Aliens and the Evolution of Spirituality

Why are we talk about aliens with my first blog in several years?

Well, because everyone else is!!! Just this week, NASA has announced that it is hiring for a position called “Planetary Protection Officer” to protect Earth from biological alien invasion. This even though there is zero empirical evidence for aliens at all.

 

[WARNING: My future posts will be MUCH shorter than this, but it’s been quite awhile, so please indulge a longer post today… plus. this is FASCINATING stuff!! You’ll be glad you stuck around!!]

 

Let me share with you some statistics on aliens in popular media:

Movies Featuring Aliens:

It almost seems that if a movie is going to be a blockbuster, it has to have aliens in it.

6 of the top 12 movies of all time are about aliens. Including the #1 grossing movie of all time Avatar which brought in $760,000,000!!

In fact, aliens are only increasing in popularity (these stats are only as of 2011 and have only increased further since then):

• Only 4 movies with aliens before 1950
• Between 1950 and 2011 there were 311
  • 5 theatrically released movies a year for 61 years straight involve aliens.
  • 160 (half) since I graduated high school (1992)
  • So since 1992- Hollywood has averaged 13 movies A YEAR with aliens in them!!!

 

A recent article from Popular Mechanics magazine sums it up well:

Purists will claim that the UFO craze officially started sometime around 500 B.C., when reports surfaced that a guy named Ezekiel had seen a flaming wheel descend from the sky. But the modern era of UFO culture began in the late 1940s, when a pilot’s account of a midair encounter with mysterious aircraft triggered a rash of similar reports across the United States. By the late 1950s, the occupation of pop culture was complete, and the old clichés have been warmed over and reinvented ever since. The flying saucers evolved into light-studded triangular mother ships, piloted first by interstellar conquerors, then kidnappers, and finally government collaborators. And just as mob movies have shaped the identity of the real-life Mafia, the fictional saucers and bug-eyed visitors in books, movies and TV shows have impacted real-life sightings. The veritable menagerie of aliens described through the decades, from furry dwarves to naked, luminous blonde humans, were replaced by the tiny-bodied, swollen-headed “Greys.” The bumbling government, making excuses to preserve our delicate sensibilities, has become a sinister cabal, either working with the Greys or cannibalizing technology from their crashed spacecraft. Today, interest in UFOs appears to be surging again, thanks in part to last year’s widely reported sightings in Stephensville, Texas, as well as a new wave of shows on cable following the exploits of UFOlogists. But the culture of UFOs is no longer a work-in-progress. The mythology is fully-formed. Here are the books, TV shows and movies that helped create it. These aren’t the best, or the worst, but the ones that made the most impact on the prevailing American superstition of our time. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, a culture of UFOs and aliens that was once the refuge of scientifically curious fiction lovers, is now an engrained part of the American psyche.

A 1997 CNN/Time Magazine poll found, among other things that;

• 80% believe that the government is hiding the existence of extraterrestrial life forms
• 64% believe aliens have contacted humans
• 50% believe that aliens have abducted humans
• 93% have never been abducted
• 75% believe that a UFO crashed near Roswell

 

As time has gone on, nearly universal message has developed in the media barrage of aliens:

• Aliens are more highly evolved than humans.
• Have technology humans need to survive.
• Are morally superior to humans.
• And increasingly, there has been a further adherence to the idea that aliens were the “gods” of supposed primitive people.
  • Including up to biblical times as evidenced by the popular mechanics article.
• And that aliens are even the cause for life on earth
  • A hypothesis put forth by no less than Stephen Hawking (the most renown astrophysicist of our time, and considered by many to be the smartest man alive.)

In fact, the scientific mainstream has now looked to science fiction for its explanations of our origins, salvation, and destiny.

It has become quite evident that a new mythology has developed.

• Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick (one of the discoverers of the structure of DN) all promote the idea of “panspermia” which says that earth was seeded by aliens.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the U.K. Guardian:

Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe, of Cardiff University, said new research “overwhelmingly” supported the view that human life started from outside our Earth.

The Astrobiologist said the first “seeds of life” were deposited on our plant from space 3,800m years ago. He claimed microbes from outer space arrived on earth from comets, which then “multiplied and seeded” to form human life. His said his evidence, published in Cambridge University’s International Journal of Astrobiology, showed humans, and all life on Earth, came from aliens brought to the earth by comets hitting the planet.

