God loves the inquiring mind. Intellectual inquiry is the supreme human activity that reflects his image that He placed in humankind at Creation. But the modern world of ideas or “science”, using the word in its most general sense, is in turmoil. One author, John Horgan, expresses the current mood in his recent book, The End of Science, in which he argues that science and philosophy have reached an “ironic” state, by which he means that the interesting questions have been answered and all that is left for “strong” scientists to do is to “pursue science in a speculative, postempirical mode” by probing the speculative fringes of science, an activity that “offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting, which provoke further comment. But it does not converge on the truth.”¹ Is it not rather that God is reaching out to the world with sharp points to reveal himself to the sincere inquirer? Is not much of the turmoil the struggle to evade these sharp points?

This report looks for evidence of sharp points in several areas. In biology, sharp points lurk in the “impossibles” of biology, particularly in striking evidence for intelligent design. In the Age of Reason, sharp points are found in the appalling applications of “science” to racism, to social Darwinism, to Marxism and other curses of recent times. For the future, sharp points are found in the unresolved themes that center about the way that societies plan for their own well-being.

What is a Sharp Point?

A sharp point is the prick of confliction that occurs when a person comes up against a truth about God or about the creation order, a truth that conflicts with the person’s own world view. The imagery of the sharp point comes from Paul’s experience leading up to his conversion, an experience that Jesus described in the vision on the road to Damascus by remarking, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” [Acts 26:14, KJV]

The starting point for sharp points is the fact that God loves the inquiring mind. This love is displayed many places in the Bible, for example in that well-known passage in Psalm 19 that begins: “The heavens declare the glory of God.”² As a person probes diligently, whether it is in natural science, or in philosophy, or in any of the myriad of activities that make up life, God reveals himself. That is how the inquiry can have a redemptive slant to it.

The proverb quoted above states how God rewards the diligent search that is implied in the cascading of the actions “calling out”, “crying aloud”, “looking” and “searching”. He rewards it with fear of the Lord and knowledge of God. Often a passage such as this is given a “soft” interpretation: as God promising the warm reward of insight to his devoted followers. But there is a “hard” interpretation too: as a promise to every person who searches out truth with diligence, whether or not that person is doing it as a matter of worship. Psalm 19 talks of a silent “voice” going through the whole earth: the voice is not just a secret reserved to the privileged few, it penetrates all of creation. That voice declares the glory of God.

The proverb hints at a sharp point in the word “fear”. There is sometimes a tendency to translate this word, which appears frequently in the Bible, by the words “awe” or “reverence”, but sometimes, as here, and in Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus, the word “fear” is appropriate.

When a sharp point occurs, the observer is brought up against a point that conflicts with a personal world view. He or she may either accept or reject the implications of the point. As E.M. Blaiklock wrote: “You can doggedly hold onto your preconceptions…or you can believe that a Mind has ordered it all.”³ A sharp point reveals the vulnerability in a person’s position, but that warning can be brushed aside with effort.

It is odd that some Christians seem to be afraid of the serious inquiry that is implied in this proverb, as if knowing the truth might somehow shake their faith. Francis Schaeffer remarked on this:
 

What does it mean, “Christianity is true to what really is there?” Repeatedly the New Testament urges Christians to consider one another as equals: “There is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free.” Saying “Christianity is true to what really is there” means that this urging is not just saying that Christians should be nice to each other, be humble and give deference to the other fellow out of some sense of Christian charity. To say “Christianity is true to what really is there” means that underlying the instructions for Christians is the fact that all human individuals really are of equal intrinsic worth, not just other Christians. This is what Dinesh D’Sousa, author of the book The End of Racism, calls the Biblical teaching of “passionate universalism.”⁵ It is for Christians who believe that God has revealed himself in Scripture, to investigate and proclaim the truths of Christianity that are “really there,” and not to act and live our lives as though these truths were just weird tribal customs that have been handed down: that is the air of unreality that Francis Schaeffer refers to.

Diligent search for insight and understanding leads to knowledge and fear of God. That is what the proverb says. A Christian believer doesn’t have to fight for this, doesn’t have to scurry around to impose a particular religious slant on the interpretation of nature, doesn’t have to resort to force or bombast. He or she only needs to urge for a clear-eyed search for objective truth, speaking only the truth in the process, and then let the results fall out as they will.

C.S. Lewis said this about the power of truth that is to be found in diligent inquiry:

Perhaps Christians need to remind one another that the Christ is also the Creator (John 1, Colossians 1). So naturally the universe rings true.

The proverb promises that honest inquiry into God’s creation will be rewarded with fear and knowledge. Fear may not be what the inquirer was looking for. Serious inquiry can reveal flaws in one’s world view. That is the nature of sharp points. C.S. Lewis said about his own conversion to Christianity, after a long struggle to maintain his scholarly atheism:
 

What is also true, but C.S. Lewis doesn’t say here, is that the struggles reflected his intellectual honesty: that he refused to evade inconvenient or uncomfortable lines of thought; in short he searched diligently as the proverb indicates. The result was sharp points that he had to face, and they led in the end to his salvation. But the interesting thing is, God does not force himself on the inquirer: God will reveal himself, but the inquiring person can doggedly refuse to follow the evidence, at a cost of some pain and unsettling. That is the point, so to speak, of a sharp point.

The Accessibility of God’s Creation

The proverb and the witnesses cited thus far, see God’s creation as strangely “accessible” to the inquiring mind. This is true. Ponder this: suppose that the scale of things in nature were two or three orders of magnitude different from what they are. Suppose there were no visible planets or that they were so far away that they would not appear to be “wandering stars”. Would scholars ever have come to an understanding of the solar system? Suppose that the laws of Newtonian physics were more subtle than they are: would Galileo, Newton and the other empiricists have discovered them with their crude measuring gear?

To be very specific for those who understand some physics: suppose the wavelength of visible light were, say, 1000 times longer than it is; that is, about a millimeter (mm, 10^-3 m) rather than about a micron (m, 10^-6m). Then it would be hard to see details in anything much smaller than the period at the end of a sentence (about 0.5 mm or 500m)—even an optical microscope would not help, because it cannot pick up details that are smaller than about half of a wavelength of light. The early scientists of the modern age would never have been able to peer into the microscopic world. Would they have ever built the precision instruments available today without the stimulus of the optical microscopes?

Suppose that fossils never formed at all, so that there was no evidence of the form of past living things. After all, fossils serve no biological function to the life that produced them. Suppose that each stratum of the geological column were so thick that all one could see in the Earth’s upper crust was a single uniform layer of sediment and rock? Suppose the Grand Canyon only displayed the top-most stratum? Would scientists have obtained an understanding of geology? What would have been the inducement?

Perhaps the supreme example of the accessibility of God’s creation is found in the comprehensive power that has been found in the general laws of physics—Newton’s laws, Einstein’s General Relativity, the laws of thermodynamics and of quantum mechanics. It is remarkable how few and simple these laws are, in comparison with their far-reaching applicability.

The very accessibility of nature, is a deliberate and gracious concession of God for the benefit of the inquiring mind, whom he reaches with silent speech and the line gone throughout the earth, as Psalm 19 eloquently states. Through the medium of that silent speech, God intrudes with sharp points.

