By the Hearing of Faith

D1: I remember on the trip across the lake, this freak storm broke out. It was just like we were on the open sea. The lake was so large, it was like one of those lakes up in the boundary waters of Minnesota. When you’re out in the middle of it, sometimes you can’t see the shore. So you might as well be in the ocean. A freshwater ocean. But this storm was very strange for a lake. The ferry was being buffeted around like a cork in a bucket. Ferries aren’t made for that kind of thing. I thought we were definitely going to capsize or get busted up somehow.
D2: What happened then?
D1: I was looking around at all the other people on the boat to see if they were as scared as I was. Most of them were, but there was this guy in the back lying down on his jacket with his head on his backpack. He was sound asleep. He must have been absolutely exhausted. He was travelling with a group of other men. They must have been his coworkers or friends or something. They kept tapping him on the shoulder and saying ‘Hey, Boss. Hey! There’s a storm! Wake up!’
D2: Huh. ‘Boss.’ Maybe they were on a business trip or something.
D1: Maybe. I just know they knew him, and they called him Boss. And he was super tired. Really sleeping deeply. But finally he woke up. And they kind of lost patience with him. They were annoyed, but they didn’t want to seem disrespectful. They were just like, ‘Hey, this storm looks super bad. We gotta think of a plan here.’ And then he looked out at the storm.
D2: And then he got scared, too, I bet. Right?
D1: No, he got kinda mad, actually. With the guys sitting around him. He raised his voice a bit and said something like ‘Why’re you guys flipping out over this? What’s the matter with you?’ And they were looking back at him as if to say, ‘You’re kidding, right?’
D2: You think he was maybe … crazy or something?
D1: I don’t know, but he looked at the storm again, and then looked back at the guys around him, and he sort of rolled his eyes and stood up. Which was actually pretty impressive seeing as how the deck was pitching around. Most people were clinging for dear life to railings and tables and stuff. But he just stood up and walked to the side portal-door thing, and then he actually opened it up. Someone said, ‘Hey, sir! The crew said to leave the doors shut! Sir!’ But he didn’t even look back. He just went out the door, shut it behind him, and stood near the deck railing.
D2: Huh. That’s crazy. So did he fall overboard?
D1: No, no, no. He didn’t fall overboard. It’s way weirder than that. Get this: He started YELLING … at the STORM.
D2: He was yelling … at the weather? Huh. What … what did he say?
D1: Not much. It was like he was just yelling at a barking dog or something. He just said ‘Quiet!’ And I think he said, ‘Be still!’
D2: That’s it?
D1: Yeah, that’s it. And then it got super quiet, and I realized that the boat wasn’t moving anymore.
D2: Shut UP, dude. Shut the heck up.
D1: I’m serious. The man yelled at the weather, and it did what he said. And everyone on the boat who saw that was like, ‘Uh … what the actual #&#! just happened ?!?’
D2: No way. I don’t believe you. Maybe it was like the tail end of the storm or something.
D1: No, the storm wasn’t slowing down. It just stopped dead. RIGHT as he yelled at it.
D2: Well, it’s gotta be a coincidence.
D1: Okay. Maybe. But I don’t think so. Because I saw lots of very weird stuff after that. I decided I was going to change my plans. Forget about the touristy stuff. I can get that on Travel Network. This guy is waaay more interesting. So I just started following him and his team.
D2: You started stalking a complete stranger.
D1: Stalking is a very negative term. I kinda resent that, man. But yeah, I guess I started stalking him. Although I kinda felt like he knew I was following him … and that he was actually cool with it. He even turned around a few times and looked right at me, and then I felt like a total jackass, but I didn’t feel like he was telling me to get lost or anything like that. It was like he knew me or something. And I couldn’t stop following him. I had to find out who this dude was. Maybe even talk to him. I actually really wanted to talk to him. About anything.
D2: Well what happened next?
D1: Sorry, I gotta run. I have a meeting in five ….

The Apostle Paul rebuked the Galatians specifically for trying to accomplish in their flesh what only God can do by the power of the Spirit. In Galatians chapter 3, Paul makes it very clear that we do NOT sanctify ourselves; sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit, Whom we’re supplied with by the “hearing of faith” (believing the Gospel). Paul is addressing fellow believers, brothers and sisters in Christ, and so the implication here is that we’re to live in the same way that we were saved: by believing in the Gospel. It’s not a one-and-done matter. We’re to revisit the Gospel daily, even hourly, reminding ourselves of the goodness, kindness, generosity, and mercy of the One “Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20) The just shall live by faith.

But in videos and quotations of Steve Lawson from prior to his recent confession of marital infidelity, I hear and read a lot about how we need to stop sinning and be holy and bear fruit, lest we find ourselves on the way to Hell and eternal damnation. Lawson seems to focus exclusively on good conduct as evidence of salvation instead of faith in the finished work of Christ, and nowhere do I read or hear Lawson mention the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit supplied by faith therein. I’m therefore not surprised by Lawson’s fall, although I am very saddened. It is heartbreaking to see a man ascend to a position of such visibility and influence in ministry and not have learned the lessons of Romans 7 and Galatians 3. It’s even more heartbreaking to see how many people were so invested in Lawson, looking to his flawed life and example instead of to the perfect Cross and empty tomb.

