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Say ‘No’ to Mother Nature

Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister – if she and we have a common Creator – if she is our sparring partner – then the situation is quite tolerable. Perhaps we are not here as prisoners but as colonists: only consider what we have done already to the dog, the horse, or the daffodil. She is indeed a rough playfellow. There are elements of evil in her. To explain that would carry us far back: I should have to speak of Powers and Principalities and all that would seem to a modern reader most mythological. This is not the place, nor do these questions come first. It is enough to say here that Nature, like us but in her different way, is much alienated from her Creator, though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain…She has nothing to teach us. It is our business to live by our own law not by hers: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honourable and merciful means.

C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age, from Present Concerns, p. 79

I get the whole ‘Mother Nature’ thing. Even from a Christian perspective, we believe that we were formed from the ‘dust of the earth.’ But there are obviously major problems with the whole ‘Mother Nature’ idea.

Lewis nails the main issue – if Nature is our mother, then she is our teacher of morality. We sit on Nature’s lap and learn her wisdom. Yet such learning leads down the road of ‘natural selection’ and such. It leads to hunger games in which we are fighting to survive at the expense of others, and others are doing the same to us (that pretty much summarizes the various ‘enmities’ of Genesis 3).

The gospel of Jesus Christ does not call upon us to survive but to loving sacrifice. And while there are glimmers of such in Nature, we must remember that all of creation has fallen with us. We take our cues from elsewhere.

Nature and science are not teachers of morality.

“To handle the spirit of man in such a fashion is blasphemy”

As John Passmore has written, Kierkegaard ‘was happy to let science deal with plants and animals and stars’; but, Kierkegaard wrote, ‘ to handle the spirit of man in such a fashion is blasphemy.’

-Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 31

One of my primary problems with the evolutionary psychology I am studying is its treatment of man as though he is essentially no different than an animal. This is why evolutionary psychologists like Skinner could perform experiments on rats and apply the results to humans. One helpful point, reiterated over and over again, in The Restitution of Man, is that men like Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and others were fighting this battle long before my time. They saw the issues involved. We are now seeing the results that they anticipated.

Paradoxes abound. In evolutionary psychology, man debases himself by thinking himself no different from an animal, with the end result that he exalts himself, as in Nazi Germany, to keep his place atop of the food chain. By contrast, the Bible exalts man as particularly made in the image of God so that he can accept his creatureliness in humility. In evolutionary thought man starts low but makes himself high. In Christianity man starts high in order that he might be humble.

Science as Logos?

Indeed, one historian of philosophy credits Renan with having given ‘birth to the first religion of science,’ and the cultural historian Edwards Said writes that Renan throughout his career ‘seemed to imagine the role of science in human life as…’telling (speaking or articulating) definitively to man the word (logos?) of things.’ Said precisely describes here the confusion of categories characteristic of scientism: it mistakes the truth about quantities, material and spatial realities, for the Logos…

– Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 36

Science as the logos means ‘in the beginning was science.’ When, for you, science becomes the great organizing principle by which all things hold together, it has become your god. And, as C.S. Lewis liked to say, if you make something into a god it will turn into a devil. There can only be one true Logos. Put him first, and science is fine. Put science first, and that’s another story altogether.

  • He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).

The Need for Speed

‘Each area of contemporary social life is impressed, not so much by the content of science,’ which in most cases is generally incomprehensible, ‘as by the pace of scientific discovery,’ notes sociologist David Martin; ‘the field of education feels the need to produce bogus innovation in order to show that it emulates the scientific paradigm; similarly so the church.’

-Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 36

Speed impresses. The gadgets are coming fast. Thus we are impressed. Now we want to make everything fast so we can impress too. Therefore a paradigm for thought which should included assiduous meditation, careful reflection, and deep roots turns into fast food.

You look at a bodybuilder with an impressive physique and you are impressed. You want to look like him, and you want to look like him right now. The fact that it took him 20 years of nearly flawless eating and 2 hours a day in the gym doesn’t seem quite so impressive as the physique itself.

You look at a big, strong, healthy church. It is impressive. You want to start one of those, and you want it now. You aren’t so interested in the fact that the church has existed for over a hundred years and that thousands of godly souls have prayed and labored and preached (thousands of sermons) to get it to where it is.

Science brings us profound discoveries, and many of them are decades, and even centuries, in the making – builders building on the foundation of others who have gone before. Then you see and iPhone and it looks like it just appeared out of thin air. Why can’t everything just appear out of thin air?

  • Matthew 13:31 ¶ He put another story before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and put in his field: 32 Which is smaller than all seeds; but when it has come up it is greater than the plants, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of heaven come and make their resting-places in its branches.

You are what you Eat? In the Beginning was the Belly

The German materialist Karl Vogt lectured across Euorpe on Darwin and scientific materialism, propagating a harsh anti-religious and atheistic philosophy. One of his most famous sayings was quoted over and over again: ‘Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys.’ Feurbach asserted that ‘Man is what he eats,’ and commented dismally that ‘It used to be said “In the beginning God.” Now it is said, “In the beginning the belly.”

-Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 33

I am currently studying for a degree with an emphasis in psychology. It happens that the bent of our psychology classes is evolutionary/behavioral. This is psychology built on the rock of B.F. Skinner, and it focuses on externals and scientific data, leaving no room for the existence of a soul. In a psychology class I took recently, the author of our textbook made the case that, scientifically speaking, ‘memory’ and/or ‘memories’ do not exist. His reasoning was that scientists have been unable to locate the whereabouts of memory and memories in the brain. Shortly after reading the argument of the textbook, I wrote this:

My psychology textbook virtually denies the existence of the memory (pp. 342-343). ‘Memory’ is not quantifiable. We have yet to scientifically locate it in the brain despite various efforts and theories. Therefore it cannot scientifically be said to have real existence. What we call memory, the textbook contends, is best expressed as behavior adaptation based on experience.

The only question is, How am I supposed to remember all that?

Some scientists (who are really philosophers impersonating scientists) have exalted the physical world to the point that nothing outside of it can exist. In addition to this, anything that cannot be explained in terms of physicality is nothing. It is written off. And so, thoughts simply become secretions of enzymes and the firing of synapses in the brain. Memories become the adaptation of physical behavior to past experiences (as if that makes any sense).

The fact of the matter is that Jesus Christ calls himself ‘the bread of life’:

John 6:48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.

This must mean, at least, that as the body is meant to live on bread, so the soul is meant to live on Christ. Without food, the body becomes malnourished, weakens, and dies of starvation. Without Christ, this same process takes place in the soul.

We, I am speaking as an American, live in a culture that exalts externals. Among those externals, food is a monster. How many diet books are being written each year? How many people are worried about eating the right sort of foods (gluten free, low-carb, organic, etc)? ‘You are what you eat,’ we are told.

This idolatrous nature of this type of physical obsession leads Aeschliman to share the above quote, which I post again here:

Feurbach asserted that ‘Man is what he eats,’ and commented dismally that ‘It used to be said “In the beginning God.” Now it is said, “In the beginning the belly.”

‘You are what you eat’ may be a true statement. But if it is, it may be extremely bad news for many. For it is not only the body that is capable of eating, but the soul as well. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which comes from the mouth of God.’ It is not, ‘in the beginning was the belly,’ but ‘in the beginning was the Word.’

The modern scientistic (not scientific, but scientistic) denial of God, Christ, and the soul is nothing more than a pseudo-sophisticated, grown up version of a child refusing to eat his veggies. And so he starves, and in his hunger-induced delusion, denies that there was ever such a thing as food to begin with – and we who go on eating are the crazy ones.

  • John 6:54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.

Knowledge is Power?

I am currently reading The Restitution of Man, by Michael Aeschliman. This is the first of a series of reflections on various quotes from the book related to the subject of ‘Scientism.’
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‘Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est’ – scientific knowledge is power, Bacon optimistically wrote. His famous words have been rendered cruelly, ominously ironic with the advent of megadeath weaponry, stockpiled pathogens, experimentation on live fetuses, neutron bombs, nerve gas, and laser guns.
The true object of scientism, wrote Lewis quoting an equally famous assertion of Bacon, ‘is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible.’ But ‘all things possible,’ as we have seen in [the 20th] century, is a menacingly amoral category; as one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb later said regretfully, ‘We felt that neither the good nor the evil applications [of the bomb] were our responsibility.’ Such irresponsible realization of all things potential regardless of consequences is a catastrophic result of the rational and moral bankruptcy of scientism.

– Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 22

I remember very well when I was a child that during an elementary school program we performed the song (I think it was from Schoolhouse Rock), ‘Knowledge is Power.’ I can still remember the chorus:

Knowledge is power. I know what I know.
The more you learn the farther you’ll go.
When you get an education, you’ll be taking a stand.
Because knowledge is power. Grab it while you can.

The point of the song is that kids should stay in school. That’s all fine and good I suppose. The issue is the statement, ‘knowledge is power.’ Power over what? What kind of power? Is it power that I want? The ‘One Ring’ of Lord of the Rings fame brought power, but was that power desirable? Indeed it was a desirable power in some sense, but it was also disastrous power .

It’s the age-old story that goes back to the story of Creation and Fall:

  • Genesis 3:4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Knowledge can certainly be a good thing. But it is not always so. There is such a thing as an idolatrous quest for knowledge, and an idolatrous use of it. Therefore be careful what you seek to learn, how you seek to learn it, and how you apply it.

Is it true to say, ‘knowledge is power?’ It can be. But if you are truly gaining the type of knowledge that brings power, you will make yourself a servant of all.

  • Mark 9:35 And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”
  • 1 Corinthians 8:1 ¶ Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. 2 If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.