The Biblical Basis for Sharp Points

Many sharp points concern assertions that are found in the Bible. As Francis Schaeffer wrote, these assertions tell us how the world really works, and not just what our creed is. They speak to the whole of God’s creation, not just to those who practice the Biblical faith. The following table lists a few of these Biblical assertions.

It is interesting to note that many of these Biblical assertions concern things that may not be immediately apparent—in fact, the surface view may seem to point in quite a different way. This is one reason why Biblical revelation is valuable. Consider the question of whether there are nature gods. The forces of nature certainly are powerful, and sometimes they seem to have a will of their own. Nature seems to have godlike qualities: it is mysterious and elusive. Is it really any wonder that the Egyptians deified the Nile river, whose whims could dictate either life and prosperity or death and famine? The very fact that a word such as “whims” is used in reference to the Nile river conveys the impression that it has a conscious will. In our speech such personifications of nature are common; it is not just “primitive” cultures that are caught up in the mysteries of nature!

Malcom Muggeridge uses the label “Christendom” to refer to a society that has respect for Biblical propositions such as the ones listed in the table. His lecture, The End of Christendom⁸laments the fact that modern society has lost respect for these roots. The false assumption, that can be traced back to romanticists such as Emerson, is that it can have the very real benefits of Christendom without keeping the roots. This is a false notion, as Muggeridge points out in his lecture. Later in this paper, the “science” of racism will be cited to illustrate the problems that result from the loss of society’s roots in Christendom.

In the absence of a communication from God, how does one discover that there are no nature gods or that there is no mysterious god called “Luck” that guides the dice? Only by long, bitter experience of lost hopes and dreams. But it is very painful to discover such an elusive truth, and that is one reason why the guidance of the Bible and the wisdom of long historical experience are so important. To put it another way, the empirical method of discovery, which is so much the rage in science, is not always terribly useful. You may empirically discover the law of gravity, but if you do it as you pass the 35th floor on a free fall, the discovery doesn’t provide much comfort or help.

This loss of even an understanding of society’s rooting in the past is one of the serious problems of modern society. The realization that the past has had its share of faults and myopia looms large in modern eyes and so everything is thrown out. Eric Hobbsbawm, in the book The Age of Extremes, remarks:
 

The lessons one might learn by listening to the roots of the past have to be relearned. These lessons become bitter sharp points.

The remainder of this paper discusses a number of sharp points that can be found in present-day society. The survey begins with the bright side of things: sharp points that come out of the marvelous achievements of modern science, followed by some of the darker results that came about in the Age of Reason, when “freethinkers” cut off the past strong ties to tradition and the roots of Christendom. Finally, some remarks will be made about the approach of the third millennium and some sharp points that face society as it looks to the future.

Sharp Points in Modern Science

Science as Participation in Creation. It is one of the astonishing facts of the Biblical Creation account that God gave Adam the responsibility for naming the animals (Genesis 2:19-20). To the Hebrew mind, naming things is very significant: it denotes authority and participation in meaning. And so the Hebrew reader understands from this act that Adam actually participated in creation itself, as a kind of assistant to God. The advances in modern science are a continuation of this gracious gift of participating in Creation that God has granted to humans. The accessibility of God’s creation, noted above, is not an accident. It confirms that God is not an enemy of scientific advancement, but on the contrary, he revels in it. At the same time, he uses this very human creativity to reveal himself ever more sharply.

The following are some examples of sharp points in modern science. The footnotes cite references that can provide much more information than can be given here.

The Creation Event¹⁰ The fact that the material universe had a definite beginning is today generally accepted in modern science. According to the usual scientific estimates, the universe began with a “Big Bang” some 12-18 billion years ago in a huge explosion and has been expanding from that initial blast ever since. Scientists can still detect the residual energy of that energetic early universe and observe its expansion in distant receding stars.

In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a vigorous effort to avoid the Big Bang theory (so-named by Fred Hoyle, a nobel-laureate astrophysicist, as an intentionally derisive label). The attempts included theories of spontaneous generation of matter, of an oscillating universe that is currently in just one of many expansion phases, and so on. None of these theories is now generally viewed to be plausible to the large majority of scientists, because the astrophysical evidence consistently and emphatically points to a single creation event. Indeed, the modern understanding of science makes it possible to give a consistent description of the early history of the universe to within a small fraction of a second (10^-38 s) from the creation event—consistent in the sense that the current state of the universe agrees remarkably well with the predictions of physical theory.

This Big Bang beginning has profound consequences. It is not possible, for one thing to credit matter with an eternal existence, which might allow it to have self-generating, god-like qualities. Scientists must face the question, “How did it begin?” as well as the question, “How did the universe develop to its present state in the limited time since the beginning?” Both of these questions are things that many scientists would rather not be faced with, which is why there was considerable resistance to the Big Bang theory, until the evidence accumulated to the point where few serious scientists now question it, and these questions are now pursued by cosmologists. The big issue today is not whether there was a creation event, but how to explain the current state of the universe and the presence of intelligent life, and whether this state can be explained without reference to God.

Many astronomers have seen the obvious sharp point: that there is a God who transcends the universe, and willed it into being. Others, perhaps most, remain agnostic; still others appear to be content to leave the implications unresolved in their personal world views. For example, one biologist proclaimed that he is a pantheist, although how that is possible in a universe that had a finite beginning is not explained.¹¹

The Finely Tuned Universe¹². The Psalmist marveled in Psalm 8 at the attention and authority that God gave to his human creation: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” When the modern Age of Science began in the mid-sixteenth century, the early scientists didn’t have the data or the tools to see how profoundly significant man is in the universe. The evidence seemed to point in the opposite direction.

Beginning in the 1500’s the findings of Copernicus and the other astronomers seemed to indicate that humans appear to be “an unimportant bit of dust on an unimportant planet in an unimportant galaxy in an unimportant region somewhere in the vastness of space.”¹³ The theologians and classical scholars protested in vain. In their protests they unwisely tried to deny the clear evidence of science, and not surprisingly they lost the argument. But as it turns out, the indications of human insignificance were false, and the theologians were right—right, that is, in the proper area of their expertise, namely theology. In fact the universe is exceedingly anthropocentric, meaning that it is exquisitely tuned for human habitation. Freeman Dyson states:
 

One can see evidence for this planning from the first moments after the universe was created. For example, according to the current scientific understanding of stars as the “furnaces” where all the elements except hydrogen and some helium were made, Fred Hoyle observed:
 

Without those consequences inside the stars, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and the other elements of life would not have existed. Barrow and Tipler in their excellent book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, give a fascinating description of how the atomic energy levels are precisely designed to yield just the right elements needed for life.¹⁶

A creationist could, of course, argue that these elements were created in their final form by God. However, if that is the case, then it is difficult to imagine why the universe would display the mechanisms, in the form of the physical laws, the precisely correct fundamental parameters to permit the natural production, and the evident byproducts of natural stellar production of the elements (such as the relative abundance of different elements).