This also reinforces why my default attitude toward pastors and the institutional church is one of wary skepticism. The Church is the Body of Christ, not a building with ministries and revenue and paychecks, and just about anyone can go to seminary/bible college, get a diploma, rise in ministry, and become a pastor–even those who are are not at all clear on the basics of justification, sanctification, and the Gospel (sadly). I used to feel bad about this skepticism, like I was being unduly rebellious or contrarian by not giving my default trust to pastors and “churchianity” at large, but I’ve learned over the past ten years that God is actually okay with skepticism. We live in a culture that rewards pastors who’ve never had to stop putting confidence in their flesh, unfortunately, and so it’s essential to reserve our trust for the only One Who is truly worthy of it.

In his letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul writes that we receive the Holy Spirit and witness His mighty work when we believe what we heard, namely the Gospel. This is the message by which we are saved and also the message by which we live. The Gospel is not just for the lost; it’s for those who are already in Christ. It’s our spiritual sustenance and the means by which we fellowship with God. And the only way for me to be a better husband and father is to fellowship more with God, so I’ve renamed and refocused this blog to that end. As before, I don’t expect to have an audience. I’m only using this space as a way to focus my thoughts and think better through writing. But if you happen to be reading this on purpose, welcome.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God …. (Ephesians 2:8, NIV)

There is unfortunately some disagreement over what the “gift” refers to in this sentence. Is it salvation or faith? The theological implications are not trivial, so it’s worth looking at the original Greek:

τῇ γὰρ χάριτί ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι διὰ πίστεως· καὶ τοῦτο οὐκ ἐξ ὑμῶν, θεοῦ τὸ δῶρον·

The word for “faith” is πίστεως· (pisteōs), which according to Strong’s Concordance entry 4102 is a feminine noun and is used here in the genitive singular form. The word for “this,” referring to the aforementioned gift, is τοῦτο (touto), which is listed in Strong’s Concordance entry 3778 as a neuter demonstrative pronoun and is used here in the nominative singular form. The word for “gift” is δῶρον· (dōron), which is listed in Strong’s Concordance entry 1435 as a neuter noun and is used here in the nominative singular form.

One does not have to be a Greek scholar to see how the word for “this” does not match the word for “faith” by gender: https://biblehub.com/text/ephesians/2-8.htm. And while salvation is mentioned as a verb (σεσῳσμένοι or sesōsmenoi, meaning “saved” according to Strong’s Concordance entry 4982) and not a noun, it makes sense that the reference four words later applies to that act of salvation using a neuter demonstrative pronoun since verbs do not have a gender, at least not in Greek.

So I find the interpretation of Ephesians 2:8 as God giving a person faith to believe rather than bestowing salvation on the person who believes to be a weak one. But I will bring it up with any Greek scholars I know to see what they say.

(Hat tip to David Benjamin of Christians Need the Gospel.)

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? … I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Hume was an Empiricist and declined to pursue a career in law, likely for the same reasons that, were he alive today, he would have avoided any kind of IT work, which is largely spent focusing on something imperceptible to the five senses (information) and drawing inferences purely from what is immaterial/non-physical. But such a frame of mind tends to follow a person beyond whatever workplace, and everyone is to some extent (for the most part intuitively/unconsciously, I think) trying to connect dots, align seemingly unrelated events, and compose a coherent picture of reality. That’s how our minds function, and so to dismiss all causal thinking due to the fallibility of sense perception, as Hume essentially did, is to consign oneself to a psychologically and emotionally crippling limbo. Life must make sense to be meaningfully lived. The above quote demonstrates that Hume both understood and was haunted by this truth. Why then would he choose to live in miserable “melancholy and delirium”? My theory is that Hume was not at all “confounded” by the weighty questions of existence but rather steadfastly avoiding conclusions to which reason would inevitably take him (or maybe just rejecting these conclusions outright because he could not accept what they implied).

For example–with respect to the potential causes from which Hume might have “derived his existence”–if we thoughtfully examine DNA, which is arguably the most complex and specified biological molecule that we know of, we can infer (through the non-physical means of mathematics/probability) that this 3-billion-symbol-long data structure encoding the instructions for synthesizing all the proteins necessary for life is demonstrably not the result of random unguided processes. Such a structure is necessarily engineered. A few more inferences then naturally follow: Where there’s engineering, there must be an engineer; since DNA is the building block of life, this engineer must necessarily transcend life; and since DNA is also information, which is free from the confines of Scientific Materialism, this engineer also transcends matter, energy, and space-time. Hume was unaware of DNA, but contemporary observations would also, at the very least, have pointed to a non-contingent “necessary” Being and otherwise inexplicable functional complexity in the natural world, just as they did for Aristotle some twenty-one centuries earlier, and Hume would have been disingenuous to deny that the description of a super-intelligent engineer who transcends life, matter, and energy evokes a Particular Person to mind.

Roger Scruton observed that a major endeavor of post-Enlightenment philosophy was to establish an objective moral framework without reference to that aforementioned Particular Person, to give “secular grounding to a shared moral position,” but you can see this endeavor already gaining some momentum in the Enlightenment with the likes of Hume. We can’t necessarily say that Hume was an atheist in the modern/post-modern sense of the word, but he was widely regarded as an atheist by 18th-Century standards. He also suffered a trauma common to the personal histories of almost all atheist/agnostic/skeptical people: a damaged, troubled, or non-existent relationship with his father. Hume’s father died when young David was just two years old, and his mother never remarried, raising Hume and his older brother as a single mother. The facts of Hume’s skepticism and his fatherless upbringing might seem unrelated, but psychologist Paul Vitz makes a convincing case that they are quite closely linked. In “Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism,” Dr. Vitz turns Ludwig Feuerbach’s “projection theory” of God–i.e., that God is essentially a creation of human consciousness as an outward projection of human nature–back on itself to implicate deficient or non-existent fathering as the primary cause of atheism. Rather than a mere projection of human nature or an intellectually principled belief/unbelief based on some sober examination of evidence, Vitz shows how our views of God appear to be mostly influenced by one major developmental factor: the relationships we have with our fathers.

