20070113 Faith- Original Sin Meets Postmodernist Optimism

TCSDaily

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

1 John 1:8 NIV

The continued assault of the world on the tenets of Christian faith is ongoing, even if it is sometimes tangential. In the linked TCSDaily article, the author, Arnold Kling, makes the startling assertion that humans are evolving away from immorality and violence- that is evolving away from sin. Unfortunately, Dr Kling’s ivory tower view of humanity is skewed by his distance from that same humanity. This assertion fails both the tests of science and faith, let alone the tests of common sense and empirical observation.

Dr Kling’s main contention seems to be that, as humans become better fed, longer-lived, and more educated, they become less prone toward violence and more moral. Obviously, Dr Kling disregards the evidence from the daily news that contradicts his hypothesis, let alone the evidence in the history of the past century or so that refute his idea. Nevertheless, he expresses the optimism that humanity is destined toward a non-violent, socially moral future.

Dr Kling’s contention seems to rest on the notion that, ultimately, educated people do not commit acts of violence. Setting aside even politically contentious issues like abortion, one can very rapidly develop a distressing list of violence, atrocities, and immorality that has been committed by highly educated and intelligent people in the past decade, let alone the past century.

For example, consider that many of the 9-11 hijackers and planners were university educated, not simply in madrasas, but in real universities in real academic programs. Further, many of Al Qaeda’s most important figures attended universities in Europe and even in the United States. Ironically, one of Al Qaeda’s major areas of recruitment is among educated, disenfranchised Muslim men.

Al Qaeda is not alone in this distinction. In fact, the leaders of many of the world’s most violent organizations and states are highly educated, well fed, long-lived, bloody, murderous monsters that put even our ancestors to shame with their proclivity for violence and cruelty. This reality is reflected in leadership of groups and nations as diverse as the ETA, FARC, Hamas, the IRA, Iran, and North Korea.

Unfortunately, Dr Kling’s argument flounders on the same rocky territory that so many secular humanist postmodernist arguments flounder, and that is the deeply held belief by such persons that humanity is surely evolving away from the vulgar, religiously oriented ways of our past toward a scientifically pure way of the future and that this evolution is proved by our tendency to be better fed, longer-lived and more educated than our ancestors.

Beneath this belief is the more bigoted belief that modern humans- this term means the same better fed, longer-lived and more educated humans, not temporally more current ones- are simply smarter than the humans who came before them. This belief equates available education with fundamental understanding and accumulated knowledge with fundamental capacity in a way that is not supported by the evidence, anecdotal or historical.

Further, this belief presumes that religion and rigid morality are relics and that morality and spirituality are simply relative expressions of ongoing evolution. By making morality relative to those being evaluated as being moral, entire categories of cruelty, violence, and immorality can be dismissed as simply no longer being immoral, violent, or cruel.

What underlies this belief is the mistaken notion, found often in Western culture, that being well fed, long-lived, and well educated protects an individual against the forces of cruelty, violence, and immorality. This notion, however, is never borne out in facts, as it is usually those same people who suffer the most and the longest from the actions of cruelty, violence, and immorality.

Of course, Dr Kling’s view is really neither secular nor modern, whatever terms might be applied to them today. In fact, these are the same views expressed from the Nephilim to the builders of Babel to the thinkers of the Enlightenment to the builders of the atomic bomb, all of who believed that they somehow transcended God and their own natures and that it was just a matter of time before the entire universe lay at their fingertips.

While these amoral humanists dream of their utopian world without God and filled with humans capable of anything they desire, the world keeps on being what it has always been. Nations war against nations. Tribes massacre other tribes. People kill each other at every available opportunity in crimes of passion, hate, religion, and simple convenience.

Granted, Dr Kling will probably dismiss such an argument as simply a throwback to an unenlightened, superstitious past that held back mankind’s natural evolution toward self-perfection, but even a casual dismissal cannot hide the facts: Mankind is evil and simply growing more cunning and capable in its capacity to enact that evil on itself.

By God’s grace, however, we do have a rescue from this depravity that has nothing to do with scientifically informed educated mental evolution through faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This salvation from mankind’s depravity exists outside of whatever construct of understanding men try to create to justify their own behavior, and for that we can be thankful to God.

DLH