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Worldview

49 Former NASA Scientists Send A Letter Disputing Climate Change

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by Gus Lubin

Some prominent voices at are fed up with the agency’s activist stance toward climate change.

The following letter asking the agency to move away from climate models and to limit its stance to what can be empirically proven, was sent by 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts.

The letter criticizes the Goddard Institute For Space Studies especially, where director Jim Hansen and climatologist Gavin Schmidt have been outspoken advocates for action.

The press release with attached letter is below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.com

Joint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence

HOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.

49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.

The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.

H. Leighton Steward, chairman of the non-profit Plants Need CO2, noted that many of the former NASA scientists harbored doubts about the significance of the C02-climate change theory and have concerns over NASA’s advocacy on the issue. While making presentations in late 2011 to many of the signatories of the letter, Steward realized that the NASA scientists should make their concerns known to NASA and the GISS.

“These American heroes – the astronauts that took to space and the scientists and engineers that put them there – are simply stating their concern over NASA’s extreme advocacy for an unproven theory,” said Leighton Steward. “There’s a concern that if it turns out that CO2 is not a major cause of climate change, NASA will have put the reputation of NASA, NASA’s current and former employees, and even the very reputation of science itself at risk of public ridicule and distrust.”

Select excerpts from the letter:

  • “The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”
  • “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”
  • “We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject.”

The full text of the letter:

March 28, 2012

The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.

For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,

(Attached signatures)

CC: Mr. John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for Science

CC: Ass Mr. Chris Scolese, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center

Ref: Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, dated 3-26-12, regarding a request for NASA to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims that human produced CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change.

/s/ Jack Barneburg, Jack – JSC, Space Shuttle Structures, Engineering Directorate, 34 years

/s/ Larry Bell – JSC, Mgr. Crew Systems Div., Engineering Directorate, 32 years

/s/ Dr. Donald Bogard – JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 41 years

/s/ Jerry C. Bostick – JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 23 years

/s/ Dr. Phillip K. Chapman – JSC, Scientist – astronaut, 5 years

/s/ Michael F. Collins, JSC, Chief, Flight Design and Dynamics Division, MOD, 41 years

/s/ Dr. Kenneth Cox – JSC, Chief Flight Dynamics Div., Engr. Directorate, 40 years

/s/ Walter Cunningham – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 7, 8 years

/s/ Dr. Donald M. Curry – JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Leading Edge, Thermal Protection Sys., Engr. Dir., 44 years

/s/ Leroy Day – Hdq. Deputy Director, Space Shuttle Program, 19 years

/s/ Dr. Henry P. Decell, Jr. – JSC, Chief, Theory & Analysis Office, 5 years

/s/Charles F. Deiterich – JSC, Mgr., Flight Operations Integration, MOD, 30 years

/s/ Dr. Harold Doiron – JSC, Chairman, Shuttle Pogo Prevention Panel, 16 years

/s/ Charles Duke – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 16, 10 years

/s/ Anita Gale

/s/ Grace Germany – JSC, Program Analyst, 35 years

/s/ Ed Gibson – JSC, Astronaut Skylab 4, 14 years

/s/ Richard Gordon – JSC, Astronaut, Gemini Xi, Apollo 12, 9 years

/s/ Gerald C. Griffin – JSC, Apollo Flight Director, and Director of Johnson Space Center, 22 years

/s/ Thomas M. Grubbs – JSC, Chief, Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Branch, 31 years

/s/ Thomas J. Harmon

/s/ David W. Heath – JSC, Reentry Specialist, MOD, 30 years

/s/ Miguel A. Hernandez, Jr. – JSC, Flight crew training and operations, 3 years

/s/ James R. Roundtree – JSC Branch Chief, 26 years

/s/ Enoch Jones – JSC, Mgr. SE&I, Shuttle Program Office, 26 years

/s/ Dr. Joseph Kerwin – JSC, Astronaut, Skylab 2, Director of Space and Life Sciences, 22 years

/s/ Jack Knight – JSC, Chief, Advanced Operations and Development Division, MOD, 40 years

/s/ Dr. Christopher C. Kraft – JSC, Apollo Flight Director and Director of Johnson Space Center, 24 years

/s/ Paul C. Kramer – JSC, Ass.t for Planning Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Div., Egr. Dir., 34 years

/s/ Alex (Skip) Larsen

/s/ Dr. Lubert Leger – JSC, Ass’t. Chief Materials Division, Engr. Directorate, 30 years

/s/ Dr. Humbolt C. Mandell – JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Program Control and Advance Programs, 40 years

/s/ Donald K. McCutchen – JSC, Project Engineer – Space Shuttle and ISS Program Offices, 33 years

/s/ Thomas L. (Tom) Moser – Hdq. Dep. Assoc. Admin. & Director, Space Station Program, 28 years

/s/ Dr. George Mueller – Hdq., Assoc. Adm., Office of Space Flight, 6 years

/s/ Tom Ohesorge

/s/ James Peacock – JSC, Apollo and Shuttle Program Office, 21 years

/s/ Richard McFarland – JSC, Mgr. Motion Simulators, 28 years

/s/ Joseph E. Rogers – JSC, Chief, Structures and Dynamics Branch, Engr. Directorate,40 years

/s/ Bernard J. Rosenbaum – JSC, Chief Engineer, Propulsion and Power Division, Engr. Dir., 48 years

/s/ Dr. Harrison (Jack) Schmitt – JSC, Astronaut Apollo 17, 10 years

/s/ Gerard C. Shows – JSC, Asst. Manager, Quality Assurance, 30 years

/s/ Kenneth Suit – JSC, Ass’t Mgr., Systems Integration, Space Shuttle, 37 years

/s/ Robert F. Thompson – JSC, Program Manager, Space Shuttle, 44 years/s/ Frank Van Renesselaer – Hdq., Mgr. Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters, 15 years

/s/ Dr. James Visentine – JSC Materials Branch, Engineering Directorate, 30 years

/s/ Manfred (Dutch) von Ehrenfried – JSC, Flight Controller; Mercury, Gemini & Apollo, MOD, 10 years

/s/ George Weisskopf – JSC, Avionics Systems Division, Engineering Dir., 40 years

/s/ Al Worden – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 15, 9 years

/s/ Thomas (Tom) Wysmuller – JSC, Meteorologist, 5 years

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Edward Feser
Atheism

Former Atheist & Philosophy Professor Edward Feser On How Studying Philosophy Convinced Him of God’s Existence

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By James Bishop

Philosopher Edward Feser perhaps has one of the most well articulated and detailed testimonies I recall having read (which at this point is quite a few). Feser is a professional philosopher after all, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Nonetheless, in this short post I have attempted to summarize Feser’s journey while also attempting to outline some of the key moments that had taken place within it. I am confident that this summarized testimony will be helpful to those who don’t necessarily have the time to read through the 7000 word testimony on Feser’s own website. However, I do encourage reading the full testimony for there is much in the details not included here.