The findings of modern science give new meaning to Isaiah 45:18:
 

God created the heavens to be inhabited: that is exactly what the scientists have found. It turns out that the apparent insignificance of humans in the vast expanse—the “discovery” of the scientists in the Age of Enlightenment—is an illusion. The focus of the universe, vast as it is, centers on creating an environment suitable for human habitation. Barrow and Tipler state:
 

This “fine tuning” is a sharp point of self-revelation by God. To pick just one of literally hundreds of items available, consider the age and size of the universe. The usual notion is that billions of years are a long time, and that our present conscious lives are only a minute speck in the eons of time. Not so. What is missing from this notion is that 16 billion years, the approximate time since the Big Bang is a very short time—in fact the shortest time possible—to have produced the physical and chemical building blocks of today’s ecosystem, if it was done by the action of the known laws of physics. It is as if God determined to use physical processes, but beyond that wasted no time at all in moving from the creation event to Eden. The following table gives the time budget, using the generally accepted calculations from physics.
 
 

If this table is accurate—it is based on the understanding of modern astrophysics—then the size and age of the universe, far from indicating the insignificance of our current era, points to a deliberate preparation for human habitation. Humans are so exceedingly significant that the entire universe was created specifically for them! The creation of life and of humans occurred at the earliest possible moment. The universe is still young, despite being 16 billion years old! This fact—that the universe is young—is confirmed by the absence of middle-aged or old (second generation) stars of the types that, according to the physics involved, should last for as many as 40-50 billion years.

The Four Impossibles in Biology. The “impossibles” of biology are: the origin of life, gaps in the fossil record, the evolution of human intelligence, and irreducible complexity. These are four areas in genetic and biochemical biology where living matter has achieved the “impossible,” meaning that there is no plausible scientific explanation to account for what the evidence shows, other than “well, it must be possible, because here it is!” Each of these areas is the source of great sharp points that demonstrate God’s Creative activity.

There is no doubt that great discoveries remain to be made in each of these areas, and by no means should one just say “God did it” and cease further research, because God loves to have humans investigate his creation, and he honors the honest inquiry into his handiwork with ever deeper and more extensive insight. But the evidence to date, points to the likelihood that this inquiry will only sharpen the evidence for God’s hand in creation; it will not reveal purely natural, undirected processes as an adequate and complete explanation for the current state of living matter.

It seems that every time some astronomer discovers another planet orbiting a star, or finds water somewhere in the solar system, the news reports speculate that life may be found there. Several such reports have appeared in the papers over the past few months. A full appreciation of these “impossibles” should show the folly of such speculation.

1. Origin of Life¹⁹ Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the configuration of DNA, wrote:
 

Mechanisms to explain the origin of life are almost totally lacking, despite the un-warranted hoopla that accompanies high school science text descriptions of the original Miller-Urey experiments, conducted in the 1950’s. What these experiments showed, is how a few molecular compounds, fortuitously called “organic”, can arise from inorganic materials. Occasionally one reads a report of “prebiotic” chemicals discovered somewhere in space: these are usually amino acids, or perhaps modestly more complex molecules. There is a vast chasm between any such evidence of complex “organic” molecules and actual life.²¹ The biochemist Lynn Margulis wrote: “To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium.”²²

The evidence to support theories for the origin of life is so meager and embarrassing that some biologists call the descriptions “just so stories.” The bottom line, after over forty years since the first Miller-Urey experiment, is that results in the attempt to generate the “precursors” to life are uniformly unconvincing. Michael Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box, reports that “in private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life.”²³

At this point in the understanding of what is the minimum needed to form life, the minimum turns out to be so huge that there is essentially no chance of its occurring naturally, at least so far as it is known today.²⁴ Ernst Mayr, a prominent biologist, wrote:
 

2. Gaps in the Fossil Record²⁶One of the hallmarks of Darwinian theory is the concept of gradualism, that the process of evolution took place over eons as a result of natural selection, and was marked by gradual changes between species. From the first, objections were raised to this view because the fossil record does not show evidence of gradual transitions between major life forms. In fact, most of the modern phyla appeared suddenly within perhaps 10 million years in the “Cambrian explosion”.²⁷This is an incredibly short time for natural selection to do its work, even aside from the sudden appearances with little record of intermediate forms. During the early days after Darwin, the argument was that the fossil record had not been adequately explored, and that the gaps would eventually be filled. But that has not happened. As time passed, the scientists in the field became increasingly uncomfortable with the observations. The century plus since Darwin has not yielded the type of defense for the theory that its supporters might have hoped. One article, arguing for moving “beyond neo-Darwinism”, stated:

The successes of the theory are limited to the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first place.²⁸

3. Human Intelligence.²⁹ The marvel of human intelligence can be seen from three lines of attack:
 

The record of forty years of research in human intelligence and artificial intelligence, only confirms that the thought processes of the human mind far transcend anything that can be duplicated or even approached by computer technology. Even the relatively simple task of writing computer programs that are intuitive and easy to use is daunting and demonstrates that computers have a hard time doing what comes easily to the human mind.

Regarding the search for the seat of consciousness, the Biblical perspective argues that the uniqueness of the human species is wrapped up in the fact that humans were created in God’s image. A reasonable conclusion from this act of God is that human consciousness transcends the material creation, since he added something that apparently was not previously present in his creative work. The sharp points that come from this involve evidence that (self-)consciousness and intelligence are phenomena unique to humans in the natural world, and that they cannot be explained solely in terms of material processes (of the brain or other body parts).

From an evolutionary viewpoint, the development of intelligence poses problems, because intelligence seems to defy the assumed self-directedness of evolutionary theory. A sophisticated nervous system requires a huge support system: for example, the human brain takes about 20% of all the body’s energy at rest. Barrow and Tipler state:
 

4. Irreducible Complexity³¹. The final “impossible” of biology is irreducible complexity. In 1994 there was a debate between Phillip Johnson, and William B. Provine at Stanford University on the topic “Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy?”³² At one point during the debate, Provine showed a picture of a monarch butterfly and stated his own position, “You cannot see evidence of intelligent design even in butterflies.” How strange and revealing Provine’s remark is! Looking at a photograph of a butterfly (Figure 1), certainly appears to show evidence for design.

But of course what the picture of a butterfly reveals is something that Darwin himself could have looked at, and evidently it didn’t convince him. On the other hand, Provine knows a lot more than Darwin could have known about the butterfly. That external appearance shown in the photograph is only the end result of an incredibly complex process. It hides vastly more indications of intelligent design than is apparent in the mere collage of color and structure that the visual image displays. And yet, evidently, all this counts for nothing to Provine.

Recently, a professor at Lehigh University, Michael Behe, wrote the book, Darwin’s Black Box³⁴. The point to his book, is that scientists know vastly more today about the biology of a cell and micro-organisms than was known in Darwin’s day. The frontispiece to Behe’s book shows a schematic of a bacterial flagellum (Figure 2).

