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American Christians Are Addicted to Patriotism

According to news reports today, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of DeLand, FL, has had to take a leave of absence after receiving apparent threats for removing the American flag from the church sanctuary.

Rev Sean Oliver, who came to the church in September after completing a pastoral residency at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, TX, decided in October to remove the flags from the sanctuary so that his congregation could focus on the cross of Christ instead of symbols of state. He made other new decisions in October, too, upsetting "about 40 church members," but apparently the removal of the flag was the precipitating cause of the harassing letters he began receiving, including a threatening note in his home mailbox that read "Resign this Sunday or else."

Really, Don't Bomb Iran

From TrueMajority.org:

Win Ben Stein's Wedgie

The ongoing battle between the dark forces of science and the light brigade of religious devotion is not going to end with Ben Stein's new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about suppression of criticism of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, focusing on some high-profile repressive tactics in academic circumstances.

There is surely something to be said for the balancing of competing intellectual viewpoints, especially when these viewpoints occur in the classroom, but this keeps getting mucked up by competing motives. We ought to abhor the teaching of evolutionary theory without affording students the opportunity to challenge the theory's methodologies, but getting students to understand the science is itself a pedagogical challenge. When we speak about enabling students (whether middle school, high school, or college) to challenge the methodology of this peculiar scientific theory, what we end up asking for is the students' broader awareness of what it requires and what it denies. One, it requires methodological naturalism, limiting the scope of scientific inquiry to testability within the parameters of observable causes and effects; two, it denies that the religious hypothesis is part of the scientific enterprise. Now two follows logically from one, but neither (nor together) implies metaphysical naturalism, which is the philosophical view that the observable world is all that is the case. If metaphysical naturalism is true, then God is a big deception and along with that the deception of religious belief. But metaphysical naturalism (a doctrine) is not a consequence of methodological naturalism (a technique). Teaching the difference between the two, which seems subtle, is the task of the philosopher, and philosophy is, alas, usually not part of any science curriculum. It's also not served up well in the so-called Wedge Strategy [PDF] first proposed in 1999 by the Discovery Institute.

Stein's movie Expelled moves along the surface in the same smooth way that opponents of Intelligent Design seek to have this debate squelched. So we have an interchange such as this, with Stein appearing in this April 21, 2008, interview with TBN's Paul Crouch, Jr.:

But juxtapose this with the following news article about an Afghanistan schoolteacher killed by the Taliban in 2006:

So long as the battle is kept between Big Science and Big Religion, the dialogue will never advance much beyond the kind of noisy prattle one finds in the alcoholic air of the cocktail party.

I think I know where Mr Stein wants to go with all of this, and I'm sympathetic with his conclusions. He wants to combat the pernicious influence of metaphysical naturalism in our school system. Metaphysical naturalism, interlocked with neo-Darwinian explanatory mechanisms, effectively entails that you and I are far more like other species of animal than we are unlike them. What values we ought to embrace, and accordingly what moral, social, and political viewpoints we ought to find compelling and actionable, are those that are given to us by reason alone, if we cannot manage to derive these from our observational sciences.

Some have claimed to find actionable policies in the observational sciences, and among these were the social Darwinists and other proponents of Progress (and similar views purporting to show how to get there from here). But the historical lesson is that we do not end Nazism and similar social progressive plans with a blunt instrument, such as a good clubbing from the stick of Big Religion. We counter it with that special change of heart that comes with real faith. Paul said [Rom 12:2] "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." What precedes this charge is a special horticultural lesson leading to our requirement that we offer our bodies to God as "living sacrifices," as our "spiritual act of worship." It is important to know that this does not follow at all from any observational science, nor from reasoning alone.