“Yes, we are all aliens – we share a cosmic ancestry,” Prof Wickramasinghe said.

 

We’ll get more into the new alien mythology in just a bit…But let’s first see where this has come from… How did we get to this point?

How is it that science fiction has become science, and this science/science fiction hybrid has formed a new mythology; a new spirituality?

 

A good place to start is with how we are wired as human beings.

See, mankind was made to be a spiritual being. We we’re created by God (as we discovered in our last session) for a relationship with Himself.

God has placed within the soul of each of us, a sense that there is something “out there”, something bigger than ourselves; something grand, mysterious, and transcendent, yet something that is somehow knowable. It’s as if the ultimate was personal… in fact, a person. He put inside us a longing to connect with this transcendent person. This is person we MUST KNOW! That person… is God Himself! Then, He placed us in a world that contains clues about Him all over the place to show us the answer to that innate desire. That we would search for Him, and find Him!

But this new scientific mythology has nothing to do with the God who is actually there, WHAT HAPPENED?

The Bible’s book of Romans, chapter 1 tells us what happened.

 [18] For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. [19] For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. [20] For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. [21] For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. [22] Claiming to be wise, they became fools, [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

So basically, mankind turned away from God and to nature. We began to look for naturalistic ways to be spiritual, for naturalistic ways to explain our origins… and naturalistic ways to satisfy the inner longer to connect with something transcendent. Once we turned away from the Creator, only some form of evolution is the only solution.

Enter Evolution

Note, by “evolution”, I mean the idea that life arose from nonliving brute matter, and the unguided common decent of all living things from a single organism. Evolution is NOT a new idea! Darwin was not the inventor of the idea of evolution. It did not begin with Origin of Species in 1859. It is a matter of history that Darwin was greatly influenced by Charles Lyell’s book on evolution, Principles of Geology published in 1830, and Charles Lyell was greatly influenced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who wrote on evolution in 1801. In fact, a bit of history recorded in the Bible’s NT book of Acts tells us that the Apostle Paul held a discussion on the origin of life with two groups of philosophers known as Epicureans and stoics… both of these schools of thought held to types of evolution.

Epicureans and Stoics were both “monists” (All is One)

Stoics– All is one, the one is spirit, you are part of the one, and the one is divine; you are god. These were one of the many progenitors of our modern New Age movement.

Epicureans– All is one, there is only matter, no spirit, no soul, only matter in motion. These we some of the progenitors of modern-day materialist philosophy… which is the presuppositional foundation of evolutionary theory.

Not only does this show us that evolution is an idea that is AT LEAST 2000 years old… But MORE IMPORTANTLY, it shows us that evolutionary theory is not the outworking of scientific evidence, rather, it’s a philosophical presupposition that interprets the world around us based on that presupposition.

Just as it did thousands of years ago, the philosophy of evolution has, in our minds at least, replaced the fact God indeed exists and is the Creator of all else. Thus it has replaced our ideas about our origins. It has removed our ideas about the hope of redemption. Evolution shouts in dogmatic terms that there IS NO higher meaning to life. It tells us that we are NOT special, in the words of the Father of secular Humanism, Paul Kurtz: “No deity will save us, we must save ourselves”

• Yet remember, we ARE creatures who are made in the image of God, and have been embedded with a sense of spirituality.
• With the idea that THERE IS something more.
  • Something greater than us,
  • something that can FIX us,
  • something that will “save” us!

 

Initially, atheism turns to technology to save us.
We develop new technologies for communication, for medicine, for emissions control, for life enhancement… to in some sense bring us happiness, and perhaps allows to not have to deteriorate and face death.

But, we know these are fleeting, AND more pressingly, we ARE spiritual creatures, created to seek after God…  So, having rejected the God Who is actually there, we create our own…

 

Enter Science Fiction

Here’s where the lines of science and science fiction become blurred. See, true science is unable to even address the issues of “why”; of meaning and purpose. So standing on the shoulders of naturalistic/materialist philosophy (like the Epicureans 2000 years ago) our modern day scientists grasp onto the alien mythologies created by science fiction.

For example, The Atlantic Monthly  wrote a memorial article on the life of Francis Crick and said:

“And thus the Nobel Prize winner embraced the theory that space aliens sent rocket ships to seed the earth.”

