Democracy:
Self-Evident?
By Harold O. J. Brown
Editor's note: During the last several weeks, your editor has been
wrestling with the question raised by Goethe in Faust: Wie alles sich
zusammenhält, how all things hold
together. There is a connection
between our hope for the success of democracy and our concomitant dread of
hearing about God in our schools.
Are they related? Perhaps
not, but perhaps what follows may be helpful.
Introduction 
America is exporting democracy. That means that we are confident that
— allowing for a few
blemishes — we have the best form of government possible. For a century, the government of the
United States has been attempting to export it. United States President Woodrow Wilson sent American troops
to Europe in World War I "to make
the world safe for democracy." Our
goal after World War II was to promote democracy in Europe, Asia, and
Africa. Since the spring of 2003,
America, supported by the British and small contingents from other countries,
has been attempting to bring democracy to the Middle East, beginning with
Iraq. But democracy, the form of
government that we so highly praise, is in trouble in America. The causes are two movements that we
tend to see as refinements of democracy, but which actually undermine it and
eventually can destroy it:
pluralism and individualism.
Pluralism
In an essay in the quarterly
Catholica, French philosopher Claude Polin asks, "Pluralism or Civil War?"[1] Pluralism as a description can be
harmless. As a principle to be
enforced, it is potentially destructive for a nation. It can be understood in a weak sense as a situation in which
a society is made up of different races, languages, religions, or other groups. In that sense the United States are
definitely a pluralistic society.
Pluralism as a principle means that no element, no philosophy, is to be
dominant, to set the tone for the rest.
According to M. Polin, the growth of pluralism in this sense will
decompose a democratic society.
A nation defined by pluralism will have no shared values, goals,
and standards. It will not be a
commonwealth, but a conglomeration.
In the United States we are told the contrary. We hardly feel ourselves on the brink of a civil war. We pride ourselves on our pluralism and
boast, "Our strength is in our diversity." We do our utmost to increase it,
legally and illegally. Recently
former President Clinton exulted in saying that Americans of European origin
will soon be a minority in the United States. One of the most politically incorrect things that one could
say today would be to argue that diversity will lead to decomposition. That does not mean that it will not
turn out that way.
In the same issue of Catholica, editor Bernard Dumont warns of
"pluralism and social
fragmentation." Was it Vice
President Al Gore who translated the American slogan, E pluribus unum as "Out of one, many"? Presumably this was a slip of the tongue, but that is what
is happening. Pluralism already
existed in Iraq, held in check by the power of the now deposed dictator Saddam
Hussein. One of our greatest
challenges in Iraq is to persuade the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds to live and
work harmoniously with one another.
If our own house begins to fragment, as Dumont warns, shall we be able
to establish social harmony in Iraq before we ourselves come apart?
As we exult in our wealth and military power, nothing could be
farther from our minds than the fragmentation of our nation. For our first two centuries, the United
States had a kind of generically Christian orientation, and English was taken
for granted as the national language.
Logically it might make sense to fear that the insertion of people
groups with dramatically different religious orientations, such as Hindu or Muslim,
could produce disruption and fragmentation. Why do we not fear any such thing? First of all, for the first two centuries of American
independence, the new people groups coming in were drawn from the same
generally European, Judaeo-Christian heritage. Other languages could and did persist in various
communities, but English was not seriously challenged. We are taking a long time, far too
long, to perceive that faith in democracy and diversity cannot truly unite
groups whose deepest commitments differ radically.
Polin points out that for the past three centuries, since the
Enlightenment, Christians have been separating themselves from belief in
God. Instead we trust
industrialization to produce the goods that we need to be happy and democracy
to keep us living at peace with one another. These simple faiths were horribly shaken by world wars and
economic upheaval, but they have returned and once again rule. In the United States, our commitment to
democracy and diversity has yet to be seriously challenged. As long as our
stores are full and we have plenty of cash and/or credit, we do not seem to
recognize that there can come a time when the motto e pluribus unum, simply will no longer work.
Unity as a goal is effective only if those who are to be united
share a common vision of the good.
Americans once did, and to a large extent we still do, but we are
beginning to hear other voices. To
use the terminology of the famous Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin,
here in the West we have what he called a sensate culture; in fact, today we
have a late, degenerate sensate culture.
In the Middle East, we have to do with what he called ideational, a way
of thinking in which God is the highest good and divine revelation is the chief
source of truth and of knowledge.
Those who think in this way will not be diverted by talk of democracy or
diversity from attacking those they think endanger their faith.