The fact that some bacteria swim by rotating their flagella rather than by waving them, as is true of other ciliated micro-organisms, was first shown in 1973.³⁵ This is so incredible that for years after this, some scientists concluded that the rotation was an artifact, and that back-and-forth movement of the flagella only seemed to be rotation, as a well-known biology reference book asserted as late as 1986.³⁶

The rotation is now well-established. The schematic in Figure 2, published in 1991, is one of several postulated designs for the motor. It shows a rotary motor in miniature, complete with all the essential parts that were “invented” for electric motors in modern times. Behe marvels not only at the design of this flagellum, but also at the complexity of the mechanism, both physical and chemical. How could this have evolved by chance through the process of small modifications from something else? Either it works as a whole or it does not. Where would one find the “evolutionary pressure” for continued development of a non-functioning motor?
 
 

2a: Flagellum base	2b: Schematic of Motor
	note: nm = nanometer = 1/10,000,000,000 meter

Behe asserts that the bacterial flagellum is an example of irreducible complexity. In his words, this means “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”³⁸ Such a system cannot be got to gradually by a series of slight modifications.

As Behe poses the question, it amounts to a sharp point that shows evidence for intelligent design in Creation. Is this enough to convince a person of intelligent design—Prof. Provine, for example? At the least, it is doubtful that Provine would have gotten the same number of knowing chuckles from the audience if he had put this picture on the screen instead of the butterfly.

Behe notes that Charles Darwin himself was quite aware of the need for “slight, successive modifications” in his theory. In the Origin of Species, in a section headed “Modes of Transition”, Darwin made this statement:
 

Darwin could look at the butterfly and he did not find “such a case”, but he was unable to look at Behe’s example, because anything substantially smaller than a cell could not be examined with the optical microscopes available in his day, hence the title of Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box.

As remarked above, an optical microscope can only see something that is larger than about half a wavelength of visible light. This amounts to about 0.25m for violet light. Only large-scale details of a bacterium would be visible; certainly not the details of the flagellum’s “motor”, which has a diameter of about 0.08m, several times smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light (See Figure 3). So it is perhaps not surprising that Darwin could not find “such a case.” One way that is used to prove that the flagellum actually rotates is to glue the flagellum to a glass slide and observe the rotation of the bacterium, which is large enough to be optically observable. This is something akin to fixing a helicopter’s prop to a rigid support, and observing the helicopter rotate. Fixed in this way, the bacteria typically rotate at a rate of 10 cycles per second, whereas free flagella have been observed to rotate up to 200 cycles per second at room temperature.⁴⁰
 
 

A. Resolution 250 nm (limit of visible light)	B. Resolution 25 nm	C. Resolution 2.5 nm This is the T2 virus (~ 80 nm wide x 250 nm high)

This clear evidence for intelligent design in creation is an example of a sharp point. It points to a Designer. And evidence of a designer points to God. This is the first step to redemption: “He that cometh to God must believe that he is…” [Heb. 11:6, KJV].

This example also illustrates that sharp points are not logical syllogisms. They do not lead to a conclusion in a mathematical sense, and so the implication of the sharp point can be denied, but at a cost which increases as the point becomes “sharper”. In the butterfly and the flagellum, one can see at least three increasing levels of sharpness.

Imagination vs. Science. It is reasonable to ask, why does one have to probe so deeply into the microscopic world in order to see evidence for irreducible complexity and design? Behe points out in his book that when a biochemist works at that microscopic level, things are more transparent because enough layers of complexity have been removed so that theories can be tested by direct experimentation or calculation. It is even possible to count the molecules. Cause and effect can be directly compared with known chemical and physical processes. At the macro level in which most evolutionists work, the complexities are so vast that it is relatively easy to gloss over the details. Stephen Jay Gould once disparaged the “poor” engineering of the human eye, arguing that if God had created the eye, he would have done a better job. This comment brings to mind the recollection of discussions as a Drexel undergraduate. When a real engineer criticizes the design of something, one can usually take the criticism to mean that he or she knows how to do the job better. Knowing how doesn’t simply mean imagining a different end result, it means having an understanding of the process that leads to the result. One might imagine an old-fashioned suction-type well pump that would draw water from a 100 foot well, but in fact that is impossible to do: imagining something different or better doesn’t count to an engineer unless he or she knows how to do it better. On the other hand, one can confidently state that neither Gould nor anyone else has any idea how to manipulate the DNA coding to produce a better eye. So his comments are not remarks of a person who has an eye for engineering. Lest this judgment seems too harsh, consider this remark of Behe:
 

Sharp Points in the Age of Reason.

Modern science has revealed marvelous sharp points through its creative work, but there is also a down side to the modern scientific age. A remarkable proverb states, “Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint.” (Proverbs 29:18a, NIV). The King James for this verse is the well-known reading, “Where there is no vision the people perish.” The King James grabs one’s imagination, but the NIV is a more accurate translation in this instance. It states in a very concise way what has happened in the centuries after Gutenberg and the rise of rationalism. It expresses the need for God’s revelation as a guide and restraint on human behavior.

The Age of Reason spans the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. If you like to think in terms of specific events, then date it from Nicolaus Copernicus, who first successfully challenged Ptolemaic astronomy, to Francis Crick who discovered the helical configuration of DNA, the genetic code that exists in the cell nucleus.

Why Copernicus? Because he challenged the gratuitous extension of religious authority to the natural world. The religious leaders naturally resisted this challenge. Luther dismissed Copernicus’ statement that the earth spins by citing the account of Joshua’s extended day: “This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.”⁴³ The fact that Copernicus proved to be right, and not Luther (or the Catholic Cardinals, for that matter), did not speak well for religious authority, which lost heavily at the court of intellectual opinion.

Why Francis Crick? Because with his discovery, biology lost all hope of fully understanding genetics, much less evolution, by empirical rational methods: the process is simply too complex. The multiple levels of indirect determinism that span the gap from the codons in DNA to the final realization in a functioning organism boggle the mind: it is just too much.

The Age of Reason is over now, done in by numerous sharp points. The new age has not yet jelled; this is not surprising, because in fact it took a hundred years on either side of Copernicus for the groundwork of the Age of Reason to be set in place. It will take some time for the new age to settle into a pattern too. Meanwhile, the new age has the label “Postmodern”, for lack of a better term.

The Age of Reason was the exuberant heyday of excessive, credulous rationalism, of the scientific method, and of logical reductionism, the notion that everything of interest yields to the methods of empirical science and can be picked apart and put back together logically and scientifically. The age saw the rise and fall of major secular isms which began in the hubris of the enlightenment and died of their own inadequacies. Some major themes of the Age of Reason, and recent books that record this demise are:
 

Actually none of these excesses is really dead, they are all still alive enough to cause a lot of trouble; they are lions without teeth or claws, but one can still be gummed and pawed to death.

The Age of Reason began as scholars and scientists came to see folly in the teachings of the old scholastic world, which over-emphasized the value of tradition and ancient authority and of particular modes of interpretation. The new age threw off this ponderous mass that had acted as a restraint on free inquiry. Unfortunately, in the process, as the age of reason rolled on, it gradually threw away all authority, including the authority of scripture, and the wisdom of practical Christendom that had worked great wonders in changing the direction and quality of Western Civilization over the preceding millennia.