They observed that Crick gives a new theology of human origins:

“The man of science who confidently dismissed God… appears not to have noticed that he’d merely substituted for his culturally inherited monotheism a weary variant on Greco-Roman-Norse pantheism—  the gods in the skies who fertilize the earth and then retreat to the heavens beyond our reach.”

 

In his scholarly history on the subject called Scientific Mythologies, James A. Herrick writes the following about perhaps the best known physicist of all time Carl Sagan:

“A similar blurring of the lines is detected in the early works of the popular physicist Carl Sagan. Sagan argued that “advanced” aliens who were ‘motivated by benevolence” would help humanity. And why should they do this? Because the recognized that they themselves had once been “helped along’ by even more advanced civilizations on other planets, and they knew that “this tradition of worthy of continuance.” Indeed, Sagan hoped that the entire galaxy might be united by an interconnected organization of civilizations, resulting in “the cultural homogenization of the galaxy” that would ultimately “unify… the cosmos.” Later in his career, Sagan was a driving force behind the massive SETI project; this Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a network of radio telescopes waiting for messages from other planets. In Sagan’s extraordinarily influential work over three decades, we find another source of the broad public expectation of extraterrestrial contact. Sagan announced themes that would become staples of much science fiction, some popular scientific writing and several religious organizations. He urged that knowledge gained from contact with alien civilizations would mark “the most profound single event in our history,’ and that information from aliens might be “the agency of our survival” and perhaps even “vital for the continuance of our civilization.” Highly advanced species on distant planets might have already achieved the status of “supercivilization gods.”

 

These ideas are becoming more and more the mainstream thought from the scientific community.

The “History” Channel, and Discovery Channel have specials and even entire recurring shows all based on the premise. And these channels are where the majority of people in the culture get their “science” from.

As I stated earlier, these shows and the scientists (and pseudo scientists) on them believe what is being taught to them by science fiction! This includes movies like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Transformers series, the Alien series, etc.; video games like Halo and Assasin’s Creed, etc.; TV shows like The X Files, Stargate, Star Trek, Futurama, etc.

These narratives all promote the “ancient aliens” idea that the “gods” of all the ancient religions were aliens.  It says that we have made religions out of these “Ancient Aliens” and now they would have us look at them “scientifically”…yet the shows seem to want to implement new rules of worship to these aliens; and suggest that if we could just connect with these ancient “gods” we could gain the technology to save us!

 

So what about all the alien sightings? Aren’t we dealing with something real? How do we explain them?

 First of all let’s look at the plausibility of the existence of aliens at all. Is it scientific and reasonable to believe that aliens exist? It is imperative to note that the idea of aliens is directly tied to the theory (the philosophy, as we have learned) of evolution!

The line of reasoning inevitably goes something like this:

• Look how VAST the universe is.
• There are literally billions and billions of planets.
• Since we are the type of planet on which life evolves, it only stands to reason that out of those billions and billions of planets and billions of years of evolution, that there MUST be another planet like ours.
• Therefore, we can’t POSSIBLY be the only intelligent life in the universe.
• Therefore, aliens MUST exist.

 

But what if life DIDN’T evolve here?  What if we are NOT the product of evolution? What if evolution is ISN”T TRUE?   …Then the idea of aliens has no basis! Because there is an ASSUMPTION of evolution here, we search for life on other planets out there!

In fact, do you know how much evidence has been discovered for life on other planets? ZERO. But we continue to GRASP for evidence. We continue to ASSUME evolution, see evidence of ice in space, and think “Oooh aliens”

The solarsystem.nasa.gov website says as much about one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa:

“Europa’s surface is mostly water ice, and there is evidence that it may be covering an ocean of water or slushy ice beneath. Europa is thought to have twice as much water as does Earth. This moon intrigues astrobiologists because of its potential for having a “habitable zone.” Life forms have been found thriving near subterranean volcanoes on Earth and in other extreme locations that may be analogues to what may exist on Europa.”

 

Wait… we have “astrobilogists” ?

Yep. On NASA’s Origins website, they say astrobiology is:

“The study of life in the universe. It’s a new field of research that covers the origin, evolution, distribution, and destiny of life- wherever it may exist.”

I want their job, because they are studying something that doesn’t exist!! There is NO evidence whatsoever for life on other planets!!!