In the early twentieth century, the German, the Austro-Hungarian,
and the Russian Empires crumbled under the blows of overwhelming military
force. Then, near the end of the
century, the greatest power to emerge from their collapse, the Soviet Union,
which we once dreaded so much, suddenly disintegrated. Democracy did not come easily to
Germany, nor to Austria and the successor nations. Is it beginning in Russia and the other successor nations of
the U.S.S.R.? Let us hope that it
may be so; it is not yet certain.
We should reexamine our hope that democracy is somehow the
default arrangement of society, to which nations will turn when obstacles are
removed. All the same, our hope
that democracy will spread when tyranny is removed is based on a rather na•ve
misunderstanding of human nature.
We have forgotten the Calvinist-inspired caution that gave us the U. S.
Constitution and our separation of powers: man is capable of good, but inclined to evil. Checks and balances must be established
to preserve good government. The
power of any branch of government must be limited, for power corrupts, as Lord
Acton said, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Crusaders Keen
At the head of the double stairway leading to the reading
room in Harvard's Widener Memorial Library hangs a great mural, showing
American soldiers in uniform boarding ship for Europe. The heading reads,
"They crossed the
sea crusaders keen, to help the nations battling in a righteous cause." Our righteous cause, as defined by
President Woodrow Wilson, was "to make the world safe for democracy." Among the Allies, only France was a
real republic; after the war,
monarchs were replaced by dictators, not exactly what Wilson had hoped.
The "Great War" (World War I) was hardly a war of democracies
against monarchs. The democratic
United States and republican France were allied with the British and Japanese
Empires and the Kingdom of Italy against the German and Austro-Hungarian
Empires. The Russian Empire had
been their ally too, but collapsed with a short-lived democratic revolution in
1917, to be replaced by Bolshevism.
The German kaiser abdicated and the Austro-Hungarian Double Monarchy was
broken into at least eight parts.
This latter breakup has left a legacy that continues to trouble the
peace.
Multiculturalism, Good and Bad
We seem to have had two ideas of multiculturalism: ours, good, and theirs, bad. If we had been thinking in terms of
pluralism and multiculturalism in those days, we should have tried to keep
Austria-Hungary together. It was a fine example of a multicultural, pluralistic
society. Despite having eight
languages and an even larger number of ethnicities, the Double Monarchy held up
well until defeat finally became certain in the second half of 1918. Wilson believed in national
self-determination and was unwilling to permit the Hapsburg monarchy to
survive. What would he think if he
were alive today and could behold the deliberate establishment of pluralism and
multiculturalism in America today?
Our success in making the world safe for democracy was below
zero. Soon Italy, Germany, and the newly named Soviet Union became totalitarian
dictatorships. One of the lessons
that we ought to have drawn from the rise of totalitarianism is that the
existence of democratic structures does not prevent it. They did not do it in
post-war Germany, nor in Italy, nor in the first, democratic revolution in
Russia. The tremendous economic
distress of the period was the major disruptive factor. The mere existence of voting rights and
democratic institutions could not prevent tyranny. We could not expect democracy to rise of its own accord in
Iraq, or we should simply have left after deposing Hussein.
After World War II our good intentions also went awry. Pressure was put on the British,
French, Dutch, and Portuguese empires to decolonialize, to liberate their
African and Asian colonies. In the
aftermath of decolonialization, democracy exists today in India and in South
Africa, but is at best a fiction in other newly sovereign states. It is not a natural consequence of
national liberation.
Method
Democracy is a method, not a solution. It is a ground where there is a place
for a measure of pluralism and individualism, but only as long as there are
common principles to which all of the diverse parts and people give
allegiance. As the late Hans
Millendorfer said, democracy works well when there is a common, shared
understanding of the good. We had this once in the United States; do we still? When the good has to be decided by a vote
— or even worse,
by a poll — democracy loses its sense of direction.
In modern America, democracy has come to be associated with the
exaltation of two other ideals, tolerable in small doses, dangerous in large
ones: pluralism and
individualism. When used to
describe a society with many different, mutually tolerant elements, pluralism
may raise questions, but it is harmless.
When it is made into a rule to be imposed on society, it eliminates all
shared understanding of the good and undermines the concept of objective,
universally valid truth.
Individualism, unlike pluralism, has a solid point of departure,
i.e. the affirmation that each individual human being has dignity and
value. When the United States were
being set up, it was assumed that all humans were "created equal, and endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." As this belief disappears, people begin to derive their
sense of value, their "net worth," to use that dreadful expression, from their
possessions and from the ways that others respect or disdain them.