As a way of biography, Feser is a well-known philosopher in the profession having penned numerous academic articles on several subjects ranging from the philosophy of mind to metaphysics. He is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College, previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. He has authored numerous books including Aquinas, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. Feser was also once an atheist naturalist until he converted to Christianity.

Feser explains that he was a convinced atheist naturalist for a period of 10 years in the 1990s and that his transition away from it “was no single event, but a gradual transformation.” He was brought up Catholic but ultimately lost his faith while a teenager around the age of 13 or 14. His atheism stayed with him well into his university years as a passionate philosophy student. While at university he discovered a new interest in existentialism and existentialist philosophers, particularly Soren Kierkegaard. This interest led him to discover other existentialists such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann of whom he both appreciated but especially Kaufmann in particular. In the more modern philosophical climate, the atheist analytic philosopher J. L. Mackie proved appealing to Feser, and he considered Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism to be a solid piece of philosophical work. Feser remarks that Mackie’s book was “intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for anything written by a “New Atheist.”” Philosopher Kai Nielsen would also appeal on issues of morality and religion. According to Feser,

What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed… Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth — something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

However, when he examined analytic philosophy in some more detail during the course of his studies it would, before long, bring his “youthful atheism down to earth.” The genesis of Feser’s transition away from atheism came about when he first began to look into the philosophy of language and logic. Over the several following years, during which he weighed information and arguments presented in his course materials, he reasoned that the existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning failed to satisfy,

I already knew from the lay of the land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested as much on fashion as on anything else.

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Thomas Aquinas
Catholic

Why Thomas Aquinas Stands the Test of Time

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by Casey Chalk

The 2016 data breach of the personal Gmail account of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, garnered much attention from Catholics. They took umbrage at an email exchange discussing the possibility of a “Catholic Spring” aimed at fundamentally changing their identity and beliefs. In that conversation, John Halpin, a Catholic and fellow at the Center for American Progress, noted that many “powerful elements” in conservatism are Catholic. He speculated that “they must be attracted to the systematic thought,” and added, “they can throw around ‘Thomistic’ thought and ‘subsidiarity’ and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.”

I’m not sure Halpin knows “what the hell” Thomistic thought is, but I certainly wish he—and all Americans—did. Thomism, 745 years since the great theologian’s death, remains perhaps the best philosophical system available to the West.

As I’ve argued elsewhere at TAC, we are all philosophers in the sense that we all develop, either consciously or subconsciously, a system of thought for evaluating ourselves, the world around us, and what counts as truth. We make choices, form opinions, and offer arguments, all based on philosophical presuppositions. When we go with “what works,” we channel the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. When we seek to maximize sensual pleasure and minimize pain, we are drinking from the well of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. When we act off of scientifically verifiable data, we are the intellectual heirs of empiricist David Hume. Those who believe morality can be changed by will honor the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche. And those who reduce human persons to their economic output have embraced the thinking of Karl Marx.

There are fundamental problems with all of these philosophies. One error that unites them is a belief, either explicit or implicit, in materialism, or the idea that man (and reality) is reducible solely to what is material, what can be sensed, and what can be empirically studied. Even that which separates man from all other animals—his intellect and will—are explained away as physical properties. Yet without an intellect and will, appeals to an essential human dignity quickly collapse. We are all just a bunch of colliding atoms in a universe of colliding atoms. It’s just that our atoms are a bit more evolved and sophisticated than everything else.

Thus do all these philosophical systems tend to dehumanize man and overemphasize certain goods at the expense of others. For example, pace the pragmatists and utilitarians, of course we should prefer things that work over things that don’t work and pleasure over pain. But sometimes what “works” isn’t immediately perceptible to our senses. Additionally, the greatest pleasures in life sometimes require great sacrifice and suffering. Making decisions based on empirical data is a good, but not all things worthy of our attention can be empirically derived (e.g. the arts, human love, knowledge of eternal truth). There is something to Nietzsche’s argument that knowledge can be an instrument of power, but his claim that reality as we know it is simply an artificial creation of our minds unravels when one asks whether his own presuppositions are really real or just perspectives he has created and thus just as ephemeral as everything he attacks. Marx was right to recognize that man’s economic output contributes to his dignity and value—but it certainly isn’t the sum of his worth.

Who can save us amid this messiness? I would offer Aquinas. His philosophy doesn’t get as much attention as other philosophers, and certainly not as much as those of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment. When Americans think of Aquinas, if they ever do, they’re more inclined to think of his role in Christian theology, especially his contribution to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Perhaps if they’ve taken introductory theology or philosophy courses, they’re aware of his famous “Five Ways,” or proofs of the existence of God, which prominent New Atheist Richard Dawkins sought to take to task (and failed) in his bestselling book The God Delusion.

Yet Aquinas is a philosopher par excellence who is worthy of our attention. He stands tall on his own merits as the one who “was able to provide the principles,” to quote French philosopher Pierre Manent, for political communities governed by reason and grace. Yet his value also lies in the larger intellectual project of which he is a part. By this I mean that Aquinas, in a way that was perhaps unprecedented in the 12th and 13th centuries, consolidates the wisdom of the Western tradition into a coherent whole. He draws upon an impressive variety of sources. Certainly Holy Scripture and earlier theologians like Augustine, John of Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Anselm loom large in his work, though he is also incredibly well-versed in the history of philosophy.

It was Thomas who “baptized” Aristotle by appropriating significant chunks of his philosophy, including such concepts as act and potency, hylemorphism, the four causes, essence and existence, transcendentals, and being. Even Aquinas’s proofs for God’s existence, as many Thomists have noted, are drawing upon Aristotelian premises. He also builds his philosophical system upon the shoulders of Plato, Cicero, Boethius, Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali, Maimonides, and John Scotus Eriugena. This enterprise reflects conservatism at its best: studying, honoring, and incorporating the very best of our intellectual forebears, while carefully and humbly critiquing where they went astray.

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Christinas-First-Possessed-Voice-web
Believers

“The Devil and Father Amorth” — Comparing A Possessed Voice with Janis Joplin using a Spectral Frequency Display

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If you’re interested in the topic of exorcism, the documentary, “The Devil and Father Amorth,” is worth your time.

It’s a professionally made documentary primarily due to the thoroughness of the director. He interviews a broad sample of observers (and participants) around the exorcisms. And, despite his expertise, the director removes all effects and technical obstacles from his subject rather than add layers of them as he did in “The Exorcist.”

If you’ve watched the clip, you’ve heard the voice of one of the possessed women (Christina) at 1 minute, 12 seconds into the above trailer.

I consistently hear three voices every time the one being exorcised cries out. If this is, somehow, faked by the director, it discredits the documentary. However, I don’t suspect there was any sound editing of the ladies voice. To satisfy my own curiosity of the makeup of these “voices,” I captured many of them from the documentary, and you can see their spectral frequency prints, below.

