The Reality of Reality TV

James Wolcott over at Vanity Fair has written a dead-on article about the various ways in which reality television is a cancer on society. Rather than recount his argument, it's better just to read it for yourself. What I like is that he separates bad TV from TV in general. I'm not a great fan of the medium, but I do like to watch good movies, and I enjoy documentaries, shows on nature and cooking, and even the occasional sporting event. I think these are good and proper uses of TV, when exercised in moderation. But let's face it: There is nothing redeeming about reality TV.

Does God Punish His People?

As you read through the book of Judges (and indeed much of the Old Testament), you will notice a theme: Israel follows God. Israel abandons God. God punishes Israel. Israel returns to God. Israel abandons God again. God punishes Israel again. And so on. This is the dance between God and His people that weaves its way through the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. Many people, especially those antagonistic toward Christianity, have dwelled far too much on the “punishment” portion of the cycle. In so doing, God is seen as a capricious master who delights in tormenting those He “loves” when they have even the slightest slip-up. But is this really the case? Can God be so cruel? Or perhaps is there something else going on here?

I think there is something else going on here, and in order to see it, we have to look at the idea of covenants. Covenants were quite common in the Ancient Near East, so it is no surprise that they show up in the Bible. A covenant is simply a formal agreement or promise. Usually covenants are made between a stronger and a weaker party (called the suzerain and vassal, respectively). For instance, a king might make a covenant with his subjects in which he promises to protect them as long as they pay their taxes, volunteer for the army and don’t cause trouble. In the biblical context, we see many different covenants that God makes with His people. One of these covenants occurs in Joshua 24. Under Joshua’s command, the people have entered into Canaan and have driven out many (though not all) of the people there. At the end of the book, God reminds Israel that He took them out of slavery in Egypt, guided them through the wilderness and gave them possession of the Promised Land. This is the backdrop for the covenant; God has protected and guided the Israelites faithfully. Then God, taking the role of suzerain, tells His vassals what He expects from them: “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD” (Josh 24:14). This, to me, is a pretty fair deal: Yahweh will continue to protect and provide for Israel, but they must serve and revere Him in return. It’s nothing different than any king would ask of his people. But what if the people don’t hold up their end of the deal? “If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you” (24:20). The consequences of breaking the covenant are given at the outset: God will withdraw His protection and in fact bring disaster on Israel. He is letting Israel know ahead of time what He will do if they choose to violate the covenant.

My wife and I are currently taking a class on Love and Logic. Love and Logic is a method of parenting wherein the goal is to raise children who can think on their own, make wise decisions and generally contribute to society. One method that L&L teaches is to make enforceable statements. In other words, when a child misbehaves, don’t tell them what to do; instead, say what you will do. For instance, if a child is whining, a parent might respond, “I am happy to listen to people who can speak in a normal tone of voice.” L&L says this is a better response than “stop whining!” because a parent cannot control if his or her child whines. A parent can control how he or she responds to whining.

This is precisely what happens in the book of Judges. God has laid out His covenant with Israel in Joshua 24. God will protect and provide for Israel, and Israel will serve God. If Israel chooses not to serve God, then God makes the enforceable statement, “[I] will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you.” God knows that He cannot control humans. He didn’t make them to be controlled; he made them to love Him, and of course love is meaningless without the option not to love. In Judges, Israel decides to take the latter option: Israel chooses not to love God.

This brings me to the question, does God punish His people? I think punish is not the right word. In L&L, as a parent I am not punishing my child for disobeying me; rather, I am allowing him to experience the natural consequences of his choice. It is my duty as a parent to make sure that those consequences are uncomfortable for him at times. Furthermore, I don’t parent in this way because I am cruel—I parent in this way because I love my son! Consequences are a very real part of life, and he needs to learn about and experience them under the careful eye of mom and dad before he gets out on his own and it’s too late. In the same way, I don’t see God as punishing the Israelites in Judges; rather, he is acting on his own enforceable statement. Israel knew what would happen if they chose to forsake God, and they did it anyway. As a good parent, God allowed the natural consequences to happen, and he made things uncomfortable for His children at times. He did this because He loved them.