Individualism based on creation in the image of God[2] was behind
our establishment of a healthy democracy and a sound society. The essential
dignity of man does not necessarily depend on the Bible, but it does seem to
require a supernatural orientation. For example, the great German philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) believed that eternal life, human freedom, and the
existence of God as an all-wise Judge capable of rewarding and punishing are
"necessary presuppositions of practical reason." Without God, either in terms of faith or in terms of reason,
humans can easily descend into what Hobbes called the bellum omnium contra
omnes, the war of all against all.
Kant spoke of
the principle of universability as the fundamental rule of moral conduct:
Act always on the maxim that you could wish to be universally applied.
Practically, this corresponds to the biblical "Golden Rule" and, like it depends
on the reality of a Judge. When such a thought is not present, the value
of the individual then depends on the self alone, not on a Creator or Judge.
This leads to autonomy, in which every man is a law unto himself.
Individualistic autonomy permits a woman to abort her unwanted child at will.
It is leading to increasing acceptance of suicide, which in an earlier day was
an offense against both God and the king. Pluralism tends in the direction of
the autonomy of the particular group without regard for general principles of
the larger society.[3]
When a society is relatively homogeneous, there is little room
for pluralism to develop and no scope for autonomous individualism. Of course no natural society is totally
homogeneous. At the very least
there will be different groupings according to age. For example, most societies judge misdemeanors and even
crimes committed by juveniles less seriously than when they are committed by
adults. Grouping by age as
"twenties," teenagers, seniors, retirees, and the like is useful for
advertising and marketing.
Linguisitic and cultural differences offer other opportunities. The danger of exalting pluralism as a desirable
principle is that it fragments society.
Pluralism and individualism together become not merely
descriptions of the situation and modes of procedure, but dominating political
philosophies to which everyone must conform. The most extreme example of autonomy is illustrated by Satan
in Milton's Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in hell than serve in
heaven." Very few ordinary humans
are capable of Satan's boast, but all too many act as he did: concerned only
with their own will to power and indifferent to society or to God.
Individualism carried to an extreme is clearly deadly for a healthy
society, particularly when it is confronted by challenges demanding solidarity
and common action. Military
service, which seems necessary for national defense in a fallen world, is no
place for individual autonomy. It
is democracy that has given us pluralism and individualism, yet when carried to
an extreme, they undermine democracy and ultimately turn it into its opposite.
Who will volunteer to defend a culture that is not his own? Eventually conscription too will
fail. When each man is a law unto
himself, the rule of the people becomes the rule of one.
Tradition
Individualism is militantly hostile to all tradition, for
tradition regulates even the details of life: speech (Mr., Mrs., Miss) and behavior (standing up when a
lady enters the room). Now we have
lost all titles (except for Mr. President). Everything reminiscent of the days when rules and limits
existed is no longer, from the Latin language on university diplomas and in the
Catholic Mass through the Confederate battle flag to the use of titles to
graciousness on the part of victorious athletes. Tradition means that the past exercises at least a kind of
moral influence on the present, and that is what individualism cannot endure.
Little Societies
For a society to be viable, its
members must share a common vision.
This holds true for little societies as well as for the greatest
commonwealth. Little societies do not enact laws, but they have rules for their
members. For example, members of a
golf club have a common vision of the game that they want to play: it is golf, not tennis, at least when
on the fairways and the greens.
Golf has rules. If a golf
club has members who would rather play tennis, they are expected to join a
tennis club.[4] The normal
golf club does not practice the principle of pluralism; it does not say,
"Tennis and golf are equally fine, go ahead and play. Level a few greens, put up posts and markers, and go for
it!" Golfers cannot respect tennis
players when they are ruining the greens.
There are two kinds of pluralism, descriptive and
prescriptive. Descriptive
pluralism simply acknowledges the presence of diverse elements in a society,
like the presence of tennis players in a golf club. Prescriptive pluralism would require that they be given the
same privileges as the golfers and allowed to play on the greens. In the United States, our prescriptive
pluralism would require that the golfers not only allow tennis, but themselves
refrain from golf in order to not offend the tennis enthusiasts.
Descriptive pluralism in a democracy means that the majority will
tolerate diversity in a minority without abusing it. Pluralism of this kind is tolerant in the sense of the older
meaning of the word. It can
exhibit magnanimity, i.e. greatness of soul, openness, and acceptance of
variations in speech, dress, behavior, and other things. Prescriptive pluralism is not satisfied
with this kind of tolerance.