Author John Eldridge calls this developmental deficit the “father wound,” the emotional/psychological (and spiritual) damage inflicted by a substandard or absent father. For good or ill, our relationships with our fathers shape our posture toward God, and whether or not we are inclined to religious belief is not a matter of some suppositious “God gene” but rather of developmental stages most influenced by whatever benevolent paternal influence we experienced. We are emotional, psychological, and spiritual beings as well as we are intellectual, and all these dimensions of our experience are relevant, though perhaps not equally so. One need not be an outright atheist with a fatherless upbringing to witness this developmental force at work. In my former agnostic life, I was often in conflict with my own father, to whose real or perceived disapproval I responded with frustration, which gave rise to anger and, ultimately, rebellion and alienation. This dynamic plagued our relationship from the time I was eight years old until I was well into my 30s, and it greatly prejudiced my view of God: If I was such a disappointment to my imperfect earthly father, how much more of a disappointment must I be to the perfect Creator of all things, seen and unseen?

C.S. Lewis’ experience as an atheist was also consonant with the idea that we all have an a-priori concept of God: “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing.” Vitz shows us that our concept of God is demonstrably presumptive, and given the inescapable evidence for God and the corresponding scientific/philosophical groundlessness of obstinate skepticism, any questions of His existence or presence are irrelevant. If we can be honest about that truth, we are then free to examine how accurate our pre-existing prerceptions of God the Father may be. I think Jesus often presented a picture of the Father not as wrathful, intransigent, and rejecting, but rather as merciful, solicitous, and compassionate because He knew that in reconciling our perception of God to what is true about Him, we might also find reconciliation in the broken relationships we despaired of ever healing.

Growing up in Fort Collins, I sometimes indulged a morbid fascination with the dark side of Colorado’s history, including its vigilantism during the frontier/territorial period, when there was no widespread professional police presence. Colorado experienced a population influx after the Civil War as people came west to work in the mining industry. Mining camps (being camps) were hastily constructed, impermanent, and lacking the basic components of civilized life, including a justice system, and so there was little in the way of due process. Consequently, expeditious public hangings (lynchings) were common. Few of these lynchings were racially motivated, if only because Colorado’s population was mostly of European ancestry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The only lynching victim in the history of Fort Collins was James Howe, a problem drinker who cut his wife’s throat with a pocket knife on April 4th, 1888 in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. Howe was arrested and confined to the “calaboose” (around Walnut Street and Mountain Avenue, now in Old Town) to await trial, possibly out of town as the local courthouse was then still under construction. But the next morning, locals “found” Howe’s body swinging by the neck from a crane, ironically at the unfinished courthouse construction site. Evidently, outraged townsfolk who’d witnessed the murder didn’t see much point in the pretense of a trial by jury, so they broke into the jail and hanged Howe that previous night. As far as I know, there was no formal investigation, and no one was charged with any crime.

I’ve been thinking more and more lately about how the decay of civil order–which I think is unfortunately inevitable for western civilization at this point–will play out, and history offers the most plausible (and disturbing) picture. Certain activist groups are exploiting recent racially charged murders and calling for the abolition of law enforcement entirely, even as their members condone and even participate in criminal activity (assault, looting, vandalism, etc.). If they have their way, we can only expect a lot more of what happened on February 23 this year, when Ahmaud Arbery was murdered–by vigilantes–while jogging in Georgia, only without the killers being held accountable. Whatever your local police department’s flaws, it’s the only alternative to vigilante savagery.

There’s an old dictum about the futility of arguing with anyone on the radical Left: The “issue” is never the issue; the issue is always the outcome of The Revolution. Radical left-wing groups like Antifa will leverage any “issue” (racism, poverty, etc.), whether real or imagined, to further their cause. Right now they’re leveraging racial unrest to divert our attention while they deliberately dismantle civilization with practiced skill. But history has shown that they’re at best incompetent at building whatever paradise they promise (and usually ferociously unjust and evil). The murderous French Jacobin Maximilian Robespierre famously quipped “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” (“On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs”), but what followed was certainly no omelette.

Don’t be deceived. There’s never an omelette.

Note: This was originally posted on 26 October 2018, but it had mysteriously disappeared from my blog in early 2020, and a database restore from backup did not bring it back, so I recreated it, mostly from memory. Update: The posts have mysteriously rematerialized, but I’m keeping this post up in case the old post disappears again.

