100 Gorillas vs. 1 Man

The internet has been buzzing with a hypothetical: “Could 100 men defeat a fully grown gorilla in a fight?”

 

As a former MMA fighter and coach, I’ve seen the limits of human strength—and the power of teamwork. I’ve trained with Olympic medalist wrestlers and UFC champions. Based on that experience, I’m convinced that 20 heavyweight, Olympic-caliber wrestlers or UFC champions could bring down a gorilla. Not because they’re stronger pound-for-pound, but because they’re strong enough together, and—more importantly—smart enough to devise a plan and execute it.

So, yes, 100 average men using their reasoning powers, coordination, and willpower could defeat one gorilla. But let’s flip the script: Could 100 gorillas outwit a single reasonable human? Absolutely not.

Even with sheer numbers, gorillas lack the intellectual hardware and cognitive faculties to engage in metaphysics, abstract reasoning, mathematics, moral judgment, strategic deception, or language. You could have a hundred gorillas staring at a chessboard or a copy of Mere Christianity, and they’d still be no match for even a modestly intelligent human being.

Why? Because Intelligence Isn’t Additive—It’s Categorical

Physical strength adds up: 100 pounds + 100 pounds = 200 pounds. But intelligence doesn’t scale like that. You don’t get collective rationality just by adding more non-rational minds together. Ten gorillas aren’t “ten times as clever” as one. A hundred gorillas don’t become a committee of philosophers. You just get a louder troop.

The Deeper Point      

Human beings are categorically different, not just stronger or more social, but made in the image of God. The imago Dei means we are capable of recognizing metaphysical reality, reflecting morally, reasoning logically, practicing self-awareness, and giving and receiving genuine love. These are not just evolutionary adaptations. They are spiritual fingerprints—ontological markers of our uniqueness.

Strength and Intelligence: Different Kinds of Power           

This gorilla debate accidentally reveals something profound: Raw strength and intelligence are distinct forms of power.

  • Strength is brute force.
  • Intelligence is strategic dominion.

And it’s intelligence that allows strength to be managed, directed, or overcome. That’s why God told Adam to subdue the earth and govern the creatures—not because Adam was stronger than a lion, but because he was rational, relational, reflective , and morally responsible.

Conclusion: Why This Even Matters 

It’s possible—at least hypothetically—for one hundred men to defeat a gorilla with brawn, brains, and teamwork. But not even a thousand gorillas could beat a man at chess, solve a logic puzzle, write a sonnet, or engage in metaphysics. Because intelligence isn’t just power in numbers. It’s power of a different kind altogether—a power that reflects the very mind of God.

Stay reasonable (Isaiah 1:18),
Tim Stratton

Recommended Resources:

I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback), and (Sermon) by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek 

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl (Book)

Macro Evolution? I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be a Darwinist (DVD Set), (MP3 Set) and (mp4 Download Set) by Dr. Frank Turek

 

Tim Stratton (The FreeThinking Theist) Tim pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska-Kearney (B.A. 1997) and after working in full-time ministry for several years went on to attain his graduate degree from Biola University (M.A. 2014). Tim was recently accepted at North West University to pursue his Ph.D. in systematic theology with a focus on metaphysics.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/40cLE4j

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The Day the Veil Was Torn: An Evangelical’s Awakening in London

I spent years studying Shia Islam from within, earning an MA in Islamic Studies from the Islamic College in London. My goal was to understand Islam on its terms, not merely as an outsider, but as a serious student of its theology, history, and lived reality. This academic path wasn’t just about gaining knowledge; it was rooted in a deep desire to build bridges between Christians and Muslims through respectful dialogue. I believed that rigorous study, combined with empathy and grace, could overcome centuries of misunderstanding and mistrust. That belief shaped my posture in interfaith spaces for years. However, on October 7, 2023, I was confronted with a reality that no classroom or textbook had prepared me for. What I encountered in the streets of London that day shook the very foundation of what I thought I knew, not just about Islam, but about the spiritual dynamics at play in our world today.

The View from England

October 7th started like any other day in London. Still, it ended with a profound shift in my thinking, particularly in the assumptions I had carried for years about the nature of Islam, the effectiveness of interfaith dialogue, and the influence of Western democratic values on extremist ideologies, a spiritual awakening that has since reshaped how I view Islam, Western culture, and my calling. I didn’t know it at the time, but that day tore the veil of illusion I had long carried with me into interfaith spaces. I had come to London to meet with Muslim scholars and leaders, particularly Shia leaders, many of whom I had interacted with for years through respectful, even warm, dialogue. My posture had always been one of a bridge-building. I believed, perhaps too confidently, that the West had a civilizing influence on radical Islam. I thought civility and grace would overcome the deeply entrenched theological and political barriers that divide Christians and Muslims. But that illusion shattered before my eyes. The events of October 7, 2023, exposed a deeper current of rage than I wasn’t prepared for.

Just one day before Israel responded to Hamas’ brutal incursion, I found myself surrounded by rallies in London that openly celebrated terror. These were not fringe events tucked away in back alleys, but widespread public gatherings in prominent areas. I stood among people I had once hoped to partner with for dialogue, only to hear unfiltered hatred. The chants were not only political, but deeply theological and dehumanizing. The language was raw and venomous, filled with images of resistance that glorified bloodshed. It was not just rage against Israel, but rage against the Judeo-Christian worldview. In that moment, I realized I had misunderstood the nature of the battle. What I saw was not just a protest, but a spiritual and ideological war.

Over the following days, I had 18 Uber rides, most of which were with Muslim drivers. While these conversations were significant, I recognize they reflect the views of individuals and not all Muslims, and each one became an unexpected dialogue. I didn’t try to provoke conflict, but I did ask questions to gain a deeper understanding of what people believed. The responses I heard were jarring and consistent: Israel had no right to exist, Hamas was merely defending the oppressed, and Christianity was a colonial relic. Some told me that Islam would eventually triumph and bring justice to the world, replacing the confusion caused by the Bible and Western civilization. These weren’t isolated opinions, but widespread sentiments expressed confidently and without hesitation. I began to see that a militant ideology was not only alive but thriving. It wasn’t hidden in caves or confined to faraway regions. It was riding beside me through the streets of London, one ride at a time.

The View from the United States     

When I returned to the United States, I expected to find some distance from the hostility I had witnessed overseas. But I returned to see the same rage manifesting in American streets and on our university campuses. At institutions such as Columbia University and Harvard, students and even some faculty were chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea,” openly siding with Hamas and calling for a third intifada. These were not isolated incidents, but coordinated events that reflected a larger ideological alignment. The same dehumanizing rhetoric I had heard in London was now being echoed on American soil. It was cloaked in the language of justice and liberation, but rooted in ancient hatreds. I realized the West is no longer just observing this battle from afar. It is becoming a participant, and the church can no longer afford to remain unaware.

In response, I knew I needed to go deeper intellectually, not just emotionally or spiritually. I began attending educational programs and seminars focused on antisemitism, both to understand what I had encountered and to equip myself more thoroughly. Two organizations in particular became central in this journey. First, I connected with Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, a respected academic center that conducts rigorous research on modern forms of antisemitism. Second, I engaged with ISGAP, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which addresses antisemitism as a global phenomenon and provides tools for confronting it at both scholarly and policy levels. These were not just academic spaces—they were communities where I found solidarity, wisdom, and clarity. I also developed friendships with others who had been grappling with these realities for years.

One year later, I had the opportunity to present my research on Islamic antisemitism at the annual conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. ASMEA is a scholarly organization dedicated to promoting high-quality, nonpartisan research on the Middle East and Africa. My paper drew on years of study but was sharpened by my experiences in London and beyond. I explored how classical Islamic texts, historical narratives, and political ideologies contribute to persistent antisemitic attitudes within the Muslim world. I argued that while colonialism and nationalism play roles, the theological foundations must be confronted if lasting change is to occur. The response to my presentation was deeply encouraging as several scholars approached me afterward to commend the clarity and boldness of the analysis, and a few even expressed interest in collaborative projects. It was clear that my contribution resonated with many who had been quietly wrestling with similar concerns. That moment reminded me that this research is no longer abstract. It is now central to my calling and mission.

A Call to the Church  

I left London with a heavy heart but a sharper mind. I had been naive in thinking that love alone could overcome centuries of deeply rooted theology and political grievance. What I witnessed was not merely a political protest; it was a spiritual and ideological war. This does not mean dialogue is useless, but it does mean we must understand the spiritual powers at work behind the slogans and marches. If Christians fail to recognize evil for what it is and reduce it to mere social grievance, we will continue to be blindsided. October 7 was my wake-up call. It showed me that our mission is not to tame Islam or conform to culture, but to proclaim Christ; and not to win arguments, but to stand firmly in the truth of the gospel.

Since that day, I have adopted a more presuppositional approach, meaning I begin with the assumption that the Bible is true and use that framework to interpret and challenge opposing worldviews to ministry, one that rests not just on reason and civility, but on the unshakable foundation of God’s Word. I still believe in respectful conversation, in common grace, and in the power of relationship. But I no longer underestimate the power of deeply held beliefs that stand in direct opposition to the gospel. The church must become more theologically grounded and aware of how antisemitism disguises itself in new forms—whether Islamic, progressive, or even within compromised Christian circles. We must speak clearly, love deeply, and engage boldly. The days of assuming we are insulated from this hatred are over. My prayer is that others will not need their own October 7 experience to wake up.

Recommended Resources:

Answering Islam by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD Set, Mp4 and Mp3)

Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book, DVD, Mp3, Mp4, PowerPoint download, PowerPoint CD)

Jesus vs. The Culture by Dr. Frank Turek DVD, Mp4 Download, and Mp3

Reflecting Jesus into a Dark World by Dr. Frank Turek – DVD Complete Series, Video mp4 DOWNLOAD Complete Series, and mp3 audio DOWNLOAD Complete Series

 

Tim Orr serves full-time with the Crescent Project as the Assistant Director of the Internship Program and Area Coordinator, where he is also deeply involved in outreach across the UK. A scholar of Islam, Evangelical minister, conference speaker, and interfaith consultant, Tim brings over 30 years of experience in cross-cultural ministry. He holds six academic degrees, including a Doctor of Ministry from Liberty University and a Master’s in Islamic Studies from the Islamic College in London. In September, he will begin a PhD in Religious Studies at Hartford International University.

Tim has served as a research associate with the Congregations and Polarization Project at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University Indianapolis, and for two years, he was also a research assistant on the COVID-19 study led by Hartford International University. His research interests include Islamic antisemitism, American Evangelicalism, Shia Islam, and gospel-centered ministry to Muslims.

He has spoken at leading universities and mosques throughout the UK, including Oxford University, Imperial College London, and the University of Tehran. His work has been published in peer-reviewed Islamic academic journals, and he is the author of four books. His fifth book, The Apostle Paul: A Model for Engaging Islam, is forthcoming.

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Why Drag Isn’t All Fun and Laughs

My “Pride ‘Heroes’” series draws attention to the philosophy and individuals behind the LGBTQ+ Pride movement.[1] At Arizona State University, the campus library commands all who enter to “Celebrate Pride.” This is the only sexual philosophy granted a dedicated month in which the public is commanded to obey. Meanwhile, ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts hosts an annual Drag Queen show as part of its ongoing promotion of gender ideology.

 

Why? Because the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts also holds events for other ideologies and religions as well, such as Christianity. Oh wait—no, that’s not true. It doesn’t do that. It exclusively pushes a radical leftist agenda.

Question: How will that affect federal funding under Trump’s new executive order?

A hero is someone who protects children. Protecting children includes protecting them from blatant falsehoods and from those false teachers who want to confuse them and hinder them from understanding reality. Now let’s look at Drag Queens: are these heroes who simply want to read books to children?  What we find is that the philosophy of Drag cannot escape God’s world.  All humans are made in the image of God, desire a meaningful life, and cannot find that meaning without understanding the created order that God made.  Let’s see how the Drag philosophy defends itself.

What exactly is the “Drag Queen” philosophy?

Isn’t Drag Queen philosophy just people having fun and being their authentic self? No. There are many ways to have fun and be yourself. The Drag Queen philosophy is very explicit about its purpose: to subvert norms and to teach that gender is fluid. In other words, to teach that Christianity and the other theistic religions are false.[2] It denies that there is an objective reality that shapes how we live our lives.

The Drag Queen philosophy rejects God’s creation of male and female; it is purposely contrary to the nature of things. It’s not just harmless entertainment. They often joke, “We’re coming for your children,” but the joke loses its humor when they actually do try to enter libraries and schools to impose their views about gender on young minds.

What Defenders Say

Let’s begin by taking the defenders of Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) at their word—or at least, at their marketing brochure.

  1. Literacy and Engagement

We’re told drag queens are simply performers who make reading fun. The makeup, the wigs, the glitter? All part of the show to get kids excited about books. But here’s the problem: there are many other engaging ways to promote reading that are not tied to a false ideology. We don’t read for the sake of reading; we read to understand what is true. If we train children to associate reading with clearly false ideas about gender, we haven’t helped them overall—we’ve hindered them. We’ve taught them that fiction doesn’t just belong on the page, but in how we view reality.