Diversity is not merely tolerated:
it rules, like the tennis players. Tolerance changes from tolerance of
persons, because of their innate human dignity which is a virtue, to acceptance
of practices and conduct which should be rejected as worthless or evil. It ceases to mean approval. With regard to homosexual practices,
for example, it does not mean that they merely be left unregulated and
unpunished: they must be approved
and celebrated. It requires
approval or preferential treatment of those who are different and thus
establishes domination by diversity.
In our democracy, prescriptive pluralism reigns. It has ceased to
mean acceptance of those who are different and has become domination by
diversity. The protest of a single
"offended" individual can prevent the majority from praying at a high-school
football game or from saying grace before meals at a military academy. Majority rule becomes the rule of
one.[5] The inability of our courts
to see the inherent anti-democratic nature of such developments shows the
degree to which pluralism and individualism have destroyed more than the common
sense of the good: they have destroyed
common sense altogether.
Family
Where individualism reigns,
society ceases to exist. Nowhere
is this more evident in the beginning of this new century than in the
transformation of sexual morality in Western "Christendom." One of the most fundamental imperatives
for living beings is the perpetuation of the species, of the race. It is contrary to natural law to
suggest that the woman, the bearer
of the new generation, should be able to dispose of it at will without any
restraint by her spouse or by her parents. The traditional covenants, marriage and family, mean nothing
to the individualist. The
elevation of abortion to a fundamental right through Roe v. Wade and a
series of concurring Supreme Court decisions breaks totally with the biblical
and natural principles of reproduction as a human duty.
"Be fruitful and multiply" is God's first command to human beings
(Genesis 1:28). Homosexual
behavior does not reproduce, and abortion negates reproduction that has already
taken place. A society that not
merely tolerates but extols and praises both — as our society does — has
clearly repudiated the reality of nature as well as the teachings of
religion. No animal species
exchanges reproductive sexual behavior for sterility. Only homo sapiens are clever enough to see this as a
"right" to be
enjoyed and praised. Throughout
the Western world, the rate of human reproduction is not sufficient to preserve
the society. The individual has no
duty to society, no more than to God.
She or he is autonomous, a law unto self. Individualism taken to this extreme is solipsistic. When solipsistic man dies, he dies
alone. There is no one to mourn
him, for there will be no one to come after him.
When there is no common sense of the good, traditional virtues
are mocked or banned, and traditional vices go from disapproval to tolerance to
acceptance to dominance. Tradition
becomes a disqualification, rather than a reason for approval. Tolerance of the old style is rejected
as implying acceptance, not disapproval, as indeed it did. What it means today is approval,
acceptance, and preferential treatment.
Tolerance comes to mean approving that which in principle was
intolerable. And as Jean-Paul
Maisonneuve said, it becomes the worst kind of intolerance.[6] The tennis players
are ruining the putting greens.
"Professing to be wise, they became fools," St. Paul wrote
(Romans 1:22, NASB). In the final paragraph of The Crisis of Our Age, Pitirim Sorokin asks that the grace of
understanding be vouchsafed to us, so that we may make the necessary decisions
to escape the fiery dies irae and
be able to continue man's divine creative mission on earth.
Presuppositions and Consequences
In the 1985 Chicago Marathon, in which your editor quite
literally "also ran," a young woman reached the finish line a few minutes after
the first few exhausted male runners.
Looking amazingly fresh and cool, she was awarded the first prize for
women. She quickly left the
scene. When reports came in from
the various checkpoints on the route, it became evident why she was fresh and
cool. She had entered the course
only a mile or so from the finish.
So her prize was taken away from her. It ought to have been self-evident that no human runner
could finish that 26-mile course well-coiffed and fresh. The presupposition of the race was that
all runners begin at the start;
had that been fulfilled, the consequences would have been that this
young woman would have arrived much later and not nearly so fresh.
From his little chalet in the Vaudois Alps, the late Francis A.
Schaeffer (1912-1985) taught a small band of willing students the importance of
presuppositions and consequences.
Instead of merely looking at our present Sitz im Leben7, consider where we began and where the course that
we are pursuing is taking us.
Looking only at our present Sitz and not at how we got into it and where we may be going is a problem
on every level. It can decisively
influence current events and policies.
It can shape long-term social and cultural developments. It can permit a whole nation or society
to change dramatically without even noticing until it is too late to stop.
Because as a people we are pragmatists interested only in what
works, we have a good record of taking immediate actions without really
imagining what the consequences will be.
The current slogan "Do whatever it takes," popular in our War on Terror
and a popular defense of actions on television and in real life, is a dangerous
recommendation for action when one is unaware of the presuppositions and unable
to gauge the ultimate consequences.