What about all the accounts of UFOs and alien encounters, then?

It is quite evident that people ARE SEEING something. And people are even EXPERIENCING something; especially when we consider Abduction cases. The vast majority of sightings and abductions are easily explained as physical or psychological happenings that there are best explained by ordinary means; and can thus be dismissed.

Respected researcher John Weldon notes the following:

1. Despite millions of sightings, there has never been a single radar detection of a UFO entering our atmosphere from outer space.
2. “Aliens’ seem able to live and breathe in Earth conditions without aid of respiratory devices.
3. UFOs have been fired upon numerous times by American, Russian, and Canadian pilots, yet not one has ever been brought down.
4. And startlingly, no UFO sighted on differing occasions ever appear exactly alike.

 

In his book Alien Intrusion, Gary Bates summarizes UFO sightings this way: “From the data we can draw the following conclusions about UFOs:

• They are already here. Some way and somehow they appear to be emanating from our own planet.
• They are visible yet do not seem to be real physical entities. In other words, they do not seem to be bound by the same physical laws as the rest of our material/natural world.
• They and their occupants are sometimes willing to be seen, but not appear to want to make open and friendly contact on a large scale.

 

Because of the lack of evidence of life on other planets and the impossibility of them getting here, and the NATURE of these otherwise unexplainable events,  many of the leading UFOlogists are now turning from the ETH (explain “terrestrial”) to Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis

Dr. Jaques Valee is a computer scientist (developed ARPNET- precursor to the Internet), and an astrophysicist. He has spoken before the UN on UFOs and is widely recognized as the premiere expert in the world on the subject. He has done computer analysis on 10s of thousands of UFO reports looking for patterns to form an explanation. He has authored 8 books on UFOs and was the real life basis for the French scientist “Claude LaCombe” in the UFO movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”

He himself saw a UFO flying over his home in 1955. Like many other UFO researchers, he attempted to validate the ETH. But by 1969 he had changed his conclusion and said that the ETH ignored too much data:

Jaques Vallee and J. Allen Hynek, describe in their book The Edge of Reality:

“If UFOs are indeed ‘someone else’s nuts and bolts hardware’, then we must still explain how such tangible hardware can change shape before our eyes, vanish like in a Chesire cat manner (not even leaving a grin), seemingly met away in front of us, or apparently ‘materialize’ mysteriously before us without apparent detection by persons nearby or in neighboring towns. We must wonder too, where UFOs are ‘hiding’ when not manifesting themselves to human eyes.”

 

Valee’s conclusion was that these beings are not “terrestrial” at all. They are real, but they are from another dimension of our own world. They are spiritual beings. That is his scientific stance.

In agreement, the world’s leading UFO publication, Flying Saucer Review, did objective and thorough research utilizing over 50 experts and the official statement of the editor of the magazine, was:

“There seems to be no evidence that any of these crafts or beings originate from outer space. The whole phenomenon involves a mass of features that conflict with modern science, and many researchers now believe that these beings… are possibly from some unknown aspect of our world.”

That editor also said in the London Times:

“I do believe that the great bulk of these phenomena are what is called satanic.’

 

In light of that, to take it up a notch here, some people (as we are well aware of) claim to have been abducted by these beings, taken aboard these ships, and to have talked to aliens, and even had strange “procedures” conducted upon them by the aliens. By all psychological accounts, these events are very real in the minds of those making the claims. Occasionally these events even leave physical traces that are otherwise unexplainable.

It is important to note here that the details of these abduction events are very similar to events throughout history. The language of cultural interpretation has changed, but the events (whatever they are) seem to be one and the same. Jaques Valee also saw a correlation to numerous religious traditions, folk stories, and occult texts and found many similarities including: Missing time, the abductees perception of reality being profoundly altered,  and stories of places where “changelings” (offspring that are half human /half goblin, etc.) are born, midwife by the abductee.

In his 1990 book Confrontations, Valee observed:

“The structure of abduction stories was identical to that of occult rituals…. Contact with ufonauts [is] only a modern extension of contact with non-human consciousness in the form of angels, demons, elves, and sylphs. Such contact includes abduction, ordeal (including surgical operations), and sexual intercourse with aliens. It often leaves marks and scars on the body and the mind, as do UFO abductions.”

