Anglican Mainstream

By Professor John Lennox, Mailonline

There's no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe.

According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.'

Unfortunately, while Hawking's argument is being hailed as controversial and ground-breaking, it is hardly new.

For years, other scientists have made similar claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to physical laws such as gravity.

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By Regis Nicholl, Breakpoint

By R R Reno, First Things

For a long time as a young teacher, I believed the danger of prostituting their minds by believing falsehoods was the preeminent, or even singular, intellectual danger my students faced. So I challenged them and tried to teach them always to be self-critical, questioning, skeptical. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where’s your evidence? Why do you believe that?

I thought I was helping my students by training them to think critically. And no doubt I was. However, reading John Henry Newman has helped me see another danger, perhaps a graver one: to be so afraid of being wrong that we fail to believe as true that which is true. He worried about the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error, rather than finding truth, were the great goal of life.

Like Plato and St. Augustine, Newman presumed that human beings fundamentally seek to know the truth. Our hearts are restless, not with fear of error, but a desire to rest in God, who is the fullness of all truth. The fulfilling activity of intellectual life is to affirm truth rather than recoil from falsehood.

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by Janie Cheaney for World Magazine

"Should This Be the Last Generation?" asks the headline of a recent New York Times column. The author is Peter Singer—always a reliable source for provocative questions.

Singer was an ethics professor of middling reputation when Animal Liberation made him an icon of the animal rights movement in 1975. … Practical Ethics was his next major work, a broader application of his views to the human species. Practical Ethics serves up Singer's version of utilitarianism, in which the ultimate good is "happiness." Anything that deprives an individual of a reasonable degree of comfort and satisfaction is therefore not good. The thing that deprives is often life itself: If physical or social circumstances are likely to doom a child to pain and suffering, it's immoral to insist that he live. Abortion can be merciful, but Singer went further: Infanticide can also be merciful, if in the first months of life it becomes evident that the child will be severely limited. And if an adult reaches a state of non-sentience and is no longer self-aware, the kindest act for everyone concerned might be to ease him gently into that good night.

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By Bill Muehlenberg

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. Unfortunately in the secular West, the rejection of God – which was meant to bring freedom – has simply resulted in bondage: bondage to bad ideas, bad thinking and bad worldviews.

A reigning worldview in much of the West – at least on most university campuses – is postmodernism. Along with its half-sister, deconstructionism, it has had a very strong, and negative, impact. A major casualty of pomo and decon is the very concept of truth.

The concept of objective, universal and unchanging truth is now more or less rejected, and in its place are simply ‘truths’. We all have our own truth, and no one’s truth is better than another’s. You have your story, I have mine, and that is all there is.

Metanarratives, or grand, overarching stories which are universally true, have been rejected for individual or cultural stories. We are told to be suspicious of such mega-stories, and of all claims at having the correct interpretation of things.

Indeed, deconstructionists insist that there is no one correct interpretation of a text (which can be anything: an idea, a book, a work of art, or a piece of music). Meaning is given to the text by the reader – there is no objective meaning to the text. Readers define and create textual meaning.

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By Albert Mohler

By Wesley J Smith, First Things

At the New York Times blog, Peter Singer favorably discusses a book that I haven’t read–Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence–that illuminates the profound danger of Singer’s utilitarian philosophy and the growing nihilism among the intellectual set.   From Singer’s post:

Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents?

 

For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. Most of those who consider that question probably do so because they have some reason to fear that the child’s life would be especially difficult — for example, if they have a family history of a devastating illness, physical or mental, that cannot yet be detected prenatally.

 

[...] Singer, it seems, finally falls foul of the problem which affects many atheists, that they just do not want to act like one. A world without human beings is, for Singer (if you’ll pardon the pun) inconceivable, even if the only justification for its continuation is the blind hope that “things can only get better”.

by Marvin Olasky WORLD magazine

One of the Bible's great statements about courage comes in chapter 5 of Esther. The Jewish queen of Persia has told Uncle Mordecai that she can't go before the king: If she does, she'll probably die. Mordecai responds with admonition—you won't escape by hiding—and then a line that has sent chills down my spine: "Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Today's three great cultural flashpoints are abortion, same-sex marriage, and evolution. We can hedge on them and justify our hedging: Playing it cool here will help me gain for Christ people who would otherwise walk away.