Religion and religious commitments encourage delayed
gratifications. Religious
commitment as a determining factor for individual and public policy is weak in
the United States and almost gone in Europe. As a result we do not imagine that others can take it very
seriously indeed. When they do, we
can be caught flat-footed.
The Short Term: Iraq
The conflict that we are facing in Iraq was unimagined
twenty-five years ago. Surprises
have happened before, such as the totally unexpected disintegration of the
Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. That a medium-sized Middle Eastern nation,
already defeated and weakened in a war over a decade earlier, can frustrate the
good intentions of a superpower such as ourselves was not inferred from what we
actually knew in advance, or we might have hesitated. Perhaps if we had looked harder at whether our
presuppositions coincided with Iraqi reality, we might not be facing the
consequences we have today.
Consider for a moment where the United States are with respect to
Iraq today. Together with a little
band of allies, which we dignify with the term "the coalition," the United
States invaded and subjugated the nation of Iraq. The victory was easier and speedier than expected. The aftermath has been painful for us
and for the Iraqis, costlier in lives and in fortune. Today, after three years of fighting, we are definitely not
where we promised ourselves that we would be. The consequences are drawn out
and more difficult than anticipated.
They may even involve a full-scale religious civil war.
One of the necessary presuppositions for initiating a war is an
evaluation of one's own strength by comparison with that of prospective
enemies. Our all-volunteer
military establishment was not designed to fight invisible enemies who mingle
with the general population and strike without warning. In World War II, we anticipated this
kind of combat. We mistakenly
assumed that the Germans were so devoted to Nazism that they would not accept defeat
even when their whole nation was crushed.
We feared that they would set up a resistance movement as their enemies
had done in territories that Germany conquered. We had prepared ourselves to meet it, but the Germans, so
totally crushed militarily and so disillusioned about Nazism, created no such
movement. The Germans, like us, are a Western nation, heirs of the
Enlightenment, and ultimately, albeit far too late, they came to their senses
and submitted.
Religious Commitments
Instead of the largely imaginary
German Werewolves, we have the all too real insurgents9 of Iraq, where
we did not anticipate them. On a
short-term view of the present age, we totally failed to recognize the degree
to which the people of Iraq are motivated by religious commitments. Christians, such as they are today, are
not mentally prepared to die for the faith; why should we expect it from any
other twenty-first century people?
The answer is that not all people think the same way. Failing to examine that presupposition leaves
us facing undesired consequences.
The reason for our insensitivity to the seriousness of our
adversaries' commitments lies in our failure to understand man. On the level of world history, we make
the serious mistake of forgetting what theologians call the fallen nature of
man. We all too easily branded all
the Germans as the evil ones among mankind (until the West Germans suddenly
turned up as our allies). They
were not to be regarded. There
were no "good Germans" with whom we might have sought to deal. We offered neither encouragement nor
help to the forces within Germany working to overthrow Hitler. If we had looked at the conquered
Iraqis with the same suspicion, we might have avoided some of the trouble we
now endure. It never occurred to us
that they might be capable of acting against what we consider their best
interest. The widespread
phenomenon of the suicide bombers should have taught us that.
Capable of good, man is inclined to evil. He cannot be depended on to work for
the general welfare, and especially not the general welfare as wealthy late
capitalistic nations see it. The
bombers do not love freedom, at least not as we envisage it. On the other hand they do not hate
freedom, as President Bush has suggested.
They have a different set of loyalties. We seem to have assumed that the Iraqis are capable of good,
but were misled to choose evil. We
assumed that when we removed their evil leader, they would rally to love
freedom and secular democracy. A
possible conclusion that we do not seem to have anticipated, but may
experience, is that instead of obtaining something resembling a secular
democracy, we may wind up having replaced Hussein with a religious tyranny like
that of neighboring Iran. The
recent elections in Palestine should alert us to the dangers of trusting the
innate goodness of man.
The strength of America's available military resources is a
factor that varies with politics and economics. The religious commitment of the Iraqi people is not so
variable. Iraq has a history that
is longer than that of the Untied States. The sites of Babylon and Assyria are
there. Although those great
empires are long past, we might have thought a bit longer about injecting our
two-hundred-year-old vision of government onto the soil where the Code of
Hammurabbi was handed down almost four thousand years ago. We could well have taken all this more
seriously into account before plunging into an attempt first to control and
then to remake the land that was once Babylon's to somewhat resemble our own
image.
The majority of the Iraqi people are Muslims, very strongly
motivated by their religious commitment.