Dissociative Trance Disorder?

When the director interviews a room full of five doctors of various expertise, he’s quickly referred to what the doctors say is “a recognized diagnosis, worldwide”: Dissociative Trance Disorder.1 From the abstract of that paper:

Although dissociative trance disorders, especially possession disorder, are probably more common than is usually though, precise clinical data are lacking. Ten persons undergoing exorcisms for devil trance possession state were studied with the Dissociative Disorders Diagnostic Schedule and the Rorschach test. These persons had many traits in common with dissociative identity disorder patients. They were overwhelmed by paranormal experiences. Despite claiming possession by a demon, most of them managed to maintain normal social functioning.

You can read the full paper, online.

Bishop Barron Isn’t Ready

Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, says he wouldn’t speak to the devil like Father Amorth because he’s not at that spiritual level:

Speaking to the devil like Father Amorth? I would never dare do that. I’m not there, spiritually, I think it’s a very dangerous thing…it’s dangerous ground. You have to be really, really, Holy. . . I’m not ready for that; I’d be afraid.

Jeffrey B. Russell’s Says it Best

One of the most insightful comments in the documentary is by Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of “The Prince of Darkness.” Jeffrey says that possession is merely the seizure of your body.

The way they take over your soul is by tempting you to sin. That’s how they get you because you’re using your free will to do evil.

Spectral Frequency Displays

As a musician, I have a good ear for sounds and the ability to distinguish between them.

For example, you know that feeling you get when you’re watching a movie and can’t quite place the voice? I rarely experience that since the person behind the voice is evident to me (If I know who they are in real life.)

To make a more objective visual image, however, I used the Spectral Frequency Display in Adobe Audition to show the “print” of the voices in this documentary.

For reference: human speaking voices for men range from ~85 – 180hz and for women, 165 – 255 Hz. Frequencies above this are usually attributed to harmonics, room echo, or non-vocal-cord sounds produced by the throat. All of those elements are present in the voice prints, below.

The vertical axis is frequency, and the horizontal axis is time. The brightness represents the loudness of the sound source in that frequency range. The bright yellow areas are the primary sound, the orange and purple are harmonics, echo, or non-vocal-cord sounds. The black areas are silent.

Here’s the director’s voice asking a question:

Audio Player

Director's Voice

Here’s Christina answering the Director’s question:

Audio Player

Christina Speaking

Father Amorth praying:

Audio Player

Father Amorth makes a guttural sound during prayer:

Audio Player

Father-Amort-Makes-Gutteral-Sounds-web

Family praying together:

Audio Player

Family Praying

Christina’s first “possessed” voice:

Audio Player

Christinas-First-Possessed-Voice-web

A six-second segment of Christina’s possessed voice:

Audio Player

Christina long segment of possessed voice

When looking at the prints of Christina’s voice during the possession, it becomes apparent why it gives the impression of either three or four voices. Two frequencies are pronounced enough to be heard separately at 1k and below. Two more are at 2k-4k. Her first print is also extraordinary in that it emits harmonics >16khz. No other voice in the documentary does that.

But look at the print when Father Amorth makes a guttural sound during prayer. Strong harmonics appear three or four times just below 3k Hz. This is an important comparison because Father and Christina are in the same room at the same time.

For an additional comparison, I’ve recorded two isolated voice tracks of Janis Joplin. The recordings attempt to isolate only Janis’ voice to be as similar as possible to the Father Amorth and Christina.

Janis Joplin, Clip #1:

Audio Player

Janis Joplin Clip 1

Janis Joplin, Clip #2:

Audio Player

Janis Joplin Clip 2

  1. ”Dissociative Trance Disorder: Clinical and Rorschach Findings in Ten Persons Reporting Demon Possession and Treated by Exorcism” by Stefano Ferracuti, Roberta Sacco, and Renato Lazzari, Dept. Of Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine, University of Rome “La Sapienza.” Journal of Personality Assessment, 1996, 66(3), 525-539, Copyright 1996, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ↩

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John-Lennox-Oxford-Union
Apologetics

Transcript: God Exists — John Lennox

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This transcript is of John Lennox presenting his case for the existence of God at the Oxford Union in 2012.

Copyright © 2012 Oxford Media Associates

The excerpts, below, are a sample of the transcript.

God Exists

And as we look at the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, Alfred North Whitehead and many others commented, that men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m not ashamed of being both a scientist and a Christian because, arguably, Christianity gave me my subject.

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What I am amazed at is that serious thinkers today continue to ask us to choose between God and science. That’s like asking people to choose between Henry Ford and engineering as an explanation of the motor car.

When Newton discovered his law of gravity he didn’t say I’ve got a law, I don’t need God. No, he wrote the Principia Mathematica, arguably the greatest work in the whole history of science, because he saw that God is not the same kind of explanation as a scientific explanation. God doesn’t Compete. Agency does not compete with mechanism and law.

It reminds me a little bit of GK Chesterton who said, “It is absurd to complain that it is unthinkable for an unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then to pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

Leading philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame says, “If atheists are right that we are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes then they have given a strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties, and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including their atheism.” Their biology and their belief in naturalism would, therefore, appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.

As modern science sprang from Judeo-Christian sources, so did the concept of human equality. Listen to atheist Jurgen Habermas, arguably one of Germany’s leading intellectuals. He said that “Universalistic egalitarianism from which sprang the ideals of freedom and collective life and solidarity, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”

This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day there is no alternative to it. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.

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The Post Christian Future, Part one
Believers

Transcript: The Post-Christian Future, Part 1 — Michael Heiser

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As described in a recent post, there are all kinds of great uses for transcripts, and I’ve started creating them for video and audio materials important enough to have in text format.

The first transcript I completed is of a documentary interview with Jordan Peterson conducted by David Fuller for Rebel Wisdom entitled, “Truth in the Time of Chaos.” You can find that transcript on McGillespie.com.

This second transcript is the first part of a presentation Michael Heiser gave in 2013 to Future Congress 2. It’s entitled “The Post-Christian Future, Part One, Thinking Theologically About the Utopian Impulse as a Perversion of the Judeo-Christian Worldview.”

(Note: I’ll be posting the transcript on the forum. What follows, here, are short excerpts)

Copyright © 2013 Michael S. Heiser

The presentation was given while Mike was preparing to write the sequel to “The Facade.” Part one is ~9000 words and includes 25 slides. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Dr. Heiser and please consider supporting his work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube. The transcript is merely an attempt to make video and audio material more accessible.

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Road Map

MH is Michael S. Heiser

MH: There’s always been sort of this impulse to either create the perfect society or more pertinently, force it on people. And so, I see looming on the horizon a new effort at creating a wonderful, blissful, totalitarian state and I want to sort of pursue that a little bit and talk about it. And again, for those of you here, and for those of you who listen later to the presentation, I just want to get you thinking about why it is that this always seems to rear its ugly head and why even Christians, at times, are not immune from this notion that we can make things perfect, that we can just make it alright if we did this, that, and the other thing, everything would be ok.

