Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

The dilemma for science is this.  If science claims or presents itself to be the pursuer of truth, following the evidence wherever it may lead, then all plausible answers regarding questions and observations of the empirical data must be weighed and debated based upon their own merit and ability to explain a particular phenomenon or set of phenomena. 

 For example, if the plausibility of the universe coming into existence by an immaterial cause is either the or one of the most plausible answers, then it, as well as purely natural cosmogonies, must be evaluated based upon its own merit.  It cannot, under this definition of science, be a priori excluded from consideration merely because it is an immaterial answer, one held by religion/s, or seems to support the probable existence of God since science is seeking truth by following the empirical evidence regardless where it leads.¹

On the other hand, if science is defined as the study of empirical data, which allows only natural or material antecedents thereby a priori excluding any answer involving immaterial or other than natural antecedents, it may do so.  However, it cannot be defined as such and simultaneously be presented as a pursuer of the truth following the evidence since possible answers are a priori and definitionally excluded from consideration regardless of their plausibility or cogency.  Scientists cannot have it both ways, and scientists need to be precise and honest about what science is and is not.  Moreover, the public needs to demand that science do so and operate accordingly, thereby dispelling the illegitimate hegemony of science in pronouncements and areas that it has no real domanial supremacy. 

Unfortunately, and I think rather deceptively, many scientists intentionally present science as the foremost objective pursuer of the truth, and therefore the best basis for public education, and what is and is not suitable knowledge for public policy, while simultaneously dogmatically defining science to exclude any rival non-natural answers.  The result is that religious knowledge becomes unsuitable for public debate or education because it is automatically classified as innately inferior albeit artificially so.  The two areas of public policy debate and education necessarily explore and impact every consequential area of human life, and if science is the sufficient guide, then by definition life and all knowable and publically meaningful knowledge is knowable empirically, which ipso facto reduces life to nothing more than nature.  This is not only naturalism; it is a tyrannical, stealth, religious naturalism sanctioned by the state masquerading as a truth seeker. 

Tragically, most Americans and the vast majority of the church seem to not understand this subterfuge, and therefore they grant science far too much authority and influence without requiring science to be accountable or to clearly define it.   Unfortunately, most people think if science says it, it is true because science is the unbiased, noble pursuer of truth, and religious beliefs are just that, beliefs. In reality, when one pulls back the cloak of objectivity draped around many of the most significant scientific claims, one often finds philosophical and religious commitments, rather than unsullied scientific evidence, driving scientists to embrace one conclusion over alternates. For example, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg said that the “steady state theory is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis.”²

1. Another consideration regarding rejecting immaterial answers because they happen to be religious beliefs as well is that would cause all material answers to be rejected since some religions believe in the eternality of matter. [↩]
2. Cited in John D. Barrow, The World Within the World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 226 [↩]

Claims to the contrary, the facts speak for themselves:

First, look at the veteran hospitals if you want to compare the kind of care given in private versus government-run healthcare.  Over the past 25 years, I have visited different veteran hospitals on many occasions.  The care is minimal and at times atrocious. I have seen veterans admitted, only to be left in filthy rooms for hours before someone came to clean the room from the discharge of the last patient.  The veteran has no say in what doctor treats him or whether or not the one that treated him the last time is ever seen again.  Consequently, it provides an alarmingly impersonal environment.

Second, there is no recourse.  In a private system there are surely incompetent healthcare professionals, but there is always recourse for a patient who is dissatisfied.  The patient can go to another doctor, hospital…but not under a government-run system.  If you think that you will have more freedom, better care, and recourse for complaints, just remember some of your DMV experiences.

Third, it is absolutely misleading for the President to say that his system will allow everyone to keep his private insurance if he so desires.  Whether he is being hypocritical or just simply naive, I know not.  Consequently, I am more than happy to assume that it is in fact naïveté. While there is more than one reason this is not true, I mention one that is undeniable. 

