Who is our Benefactor?

“Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. It is a holiday celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States. While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.” So says Wikipedia, the cultural standard bearer of definitive information in contemporary culture. Secularization of American culture is most definitely a significant force in our land, but in thinking about our upcoming Holiday I gave a few minutes thought to the outworkings of secular ideology as it relates to thanksgiving in general.

According to the given definition, tradition has held that on Thanksgiving we express general feelings of gratitude. Many times this tradition is manifest in the form of persons in a gathering taking their turn expressing gratitude for that one particular thing for which they are most thankful in the past year. “My new set of golf clubs” says one, “Keeping my job in difficult times” says another, “Just getting together with family” still another. Around and around we go, expressing our gratitude. But gratitude to whom? Gratitude is not a general statement to no one in particular; rather it is an expression of thanks to a person.

These expressions of gratitude are very basic, but what about the most important things in life; namely our life and health. If we can be grateful for golf clubs or a continued place of employment or the opportunity for a family gathering, then how important is giving thanks for the breath we draw each day, waking up every morning, or the good health most of us enjoy to go about our daily activities. To whom do we give thanks for those things that we often express are most important?

This issue is especially poignant for me this year as my wife and I are expecting our fourth child. Ultrasound technicians have told us that it appears we will be having a healthy little girl (our first as we currently have three boys at home). The secularist would tell me to be generally grateful for that little girl, but it would seem they do not tell me to whom to be thankful. Based on the worldview behind secularism, however, they do give an answer. Secularism would tell me that my little girl is a new happy accident and my thanks should go to the beneficent hand of the evolutionary process of time and random chance. The point I wish to make, and the problem that secularism would have us ignore, is that without God, gratitude as a real response for things we would hold up as most important in this world is lost.

Perhaps instead of settling for a secular idea of an expression of “gratitude in general”, we should consider giving a more specific thanks as King David implored upon beginning a monumental building project, “But who am I, and who are my people, that we shoud be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. O Lord our God, as for al this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. I know, my God, that you test the heart and are please with integrity. All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent. And now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. O Lord, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Isreal, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you.”

During this season of Thanksgiving, let us all give some consideration not just to the act of being generally grateful, but to whom we are giving our thanks. It has been said that if we can tell our children to thank santa claus for putting goodies in their stockings, is there no one we can thank for putting two feet into ours? I cannot speak for another, but as for me and my house, from the most important things to the least, we give our heartfelt thanks not to a great perhaps of indifference, but to an infinite personal Creator God from whose hand all blessings flow.

Critique Two - Part Seven - Heart and Soul

As the final principles of "loose consensus" presented by Mr. Kurtz (reason, science and education) are those which i've commented at length in recent posts, i'm going to address one final point and then a brief summary of this reading in secular humanism.

Mr. Kurtz states in a section entitled "Religious Skepticism" that "We have found no convincing evidence taht there is a seperable 'soul' or that it exists before birth or survives death." This statement is intriguing to me coming from the secular humanist camp because it so blatantly and opening argues in a circle. Mr. Kurtz has gone to great lengths to describe how the secular humanist feels that everything is knowable by human intellect and reason. Tell me, can the soul of man ever be detected by human intellect or reason? The answer of course is no. The humanist has here begun by assuming nothing supernatural exists and everything that can be known is discovered through the cognative abilities and physical investigations of man. So, in essence he says that only measureable things exist, we cannot measure the soul, and therefore the soul doesn't exist.

This is quite telling, because I believe this is the point with the vociferous atheist and secular humanist, namely that in the realm of the religious there is no amount of evidence that would be accepted. As a believer in Jesus and one who is comitted to the Biblical-Christian worldview, I cannot prove that God exists. I can provide evidence (Cosmological argument, Teleological argument, Existence of Morals, Ontological argument and arguments from specified complexity and irreducible complexity) that when gathered together to answer in a cogent and comprehensive manner the most important questions in life, namely origin, meaning, morality and destiny, end up being the most compelling and lucid. I also can bring the real and personal experience of the change in my life that has come from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in a daily walk.

It is important to remember that every worldview must answer those most important questions in life. If someone were to ask: Where did I come from? Why am I here? How should I behave and interact with others while i'm here? What will happen to me when I die? The secular humanist would have to respond, in simple form: You originated from a random collocation of atoms, a happy accident, a pure product of time and random chance. Based on the answer to question number one, there is no good reason why you are here as opposed to not being at all. You can do whatever you like as long as you don't hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt. Nothing happens when you die, we have asked dead people what happens and they didn't say anything.