MH: So, I want to try to think theologically about those things, and we’ll see what happens. So, here is our roadmap for the day.Road Map

Definition & Relevance

MH: So, first part: definition and relevance. Utopia as you may or may not know, again, is this idea of a perfect human society. The term itself refers to an ideal place that actually doesn’t exist.Definition & Relevance

MH: It’s imaginary, you know, it’s conceptual. It’s this grand wish, something that can’t be real in the real world but boy we wish it was, that sort of thing.

MH: And again the breakdown of the term utopia: no place, a good or no place. And you’ll see it spelled either with the “e” or with the “o” forming the “u”, in either case. But it actually could have either derivation depending on who’s using it.

MH: An imaginary world where social justice is achieved, whatever that means, and the means of guaranteeing all that is secure. That’s where the control comes in. So that’s what we’re talking about. And as far as the impulse, what are the elements?

ExamplesUtopian Examples

MH: And HG Wells, of course, a lot of a lot of their thinking was influenced by eugenics. To create the ideal society you need ideal people, right? You need to sort of weed out the unfortunate or less desirable elements to the human population. So that was very common in the United States. A lot of later not-so-eugenic theory and practice was drawn from American and British writing. Those were the seed beds to some of those things that we would come later on.

MH: Marxist Leninism, of course, this would be the Lennon experiment with Marxism. Of course the Revolution of 1917. You know, again, the working class. We’re going to create the community where the worker is in power. Ostensibly, this is how it’s marketed. This is how it’s put forth.

How It’s Sold vs. Actual ResultEcological vs Neo-Paganism

MH: Nowadays we refer to eugenics as genetic engineering and genetic selection. Genetics is just the new eugenics. And I’m not here to demonize all genetic research because that would just be ridiculous too. But, once you have the power of the genome in your hand, eugenics is really easy. You know, it’s just it’s just how do we how do we accomplish this thing we can easily do now on a wide scale? That’s the only question you need to ask.

MH: Politically, of course, world peace freedom from crime which in their right mind would oppose that? Well, I’m not opposed to that. I am opposed to statist fiefdom. If you’re a statist, you are anti-individual. Think about that. That means if you’re in control you get to criminalize practically anything. Criminalize self-protection —that would be like gun laws taking guns away okay. We’re going to criminalize your ability to protect yourself. Why? Because your emphasis is on the state, the utopia, as opposed to the individual.

MH: Citizens self-sustenance, we talked about that with the food supply. You have each individual state, state being defined as country here, trying to implement their view of perfection, their view of the ideal situation. But ultimately you have a push toward global government.

Progress or Human Control?Progress or Human Control?

MH: Progress, human improvement, science & technology. Human control is what this means in our day and age. So, whereas we would call it progress human improvement through science and technology what it really means is control of people through science and technology.

MH: We have information control. In other words, we’ll fill your head with what it needs to be filled with. Knowledge is power. It’s easy to propagandize things like the political process. Eugenics, that’s progress because we’re weeding out…we’re clearing out the gene pool there and that a good thing. Police state we have to have a police state to enforce progress. Commerce comes under state control. Basically, everything you do, if it’s viewed as being an impediment to progress, then it needs to be controlled or eliminated. We have to be able to keep the progress going. We don’t want progress to stop.

MH: Now, utopian impulse as a biblical perversion. And this is where your handout comes in I’m going to go through this quickly, and I’ll tell you what the handout supplements.

MH: Here are the fundamental myths of utopianism. The idea that humans are perfectible, that’s a myth. Either on an individual level or a corporate level, it ignores human capacity for evil. It ignores you know the condition of the heart. But it’s a myth that drives utopianism. The other myth is that you can force human perfectibility. That just isn’t going to work. So enforcing an Edenic state. In other words, it would be Eden by human effort. Eden created by a ruling human elite.

Babel and Myths of UtopianismBabel & Myths of Utopianism

MH: Babel is a big deal with this because if you understand what’s going on at Babel a ziggurat, Tower of Babel, was built to bring the divine to earth. We’re going to build you a house we’re going to build you home because gods live on mountains so let’s like build our own mountain so that the deity will come here and when he comes here we can negotiate; we can we can kind of barter.

MH: It’s the same logic of idolatry. The ancient person wasn’t wasn’t an idiot he knows that this thing he just made isn’t his creator so why do they make idols? Because they believe deities can be summoned to reside there; you locate the deity. This is why Israel was forbidden to make graven images because Yahweh cannot be tamed. Yahweh will not be brought anywhere for negotiation. That’s up to him. It’s a completely different perspective on it. But you have the same thing going on with Babel. We are going to reestablish Eden we are going to bring the deity back to earth. We’re separated from the deity now we got kicked out in all that stuff we’re going to bring the deity back down to earth, and then we’re going to you know do all this stuff, all this good stuff. Well, again it’s a usurpation of God’s plan God’s punishment. Humans trying to remedy and re-kick-start what they ruined. Babel is sort of the beginning living illustration of this idea that hey let’s bring heaven to earth. Utopian thinking. Heaven is not going to come to earth until God wills it and not before. But that’s what the utopian misses or hates take your pick, one way or the other.

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Christianity And Darwinism
Biology

Two Notable Evolutionary Biologists Dismiss the Reigning Theory of Darwinian Evolution

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Bill Sardi reports . . .

In the process of introducing a new theory on how life began, two notable evolutionary biologists have just dismissed the reigning theory of Darwinian evolution, maintaining it would take many billions of years to accomplish and would extend beyond the very age of the universe, making the current understanding of evolution impossible.

The study of Darwinian evolution, the gradual assemblage of molecules that somehow were constructed and then began replicating themselves out of some imaginary “primordial soup” or “warm pond” as Charles Darwin once described it, has just taken a U-turn.

Today the vast majority of biologists maintain what they call RNA World existed on Earth before modern cells arose.  For the past few decades the consensus of molecular biologists is that life originated from RNA — ribonucleic acid, which is a single strand of nucleotides (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine) unlike DNA which is double-stranded, and is bonded with ribose sugars rather than deoxyribose sugars that comprise DNA.

However RNA is more unstable and prone to degradation than DNA and makes a less plausible platform for the origin of life say two eminent researchers.  For the very reason of RNAs inherent instability, two researchers now say RNA couldn’t have endured the time it would have taken for evolutionary life forms to appear.

Scientific U-turn

The scientific U-turn is this.  According to astrobiologist and (Honorary) professor Brig Klyce, “Virtually all biologists now agree bacterial cells cannot form from nonliving chemical in one step.  If life arises from non-living chemicals, there must be intermediate forms.  Among the various theories on the origin of life, biologists have reached consensus on the RNA theory (called RNA WORLD), which serves as a messenger to carry out instructions from DNA and initiate and control the synthesis of proteins.  But now evolutionary thinkers say life’s first molecule was protein, not RNA.”

