Christianity, Culture, Vocation
Anthony Sacramone reviews another critique of the new atheism, “The Irrational Atheist” by Vox Day. That author deals with the slur that religion has caused most of the world’s wars by actually counting them:
Day found 123 wars that could validly be claimed to have religion at their heart—a grand total of 6.98 percent of all wars fought. “It’s also interesting to note that more than half of these religious wars, sixty-six in all, were waged by Islamic nations,” Day offers as an aside.
Patrick Henry College, where I teach as a Literature Professor and which I administer as the Provost, stands in stark contrast to the institutions and educational methods that I have been criticizing. We offer a classical Christian education with the highest academic standards to some of the best and the brightest young people in our nation.Once each semester, we dismiss classes for a day that is devoted to what we call a “Faith and Reason Lecture.” A speaker, usually alternating between an outside scholar and one of the scholars on our faculty, delivers to the entire campus community a substantive academic presentation exemplifying Christian scholarship. After the lecture, we discuss it over lunch, then break into our Christian study groups (an ongoing book study led by a faculty member) to talk about it in depth. Then we all meet together for a panel discussion with other faculty members, and then an extensive period of Q&A from our students.Our lecture this semester was by my colleague David Aikman, an Englishman who spent 23 years as an international correspondent with “Time Magazine” and is currently our writer in residence and one of our history professors. He spoke on the subject of a new book that will soon be released, a consideration of the “New Atheists” currently in vogue. Here is his paper.Today I thought I’d post just a couple of tidbits, things I learned from what Dr. Aikman said. I am not even trying to do justice to the way he took apart Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. You can read that for yourself. (I’ll try to remember to post something on his book when it comes out.)
P.S.: I’m having trouble making paragraphs on this WordPress blog software. So please don’t think I don’t know how to sort out my prose properly. And if anyone knows how I can fix the problem–I’m striking out on “help”–please let me know.
Dr. Aikman recounting one reason the noted atheist Anthony Flew (whose arguments against the existence of God I was subjected to when I was an undergraduate) changed his mind:
The “Monkey Theorem,” in its popular form, holds that if you have an infinite number of monkeys banging away at an infinite number of keyboards, eventually you will get from one of them Shakespeare’s Sonnet Eighteen, the first four lines of which read:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? /Thou art more lovely and more temperate./ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/ And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Well, in the 1990’s the British National Council of the Arts, in an inventive use of taxpayers’ money, placed six monkeys in a cage with a computer. After banging away at the keyboard for a whole month – and using the computer as a bathroom at the same time – the monkeys had typed 50 pages but failed to produce a single word in the English language, not even the letter “a” by itself. [Gerry] Schroeder applied probability theory to the “Monkey Theorem” and calculated that the chance of getting Sonnet Eighteen by chance was 26 multiplied by itself 488 times (488 is the number of letters in the sonnet) or, in base 10, 10 to the 690th. If that number is written out, it is 1 with 690 zeroes following it. But, as Schroeder showed, the number of particles in the entire universe – protons, electrons and neutrons – is only ten to the 80th. Thus, even if every particle in the universe were a computer chip that had been spinning out random letters a million times a second since the beginning of time, there would still be no Shakespeare’s Sonnet Eighteen by chance. As Flew concluded, “if the theorem [the Monkey Theorem] won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.
I love knowing that there are 10 to the 80th particles in the universe! Is that all? And a typing monkey couldn’t come up with one of them!