These are not trite, false or overexaggerated answers. If pressed on these points the secular humanist would have to answer this way or betray the worldview he/she espouses. What is lost therefore is meaning, hope, love, justice, freedom and gratitude; a high price to pay to satisfy the desire to reason among themselves to cast off all restraint and do what seems right in their own eyes.

In contrast, when asked the same set of questions, the Biblical-Christian turns to the Word of God (for perspective in this life) and answers as follows: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in this body, this will mean fruitful labor for me." "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind...Love your neighbor as yourself." "After that, we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words." If we submit ourselves to Jesus we are offered love, joy, peace, contentment, hope, justice, freedom and meaningful and consistent answers to the most important questions in life.

Ultimately it comes down to a simple choice: we tell God "Thy will be done", or we tell ourselves "My will be done."

Critique Two - Part Six - Building without Foundations

Education is a topic of great importance to me as I have been blessed with four children, one which I look forward to meeting for the first time in early February, all of which my wife and I have chosen to homeschool. Mr. Kurtz makes a few remarks in his sixth principle of “loose consensus” among secular humanists whose logic is blatantly circular and specifically ignores an issue of great difficulty. In this single paragraph synopsis of his beliefs regarding moral education, Mr. Kurtz states the following:

“It should be noted that secular humanism is not so much a specific morality as it is a method for the explanation and discovery of rational moral principles,” and elsewhere, “We do not believe that any particular sect can claim important values as their exclusive property; hence it is the duty of public education to deal with these values. Accordingly, we support moral education in the schools that is designed to develop an appreciation for moral virtues, intelligence, and the building of character…We do not think it is moral to baptize infants, to confirm adolescents, or to impose a religious creed on young people before they are able to consent.”

There are many issues that are of great concern to me in this area, but I will deal with only two herein. Firstly, on the statement that secular humanism is merely a method of explanation and discovery of rational moral principles. There seems to be one glaringly obvious omission in this statement; namely, does the secular humanist never ask from whence those moral principles came? Secondarily, with reference to the previous discussion on ethics, on what basis would a secular humanist decide what makes a moral judgment rational? The fatal problem in the secular humanists’ position here is that he or she has to first assume that moral choices exist and that they can be rationally determined without ever asking from whence they came. Is the origin of morals irrelevant to the pronouncement and instruction of them? The humanist is trying to build a house without a foundation. It occurs to me the position is the same with young people today and the use of calculators. Why don’t we only teach children the use of calculators in math classes? After all the children would receive perfect marks in their primary math courses of study. They would know to match up the numbers and symbols on paper with those on the calculator and the teachers in class could simply instruct the students on the sequencing of the keystrokes, or “explain and discover the rational calculative principles in math”. I would submit it is because we know that when they enter reality and are working part time behind the register at a local fast food chain and the computer goes down they would be crippled intellectually.

If the origin of ethics is ignored or purposefully excluded in the instruction of children of all ages, in time what we will have is not a society of free-thinking rational moral agents, but rather a generation of adults who are ethically crippled. You can attempt to show people intellectually the how’s of making moral choices, but without origins you cannot tell them the why’s of making moral choices. Relative to morality this is precisely what the Biblical-Christian offers, the why’s of moral choices. Jesus taught exclusively on the why’s of ethics and morals. Jesus did not spend his approximately three years of active ministry holding seminars on the specifics of moral behavior; instead He walked and talked with people, showed them why their actions were sinful, forgave them and left them with the simple instruction: “Go and sin no more.”

The secular humanists' duplicitous position of attempting to smuggle in an ethic and then proposing to have discovered a moral principle using pure intellect carries over into the issue of education. Mr. Kurtz makes the assertion, quite rightly, that no group can claim as their property important values. However, he then makes the unsupportable claim that therefore public education is the only valid arena in which to deal with the issues of morality. Mr. Kurtz has stated that it is not moral to impose any kind of moral creed on young people before they are of consenting age, but this completely negates his statement on public schools, and is contrary to reality. Wouldn’t public schools be a body of adults (Boards of Education, Principles and classroom instructors) teaching children the ‘right way’ to deal with moral issues? Besides we have already established that the instructors could not even address where those morals came from in the first place. What Mr. Kurtz is promoting is not that children be free from indoctrination, but that they be indoctrinated with secular humanist beliefs as opposed to religious ones, with the hollow justification that religions 'force' morals on people and secular humanism is no religion.