How do I know He loved them? Take a closer look at Joshua 24:20: “If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.” Did God bring disaster on Israel in the book of Judges? Numerous times. Did He make an end of them? No. In His grace, time and time again God raised up judges to deliver Israel from bondage and bring them peace. When Israel cried out for help in the midst of a situation of their own making, God had compassion and saved them.

And this compassion carries over into our covenant with Him, the covenant of the cross. We are all in a lethal mess, one we made ourselves by choosing to forsake God. God allows us to experience the natural consequences of our decision, and sometimes it can be quite uncomfortable. But in His grace, He sent His Son to die on the cross, to take our mess upon Himself, if only we will cry out to Him. When we do cry out to Him and accept His grace, not only does He take those consequences upon Himself, but He goes so far as to empower us to fulfill our end of the covenant. He gives us what Israel lacked—the gift of the Spirit.

Does God punish His people? I don't think so. Not in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament. Instead, He shows grace time and time again. In Judges, God raised up human deliverers. With Christ's work, we are now delivered and empowered. If that is God's idea of punishment, I'll take all He's got!

And Yet...

That same night the LORD said to [Gideon], “Take the second bull from your father’s herd, the one seven years old. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. Then build a proper kind of altar to the LORD your God on the top of this height. Using the wood of the Asherah pole that you cut down, offer the second bull as a burnt offering.”
So Gideon took ten of his servants and did as the LORD told him. But because he was afraid of his family and the men of the town, he did it at night rather than in the daytime. In the morning when the men of the town got up, there was Baal’s altar, demolished, with the Asherah pole beside it cut down and the second bull sacrificed on the newly built altar! They asked each other, “Who did this?” When they carefully investigated, they were told, “Gideon son of Joash did it.” The men of the town demanded of Joash, “Bring out your son. He must die, because he has broken down Baal’s altar and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.”
But Joash replied to the hostile crowd around him, “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.”
So that day they called Gideon “Jerub-Baal,” saying, “Let Baal contend with him,” because he broke down Baal’s altar. – Judges 6:25-32

God had called Gideon to deliver the Israelites from the oppression of the Midianites. Israel had cried out to God in anguish for help, and soon, Gideon would provide it to them. He would route a seemingly infinite Midian army with a scant 300 men, delivering his fellow countrymen in God’s strength. But who were Gideon’s countrymen? What was Israel like? Who are these people on whose behalf YHWH himself fought through Gideon?

Before Gideon’s famous fight, God asked him to do some “prep work.” God told Gideon to desecrate his own father’s place of worship—the same place he himself worshiped as a child, no doubt. On God’s orders, Gideon killed his father’s best bull, destroyed his Baal altar and sacrificed the animal to YHWH using the Asherah pole as fuel for the fire. There is really no more blatant religious commentary one can make than that! “YHWH is God; Baal and Asherah his consort are destroyed in his presence! Their holy places are worthless scraps of kindling, only useful to be burned!” If YHWH was to save Israel, they needed to be reminded that He was in charge.

How do the Israelites react to this—the same men who had cried out to God in anguish for help? They are filled with rage. They see their holy places desecrated and destroyed, and they demand a hefty revenge—the blood of Gideon! The idolatrous Israelites demand death for the “criminal” Gideon, when in fact it is the two-faced Baal worshipers whom God should have pronounced guilty of the capital-offense crime of putting another god before Him! Israel has become a completely pagan nation—incensed that their idols have been struck down but uncaring that they have forsaken the one true God—whom they had actually had the audacity to petition for help!

And yet God still delivers them!

Is any culture, then, so far gone that God is not willing to deliver the people, if only they would cry out?

