The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 1

27 January 2010

Volume 12, Issue 4

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At the close of my philosophy class at the end of my undergraduate college education, Mr. Gibbons stated essentially that your success in any philosophical argument that you may choose to pursue, really wasn’t due to the strengths or logic of your arguments, but rather the weakness of the position of others. This came as I spent the quarter discussing in written response to Mr. Gibbons questions, the role of language in our interpretation of reality, and a term paper on Philosophy and Science, with a conclusion that stated: Science is what my father uses to convince me to eat my peas and philosophy is what I use to state why I think (eating peas) is a bad idea, and “and” is the word that holds the whole thing together.

Of course none of these discussions dealt with the epistemology of sophisticated language itself and how it developed only in humans. To say that somehow it evolved from the grunts, howls, cries, and similar communications of less evolved animals, truly lacks any intellectual acumen. Furthermore that discussion would quickly require the reality of supernatural intelligence that never has been a prerequisite for what we call the modern university, which doesn’t deal with the real universe at all, and especially in the arts and humanities, mostly uncontested, ad hominem, personal bias about the universe.

We touched on those profound truths last week in our exegesis of the Genesis creation account. This week we continue along those lines looking at how sin entered the perfection of God’s creation and what that means to us today, a day and age when we think we have evolved to such a point that evil and sin no longer exist. That construction, again based not so much on the strength of the evolution argument, but rather a lack of anything looking like an argument from the other side in common life, or as Augustine defined the term, “City of God.”

In a worldview that holds that the beginning really isn’t that long ago, like thousands of years, rather than millions and billions of years, what we see demonstrated in creation, is not a revelation of the deity of creation itself, but rather the omnipotence of God. Furthermore when you look at human history, especially its violence and a sacrificial system of appeasement to nature’s supernatural gods, many times including human sacrifice, you see evil depravity at the opposite extreme of the continuum of good and evil, where our definition of good is some warm fuzzy feeling of my desire to withdraw from the reality of actual life.

Back when I was attending the Pentecostal church, the couple that served as advisors of the singles group, were the managers of the church’s senior and disabled apartment unit. Before this childless couple got this housing job, for a time Roy was an itinerant evangelist, holding revival meetings at various small churches in the denomination where he did not make survival wages from such ministry. So the church housing management job was a true Godsend.

The singles group itself was quite active and probably had a total informal membership of about fifty people roughly between the ages of twenty to forty, with most of the group’s functions attracting about twenty people. At many of those gatherings Roy and I would get into theological discussions, and often those friendly debates became so intense that they would dominate the whole group for an hour or more.

As a true revivalist evangelist Roy’s arguments centered on the belief that for people to become Christians they needed to acknowledge that they were sinners and then understand and make the commitment to the truth that Jesus Christ was the answer to getting their sins washed away and restoring them to a personal relationship with God.

In our modern culture, I have always had a problem with the concept of relationships always being positive and never negative, but that never really was part of our boisterous discussions. My point generally settled on the fact that Jesus can’t save anyone who doesn’t believe they are a sinner. Even Jesus said that when talking about the Pharisees, that the (self) righteous don’t need a savior (Matthew 9:13, Mark 2:17, Luke 5:32).

Both the educational paradigm and the broader cultural genre, since at least the end of WWII has been that we are all by nature good people, and by free will, people over their lifetime either work to become more (self) righteous, or scheme to do evil. My point was always that if people didn’t understand the construct of sin as an inherit evil, even in the broadest terms, they really had no desire or any need for a savior.

Continuing in that thought, if I’m OK, and your OK, not only are we not sinners, there is no need for some substitutionary, or propitiatory sacrifice, to protect us from God’s holy wrath, by grace or any other form. This is especially true when the whole paradigm of the culture says that the whole God thing itself, is a primitive evolutionary trait that the knowledgeable scientific elite have rejected, because after all they are our culture’s true religious leaders, not like Biblical Pharisees, but rather Sadducees that didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead.

All this talk about sin comes into play when our exposition of the early part of the Biblical book of Genesis enters Chapter 2. But before we get there we need to spend a little more time on the creation of life and especially human life. Framed in the context of uniformitarian evolution, with some great random leaps in organization, how did the evolution of sex take place?

Well it can be said that sex, in pretty much all animal and plant life, allows for diversification of the genome, but the presence and utilitarian reproductive usefulness of sexual differences, in no way answers the question of sexual origin or genesis. This is like asking the question, “What came before the big bang?” and kicking up the design requirements like a million or billion times. Furthermore, stating that the Great Watchmaker, or the Superior Engineer was responsible, is probably more hilarious, but just as irresponsible. The only plausible explanation come from the Bible that says God created sex ex nihilo, because he knew it would be good and the only way any life would be self sustaining.

Now for the sake of argument let us say that God created the whole universe including people, as best as we can understand, not all that long ago, simply because he is God. Someone, definitely not me, for I would be very afraid of the answer, might ask a question such as, “How smart were Adam and Eve?”

