intimidating rhetoric must become part and parcel of our thinking.

In a few short months the 2008 presidential candidates will begin to announce their candidacy. Americans will be inundated with plenty of ideologies and promises and plans, some served up with great panache by gifted orators, some by the not-so-gifted. But with any luck, U.S. Citizens will step out of their American Idol mindset and work very hard to dissect the promises, arguments and accusations that are about to be launched at them. We don't need a superstar. We need leaders who are not afraid to lead, leaders about whom it can be said, 'what you see is what you get.'

Wanting solutions can be very different from wanting the Truth.