The Case for Intelligent Design

Toastmasters is great. No topic is off-limits when it comes to giving a speech. I'm currently working through a manual on persuasive speaking. One of the projects in this manual is to give a speech on a controversial and generally unpopular topic. This helps one learn the skill of addressing the opposition. I gave that speech last Tuesday, and I gave it on the most controversial and unpopular topic I could think of: Intelligent Design. I've posted the transcript of that speech below and added slides where appropriate. Feel free to agree or disagree with anything and everything I said, but please do keep in mind, it was a seven-minute speech by an admitted amateur, not a full-orbed scientific or theological treatise. But I do hope that at least it will provide some food for thought. Enjoy!

Charles Darwin published his seminal work, The Origin of Species, in November of 1859--exactly 150 years ago this month. And for those last 150 years, the theory of evolution has been the accepted scientific theory of the development of life. By evolution I mean the idea that all life has evolved from a single ancestor through slight, natural and undirected modifications. This idea has become the foundation for the scientific outlook on life. In recent years, however, a small group of scientists and others has challenged the idea of evolution and proposed a different outlook than Darwin's Origin of Species. They propose that some aspects of nature are best explained not as the product of blind, material forces but as the product of intelligence. You may have heard of their theory--it's called Intelligent Design.

As you can imagine, challenging the scientific consensus of evolution is not an easy task. Challenging the group kind of makes one unpopular by definition, which often results in one having to overcome many obstacles. One of the biggest obstacles Intelligent Design theorists have to overcome is confusion. There is much confusion about what Intelligent Design is and what it is not. Today I would like to clear the air regarding Intelligent Design by explaining to you what it is and what it is not. As I go through this explanation, I hope to persuade you to accept or at least consider the idea that Intelligent Design should be seen as a valid scientific theory.

Let's talk about what Intelligent Design is.

Intelligent Design can be defined as "the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence. It rests on two pillars: (1) that the activity of intelligent agents is sometimes detectible and (2) that nature may exhibit evidence of intelligent activity." In other words, the basic idea is that there are things in nature that certainly look as if they have been designed for a purpose--and both evolutionists and Intelligent Design proponents will agree to this. The eye has been constructed for the purpose of sight. DNA contains information for the purpose of building cells. The tail of a bacteria, called a flagellum, contains all the same basic parts as an outboard motor, both of whose purpose is propulsion. But while evolution says that these things only appear to be designed, Intelligent Design says that they really are designed. But this raises the question, how would we know if things in nature are designed or not?

Intelligent Design simply proposes that the natural sciences, such as biology and chemistry, should make use of the same methods that are already used in anthropology, archeology, and forensic science. For instance, say you're in South Dakota and you come upon this sight:

Would you conclude that this rock façade was designed or created by forces of nature? Okay, now say you're walking on the beach in Hawaii and you find some marks in the sand that look like this:

Is this formed from natural forces, or is it designed? Now, how did we decide these cases? What was it about them that told us these are examples of design and not just natural phenomena? Well, there are many answers, but they all boil down to two criteria. And these criteria are currently used by anthropologists and archaeologists all the time.

The two criteria are specificity and complexity. Something is specific when it conforms to a pattern. For example, this little guy (the smiley face) is easily identified as a smiley face--that formation of various lines forms a recognized pattern. This squiggly line, however, does not. It's not specific to anything. On the flip side, complexity is something that is not likely to happen by chance. Thus the sentence, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," is complex--a random typing of letters on a typewriter will not likely form that arrangement of letters. The word "cat," however, is not complex--it could fairly easily be found in a random string of letters. The end result is that Intelligent Design maintains that specificity plus complexity equals design.

Let's go back to Mt. Rushmore. It's specific--its shape conforms to the faces of four former presidents. It's complex--there are myriad angles in the rock surface have to be very precise. The same goes for the writing in the sand. It conforms to a known pattern--an English word and two numbers, in this case, and it's complex--it's unlikely that a piece of driftwood would wash ashore and leave those markings behind. So, specificity plus complexity leads us to conclude design.

Let's look at a few more examples.