“Only one fact concerning the RNA World hypothesis can be established by direct observation: if it ever existed, it ended without leaving any unambiguous trace of itself,” say Peter R Wills and Charles W Carter Jr., authors of the new theory writing in the BioRxIV Beta journal.

Carter and Wills argue that RNA could not kick-start this process alone because it lacks a property they call “reflexivity.” It cannot enforce the rules by which it is made. RNA needed peptides to form the reflexive feedback loop necessary to eventually lead to life forms.

Bill Sardi continues with his thorough report . . .

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Unseen Realm Supernatural
Unseen Realm

Frank Viola Interviews Michael Heiser re: The Unseen Realm

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July 14, 2017 by Frank Viola

Countless books pass through my hands each year. Evangelical publishers send me their neaw titles routinely. Once in a while, I will interview the authors. Most of the time I don’t.

Recently, however, I came across a book where I actually found fresh content that was significantly helpful to my own thinking. Given how much I’ve read over the years, this rarely happens. Most Christian books today simply repeat what others have already written.

Here’s the story.

While doing my research on my upcoming book on the kingdom of God (due to release Summer 2018), I began reading everything I could find on the world system (which is one of the primary enemies of God’s kingdom). This led me to take a fresh look at what Scripture calls the “principalities and powers.”

In exploring the “principalities and powers” in the world of biblical scholarship, I came across Michael Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm.

While reading the book, Heiser and I began an email dialogue that delved deeper into the themes of his book and my specific area of interest. I then followed that dialogue up with the following interview for this blog. Below you can read Heiser’s answers to my interview questions regarding the content of his book The Unseen Realm. (Our own private dialogue isn’t reflected in this interview.)

The most important contribution of The Unseen Realm in my own thinking is Heiser’s treatment of cosmic geography. His work on this subject colored in many gaps that I never observed or considered before, particularly the detailed parallels between Pentecost and Babel as well as God’s relationship to the nations of the world in biblical history.

I can’t say this about most authors today, but I owe a debt to Heiser for showing me aspects of the principalities and powers that I’ve never seen before nor read in any other scholar, theologian, or commentator.

For this reason, I cite Heiser quite a bit in several chapters of my upcoming book on the kingdom.

Here’s the interview.

Enjoy!

Instead of asking, “what is your book about,” I’m going to ask the question that’s behind that question. And that unspoken question is, “how are readers going to benefit from reading your book?”

Michael S. Heiser: Several ways. First, if reviews and interactions I’ve had with readers over the last year are any indication, _Unseen Realm _trains readers to contextualize their Bible. We think “reading the Bible in context” means thinking about the handful of verses before and after the verses we’re looking at on the page. That isn’t the case. While that’s important, context is so much wider than a handful of verses.

What I mean by context is worldview—having the ancient Israelite or first-century Jew in your head as you read. How would an ancient Israelite or first-century Jew read the Bible—what would they be thinking in terms of its meaning? The truth is that if we put one of those people into a small group Bible study and asked them what they thought about a given passage meant, their answer would be quite a bit different in many cases than anything the average Christian would think. They belonged to the world that produced the Bible, which is the context the Bible needs to be understood by.

Our contexts are foreign. They derive from church tradition that is thousands of years removed from the people who wrote Scripture and the audience to whom those people wrote. _Unseen Realm _demands people read the text of Scripture—particularly in regard to supernaturalism—the way ancient people would have read it. Second, it exposes people in the church to high scholarship—peer-reviewed material produced by biblical scholars—but in readable, normal language used by non-specialists.

It’s important for people in the Church to realize that the way they talk and think about the Bible isn’t the way Bible scholars talk and think about it—and I’m including “Bible-believing” scholars there. There is a wide gap between the work of biblical scholars, whose business it is to read the text of the Bible in its own worldview context, and what you hear in church.

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that’s just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower. _Unseen Realm _deliberately does that. Though readers might think that things in the book are novel since they never heard them in church or read them in a creed, every paragraph is the result of peer-reviewed scholarship. People need to know what they’re missing.

Over the years, I’ve met some Christians who deny the reality of the demonic/satanic world. They believe that the cosmology of Jesus and Paul was archaic. Mental illnesses were ascribed to “demons.” And “Satan” and “principalities and powers” were metaphors for personal and structural evil, etc. What would you say to such people in order to convince them that the spiritual worldview of Jesus and Paul does in fact reflect reality, even in the 21st century?

Michael S. Heiser: Well, the first thing I’d say is that their worldview isn’t the worldview of Jesus, Paul, or any of the biblical writers and characters. And if you don’t have the worldview of the people who produced the Bible (under inspiration no less), you can’t understand what they were trying to communicate in many respects. Biblical people weren’t modern people. That’s self-evident no matter how much we try to deny it. We doubt the supernatural because we’ve either been taught to deny it (thinking—wrongly—that it’s incompatible with science) or because we just want to be comfortable.

We impose our modern worldview on the Bible to make it conform to our intellectual happy place. But we deceive ourselves into thinking this works or is legitimate. We fail to realize that the supernatural things we want to avoid are no more supernatural (or “weird”) than the things that define the Christian faith. What’s so “normal” about the virgin birth, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the hypostatic union of the incarnation (Jesus was 100% God and 100% man)?

Why don’t we “de-mythologize” those things in our Bible while we earnestly try to deny supernaturalist interpretations of other parts of the Bible? It’s a hopelessly inconsistent and self-focused approach to say part of what the Bible says about the supernatural spiritual world are fine but other aspects of its portrayal of that same non-human world are too strange and in need of being explained away.

What is the difference between a cherub and a seraph in Scripture? They appear to be different from their biblical descriptions (number of wings, faces, etc.).

Michael S. Heiser: There’s no difference conceptually. Both terms are job descriptions of a divine being whose role it was to protect sacred space from defilement—to guard the presence of God. The terms and the descriptions are not anatomy lessons—spirit beings are not embodied by definition. Rather, the descriptions in the visions of the prophets serve as metaphors for describing a role. They are basically job descriptions.

The terms are drawn from ancient Near Eastern iconography (Mesopotamian and Egypt, respectively). They utilize the imagery these civilizations used to describe divine beings who guarded the presence of gods or god-kings. We know that because we have the iconography (sculptures, paintings) in their appropriate context. The Babylonian context for Ezekiel’s cherubim is obvious from the first chapter. Most Bible readers don’t realize, though, why (historically) Israelites living during the eras of Ahaz, Uzziah, Hezekiah, and Isaiah would have recognized Egyptian motifs. There was a lot of royal interaction with Egypt then.