 

Associate Professor of psychology at Wheaton College Elizabeth L. Hillstrom points out that a growing number of academics support the conclusion that UFOnauts are synonymous with historical demons.  In her book, Testing the Spirits, she writes:

‘From a Christian perspective, Vallee’s explanation of UFOs is the most striking because of its parallels with demonic activity.  UFO investigators have noticed these similarities.  Vallee himself, drawing from extrabiblical literature on demonic activities, establishes a number of parallels between UFOnauts and demons….Pierre Guerin, a UFO researcher and a scientist associated with the French National Council for Scientific Research, is not so cautious: “The modern UFOnauts and the demons of past days are probably identical.”  Veteran researcher John Keel, who wrote UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and other books on the subject, comes to the same conclusion: “The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon.’

In fact, surveys taken of abductees overwhelmingly show that they subsequently develop an interest in and openly participate in New Age/occult or Eastern-type mystical religions.

So the rabbit hole goes much deeper…
But suffice it to say that This idea of aliens as gods that our culture is flirting with is an even much more dangerous idea than it seems on the surface!

The evidence points to the fact that in our cultural desire to get rid of God. To create beliefs systems of our own using the fantastical world of science fiction and aliens… there are real, spiritual entities that all just fine playing to our presuppositions and leading us astray.

How We Lost Our Minds

We are swimming in postmodern ideology. The whole “my truth/your truth” thing has become the crutch for anyone who wants to retreat from dealing with the reality of how God has ordered the universe.  When trying to diagnose how to deal with ideas like this, it’s always good to look at thier origins. Here’s a great article from Summit.org on just that. You’ll see after reading, why I recommend you subscribe to this free e-publication from Summit.

Ideas Have Histories: Where Postmodernism Came From

Postmodernism comes in all kinds of shapes and expressions. This sort of variety can make it difficult to understand. Further, postmodernism resists categories and distinctions, and this makes it more difficult to nail down as a worldview. There is a larger intellectual history that must be understood in order to grasp the uniqueness and significance of postmodernism as a worldview.

Ideas Have Histories: How We Lost Our Minds…

 

While dividing history into distinct time periods is not an exact science, there are two major historical transitions that can help us clarify the emergence of postmodernism: (1) the transition towards modernism, typically dated around the 1700s and (2) the transition away from modernism which began in the late 20th century.

The transition from what is often called the pre-modern period into the modern period corresponds with the influence of Enlightenment thinking and the scientific revolution. Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a dominant cultural belief in the existence of the supernatural. This was due in large part to the rise of Christianity and specifically the Roman Catholic church as the most powerful cultural presence in medieval times. This was a world of authority, and authority rested in the hands of traditional institutions, especially the church, since it was entrusted with interpreting and communicating this truth to the common person.

With a belief in God came a strong belief in the concept of revelation, that God not only existed but had revealed Himself and His will in the Bible. This revelation was considered the primary source of truth, and could be trusted to unlock God’s metanarrative (or, “Big Story”) for the world. Believing was the starting point of real knowledge. St. Anselm, typifies a pre-modern perspective on truth: “For I seek not to understand in order that I may believe; but I believe in order that I may understand, for I believe for this reason: that unless I believe, I cannot understand.” This view of revelation and authority did not fare well during the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a movement among European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the decades leading up to this time, the church’s authority had been successfully challenged politically (reactions against corruption), theologically (Luther, Calvin and the Protestant Reformation), philosophically (downfall of scholasticism), and scientifically (Galileo, Copernicus, and Baconian method). There was a growing disillusionment with the traditional educational, political and religious institutions, as well as their authoritative sources.

During the Enlightenment, authority shifted from traditional institutions to human reason. A scientific approach to the world yielded tremendous advances in medicine, technology, and communications and challenged the centrality of theology and religious belief as the paradigm for learning. Free from the restrictive shackles of traditional beliefs (thus, modernism), progress seemed inevitable. Immanuel Kant described this period of time in this way: “Sapere aude! ‘Have the courage to make use of your own mind!’ is thus the slogan of the Enlightenment.” [1]

The modern period had begun. The growing skepticism in regards to anything supernatural was matched by growing faith in human ability to know the world, control it, and reap the inevitable benefits. The “Big Story” of the world was not given by revelation; rather, it was to be discovered and perhaps even determined by science, reason and technology. This major transition was at the heart of the modern period.

