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The four Emory University biology faculty who played the role of Darwinian thought police had the opportunity to hear Dr. Ben Carson talk Monday about the kind of tolerance we should all strive to exhibit:

I know there was some controversy about my views on creation and somebody thought that I said that evolutionists are not ethical people. Of course I would never say such a thing and would never believe such a thing nor would anybody with any common sense. So that's pretty ridiculous…. Many people came to this nation and they were trying to escape from societies that tried to tell them what they could say and what they could think and here we come reintroducing it through the back door….  The emphasis should be on learning how to be respectful of individuals who have a different opinion. [Well said, Ben. Watch all of Dr. Ben Carson's speech, and read insightful commentary about it, here].

Ben Carson was recommending the traditional notion of tolerance, which would allow for Commencement speakers who hold minority viewpoints about controversial science topics like Darwinian evolution. D.A. Carson (no relation to Ben) has recently analyzed how intolerance is being reintroducing through the back door of the house of politically correct “tolerance” in his book The Intolerance of Tolerance (Eerdmans, 2012). This book by D.A. Carson, writes Marvin Olasky in a review, “illuminates the subtle but massive change in the definition of ‘tolerance’ adopted by many leaders in academia and media. ‘Tolerance’ once meant recognizing the rights of others to have different views. Now it stipulates that no one can say some views are right and others are wrong.” This politically correct sentiment dominates ethical matters, but usually it is not applied to the natural sciences. For example, the Emory biologists claim that their evolutionary viewpoints are right and Carson's doubts about Darwin are wrong.

The Carson-Emory controversy is full of ironies regarding tolerance and truth claims. The Emory biologists tried to label Ben Carson "ethically intolerant." Carson never claimed that all evolutionists are unusually unethical people, but he did correctly note that if Darwinian evolution were true it would undermine any good reason for belief in objective morality. Richard Weikart’s podcast about Carson and the moral implications of Darwinism spells this out in more detail. But at least get this: Ben Carson understands that most people usually live their lives as if objective moral values exist even if their stated theory of origins (such as Darwinism) undermines any good reason for such objective ethical truths. Stephen Meyer actually uses this atheistic contradiction as part of a moral argument for God’s existence in this part of his TrueU DVD, which argues:

Reasoning about our moral experience leads to startling conclusions. God’s existence offers the only coherent explanation for objective and meaningful morality. Because the actions of all people reveal that they presuppose an objective and meaningful moral code, only belief in God allows people to live consistently with their belief system.

The Emory biologists have the right to disagree with Ben Carson (and Stephen Meyer), but they have no good reason to be intolerant of such well-reasoned viewpoints. Under the old definition of tolerance, D.A. Carson explains, "tolerance is the virtue of a person with convictions who thinks that others should not be coerced to agree with his convictions." The new definition produces exclusion in the name of inclusion.

Dear Emory biologists, please model for your students the only kind of tolerance worthy of a free society and higher education: Exhibit the virtue of holding convictions (Darwinian or otherwise), while not coercing others to agree with your convictions. Welcome community giants like Dr. Ben Carson on your campus while respectfully disagreeing (if you are so convicted) with his views about biological origins. Don’t attribute silly ethical views to Ben Carson that he doesn’t actually hold in an attempt to manipulate your own students into accepting Darwinian orthodoxy. In short, be honest and nice. Irony!

If you liked this blog, then I urge you to visit two of the resources mentioned above:

• Watch Ben’s speech (or at least read more insightful commentary about it) here.
• Listen to Richard Weikart’s podcast about Ben Carson and the moral implications of Darwinism.

When it comes to video games, Jean and I have a pretty simple and straightforward rule:

No guns, no blood, no bad language and, obviously, nothing that’s sexually suggestive.

So I know what some of you are probably thinking:

It’s still possible to purchase and play Pong? 

Our boys actually play a very limited amount of games on Wii, usually sports-themed and always very innocuous in nature.

But we know parents who feel strongly that any type of video game is just a bad idea and a poor use of a child’s time. Whether or not it’s gaming, Facebook or watching television, there’s no question that the average child is experiencing far more “screen time” than ever before.

I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

There are only so many hours in a day, and childhood is a finite season of life. Is it possible that we’re doing our kids a disservice by allowing them access to tools that discourage creativity and hamper the development of social and intellectual skills?

Whatever happened to cultivating a child’s imagination? This generally only happens when it’s quiet. We need to deliberately set aside such time and, to quote Jane Austen, encourage them to “indulge [their] imagination in every possible flight.”