What does it mean, exactly, that Satan (the devil) is “the ruler of the dead?” And where can we find this in Scripture? Related: What does it mean that Satan once had “the power of death” — Hebrews 2:14 — implying that he doesn’t have it anymore. 

Michael S. Heiser: The idea comes from several trajectories. On one hand, you have verses like Heb 2:14 (“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself [Jesus] likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil”).

The point isn’t that Satan pulls a lever somewhere and someone dies. The idea is that all humans will die—we are not immortal—because of the transgression of the Eden that the serpent instigated. He was cast down to the underworld, the realm of the dead (I discuss the terms and motifs behind that at length in Unseen Realm), which is where all humans are destined to go and remain because of the Eden tragedy. God’s plan of salvation was designed to remove humans from the realm of the dead. Humanity followed the serpent in rebellion, and so his domain is where humanity goes.

But our destiny can be different because of God’s plan. On the other hand, there are theological ideas running in the background that produce the same idea. In Canaanite religion, for example, Baal was lord of the Underworld. He was called baʿal zebul. Sound familiar? In Ugaritic it means “prince Baal,” but by the time of the New Testament it became a descriptive title for Satan. Baal, of course, was the major deity-rival to the God of Israel. He was the lead adversary to Yahweh in Israelite religious context. What people thought about Baal informed the way they thought about the Devil later on.

Regarding the origin of the devil (“Satan” as the NT calls him), in your view, specifically when, why, _and how _did he fall?

Michael S. Heiser: I believe that all Scripture tells us is that the being the New Testament calls Satan (and which it associates with the serpent in Eden) fell when he engaged Eve to steer her out of God’s will. Eve’s existence, purpose, and destiny were of no concern to the serpent figure (which I don’t believe was a mere animal—he was a divine being in rebellion against God). Fiddling with what God told her was above his pay grade; i.e., contrary to the supreme authority, which was God. We are not told he rebelled earlier than this. We have only this initial act of rebellion. Some folks appeal to the notion that he rebelled before the creation of humanity and took a third of God’s angels with him, but there is no passage in Scripture that teaches that. In fact the only place you find the “third of the angels” talk is in the last book of the Bible—Revelation 12.

But in that passage, the war in heaven is explicitly associated with the birth / first coming of the messiah, which is considerably after creation (and the Fall). As far as why he rebelled, we aren’t told specifically. But why would an otherwise intelligent being (like you and me) overstep authority? Several reasons come to mind, like self-interest and arrogance. Since there are a number of (Hebrew) inter-textual relationships between Genesis 3 and Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, and since those prophetic chapters use the tale of a divine rebel filled with hubris to malign the kings of Babylon and Tyre, respectively, I’d say we’re on safe ground to presume that self-interest and hubris are at the core of the rebellion.

The divine rebel story behind Isaiah 14:12-15 has the villain wanting to be like the Most High and above the stars of God (a term drawn directly out of Canaanite material for the divine council / heavenly host), it’s clear the villain wanted to be the highest authority in the supernatural world. He was a usurper propelled by his own arrogance.

How does your view fit in with Ezekiel 28:14, which some believe is a reference to the devil before he fell. However, assuming that interpretation is correct, he is called “an anointed cherub.” How does that fit into the idea that the devil was once a member of the Divine Council, which some believe? 

Michael S. Heiser: I believe the “anointed cherub” phrase in this verse points to a divine rebel, not Adam as many biblical scholars want to suggest. There are many reasons for this, some of which are very technical. Readers of _Unseen Realm _will get the overview, but if they really want the details, they should read through the companion website to the book, moreunseenrealm.com (click the tab for Chapter 11).

Since the Old Testament doesn’t use terms like “devil” and never applies the term “satan” to the serpent (in any passage), this question requires more unpacking than an interview can provide (i.e., it’s best to just read the book where I can take two chapters to go through it). But I’ll try and compress a few thoughts.

On one level, by definition every divine being loyal to God is a member of the divine council, presuming “council” is understood as the collective body of heavenly beings who serve God. There are of course tiers of authority in the council, but the idea can be collective as well. So, prior to his rebellion, the being that came to Eve and caused her to sin and that later became the known as the devil was a member of God’s council, broadly defined, merely because he was a spirit being. But since we have no prior history of him before Genesis 3, we can’t say much beyond that. (The serpent of Genesis 3 is not the satan figure of Job 1-2 because of a certain rule of Hebrew grammar [again, you have to read the book], so Job 1-2 isn’t much help there).

Some scholars want to restrict the term “divine council” to the “sons of God” tier, presuming them to be the only decision makers, but this understanding doesn’t reflect the variability of the terms and ideas found in ancient texts parallel to the Hebrew Bible from which the council metaphor is drawn in many instances. The analogy of human government in civilizations that had a conception of a divine council makes that point clear. Not all members of a king’s “government” would be directly involved in decision making. There are layers of advisors who have input. But these governments had service staff or “lesser bureaucrats” who were nevertheless part of the king’s administration.

Perhaps a modern analogy of government in the United States will help make the point. We can speak of the federal legislature, by which we mean that branch of government responsible for passing laws. The term “Congress” is a synonym. However, our Congress has two parts: the Senate and the House. Decision-making members of these two bodies, and hence the Congress, are elected. The House and Senate both have service staff (e.g., “guardian officers” like the Sergeant at Arms). Though they have no decision-making power, they are nevertheless part of “Congress” in certain contexts where that term is used.

For example, saying “Congress was in session” does not mean that all service staff were given the day off. “Congress” can therefore refer to only those elected officials who make laws, or can refer to the entire bureaucratic apparatus of the federal legislature. As we will see in this discussion, the heavenly bureaucracy (council) is layered and its members serve God in different but related ways.

Rebellion against God results in being cast out of his service. God doesn’t run the affairs of the spiritual world or our world with rebels on his payroll. They are cast to the Underworld (in the case of the Eden rebel), or a special place in the Underworld (e.g., the offenders of Genesis 6:1-4, who are, to quote Peter and Jude, “kept in chains of gloomy darkness” or “sent to Tartarus”). There are more divine rebels than that in the Bible, but hopefully that scratches the surface enough.

In the book, you argue persuasively that Deuteronomy 32:8 and Psalm 82 are speaking about God assigning heavenly beings to oversee each nation in the world (after Babel). How do you envision an unfallen heavenly being specifically carrying out the tasks listed in Psalm 82? Namely, _defending the just, defending the weak and the fatherless; upholding the cause of the poor and the oppressed. _This was God’s role for them before they rebelled, but how do you envision them doing this work exactly?

Michael S. Heiser: He would do what God would do. God’s standards for justice are revealed in his moral laws, in how he tries to get humans (his imagers) to relate to each other, and in true worship. Biblical theologians encapsulate all that in the concept of “order” (the opposite of which is “chaos”).