This was the basic argument for government controlled education—often referred to as public but we had those before the government took over education.  On a state level, the state may choose to reject a federal-mandated requirement, but for all practical purposes, the state cannot because its schools would lose millions of federal dollars that are given only to schools that comply.  Losing the money is, according to modern educational standards, the death knell or the unpardonable sin.  Of course, the money the federal government withholds in such cases was actually taken from the states—the people—through federal taxation.  This is the way the federal government can control public education even more than the law allows, which is in itself extreme.

Even more dastardly is how it plays out with individuals being allowed to keep their private insurance and not have to take the government healthcare if they so desire.  That sounds good, but it is not reality for most.  The public school system provides a clear picture of what will actually eventuate once federal healthcare is in place for a while.

While it is true that individuals are legally free to send their children to private schools, it is only true for those who are financially well off enough to pay the taxes it costs to run the government school and pay the tuition costs of the private school, which only a very small percentage of the population can do.  Consequently, as with government run and funded education, reducing the amount of discretionary spending individuals have to apply to the education of their choice, the same will be true with healthcare.

The liberals’ claim to want to help the family and high view of human life is once again seen to be empty. As they took the privilege and responsibility away from families for education, teaching morals in community settings, deciding where to invest the lion share of their income, being responsible for retirement and ailing family members, this move will allow government to control more of people’s lives by simply taxing any behavior that they don’t like or that they can show is costing the healthcare system, whereas now an insurance company could incentivize good behavior but not coerce it.

Can we take seriously President Obama’s denials that his plan will ultimately result in healthcare rationing?  Well no.  The ultimate end of any such system further devalues the sanctity of human life because the government determines which citizens deserve to get the care they need, and the government can do this while simultaneously denying that healthcare is rationed. 

We only have to look to England—or any other country with socialized medicine—to see ways this not only can be done but is being done and will be done here if Obama’s plan passes.

Daniel Hannan, Member of the European Parliament representing Southeast England for the conservative party, said that the British government rations healthcare by the long lines that are a part of the socialized system of medicine.  This assures that many who need care soon will probably die before they get the care they need, and by this the system will not be financially drained to the point of collapse.
 
Hannan said that when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, he was appalled by such inhumanness and made it mandatory that once a person talked with a doctor’s office, the person must be able to see a doctor within 48 hours. However, in order to maintain the brutish status quo, the doctor’s office would make sure that when a person needing medical care called they would get a recorder and never actually talk with a doctor; therefore, they remained in queue, not getting the care they needed, and the rationing continues even to this very hour.

To personalize this, under Obama’s system, many in the church where I pastor would be dead since they would have been forced to remain in queue awaiting treatment.  Rationing is Rationing regardless what one chooses to call it.

Given the fact of legalized abortion, not to mention the historical precedence of other socialized medical systems or the constraints of economics; it is inarguable that the decision of who will receive healthcare will move inexorably to being based on a government-determined quality of life that the patient will have to meet before being eligible for healthcare.  Moreover, the callous and barbaric treatment of infants in the womb does not forebode well for the weakest at the other end of the life continuum.

Whatever happened to repentance?

The phrase, “mistakes were made” is popular in politics, education, and in virtually any area where personal responsibility and sin used to be the reigning culprit.  However, it does not take much to see why “mistakes were made” rather than “I have sinned” has become so popular.  Someone has noted that: first, the sentence has no human subject. The speaker makes no reference to himself as in “I sinned” or “I broke the law.” As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll translated it, “We acknowledge the existence of mistakes but have no knowledge of how they got there.” Second, the passive voice and the past tense distance the speaker from guilt; whatever might have befallen someone or something is water under the bridge. Third, it collapses the distinction between human fallibility and human culpability.

In other words, there is little or no distinction between lying and inadvertently recording the wrong phone number, i.e. sin and a real mistake.  Personal responsibility is replaced with a series of mistakes, which are really no one’s fault, they just are.