A recurring question of philosophy concerns whether or not things that have highly complex order/structure can result from random events or accidents and, more specifically, whether or not complex information can result from randomness/accidents. That last question was examined as early as the mid 1st-century B.C. by Cicero, a Roman contemporary of Julius Caesar, in Book 2 of his “Tusculan Disputations.” Cicero’s great rhetorical skills not withstanding, he lacked any formal mathematical method to effectively prove his case. Today we have such a method in the mathematics of probability, thanks largely to the heavy lifting of 17th-Century mathematicians like Blaise Pascal, Abraham de Moivre, and Christiaan Huygens. By the mid-19th century A.D., one answer to this question about the origin of complex information is what has come to be known as the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which may seem merely whimsical until you realize that the monkey here is just a symbol for randomness. The Infinite Monkey Theorem is actually a legitimate probability proof that shows how complex information will occur at random, given an infinite number of random data event generators–such as monkeys randomly tapping away at keyboards–or just one such random data event generator operating for an infinite amount of time. The event spaces are infinite, either in scope or duration, and therefore encompass all possibilities with respect to complex information.

The problem with the Infinite Monkey Theorem is that it’s not a particularly meaningful answer to this question about the origin of complex information. Today, we know the Universe to be finite: It had a definite beginning, a finite amount of time has transpired since the Big Bang, and we can infer that the Universe therefore has finite boundaries encompassing a finite amount of matter, energy, and space-time. If we want a meaningful answer to this question about the origin of complex information, we need to therefore re-evaluate scenarios like the Infinite Monkey Theorem from a finite perspective. Scholars and scientists have been doing just that for at least the past 50 years, and one such scholar was an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado. Richard A Roberts passed away in 1990, but one of his text books was published posthumously (An Introduction to Applied Probability. Addison-Wesley, 1992, ISBN-10: 020105552X), and in the chapter covering repeated independent trials, Roberts re-examined the Infinite Monkey Theorem with finite dimensions.

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Example 3.5.2

Suppose a billion monkeys type on word processors at a rate of 10 symbols per second. Assume that the word processors produce 27 symbols, namely 26 letters of the English alphabet and a space. These monkeys type for 10 billion years. What is the probability that they can type the first sentence of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”?

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Solution: If we counted correctly, there are 168 symbols in this sentence. Let N be the number of symbols typed per monkey in 10¹⁰ years. A sample space of possible letter sequences typed by each monkey is

S = X * X * … * X (N times)

where X is the set of 27 symbols. Now define s as a particular sequence that is m symbols long:

Let A_k be the event that s appears at the k^th index in a sequence of length N:

In other words, A_k is the event that a particular sequence, s, which is m symbols long, appears in one monkey’s sequence and ends on index k. The event of interest is A, given by

In our case, m = 168 and N is the number of symbols typed by one monkey in 10¹⁰ years. Thus by Boole’s Inequality,

Now the probability of the event A_k is the number of outcomes of event A_k divided by the total number of outcomes. The total number of outcomes is 27^N. The number of outcomes that produce event A_k is 27^N-m. The exponent is N-m because there are m positions specified in A_k. The remaining N-m are arbitrary. Thus

And so

since N >> m. Thus P[A] is bounded above by N/27^m, where N is the number of trials produced by a single monkey. That is the probability bound for P[A] for one monkey. For 10⁹ monkeys, we can think of forming one long sequence by concatenating 10⁹ sequences so that N becomes the number of trials produced by 10⁹ monkeys. Thus P[A] is bounded above by

P[A] ≤ (10⁹)(10⁷ sec/year)(10 symbols/sec)(10¹⁰ years) ≅ 10²⁷/10²⁴⁰ ≤ 10^-213.

The probability of producing a specified sequence of English text 168 symbols long is bounded above by 10^-213. No reasonable model for the source of the “Gettysburg Address” would propose a team of monkeys as author.

A similar example of repeated independent trials used as a mechanism for obtaining order from disorder is chemical evolution. Because of its philosophical implications, however, the example is more controversial.

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There are actually 172 symbols in the first sentence of the “Gettysburg Address” (adjusting the text to all lowercase with no punctuation and with “four score” being two words, as in the original), but applying the same math yields an upper bound on the probability at 10^-219, a number that for most computing devices is indistinguishable from 0. To put that in perspective, if I were to mark a single atom (of the 10⁸² atoms that physicists estimate exist in the entire known observable Universe) and ask you to guess which one I marked, and you guessed correctly on the first try, the odds would have been better by a factor of 10¹³⁷ than the odds of one in a billion monkeys accidentally typing the first sentence of the “Gettysburg Address.”

This is just one example, but you can find others in the mathematical literature, demonstrating how complex information does not occur by accident in finite scenarios–which are the only scenarios that actually exist. Maybe Roberts didn’t feel that this example was controversial or didn’t present philosophical implications, but I would argue that it certainly does pose moral implications given that DNA is arguably the most complex informational structure known to humanity. I will post an excerpt of the “controversial” example shortly.

Since FOX refused to run this particular advertisement (featuring people who, still in the womb, survived attempts to end their lives through abortion) during Super Bowl 54 but aired the pornographic pole-dancing/crotch-grabbing halftime show that network executives knew children would be watching, I’m more certain than ever (if that’s possible) that popular culture is imposing values totally at odds with the values my wife and I are trying to impart to our children, and that imposition has become downright adversarial. Maybe you’ve also likely experienced some tension with friends or family members who aren’t on the same page with your parental ambitions, who don’t see any value in modesty or reverence for the sacredness of human life, who bought into the lie of the Sexual Revolution, who retreat into the philosophically obtuse and self-contradictory thicket of moral relativism the moment they’re confronted with the possibility of objective moral truth, and who frustratingly use words like “right” and “wrong” while expecting a universal understanding of what they’ve just claimed can’t possibly be universally agreed upon.