DNA is formed as a large chain of four chemical bases: A, G, C and T. The sequence of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism. So do we have specified complexity here? You bet. DNA is specific--it always and only uses A, G, C and T--this is the DNA alphabet, as it were. It's also complex--how likely is it, for instance, that the 3 billion letters in a human DNA chain would have come about in just the right order through blind natural forces? Not very.

Another example is something called the bacterial flagellum. It's the tail of a bacteria, which serves to propel it to where it wants to go. As you can see, it has various parts--rings, a motor, a filament, a hook. Again, we see specificity--the flagellum has striking similarities to what we recognize as an outboard motor. It also has complexity. It is so complex, in fact, that if you were to remove any single part, the entire flagellum would cease to be functional. Thus we have specificity, complexity and therefore design.

These are the basics of Intelligent Design. If something is specific and complex, one can safely infer that that thing was designed. Now that we know what Intelligent Design is, let's talk about what it isn't. There are two main misconceptions about Intelligent Design:

The first of which is that Intelligent Design is "creationism in disguise." Creationism, however, begins with a religious text (Gen 1-2, for example) and tries to reconcile known facts of the natural world to that text. Intelligent Design does not in any way use any religious text in its arguments, and proponents of Intelligent Design come from many different religious backgrounds. So while it is true that Intelligent Design is complementary to creationism, it is not the same thing as creationism as the term is widely understood.*

Another common assertion about Intelligent Design is that it is an argument from ignorance--it's often called a "God of the gaps" theory. In other words, since we don't know how something could have evolved, well, God must have done it. But thankfully, this is not actually the case. Rather, Intelligent Design relies on something called inference to the best explanation--something that we all use every day. Given all of the facts at our disposal, if something appears to be designed (based on our criteria of specificity and complexity), it makes more sense to conclude that it is designed than to conclude that it got that way through natural means.

We have seen that Intelligent Design is a theory that looks for elements in nature that are best explained not by chance but by design. It seeks to do this using the widely accepted and testable criteria of specificity and complexity. It is not creationism, nor is it an argument from ignorance. Rather, it is a scientifically viable theory.

At this point, I concluded with a brief Q&A session in which I also mentioned the following resources:

*In the Q&A time afterward, I discussed that ID could be called creationism in a wide sense--it does argue for a Designer/Creator, after all--but the narrower sense of the term as I describe above is the one meant when this accusation is leveled.

Tolerance

I saw this bumper sticker on the car in front of us as we drove home from Costco last night. I’ve seen it before, and no doubt, you have, too. Ordinarily I would have paid it no mind, but I had been thinking about Nidal Malik Hasan earlier in the day. Hasan, of course, is the suspect in the Ft. Hood shootings earlier in the week. There are reports surfacing that Hasan held some pretty radical (and quite intolerant) Islamic views--views that likely caused him to kill fellow soldiers.

As I write about Hasan, I also think of Scott Roeder, the man who shot and killed abortionist George Tiller in Wichita earlier this year. Somehow he came to believe that killing the doctor was a justifiable act, even a righteous act—one that was presumably pleasing to God. I grew up in the Wichita area and knew much about Dr. Tiller. My dad took part in peaceful protests down at his clinic. But neither he nor anyone else that I knew would have ever considered killing Dr. Tiller to be even an option on the table, much less the right thing to do.

I think of the Columbine shooters, who killed fellow classmates at the school just down the street from where I used to live in Littleton, Colorado. I can’t even imagine the thoughts running through their heads that made them go on a shooting rampage.

The list could go on and on, but the point I am trying to make is thoughts lead to action. One's worldview shapes the way one acts. Our culture says that all worldviews are equally valid, none is any more or less true than any other. (One might say that Pontius Pilate is our spokesperson and his catchphrase is, "What is truth?") Since no one way of thinking is superior to another, of course we should be tolerant of all. But when tolerance is the supreme virtue, what do we do with men and women like Nidal Malik Hasan, Scott Roeder and the Columbine shooters?