Over the past 15 years I've tried to explain some of the problems of Darwinism. Last year I raised questions about the "theistic evolution" that Francis Collins espouses, but didn't offer answers—and several WORLD readers have pressed me for more. OK. Read more

By Melanie Phillips in The Australian

In Britain, the benefits of diversity are apparently boundless. Now that the Pagan Police Association has received government recognition, police officers can take a string of pagan festivals as official holidays.

These include celebrating the festival of lactating sheep, and drinking mead and dancing naked to celebrate the harvest. In court, pagan officers will be allowed to pledge to tell the truth not before God but by what ‘they hold sacred’, including, presumably, the Sun God or Kriss Kringle, the Germanic god of yule.

In Australia, as historian Keith Windschuttle has chronicled in his new book The Stolen Generations – volume three of his tireless evisceration of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History — the allegedly monstrous theft of 100,000 Aboriginal children by Australian officials just because they were Aboriginal never actually happened.

In the US, when a car bomb was planted recently in New York’s Times Square by a man later revealed to be a Muslim trained in bomb-making in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, there was an initial stampede to declare the attempted atrocity was unconnected to Islamic terrorism.

It was said to be most likely the work of a Tea Party member, right-wing militiaman or lone nut. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg even suggested the bomb could have been placed by ’somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the healthcare bill or something’.

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In other words, some say this, and some say that, and who is to say who is wrong? Yet this is not a recipe for unity but for disaster. Bishop Jones needs to read Richard John Neuhaus on ‘The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy’, and to look at what the revisionist lobby is saying. The midway position on this topic is not one that can be sustained, not least because it is not one that the key protagonists wish to hold.  John Richardson

by Rowan Williams, Guardian

We shouldn't leave politics to managers and economics to brokers – or be afraid to reintroduce 'virtue' to public discourse

Human beings begin their lives in a state of dependence. They need to learn how to speak, to trust, to negotiate a world that isn't always friendly, and involves unavoidable limitations. They need an environment secure enough for them to take the necessary risks of learning – where they know there are some relationships that don't depend on getting things right, but are unconditional. The family is the indispensable foundation for all this.

We are also beings who take in more than we can easily process from the world around us; we know more than we realise, and that helps us to become self-questioning persons who are always aware things could be different. We learn this as children through fantasy and play, we keep it alive as adults through all sorts of "unproductive" activity, from sport to poetry. It is the extra things that make us human.

This is closely connected with understanding and sympathy for others. If you live in a world where everything encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view – ultimately, to ignore the cost, or the pain of others. The result may be a world where people are articulate about their own feelings and pretty illiterate about those of others. An economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, fed by a distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified box room for paranoiacs.   Read here

By N J A Humphrey, The Living Church

In his presidential address to the Church of England’s General Synod in London on Feb. 9, Rowan Williams stated his strongly-held belief that the Church desperately needs “to recover … something of the tragic recognition that not all goods are compatible in a fallen world.” If this is the case, he said, “our job is not to secure purity but to find ways of deciding such contested issues that do not simply write off the others in the debate as negligible, morally or spiritually unserious or without moral claims.” He went on to note: “Something of that ‘tragic’ awareness is hard to avoid when we look at the decisions that face us in our Church.”

Rowan Williams’s own awareness of the “tragic” in the life of the Church has been shaped, I believe, through his engagement with the works of that expert of the “tragic” in literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 2007, Rowan Williams was on sabbatical from his duties as Archbishop of Canterbury. While on sabbatical, he wrote Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007; page numbers following quotations are in parentheses). In the days leading up to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the appearance of a book about the works of a nineteenth century Russian novelist was viewed by some commentators as an instance of Williams’s penchant for diversion from the burdens of ecclesiastical office. Far from having nothing to do with practical matters, however, the book is profoundly relevant both to the one Church and to the Anglican Communion.   Read here

By John Richardson, Guardian

Few of seek it, but those of us who undergo great torment and survive can emerge all the better

Like most people, I have known those to whom life has been exceptionally good, who seem to have sailed through it with all the advantages and few of the problems. Then I have known others who, if there are such things as "fairness" and "fortune", seem to have had an unfair share of life's misfortunes.