  1. Inclusion and Diversity

DQSH events are promoted as celebrations of inclusion, where LGBTQ+ families can feel represented and children can learn to “tolerate” diverse expressions of identity. But here’s the irony: just as those families wouldn’t want a conservative Christian showing up to impose his beliefs on them, others have a right to be free from having Drag ideology imposed on their children. The First Amendment protects free expression, but it does not give anyone the right to indoctrinate other people’s children under the guise of public programming. That path doesn’t build a diverse society—it builds resentment and antagonism. The push for “inclusion” must still respect boundaries.

  1. Teaching Gender as a Social Construct

This is the most revealing justification of all. Drag queens, as avatars of gender fluidity, are used to teach kids that gender roles are flexible, performative, and non-binary. The message? There’s no “he” or “she”—only what you feel and how you present. There is no truth, only “my truth” which is to say “my feelings.”

This is the heart of it: the desire to inculcate children with a philosophy that denies nature, creation order, objective reality, and even basic reason itself. Drag isn’t just dress-up. It’s a worldview, and its aim is to deconstruct the categories that are essential for human flourishing. The Drag Queen philosophy is clear about opposing God and his created order. Here’s a truth about every human who has ever lived: they all had exactly one biological mother and one biological father.

The problem is, homosexual men cannot have children of their own. They can try to adopt someone else’s child. Or, they can pay a woman—often a disadvantaged woman who needs the money—to rent her womb so that one of them can use his sperm to fertilize an egg (meaning the child is unrelated to the other man). But together they cannot produce a child. And so, instead, they feel the need to teach other people’s children.

This is the self-contradiction in their philosophy. On the one hand, they deny that there are any essences. They insist on radical nominalism: there are only particulars, no universals. There is only the self-declared individual who proclaims, “I am a they/them,” and no such thing as human nature, male and female, mother and father.

And yet, they still have the natural desire to pass their worldview on to children.

Their childless philosophy still conforms—unwittingly—to the natural order they claim to reject.

They cannot escape the creational pattern established by God. No amount of thinking, feeling, “authenticity” or “identity expression” can make two men conceive a child. No amount of “I wish, I wish” can erase the basic fact that civilization depends on a man and a woman teaching the children that come from their union. We live in God’s world. And we cannot escape His reality.

We live in God’s world. And we cannot escape His reality.

But this philosophy openly tells us that they are working to subvert God’s creation and replace God with their own sexual desires.  They say “fight evil with love” but reverse the meaning of those words as they actively work to teach children to disobey God.

What’s the Harm?

Far from helping children, the drag philosophy introduces serious philosophical harms. Let’s consider just a few:

  1. Normalization of Gender Confusion

Drag, by definition, is an exaggerated parody of womanhood, often rooted in sexualized adult performance. It insults women by treating them as unreal, as if a man in flamboyant costume is just as much a woman as an actual woman. In fact, they deny that there are any “actual women;” a woman can be any man who thinks he is a woman.

Presenting this to children is not “tolerance.” It is the deliberate confusion of the categories God created—male and female. It teaches children that gender is not a given but a costume, not reality but performance. This is not education. It’s miseducation. It is incoherent thinking that believes “if I think it then it is true and the rest of society must conform to my inability to understand reality.”

  1. Undermining Parental and Religious Authority

Many of these events are marketed directly to children. Parents are sometimes invited—but often just bypassed. The unspoken message is clear: your parents and your pastor are outdated. Tune them out. Tune in instead to the man in heels reading Heather Has Two Mommies. But on what basis should Drag Queens get access to other people’s children? If they tell children not to listen to their parents, why would anyone ever listen to a Drag Queen who lives a life of confusion and denial of reality?

This philosophy has no great achievements to point to—no contributions to human flourishing on which it can stand. It is, at bottom, simply men in exaggerated costumes claiming that their greatest accomplishment is refusing to follow any moral norms and instead doing whatever they feel. That’s not authenticity—it’s the height of immaturity and a lack of personal discipline.

Drag ideology depends on gaining access to the children of others because it is fundamentally sterile—it cannot produce its own future. And yet, it wants to disciple a generation. To do that, it must undermine the family and the faith communities that stand in its way.

Drag ideology depends on gaining access to the children of others because it is fundamentally sterile—it cannot produce its own future.

  1. Boundary Testing

Drag has always been about pushing boundaries. Its adherents are quite open about this. It is rooted in burlesque, rebellion, and sexual subversion. Bringing it into children’s spaces may not always be criminal, but it is certainly corrosive to innocence. It introduces adult themes into tender minds. And that alone should be reason enough to keep it out of your public library’s children’s room. The Drag Queen has failed to understand the basics about reality, including what is and is not appropriate for children.[3]

  1. Neo-Gnosticism and Cultural Marxism

Now we’re getting to the philosophical roots. Drag fits seamlessly into a broader project to deconstruct creation order. At its core is a rejection of nature itself—a denial that reality has a given structure. In place of divinely revealed identity—male and female, made in God’s image—we’re offered expressive individualism: You are whatever you say you are. Reality must conform to your feelings. Biology is oppression. Nature is optional.

The drag queens can rage against God’s created order of male and female all they want, but each of them came from the union of a man and woman.

This is nothing new. It’s simply a remix of ancient Gnosticism and modern Marxism. Like Gnosticism, it treats the body as a problem—believing we are souls trapped in the wrong body, and that the solution is to cut, reshape, and mutilate the body to fit our desires. Like Marxism, it sees the family and the church as oppressive structures that must be overthrown. And like both, it cannot build anything—it can only tear down.

A Better Story Hour

Now imagine a different kind of story hour. Imagine a public university that doesn’t impose this sex philosophy on its students. One where children are told that they are not mistakes or blank slates, but created by a loving and wise God. That their bodies are good as they are. That the world is meaningful. That truth is not invented but discovered. Imagine a child learning not that gender is a costume, but that they are fearfully and wonderfully made. That sin is real—but so is grace. That the answer to confusion is not doubling down on meaningless and self-contradictory self-expression, but humbling oneself to seek wisdom. That would be a story worth telling. And it wouldn’t need glitter or wigs to hold a child’s attention—just truth, spoken clearly, in love.

Let the Drag Queen Story Hour promoters keep their costume parties. We’ll keep the real stories. The true ones. The ones that don’t melt under the heat of reality like a rhinestone wig on an August afternoon in Phoenix.

We live in God’s world, he has put eternity in our hearts, and we will never find lasting meaning until we look to him and his created order (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

References:

[1] Editor’s note: Dr. Anderson’s “Heroes of Pride Month” series includes, Intro to Pride Month,  features Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Drag Queens, and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

[2] Editor’s Note: Historic Christianity traditionally teaches that homosexual practice and crossdressing are  wrong, and that natural marriage and biblical sexual ethics are prescribed for society (Deuteronomy 22:5; Romans 1:26-28; Matthew 19:1-12). There are, however, schismatic churches and perhaps even whole denominations that identify as “Christian” in roughly the same way that trans people identify as a different gender from their natural sex. People can try to socially construct their identity just as they may try fabricate their own brand of Christianity, but if it contradicts what God has made – be it the Church or biological gender – then “trans” roughly translates as “fake.”

[3] Editor’s Note: Even some drag queens have been speaking out against Drag Queen Story Hour as it has “pedo-vibes” for putting crossdressing gender-bending burlesque dancers in close contact with elementary children, and that See here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jF7W3N1T7U

Recommended Resources:

Correct not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism by Frank Turek (Book, MP4, )

4 P’s & 4 Q’s: Quick Case FOR Natural Marriage & AGAINST Same-Sex Marriage (DVD) by Dr. Frank Turek 

Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book, DVD, Mp3, Mp4, PowerPoint download, PowerPoint CD)

Does Love and Tolerance Equal Affirmation? (DVD) (Mp4)  by Dr. Frank Turek

 

​​Dr. Owen Anderson is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, a pastor, and a certified jiu-jitsu instructor. He emphasizes the Christian belief in God, human sin, and redemption through Christ, and he explores these themes in his philosophical commentary on the Book of Job. His recent research addresses issues such as DEIB, antiracism, and academic freedom in secular universities, critiquing the influence of thinkers like Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. Dr. Anderson actively shares his insights through articles, books, online classes, and his Substack.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/3Ix1bpq

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The Role of Intelligent Design in UNFORGETTING GOD: An Interview with Barry Arrington about his new book

Barry Arrington is a friend, colleague, and top-flight attorney who is deeply interested in how worldviews impact our society. He and I collaborated for close to two decades on the intelligent design blog UncommonDescent.com, which I started in 2005, which Barry managed for more than a decade as a 501(c)(3), and which we finally archived in 2023. In its first decade, Uncommon Descent was the premier blog for advancing the intelligent design movement, though in more recent years other blogs surpassed it in that role, notably EvolutionNews.org.

On May 6, 2025, Barry published with Inkwell Press a fascinating new book titled Unforgetting God: Defeating Culture-Destroying Materialism Through Christian Renewal (available at Amazon here). Barry’s perspective as a Christian, intelligent design proponent, and seasoned litigator (he has brought cases before the US Supreme Court) has given him a useful perspective from which to understand how materialism affects and infects our culture. Intelligent design provides an important tool in his arsenal for defeating materialism. I therefore proposed to him that we do an interview relating his book to intelligent design. Barry graciously agreed and gave the following interview.

Tell us about Barry Arrington.

I grew up in Texas and graduated from the University of Texas Law School (Austin) in 1986. I was admitted to the bar in 1987 and since then I have practiced mainly in complex civil litigation, including constitutional law, and nonprofit law.

I have been an allied attorney with the Alliance for Defending Freedom since 1994. I served in the Colorado legislature in the 1990s.

Some of my cases have been in the news. In 1999, I began representing several of the families whose children were killed at Columbine. In 2020, I represented a Colorado church in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court. We won that case and succeeded in opening the churches, which Colorado had shut down during COVID. I discuss my experiences with those cases in the book.

I have been involved in the intelligent design movement for many years. I ran the intelligent design website Uncommon Descent (UncommonDescent.com) for well over a decade, which in its heyday was the largest intelligent design discussion site on the internet. In 2023, we decided to shut UD down and archive it at the Discovery Institute’s website.

Currently, I have a case pending in which I sued the State of Colorado over its law making it illegal for licensed professionals to counsel teens struggling with gender dysphoria in any way other than “trans affirming.” The Supreme Court has agreed to hear that case and oral argument will be in the fall.

What was your purpose in writing Unforgetting God?

In 2020, I wrote a post for Uncommon Descent with the intentionally provocative title “Critical Theory is Certainly Correct.” The first sentence of the article is: “Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true.” In that article, I went on to write:

“Critical theory is applied metaphysical materialism. Materialism posits that the physical is all there is. Its central premise is this: In the beginning there were particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in motion. This means that human beings are not special. You and your family and your friends are also merely particles in motion, reducible to the chemicals that make up your bodies. Humans are clever hairless apes with no more ultimate significance than rocks. Yes, they have come up with this thing called ‘morality.’ But morality is an illusion foisted on us by material evolutionary forces because it gives us a reproductive advantage. Morality in any objective transcendent sense of the word not only does not exist, it cannot exist. There are no moral or immoral rocks. And humans — in their essence — are in the same category as rocks. Both rocks and humans are mere amalgamations of burnt out star dust. If this is true, it has profound implications for just about everything. One of those implications is that there are no universal truths guiding our relations in society. There is only power and those who have it and those who do not.”

That article in UD contained the seeds that would ultimately grow into the book Unforgetting God. The book is about premises. If materialist premises are true, then certain conclusions logically follow. This radically secular philosophy has come to dominate the minds of Western cultural elites and is at the root of tribalism in our politics, lawlessness in our courts, chaos in our universities, and the crisis of meaning rampaging among young people.

In my thirty-eight years of practicing law, I have had a front row seat watching materialism literally destroy lives and hollow out our once vibrant cultural institutions. In Unforgetting God, I try to shine a light on the path out of the soul-numbing materialist wilderness in which we find ourselves. The book is about demonstrating that materialism is false, even absurd, and pointing the way to a loving God who is our best hope for personal salvation and cultural renewal.

The cover of your book is striking. Tell us about that.

The cover features Friedrich Nietzsche and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn holding opposite ends of a rope as they play tug of war for the soul of the West. Nietzsche famously said “God is dead.” In contrast, Solzhenitsyn was a committed theist who called for spiritual renewal.

The title of the book is an allusion to Solzhenitsyn’s speech when he accepted the Templeton Prize in 1983. He said that he had spent 50 years working on the history of the Russian Revolution. He had read hundreds of books and interviewed hundreds of witnesses to try to gain an understanding of that unspeakable human tragedy. Then he concluded:

“But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”

Even a casual perusal of the headlines on any given day reveals that in the West, we too are rapidly forgetting God. The purpose of the book is to call for a reversal of that trend before it is too late.