On the cusp of summer, it would be a good idea to exchange “screen time” for “sky time” and see to it that our children take time to play in the sun and gaze into the stars, to “wonder anew what the Almighty can do” in their young lives.

Here’s an idea: how about challenging our children to read a stack of good books these next few months?

My colleague, Tim Goeglein, wrote yesterday and reflected on a recent speech he made at Patrick Henry College, where 90% of the students come from homeschooling backgrounds. Here is what he shared:

The student body is remarkable. They read Thucydides, Burke, Livy, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Milton, Spencer, and Dante.

I am bowled over. Wow. The future is bright.

I’m not sure how many Patrick Henry College students play video games, but I suspect that it’s far, far below the average.

Let me ask you how you see this issue. Is it black and white for you?

Do you let your children play video games? Why – or why not? If you do, what type of parameters do you put on them?

ALSO:  Would You Take Your Son to a Brothel and The President Should Have Called the Pastors First

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The late Norman Vincent Peale, senior pastor of New York City’s Marble Collegiate Church for over 50 years, grew up in Ohio, a preacher’s kid. His father, Clifford Peale, was a tremendously compassionate man. If there was a need within his congregation, he was determined to meet it.

Norman remembers the phone ringing in their parsonage one cold winter’s night. His mother answered, and passed the phone to his father. The woman on the other end of the line explained that she didn’t know any other preachers, but had one night slipped into Dr. Peale’s church. She didn’t remember anything he said, but she did recall that he struck her as gentle and kind, which is why she had picked his church out of the many from the phone book.  She was calling with an awkward but serious request. As it turned out, she ran a local brothel.  One of the prostitutes was dying. Would Dr. Peale be willing to come and pray with her?  He agreed and hung up the phone, quietly explaining the situation to his wife.

Suddenly, he turned toward his boy. “Norman,” he said, “put on your overcoat and come with me on a pastoral errand of mercy.” 

The young Peale’s mother gasped. “Clifford,” she said, “you are not going to take our ten-year-old son to that place of sin.”  But his father pressed on. “Yes, I am,” he replied. “Norman can see Jesus Christ reaching for one of the sheep who was lost, but wants to come home to the father’s house.”

At the brothel the Peales encountered the nineteen-year-old prostitute, now near death.  "I am a bad girl Reverend,” she said, “but my family are godly people and I was raised a Christian and I attended Sunday school, I was baptized by our preacher, but I have brought shame on my mother and father. I am bad. I am a bad girl."  Norman’s dad placed her diminutive hand inside his.

"Do you love Jesus, Mary, and do you believe that he has forgiven your sins and that he will forgive your sins and wash them all away, so that in your soul you will be pure?"

"Yes."

"Do you give yourself now, your whole soul, your whole self to the Lord asking for salvation?" Again, she said, "Yes" adding, "I asked the Lord to save my soul." Dr. Peale then concluded.  "Well, then I declare to you in the name of Jesus that you are saved."

In the midst of this conversation, all the other women in the brothel, one by one, had begun to surround Mary, openly weeping at the sight and sound of her pain, confession and finally, absolution and assurance of salvation. Years later, Norman Vincent Peale said that night was one of the determining factors that led him to his decision to become a pastor. He had witnessed the strength and power of the Gospel firsthand.

Would you have allowed your ten-year-old son to accompany you on that mission?

I have been thinking of that in light of my own boys. I wonder if we have sterilized our faith to the point of rendering its appearance powerless to the younger generation.

If it appears all sweetness and light without struggle and strain, how is that going to match up with reality when times grow tight and tough?

Why would a young person find our faith relevant and vibrant if it doesn’t appear viable to the good and bad in life?

Norman Peale’s father gave his young son a great gift that cold winter’s night. In that difficult visit, he shared with his son a vivid snapshot of the source of our strength.

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There's a curious article in this morning's New York Times detailing the evangelical fallout from President Obama's decision last week affirming his support of same-sex marriage.

The headline reads:

After Obama's Decision on Marriage, A Call to Pastors

The article described a presidential conference call two hours after Mr. Obama's announcement with approximately eight African-American ministers, followed by additional phone conversations with several of his spiritual advisors. In each of the calls the president attempted to explain his rationale for the decision.