Today we have defined the average intelligence IQ of a human being at 100 on the basis of some literary test we have developed and the normal statistical distribution of the results. Assuming the validity of the test and the normal distribution of the results, as true science, for fun if for no other reason, we can only speculate about those ancients and their smarts.

Evolution states that we are continually evolving onward and upward and therefore by definition our dumb ancestors must have had an intelligence of maybe 10, or maybe very optimistically say 50. But just as with the origin of sex, one must ask the source of those quantum leaps in essentially verbal ability needed to get us up to today’s average IQ.

In that same light, the answer I’m sure must be presented along the empirical lines, “We are so much smarter because you can look at all the stuff we have and how complex it is.” But the paradigm behind this statement is quite similar to our verification of geological and the fossil records, circular reasoning. We are smarter than our ancestors because we have defined smarter in such a way (a literary test) to support our own presuppositions. Essentially we have defined gross materialism as superior, because we have eliminated other more spiritual paradigms from our worldview.

But before we get too carried away let us look at more historic empirical evidence, or better stated as empirical questions, such as:

How and why did ancients design and build the pyramids not only in Egypt, but also in the Americas?

How could they cut huge stones, move them from distant quarries, and fit them together in ways superior to our best technology today?

Why were these people so interested in astronomy in that they were able to build massive structures that tracked the seasons and other universal phenomenon?

Bringing it more up to date:

Why do we say that the U S Constitution is an evolving document when just cursorily reading of its pages shows that it was to be absolute standards of national conduct, that protected the inalienable rights of the people at the expense of all forms of government?

Why did the Founders state that it could only be changed by amendment rather than legislative or judicial fiat?

Why have we dumbed down our educational system so that it only supports materialism through a paradigm that bigger institutions are always better than smaller and that there is no other goal in life than making as much money as possible, and then you die?

Probably the most profound questions:

Why do the so-called religious leaders with supposedly a higher spiritual calling acquiesce to all this material nonsense?

Could it be rather than getting smarter, we are really getting dumber, and dumber, and dumber?

It would seem that if humans were indeed created in the image of God, it would logically follow that Godly pursuits should necessarily take a more pronounced position in one’s life than say a new car, or an air conditioner, or even an iPod.

The antithesis of that argument is also true, those rejecting those Godly pursuits would do it with a vigor that would do everything earthly possible to find eternity in other places, such as human sacrifice, worshiping creation, and amassing material stuff, for just the purpose of we can, because the alternative of a real God is truly an undesirable worldview to those who want to run the show themselves.

In this God centered worldview perhaps God created humans with an IQ of 500, or even 1000. With The Fall of man(kind) as described metaphorically in Genesis Chapter 2, those inherited smarts have gradually decreased to the point where the average human, only scores 100, when we are actively designing a world in which a 100 really is below marginally acceptable.

Going back to a historic lack of a written record, there really is no need to record what is generally understood as common sense. To use an oft-used statement by one of my college math professors, when asked a question he thought inferior to his ability to communicate at his desired level of smarts, he would turn an walk to the window, and without addressing the questioner, or the class in general and say, “It is just obvious!” The obvious to someone with an IQ of 1000 is much broader and significantly more complex that someone with an IQ of only 150.

I recently heard this take on an old saying that goes like: “Those who can’t do, teach – those who can’t teach – go into politics.” I suppose I am getting off track, but then maybe not?

Anyway there is also another thought that may come out of the created world before The Fall and that is even though created from the dirt of the earth, mankind had access in that state to the total knowledge and wisdom of God. That perhaps is the best description of Ecclesiastes 3:11 where Solomon says that God put eternity into human hearts. It also puts into the context as vanity all this Babylonian and other utopian schemes of so-called human enlightenment. That also puts into context the title of this week’s oeuvre – Paradise Lost: Part 1.

No matter how you define a creative work that actually participates in the real world, such as a person, a car, your iPod, or television, it has a useful life and functions quite well at a high standard of excellence for an extended period of time. Then things begin to fall apart rapidly, sadly that is even true with the human body, as well as our automobiles. The prime differences among the politics of the health care debate in the United States, is and was, really how do we pay for the preventive maintenance and repairs to our bodies, to pay for those who have inherited a body with some serious defects, but also to pay for those who are unwilling to take care of the body they were given. We all fall into both of those degrading and slacker categories to a greater or lesser extent.

Below you will see a graphic representation of what is called in our Wonder Springs construct of Business Ecology – the Sin Cosmos. We have also replaced the Community Tab on the Wonder Springs website with a Phylogenesis Tab that contains the Seven Principles of Business Ecology as well has Five Lifestyle Curves. The latest of those curves was the Sin Cosmos, which was added sometime after the original graphs from the 1980s and consequently it is blue in color. There you will also see a definition of Phylogenesis that will be used as we move forward in this series.

Next week we will do Part 2 of Paradise Lost, which will look at the Garden in Genesis 2, The Fall of mankind into sin, and briefly how the doctrine of Total Depravity has been brought into our falling apart world.