You mentioned Columbine. How does that tragic event figure into your book?

This too has its roots in a UD article I wrote many years ago called “Darwin at Columbine.” Eric Harris was the leader in the Columbine shooting. Dylan Klebold was merely a follower. In the course of representing my clients whose children were killed that day, I spent hundreds of hours investigating Harris’s writings as well as his video and audio recordings. Contrary to popular myth, Harris was not insane. Nor was he a victim of bullying out for revenge. Harris was an intelligent young man who had even studied philosophy. And as I write in the book:

“[Harris] took the philosophical ideas he learned very seriously indeed. He often alluded to those ideas in his journals and recordings. That’s how we know that Harris affirmatively believed those philosophical ideas justified his actions. Unfortunately for those he murdered and maimed, those ideas were a toxic miasma of Charles Darwin funneled through Friedrich Nietzsche. . . . If there is one quotation that sums up Harris’s views, it is probably this one: ‘F**k money, f**k justice, f**k morals, f**k civilized, f**k rules, f**k laws . . . DIE manmade words . . . people think they apply to everything when they don’t/can’t. There’s no such thing as True Good or True evil, it’s all relative to the observer. It’s just all nature, chemistry, and math.’ Harris was a deeply committed materialist who believed that ‘morality’ is just a word; there is no such thing as good or evil, and everything ultimately reduces to chemistry and math.”

Harris took materialist evolution very seriously. It was not a coincidence that the shirt he wore the day of the shooting had “natural selection” emblazoned across the front. He believed he had evolved into a Nietzschean Übermensch, and as such he had no duty to respect his fellow students’ right to life.

Obviously, the overwhelming majority of materialists are not mass killers. My point is that Harris was taught to reject the existence of objective good and evil. The only difference between Harris and other materialists is that he acted on his metaphysical beliefs and they usually do not.

How does Darwin make an appearance in your book?

In the opening chapter, I discuss how the late philosopher Daniel Dennett compared the materialism that came to dominate the minds of Western intellectuals following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species to a “universal acid” that ate “through just about every traditional concept” in Western culture and left in its wake “a revolutionized world-view.” Materialist evolution was not a new concept in 1859. The Greeks and the Romans had discussed forms of the theory (such as Epicurus and Lucretius).

Darwin’s genius lay in overcoming the fatal flaw in the classical theory — its prior invocation of sheer randomness to account for the exquisite design of living things. Darwin proposed a seemingly plausible materialistic explanation — natural selection acting on random variations in deep time — to account for the apparent design of living things. And the rest is history. As Richard Dawkins remarked in The Blind Watchmaker, he could not imagine being an atheist prior to 1859, the year Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in print. But for Dawkins, everything changed in 1859 — Darwin now made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

It is no coincidence that belief in metaphysical materialism came to dominate the minds of Western elites in the decades after Origin of Species was published.

Describe the place of intelligent design in your book.

In the first third of the book, I draw on my experience as a lawyer and former legislator to discuss materialism’s corrosive impact on culture, politics, and law, especially constitutional law. I then make a plea for a reevaluation of the premises underlying the materialist worldview. I write:

“As late as the 1980s, when materialism’s iron grip on the minds of intellectuals was at its zenith, it would have probably been pointless for me to write a book like this. To be sure, many people continued to believe in God, but that belief was under assault from a militant and ascendant materialist elite that accused believers of clinging to superstitious myths. Times have changed, and we live in an exciting intellectual age for theists in general and Christians in particular. The materialist edifice has been crumbling for some time now. Nevertheless, while materialism is no longer intellectually ascendant, it remains culturally dominant, and the cultural course materialists have set us on is fraught with danger. Destruction and chaos lie at the end of our current path.”

I urge my readers to reevaluate the case for theism generally and for Christianity in particular. As Stephen Meyer discussed in his masterful Return of the God Hypothesis, which I cite extensively, ID can play a role in pointing to theism generally. Chapter six is in many ways the heart of the book. I sketch [out] many ID arguments and point to the work of ID theorists for more in-depth analysis. These ID arguments include how Big Bang cosmology, cosmic fine tuning, and the staggering specified complexity of living things point to a creator. Along the way, in addition to Meyer, I discuss Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference, Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, Jim Tour’s work in the origin-of-life area, Douglas Axe’s work in protein folds, Granville Sewell’s insights into complexity theory and the work of other ID luminaries.

What convinced you that intelligent design is true?

In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins wrote that “The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design.” Dawkins went on to argue in that book that this appearance of design is an illusion, but the point is that even an arch-atheist like Dawkins concedes that living things at least appear to be designed.

Is that appearance of design really an illusion as Dawkins argues? I have always been skeptical of that claim. So, to answer your question, I probably always had a deeply held intuition that intelligent design is true. The more important question in my mind is, “When did you come to realize there are solid empirical grounds confirming that intuition?”

For years I endured a constant onslaught of Darwinian/materialist indoctrination as I made my way through the education system. I had resisted that indoctrination but I constantly wondered whether I was just being stubborn. All the “smart” people believed in materialist evolution. Phil Johnson’s seminal book Darwin on Trial was, for me, epochal. Like many people, Darwin on Trial was my first introduction to the ID movement, and thirty-five years later, I still remember the excitement I felt reading that book.

Johnson demonstrated that the empirical support for the modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism) is really quite unimpressive. Then, in a stunning passage that literally changed my life, he provided an insight that finally made it all make sense. Why do “smart” people believe such a weak theory? Religion. I incorporated Johnson’s insight in the following passage in Unforgetting God:

“One of the consequences of a fervent religious commitment to materialism . . . is the belief that any evidence is a stunning confirmation of the materialist origins myth. Phillip Johnson pointed out that if materialism is true, ‘then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes.’”

Belief in Darwinian evolution is not a conclusion based on the evidence. It is a logical deduction from metaphysical materialism.

That was in the early 1990s. In the decade or so that followed, I continued my investigation into ID. At that time, Richard John Neuhaus was still in charge of First Things, and he provided an early forum for ID proponents. I remember Stephen Meyer’s “DNA and Other Designs,” in which he set forth an early version of the ideas that would appear in his book Signature in the Cell, having a particularly powerful impact. During this time, Dembski’s and Behe’s work also came to my attention. So, to answer the question, while I always believed design at an intuitive level, the ID pioneers confirmed my belief at an empirical level.

Opposition to intelligent design is a proving ground for atheism. How did your leadership for close to 20 years at Uncommon Descent in defending intelligent design against atheist critics help shape Unforgetting God?

Indeed. The late Cornell atheist professor William Provine (who often debated Phil Johnson) rightly stated that evolution is the greatest engine for atheism ever invented. This is true because Darwinian evolution has tremendous first-blush plausibility, and if one is inclined to go with the cultural flow, it provides a great jumping-off point.

Francis Bacon famously said that a superficial knowledge of science (which he called “natural philosophy”) would “incline the mind of man to atheism,” but a deeper understanding would bring him back to God. That is still true today. A superficial study of origins undermines theism, but the deeper study provided by ID theorists points the other way.

As I mentioned earlier, I have always believed in ID at an intuitive level, and ID theorists helped confirm that belief empirically. There is an obvious pitfall here. A natural human tendency is to believe what one wants to believe despite the evidence. There is a name for that tendency: confirmation bias.

After I had been running UD (Uncommon Descent) for several years, I addressed an earlier fear I had had that my belief in ID would one day be exposed as nothing but the result of intense confirmation bias. The name of that article was “No Bomb After 10 Years,” and it opens with this:

“I have to admit that when I first started debating the origins issue I did so with some trepidation. After all, there are a lot of highly educated, credentialed, intelligent professionals who say they believe the Darwinian narrative. To tell the truth, when I first started debating origins, I assumed not only that there was a very good chance that I was on the wrong side of the debate, but also that one or more of those highly educated, credentialed, intelligent professionals would come along and drop a science bomb on me that would destroy my naïve belief in ID.”

I go on to report that after 10 years of debating hundreds of materialists, no one had dropped a science bomb on me. My confidence in ID was as strong as ever, and I was beginning to suspect there is no bomb.

Leading UD all those years was valuable for several reasons. The first I have already mentioned. Exposing one’s ideas to criticism can be scary, but if those ideas come out intact through the crucible, one can hold them with much more confidence. Yes, confirmation bias will always remain a risk, but one way to mitigate that risk is to receive and deal with intense objections in good faith. That “good faith” part is important. You have to address the opposition’s real argument, not some straw man caricature. One thing I have found over the years is that when your opponent sets up and knocks over a straw man, it is a sure sign they are not so confident that they can beat your actual argument.

Second, debating origins all those years at UD not only strengthened my own position, but it also exposed me to materialist arguments that I might not otherwise have thought of. At UD, I learned that materialists tend to recycle the same arguments over and over. This prepared me to write one of the most important chapters in Unforgetting God entitled “Objection!” in which I address numerous materialist objections to theism.

How does your background as a lawyer impact your approach to atheism?

How many times have you heard someone say, “there is no evidence for God’s existence” or “you can’t prove that God exists.” After 38 years of litigation, I know a thing or two about evidence and proof, and in the book, I show how both of these claims are demonstrably false. You may not be persuaded by the overwhelming evidence for God’s existence. That does not mean that evidence does not exist. And while the existence of God cannot be proved to an apodictic certainty, the totality of the evidence proves his existence to a high degree of certainty. God permits doubt. He does not permit reasonable doubt.

In addition to my experience in evaluating evidence and proving facts, I hope I am following in the tradition of Phil Johnson in Darwin on Trial. Johnson said that he was a lawyer “with a specialty in analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments. This background is more appropriate than one might think, because what people believe about evolution and Darwinism depends very heavily on the kind of logic they employ and the kind of assumptions they make.” That is just as true today as it was in 1991 when Johnson published Darwin on Trial.

In a world without intelligent design, what happens to natural law? How does natural law undergird Unforgetting God?

There is a passage in chapter four of Unforgetting God entitled “Lawless Law,” in which I address the question of natural law:

“Prior to the Revolution, the colonists did not think of themselves primarily as ‘Americans.’ They thought of themselves as Englishmen living in America, and English common law was the law of the colonies. After the Revolution, English common law carried over as the law of the states of the new nation, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries were the preeminent authority on that law. It is difficult to exaggerate Blackstone’s influence on early American law. John Marshall, considered by many to be the greatest Chief Justice in our nation’s history, read the Commentaries four times by the time he turned twenty-seven. As one historian wrote, ‘In the first century of American independence, the Commentaries were not merely an approach to the study of law; for most lawyers they constituted all there was of the law.’ To this day, the Supreme Court cites Blackstone when it is seeking to understand the state of the law in the early republic.”

For Blackstone, all legal matters implicating a moral question must be resolved by reference to natural law principles that God infused into the fabric of the universe at creation. He wrote: “[When God] created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.” The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “Laws of . . . Nature’s God.” These are the immutable moral principles laid down by God of which Blackstone spoke.

A key idea in natural law theory is that men do not create natural law. Rather, like mathematical concepts that are discovered and not invented, the precepts of natural law have a freestanding existence and are discovered through human reason. This idea informed the founders’ view of law when they signed the Declaration of Independence. It is the view that dominated American law through the end of the nineteenth century.

In Unforgetting God, I describe how all of that changed largely through the work and ideas of one man, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes was a committed Darwinist, a brutal materialist, and a moral nihilist. For good reason, he has been called “the American Nietzsche.” Holmes’s great project was to sever the link between law and morality, which he believed had no objective existence. For Holmes, all human relations, including the law, boiled down to a Darwinian struggle. One consequence of Holmes’s ideas was that American legal thinkers developed the jurisprudential theory of “legal positivism,” which remains the hegemonic theory of law to this day. Under legal positivism, law is not “discovered.” It is made by the people with the power, and the laws they make will have no necessary connection to morality.

The prevalence of legal positivism is only possible in a legal culture that is thoroughly saturated with materialist presuppositions. In Unforgetting God, I point out the brutal consequences of judges imposing their will on the American people under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. The “living constitution” project is essentially materialism played out in constitutional law. I call for a reexamination of the materialist underpinnings of the modern legal project, and crucial to that reexamination is answering the following key question: Does God exist?

As I discussed earlier in this interview, intelligent design plays a critical role in answering that question. Again, it all comes down to premises. If God does not exist, the legal positivist view of law is almost certainly correct. Natural law — law based in a fundamental morality — is possible only if objective morality exists, and objective morality exists only if God exists.

What do you say to people who think that God created by Darwinian evolution? Can such “theistic evolutionists” still profit from your book, and if so, how?

As I discussed above, belief in the materialist worldview exploded after Darwin. Daniel Dennett was surely correct that Darwin’s “universal acid” dissolved ancient theistic beliefs, and for many Western intellectual elites (such as Holmes) those theistic beliefs gave way to a thoroughgoing materialism. For over 160 years, many Christians have been trying to reconcile belief in God with belief in Darwinian evolution. Many of them have settled on what’s come to be called “theistic evolution.” Today, the BioLogos Foundation, established by Francis Collins, promotes this theory relentlessly.