I’ve said before that genuine education is not merely about imparting knowledge but rather about instilling virtue, a standard that can’t even be defined without an objective moral framework, and so it would be easy to dismiss moral relativism as merely an affliction of the uneducated mind–and I could make a compelling case as a recovering casualty of the public “education” system myself as I’m still undoing the damage of some collective 16-20 years of progressive indoctrination–but this one factor alone would not explain the inconsistency of relatively educated 19th-Century philosophers turning to relativism (like Nietzche’s Perspectivism) or of progressive elites publicly espousing social engineering and situational ethics while privately embracing the traditional mores of the nuclear family.

The late Roger Scruton clarifies the origin and problem of moral relativism in an interview from 2012, first by defining it:
“In layman’s terms, a moral relativist is somebody who believes that a moral judgement is the expression of the subjective opinion of a particular person and that it cannot be evaluated from any other position than his own. Every judgement is relative to the interests and position of the person who makes it, so that in the end there’s no position outside the individual from which he can be judged.”
This is an essential component of the Postmodern view, and any logically sound examination of it should conclude that it suffers from an inherent contradiction.

Since subjective morality is confined to the individual, it’s socially useless. Attempts to establish a secular/non-theistic objective moral framework have been made at least since the days of Aristotle and culminated in the Enlightenment:
“That has been one of the efforts of philosophy down the centuries … the effort to produce a fulcrum on which our world view can turn, which is not simply our individual desires. For a long time after the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals believed that they’d discovered that, in the idea of morality put forward by Kant or perhaps some version that was downstream from that, like the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, which gave a secular grounding to a shared moral position, which would not be the position of any particular person but the position of all of us. And from that we could come to conclusions about what was right and wrong which didn’t privilege the individual and his desires.”

This secular grounding to a shared moral position did not endure into the 20th Century, by which time philosophers began to despair that any viable secular/non-theistic objective moral framework could be made. The most rhetorically important expression of this despair was the Existentialist view, perhaps best articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, who fully embraced the outright egocentric Postmodern version of moral relativism we encounter today, which when carried to its logical conclusions is incompatible with and inimical to civilization:
“Sartre argued that there is no position from which I can be judged except my own, so that the only thing that can authenticate my moral judgments is my choice that those are my judgments. So the difference between a moral and an immoral person, on Sartre’s view, is simply that the moral person is somebody who wills his own desires as commitments, whereas the immoral person is someone who just has those desires. On that view, the authentic Existentialist rapist is the one whom you should praise, not the person who simply is tempted by his sexual appetites.”

Humans by nature tend to affirm themselves through moral judgments, and so when moral relativists naturally impose their relativism on others, they paradoxically create an absurd kind of objective moral norm:
“You see this happening especially in the European Court of Human Rights, where you found people with old-fashioned objective systems of values constantly being called before the judges and reproached for the fact that they are ‘discriminating against’ people who don’t share their values. So it becomes ever more difficult to retain those old-fashioned objective views of what morality is without being condemned on moral grounds for having those views.”

Scruton contrasts the 18th-Century Enlightenment concept of human rights, based in a secular/non-theistic objective morality and defined negatively in terms of how inalienable rights are not to be infringed upon, with the mid-20th Century concept of positive rights that obligate/appropriate the property and labor of others:
“It all went terribly wrong, in my view, after the Second World War, when people lost any sight of what the list of human rights consisted of. Originally, in people like Locke and also in Kant, human rights are fundamentally negative things: A right not to be interfered with, not to have your life taken away, not to have your freedom taken away, not to have your property taken away. Essentially liberal ideas, and it’s a sort of axiom of that way of thinking that your right is my duty …. If your right is simply not to be interfered with, it’s easy for me to fulfill that duty. I don’t interfere with you, I don’t kill you, take your property, enslave you, and so on. But with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War, all kinds of new rights … were postulated by the process that then was initiated, including the right to have a job, the right to have security of home life, the right to cover the basic needs of existence, the right to health care …. These are not freedoms but claims. They’re very different … because once you make these claims, if you hold on to the axiom that my right is somebody else’s duty, you automatically have to answer the question ‘Well, whose is the duty to provide?'”

This radical change in the definition of rights necessarily entails expansion of the state, its intrusion into our lives, and the corresponding curtailment of individual liberties, especially (for Americans) the “negative” inalienable rights outlined in the Constitution. It also causes confusion as to the basis of rights (an objective moral framework vs. the arrogation of the state) and results in social tension. Scruton takes as an example the historic Christian view of human rights (specifically the Roman Catholic view in this instance):
“But these rights are not for us to determine according to political criteria or according to the desires of people in secular society. They are eternal. So for instance, although there is a right to life, the Roman Catholic would say that right attaches to the unborn, too, and the European Court of Human Rights would say ‘No, because that interferes with the right to abortion that we guarantee because it’s part of what is offered by way of settling disputes in a secular society.’ The Polish government has had to confront this. I’m not sure if it’s resolved it yet as to whether it’s going to change its law on abortion or not.”

Moral relativism has also radically changed, and even inverted, the concept of tolerance:
“The influence of moral relativism is to say that it’s intolerant to make judgements at all. This is what we find often said in my country that someone being judgemental is committing the primary moral fault, and real toleration means not discriminating at all against rival views, accepting all views as equally valid. But actually, toleration means the opposite of that. Toleration means accepting what you don’t approve of, accepting what you do disagree with. And our tradition in England of toleration, which grew up in the 17th Century, was a solution to radical conflict. People learned to be tolerant precisely of the things that they really hated. Learning not to hate them means not tolerating at all because there’s nothing to tolerate. This is a very important virtue in this case, but it depends upon having objective moral values.”
Which is why, I would argue, moral relativists are actually among the least tolerant people you’ll find.

