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.

Peace On Earth

We hear a lot about ‘peace’ these days. War tends to bring that concept right on around to the forefront of thought for many.

I’m just curious about one thing: What is peace?

Is peace the absence of war? If the conflagrations of war that presently smatter the globe were to be suddenly extinguished, would we, on that day and at that precise moment, have peace?

I think not.

I think we seek what we do not know nor understand. Because peace is first an internal human condition, the absence of conflict in a community, be it local or global, does not equate to peace in the hearts of men. Dissention and dissatisfaction seem to foment within humans, eventually erupting in confrontation. I will wager that to the majority of people, ‘peace’ is an expectation unwittingly placed on everyone other than themselves. Peace would mean everyone simultaneously and continually yielding on all fronts to everyone else. If you've lived in a family very long, you already know how hard it can be at times just to 'get along', but the deeper reality is inner dissention and dissatisfaction. The key is how those negative feelings are processed. We choose either to entreat one another, or to erupt at one another. The reason there is not Peace on Earth is because it is filled with human beings.

Peace seems to be a favorite poster child of Hollywood. Hollywood stars and starlets tend to be very vocal about the illegitimacy and immorality of war, about its negative consequences on innocents, about the upheaval and disruption it creates in the lives of the affected. All of this assumes that upheaval is not the norm, and that somewhere this ideal of peace as a normative and good state does exist. However they tend to distill peace down to the absence of war. Yet their own lives, like the life of every other human on the planet, manifests the seeds of conflict; there is no shortage among the Hollywood elite of broken vows, nasty divorces, and patently self-destructive behavior. Conflicts one and all, and thus by definition, without peace.

So Hollywood icons use their audience access to promote the higher good of peace. Yet what do we see coming out of Hollywood? Are we deluged with programs and films that extol virtue, honor and selflessness? Hardly. We find a deliberate attempt to evict innocence from humanity, starting with the youngest among us. A deliberate attempt to project what is neither the norm nor normal AS exactly that…normal and acceptable. Young people are assailed with a culture of self-centeredness and sex. Both are portrayed as the panacea that will give them ultimate equality and freedom, though with what and from what escapes me. Advertisers understand this predilection all too well, and absolutely capitalize on it when seducing the dollars out of naive youths around the world, though probably nowhere more than in the Western world.

Movies and television programs are filled with the macabre, the sadistic, the amoral and immoral. Perversion is pumped onto movie and television screens like barrels of oil bursting from the Persian Gulf. But where unrestrained consumption of oil is bad (we are told), unrestrained consumption of sex is good! We are told that there needs to be change, that Americans are too Puritanical.

This call for change amounts to an agenda, and agendas precipitate conflict. Today our country is divided largely along lines of conservative and liberal morals and values. Liberal morals preach a ‘do what you want as long as it doesn’t harm another person' perspective. Conservative morals ask, ‘is what you are doing the right thing?’ and also assumes that a higher standard of 'right' does in fact exist.

But peace really requires more than warlords and dictators laying aside their agendas. It requires individuals to put aside their own interests and pursuits, their own personal agendas, in the interest of helping others.

Rebellion is the forerunner of war, and rebellion is what resides in the hearts of men. Rebellion is the refusal to acknowledge certain laws and moral standards as legitimate, and purposing instead to replace them with relative standards, so that what is wrong today may in fact be right tomorrow.

It is as though we are first and foremost at war with ourselves. And that would explain the rest.

Evolving Kansas

In 1995 the official Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) rendered the following explanation of life's origins: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments"(emphasis mine).

This is also the pronouncement of atheism, which is simply 'non-belief' in anything supernatural; like science, if one of the five senses can't discern it, it cannot be. This is known as scientific naturalism and is identical to the mandates ordained by and for public education.

NABT removed the two words 'unsupervised' and 'impersonal' in 1997 after criticisms were raised by a philosopher and a religious scholar pointing out that those statements veer off into the realm of philosophy and are not scientifically provable. Those deletions subsequently led to a backlash from many in the scientific community who apparently have deeply held beliefs that evolution is indeed impersonal and unsupervised.

What is remarkable, however, is the unreserved honesty of the NABT's approach as revealed in their original definition of evolution. Few today will publicly profess evolution using its complete and accurate connotation, but instead take the tack of the NABT's revised statement of evolution, steering clear of the incendiary words 'unsupervised' and 'impersonal'. But unsupervised and impersonal are indeed what remain if scientific naturalism is the compass guiding the ship of discovery.

So what does any of this say about our origins as a species? Clearly it states that we are here only by some utterly freakish accident; an unplanned pregnancy of the universe, we might surmise. And then what have we done to God? Some evolutionists, and all institutions of public education, ardently declare that they are not out to depose God. But given evolution's basic assumptions of scientific naturalism and materialism, the only way God can exist is if we have made Him, i.e. he is nothing more than a construct of our own collective imaginations. (This would explain the effort in recent decades to reshape the God of the Bible into a more modern god fashioned after our own, ever changing, image.)