The essence of theistic evolution is that God uses Darwinian evolution to create all living things, including humans. The only difference between atheist Richard Dawkins and the typical theistic evolutionist is that the theist evolutionist adds the following footnote: “We accept on faith that all of this was caused by God in an empirically undetectable way.” Well, if science is the study of empirical phenomena, what is the purpose of that footnote? Good question. Theistic evolutionists are committed to the view that “theistic evolution” is, at the level of empirically observable phenomena, identical to “materialist evolution.”

I believe that theistic evolution is misguided in at least two respects. First, as ID theorists have convincingly demonstrated, a creator’s work is empirically detectable. Second, they are kidding themselves if they believe that theistic evolution will halt the culture’s slide into atheistic materialism in any meaningful way. It is a very short journey from “God is not empirically detectible in the process” to “God is not necessary to explain the process,” and it is an even shorter journey from there to “God is not necessary, full stop.”

In Unforgetting God, I rely on ID theory to demonstrate that the design inference is by far the most reasonable explanation for the staggering specified complexity of living things. Thus, there is no reason to retreat into the theistic evolution cul-de-sac.

What impact would you like your book Unforgetting God to have immediately and in the coming years?

In a word, I am calling for the revival of skepticism. This might sound odd coming from a theist because we have been conditioned by our culture to believe that only atheists can be true skeptics. While that might have been true at one time, as I explain in the following passage from Unforgetting God, that is no longer the case.

“’Fideism’ is a grit-your-teeth-and-believe-despite-the-evidence sort of belief. I am not asking anyone to retreat into an unreflective fideism. Indeed, I am calling for just the opposite – a revival of skepticism. For centuries, ‘skepticism’ was associated with unbelievers such as the Enlightenment thinkers David Hume and Voltaire. This is because they were skeptical of the dominant cultural narrative, which in their time was Christianity. In our time, materialism is the dominant narrative, especially in the media and academia, which are the joint heralds of our culture’s received wisdom. My purpose in writing this book is to urge everyone to re-examine the evidence for the existence of God with a skeptical perspective toward the secular received wisdom that has long dominated the discourse in our nation. . . .

I am calling for a renewal of an attitude of genuine skepticism toward the cultural hegemon of materialism. Again, I am not asking anyone to retreat into fideism. That is both irrational and unsustainable in the long run. I am not asking anyone to endure and believe despite all the evidence to the contrary. I am asking for the opposite. The point of this book is to encourage people to examine the evidence again, especially in light of the scholarship summarized in chapter six that demonstrates that accepting the existence of God and the truth of Jesus Christ’s message of love, peace, and redemption are the overwhelmingly more rational positions to hold.”

As the highlighted part of the passage states, my purpose in writing Unforgetting God is to call on people to examine the claims of materialism with a genuinely skeptical attitude. I understand this will be difficult for many. It takes true courage to stand up against the overwhelmingly dominant materialist narrative of our culture. While I do not agree with Hume’s and Voltaire’s conclusions, I cannot help but admire their courage in standing up to the dominant narrative of their culture. We must find the courage to do the same thing, because the stakes are very high. Indeed, they are nothing short of existential for Western Civilization.

Recommended Resources:

I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback), and (Sermon) by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek 

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

Answering Stephen Hawking & Other Atheists MP3 and DVD by Dr. Frank Turek 

Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible by J. Warner Wallace (Paperback), (Investigator’s Guide).

 

Bill Dembski holds doctorates in math and philosophy as well as an advance theological degree. He’s published in the peer-reviewed math, engineering, biology, philosophy, and theology literature. His focus is on freedom, technology, and education. Formerly almost exclusively an ID (intelligent design) guy, with most of his writing focused on that topic, he found that even though ID had the better argument, it faced roadblocks designed to stop its success. So his focus shifted to the wider social and political forces that block free human inquiry. Bill still writes a lot on intelligent design but his focus these days is broader.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/3FyCxE9

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How to Spot a Kant in Sheep’s Clothing

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One of the ways you will find philosophy professors denying Christ is through an appeal to Kantian ethics. Kant’s ethical theory uses many positive-sounding words that appeal to our moral intuitions. Yet, when we examine the content, we find that Kant was opposed to Christ as revealed in Scripture. Instead, he sought to elevate the individual’s moral intuitions as the highest authority, and even above the Bible.

 

I know of professors who lure students in by claiming to be Christians, but then play a shell game: they subtly replace Christianity with Kantianism, and then argue that the Bible and Christianity are false because they contradict their moral intuitions.

Kant’s Ethics

Permit me to give you a brief overview of Kantianism. Immanuel Kant sought to ground ethics not in religion or divine revelation, but in human reason alone. His project was part of the broader Enlightenment goal of establishing a rational foundation for morality that could be universally valid, independent of theological commitments. By itself, that all sounds great. But once we begin to ask what Kant meant by terms like “reason” and “summum bonun,” we run into deep problems. Here’s how he approached it:

1. Moral Law from Within, Not from Above

Kant believed that morality must be autonomous, not heteronomous, that is, it must come from within the rational will of the individual, not from an external authority like God or the Church. By “reason,” Kant distinguished between pure reason (used in studying metaphysics) and practical reason (used to solve problems in means/ends reasoning). He was a skeptic about pure reason, arguing that it ends in contradictions. So, when he tells us to be rational or to use a rational will, he means to use reason to live according to the categorical imperative.
He famously wrote:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

This “moral law within” was, for Kant, the source of true ethical obligation. He did not deny God’s existence, but he insisted that moral duties must be discoverable by reason, not dependent on divine command. He speaks like the Serpent from the Garden: he believes to be moral we must determine good and evil for ourselves.

2. The Categorical Imperative

Kant replaced divine law with a purely rational principle: the categorical imperative. This is a test for determining whether an action is morally permissible. His most famous formulation is:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

This is an attempt to derive moral law from pure reason, without appeal to consequences, emotions, or divine will. For Kant, if a rule cannot be universalized, it is morally impermissible.

Yet, he bases this on “if you can universalize it.” Can you live with this rule being universal. This means it is a statement of subjective opinion and not objective reality. Nietzsche took this to its logical conclusion in his will to power. Because the Kantian rejects God’s law as heteronomy he has no appeal to anything objective by which to critique the will to power. And this is why professors in the Kantian tradition fell in so easily with philosophies of power like DEI and critical theory.

3. Human Dignity and Autonomy

Kant believed that each person possesses intrinsic worth because of their rational nature. Therefore, one should always treat humanity, whether in oneself or in others, never merely as a means, but always as an end. This principle grounds ethics in respect for persons, not in obedience to God.

The university Kantian combines this with the categorical imperative to make an appeal to abusive empathy. This is when you take advantage of the listener’s disposition to compassion and excuse the wrongdoing of the person who is pitied. How another person feels becomes their moral standard. If someone is poor, we do not consider the possibility of sloth; instead, we ask how they must feel and how good they would feel if they were simply given money and a house. This abusive empathy is used to bully the Christian into accepting the radical leftist morality that Kantianism has become.

Kantianism presupposes Rousseau’s claim that human beings are naturally good and only corrupted by the invention of private property. It rejects God’s providential rule of the world and instead insists that all injustice stems from the unequal distribution of material goods and resources. Kant rejects the biblical doctrines of the Fall and sin, and instead teaches that humans are perfectible through adherence to Kantian moral theory.

4. Religion as Morality’s Handmaid, Not Its Source

In his book Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1792), Kant argued that religion should support morality, not define it. He viewed Christianity as a helpful moral teaching only insofar as it agrees with his subjective reason. It is “subjective reason” because it relies on his moral intuitions about “how the world should be.” Christ was seen more as a moral example than a divine Savior.

And remember, for Kant, “reason” means: What can I universalize?, and then solving practical problems that arise as you live according to that principle. In other words, Kantian “reason” becomes subjective and denies the clear general revelation of God and His moral law.
Kant even called the concept of a divine command the “heteronomy of the will,” which is a failure of reason to guide itself. He wanted a moral law that any rational being, whether religious or not, could recognize and obey.

5. Postulates of Practical Reason

Although Kant did not ground morality in religion, he concluded that moral reasoning requires presupposing three things:

● God (as the guarantor of justice, otherwise unknowable)
● Immortality (so that perfect virtue is achievable)
● Freedom (to be morally responsible)

These are not proofs, but practical postulates, which are ideas we must assume if we are to take morality seriously. Still, they are subordinate to Kantian reason, not based on revelation or faith in Christ.

Kant attempts to get around God’s providence in this world, and the inherent connection of sin and death, by saying that what appears to be unfair in this life (the righteous suffer and the wicked live well) is made right in the next life. He defines the summum bonus, or highest good, this way: “The highest good is the complete unity of virtue and happiness” Critique of Practical Reason, 5:110).

In other words, the summum bonum is the state in which a person who is fully morally good (possessing a good will) also experiences the full happiness that such goodness deserves.
Kant teaches his followers to reject God’s law as heteronomy, to live according to their own subjective intuitions about what should be universal, and to be content with the idea that their self-defined virtue in this life will be rewarded with happiness in the next.

6. The Serpent and Kant

Think about how closely all of this resembles the teaching of the Serpent in Genesis 3. The Kantian is told to determine their own good and evil. God’s law is rejected as imposed, as a limitation on freedom, it is heteronomous and therefore illegitimate.

It is seen as an invasion of the human will by an outside source. But in Genesis 3, God imposed death as a call to repent of sin. Instead of repenting, the Kantian says, “Live by my philosophy, and you will be given happiness in the next life.” “God” becomes a mere postulate, which is a necessary idea to guarantee that promised happiness.

Yet Kant offers no explanation of how a sinner can be reconciled to a perfectly holy and good God. He teaches works righteousness. In his system, the human is not a sinner in need of grace, but someone who does wrong due to social circumstances, and who can be perfected and made virtuous by following Kantian philosophy.

7. Identify the Wolf

As a student, you should understand the philosophy your professors will be imposing on you. You can use Kantianism against them. Instead, insist on your own autonomy and reject their heteronomy. Then challenge their categorical imperative and ask how it escapes absolute subjectivity. And ask why God, who is holy, would ever grant happiness to an unrepentant sinner; someone who has spent a life rejecting God’s law and reducing Christ to a mere moral example rather than the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Kant:
1. Couldn’t explain what has existed from eternity.
2. Denied that what is good for a being is based on their nature and therefore determined by their Creator.
3. Rested his entire philosophy on ultimate skepticism about God and providence.
4. Denied that the Bible is divinely inspired.
5. Denied we need to be reconciled to God by Christ.

The Kantian is no Christian.

Learn to expose your professor’s presuppositions and demolish their arguments. Or better yet, don’t even sign up for, or pay for, such classes. Exercise your autonomy to find a university and professors who recognize what is clearly revealed about God and the moral law through general revelation.

Recommended Resources:

Intellectual Predators: How Professors Prey on Christian Students (DVD) (mp3) (mp4 Download) 

Correct not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism by Frank Turek (Book, MP4)

Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book, DVD, Mp3, Mp4, PowerPoint download, PowerPoint CD)

Letters to a Young Progressive by Mike Adams (Book)

 

​​Dr. Owen Anderson is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, a pastor, and a certified jiu-jitsu instructor. He emphasizes the Christian belief in God, human sin, and redemption through Christ, and he explores these themes in his philosophical commentary on the Book of Job. His recent research addresses issues such as DEIB, antiracism, and academic freedom in secular universities, critiquing the influence of thinkers like Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. Dr. Anderson actively shares his insights through articles, books, online classes, and his Substack.

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Secular Professor Tactics 101

As a parent or student it will help you to know that in many cases your secular professors have a strategy. They have a goal. A strategy is the big-picture plan to win or achieve that goal. Tactics are the step-by-step methods used to carry it out. I’ve told you before that you can see their goal by how they live their own lives. But now let’s look at their classroom tactics.

 

If you’re a parent or a prospective student, you need to understand the tactics of the secular professor. For many of them, “winning” means leading students to adopt a radical leftist ideology—either by outright agreement or by slow, subtle influence. Agreement isn’t always demanded immediately. Sometimes, all they want is your gradual surrender of confidence in anything else.  The big win, however, is final deconversion from Christianity and acceptance of something like the LGBTQ+ “safe zone” philosophy pushed at ASU.

Undermining Christianity: The Real Strategy

The strategy of many secular professors is simple: undermine Christianity. Why? Because Christianity remains the major roadblock to their radical leftist ideology.  Without that, their goal is in sight.

If you had to guess a student’s religion, statistically, you’d guess Christian and be right more often than not. Christianity remains the default framework for morality, identity, and truth for many students, even if only in fragments.  Christian teaching is the main roadblock to the Marxism at the core of the radical left.

And that’s a problem—for them.