From the proverb it is evident what this throwing off would lead to. If there is no revelation for a guide, and if the empirical methods of science are the only source of truth and knowledge, then society suffers two things:
 

Scientific Racism. To begin, it is important to distinguish between tribalism and racism. Tribalism is a bias in favor of one’s own group, but does not necessarily imply that there is an objective difference between tribes, only that others are foreigners and do not belong. A current example of pure tribalism is the ethnic hatred between Bosnians and Serbs, who are racially indistinguishable. Racism, on the other hand, asserts that there is an objective inherited difference between cultural groups; that is, the empirical “observables” betoken a genetic “otherness” that separates human races.

There are two general explanations for cultural differences:
 

Does the Bible say anything about this? Definitely yes. Consider the statement in Colossians 3:10-11:
 

The combination “barbarian, Scythian” here is parallel to the combination “Greek or Jew.” To the Jew of Paul’s day, the name “Greek” brought to mind a person who, although possibly cultured, was religiously a pagan, and therefore detestable to the Jewish God. Similarly, the “Scythian” is the arch-typical barbarian, the barbarian of barbarians. Thus, Col. 3:11 makes the emphatic point that even the “offense which a Scythian must give to natural sensibility is overcome by the baptism of the Messiah Jesus.”⁴⁴

Remarks about the equal worth of all humans occur in a number of places in the Bible, but this statement is particularly interesting, because the equality among believers relates to the “image” of the Creator. It clearly indicates equal participation in the Gospel, and therefore equality at a fundamental level, of all humans. This rules out, for example, the possibility that the “barbarians” or even the “Scythians” are sub-human, which has been a sticking point and the subject of many sharp points regarding racism, from the Enlightenment through the present time. There is no room here for racism, or for tribalism for that matter. As was remarked earlier, D’Sousa calls this Biblical teaching “passionate universalism.”⁴⁵

Secular culture today teaches that racism is based in primitive tribal or (especially) religious prejudice, and that its elimination depends on the triumph of humanism and rationalism. In fact, the historical truth is exactly the opposite of this. Racism is a product of empirical science, developed and fortified during the enlightenment, and its demise, together with the end of slavery in the Western world, was initiated and is largely due to religious efforts based on Biblical teaching and opposed by the enlightened “freethinkers” of society. D’Sousa expresses the cultural situation this way:
 

Racism began as part of an effort to understand cultural differences among ethnic groups. As Europeans explored the world in the centuries after Columbus, they came across primitive and strange cultures. The question arose as to why many of these cultures apparently stagnated at a primitive subsistence level, while others had apparently advanced to a level of sophistication and then collapsed. They encountered social mores and practices that were offensive or seemed to display a child-like naiveté. As these things were studied systematically, it became hard for the empirical scientists not to conclude that the differences between “primitive” and “advanced” ethnic groups had a genetic basis. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who was a prominent scientist of the mid-1800’s wrote the book The Inequality of Human Races in 1853, just 10 years before Darwin’s Origin of Species.. D’Sousa cites him as follows:
 

Racism evolved into a scientifically-based assertion of Western cultural superiority that was eventually proclaimed to be intrinsic to the white races and was used to justify slavery and domination of the third world by Westerners. This message is the essence of D’Sousa’s book, and is one reason why that book is so disliked in some academic circles because it points to the scientific method as a major culprit, rather than to religious prejudice and superstition.

Virtually all of the prominent scientists of the nineteenth century accepted these studies in racism, because in fact it was a triumph of modern science over the old Greek environmentalism as well as the passionate universalism of Christianity, which the secular scientist and freethinker ridiculed. It is interesting to see how modern humanistic scientists dance around this fact. In the book Broca’s Brain, named after Paul Broca, a surgeon and anthropologist of the late 1800’s, Carl Sagan felt it necessary to find an excuse for this prominent scientist. He wrote:
 

The truth is, it was not “consuming prejudices of society” that were at fault, it was empirical science itself, as practiced by the “freethinkers” who disregarded the warnings and example of the Bible and of history. But Carl Sagan, the supreme humanist, could not accept this explanation. In fact, Broca was very much in the mainstream of the empirical science of his day, and the fault lay less to prejudice than to blind faith in the powers of the empirical method.

The issue of racism is a good example of why humans need revelation from God: Christendom’s position of the essential similarity of the human “races” had to suffer through almost three centuries of refutation by the “enlightenment” before it once again took hold. The first steps to ending racism began with an early 1800’s Quaker movement to end slavery, first in Europe and then in the United States. D’Sousa says of this:
 

As a result of the revival of the Biblical concept of human equality, the explanation for differences between ethnic groups once again reverted to environmental causes.

The tale of scientific racism is a story of science gone wild. The new-found enthusiasm for the empirical method threw off all restraints, especially Biblical principles—that is what the word “freethinker” means. The consequence was a terrible centuries-long history of humans perpetrating injustice in the name of science. The end was the double tragedy of scientific justification for treating the third world races as inferior to Westerners, and the “scientific” theories of Arianism that fueled Hitler’s “ethnic cleansing.” The world ended up being sickened by the consequences of its own vaunted freethinking. “Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint.”

Space does not permit discussion of the other isms of science in the Age of Reason: of Marxism, Darwinism, especially social Darwinism, Freudianism and so on. Collectively, these isms have resulted in The Age of Extremes as historian Eric Hobbsbawm titled the first half of the twentieth century, in which more humans were killed or allowed to die as the result of conscious, rational, scientific decisions than ever before in history. Isaiah Berlin called the century “The most terrible century in Western history.”⁵⁰ The two world wars of this century were profligate in the wasting of human lives. But they had the effect of showing the lie to Racism, Social Darwinism and other isms. They graphically demonstrated that the prevailing secular viewpoint is woefully inadequate and leaves mankind vulnerable to untold devastations. They point to the need to consider something beyond the secular. But how many millions suffered, and how much injustice in order to make this point! One reads of French priests who became atheists at Verdun, the focus of the most terrible battles in World War I, after observing the horrors of battle, and deciding that no God could exist who would tolerate such a thing. But no one can know how many others then and since have been humbled to see that the war was not a parable about God, but about secularism and the flight from God, and turned to God as a result.

Sharp Points in the Third Millennium.

It is risky to comment about the future, and most especially about what God is going to do in the future, so the following remarks about the third millennium should be taken with a pinch of salt. For one thing, perhaps Christ will return, as he promised. But from the viewpoint of present times, it seems worth noting some features of the future in which sharp points appear to lurk.

1. God’s Sustaining Activity⁵¹ It is probably news to nobody that the present mood in society has an undercurrent of turmoil, anxiety, and discontent. At the same time, it is also evident that the world is in much better economic and ecological shape than was confidently predicted a few decades ago. The laws of Malthusian gloom appear to have been suspended, at least for a time. The world is not in a state of devastation resulting from a nuclear holocaust; it is not facing industrial collapse stemming from the loss of fossil fuel reserves; it is not experiencing runaway inflation; it is not in the midst of mass starvation caused by an exploding population that has outgrown the food supply. It is not in the grasp of a global totalitarian dictatorship.