As veteran New York Times correspondent, editor, and bureau chief John M. Broder put it, “Mistakes were made,” sounds “like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else.”¹  This evasive expression stands in stark contrast to Robert E. Lee’s  words to one of his generals after the Battle of Gettysburg: “[A]ll this has been my fault; it is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it in the best way you can.” ²

In the 2007 book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson entitled Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts³, Tavris and Aronson concluded that people have become “mistake-phobic,” and so they suffer moral paralysis. They become oblivious to their faults: “[W]e don’t change because we aren’t aware that we need to…” Furthermore, pride trumps repentance: “We see the admission of a mistake not as a sign that something needs to be fixed—even though such an admission often elicits the plaudits of others—but that we are weak.”

This “mistakes were made” mentality, and/or shifting blame is nothing new.  It actually goes back to Adam who blamed Eve for his predicament, saying, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12).

This is the seed of the “therapeutic culture.” It grows whenever men, collectively, run headlong from responsibility.

Of course as bad as it is in politics, economics, and even personal relationships, it is exponentially worse with regard to salvation.  If individuals lose the sense of personal responsibility, repentance is lost as well, and without repentance, a person cannot be saved from his sin and is therefore lost for eternity (Luke 13:3).

1. John M. Broder, “Familiar Fallback for Officials: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” New York Times Website, March 14, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14mistakes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed June 10, 2008) [↩]
2. Frank Moore, The Civil War in Song and Story: 1860-1865 (P. F. Collier, 1889), 321 [↩]
3. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007). [↩]

On May 12, 2005, Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Speaking “In Defense of History,” he made three points that I would like to apply to the dangerous trend of marginalizing history in much of contemporary preaching.

First, I begin with one of Kagan’s concluding remarks.  He said, “It has been increasingly harder to persuade people that they have anything to learn from history . . . .Religion and the traditions based on it were once the chief sources for moral confidence and strength.”¹ 

That this is true in much of the contemporary church is evident, as historian Steven Ozment noted, “The longest shelves in local bookstores and libraries are filled with fiction, self-help, and current events (mostly the lives and politics of American leaders)—immediate, self-referential information serving personal amusement and struggle.” ²  Of course this reinforces the shameful truth that the church is following rather than challenging culture.

Second, Kagan said, “For history is a discipline in which the improvement of understanding is not impossible, random, nor merely cyclical, but cumulative.”³  This statement came after he challenged his colleagues to rid themselves of the mindlessness of postmodern claims such as history is merely opinions to oppress and all truth is relative and objective history is non-existent—except of course the postmodern’s claims concerning history, truth….

The great biblical scholar, J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) wrote, “Christianity is certainly dependent upon history . . . if religion be made independent of history there is no such thing as the gospel. For ‘gospel’ means ‘good news,’ tidings, information about something that has happened. A gospel independent of history is a contradiction in terms.” ⁴  Those who shun history in their misguided zeal for relevance are their own worst enemy and guarantor of their future irrelevance if they are indeed successful.

Third, Kagan said, “History, it seems to me, is the most useful key we have to open the mysteries of the human predicament.”⁵

Without history, man will never know himself.  The fall of man is a historical event, which allows man to see himself rightly, without which he will neither have a true self-image or view of God.  In addition, history is the insuppressible and irrefutable testimony to the depth to which man fell, and as Jonathan Edwards noted, “[T]he language of God’s redemptive love.” ⁶ 

The preacher’s invitation for listeners to believe the gospel, one that is either devoid of history or contains whimsical notions of it, is both unconvincing and unintelligible.

1. Donald Kagan, “In Defense of History” (34th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Washington, DC, May 12, 2005) National Endowment for the Humanities, http://www.neh.fed.us/whoweare/kagan/lecture.html (accessed July 8, 2009). [↩]
2. Steve Ozment, “Why We Study Western Civ.” in The Public Interest (Winter 2005): 113. [↩]
3. Kagan, “In Defense of History”. [↩]
4. John Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1923), 121. [↩]
5. Kagan, “In Defense of History”. [↩]
6. Summarized by George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 488. [↩]