The teachings of Christianity are fundamentally incompatible with the radical left’s view of sex, gender, truth, power, and the good life. So, it’s not just about “dialogue” or “working together.” Before they can win a student to their worldview, they must first destabilize the student’s confidence in Christianity. Undermine the foundation, and the rest of the structure will fall. That’s the strategy. Their tactics follow.

How the Strategy Is Carried Out: Tactics You Should Know

This strategy to undermine Christianity is carried out through many identifiable tactics. For parents and students, it’s worth learning these—not only to recognize what’s happening, but also to see how poorly equipped many of these professors are for the intellectual life they claim to lead. Scripture puts it plainly: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22). What we’re witnessing in many classrooms today is a real-time application of that verse. Let’s examine a few of their most common tactics. We’ll begin with three—but the list, sadly, is always growing.

Tactic #1: Undermine the Word of God

The first and most foundational tactic is to undermine the authority of Scripture. This can take the form of a direct assault—mocking the Bible as outdated, oppressive, or absurd—or a more subtle approach: cherry-picking verses to support radical leftist ideology.

For example, I have a colleague—openly anti-Christian—who claims that Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me”) is the best verse in the Bible. Why? Because she believes it proves her progressive social philosophy. On her reading, all you have to do is advocate for so-called sexual minorities, and you’re doing exactly what Jesus said. No need for sound doctrine. No need to understand the whole Bible. Just grab a single verse and weaponize it.  Incidentally, it is worth noting that in this specific verse, Jesus is speaking about believers.

But that’s only half the tactic. The next step is to accuse actual Christians of not living up to the verse. She’ll claim that conservative Christians don’t care for the poor or marginalized—never mind the fact (which students rarely hear) that conservative Christians out-give atheist professors by a staggering margin when it comes to charity, adoption, missions, disaster relief, and practical acts of compassion.

Still, students don’t know that. So the professor paints a picture: the Bible is on her side, and Christians are hypocrites who don’t live up to it.

You’ll notice she never mentions John 6, where Jesus rebukes the crowd for following Him only to get bread, rather than the Bread of Life. She’s not interested in the full counsel of God—only the verses that can be twisted to serve her ideological agenda.

There are other versions of this tactic. One common move is to deny that the Bible even teaches that homosexuality is a sin. “That’s just in Leviticus,” they’ll say, “and no Christian keeps that anymore.”

I call this the “Did God really say?” tactic. Just like the serpent in the garden, the secular professor begins by sowing doubt: Did God really say that?

Did He really say that homosexuality is a sin?
Did He really define male and female?
Did He really establish the moral order we find in Scripture?

If they can get the student to doubt the clarity, authority, or consistency of God’s Word, they’ve won the first battle.

Tactic #2: Vilify Christianity

The second tactic is to vilify Christianity—to paint it not as the source of civilization’s greatest moral and social advances, but as the root of all historical evil. This is straight out of the classical Marxist playbook, so anyone familiar with the last 150 years of ideology should see it coming a mile away.

Unfortunately, most parents assume we’ve moved past this kind of propaganda. And most students, born long after the fall of the USSR, have never heard a rebuttal. So here’s what they’ll be told:

Christianity invented slavery.
Christianity promoted poverty.
Christians fought to keep people oppressed.

Of course, if you dig long enough, you can always find someone—somewhere—who called themselves a Christian and said something foolish or sinful. That’s not hard. But that’s not the [larger] truth. The truth is this: Christianity gave birth to orphanages, hospitals, and universities. It introduced the rule of law, the dignity of the individual, and the foundation for economic growth and human rights. Christianity gave entire nations the hope of a better future in this life—and the next.

You won’t hear that in most classrooms. Instead, students will be told that Christianity supported slavery. But the historical reality is that slavery was universal in the ancient world. Christianity challenged and ultimately abolished it in Christianized nations—while it still exists today in non-Christian societies.

Why do professors hide this? Because the tactic is designed to make students (specifically white male Christian students) ashamed of their own heritage, their faith, and their families. That shame softens them. Once a student is ashamed of Christianity, they can be more easily reprogrammed and brainwashed. The Marxists knew this. And today’s professors are still using the same tactic with unnerving skill.

Tactic #3: Teach That It Doesn’t Matter Either Way

This tactic is all about misdirection. Unlike the first two, which confront Christianity directly, this one tries to bypass it entirely. The professor simply avoids mentioning the Bible at all. Why? Because attacking it outright might prompt a student to open it—and then the risk is that the student might actually be convinced by its truth. So, instead, the tactic is silence.

The professor communicates—both directly and indirectly—that the student can live a good, meaningful, moral life without ever knowing what the Bible says. If Scripture does come up, it’s brushed aside with a casual, dismissive remark: “Oh, the Bible? Sure, there are a few good things in there—for people who like that sort of thing.”

The message is clear: the Bible is irrelevant.
Not dangerous. Not sacred. Just… beside the point.
Outdated. Unnecessary. Background noise.

This is misdirection at its finest—because it leaves the student disarmed. There’s no battle to fight if the battlefield itself is ignored. The professor shifts the student’s focus to career, activism, self-expression—anything but divine truth. And over time, the student begins to believe the lie that neutrality is possible, and that the big questions of life—truth, meaning, morality, destiny—can be answered without reference to God. But that is not neutrality. That’s secularism in disguise.

Spot the Tactic: A Challenge for Students

Recognizing these tactics is the first step to seeing how certain professors use their class time—not to educate—but to advance a strategy of deconverting Christian students. In fact, you might even turn it into a bit of a game. Challenge your friends:

  • Who can spot the most tactics in a single class session?
  • Whose course schedule has the most ideologically driven professors?
  • Who can most clearly connect the tactics to the broader strategy?

Keep score. Compare notes. And when you’re ready, send me your tallies—I’ll make sure they’re seen by those with oversight at the university. Because let’s be clear: taxpayers aren’t funding this nonsense.[1] And it certainly doesn’t qualify as “education.”

References:

[1] [Editor’s note: At least, taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund any anti-religious bigotry or anti-Christian indoctrination or deconversion tactics.]

Recommended Resources:

Intellectual Predators: How Professors Prey on Christian Students (DVD) (mp3) (mp4 Download) 

Can All Religions Be True? mp3 by Frank Turek

Was Jesus Intolerant? by Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Another Gospel? by Alisa Childers (book)

 

​​Dr. Owen Anderson is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, a pastor, and a certified jiu-jitsu instructor. He emphasizes the Christian belief in God, human sin, and redemption through Christ, and he explores these themes in his philosophical commentary on the Book of Job. His recent research addresses issues such as DEIB, antiracism, and academic freedom in secular universities, critiquing the influence of thinkers like Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. Dr. Anderson actively shares his insights through articles, books, online classes, and his Substack.

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A Wolf in Women’s Clothing: The One Question Trans-Activists Can’t Answer

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”
Matthew 7:15 (ESV)

 

The bathroom debate has resurrected some very old questions about women’s rights.[1] Once upon a time, women fought for separate bathrooms from men. The reasons were obvious. Privacy, modesty, prudence, and the unfortunate fact that men have a worse record for physical and sexual violence. It’s not in women’s best interests to get stuck in a bathroom with a strange man, if she can help it. But in recent years, the common-sense solution of “separate bathrooms” has come under fire. The Trump administration has introduced a new level of pushback, but the bathroom debate is still far from settled. I have to wonder, however, if we could let the air out of this inflated debate by asking one simple question.

The Question Trans-Activists Can’t Answer

If we ask the right question, we can show that trans-activists aren’t very serious in proposing trans-inclusive bathrooms. Of course, trans-activists probably think they’re serious. We don’t have to question their intentions here either. Good intentions can’t redeem bad policy anyway. So, for the sake of argument, we can grant good intentions – compassion for marginalized people, commitment to justice, loving your neighbor, human rights, etc. But when activists push for trans-inclusive bathrooms they have to answer this important question. Otherwise, they haven’t really thought through the issue. So  they aren’t very serious. That question is simply this:

How do you police against the predators?

When I say “predators” I’m not talking about all LGBTQ folks or “trans-women” generally. I’m talking about would-be sex criminals: the voyeurs, rapists, pedophiles, criminal opportunists, and even “autogynephilic” men (males who derive sexual arousal from imagining themselves as women). Predators really exist. We can expect some predators to trespass into women’s restrooms as long as naïve policy allows them to. Predators are liable to spawn as long as the systems in place give mischievous males unfettered access to potential victims. In this way, predators are a reliable “test case” for progressive bathroom policies.

Trans vs. Trans-Acting?

We cannot rationally assume that every man who would use a women’s bathroom is a “trans-woman” (biological male who ‘identifies’ as female). Sure, he might be a classic transgender case who poses no real threat to women. But, he could instead be a cross-dresser who likes to sneak a peek at the ladies. He could be a flasher or a sexual harasser he gets a kick out of exposing himself or behaving rudely with women in the restroom. He could be a pedophile, taking mental pics of naked girls, to fantasize about them later. Or he could be a rapist who’d gladly wear a dress if it means open access to women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. Or he could be a clinically sick teen boy using performative gender to corner his “girl crush”, alone, so  she can’t reject him if she tried. History, criminal psychology, and a healthy dose of realism, attest that these are all live possibilities as long as biological males are legally allowed in women’s restrooms.

Maintaining separate bathrooms has, traditionally, been the common-sense solution for reducing those threats. No solution is 100% perfect here. But, realistically, keeping biological males out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms is a good start for policing against perverts and predators. Dropping that wall of separation means reducing our practical ability to protect women from predators. Bear in mind, we still have active laws against flashers, sexual harassers, and peeping toms. But, if it’s legal to do all of that now, as long as you “trans-act”, then our bathroom policies have given perverts and predators an escape clause in our legal code.

Sheep, Goats and Wolves

It would be nice if every “trans-woman” was just an innocent, lost sheep. Maybe they just need a little care, understanding, and a little guidance, to bring them into the fold. Then God could redeem their own unique gender-expression and sexual identity however He sees fit. Perhaps if the church did a better job caring for “widows and orphans,” i.e., fatherlessness, we wouldn’t have as much transgenderism going around (James 1:27; Exod. 22:22; 1 Tim. 5:5). Undoubtedly, there are some lost sheep out there that fit this profile.

The debate over trans-inclusive bathrooms would be a lot simpler if we were only dealing with the proverbial lost sheep. But, realistically, our policies must also account for goats (fakes and frauds). And we especially need to watch out for the wolves (predators and criminal opportunists). We cannot reasonably assume every “trans-woman” is a “lost sheep.” Instead, we have every reason to expect some of them to be wolves in women’s clothing.

The next time someone offers a policy proposal where trans-women can use the women’s restroom, you can ask them how that policy will police against predators? It’s a fair question. We used to police against them by, first, separating bathrooms according to sex. But, if biological males are now allowed into women’s restrooms, how do we expect to replace that policing power now that the perimeter defenses are down?

Remember the Wisdom of Separate Bathrooms

The ugly answer seems to be that trans-inclusive bathroom policy was never intended for women’s safety, but rather for men’s convenience. Males who identify as female are the target audience here, even if biological women are left in the lurch because of it. When inclusive-bathroom policies unwittingly carry a pack of savvy predators, as stow-aways, then as soon as they’re dropped on women’s restrooms, that’s like airdropping a pack of wolves into the sheep pen. Women deserve better. Moreover, it doesn’t do trans-activists any favors when their own policy is readily hijacked by criminals and predators. We do well to preserve separate bathrooms.

References: 

[1] A “quick fix” solution here is to make only “single-stall” bathrooms. That option can work in some cases, but it’s often impractical for stadiums, locker rooms, health clubs, large businesses, and so forth. The bathroom debate isn’t that easily solved.

Recommended Resources: 

Correct, NOT Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone (Updated/Expanded) Book, DVD Set, Mp4 Download by Frank Turek

Legislating Morality (DVD Set), (PowerPoint download), (PowerPoint CD), (MP3 Set) and (DVD mp4 Download Set) 

Does Jesus Trump Your Politics by Dr. Frank Turek (mp4 download and DVD)

Was Jesus Intolerant? (DVD) and (Mp4 Download) by Dr. Frank Turek 

 

Dr. John D. Ferrer is a speaker and content creator with Crossexamined. He’s also a graduate from the very first class of Crossexamined Instructors Academy. Having earned degrees from Southern Evangelical Seminary (MDiv) and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (ThM, PhD), he’s now active in the pro-life community and in his home church in Pella Iowa. When he’s not helping his wife Hillary Ferrer with her ministry Mama Bear Apologetics, you can usually find John writing, researching, and teaching cultural apologetics.

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A Disturbing Trend

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A disturbing trend is rising. People are calling for Trump’s assass1nation.[1] Political discourse has shifted from divisive and shrill, to radical and violent. Meanwhile, there have been four confirmed attempts on the president’s life, one of them missed by mere inches. This is getting out of hand.

 

Ironically, the same people calling for violence against the elected president think they’re fighting for democracy. Apparently, people can avoid the courts, evade elections, derail due process, and bypass all the checks and balances of this constitutional democratic republic, and somehow they’re still “pro-democracy.” How does that work?