That the president has now endorsed same-sex marriage doesn't surprise me given the trajectory of his comments and the administration’s policies these past few years. But it's unfortunate that Mr. Obama wouldn't have allowed his select group of pastors to speak into his decision-making process.  The Reverend Joel Hunter, one of the pastors he spoke with and a friend of President Obama, was refreshingly blunt when asked about his involvement:

“I’m not at all surprised he didn’t call me before because I would have tried to talk him out of it. My interpretation of Scriptures, I can’t arrive at the same conclusion. He totally understood that."

In other words, the president was making a historic and historically radical decision about the government's perspective on a fundamentally essential civil institution as well as a deeply sacred religious institution, but he wasn't interested in a spiritual perspective. This should sadden all of us.

There is wisdom, of course, in many counselors. Whether you're the president of the United States or a father or mother, Solomon's words ring true:

For lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisers (Proverbs 11:14).

NOTE:  Paid for by Citizenlink

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Episode 4 of Is the Bible Reliable? focuses on the archaeological evidence for the monarchy of David and Solomon. One of the key sites in the debate over the United Monarchy under David is Khirbet Qeiyafa (sometimes called the "Elah Fortress" and possibly the site of a city called Sha'arayim), where an Israelite fortress from the beginning of the Iron Age II was discovered. Among the ruins an ostracon (pottery sherd with writing) considered to be the oldest existing Hebrew document, dating to ca. 1000 BC, was found. The site is located on the side of the Valley of Elah, while to the west is Philistine territory and the nearby city of Gath. The Valley of Elah was the site of the battle between David and Goliath.

In the last excavation season at the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa, religious artifacts were discovered in three rooms apparently used as shrines. The fortress and the finds date to about 1000 BC, which was during the reign of King David. The excavation director, archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, stressed the importance of two particular finds--a ceramic box and a stone box. He identified these boxes as shrines, and links some of the design elements to the temple as described in the books of 1 Kings and Ezekiel. The stone box, or shrine, he claims, has design elements similar to the "pillars" and "windows" in the Temple built by Solomon, which with the new information from the stone shrine, Garfinkel suggests were actually triglyphs and a triple recessed doorway. The ceramic box he says has links to the two pillars of the Temple (Yachin and Boaz), and the curtain. Interestingly, the ceramic box appears to have more similarities to the Ark of the Covenant than the Temple built by Solomon. Both were boxes designed to hold religious objects, rectangular, and had guardian figures on top. The ceramic box has two guardian lion figurines on top, in addition to three birds. While the various comparisons are all speculation, the similar design elements are interesting to note when comparing descriptions from the Bible to finds from the period of David. The most interesting and important part of these recent discoveries, however, is evidence that the inhabitants of this town or fortress did not worship idols and did not eat pigs. There were no idols discovered in the excavated shrine areas, nor have any pig bones been discovered at the site. This suggests that the people living at Khirbet Qeiyafa followed the Mosaic Law ban on making and worshipping images and idols, and the ban on eating pork. This evidence further demonstrates that there were Israelites living at the site, since the surrounding cultures practiced the opposite of these prohibitions. When reading through the Bible, it is also apparent that during the time of David, Israel did not have serious problems with following the Mosaic Law. This trend is backed by the discoveries at Khirbet Qeiyafa, yet is also a quite different picture than later in the Divided Kingdom when idolatry and breaking of the Mosaic Law ran rampant--a trend also backed up by archaeological discoveries. Overall, this site is one of the keys in helping to establish not only that an Israelite Monarchy existed at the time of David and Solomon, but that the practices of the Israelites during this period match what is recorded about that period in the Bible.

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/History/Early+History+-+Archaeology/Cultic_shrines_time_King_David_8-May-2012.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120508103803.htm

In TrueU Is the Bible Reliable? Stephen Meyer discusses the evidence for biblical historical accuracy drawn from the names mentioned in the Bible in relation to the frequency of name use based on non-biblical sources. The match is quite good, he argues. This sort of research on personal name popularity by time and place is of great value in determining the historical “situation” of any historical text.

Recent research on name use frequencies shows that the New Testament documents most likely were written during the first century, rather than much later as many secular textual critics argue. This bolsters our confidence in the New Testament’s historical accuracy. British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham correlated New Testament names with the list of 3,000 names compiled in 2002 by Israeli scholar Tal Ilan and concluded the following:

• The Gospels were nearly perfect in how they captured the frequency of names among Palestinian Jews of the time. For instance, Ilan’s list of the 10 most popular names matched rank for rank the list of the most frequent names in the Gospels and Acts. This is an extraordinary confirmatory correlation.