Some of the fears that exist today can be traced to “junk science”. The books But is it True? by Aaron Wildavski, and The True State of the Planet Earth by Ronald Bailey focus on these fears and the facts behind them. In contrast, the fears of fifty years ago were solidly based in reasonable expectations and sober thinking. The literature of the time, such as Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm, Doctor Strangelove and On the Beach was not based on scientific fancy but on conditions that actually existed: There were terrorizing and suppressive dictatorships on a massive scale; there was an out of control arms race towards a pending nuclear holocaust; there were contemporary cases of mass starvation, and of populations wildly outstripping food supplies, known fossil fuel supplies were diminishing. These were not the result of some computer model predicting exotic scenarios. Finally, the whole world had just gone through the second horrendous World War in less than two generations, ending in a crescendo of military firepower. Who would predict that there would not be an even more horrendous repetition in the next two generations? In the face of these demonstrably real disasters waiting to happen, it is hard to imagine anyone in 1950 looking ahead to the year 2000 with anything but foreboding. Even the optimists worked with an urgency inspired by a sense of impending disaster.

The contrast between then and now could hardly be more stark. The gloomsters of the present have an ever more Cassandra-like appearance, as things continue to truck along in relative calm. The real problems that exist today, are generally recognized as solvable ones that only (!) require political will; in 1950, it was as if the world were on a roller-coaster, with no-one able to control the fate that the future would bring.

With this as background, one reads with some amusement, a comment by Eric Hobbsbawm in his recent book, The Age of Extremes. Hobbsbawm was a leftist historian; no doubt he was a Marxist in the 1930’s, perhaps later. Marxists believed in the revolt of the masses, and the collapse of capitalism. Stalin once said that a capitalist would sell you the rope so you could hang him: the idea being that the ideals and motivations of capitalism are self-destructive. Hobbsbawm divides the century in two parts: The Era of Catastrophe through World War II, and the Golden Age after World War II, ending in the 1970’s. He wrote:
 

One gets the picture of a person who disparaged capitalism in the 1950’s only to find that history ignored the assured results predicted by the best left-leaning academics.

What happened? At the risk of getting into trouble with some Christians who see only the unremitting prospect of doom as consistent with Biblical prophecy, what seems to be at work is God’s gracious sustaining activity at work. Things are not wonderful, but the relatively stable state of the world today in contrast with the expectations of a half-century ago is due principally to God’s gracious providence. It says in Colossians 1:17, “In him all things hold together.” That statement emphatically applies to the current situation.

The gloom and doom predictions after World War II were not wrong, they were in fact right, or at least reasonable in view of the recent experiences. In contrast to this realistic gloom, the Polyannish millennialists of the late 1800’s were indeed wrong: their utopia was the result of the much ballyhooed progress of science and of human self-effort. A revealing example of such utopian vision is Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887.⁵³This novel is set in Boston in the year 2000 and describes a placid, communal society, perfect in every way. The bitter tragedies of two world wars thoroughly extinguished such visions on the part of authors of the late 1940’s.

The gloom and doom predictions after World War II were based on solid and reasoned appraisals of the state of things at the time. Similarly, the responsible environmentalists who see today’s ecosystem as fragile and unstable are right! If you look at this speck in the universe, that God picked to create life and ultimately to create humans into which he vested his own image, it looks like an exceedingly precarious place to vest such an effort. Surely, Ptolemy’s scheme of the earth-centered universe is a much more stable and secure a place in which to perform such precious work! If you look at the 4 billion years over which God prepared the world for human habitation, your gut inclination would be to say, “Couldn’t God have picked a better, safer place?”

This leads to the sharp point: the world today is in reality a precarious and unstable place, not just physically, but economically, politically and in every other way. As scientists learn more and more about this world, it will not become more understandable and therefore more controllable—in fact, that is the message of the junk scientists: “spend more money, we can do it!” On the contrary, the stability that the world experiences will become ever more inexplicable as one learns more about it. The Cassandra-like calls of doom if humans do not actively work to control our environment, reflect an appreciation of the inherent instability of the world, even if their solutions are futile. It is an assessment that does not take into account God’s “holding things together.” As more and more is learned about the world around us, there will be less and less warrant for calm and complacency, because humanity will appreciate ever more keenly how truly tenuous is its hold on the third planet from the Sun. But the appreciation may also dawn that it is totally beyond human ability to affect this in any substantial way. To some this will lead to ironic living and self-delusion, expressed, for example in the arrogant posturing of the poem Invictus.:
 

To others it will lead to God.

It is not hard to see a future in which governments are led down the primrose path, trying to control the world to make it a more stable place to live. They will spend vast amounts of money, and squander vast amounts of effort, and will end up with as much uncertainty and instability as they began with. A good prototype for this is the “war on poverty” on which America has spent over four trillion dollars, with little to show for it. That is a sharp point. This does not mean that societies should pay no attention to the environment or to other potential perils, but it does mean that draconian efforts will be expensive and unavailing, and will never calm the fears of those who can see with clear eyes how perilous is our perch in the universe. Rational analysis will just outline more clearly the stark reality: that the world is unsafe! The very stability of the outcome, in the face of the instability of the prospect, is a sharp point to those who heed it. It points to our dependence on the providence of God.

2. Ironic Science.⁵⁵The term “ironic science” is John Horgan’s term to describe the state of science and philosophy in the future, in his book, The Death of Science. Ironic science results from science which is based on speculations that cannot be empirically verified. Ironic philosophy is philosophy based on a notion that there is no such thing as truth, or that, if there is, there is no way of knowing it. This is the essence of philosophical reductionism. A remarkable number of recent books lament the coming of this age of ironic science.

John Farrell, in one of these books, Freud’s Paranoid Quest, remarks,
 

Irony and paranoia go hand-in-hand. A paranoid is a person who is an exception to his own world view. He makes himself a god, standing above the mundane world. Freud was an arch paranoid. But if you live in a world in which there is no such thing as knowable truth, then paranoia is the way to advance your own agenda: you make yourself an exception to your world view. Lynne Cheney, in the book, Telling the Truth, marveled at academics who on the one hand argue that everything is relative, that there is no such thing as truth, but then insist on being believed themselves.

John Horgan’s book laments the fact that all of the “easy” stuff of science has been or soon will be discovered. The book consists of fascinating interviews with many famous modern scientists and philosophers, with the general conclusion that most of science is heading toward an ironic state: physics is reduced to speculations on superstrings and other exotic explanations for the material universe that are totally beyond any experimental testing; biology is coming face to face with ever starker evidence of what have been discussed as its “impossibles” and which Horgan sees as an impenetrable barrier to advancement; philosophy has hit the dead-end of reductionism.

