Second things suffer, as Lewis was fond of repeating, when put first. Science is a good servant but a bad master, a good method for investigating and manipulating the material world, but no method at all for deciding what to do with the knowledge and power acquired thereby.
Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 33
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.
The common-sense dualism that discerns and distinguishes mind and matter, God and the world, and attests to the reality of both, is frequent in Newman’s thought: ‘That a divine influence moves the will,’ he wrote, ‘is a subject of thought no more mysterious than the result of volition on our muscles.’
-Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 34
In other words, if your will can move muscles, you shouldn’t be surprised that God’s will can move mountains and men. In each case, the immaterial is moving the material.
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.
‘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?
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.