• By contrast, if you examine the most popular Jewish names in a different region (such as Egypt) at the time, the list is dramatically different. The pattern of names does not match what we know the pattern to be in Palestine.

• Also by contrast, if you examine the names that appear in the Apocryphal Gospels (such as the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, Judas), you discover that the frequency and proportion of names in these writings do not match what we know to be true of names from the land and time of Jesus. Hence the Apocryphal Gospels do not have the ring of authenticity with regard to personal names and are rightly called into question.

See chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Eerdmans, 2006. See also Craig Hazen’s summary of this work, from which the three bullet points above were taken.

In fact, you're already thinking about where you're going to go eat when you ask what your friend thought of the flick. Your friend seems quiet. A bit withdrawn, even. "Man," he finally admits, "there were some things in that movie that really disturbed me. I'm not sure I should have seen it."

Suddenly you find yourself wondering, Should that movie have bothered me more? Am I just totally desensitized? Or are my friend and I just different people with different sensitivities?

Thoughts like those raise some larger philosophical questions that all of us should grapple with:

1) What experiences and convictions inform my standards when it comes to movie content?

2) How can I tell if I'm being desensitized and/or negatively influenced by what I've seen?

3) Am I willing to actively engage with my motives (and possibly my rationalizations) for seeing certain films, as well as actively engaging with the ideas and images I see there?

Let's talk first about our experiences and convictions, and how they relate to our movie choices. Some of us already have very defined parameters regarding our entertainment choices. Others may not have ever thought too deeply about what we see—we just kind of go with the flow. Wherever we're at on that spectrum, I think it's worth reflecting on what has influenced our decision-making grid when it comes to content issues.

A helpful passage of Scripture for me, personally, is the Apostle Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 10:23: "'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is beneficial. 'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is constructive." At the very minimum, this passage prompts me to ask the question of a particular film, "Is my watching this going to be constructive or beneficial?" Sometimes I can easily answer that question. But it's a good, quick and accessible starting point for my initial process of discernment.

(As an aside, Paul also deals with the issue of different people's convictions in the balance of 1 Corinthians 10 as well as Romans 14. In both places, he warns against harshly judging someone who has come to different conclusions in a grey area than we have.)

As far as experiences go, one watershed movie experience for me was watching American Beauty in 1999. This critically acclaimed film about a middle-aged man trying to find meaning in his vacuous suburban life won Best Picture that year. It's a disturbing story about the emptiness of the American dream, and it's a brilliant depiction of depravity. But some of the film's images were pretty disturbing to me, and they stayed with me a long time—so much so that I began to ask the question, "Do I need to see a brilliant depiction of depravity to know that depravity is depraved?" Much, if not most of the time, the answer is no.

Next, it's critical to deal with the reality of desensitization and influence. It may be that certain content truly doesn't affect us. But before we insist that that's the case, we need to take some time to determine whether it's actually true or whether we might be more hardened, more desensitized to certain things, than we want to admit.

In our culture, we're deeply invested in the idea that we know what's best for us. If we say that something doesn't affect us, we believe it doesn't. The classic case is the adolescent responding to his parents' objections about a certain song: "Mom, I don't listen to the lyrics, I just like the beat." And yet he can sing every lyric word for word. Whether he realizes it or not, those lyrics are going in. The same thing can happen when it comes to movies.

Recent academic research consistently indicates that there is a strong correlation between what we ingest, entertainment-wise, and what we think and do. (I chronicled some of the latest research on this connection in my article "See the Show, Be the Show.") But what about us individually? I think there are some questions each of us needs to ask ourselves to begin to determine whether and how much we're being influenced by what we see on the big screen:

1) Do you continue to have images from a movie (or a certain kind of film) coming to mind days or weeks after you've seen it? If so, that's a big indicator that a particular movie, type of movie or content is having a real impact.

2) Are you slipping into thoughts, attitudes or behaviors that you know aren't right? If you've seen a bunch of films filled with foul language, for example, and you find yourself swearing more, that might be an indicator of how those movies are influencing you.

3) Do you find yourself dismissing or minimizing content that's blatantly at odds with what Scripture teaches, simply because you want to be entertained? I think this is an especially useful question when it comes to comedies that generate a lot of buzz. It's easy to say, "It's just a dumb comedy. It doesn't matter." But if we're just letting ideas and images counter to God's truth sweep over us because we want a laugh or we want to unwind and veg out without thinking, we become quite susceptible to being influenced by the world's point of view.