This is something that Westerners do not seem to understand, but that
does not make it any less real or less dangerous to the fulfillment of our
plans for Iraq. Theirs is what
Pitirim Sorokin called the ideational
sociocultural supersystem: only
God and his will count. Millions
are prepared to die rather than violate God's law as they understand it. Their determination exceeds that of the
Jews under Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3:1-30) and the Christians under their Roman
persecutors, for although these were willing to die, they did not deliberately
kill themselves in order to kill others.
Muslim religious commitment is a factor that the
"coalition"
strategists did not take into account, no doubt because traditional
Christianity has become such a pale, wan force in our own lands. As a result they did not envisage the
consequences to which we well-intentioned liberators are being subjected in Iraq. The problem is man.
The Long Term: Humanity
The late classics Professor John
H. Finley, Jr. often said that the message of the Iliad is, "Man lives in the
eye of God and not Who's Who." At
the beginning of our national history, Americans knew it. Our Declaration of Independence begins,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rightsÉ" In the eye of God all human beings are
equal, there and only there, for in the material world no two humans are
equal. Do we still believe
that? For many, perhaps for most
Americans, that confidence is still there. How long will it last, if the new generations are persuaded
that there is no Creator to have endowed us? With no Creator, from where will our rights come? Will we
plunge into the madness extolled by Nietzsche, himself on the verge of
insanity, to be ruled by the will to power? Or will we drift into the pathetic abandonment of purpose
implied by Jean-Paul Sartre's statement that man is nothing but a useless
passion, une passion inutile?
The concept of Creation, that we human beings were created by the
infinite and all-wise God with a purpose and with a destiny and dignity, is
being levered out of the minds of the young by the relentless promotion of a
concept of evolution, praised as pure science, that denies every
alternative. From the six times
twenty-four hours of Creation that emerge from a strictly literal
interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, to
the inference that biological life itself requires us to think of intelligent
design, every alternative to a materialistic evolution is resolutely condemned
by a vociferous majority of scientists, by the educational establishment, and of
course by the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, and
all the other usual suspects, to borrow a word from the commsaire de police in the movie Casablanca.
The eminent biologist Richard Dawkins boasts that evolution is
the total and complete explanation of life on earth, happily liberating us from
the superstitious veneration of the supposed Creator. Only a few other scientists go so far as to deny God, but
most do little to remind us of him.
Very few educators, and fewer civil libertarians, claim that there is no
God. They are satisfied to make
him superfluous. They draw up in
line of battle to ward off even the moderate suggestion that living beings,
from the cell to the whale, bear evidence of intelligent design. Such design would inevitably suggest
not merely great intelligence, but something resembling omniscience, a quality
to be found only in God.
It is difficult to see the vigorous denunciations of even the
mildest efforts to suggest Intelligent Design as an alternative to Naturalistic
Evolution as anything but the effort to banish all thoughts of the Creator from
the minds of the public.
The Divided Field of Truth
If the universe is the handiwork of the infinite, omniscient
God, as the Psalmist says (Psalm 19:1), then people who consider the Bible to
be his revelation must believe what human inquiry discovers in the fabric of
the world will not contradict it.
Mistakes may be made on one side or the other and contradictions may
appear to be there, but the world rightly understood and revelation properly
interpreted will not contradict each other. The conviction that the truths of religion and truths of
science are totally independent of each other is essentially a denial of Creation.
The Hebrew Bible begins with Creation:
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
earth." The two most important
Christian creeds begin with Creation: "I believe in God, the Father almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth"
(Apostles' Creed). The Nicene
Creed of A.D. 325 elaborates, "One God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven
and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." This assertion that the one God is the Creator of all means
that truth must be one. It does
not distinguish between the truth of science and those of religion, for God,
the object of religious worship, is the Creator of all physical reality, the
subject of natural science. The
Nicene Creed added the words "one" in "one God" and "of all things visible and
invisible" to reject the Gnostic concept of two gods, one the creator of the
spiritual realm, and another, lesser being who made the material world.
When religious doctrines appear to conflict with our natural
knowledge, we cannot evade the problem by saying that the doctrines are true
"religiously" when our knowledge is true "scientifically." This is to divide the field of truth.
The real world of matter is not independent of the realm of
religious doctrine. The men who
waged the American War of Independence knew this, for their Declaration begins
with the assertion, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights..." Today all too many
Americans think that as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, their rights depend on
"firm constitutional guarantees."
The Constitution and its guarantees were made by human beings, and they
can be changed or, as happens all too often, abolished by a decree of the same
Supreme Court of which Holmes was once the Chief Justice.