“The same people calling for violence against the elected president think they’re fighting for democracy”

Firebombing Car Dealers . . . Bad.

Now I don’t think Donald Trump is the best or the worst. He’s neither demon nor angel. And he’s definitely not the Messiah. As a Christian conservative, I have mixed feelings about him. But, I pray for him in office, just as I prayed for Biden and Obama before him. I believe in civic engagement, voting your conscience, and so forth. My view on Trump isn’t pollyanna or apocalyptic. I’ll give him credit when he’s right, and critique when he’s wrong. He needs the Constitution and the courts to keep him in-check and level-headed. Every other presidence had needed that same check-and-balance system. So, when I go on Facebook and X, and see people calling for his severed head, it’s a little startling.

I’ve been trying, and failing, to convince anti-Trumpers that regardless of their views on Trump, domestic terrorism is really bad and we shouldn’t support it.[2] You don’t have to be a Trump supporter to recognize that “killing is bad.” But, those same people argue instead that firebombing a car dealership is “pro-democracy,” erecting a guillotine outside a Trump rally is just “good clean fun,” and that we should be cheering for assassination attempts against Trump. Folks, this is not okay.

Of course, radicals are going to do what radicals do. We can expect veiled threats of violence in the wafting smog of hot air from loud-mouth critics, social media incels, and guerilla radio pundits. Till Christ returns, we can expect as much. That’s bad, of course. But, there are loud-mouth fools on the political right, left, and middle. As long as it’s just talk, then we might not need to sound the alarms just yet. As long as they stay on the fringes, they aren’t the political “base” of their party. But the fringe isn’t so “fringe” anymore.

“The fringe isn’t so ‘fringe’ anymore.“

The Fringe is now the Base

The radical edge of the Democrat party is quickly becoming the core of the Democratic party. We’ve seen a lot of this shift in real time, over the last 12 years or so. There’s Occupy Wall Street (2011-2012), BLM (2013). Antifa (2016), George Floyd riots (2020-2021), not to mention the disorienting rise of radical Trans-activism (2016-2023) and the Covid chaos of 2020. And that’s not even counting “old-school” terrorists like Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). To be sure, the right wing have their issues too, and I don’t doubt that – if pushed – radical elements on the right could resort to violence too. Domestic Terrorism and violent extremism is not just a “left-wing” problem, even if that’s where some of the loudest support is right now. The point is the mainstream left is starting to sound and act like domestic terrorists.

The “left” has pulled hard left since at least 2012. The “radical fringe” of progressive radicals, neo-marxist revolutionaries, and anarchists isn’t “fringe” anymore. They’re mainstream.

The Conversation Has Changed

If you’ve been tracking the tone of political discourse in the last few years, you’ve seen a swelling violent undercurrent. Political discourse is losing the humility, sophistication, and mutual respect it once had. People now talk at their political opponents like they’re instructing imbeciles, house-training a puppy, or even rebuking a demon. The conversation has changed, for the worst.

I’ve been monitoring this trend, in part, because of my background in logic and debate. I taught logic and debate at the high school and college level. I’ve organized and participated in several formal debates. I celebrate respectful, intelligent, civil discourse. I honestly don’t trust people who agree with me on everything, because that means someone’s lying. We all have disagreements. That’s normal and healthy. And we can’t mature very well, socially, unless we learn how to respectfully engage over contentious topics and dialogue through our disagreements. That’s a big part of adulting.

For all the risks and drawbacks that come with that aspect of free speech, it’s critically important that we have the freedom to disagree or we lose one of the most basic tools for warding off tyranny and correcting injustice. Not to mention, as a Christian, free speech means people like me have the freedom to confess and share our faith with others, preaching, teaching, and shining God’s light into a dark and dying world.

In recent years, however, civil dialogue has been drowning in the undertow of angry tirades, ignorant screeds, paid propaganda, and deliberate misinformation. And with the rhetorical swell, there’s been a rise in violence. We aren’t just dealing with a “few outliers” anymore, or the occasional random crazy person. Trump has already survived a near-miss assassination attempt, so we know it’s not just idle threats either. Mainline and establishment lefists are calling for political violence (i.e., literal domestic terrorism).

Rationalized Violence

People don’t just support violence because they like being the bad guy. That’s not how sympathy for the devil works. Instead, people want to feel like truth, goodness, and justice is on their side. So, they argue that this violent act is a necessary evil for the sake of some greater good. That necessary evil might not seem palatable at first. But with a little desensitization, ordinary men can become killers; peaceful pedestrians can be made to cheer for crimes against humanity.[3] That desensitization can be as simple as media streams constantly comparing Trump to “Hitler,” calling him a “Fascist,” “Dictator,” and “Autocrat.” And social media algorithms can populate our news feed with alarmist click-bait and conspiracy theories casting Donald Trump as the devil incarnate. The perspective shift can be so gradual you don’t even notice your own moral drift. Domestic Terrorists start looking like “Freedom Fighters.” Soon you’re imagining how the world would be better off without him.

At that point, it’s easy to rationalize violence. If Trump is as bad as his critics are saying, then assass1nation sounds entirely justified. If you’re creative enough, or deluded enough, then you can make any sort of violence sound plausible. The pandemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome has gotten that bad.

Even if Trump were to save America $10 trillion dollars of government waste, drain the swamp, secure the borders, save thousands of lives through healthcare reform, convict thousands of violent gang members and fentanyl smugglers – every one of those “wins” will be interpreted in a conspiratorial way to make Trump out to be a racist, elitist, megalomaniacal dictator and all those “wins” are just bribing people into compliance with his demagoguery.

Government Overreach Across the Aisle

Now to be fair, Trump is certainly more aggressive in office than Biden was. But, every potential overreach from Trump is being challenged in the court system – as it should be. And the outsized power of executive orders, in Trump’s hands, stems from the Obama and Biden-era precedent, where both of them expanded the power of the Executive office. Trump is still working within their established order. Not to mention, we have recent memories of Obama earning the title “the Deporter and Chief,” and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer all talking tough about strong borders. Meanwhile, the deep state shenanigans of USAID, FBI, DOJ, and CIA, were operating at full force under Obama and Biden. We could also talk about government overreach in the form of DEI programs, activist judges, vaccine mandates, and more. Government overreach has never been a uniquely Republican phenomenon. If you’re on the progressive left, and you don’t fear government overreach till it’s coming from the other guys, then it’s not authoritarianism you dread, it’s conservatism.

If you’re on the progressive left, and you don’t fear government overreach till it’s coming from the other guys, then it’s not authoritarianism you dread, it’s conservatism.

Worldview Factors

One reason domestic terrorism is easily rationalized among progressives is because many on the left have already committed to a flexible view of truth, language, and reality. For example, the popular left-wing perspective known as Critical theory tends to oppose and question any hard facts, asserting instead that everything is a social construct. Instead of factual knowledge, it’s all perception and interpretation. Unfortunately, those can be stretched to make anything fit.

When your grasp of language, factual truth, and subjective bias are all entirely framed by social constructs, then truth doesn’t matter much anymore. You can make any behavior seem justified through word games, propaganda, and emotional manipulation. I’m sure, Ring-wingers have their self-serving biases too. But, social constructivism is a common theme among modern leftists, and it offers no safeguard against radicalism, violence, or domestic terrorism.

A lesson from 1984

This truth-issue reminds me of one of the most chilling details in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. When the protagonist, Winston Smith, is arrested and interrogated by a “Big Brother” agent, the agent eventually admits that truth doesn’t matter to him. For him, power is all that matters. Truth and falsity are just tools to be used, as needed, to collect more power. There’s no ultimate accountability for our actions, there are just winners and losers. Righteousness is irrelevant because any demon powerful enough to “win” can rewrite the history books afterward and make himself the hero. He doesn’t have to be a hero – that’s a truth-claim. He just has to win. Then he can invent the hero part.

Historically, reality has been the final arbiter between competing forces. People disagree about scientific theories? Let reality decide. People disagree about what “woman” means? Let reality decide. People disagree about American history since 1619? Let reality decide. But now a deeper deception has crept in. It whispers that no one really knows the truth. It’s all social constructs. It’s all relative. Perception is reality. Underneath it all, everything is really about the age-old struggle between the “haves vs have-nots”. These relativist themes tie together a whole batch of theories common to left-wing politics: postmodernism, critical theory, Marxism, Neo-Marxism, nihilism, absurdism, anarchism, critical race theory, queer theory, and more. From that adjustable platform, you can rationalize any amount of distortion, lying, deception, propaganda, and yes, even violence. All of that can be rationalized for the sake of securing more power for your side.

Let’s Call it What it Is

Ultimately, when it comes to actual political violence, we need to call it what is: Domestic Terrorism. And terrorism is a poor man’s authoritarianism. When people resort to terrorism they are using fear and violence to force their political agenda on others. That’s what we’re dealing with in all the “assass1nation idealization.” That’s what we’re dealing with in the fire-bombings on Teslas dealers. That’s what we dealt with in the BLM riots of 2020-2021. That’s what we dealt with in the attempts on Trump’s life.

People may think they’re just rooting for “the good guys” through pragmatic means, but when folks are quick to violence at the expense of courts, elections, and the democratic process, they are not fighting FOR democracy, they’re fighting for terror. The “means” has become the “ends”.

A Poor Man’s Authoritarianism

It’s like when a team of bank robbers get their way through fear and intimidation. For all we know, they may have suffered terrible injustice, maybe they are poor by no fault of their own, or they lost their jobs for bogus reasons. We don’t know. But regardless of the injustice done to them, they are still terrorizing innocent people in that bank. In that way, terrorism is a poor man’s authoritarianism. It’s a method of getting your own way, even if no one votes for you, likes you, or agrees with you.

“Terrorism is a poor man’s authoritarianism.”

As Christians we need to be especially discerning in these confusing times. Scripture encourages us to weigh both sides of a matter, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17; ESV). And Proverbs 6:17 warns us that, God hates “haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood.” We need an extra dose of wisdom these days. It’s all too easy to be deceived by our own latent bias. It’s not enough to just “do the right thing” either. We must do it the right way or else it’s not the right thing.

Leftists cheering for violence is nothing new. And it’s not unique to the Left either. But, the degree of foolishness and delusion behind it might be a new peak. Meanwhile, Christ-followers must honor the sanctity of human life at every turn, even when it means loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44).

References: 

[1] I don’t have exact numbers. We probably won’t have any credible surveys on this any time soon, since threatening the president’s life is a federal offense. You can see some of these threats replayed at Trump’s impeachment trial here. Christian author and political moderate, George Yancey has been writing about this alarming trend calling it “assass1nation idealization.” And conservative commentator Allie-Beth Stukey has been calling out democrat politicians and pundits for advocating for violence. The Trump administration also compiled a list of violent threats against Trump from Democrat politicians sometimes veiled, and sometimes overt.

[2] I’m not speaking of most or all people on the political left, but only a sample of folks on the left. For the record, there are radical revolutionaries on the right wing too.

[3] Regarding evil possibilities from “ordinary men,” see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men (2017). See also, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (2006).

Recommended Resources:

Was Jesus Intolerant? by Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Correct not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism by Frank Turek (Book, MP4, )

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book, DVD, Mp3, Mp4, PowerPoint download, PowerPoint CD)

 

Dr. John D. Ferrer is a speaker and content creator with Crossexamined. He’s also a graduate from the very first class of Crossexamined Instructors Academy. Having earned degrees from Southern Evangelical Seminary (MDiv) and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (ThM, PhD), he’s now active in the pro-life community and in his home church in Pella Iowa. When he’s not helping his wife Hillary Ferrer with her ministry Mama Bear Apologetics, you can usually find John writing, researching, and teaching cultural apologetics.

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The Myth of the Dark Ages

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We have all heard about the “Dark Ages” between 500 AD and 1500 AD.  Some common descriptions include:

  • “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”[1] – Ruth Hurmence Green (1915-1981, a notable atheist with the publication of her book The Born Again Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible).
  • Joseph Lewis in An Atheist Manifesto claims that “If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom.”
  • Jeffrey Taylor, a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly and NPR’s All Things Considered states on com, “There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.”
  • Even as recently as Catherine Nixey’s book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World states emphatically that “This is a book about the Christian destruction of the classical world. The Christian assault was not the only one – fire, flood, invasion, and time itself all played their part – but this book focuses on Christianity’s assault in particular” (xxxv). (See below for several extensive reviews and critiques of Nixey’s book.)
  • The diagram below, which has circulated on the internet, claims to demonstrate that the Middle Ages caused a tremendous hole in learning and advancement caused by Christianity.
  • Anne Fremantle in her study of medieval philosophers, The Age of Belief (1954), wrote: “of a dark, dismal patch, a sort of dull and dirty chunk of some ten centuries.”
  • Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, who attacked the church, described the period as one when “barbarism, superstition, and ignorance covered the face of the world.”
  • Rousseau declared that the era following the fall of Rome caused “Europe [to] relapse into the barbarism of the earliest ages.  The people of this part of the world . . . lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.”
  • The great Roman historian Edward Gibbon called the fall of Rome the “triumph of barbarism and religion.” The famed scientist Carl Sagan also attributes a millennium gap [during the Middle Ages as] a poignant lost opportunity for the human species.”