Darwinism has marshaled an implausible army of supporters over the past 145 years since Origin of Species was first published, and Darwinism's hegemony of the public's mind has gone unchallenged for decades. The popular media is in no way a minor player in this stunning rise from theory to undeniable, if not inscrutable 'fact'.

But science has marched on, and the modern discoveries in cell and molecular biology have thrown open the door on a previously unimagined landscape in the origins of life expedition. And things there are not at all as we had thought. Darwin himself had reservations about his theory given certain scenarios which have now become reality.

Science is to be, above all things, an expedition. Assumptions usually serve as the guardian of biases, and biases detract from objective thinking. Certainly thinking is what we must be about.

I am a theist. Not a deist; not an agnostic; not an atheist. I am not threatened by evolution, or by the exploration of its merits - and its shortcomings. I have been a student of science and particularly biology for decades; I am a life-long learner. And one of the things I continue to learn is that no matter how much knowledge we accumulate as a civilized world, it fades into infinitesimal minuteness in the face of what is unknown.

Learning occurs only in the arena of intellectual curiosity. Serving up the close-minded and improvable dogma of scientific naturalism is tantamount to indoctrination: Something - I believe - we frown on in this country.

Separation of Press and State

Who’s Minding the Press?

Our founding fathers very early on in the process of creating a free republic declared that the ‘press’ should be free, set apart from any government control - a sort of “Separation of Press and State”, if you will. The press is accountable to no empowered agency whose responsibility it is to monitor the activities of the press, and to no standard save its own. While ideologically sound, the reality is a victimization of fact and truth far beyond anyone’s imaginings, and with obvious and serious ramifications for the public that the press purports to serve and inform.

That the press (including it modernized brother, the electronic media) is a powerful instrument wielded to shape public opinion should never be doubted, nor can its effectiveness at doing so be overestimated. If the press were recognized as a political system, it would most nearly approximate a dictatorship. The citizenry have, in the written press, a limited, edited voice with which to address issues of public interest, but not matters directly related to the performance of the press itself. Public commentaries critical of the press are summarily excluded from publication/broadcast by that same press. Few individuals or groups have the resources to investigate the accuracy of the information disseminated by the press. And at any rate, the mainstream press is unlikely to print or broadcast allegations of subterfuge made against it.

Given that public opinion shapes public policy, and given the role of the press in shaping public opinion, a serious conflict of interest exists that will never be fully exposed under the current system of information dissemination that we have today in this country. The fox is carefully guarding the henhouse.

As citizens we fail in our duties when we allow the press to crank out doggedly biased information that goes unchallenged for the very fact of its bias. Listen carefully to the adjectives news broadcasters choose or the newspaper employs in its articles. An intentional, conscious effort is made to shape the viewers’ or readers’ perception of the facts. Equally important are the words that are left out of newspaper or television news broadcasts. Again I will say, the press is the most powerful instrument in human society, because it is the basis upon which public opinion is formed. Our own Revolutionary war was nearly a lost cause within a few short months of the Declaration of Independence precisely because the public’s opinion about the war was being purposefully manipulated by a non-sympathetic press to view it as a lost cause. The effect of this reporting crippled recruiting efforts by militia groups and the Continental Army as the ideal of freedom began to be painted as a cause beyond the reach of the Colonists. The hope and morale of the people faded. Had Thomas Paine not written a series of pamphlets, in particular one entitled The Crisis, that elucidated clearly the higher ideals at stake and the means –and cost - by which to effect them, America would doubtless be decades behind where it is today politically, socially, technologically and economically.

Words do matter because words convey ideas, and ideas shape actions. The English novelist Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was no fool when he wrote, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” When Michael Moore cried foul to the network news corporations about Disney Corporation’s refusal to buy and release his movie, Fahrenheit 911, the media’s presentation of the story left the unmistakable impression that Moore and his film had been suddenly jilted, skewered by the forked tongue of Censorship. The plain facts are that a full year prior to Moore’s film being ready for release he had been informed by Disney’s Miramax that they had no interest in the film, leaving him 12 months to market it elsewhere. The New York Times chastised Disney Corporation for this perceived ‘censorship’. Moore meanwhile harvested the energy falling out of the media tempest and sagely took his film to the Cannes Film Festival where the tidal wave of media-generated controversy landed it at the top. Thus making it a very tempting tidbit for a small UK company distribute on the energy of all the pre-release publicity. (The press performed this same function when it tried to squelch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ by its continuous interviews with those claiming the film to be anti-Semitic.)