However, from our 21st century perspective, it is clear that the predictions of utopia guaranteed in the modern period never materialized. Instead, modernists became disillusioned as military increase brought world wars; failed development policies led to class oppression and colonialism; economic idealism resulted in communism and the Cold War; and our best science created nuclear weapons and the threat of global devastation.

Postmodern writers, beginning with Nietzsche, began to question the integrity of modernism’s metanarrative of progress. In fact, the main casualty of a postmodern perspective is the very idea of a metanarrative. Postmoderns are skeptical of any and all claims to an authoritative comprehensive worldview, absolute truth about reality, and an overarching purpose to the human story.[2] Postmoderns embrace local narratives, not metanarratives; a multitude of stories, not a “Big Story.”

In short, it could be said that religious metanarratives were dismissed by modernism. Man-made ones are dismissed by postmodernism. This is what Myron Penner and others have referred to as “the postmodern turn:”[3] postmodernism is a turn away from the certainty and optimism of modernism. As Jean Francios Lyotard wrote: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”[4]

Answering the Postmodern Challenge

 

Postmodernism’s impact on Western culture is hotly debated, and various thinkers and writers- including those coming from a Christian worldview- have offered diverging opinions of it. Some see it as a passing fad; others see it as long-lasting paradigm shift. Some decry it as dangerously destructive; others embrace its destruction of the oppressive structures of modernity.

The most helpful contribution of postmodernism is, first, that it has successfully challenged the reigning paradigm of the modern period, which was based largely on naturalistic humanism. Modernism, in seeking to arrive at absolute knowledge through empirical investigation, separated matters of “faith” from matters of objective knowledge about the real world. Postmodernism confronts this dichotomy in ways that are helpful for the Christian worldview.

Second, postmodernism has cast a large shadow of skepticism (and has offered a strong dose of humility) on the modern belief in the efficacy and near inerrancy of human reason. As was seen during the modern period, human reason can be quite productive, especially in the arenas of science, medicine, and technology. However, human reason can also be manipulative and destructive, especially when it produces the totalizing ideologies (e.g. communism, Nazism, colonialism, etc) that characterized the modern period.

Third, postmodernism has demonstrated that objectivity and certainty are not exclusive to the realm of science as was claimed during the modern period. In fact, science is often quite biased and agenda-driven, and is therefore in no place to claim to be the final arbiter on all matters of knowledge. This is especially helpful for Christians, who often feel the burden to play by the rules of modernism and empirically demonstrate every aspect of Christian truth.

Fourth, postmodernism rightly reminds us of the power of our culture, and especially the language of our culture, in creating our frames of reference. The modern period demonstrated that this power can be used to marginalize and oppress others at the personal and the systemic level. For the Christian, then, care should be taken to distinguish Scriptural teaching from our cultural perceptions.

Finally, the emphasis of postmodernism on story and narrative fits (to a limited extent) with the way the Bible presents God’s interaction with the world. The Bible is, on the whole, a narrative through which God gives us the Truth about Himself, humanity and the world. Of course, for the postmodernist, no story is to be considered true in this absolute sense over and above any other story, and propositions from one interpretive community are irrelevant for others.

The Bible does not present a God whose story is one among many, but a God whose story is the story above all others. So, in dealing with the postmodern mind, evangelicals face a difficult situation. For the past several centuries, modernity has relegated Christianity to the category of an unscientific, unrealistic worldview that is simply not believable for thinking people. Some Christians are tempted to settle for having Christianity accepted as a truth rather than face the prospect of being dismissed due to dogmatically claiming to be the truth, and abandoning the concept of worldview seems to be a small price to pay for having at least some claim to “truth.”

Although the dethroning of humanistic scientific reason is attractive to battle-weary Christian intellectuals, the postmodern denial of all objective truth is unacceptable. Further, it is important to note that none of the positive contributions of postmodernism originated with postmodernism! In fact, the Christian worldview has always attested to the limitations of unaided human reason, the effect of the fall on objectivity and certainty, the tendency of humans towards marginalizing others, and the role the concept of story plays in our experience.

Despite the popularity of postmodernism among many Christians, the Christian worldview and the postmodern worldview cannot co-exist without one capitulating to the other. One could argue that we are chronologically “postmodern;” but ideologically, we cannot become “postmodernists.”[5]

________________________________________________________________

 

Footnotes

1. Immanual Kant, “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?'” available online here.

2. David Wells, Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2005), 74–90.

3. Myron Penner, Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, 19–28.

4. Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, in Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10 (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984).