Some other memes likewise blame Christianity for the so-called “Dark Ages” stunted growth.

Unfortunately, this derision of the Middle Ages as a “darkened period” continues into contemporary descriptions.  Such perpetrators include Bertrand Russell, Charles Van Doren, and William Manchester.

One Among Many Myths About Christianity

Like the myth that the church hindered science, or that everyone in the middle ages believed the earth was flat, or that Galileo was thrown in jail for promoting the heliocentric model of the universe (which you can read about in my previous posts linked); the term “dark ages” is a pejorative term to deride the period as backwards, ignorant, and dismal.  Given that the Christian church was the most influential institution in the Middle Ages, to reference that period as the “Dark Ages” is, in essence, to slander Christianity.  Who, in their right mind, wants to associate themselves with “incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness” as Manchester does in his A World Lit Only by Fire.

The Problem with This Myth

The problem with this myth is that it is so contrary to the facts.  If the “dark ages” were so unproductive and backward, how does one explain the proliferation of inventions and developments during this time period?  A simple listing of inventions, discoveries and developments demonstrates that the Middle Ages were anything but dark:

  • The collar and harness for horses and oxen enabled them to draw very heavy wagons, with increases in speed
  • The 8th century invention of iron horseshoes protecting the feet of horses by greatly improving their traction in difficult conditions
  • The swivel axel (9th century) was made large transport carts much more maneuverable
  • The invention of the horse-drawn furrow plow increased food production
  • The watermill was invented in the Middle Ages
  • The mechanical manufacturing of paper instead of being done by hand and foot
  • Wind power was harnessed to mill, grind, and pump water
  • Eyeglasses were invented in 1284 in northern Italy
  • The mechanical clock, a 13th-century invention, for centuries existed only in Medieval Europe
  • The blast furnace (12th century)
  • Spinning wheel (13th century)
  • The agricultural revolution of the three-field system
  • Chimneys (12th century)
  • Universities (1088 AD) [2]
  • Quarantine (14th century)
  • Musical Notation (11th century)
  • Western Harmony
  • Local Self-Government
  • Chartered Towns

Also, perpetuated about the “dark ages” is the loss of literary concern.  Stephen Greenblatt in The New Yorker (promoting his book The Swerve) declares that:

It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

In truth, the Middle Ages “did have a thriving literary and intellectual culture in which monks played a crucial, creative, and engaged role.” (source). Here is a small list of literary, historical, and philosophical masterpieces written during the so-called “Dark Ages”:

  • Alexiad, Anna Comnena
  • Beowulf
  • Caedmon’s Hymn
  • Book of the Civilized Man, Daniel of Beccles
  • The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
  • Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
  • The Dialogue, Catherine of Siena
  • La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), Dante Alighieri
  • First Grammatical Treatise, 12th-century work on Old Norse phonology
  • Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), the Venerable Bede
  • The Lais of Marie de France, Marie de France
  • Mabinogion, various Welsh authors
  • Il milione (The Travels of Marco Polo), Marco Polo
  • Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
  • Poem of the Cid, anonymous Spanish author
  • Proslogium, Anselm of Canterbury
  • Queste del Saint Graal (The Quest of the Holy Grail), anonymous French author
  • Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich
  • Sic et Non, Abelard
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous English author
  • The Song of Roland, anonymous French author
  • Spiritual Exercises, Gertrude the Great
  • Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas
  • The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, anonymous Russian author
  • Tirant lo Blanc, Joanot Martorell
  • The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, John Mandeville
  • Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, Chrétien de Troyes

A host of others can be mentioned but just check out this wikipedia article on “Medieval Literature.”

Ad Hominem

The fact of the matter is the term “dark ages” is a form of the ad hominem argument.  In short, it’s name-calling.  Until one can demonstrate that the middle ages was backward and made no technological, societal, or intellectual advancement (which is not possible given the prolific advancement during this time as shown above), the term “Dark Ages” is just a term of derision, void of any substance.

One more telling point to demonstrate that the Middle Ages were much more advanced than even our current modern and contemporary age. In the Middle Ages, a peculiar institution fell into disfavor but tragically was revived in the modern era: slavery.  This very fact shows that the Modern Age is [arguably] much darker than the Middle Ages ever were. While slavery never disappeared, it was nothing like the transatlantic slave trade or modern slavery.

As Anthony Esolen, professor of English at Providence College says at the end of the video below:

“Instead of the ‘Dark Ages’ as it is popularly called.  The Middles Ages might better be described as the “Brilliant Ages.’”

Additional Resources on the Middle Ages

Quick Quotes from the Experts:

  • “Nevertheless, serious historians have known for decades that these claims [that the Middle Ages were dark] are a complete fraud.  Even the respectable encyclopedias and dictionaries now define the Dark Ages as a myth. The Columbia Encyclopedia rejects the term, nothing that ‘medieval civilization is no longer thought to have been so dim.’ Britannica disdains the name Dark Ages as ‘pejorative.’ And Wikipedia defines the Dark Ages as a ‘supposed period of intellectual darkness after the Fall of Rome.’ These views are easily verified.” (Rodney Stark, How the West Won. ISI Books, 2014)
  • “Let’s set the record straight. From 962 to 1321, Europe enjoyed one of the most magnificent flourishings of culture the world has ever seen.  In some ways, it was the most magnificent.  And this was not despite the fact that the daily tolling of the church bells provided the rhythm of men’s lives, but because of it.” (Anthony Esolen, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, p.132)
  • “It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one – scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any.” (Tim O’Neill “The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews ‘God’s Philosophers’” Strange Notions)
  • “Western civilization was created in medieval Europe. The forms of thought and action which we take for granted in modern Europe and America, which we have exported to other substantial portions of the globe, and from which indeed we cannot escape, were implanted in the mentalities of our ancestors in the struggles of the medieval centuries.” (Cambridge University historian George Holmes’ Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe)

Books:

Articles:

Videos:

Book Reviews:

  1. The Swerve: How The World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize winning (and National Book Award, MLA book award, amongst others) The Swerve (2011) tells “a literary detective story about an intrepid Florentine bibliophile named Poggio Braccionlini, who, in 1417, stumbled upon a 500-year-old copy of [Lucretian’s] De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] in a German monastery and set the poem free from centuries of neglect to work its intellectual magic on the world.” (source) While the literary side of the story is commendable (Greenblatt is a Shakespearean expert), it is the historical matter that is problematic. Greenblatt’s view of the Middle Ages continues to it as a dark and shallow intellectual vacuum in which the Renaissance (and later the Enlightenment) overcame its backward and regressive mentality.  Greenblatt declares in his The New Yorker article “The Answer Man: An Ancient Poem was Discovered – and the World Swerved”:

“Theology provided an explanation for the chaos of the Dark Ages: human beings were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them. God cared about human beings, just as a father cared about his wayward children, and the sign of that care was anger. It was only through pain and punishment that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation. A hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage, and an obsession with the afterlife: these were death knells of everything Lucretius represented.”

Unfortunately, Greenblatt hasn’t kept up with modern medieval historiography.  Both Jim Hinch, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Laura Miles, over at Vox, point at his errors.

  1. “Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong — and Why It Matters” by Jim Hinch | Los Angeles Review of BooksDec 1, 2012

Apparently, Lucretian was not as obscure in the Middle Ages as Greenblatt represents.  Hinch writes that “Cambridge classicist Michael Reeve pointed out five years ago in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, scholars have long detected ‘Lucretian influence in north-Italian writers of the ninth to eleventh century, in the Paduan pre-humanists about 1300, in Dante, and in Petrarch and Bocaccio.’ Greenblatt cites the Cambridge Companion numerous times in his endnotes. Did he read it?” Obviously not.

Greenblatt’s caricature of the (read the quotes with sarcasm) “Dark Ages” as living life as if God is a cosmic kill joy is puzzling to Hinch as well: “Equally untrue is Greenblatt’s claim that medieval culture was characterized by ‘a hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage and an obsession with the afterlife.’ I know Greenblatt has read Chaucer. He’s quoted from him in numerous books. Has he forgotten the ribald pleasure-seeking in The Canterbury Tales? What about the 13th-century French courtly love epic The Romance of the Rose? The twelfth-century Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes? I find no rage in Dante’s complex vision of human morality and providential grace in the Divine Comedy. Nor do I detect an ounce of asceticism in the ravishing unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters Museum in New York. Or in the rose window in Chartres. Or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Or in the gracious courts of the Alhambra.”

It seems Greenblatt is a good literary scholar, but a terrible Medieval historian, according to Hinch.

  1. “Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve racked up prizes — and completely misled you about the Middle Ages” by Laura Saetveit Miles | VoxJuly 20, 2016

Laura Saetveit Miles, professor at the University of Bergen in Norway, declares that

The Swerve doesn’t promote the humanities to a broader public so much as it deviously precipitates the decline of the humanities, by dumbing down the complexities of history and religion in a way that sets a deeply unfortunate precedent. If Greenblatt’s story resonates with its many readers, it is surely because it echoes stubborn, made-for-TV representations of medieval “barbarity” that have no business in a nonfiction book, much less one by a Harvard professor.

In a very revealing moment in Miles article on The Swerve she declares the book as dangerous:

“When I finished, I put down The Swerve on the table, and the academic side of my brain kicked back in. I had let myself read it as fiction. Yet it was supposed to be not fiction. When I thought of it as a scholarly book, and thought of all those thousands and thousands of people out there who read it and believed every word because the author is an authority and wins prizes, I realized: This book is dangerous.” [emphasis added]

Why is it dangerous? Because it is worse the Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code:

“Every page of The Swerve strives to present the Renaissance as an intellectual awakening that triumphs over the oppressive abyss of the Dark Ages. The book pushes the Renaissance as a rebirth of the classical brilliance nearly lost during centuries mired in dullness and pain. (In Greenblatt’s Middle Ages, bored monks literally sit in the dark when not flagellating themselves.)

This invention of modernity relies on a narrative of good guys (Poggio, as well as Lucretius) defeating bad guys and thus bringing forth a glorious transformation. This is dangerous not only because it is inaccurate but, more importantly, because it subscribes to a progressivist model of history that insists on the onward march of society, a model that all too easily excuses the crimes and injustices of modernity.

But history does not fit such cookie-cutter narratives. Having studied medieval culture for nearly two decades, I can instantly recognize the oppressive, dark, ignorant Middle Ages that Greenblatt depicts for 262 pages as, simply, fiction. It’s fiction worse than Dan Brown, because it masquerades as fact.”

  1. “Book Review: The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began” byJohn Monfasani | Reviews in History July 2012

John Monfasani, professor of history at the University at Albany, State University of New York damning declares that “Greenblatt has penned an entertaining but wrong-headed belletristic tale.”

  1. A World Lit Only by Fire: the Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester

Manchester begins his scathing history of the middle ages by claiming that

“The densest medieval centuries – the six hundred years between, roughly, A.D. 400 and A.D. 1000 – are still widely known as the Dark Ages.” (Manchester, 3) William Manchester does admit that modern historians have abandoned that phrase but the “intellectual life had vanished from Europe” and declares in the very first paragraph of the book: “Nevertheless, if value judgments are made, it is undeniable that most of what is known about the period is unlovely. After the extant fragments have been fitted together, the portrait which emerges is a melange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.”

The wikipedia entry about the book states that,

“In the book, Manchester scathingly posits, as the title suggests, that the Middle Ages were ten centuries of technological stagnation, short-sightedness, bloodshed, feudalism, and an oppressive Church wedged between the golden ages of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.”

Technological stagnation

Short-sightedness

Bloodshed

An oppressive church

Between the golden age of Rome and the Renaissance.

Nothing really new about this negative report about the so-called “dark ages.”  The only problem is that other modern historians have dismissed and criticized the book because of its gross errors, misinformation, and out of date understanding of the era.

Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams, professor and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor of Medieval Europe of SMU and Ph.D. from Harvard (Manchester has an BA and MA in English, no training in history or a history degree), grudgingly reviewed the book. In Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, Adams remarked that Manchester’s work contained “some of the most gratuitous errors of fact and eccentricities of judgment this reviewer has read (or heard) in quite some time.” He begins the review by lamenting:

“This is an infuriating book. The present reviewer hoped that it would simply fade away, as its intellectual qualities (too strong a word) deserved. Unfortunately, it has not: one keeps meeting well-intentioned, perfectly intelligent people (including some colleagues in other disciplines – especially the sciences) who have just read this book and want to discuss why anyone would ever become a medievalist.”

Adams goes on to point out that Manchester’s assertions about clothing, diet, and medieval person’s views of time and sense of self ran counter to the conclusions of established historians of the Middle Ages of the 20th-century.