This only covers the first 25 minutes of the full 62-minute interview, but it’s worth watching all of it. Unless I’m mistaken, Scruton only speaks to the origin of moral relativism but not to its motivation, and maybe that’s because the motivation is actually quite obvious: 20th-Century philsophers who despaired of establishing a workable secular/non-theistic objective moral framework cast themselves into the painfully chaotic, nonorientable limbo of Postmodernism, rather than turn back to the only proven source of an objective moral framework, because doing otherwise posed moral implications that were unacceptable to them. It’s the creator of an engine, not the user, who decides what fuel that engine will use–putting gasoline into the fuel tank of a diesel vehicle will certainly have very bad consequences–and the same truth applies to humanity: If we are not the result of a random collision of amino acids and unguided evolutionary processes–and the truth that we’re not can be incontrovertibly demonstrated both mathematically and scientifically–but are instead created beings, then we do not get to make up our own rules about what’s right and wrong. Hence the moral relativist’s hostility toward the very notion of God, Whose existence shows us all how desperately wretched we really are. Pretending that life is a series of meaningless coincidences and that behavior has no absolute moral consequence, the moral relativist sits atop his self-affirming illusion of goodness and smugly indulges himself, exemplifying Ivan’s argument in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamozov” that, without God, all things are permissible. This is our contemporary culture.

But cultures and civilizations are not the same: While cultures may disagree about morality, civilizations must adhere to common set of values (viz. C.S. Lewis’ concept of Tao) without which those civilizations cannot survive. For example, a civilization whose culture does not value children will face an inevitable demographic crisis, whose culture abandons modesty and sexual restraint will precipitate irresponsibility and ultimately victimization/predation, and whose culture, as Scruton would say, “privileges the individual” over equal enforcement of the law will suffer civil unrest, if not outright civil war, at some point. And these common values, this objective moral framework, has a way of intruding on and dispelling illusion.

Unfortunately, the more tightly that illusion is held, the more painful is the intrusion of reality. As author Denise McAllister puts it, “History has a way of cycling back to normalcy. The sad thing is, societies often have to go through terrible trials and tribulations to wake up to reality. Historically, that has often been brutal.” Sad indeed. I’m assuming FOX and Pepsi, which funded the halftime show, will likely ignore the complaints of outraged parents. This culture, these values make the Super Bowl a cash cow … for now. But mark my words: it won’t last. A culture as sick as ours is toxic to civilization, and what can’t continue won’t. If you don’t see that, you’re blind or kidding yourself. If you keep pushing your toxic values up against reality, you can expect reality to push back, and maybe with a ferocity you never expected. That’s something to think about as you count your money among the ruins.

Original text:
Lay out your tent body with the door facing up. Place a stake at each corner, through the loop at the end of the webbing. (Note: Insert all stakes into the ground at a 45 ̊ angle with the tops facing away from the center of the tent.)

Revised text:
Lay out your tent body with the door facing up. Then try to extricate your two-year-old, who has crawled into the collapsed tent body. Retrieve tent stakes from your four-year-old and attempt to place a stake at each corner through the loop at the end of the webbing … even though this is actually impossible because your four-year-old has already buried several stakes in the sand box. (Note: Attempt a reasonable angle for the stakes you can find, but let’s be honest; trying for 45 ̊ is a fool’s errand.)

Original text:
Pull the webbing taut so that you attain a straight line but do not distort the shape of the tent.

Revised text:
Pull the webbing loosely around your two-year-old’s small wiggling body while she giggles and pulls the webbing in the opposite direction. Answer some of your four-year-old’s many questions about poisonous African snakes. Direct all other reptile questions to Mommy, who is conveniently running errands.

Original text: Assemble all poles. Each sleeve and clips are color-coded to the correct poles.

Revised text: Stop four-year-old from attempting to pole vault with a half-assembled tent pole. Distract both kids with juice boxes. Assemble all poles quickly by yourself, and then hide them behind the ash tree so they’re less likely to be stepped on and bent.

Original text: Starting at A1, insert the matching pole through the sleeve. Repeat this step for the B and C color-coded poles.

Revised text: Starting at A1, insert the matching pole through the sleeve. Repeat this step for the B and C color-coded poles while answering four-year-old’s various what-if questions like, “What if ALL the roads were actually a giant water slide as big as the Moon, and you could go this way and that way, and then it all emptied down into a huuuuuuge pool full of dolphins that made you an ice cream cone in whatever flavor you wanted?”

Original Text: Insert one end of the A1 assembly into the middle ring pins. Repeat this step for B1. Only these two points will have three pins.

Revised Text: Read and reread this simple sentence five times with 0% comprehension while four-year-old seizes sledgehammer and runs around screaming “ZOO-ba-da-bah-YAH-bah-ZAH-bah-DAH-ba!” to the cadence of Sousa’s “The Washington Post” march.

Original Text: Carefully lift the tent and set the poles on the pins at locations A2 and B2. Repeat previous steps for pole assembly C.