5. Note: This article is an adaptation and abrdigement from the second chapter of Making Sense of Your Wolrd: A Biblical Worldview by Gary Phillips, William Brown, and John Stonestreet.

The Real Battle Behind the Headlines: Part 1

     Perhaps now, as in no time ever in history, the world is a divided place.  Despite seemingly limitless technologies to keep us “connected” we are more isolated than ever.  Even while talk around the globe of “universal” this, “global” that, and “consciousness” another saturate our vocabulary, we find ourselves further apart ideologically than we ever have.  Why? Perhaps it is because we are missing the real battle that lies underneath all the headlines of the superficial battles we are caught up in.  The real battle is spiritual and it is being played out on only two major battlefronts. In the Eastern hemisphere the battle is over the identity of God.  The three major monotheistic religions of the world are waging an ideological (and too often physical) war as to whether it is the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim belief system that has it right when identifying God and how God should be approached. The war here in the West is not over the identity of God, and not necessarily over the existence of God; despite the multitude of unceasing headlines that tell us this is the battle.  The real battle in the West is theism vs. monism. 

Most of us know what “theism” is.  It is the idea that a personal, nonphysical, Creator God made all things, holds all things together, and rules over all things. This is the concept behind the ideas of all the participants in the battle that is going on in the East; but that battle is over the identity of that God.

“Monism” on the other hand may be an unfamiliar term; this is particularly strange because as you will see, we are literally swimming in ideological monism at every turn.  “Monism” is the idea that all of reality is made up of a singularity.  You will recognize monism more easily when it is broken down into its two branches, Materialistic Monism and Spiritualistic Monism For our discussion we will simply call them materialism and spiritualism. 

Materialism, which is also accurately referred to as “naturalism”, is the view that all of reality is ultimately reducible to the physical.  This has been the prevailing idea of the universe since the 1960 film “Inherit the Wind” gave a greatly slanted view of the Scopes Trial (more on the movie and the trial itself here).  Since that time, materialism has been the growing norm in terms of how we view reality.  In this view, man does not have a soul, only a brain. Man is the product of matter and is himself simply matter in motion.  Materialism says further that there certainly isn’t any God that is the creator, sustainer, and judge of man for God would not be physical in nature by definition, therefore God cannot exist.  More on the repercussions of this idea in Part 2.

Spiritualistic Monism (spiritualism), like materialism, holds that all of reality is made up of a singularity; only with the distinction that the singularity is purely spiritual and is divine.  So in materialism you have “All is one and in it there is no God at all”, and in spiritualism you have “All One and All is God”.  Spiritualism is quickly growing in the Western psyche.  It appeals to the culture in many ways: there is no God over us, we are all part of and One with the earth and the cosmos. More on the repercussions of this idea in Part 2 as well.

These two ideological starting points are at war with Christianity in the West.  But don’t think the battle is a new one.  Historically, this battle has its roots in ancient thinking. The Greek thinkers first laid it out in a simple and clear way.  They discovered that there were really only three ways to view the world and how it came to be.

1. In the beginning was Chaos. Out of Chaos (randomness) comes Cosmos (order). Out of Cosmos comes either human or divine Logos (word or mind) that explained the Cosmos.
2. Cosmos has always existed. Out of the Cosmos comes Logos.

These two options represent monism in that all is one singularity. Disagreement only exists over the nature of the one singularity.

    3.  Behind everything there is a divine Logos that created the ordered Cosmos, and out of that Cosmos came human Logos.

This third view is the way of viewing reality that was in dominance even before the time of Christ, yet it is clearly representative of theism.  However, Christianity would bring further clarification to the table that has major implications for our survey of the battle at hand.  This was the idea of the Imago Dei, that is that we are made in the image of the Creator God which we will also discuss in Part 2.

This battle of ideas (as you may be able to see already) has major implications for the way we view ourselves, others, the earth, morality, politics, science, law, and human destiny only to mention a few of the areas.  Suffice it to say that this battle is the battle behind all of the headlines and every issue in our lives.  Again, more in Part 2.

A great rescource for further study on this subject is Peter Jones’ book Spirit Wars.