Michael Eisner, in response to the harsh criticism leveled at Disney by the Times, wrote the editors and let them know that just as the Times is not obligated to print every article or letter received by it, neither is Disney obligated to release every film that it is offered.

Or maybe you already knew all of that.

As a free and democratic society, we have a rich history of abhorring the political indoctrination of any people by any government. And yet we are subjected to it daily through the news media on which we depend to keep us informed.

The separation of Press and State is indeed a worthy and necessary breach. However, if the integrity of the mainstream media does not improve, and significantly so, the time may come when the press will have to disclose themselves as a political party, if not a branch of government, and surrender their press passes to those enlightened enough to want to pursue truth for the sake of truth and not with the intent of manipulating the perception of the citizenry.

At that point we will truly have a free press.

Kansas, Dust, and Education

The year was 1999. The Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to strike evolution from the state competency examinations had scarcely drawn its first breath, and already turbulence rocked the cradle. The Board’s action generated so much national publicity - much of it erroneous and condescending – that upon installment of newly elected State School Board members eighteen months later the decision was promptly reversed.

Did Kansas reverse its decision simply to dodge the taunts of a hostile media and national commentary leveled by ‘experts’ near and far? (A sting so painful as to effectively quash any discussion of this same item in 2003).

The irony is this: never was it said in the 1999 decision that Kansans could not and should not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was simply determined that it was not necessary to emphasize evolution in testing at the state level. In a national climate that fosters the expression of every freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, many citizens are now asserting their First Amendment rights by rejecting the state’s attempts to eliminate God from the worldview of their children. Implicit in the state’s actions is the prohibition of open student discourse and debate about the state’s worldview, Darwinism, as the definitive interpretation of life’s origins. Naturalism is the only paradigm tolerated by the state.

It is dust that spawns the storm when it comes to humans reckoning their origins.

Evolutionary accounts describe the water and the dust of the earth combining in a precisely correct atmosphere and in the presence of a proper catalyst, so as to form the amino acids that eventually transformed into something meeting the criteria for life.

The biblical account of creation states that God took the dust of the earth and formed it into man, and, Himself being the catalyst, God breathed life into the man He had formed, and the man became a living thing.

Either way you slice it, we’re dust.

Since we cannot know with certainty in either case, evolution or creation, our only recourse is to believe. It is offensive and unacceptable for our government to determine for us via the public education system which tale of origins, which worldview is worthy of our credence and our tax dollar.

By adopting evolution as the national scientific standard for explaining the origins of life, we are making a public declaration of a national belief, principally that life arose exclusively by chance.

To say that the beginning of life and its subsequent evolution are autonomous and undirected is to tacitly embrace atheism. This is a direct contradiction to the beliefs of millions of American schoolchildren and their taxpaying parents. Further, if God does exist, and He indeed created the universe and all of life, then teaching otherwise is in fact political indoctrination at its most heinous: it is the attempt by the state to hide the truth by deception and to replace it with the state’s dogma.

Looking back, Kansas failed to respond thoughtfully to its critics. We instead capitulated in knee-jerk fashion, seeking pacification of those who had no vested interest in our state, yet used our state school board’s 1999 decision to castigate us absent any legitimate rationale for doing so.

In the fall of 2002 the state of Ohio likewise revamped their standards, creating new ones that allow for ‘critical analysis’ of evolutionary theory, while giving latitude to the individual school districts concerning intelligent design theories. Their prescience is laudable. It is a decision whose continued existence, however, rests in the resolve of present and future school board members, and parents, to stand firm in the face of government-backed opposition.

Presently the state school board of Georgia is engaged in similar dialogue regarding its stance on the question of evolution’s place in the education objectives for their students. May they opt for a sensible course of action - one that speaks to the true needs of its students - and in the process model leadership, open mindedness and good old-fashioned backbone. Something Kansas failed to do.

The chronicles of science are filled with men and women who bucked the prevailing and ingrained doctrines and widely held beliefs of their day. They followed expanded, farther-reaching beliefs - their hypotheses - and in the process enlarged the realm of knowledge and the richness of the human experience. Using the tools at their disposal, and the empirical evidence at hand, they pushed against academic and intellectual frontiers and grew them, rather than imprison the intellect within immovable boundaries of improvable theories. By their inquisitiveness and persistence they demonstrated leadership.

Kansas did not think broadly enough on the issue at hand, and, when the flames of opposition grew too heated, demonstrated an unwillingness to step up as a leader in an emerging ideological debate, a debate that is far from over. Leadership not infrequently flies in the face of prevailing thought. Leaders are people intent on discovering the truth, knowing all the while that whatever their contribution to the advancement of these qualities, and to the human race, it is merely another starting point for discovery and not a firm and final conclusion. These are the people who leave an indelible strand woven in the collective fabric of our daily life experience.

People like Charles Darwin.

J.K. Decker