Religion is defined by the unabridged random house dictionary as the following: “concern over what exists beyond the visible world, differentiated from philosophy in that it operates through faith or intuition rather than reason; a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects; a body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices.” Although Mr. Kurtz tries very hard to classify secular humanism as something other than a religion with his usage of wording such as “loose consensus”, “method” and “develop an appreciation;" make no mistake, secular humanism is a religion based on ideas established on faith, seeking to make disciples through evangelistic efforts and proselytization. More on this next time.

Critique Two - Part Five - Perspective on Ethics

"Ethics Based on Critical Intelligence" is the next in the line of principles that form the secular humanist "loose consensus". Religion is waved aside in the ethical discussion with the statement "Thus secularists deny that morality needs to be deduced from religious belief or that those who do not espouse a religious doctrine are immoral." Ethical discussion are, in my opinion, the weakest of all the humanist positions. It is one of a few areas where they attempt to make a short leap over an uncrossable divide. Because the point is so obviously weak with a little thought, I won't spend much time on this point, and only give a few illustrations for clarity.

This issue is one of perspective and brings to mind the arctic. I have read that in the history of arctic exploration whole parties would be lost. They would be walking along a sea of white and happen upon a crevasse and summarily fall in to the huge split in the ice. The party never saw the crevasse because they were looking on a 2-dimensional plane. With the perspective of the third dimension they could have seen the crevasse and avoided the pitfall. Ethics for the humanist is like this crevasse. The humanist approaches the idea of ethics from a 2-dimensional grid of the cognative and the emotive and try to make the short step to morality. However, real life shows that no amount of reason or emotion can lead to an ethical decision, rather an ethic has to already be in place to make an ethical decision.

C.S. Lewis describes it this way: he says that the humanist is like a person in a hallway devoid of any previous ethical bias and has a series of doors of ethical decision from which to choose. But which door will he choose? He has no ethic to call on to decide which door in correct. One cannot make the ethical decision without first having an ethical intimation of which door is right before choosing. The humanist is left with only selecting one door and waiting to see if he or she happened upon the correct door by chance, and must then live with the consequence of leaving such an important decision to chance.

For the secular humanist the apparent short step from the cognative and emotive to the moral, without the perspective of a transcendent ethic, ends up being a fall into the morass of "grey areas", exceptions, and a wait-and-see consequentialist approach.

For the follower of Jesus with the biblical-christian worldview this problem does not exist.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." John 1:1-2
Providing the perspective on the cognative and emotive grid is the Word of God. Notice carefully that it does not say 'In the beginning was the feeling..." or "In the beginning was the reason...". No, rather "In the beginning was the Word..." The Word of God is the transcendent ethic that provides perspective that guides humankind to moral choices on the intellectual and emotional grid. Those in Nazi Germany who abandoned the perspective of the transcendent ethic reasoned and felt like they should help evolution along in creating a better race of man. They had the majority and were the most cultured and educated in Germany at the time. Even if reason and emotion led the whole world to follow that line of thinking, it was ethically wrong and immoral to attempt to exterminate an entire race of people because the Word of God stands above us all, sees the great cravasse of death, destruction, bloodlust and greed for power and says "Thou shalt not kill" because "...God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Critique Two - Part Four - Autonomy Assumed

"As democratic secularists, we consistently defend the ideal of freedom of conscience and belief from those ecclesiastical, political, and economic interests that seek to repress them, but genuine political liberty, democratic decision-making based upon majority rule, and respect for minority rights and the rule of law." This statement is part of Mr. Kurtz' opening remarks for the third position of "loose consensus" for a good majority of secular humanists. There is much to say, but I believe it really comes down to two really problematic considerations at which humanists must simply wave their hand, but cripple this mindset of the ideal of freedom.