Revised Text: Despairing of any possibility at ever successfully completing these absurdly long and needlessly detailed instructions, hastily jam tent poles through any sleeves available. In blind panic, anchor pins in the soft wet clay soil of the lawn, and then gracefully vault, gazelle-like, to intercept two-year-old before she executes swan dive from trampoline’s edge into sand box below.

Original Text: Next, attach the C-clips to each of the three poles from the bottom up. Pole D follows the seamline from points C1 to C2. Insert one of the ends onto the ring pins and bend over the top of existing poles.

Revised Text: With promises of popsicles and episodes of “Fireman Sam,” coax both children into house, where there is AC and peace of mind for Daddy … and beer.

Original Text: Next, insert the opposite end into corresponding ring pin. Repeat the process for pole-assemblies E and F. Pole E follows points B1 to B2. Pole F follows points A1 to A2 (Fig. 5).

Revised Text: Ya know what? *#%$ the ring pins and their corresponding pole assemblies! What have they ever done for Daddy, besides lay insouciantly in the damp grass, mocking him?

Original Text: Attach C-clips to the rest of the pole assemblies.
(Note: Where poles intersect, there is a hook-and-loop webbing attachment. Pass webbing over intersecting poles and through the D-ring and then back onto itself. (Fig. 6))

Revised Text: Stuff everything into available canvas bags. Devise plausible “explanation” for Mommy as to how the tent is not assembled and both kids’ faces are encrusted with sticky residue of popsicles and cracker dust.

One of the many things I love about my Dad is his sense of humor and its amazing social versatility–if you can tell this joke to your straight-laced pastor and get him to laugh out loud, you have a gift. And in the days before caller ID, Dad could make prank calls with the skill of a seasoned radio shock jock. I’ve never been all that impressed by the Jerky Boys because I know Dad can do far better (and without any profanity).

I’m not so proud of it now, but in my younger days I excelled at telling dirty jokes. I like to think that I have matured somewhat (fart jokes notwithstanding) especially since becoming a husband and father, and in retrospect I can see that some off-color jokes ironically have redeeming moral value and can even be worth repeating in polite company. Here is one such example:

A lecherous man finds himself seated next to a married woman on a long flight. He notices the wedding band on her left ring finger but, undeterred, shamelessly propositions her for a hypothetical $10 million dollars. Shocked but curious, she replies “For $10 million …? Sure. Why not?” He follows up with an insultingly low-ball offer of $10. “JUST WHAT KIND OF WOMAN DO YOU THINK I AM!?!” she yells. He responds with the joke’s punchline: “I think we’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.”

This joke has value in that it shows how some things are not (or should not be) negotiable because they are sacred. And if you try to abase what is fundamentally sacred, you’ll find that only you become abased, while what is sacred remains so, regardless of how you yourself may see things. In this joke, that sacred object is marriage.

Another sacred object is human life and its inherent value. I find that attempts to diminish the sacredness of human life often take the form of an arbitrary and indefensibly illogical definition of personhood. In the United States of the late 1850s, the legal definition of personhood was defined to exclude persons of African ancestry, for example. This arbitrary definition was used to perpetuate slavery, but the ultimate result was abasement: complete breakdown of the social order culminating in a civil war costing the lives of over 600,000 Americans and the economic devastation of the South.

Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation with respect to the sanctity of human life. Personhood has been arbitrarily, though legally, redefined to exclude persons in-utero (and even freshly ex-utero). Though scientifically and philosophically unsound, this definition is used to justify abortion up to and including the moment of birth, and consequently the United States now has debatably over 60 million fewer citizens than it would have had since 1973, the year SCOTUS handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. There are very real and measurable economic consequences for this loss of respect for human life (to say nothing of the deeper philosophical/spiritual costs), and I think we’re only beginning to see the first and mildest effects.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the would-be iconoclast’s unintentional self-abasement–whether it’s an individual, a philosophy, or a culture at large–and it seems to me that this degradation progresses through three phases: First, there is a loss of the ability to reason; second, there’s a loss of the ability to productively dialogue; and third, there’s a loss of the ability to live peaceably with others (and even with oneself).

Late last year I wrote about how, in my former life as an agnostic, I failed to see the primary philosophical contradiction inherent in postmodern thinking. That failure was enabled and actually reinforced by fellow agnostics and atheists, who unconsciously could not function without the very notion of objective truth they were consciously abnegating. The reference point of absolute truth is an essential condition for purposeful rational thought. I would even go so far as to say that, with respect to moral truth, this reference point is sacred, and its proximity to the Divine is no mere coincidence: When you can’t find your balance on the pitching deck of moral relativism, your argument is not with those who hold to an objective moral framework but rather with the Author of that framework. In denying the objectivity of truth, our culture has consequently lost the ability to reason, and one can see evidence of this everywhere in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

The ability to reason being a prerequisite for effective dialogue, it then becomes difficult and even dangerous to talk with someone who has become irrational (or, as German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dieterich Bonhoeffer more bluntly put it, stupid):

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Bonhoeffer aptly describes the transition from the second to third phase of self-abasement: Having lost all humility and the ability to dialogue, the irrational person becomes insulated in a fog of false self-righteousness which, when challenged, gives way to murderous anger. It was the irrational evil and stupidity of fascist Germany that cruelly executed Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg concentration camp just days before its liberation by the U.S. Army in April of 1945.