Farrell basically argues that Freudian psychology was always fraudulent, which is becoming increasingly clear. In a review of Farrell’s book, Richard John Neuhaus remarked:
 

Some of the physicists who worked in the simpler older days express disgust with the current state of affairs, such as is evident in this remark by Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate physicist:
 

What is happening is that since the beginning of the Age of Reason, as the enlightened view of science came to pervade all of society, the world has operated in the belief that there is a sharp demarcation between the religious and secular spheres, and that a “wall of separation” could be maintained between them. This is nonsense, but that fact is only now gradually becoming apparent. The world described by Richard Feynman never really existed: there never was a time when science existed apart from philosophical and religious ideas. Roy Clouser, in the book, The Myth of Religious Neutrality, expresses this as follows:
 

Irony and the resultant paranoia are at work in much of academia today, and it is spilling over into politics and the media, where lies and fabrications are increasingly treated on a par with facts and truth, and reported with the same deadpan so-called media neutrality. As Lynne Cheney points out, much academic argument has abandoned reason and logic, and moved in the direction of political bombast and power-based coercion. Truth is the victim in the process, because truth is irrelevant. People who insist on accuracy are “fact fetishists” or have “an excess of literalism” as George Stephanopoulos once complained.⁶⁰

There are several sharp points in play here, which will become more and more apparent as science and culture proceed in the coming millennium. One is that the so-called “wall of separation” between secular science and religion will be seen as a myth. Clouser and Horgan are both talking about the same phenomenon. Both are saying you can’t talk about science or philosophy without bringing in gratuitous assumptions. Horgan calls these assumptions ironic; Clauser calls them religious.

This is an important sharp point that will come into play in future years. If the sharp point is heeded, society will eventually see the fiction in the “wall of separation”. If reason prevails, the result should be greater acceptance of religious instruction in morals, ethics and religious content in science in general. If reason does not prevail, the result will be an ever starker breakdown in education, science and in social policy. Science will head toward politics and power, towards irrationality and away from reason, resulting in further painful sharp points.

Ironic science is a reality, but it should not be a cause for despair, except to those who are unable to accept the fact that religious assumptions pervade all activities, even the “secular” ones. Learning that lesson is itself a very positive step back to a reasonable balance between religion and secular science, a balance that science failed to attain when it threw off the influence of religion and tradition at the start of the Age of Reason.

3. Elitism⁶¹Elitism is a kin to racism. It can take many forms, but it is at root a belief that certain strata of society or people who have certain qualities—talent, attractive features, intellect, or social pedigree, for example—have a right to be served or to provide leadership for the rest of society. The belief in the divine right of kings or in other sorts of inherited privilege is a form of elitism. The deference given to highly educated people over others is a kind of elitism. The paranoia that results from ironic science is another kind of elitism, in that it places the paranoid person over everyone else.

The Old Testament is full of statements that condemn the pride of the social elite, whose self-absorption leads to hardship and oppression of those who live in humble circumstances. It is no accident that the prophecies of the coming Messiah depict him as coming, not from Jerusalem, but from the laboring class town of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). In addition, Isaiah 53 depicts the Messiah as having no regal bearing or social stature that would be a mark of status or royal patrimony.

Jesus catered to people of humble circumstances, and made a point of associating with social outcasts such as “publicans and sinners.” He pointedly accepted people whom the religious leaders rejected: even the despised Samaritans, whom he depicted in the parable of the Good Samaritan as having greater sense of neighborliness than the priests and levites. These stories, parables and his actions were sharp points designed to get his audience to do some self-examination and return to the principles of equality that were in fact embedded in the Law, even though lost in the practices of some of those who claimed to honor it most.

Justice Bork, in the book Slouching Toward Gomorrah, and Lynn Cheney both argue that the American government is distorted by an academic hegemony. Rather than being ruled by the Constitution, Bork argues, the courts rule by the whims of the academic elite. The institutions of higher learning, which are breeding grounds for trashing American values, are for the most part subsidized by the very American taxpayers whom they trash. Elitists who call themselves “artists” consider themselves above the law and produce outright pornography, including child pornography that is protected as “art” but some of which would be illegal for a private citizen to own. Government institutions such as the National Academy of Science, and the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities (NEA, NEH) provide money and subsidies to continue this cult of elitism.

The sharp points that come from elitism are well described by these authors. They are found in the disasters of socialism, in public education, in the legal system and in other areas of society where elitism has held sway. It is hard to predict what the end result will be, whether progress will be made against elitism or whether the entrenchment of the elitists, with the money and power that goes with it, will continue unchecked.

4. The Nature of Just Law.⁶²The Bible has a lot to say about the nature of just laws. The coming millennium will bring into sharp focus the contrasts that now exist between the Biblical views and law as it is practiced in our society. If changes are not made in our laws, then our society may face a breakdown of the rule of law with terrible sharp points.

Two conceptual differences exist between our current laws which are based on the Greco/Roman model and the Biblical model. First, Biblical law is descriptive law, whereas the Greco/Roman model is prescriptive law. Second, in Biblical law, the victim is the focus of justice, not society as a whole.

Prescriptive Law. The social laws of the Old Testament were very few in number, and concerned sweepingly general principles of conduct. The ten commandments, to give one example, would fit on just one of the tens of thousands of pages of regulations in the Federal Register that are produced each year. The Old Testament principle at work here is that laws should be general and not specific, descriptive and not prescriptive. As Philip K. Howard states in his book The Death of Common Sense, the modern objective to make “a system of laws where all is set forth precisely, each situation covered in advance comes directly out of the Enlightenment.” This is the ultimate of prescriptive law. As Howard points out, this ideal is impossible to attain, and in fact leads to arbitrariness in its application. Howard cites numerous examples where laws that attempt to prescribe for all possible outcomes end up being impossible to carry out, with the result that the law enforcer ends up with arbitrary and capricious powers. The very arbitrariness in the administration of law is a sharp point.

The essential moral problem with the (non-Biblical) Greco/Roman approach to law is that it leads to the abandonment of common sense, as the title of Howard’s book asserts, and it leads to general disrespect for the law. Justice is not served by drawing fine legal distinctions that are totally artificial, such as the distinction between late-term abortion (which is legal and can be performed for any reason) and infanticide (which is murder). Thus a young woman who aborts a child for any reason, just before birth acts within her “rights” and is entirely within the law, but a woman who kills her newborn child is a murderer. It is perhaps understandable that the woman herself cannot see the distinction, since it would take a sophist who is thoroughly immersed in legal distinctions to understand it. Similarly it is patently nonsensical that a woman who “endangers” her unborn child by excessive drug or alcohol use is a felon, but one who aborts it is not. These kinds of distinctions in law breed disdain for the rule of law: trivialization of common sense leads to disdain for the rule of law. This is the source of a number of sharp points.

Identity of the Victim. An important contrast exists between modern law and Biblical law in identifying the wronged party. The modern concept is that a fictitious entity, the state, is the injured party: a crime is viewed as an offense against the state, disrespect for its authority or disregard for its regulations. The Biblical concept is that the victim is the injured party: the purpose of the state is to ensure justice for the victim, not to protect its own majesty. Roy Clouser notes:
 

Clouser goes on to say that the proper role for government is to act as the “bearer not the creator of the authority it wields in enforcing justice.” It must act on behalf of the citizen not on behalf of its own offended majesty. The objective of the state should be not only punishing and if possible rehabilitating the criminal, but also with providing justice for the victim.

The sharp points that arise in this area have to do with the breakdown in the rule of law. This breakdown will continue until society learns to pattern laws after the Biblical example.