Creation depends not on human constitutional guarantees, but is
the work of God. Of course it is
possible — although hardly to be encouraged — to believe neither in God nor in
creation by God. Those who are willing to deny God, or to place him in an
imaginary world of religion with no reference to material reality, will soon
have to face the fact that it is God who ordained human equality and that
without creation we have no good reason not to proceed to the bellum omnium
contra omnes, the war of all against
all.
Most scientists and educators, with few exceptions, will protest
that they do not exclude the possibility that God is real. They simply say that
that is a religious question. People have a right to be religious, but they
must not confuse religion with science. This is, again, the divided field of
truth. Certain things are true scientifically: that we know. Others may be true
in the religious realm, but that is not science. It is faith. We understand
nature through science, and we leave religion to faith. We live and breathe,
eat and sleep, grow and eventually die in the realm of nature. The biblical
world and life view, with which the West grew up and developed, sees the truths
of nature as the handiwork of the Creator, who is as real as the world he
created.
Are the truths of faith to which religion points accessible only
to faith, or is there something in the material universe that points beyond
itself not merely to its origin, but to its Maker? Most of the defenders of evolution as the sole and only
truth are willing to leave religion to its devotees, but that is precisely what
is wrong if in fact the world is made,
i.e. created, and did not simply happen.
If we wish to look on the world bearing at least some evidence that it
is the work of God, are we being foolish and self-deluded? How we answer this question is relevant
to the question with which we began, the question of presuppositions and
conclusions. If God is at the
beginning, then there is room for purpose. If there is no reality beyond that which evolutionary
science can show us, there is no lasting difference between the scientist and
the high priest, no difference between the king and the subject, the banker and
the beggar, the athlete and the couch potato. All will die and be forgotten.
The earth will die too, whether by cold or in the heat of an exploding
sun.
Extinction and ultimate meaninglessness is not what the
evolutionists want us to think. If some of us turn to God in prayer, and that
makes us happy, they are willing to leave us in that comforting illusion. But
we must not claim to see any connection between the prayers of religion and the
reality of biological life.
Did the reader notice this claim of the most strident voices of
evolutionary science, that there is no connection between what science knows,
namely how life has evolved, and what religion asserts, namely that God created
it? The claim of the militant evolutionists is that there is nothing living
that cannot be explained by what they call science alone, meaning a discipline
that excludes all possibilities lying outside of the reach of its instruments.
The claim of advocates of Intelligent Design is that true science will be open
to examine things in nature that seem to point beyond mere biological process
to prior design and, of course, ultimately to a Designer. The late German
theologian Paul Althaus contended that God has deliberately revealed himself in
nature, first by constructing it so that principles of His design are evident,
and then by endowing us, His creatures, with minds that can discern them. In
other words, there is something there that the Creator intends for us to find:
It is precisely this that the naturalistic evolutionist cannot stand.
First
Cause or No Cause
If God is the First Cause, the Creator, then it is very
plausible to think of a Final Cause, his purpose in creating. This is what the struggle between
evolution and intelligent design is about. It can be won by the naturalistic
evolutionists only if they can maintain an absolute division in the field of
truth. The advocates of Intelligent Design argue that the complexity of
biological life points to something beyond it, to design, and by implication to
a Designer. The ardent partisans of naturalistic evolution say that the
complexity, which they acknowledge to be there, points back behind itself to
the first cell, behind that to the first molecules, to the first atoms, to the
first instant of reality, to the Big Bang.
The advocates of evolution as the explanation for everything
accuse their opponents of seeing visions, of dreaming of images without solid
feet on the ground of reality. The advocates of intelligent design are being
confronted not by commendable scientific skepticism, but by a presupposition,
by the denial that there is anything there to see. This is a persistent
unscientific refusal to look beyond what they think they know to see things
which, if they are really there, point to something they do not want to see, to
Design, to a Designer. Natural science in general, and naturalistic evolution
in particular, refuse to see that in its zeal to discover how things came to
be, they fail to answer, or even to ask, the questions of First Cause and Final
Cause. What or who caused the chain of events they seek to understand, and to
what end was it caused? The
question of First Cause cannot be answered by natural science alone, but it can
at least be asked. That is precisely what the currently reigning evolutionists
and educators refuse to do, and what they do not want their students to dare.
But if there is no First Cause, there is no Final Cause, and as to the future
of the United States, or of Western Civilization, or of the entire inhabited
earth, it makes little difference whether we are still at the beginning, at the
middle, or at the end. Jacques Monod said this quite explicitly at the end of
his prize-winning book, Chance and Necessity. Monod is dead, so if he
was wrong, he now knows it. If he
was right, he is neither better nor worse off than we are, for we are
ultimately all dust.