Maybe it’s my price to pay for a youth misspent desecrating the fence that separates the sacred from the profane, but having lived long enough to learn why that fence is necessary, I now feel some responsibility to mend the parts of the fence that I once damaged and to keep a watchful eye on the cultural horizon. That sense of responsibility grows in urgency as, unfortunately, Western Civilization seems to edge from the second to the third phase of degradation. Writers and commentators with intellectual clarity and moral insight that I respect are increasingly indicating that we’re already in a cold (i.e., relatively non-violent) civil war and focusing on how to prevent that cold civil war from turning into a hot (i.e., violent) civil war–because no matter how confident some people may be about surviving that prospect, it’s generally considered to be the worst-case scenario.

Frankly, I struggle to be so optimistic as to think we can reverse course, but there are those who believe that by “creating dialogue,” or even just maintaining a strained conversation, we can avoid the worst. And that reminds me of another joke about a lady who walks into a psychiatrist’s office with a duck on a leash: “What seems to be the problem?” asks the shrink. “Oh, it’s my husband,” says the woman. “He thinks he’s a duck.” That joke ends with a punchline, but I feel like we’re now living in some awkward post-punchline silence, when the psychiatrist’s mind tries to keep from slipping into despair. What’s the point of having a conversation with a lunatic? For the psychiatrist, the aim is to restore sanity, not to abdicate one’s own mental health and help a lunatic feel better about his condition. It would serve neither person for the psychiatrist to lie and agree that a duck is a man (or that a man is a woman, or that a baby is simply a blob of cells with no unalienable right to life, or that you can force people to violate their conscience and never have the same, or worse, done to you).

In matters of sacredness, the credos of postmodernism/multiculturalism and the Hegelian dialectic are worse than pointless when the aim of communication should be to influence, to persuade, to warn, to acknowledge the immutable truth of what is inviolable before imminent catastrophe transpires. I can’t help but think of some video filmed in Phuket on 26 December, 2004: Vacationers wanting to put out to sea were annoyed to find all the boats strangely beached, despite still being out in the bay. Not thinking of why the water level might possibly recede so quickly and dramatically, some of these people ventured far out into the wet sand, musing over rocks and sea shells. The camera then raised to the horizon and glimpsed the tsunami’s crest approaching at 500 miles per hour. A few locals could be seen sprinting toward the hills and then the camera captured the first casualties, many of them frozen in confused terror as they were inundated by the merciless wave. Were those who saw the tsunami from safely atop their hotel balconies debating about what it was? No, they were screaming for others to run for their lives.

As Ravi Zacharias once put it, “… even in India, we look both ways before crossing the street–it is either the bus or me, not both of us.” It is either us or the bus, truth or a tsunami of moral obtuseness, our deference to the sacred or our ruination. So when you see danger looming, do you stare breathlessly or sound the alarm? If you yell at children running toward a busy street, are you trying to dialogue with them? If you honk at a car entering a freeway exit ramp, are you trying to win an argument? What satisfaction could there possibly be in saying “I told you so” to someone who fell through the ice and drowned?

Another of the many things I love about my Dad is that he always told me the truth when it mattered, even when (especially when) I didn’t care to hear it. He wasn’t trying to win an argument or “engage in dialogue.” He told me the truth, knowing that I would reject his advice and argue with him and even insult him, because he loved me. A friend of mine always tells his daughter, “When you deny the truth, there’s nothing left but lies,” and his words seem more meaningful when I imagine them spoken in his Russian accent. He grew up in the USSR, where truth was deemed incompatible with the state’s ambitions, where telling the truth would get you beaten up, thrown in jail, or killed. Many people suffered all three of those consequences yet were followed by more people still willing to tell the truth.

When I rebranded this blog two years ago on Father’s Day, I wrote about this kind of love, “… the real, gritty thing: sacrificial, unpleasant and often chaotic, inconvenient and usually mistaken for something else.” I still think that’s a better-than-average description of real love, but I would make one addition/edit: Like truth, real love is going to offend lots of people; in fact, love and truth are inseparable. I’m bracing myself for that like I prepare for my two-year-old daughter’s reaction when I lovingly tell her that a growing body requires more sustenance than can be provided by a diet of dried strawberry chips. Or when in casual dinnertime conversation I point out that, with things like this happening, we do not have happy days ahead as a civilization (sorry if that doesn’t nicely square with your vacation plans or your remodeling project). This is difficult because I don’t like conflict or confrontation, but I’m finding there are some things I just can’t shut up about. And I can’t say it any better than this:

“We are in a war of ideas in which we must defend the idea of the human soul and the moral world in which it has its being and its rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We need to map this defense with logic, with science, with patience, with humor, and with courage. We need to do it, yes, even if they ban us from Twitter and Facebook. We need to do it even when they riot on campus at our speeches. We need to do it even if our professor marks us down and our boss sends us to HR and our sponsor drops our show. And God prevent it should ever come to this, but if at last the truth itself is outlawed, then outlaws we must become …. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but we have to at least embrace the principle that telling the truth about the human condition is worth great sacrifice so we’ll be ready to face the lesser sacrifices that even here, even now, the truth sometimes demands. We have to be ready to make those sacrifices for truth because the wages of lies are corruption, slavery, and death. This country has been so free, so safe, so powerful, so long that it’s easy to forget how quickly freedom can be lost in the fog of bad ideas. Wandering in that fog, the world goes mad. And in a world gone mad, we cannot be silent.” 
–Andrew Klavan, Address at Hillsdale College, April 2019