An example of his errors is with the famed Pied Piper. Manchester claims that the Piper of Hamelin was  “was horrible, a psychopath and pederast who, on June 24, 1484, spirited away 130 children in the Saxon village of Hammel and used them in unspeakable ways. Accounts of the aftermath vary. According to some, the victims were never seen again; others told of disembodied little bodies found scattered in the forest underbrush or festooning the branches of trees.”

Over at The Straight Dope we learn that “Manchester doesn’t footnote this passage” and that their own “research suggests that Manchester got some of the details wrong–among other things, he appears to be off about 200 years on the date.”

  1. “Review of A World Lit Only by Fire” Kirkus Review, May 20th, 2010.

This review reveals that Manchester, by his own admission, did NOT master any scholarship on the early 16th century, which ” dooms him to retelling the same old stories recounted countless times before.”

In the book’s “Author’s Note”, Manchester says, “It is, after all, a slight work, with no scholarly pretensions. All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship on the early sixteenth century.

So, Manchester, who has no formal training in history, not a medievalist, admits to not using primary sources as well as not mastering any recent scholarship of the early 16th century, has penned a propaganda piece (at best) of the middle ages. Again, another myth that the middle ages were dark.

  1. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey is one of the latest publications (2017) propagating the dark ages myth.  Nixey studied classics at Cambridge and taught the subject for several years before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at the Times (UK). Her book, The Darkening Age, no surprise, focuses on “the Christian destruction of the classical world” (xxxv).  Her prologue characterizes Christians as “destroyers, . . . marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots” whose “ . . . attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective.” She goes on to say that “these men moved in packs—later in swarms of as many as five hundred—and when they descended utter destruction followed” (xix).

Some of the reviews and reactions to Nixey’s book can be listed:

  • The esteemed historian of Late Antiquity of Oxford University, Dame Averil Cameron, calls Nixey’s book “a travesty” condemning it as “overstated and unbalanced.”
  • Lecturer of Medieval history at Exeter University, Dr. Levi Roach, stated that Nixey’s book “does not seek to present a balanced picture (…) this is a book of generalizations. (…) Nixey (…) is unwilling to see shades of grey” in his evaluation at Literary Review titled “At Cross Purposes.” He goes on to state in the article that, “to characterize late-antique Christians as ‘thugs’, as Nixey repeatedly does, it perhaps defensible, to call them ‘primitive’ and ‘stupid’, as she also does, is not. All to often Christians are cast as the aggressors, even when, as Nixey acknowledges more than once, they are responding to prior attacks.” And “Perhaps most worryingly, in embracing this line of argument [i.e., over-generalizing] Nixey ends up endorsing the long-debunked view of the Middle Ages as a period of blind faith and intellectual stagnation (which she again, problematically equates with one another.)”
  • Tim O’Neill, over at his website History for Atheists, give a long, detailed analysis of Nixey’s book and concludes, “Good history books, including good popular history, should give the reader a greater insight into the period and the subject. They should make the reader better informed and, in doing so, make them wiser. They should deepen understanding, so that anything else read on the subject from that point tends to add layers to that depth. Watts’ book [The Final PaganGeneration] does this. O’Donnell’s book [Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity] does this. Duffy’s book [The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580] does this. Nixey’s book does not. Anyone reading Nixey’s book is likely to come away thinking they know and understand more but will actually have learned things that would have to be unlearned or corrected later. Nixey’s is not a good history book. It is, as Dame Averil said so pithily, ‘a travesty’.”
  • “Review of The Darkening Ageby Catherine Nixey” by Tim O’Neill. History for Atheists November 29, 2017
  • “When History Turns Anti-Christian” by Bryan Litfin. The Gospel CoalitionApril 5, 2019
  • “Book review, ‘The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World’ by Catherine Nixey” by Joshua Herring. The Acton Institute December 22, 2017
  • “Blame the Christians” by Averil Cameron. The Tablet September 21, 2017
  • “At Cross Purposes” by Levi Roach. Literary Review November 2017
  • “Reactions to and Reviews of Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age” by Cornelis Hoogerwerf. What is Written October 22, 2017

References: 

[1] [Editor’s Note: These quotes are presented as is. If any source information is lacking, that’s how it was presented in the original.]

[2] [Editor’s note: The University of Bologna, established in 1088, is widely considered the first and longest-running university in the world. The University of Al-Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco, a Muslim institution, is sometimes credited as the first but it’s disputed whether that school was a “university” (marked by free inquiry, freedom of thought, and free speech) before Bologna was established. Nevertheless, it too is a medieval creation. So Steve Lee’s thesis is unchallenged either way.

Recommended Resources: 

How Philosophy Can Help Your Theology by Richard Howe (DVD Set, Mp3, and Mp4)   

Debate: Does God Exist? Turek vs. Hitchens (DVD), (mp4 Download) (MP3)

Your Most Important Thinking Skill by Dr. Frank Turek DVD, (mp4) download

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

 

J. Steve Lee has taught Apologetics for over two and a half decades at Prestonwood Christian Academy. He also has taught World Religions and Philosophy at Mountain View College in Dallas and Collin College in Plano. With a degree in history and education from the University of North Texas, Steve continued his formal studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary with a M.A. in philosophy of religion and has pursued doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and is finishing his dissertation at South African Theological Seminary. He has published several articles for the Apologetics Study Bible for Students as well as articles and book reviews in various periodicals including Philosophia Christi, Hope’s Reason: A Journal of Apologetics, and the Areopagus Journal. Having an abiding love for fantasy fiction, Steve has contributed chapters to two books on literary criticism of Harry Potter: Harry Potter for Nerds and Teaching with Harry Potter. He even appeared as a guest on the podcast MuggleNet Academia (“Lesson 23: There and Back Again-Chiasmus, Alchemy, and Ring Composition in Harry Potter”). He is married to his lovely wife, Angela, and has two grown boys, Ethan and Josh.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/3Gsq4BN

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Christianity and Abortion, Part 2: The Early Church’s View of Abortion

In Part 1 of this series on abortion, we discussed that abortion has been practiced for millennia. It is nothing new although the means of destroying a child in the womb have varied. We also briefly looked at why abortion has been a human preoccupation throughout history. For philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, they firmly believed it was to ensure that the best progeny would be born and eventually be leaders of the state. It was also because they feared possible overpopulation. For these reasons and several others, they thought abortion was justified.

 

Contrary to these pro-abortion views was the Christian view. Throughout the history of the church, abortion has been viewed as a wicked, sinful act, specifically because it was considered murder (i.e., the unjustified taking of an innocent life). The early church (second through fifth centuries) was known for its condemnation of abortion. From the early Christian document the Epistle of Barnabas to the theologian Augustine, Christianity viewed abortion to be murder, and as such, it should never be performed.

The Epistle of Barnabas

The earliest extant reference to abortion in Christian writing is the Epistle of Barnabas. Most scholars have dated this letter between the late first to early second centuries. The letter was viewed by many church Fathers, like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, as being associated with the Apostle Paul’s colleague Barnabas. Although it is uncertain whether the letter was penned by Barnabas, it was often included in some early copies of the Bible. Jerome, known for the Latin Vulgate translation, commented that it was valuable for instruction and edification but is not canonical.

The Epistle of Barnabas condemns abortion clearly. “Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring an abortion,” it says.[1] “Nor, again,” it continues, “shalt thou destroy it after it is born.” We see here a clear command not only to avoid abortion but not to kill a child by exposure after birth, which is in contradistinction to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers.

Barnabas does not end with this simple command but goes on to explain why abortion and exposure are not permitted. It states, “Thou shalt not withdraw thy hand from thy son, or from thy daughter, but from their infancy thou shalt teach them the fear of the Lord.”[2]  In other words, the duty of Christian parents is to raise their children in the instruction of the Lord, not kill them (“withdraw they hand from they son, or from thy daughter”).

Tertullian

One of the earliest church Fathers, Tertullian, lived and wrote in the mid-second to early third centuries. Many of his writings are extant. One of the most well-known is his Apology in which he defends Christians against unfounded accusations from Roman culture.

In a section where he expounds upon the sin of murder, he explains, “Murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the foetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance.”[3] Clearly, Tertullian is referring to abortion as his language of the fetus being in the womb when destroyed suggests. And if there is any doubt about his reference, he makes it clearer when he states, “To hinder birth is merely speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed.”[4]

Athenagoras

Writing at about the same time as Tertullian is Athenagoras. In the midst of Roman persecution under Marcus Aurelius, Athenagoras writes his Apology, also known as A Plea for the Christians. In a similar manner as Tertullian, Athenagoras defends Christians from unfounded accusations, like murder (!).

In part of his response to such a ridiculous idea, Athenagoras asks, “And when we say that these women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder?”[5] In effect, Athenagoras attempts to undercut the accusation of murder by explaining that Christians do not even practice abortion. How does this undercut the accusation? Because abortion is murder, and the person who commits such an act will have to give an account to God.

He further explains the reason why abortion is murder. He says, “For it does not belong to the same person to regard thy very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it.”[6] Furthermore, Christians are “not to expose an infant,” that is to say, give birth to a child and expose it to the elements to die. The reason? “Because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it.”[7]

The Didache

Probably the next earliest Christian writing to refer to abortion is the Didache (Greek, “teaching”), also known as The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. It is unknown when the document was written, but we know it must have been before AD 300 since the church Father Eusebius of Caesarea quoted it in the early fourth century, and it is the basis for some of the fourth century document Apostolic Constitutions.[8] The Didache primarily provides instructions on church practices (like baptism and communion) and moral guidelines.

Considering that the Didache constitutes moral teachings, it is not surprising that it includes instructions on the teaching of children and catechumens. What may be surprising to some, however, is the clear prohibition of abortion. It states, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.”[9] Note that the command isn’t merely to not kill a child who is born (“begotten”) but specifically a child not born yet (“abortion”). Moreover, it considers such action as murder as all the previous writings.

Augustine

One of the greatest Christian theologians and prolific writers, Augustine, did not leave the subject of abortion untouched. Amid a discussion on marriage, he chastises those who marry for the purpose of having sex only and finding children undesirable.

One reason Augustine chastises this action is because it may result in the conception and birth of unwanted children, who will then be left for dead via exposure. “Having also proceeded so far,” he reasons, “they are betrayed into exposing their children, which are born against their will.” This leads to “[hating] to nourish and [retaining] those whom they were afraid they would beget.” Such an “infliction of cruelty on their offspring so reluctantly begotten,” he continues, “unmasks the sin which they had practised in darkness,” i.e., the sin of marrying for purely sexual gratification.[10] The end result is leaving the child for dead.

But Augustine also argues that the sin of marrying for sexual gratification alone, or “cruel lust” as he refers to it, often results in the practice of abortion. In particular, it entices women to ingest abortifacients. “Sometimes,” opines Augustine,

“this lustful cruelty, or, if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born.”[11]

Because of this, those who marry ought to align their desires and passions with God’s intent for marriage: the propagation of children. To do otherwise, opens the gate to the sin of killing a child in the womb (abortion) or even infanticide. Those who practice such things are “flagitious,” Augustine says.[12]

Summary

From Parts 1 and 2 on this brief survey of abortion, we see (1) abortion has been practiced for millennia—it is nothing new and certainly not unique to our modern world, and (2) Christians from the earliest centuries have viewed abortion (and infanticide) as murder, and therefore it is a sin and ought not be practiced. The Christian view of abortion throughout the history of the church is consistent and clear. In Part 3, we will continue the discussion of abortion as it relates to contemporary arguments and objections.

References:

[1] Epistle of Barnabas, XIX, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo, NY: The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885; reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), 1:148. All references to The Ante-Nicene Fathers hereafter will be ANF.

[2] Barnabas, XIX, in ANF 1:148.

[3] Tertullian, Apology, IX, ANF 3:25.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Athenagoras, Apology, 15, ANF 2:147.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] See the good short article on the Didache in the Britannica Encyclopedia here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Didache

[9] Didache, II, ANF 7:377.

[10] Augustine, “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” I:17; accessed at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm

[11] Ibid.

[12] [Editor’s Note: Flagitious is a 19th century English adjective meaning “criminal, villainous.”]

Recommended Resources: 

Correct not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism by Frank Turek (Book, MP4 )

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book, DVD, Mp3, Mp4, PowerPoint download, PowerPoint CD)

Is Morality Absolute or Relative? by Frank Turek (Mp3/ Mp4)

 

Peter J. Rasor II is presently the Senior Pastor of Lilburn Christian Church in Lilburn, GA and is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Grand Canyon University (GCU). He previously served as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at GCU (2015-2023). He is co-author of Controversy of the Ages (2017), author of the fantasy novel The Plague of Kosmon: Rise of the Seer, and has a multiple-authored forthcoming book An Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Guide to the Things that Really Matter (Zondervan; 2025). He holds a ThM in theology and PhD in philosophy from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY) and a MA and MDiv from Cincinnati Christian University.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/4hQcZje

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