First, there is an assumption underlying the purely democratic position presented here. Mr. Kurtz is presenting a democratic system of decision-making based on majority rule that will stand for freedom from any group's attempt at control, that will defend and protect human rights all for the ultimate strengthening of the human race. The assumption here seems all too clear; namely, the majority will choose the 'right' thing for the human race. But from whence does the idea of the 'right' thing come? Isn't the 'right' thing for the human race being decided by the human race one vote at a time? If there is no absolute moral law (which is what theists posit as part of the nature of God) what does 'right' even mean, except what the majority decides? This brings up a frightening question, what constitutes a majority decision? 51 of 100? What if 51 out of 100 people feel that people over the age of 70 represent the vast majority of health care costs, and since economically the culture cannot maintain itself at the current rate of expenditure for health care, and so for the betterment of society as a whole anyone over the age of 70 should be euthanized? Wouldn't this have to be implemented? Wouldn't this actually be the 'right' thing to do since the majority had considered the ultimate betterment of society and legitimately voted of the policy? These questions are not far-fetched or extreme, history shows that man is capable of exactly this line of reasoning outside any religious system. Without an unchangeable set of values that says all life is precious and filled with intrinsic value, what would keep any group in the majority from simply deciding which other groups were a 'drag' of the society as a whole and having them eliminated? It is only through an altruistic and simple view of all men as autonomous agents who always choose actions that are 'right' or 'good'. Those who espouse a Biblical-Christian worldview (and the founders of this nation) present a view of humanity that is actually consistent with reality, namely, man knows what is right, he doesn't do it. We know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, because we are created in the image of God and therefore have common leanings toward the good. Evil is simply a perversion of good, and that is true for every human regardless of race, color, creed, location, age, or any other material or physical attribute.

That brings us to the whole discussion on freedom. What is the freedom we are talking about here? Mr. Kurtz actually borrows from the Declaration of Independence and says humanists are for the defense of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". He says these are rights are all human rights. With due respect, from whence do these rights that all humans have come? If humans are nothing more than cosmic accidents that exist because of a combination of random chance and time then did these rights come from the cosmos? Chance? Time? Do we give these rights to ourselves? Why do we have these rights and not trees or tadpoles or groundhogs? Again, looking to the founders, who were directly influenced by the likes of Coke, Blackstone and Locke who wrote based on the ideas of the Reformation, these rights are called "inalienable" and are said to be given to man by his "Creator". They understood man was created in the image of God and therefore has intrinsic value with rights to life, liberty and property that were not given by man and could not be infringed upon or taken away by man.

Arthur James Balfour dealt with the ideas of humanism in the early 1900's and addressed these very issues in a series of lectures later published under the title "Theism and Humanism". On the topics of freedom, values and democracy, he says the following:

"How came they to be what they are? To what causal process are they due?...what survival value have aesthetic judgments and feelings at any stage in culture?...It must, in other words, be shown that communities rich in the genius which creates beauty and in the sensibility which enjoys it, will therefore breed more freely and struggle more successfully than their less gifted neighbors...if so, our aesthetic sensibilities must be regarded (from the naturalistic standpoint) as the work of chance. They form no part of the quasi design which we attribute to selection; they are unexplained accidents of the evolutionary process. This conclusion harmonizes ill with the importance which civilized man assigns them in his scheme of values...Can we be content with a world-outlook which assigns to these chance products of matter and motion so vast a value measured on the scale of culture, and no value worth counting measured on the scale of race survival?...Where then, it will be asked, do we reach the point in the aesthetic scale at which values begin to require metaphysical or theological postulates? Is it the point at which beauty begins? If so, who determines where this lies; and by what authority do they speak?"

I believe what the secular humanists are advocating is autonomy for man, that humankind should be able to do whatever humankind decides to do. This, however, is not freedom but slavery. We all live in the present with a record of the recent past. Humankind cannot see into the distant past nor the future, and therefore can have no concept of how things began or how current decisions will turn out in the end. Worse, if it is a given that we are nothing more than happy cosmic accidents it doesn't even matter what decisions we make or if we survive as a race another day. So, under the secular humanist worldview, all decisions by a majority will turn out to be choices made in response to whim or fancy, even if they are arrived at after serious contemplation and discussion and with all possible sincerity. In this attempt to throw off all restraint by God, government and anyone else who would attempt to 'control' them, mankind ends up being shackled by his own appetites, enslaved by his own wants, and subject to his own selfish desires.

In contrast, Jesus who was and is and is to come offers the following with respect to freedom:
"If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free...I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." John 8:31,32 and 34-36

What are the commandments Jesus proposed we hold to for the truth and subsequently freedom?

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."