Conclusion

The following quotation from Muggeridge expresses the fact that all of creation is involved in God’s conspiracy to reach out:
 

These messages take the form of sharp points that urge humanity in the direction of God. In the final analysis, the reality of sharp points in the lives and work of the diligent inquirer lead to a sense of emptiness and unfulfilment, as the end of Ecclesiastes 3:11 states: “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” That emptiness, which one person described as a “God-shaped void” that can only be satisfied by God himself. Anything else leaves emptiness and the pain of sharp points.
 

Postscript

A New York Times article, dated April 3, 1997⁶⁵ reported the following. In 1916, 600 scientists responded to a poll in which they were asked if they “believed in a God who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray ‘in expectation of receiving an answer.’” The poll revealed that about 40% believed, 15% were agnostic, and 42% disbelieved in such a God. The exact same poll was repeated recently, with essentially the same results (the Times noted that the disbelievers rose to 45%, but in fact this change is not statistically significant). The Times article also noted that “teachers of the so-called hard sciences, like math and chemistry, are more likely to be devout than are professors of such softer sciences as anthropology and psychology or of the humanities.” This may reflect the effect of “imagination vs. science” noted in Behe’s remarks cited earlier: the evidence for God’s activity is harder for the hard scientists to explain away (the Times article had a less flattering explanation that “the [hard] scientists are looking for definite answers, whereas humanists go into their field because they like to deal with ambiguities.”). It appears that God’s conspiracy to evangelize the inquiring mind is effective! DCB

¹ John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, Addison Wesley, 1996, p7.

² The New Revised Standard Version is recommended as an accurate translation of Psalm 19:1-4. See also David C. Bossard, God’s Law, Creation Law, IBRI RR 42, 1995, p5.

³ E. M. Blaiklock, ed. Why I am Still a Christian, Zondervan, 1971, p12.

⁴ Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church At the End of the Twentieth Century, Inter-Varsity Press, 1970, p45.

⁵ Dinesh D’Sousa, The End of Racism, Free Press, New York, 1995. p43.

⁶ C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, Brace, 1955, p177.

⁷ C.S. Lewis, p229.

⁸ Malcon Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, Wm. B. Eerdman, 1980

⁹ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, Pantheon, 1994, p3.

¹⁰ For further details in this subject area see Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, NavPress, Colorado Springs 1993, and John D. Barrow, The Origin of the Universe, Basic Books, 1994.

¹¹ Harold J. Morowitz. Statement made in the “Scopes 2” trial.

¹² For further details in this subject area see John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press, 1986.

¹³ Barrow & Tipler, pvii.

¹⁴ Quoted in Barrow & Tipler, p318.

¹⁵ Fred Hoyle, Religion and the Scientists, SCM, London, 1959. Quoted in Barrow & Tipler p22.

¹⁶ Barrow & Tipler, p253.

¹⁷ Barrow & Tipler, , p vii.

¹⁸ Synthesized from Barrow & Tipler. See pp 369ff for description of the first few minutes of the universe. The primordial elements are nuclei only, since the universe is too hot to form true atoms until it has aged about a million years. See also Barrow (1994).

¹⁹ For further details on the origin of life see Harold J. Morowitz, Beginnings of Cellular Life, Yale Univ. Press, 1992, Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Philosophical Library, New York, 1984; Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982; Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, Free Press, 1996; and Horgan.

²⁰ Francis Crick, Life Itself, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p88.

²¹ A summary of the evidence up to the mid-1980’s is found in Thaxton, Bradley, & Olsen.

²² Horgan, p140.

²³ Behe, p173.

²⁴ For an interesting discussion of this minimum, see Harold J. Morowitz, Beginnings of Cellular Life, Yale University Press, 1992.

²⁵ Mayr,p583.

²⁶ For further details in this subject area see Mayr and Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, Basic Books, NYC 1981.

²⁷ Behe, p27.

²⁸ M.W. Ho and P.T. Saunders, Quoted in Behe, p28.

²⁹ For further details in this subject area see Barrow & Tipler, p134ff; Mayr; and David C. Bossard, Beyond The Shadow of a Doubt: Logical Deduction and the Reasoning Process, IBRI RR 31, 1986.

³⁰ Barrow & Tipler, p131-3.

³¹ For further details see Behe: irreducible complexity as a major theme of the book.

³² William B. Provine and Phillip E. Johnson, Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy, (Video) Access Research Network, Colorado Springs, CO, 1994

³³ Copyright © 2000 David C. Bossard

³⁴ Behe, frontispiece. See also Fig. 3-3,p71.

³⁵ Behe, p 70.

³⁶ Evelyn Morholt & Paul F. Brandwein, A Sourcebook for the Biological Sciences, 3rd Ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, p6.

³⁷ Figure 2a is from Stephan C. Schuster and Shahid Khan, "The Bacterial Flagellar Motor" Ann Rev Biophys Biomol Struct, 1994, 23:509-39, . Cited in Behe Ch3. note 8.; Figure 2b is from Behe, Fig. 3-3. p71.

³⁸ Behe, p39.

³⁹ Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th Ed. (1988) New York University Press, Ch.6, subhead “Modes of Transition”, p154.

⁴⁰ Schuster & Kahn, Op. Cit.

⁴¹ Sketches from Stanley L. Flegler, et al, Scanning and Transmission Electron Microscopy, Oxford, 1993, p8.

⁴² Behe, p173.

⁴³ Martin Luther, Table Talk, 69, quoted in Will Durant, The Reformation, Volume 6 of The Story of Civilization,, Simon & Schuster, 1957, p858.

⁴⁴ Gerhard Kittel, Ed.,Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964:Vol 7, p450, on the word SkuqhV (Scythian).

⁴⁵ D’Sousa,p43.

⁴⁶ D’Sousa, p63

⁴⁷ D’Sousa, p65.

⁴⁸ D’Sousa, p. 11.

⁴⁹ D’Sousa, p 105.

⁵⁰ Quoted in Eric Hobbsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, Pantheon Books, 1994, p1.

⁵¹ For further details in this subject area see Aaron Wildavski, But Is It True: A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues, Harvard U. Press 1995; Ronald Bailey, Ed., The True State of the Planet Free Press, 1995; and Hobbsbawm.

⁵² Hobbsbawm, p267.

⁵³ Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1888.

⁵⁴ William Ernest Henley, Invictus

⁵⁵ For further details in this subject area see Horgan; Lynne V. Cheney, Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense, Touchstone: Simon and Schuster, 1996; John Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion, NYU Press, New York, 1996; and Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality,: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

⁵⁶ John Farrell, p204.

⁵⁷ Farrell, Reviewed by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things Dec. 1996, p51

⁵⁸ Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, MIT Press 1967 p173.

⁵⁹ Clouser, p2.

⁶⁰ Cheney, p17.

⁶¹ For further details in this subject area see Robert H. Bork,, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, Regan Press: Harper Collins 1996; Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, Harper & Row 1988; also Cheney, Farrell, and Howard.

⁶² For further details in this subject area see Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America, Random House, 1994; Bossard, God’s Law, Creation Law; also Bork, Clouser, and Howard.

⁶³ Clouser, p271.

⁶⁴ Muggeridge, p14.

⁶⁵ Natalie Angier, “Survey of Scientists Finds a Stability of Faith in God”, New York Times, April 3, 1997, pA-12. Citing survey by Dr. Edward J. Larson, to appear on this date in Nature.