Ruling the way God wants you to rule means fostering the ordered relationships he desires, not because he is a killjoy, but because that order maximizes human happiness and love for God. Part of that is worshipping only the true God and no other. Psalm 82’s diatribe against the fallen gods is directly linked to justice because, in the biblical worldview, failing at just living produces chaos on earth—and it’s the job of superior beings to make sure that doesn’t happen. Instead, the picture we get in Psalm 82 runs from neglect that causes chaos to stirring the pot of chaos, thereby making the lives of people miserable.

Satan is called “the prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2. What do you think that means exactly?

Michael S. Heiser: On one hand, “air” is part of the vocabulary for the spiritual world—the world which humans do not inhabit, but which divine beings do inhabit. But “air” was also a descriptor for the heavens below the firmament in Israelite cosmology—still distinguishable from God’s abode, which was above the firmament (Isa 40:22; Job 22:13; cp. Gen 1:7 to Psa 29:10). The “air” metaphor allowed people to think of the spiritual world in terms of (a) not being the realm of humans, and (b) still beneath the presence of God, or the place where God lives.

That meant Satan wasn’t in God’s presence or in control of God’s domain. Angels could be sent into the world to assist humans and would of course be opposed by those spiritual beings in control of earth’s “air space” so to speak. Ultimately, the spiritual world has no measurable parameters, or latitude and longitude (the celestial sphere is no help locating it!). Human writers have to use the language of “place” to describe something place-less (in terms of what we, as embodied beings, can understand). For that reason, it isn’t always a neat picture.

Throughout Ephesians, the phrase “heavenly places” is used in a positive sense. God’s people are seated with Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 2). All spiritual blessings reside in Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 1). However, also in Ephesians, we are told that evil principalities and powers operate in heavenly places (Eph. 6). In your view, what are the “heavenly places” in Ephesians and how can both evil spirits and Christians occupy them at the same time?

Read the Rest (~4,500 words) of the Interview of Michael Heiser by Frank Viola

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Practical Guide to Culture
Education

How Do We Help the Next Generation Navigate Culture?

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by Sean McDowell

As a parent of three kids, I am frequently trying to help them best navigate cultural voices vying for their hearts and minds. This is why I am thrilled about the new book by A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World, by Brett Kunkle and John Stonestreet. They are both my good friends and ministry partners. But most importantly, they have written an excellent book.

If you work with students in any capacity—parent, youth worker, teacher, mentor—this is a book you need to get. Read it, study it, and pass it on to other youth influencers. Here’s a quick interview to give you a taste of how to help students best navigate culture:

SEAN MCDOWELL: Why did you feel the need to write a book helping the next generation navigate culture?

KUNKLE & STONESTREET: There are nine reasons we wrote this book: Alexis, Micah, Paige, Ella, Jonah, Abigail, Ann, Ali and Hunter. They are our kids, from 22 years old all the way down to 2 months old, and we’re in the middle of trying to help them navigate the challenges of this cultural moment. We speak to parents all the time who sense, like us, that the tides have shifted significantly.

We’ve watched as the culture has become saturated with explicit sexuality, omnipresent glowing screens, increasing racial tension, marketing messages promising the good life, information from a thousand different voices, and the celebration of perpetual adolescence. However, kids growing up in this culture have never known anything different. If they are going to be discipled in Christ within the context of these challenges, we must be intentional in some very specific areas and some very key ways.

Also, we wanted to provide a resource that was tremendously practical, as the title of the book says. There are many good academic and theoretical treatments of culture have been written recently, and we wanted build on that work and leverage the insights of those books to help parents, teachers, and mentors of the next generation apply these insights in ways that will equip the next generation to thrive as followers of Christ.

What is culture? And are Christians in, above, or against culture?

To answer the second question first, yes! With proper discernment and grounding in the overarching story of redemption that Scripture provides, we will find ourselves at various times in culture, while holding to truths and values and practices that are above culture, but will occasionally (and in some contexts, often) find ourselves against  culture. We see all three approaches at different times throughout the history of the Christian church. In this Practical Guide, we hope to help the next generation cultivate the wisdom to know which approach will be required in various arenas of culture today.

Defining culture, which is how we begin the book, is essential for developing that discernment. Many Christians reduce culture to all the bad stuff “out there.” On this view, our posture will constantly be against anything and everything in culture. However, this view fails to recognize that you find culture wherever you find human beings, so we cannot reduce it to the stuff “out there.” Culture is simply what humans make of the world. It includes all of our ideas, institutions, habits, and the structures we embrace to live life together.

God made us to be culture creators. Thus, culture in and of itself is not what is bad. Instead, it’s the worldview underneath our culture-building that is true or false and it’s the direction we take culture which may be good or evil, life-giving or dehumanizing.

How does the ubiquity of information shape the way kids think? And what are a couple practical ways to counter this?

Those of us living today will encounter more information daily than someone living just a few centuries ago would have encountered during the entire course of their life. Ours is the age of information and we must understand that information constantly communicates ideas about how we are to think about and live in this world. Ideas are not merely confined to the theoretical realm but ultimately, ideas have consequences for all of life. And bad ideas have victims.

In this age, access to information has replaced the pursuit of wisdom. So, without a keenly developed sense of discernment, kids may have all the information in the world at their fingertips and yet, not know how to live life well, with wisdom. Additionally, technology has “flattened” the world such that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between what is an authoritative source and what isn’t. For our kids, this creates a major existential struggle as they ask, “Who should I trust?” In a world with so many voices, should they listen to mom and dad, their pastor, their teachers, their friends…or Wikipedia? Often, the inability to discern truth from error among all these different sources can lead to skepticism and cynicism about truth itself.

Thus, discernment is a skill we must help our kids develop. Practically, in the book we suggest that parents, mentors, and teachers should learn from the greatest educator in history, Jesus. Jesus was much more than a teacher, of course, but as He taught He harnessed the power of asking good questions. Often, His response to a question was a another question, in order to expose faulty assumptions, reveal truth and develop discernment in His listeners. In this book we offer a number of discernment-building questions to use with students to cultivate wisdom and discernment.

Perhaps the most important question students should be asked and taught to ask is, “What do you mean by that?” This important question can bring much-needed clarity amidst all the information out there. For instance, we often find ourselves using the same words as others in our culture, but not meaning the same thing. When it comes to words like love, truth, freedom, God, gender, and purpose, the Christian’s dictionary will be very different than the culture’s dictionary. When we equip students with good questions, we help them find clarity in the language and ideas of the culture. Next, we then teach them how to employ those questions when they are watching a movie on Netflix, listening to their college professor, or having a conversation with their Muslim friend.

What do you think is the most pressing issue youth influencers need to address?

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Mental Dimensions
Liberty

Father to Son: ‘The Jurisdiction of Reasonableness’

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In a world of information overload, whoever appears to be the most reasonable can influence or control the overloaded.

There’s no historical precedent for the amount of information the average person has at their fingertips, today. Anyone with a phone can bring libraries of information to bear on each and every decision.