If we in the United States, the strongest and richest power of
the West, lose our confidence in Intelligent Design, that is to say, if we no
longer believe that we are created for a purpose and have a dignity conferred
by our Creator, will we be able to stand against the terrorists with whom we
wage war? No doubt we shall make the attempt, for after all, without design homo
homini lupus, man is a wolf to man. "Where
there is no vision," the Proverb says, "the people perish" (Proverbs 29:18). If
we wish to have a future as a nation, not merely as a mass of biological
specimens, we must have a vision that looks beyond the self-explaining cell
that cannot deliver us to its Designer who can.
IN ADDITION TO WHICH
• In a rare display of courage, the South Dakota legislature
voted to ban all abortions except where the life of the mother is
threatened. This was the rule in
many states prior to Roe v. Wade
(1973). If the United States had
not had the 45 million babies aborted since that date, we would have at least
15 million more American citizens old enough to vote and if necessary to fight
for their country. When this
editor was in a hearing of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Birch Bayh (D. Ind.), Bayh refused
to let anyone mention potential demographic consequences of abortion on
demand. He was able to prevent
bringing them up in testimony, but not to prevent them from happening.
• Pro-abortionists,
or pro-choicers as they prefer to be called, protest that South Dakota has
already made it difficult to get an abortion in the state. Individual autonomy, or more
specifically women's rights, should permit a woman to have an abortion whenever
she needs (wants) one without having to travel out of state. This approach presupposes the right to
engage in sexual intercourse without thinking of the consequences, and of
course there is no suggestion of any rights or responsibility for the male who
is involved. To refuse abortion to
a woman impregnated in the course of a rape, the pro-choicer said, is
cruelty. At the hearing mentioned
above, Dr. I. C. Bernstein of the University of Minnesota Medical School said,
"If you really want to help a rape victim, there are better things you can do
for her than helping her to abort her baby. But they take longer and they
cost more."
• "Behind
the door," the song says, "her father keeps a shotgun. He keeps it in the
springtime, and in the month of May.
And if you ask him why the h___ he keeps it, he keeps it for a college
man who's not so far away." In the
days before the birth control pill, the presence of the shotgun, figurative or
literal, served to remind young men that their sexual organs were at least
potentially reproductive in nature and were to be used, as the old Prayer
Book put it, "thoughtfully, reverently, and
in the fear of God," or at least in awareness of the shotgun. The ready availability of the
contraceptive pill and other forms of birth control, it would seem, should have
made "unwanted pregnancy" a very rare phenomenon. Instead, it seems to have
made sex free and easy and abortion the second most common surgical procedure
(after circumcision). It is not likely that "contraceptive failure" causes many
pregnancies. Why bother using
birth control if abortion is always available (except, it seems, in South
Dakota)?
• The
Ninth General Assembly of the World Council of Churches met in Porto Alegre,
Brazil on February 14-23, 2006 and called for "alternative globalizationÉa
reform of the world economy to eliminate poverty and inequalityÉ.This would
means just trade relationships, responsible administration of credit, and
control and regulation of world financial markets."1 Latin American delegates
dressed in Fidel Castro costumes called for justice and liberty. Lutheran Bishop Martin Hein of Kassel
commented that the declaration lacked scientific facts. "Beginning with me" was the
subtitle of a book by the Episcopal minister Samuel Shoemaker, Reform Thy
Church. It would be a good slogan for the members of the WCC to say, "Reform the world, beginning with us." Or even
"beginning with me."
Endnotes:
1 Claude Polin, "Pluraisme ou Guerre civile?,"Catholica, No. 90, Winter
2005-2006, pp. 11-22.
2 Genesis 1:26ff.
3 Individualism in this sense supports homosexual conduct, for it sees the
individual as entitled to judge his behavior for himself without regard for the
larger society.
4 As a college freshman fresh from a local chess tournament, I found the Boston
Chess Club in the telephone book and went in to see it. I found men
sitting around card tables playing bridge. When I asked about chess, I was
told that they did not play it any more, but they kept the name because it was
the oldest club in Boston.
5 In the United States, this principle is illustrated by the Supreme Court,
where the vote of one justice, if she is a "swing vote," can rule the entire
nation.
6 Your correspondent's birthplace, Tampa, Florida, has now approved a gay pride
demonstration. There is no such thing as "straight pride," and at the
moment, if people began to be carried through the streets of Tampa while
performing simulated or real heterosexual acts on one another, they would be
arrested. Eventually equality will no doubt come to prevail here as well.