Out of the two groups, however, whilst I have sometimes envied the former, I would far rather spend quality time with the latter.

This may be the result of my own background (I do not mean, by this, my faith). But I suspect it is rather a recognition, common to us all, of a positive quality in those who have "been through it", which is missing from those who have not.

Take Nelson Mandela, for example. Part of what makes him admirable is his dignity. Yet I doubt that he was born dignified. On the contrary, I suspect he was made that way precisely by his experience of indignity.

Now it is true that the kind of indignities heaped on Nelson Mandela may have quite a different effect on someone else. It was, we might say, "in the nature of the man" to turn out as he did. Nevertheless, we may surely doubt whether, had his life been "better", what he is today is the man he would have become.

I am sure, therefore, that suffering can improve us.

But there is nothing to guarantee it will. Nor does such improvement depend on suffering per se. This is one reason why I have little time for some of the self-inflicted "sufferings" of Lent. To make life marginally less pleasant, and then to imbue that experience with spiritual meaning, seems to me actually to belittle real suffering – unchosen, uninvited, unwelcome suffering – such as many people endure.

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By Wesley J Smith, First Things

It is astonishing to me the fervor with which some in the life sciences seek to dismantle the very concept of human freedom. If they have their way, we will go from, “The devil made me do it,” to perhaps, “My genes made me do it,” or, “My genes as mediated by my experiences made me do it,” to now apparently, “My chemicals made me do it.”

At least that is what Penn biologist Anthony R. Cashmore seems to be advocating in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an article in which he claims that human free will is fiction. First, Cashmore claims that our behavior is controlled by a “trinity of forces,” one of which is the “inherent uncertainty of the physical properties of matter.” From the article, “The Lucretian Swerve: The Biological Basis of Human Behavior and the Criminal Justice System (no link, here’s the Abstract):

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by David Yehezkel

Many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. 

By Bill Muehlenberg

(Clip)  For millennia the West was based on the monotheistic religions which viewed creation as the finite result of an infinite God, while the East has been shaped by monism (the belief that all is one) and pantheism. But recently these two opposing worldviews have experienced a massive crossover.

There are various reasons why East and West have lost their distinctive differences, and become so entwined. I here wish to focus on just one area. Western popular culture and the entertainment industry have done much to promote the pantheistic worldview and New Age spirituality.

Whether it be popular films such as the Star Wars series, or bestselling New Age tomes such as The Secret by Rhonda Byrne or A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, on all sides the West is being inundated with Eastern thinking and New Age concepts.

The most recent – and most spectacular – example of this is the runaway hit film, Avatar. It is a classic example of the pantheistic worldview, dressed up to suit modern Western tastes. It is thus quite a part of the New Age revolution which has conquered so much of the West over the past few decades.

Part of the reason why the New Age appeals so much to Westerners is that it offers the Eastern religious system but without much of its more demanding religious and ethical emphases. People are free to choose in the New Age spirituality what they like, and little or no demands are made on them.

Many of the people today who tinker with the East are really just imbibing in the New Age smorgasbord. They pick and choose those aspects which they like, and leave those which they don’t. It is all very Western really, fitting our consumerist lifestyle. Thus Eastern thoughts and concepts have very much become a part of Western life.

And films like Avatar are in many ways just a reflection of this. Instead of a creator God who stands outside of us, and places expectations and demands upon us, in the new Easternised spiritualities of the West, people are free to call the shots and determine what is right and wrong, true and false.

Indeed, they get to be God. That is the real attraction of the New Age worldview. Instead of a transcendent God with whom we must do business, and bow to, we in fact are all a part of the divine already. We just need to realise that we are already God, that we are already divine.

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by Marcia Segelstein for World Magazine