But information is not knowledge. And knowledge is not wisdom. Without wisdom, it’s hard to tell what information applies to which decision.

This challenge, to the average person, is an opportunity for:

  1. Those who would seek to influence.
  2. Those who would seek to control.

Influence vs. Control

Whether influence is good or bad can only be determined by context and discernment. For now, I’ll confine “influence” to that with no destructive intent.

Control, on the other hand, is the desire to obtain consent for the purpose of domination. I’ll explain why consent is necessary, later in this article.

How can you tell whether someone is seeking benevolent influence or destructive control?

Those Seeking Influence …

… behave like vendors in a marketplace. They present the pros and cons of an idea or product and leave you to decide for yourself.

Those Seeking Control …

… bully, rather than inform or persuade. For example, any one of Schopenhauer’s 38 stratagems might be used to give the appearance of being right; with little or no interest in actually being right:

  1. The Extension (Dana’s Law)
  2. The Homonymy
  3. Generalize Your Opponent’s Specific Statements
  4. Conceal Your Game
  5. False Propositions
  6. Postulate What Has to Be Proved
  7. Yield Admissions Through Questions
  8. Make Your Opponent Angry
  9. Questions in Detouring Order
  10. Take Advantage of the Nay-Sayer
  11. Generalize Admissions of Specific Cases
  12. Choose Metaphors Favourable to Your Proposition
  13. Agree to Reject the Counter-Proposition
  14. Claim Victory Despite Defeat
  15. Use Seemingly Absurd Propositions
  16. Arguments Ad Hominem
  17. Defense Through Subtle Distinction
  18. Interrupt, Break, Divert the Dispute
  19. Generalize the Matter, Then Argue Against it
  20. Draw Conclusions Yourself
  21. Meet Him With a Counter-Argument as Bad as His
  22. Petitio principii
  23. Make Him Exaggerate His Statement
  24. State a False Syllogism
  25. Find One Instance to the Contrary
  26. Turn the Tables
  27. Anger Indicates a Weak Point
  28. Persuade the Audience, Not the Opponent
  29. Diversion
  30. Appeal to Authority Rather Than Reason
  31. This Is Beyond Me
  32. Put His Thesis into Some Odious Category
  33. It Applies in Theory, but Not in Practice
  34. Don’t Let Him Off the Hook
  35. Will Is More Effective Than Insight
  36. Bewilder Your opponent by Mere Bombast
  37. A Faulty Proof Refutes His Whole Position
  38. Become Personal, Insulting, Rude (argumentum ad personam)

Personal Favorites

  1. Declaring as “over”, debates that have hardly begun.
  2. Declaring as “debunked”, valid concerns yet to be addressed.
  3. Declaring as “discredited”, persons of integrity.
  4. Declaring as “concluded”, discussions that have hardly begun.
  5. Threats in lieu of persuasion.
  6. Imposing artificial deadlines for a decision.
  7. Declaring that “everybody does it” while providing no specific examples.

All of the above are attempts to deceive, rather than inform or persuade.

The Debate is Over!

Whenever I hear someone say, “The debate is over”, I know an end has been pronounced by someone desperate to avoid a beginning. I also know that the one making the pronouncement has made an investment, either monetary or emotional, that debate would put in jeopardy.

Global/Climate (Cooling | Warming | Change)

The first time I heard the phrase “Global Cooling” was in a sentence declaring the debate about it to be over. The phrase was then changed to “Global Warming” in the  same sentence declaring that debate to be over, as well.

Finally, the phrase was changed to something for which no debate is necessary: “Climate Change”. Indeed, climate is 100% guaranteed to change, forever!

The debate is over on a lot of things: ocean waves, morning dew, childish innocence. If the debate about something is declared to be over before it’s even begun, the one making the declaration has something to hide.

The Information Advantage

Due to the amount of information available, those who seek control must compete in the “marketplace” of ideas. They must not only to appear reasonable, but the most reasonable among competing alternatives. This “most reasonable” appearance must persist for as long as it takes to obtain a lasting form of control. The best of these is a binding contract, either signed or opted into.

Consent is Required for Lasting Control

Without consent, control is temporary. It lasts only as long as you remain fooled.

With consent, however, control lasts for the length of the contract.

The Jurisdiction of Reasonableness

Mere opinions, and the bullying tactics used to get them accepted, don’t matter unless there’s a valuable jurisdiction to be gained, and a judge to decide who gains them.

Those who don’t seek control rarely think about things like jurisdictions and judges. Those who do seek control, however, think about little else. They spend most of their time campaigning for appointment, by you, to be a judge in one of the most important jurisdictions of all: your mind.

Your mind is not only a jurisdiction, but the deciding jurisdiction of all others.

Agreement Types

Contractual opt-ins are becoming more and more subtle. For example, the mere breaking of a plastic seal on the box for a TV or appliance, is the opt-in for many EULAs (End-User License Agreements).

Still, an actual signature “on the dotted line” of a contract is the best legal mechanism of control.

The Debt-Contract Example

Only a handful of contracts, spread across the 7 Matters of Life, are needed to control most aspects of life. Three debt-contracts illustrate the point:

  1. Student loans — 10 Years.
  2. Car Loan — 5 Years.
  3. Mortgage — 30 Years.

One of these three contracts enslaves a large percentage of the world. To avoid that fate, consider two questions, before signing one of them:

  1. Are you fully aware of the educational, transportation, or housing alternatives that would fill these needs without going into debt?
  2. Do you not know that, if you present yourselves to anyone as an obedient slave, you are a slave of the one whom you obey? (Romans 6:16)

Some Legal Terms

Contracts are as good, or bad, as the words they contain.

Most liberties are not “lost” or “stolen”. They are surrendered, voluntarily, through legal contracts. It’s worth understanding some legal terms around such contracts.

To bear witness v. — To solemnly assert something, offering firsthand authentication of the fact; often concerning grave or important matters.

Truth (quality) n. — Conformity to reality or actuality; often with the implication of dependability.

Message — truth n. — A message that conforms to reality or actuality; whether historical (in space and time) or supernatural.

The Usual Campaign Sequence

The campaign to become an appointed judge in the jurisdiction of your mind follows a usual sequence. Think of it as a sales pitch, because that’s what it is.

  1. I am the most reasonable and provide the best options.
  2. You are less reasonable with limited options.
  3. “Those who love the truth hear my voice”1, and sign my contract.

Conclusion

Your mind is the deciding jurisdiction of all others, and you are its primary judge. The cost of retaining this position is choosing the highest source of truth, exploring all options available, and solving problems with a commitment to remain debt-free.

Pay whatever cost necessary to remain the primary judge of the jurisdiction of your mind. If you forfeit that position, all that isn’t immediately lost, is exposed to loss.

In a world of information overload, whoever appears to be the most reasonable can influence or control the overloaded.

  1. John 18:37 (ESV) ↩

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