I love how Eugene Peterson addresses this issue in his paraphrase of Romans 12:2 in The Message: "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

Finally, if you've considering watching a movie that you know ahead of time includes harsh content, I think it's well worth considering why you want to do that—and whether it's really good or necessary to do so. What do you hope or expect the outcome to be? How might it influence you negatively? Sometimes, if we're honest with ourselves, we may find that we're succumbing to temptation to see something that, deep down, we know we shouldn't set before our eyes. I'm not saying that potentially difficult content in a film always pushes it out of bounds in all cases. But we need to be willing to engage our motives on a case-by-case basis.

And if we do decide to engage with something with tough content, I think we've got some work to do on the other side as well. What were the messages? What images affected you and why? In short, are we willing to engage critically, reflectively and personally with what we're watching? Because if we're not talking about it and thinking about it, it increases the odds of us being influenced and desensitized by it.

And we may not even realize it.

This post is the fifth in a series. Feel free to click on these related posts:

Don't Watch. But If You Do ...

Sorting Out the Good, the Bad and the Excellent

How Come They Get to Watch Bad Movies and I Don't?

Getting to the Very Art of the Matter

Although Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson doubts Darwinian evolution, he agrees with Darwin that if evolutionary theory were true, then Christian moral precepts such as the golden rule and love for all human races (ethnicities) are no more natural or normative than selfishness and racism.  Although Carson disagrees with Darwin and Darwinists today about the plausibility of the evolution of all life from a common ancestor, Carson agrees with Darwin and many leading Darwinists today about the moral implications of Darwinism. Apparently many students and faculty at Emory University are uninformed about how Darwin and leading Darwinists today have undermined belief in the objectivity of moral standards such as “infanticide is wrong.” For such sentiments to count as objective moral truths would mean that they could not be illusions thrust upon us by the accidents of our evolving genes.

But, note what leading Darwinists Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson wrote:

Morality… is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends… In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.” Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics” in James Huchingson, Religion and the Natural Sciences: The Range of Engagement (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), p. 210.

Or, go back to Darwin’s main book on the topic:

That animals sometimes are far from feeling any sympathy is too certain; for they will expel a wounded animal from the herd, or gore or worry it to death. This is almost the blackest fact in natural history, unless indeed the explanation which has been suggested is true, that their instinct or reason leads them to expel an injured companion, lest beasts of prey, including man, should be tempted to follow the troop. In this case their conduct is not much worse than that of the North American Indians who leave their feeble comrades to perish on the plains, or the Feegeans, who, when their parents get old or fall ill, bury them alive. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), vol. I, p. 76-77. This is a reprint of the first edition that was published in 1871.

Darwin and many Darwinists today have argued that natural selection (coupled with other unguided natural events) is the chief explanation of all human behavior, including both loving maternal care for infants, and infanticide. Care toward elderly family members, and euthanasia, likewise, are (allegedly) both the natural results of human evolution.

John West explains some of the subtleties and contradictions within Darwin’s book The Descent of Man:

Throughout his discussion of morality, Darwin repeatedly referred to “higher” and “lower” moral impulses as if there were some transcendent [objective] standard of morality to which he compared human and animal behavior. Darwin wrote as if conventional virtues such as kindness and courage were objectively preferable to conventional vices such as cruelty and lust. But it is difficult to make sense of such comments in terms of Darwin’s own system, which clearly portrayed morality as ultimately reducible to that which promotes biological survival.

Read more of John West’s analysis of Darwinian views of ethics here.

Or, to further tie such discussion to the Carson-Emory controversy, read Richard Weikart's excellent essay posted today: At Emory University, Consternation over Ben Carson, Evolution, and Morality. It begins with this:

Almost 500 Emory faculty and students have expressed their dismay that their commencement speaker on May 14 does not toe the ideological line on evolutionary biology. Yes, gasp, the renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson does not believe in evolutionary theory. Not only that, but biology professors at Emory and their supporters also accuse Carson of committing a thought crime because he allegedly "equates acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality."

Since I am a historian who has studied and published on the history of evolutionary ethics, I was rather surprised by the Emory faculty's consternation over Carson's belief that evolution undermines objective ethics and morality. Last summer I attended a major interdisciplinary conference at Oxford University on "The Evolution of Morality and the Morality of Evolution." So I am well aware that there are a variety of viewpoints in academe on this topic. Nonetheless, many evolutionists -- from Darwin to the present (including quite a few at that Oxford conference) -- have argued and are still arguing precisely the point that Dr. Carson highlighted: they claim that morality has evolved and thus has no objective existence.