Dr. Aikman on an urban legend pushed by the “new atheists,” and one of their major blind spots:
Atheists who spend much of their time revisiting the crimes of religion ought to be quizzed again and again about what happens when governments adopt atheism as their official worldview.It is one of the most erroneous statements in popular culture in America, one of the most inaccurate but frequently repeated “urban legends,” that more people have been killed in wars of religion than any other kind of war.Wrong. If the entire list of victims of every religious war ever fought, from the Crusades, through the wars of religion in Europe after the Protestant Reformation, to the brutal attacks upon each other of Muslims and Hindus in the sub-continent of India is added up, that number is completely dwarfed by those murdered by Communist regimes in the twentieth century.According to some estimates, the number of people murdered under Communism, whether in wars started by Communist regimes, or as a result of internal repression against domestic adversaries, or in policies deliberately intended to produce starvation (Stalin’s holocaust in the Ukraine through starvation in 1933 murdered between seven and eleven million men, women, and children) approaches a total of 100 million.Then there is Hitler, who by general agreement deliberately murdered about twelve million people but started a war that took the lives of some 50 million. Hitler wasn’t technically an atheist – we’ll come to this in a moment –but there is no question that he acted as if there were no Divine personality or moral code above him to which he was going to be held accountable. In short, he certainly acted like someone in total rebellion against God.
150 million dead!
Susan Jacoby wrote an op-ed piece, based on a book she is releasing, entitled The Dumbing Of America. She decries the anti-intellectualism of America today, citing the rank ignorance about history and geography that is rampant today, as well as statistics such as 40% of Americans have never read a book in the last year. She also discusses how our culture tends to denigrate intellectuals as “elitists,” as opposed to the down-home democratic ideal of average “folks.” What she neglects to address, though, is that when it comes to anti-intellectualism, our elites are the worst offenders! It is precisely our intellectual elites–university professors, cutting-edge artists, culturally-in-tune authors–who are denying the efficacy of reason, insisting that truth is relative, and holding onto exploded ideas (such as Marxism and neo-Marxism) against all evidence. Who is training the teachers and writing the curriculum that have gutted our young peoples’ education and deprived us of our knowledge base? Who is denying that there is such thing as truth or goodness? Who is denying the existence of beauty and purposefully making art that defies the canons of classical aesthetics? Most common “folks” have better sense. So I agree with the author in lamenting the dumbing down of our culture. But until not just the “common people” but the intellectual elites who need to change their thinking.
A letter-writer to the “Washington Post” fulminates at the way NASCAR allowed the Daytona 500 to begin with a prayer. Not only a prayer, but one that “invoked Jesus Christ by name.” This, says the letter-writer, is another step in the effort to make Christianity into our nation’s official state religion. Read the letter. Notice what is happening. Yes, the government is not allowed to favor Christianity in schools, the military, and public events. But now that same standard is being applied to a private event that receives no federal money (why should NASCAR need to?). On a much larger scale, we have been seeing the God-free rules of the government applied in private companies, as in stores not allowing their employees to mention “Christmas” even in Christmas sales. This is phenomenon has not just religious implications but also political implications. People evidently see the government as so all-encompassing that government standards should be applied to EVERYTHING.
Inflation in the South African nation of Zimbabwe has reached Weimar-republic-like proportions. Michael Gerson writes how that nation’s dictator President Mugabe–who famously confiscated the land of all white farmers, who had supplied much of the food supply for generations–is funding his predatory government by simply printing money. Back in 1980, a Zimbabwe dollar was worth about as much as ours. Today, a newspaper costs $3 million, and a two pounds of chicken costs $15 million. People have to carry around boxes of money. If someone doesn’t collect a bill within 48 hours, it isn’t worth collecting anymore, since by then the hourly inflation will have rendered the original amount into chump change.
Paul McCain has put up some more material on his blog devoted to that Lucas Cranach altarpiece. He includes some exposition of the figures in the painting and what they mean. Note the self-portrait of Cranach, who shows the blood of Christ shooting out from His wounds upon himself. That’s a powerful confession of faith from the great artist. Go to A Painting That Preaches Christ.
The Washington Post has sure been publishing some good articles about today’s education debacles, which tells us that even the liberal establishment is waking up to the necessity of actually educating children, as opposed to what contemporary educational theory is doing. Today’s edition included a feature entitled Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math. It’s about a math textbook entitled “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space.” It tackles the problem of multiplying six times three, by having students make six marks on a piece of paper in a little box and to do that with three boxes. Then count how many marks. And it does away with the traditional way of adding big numbers, in which you put them into columns, add each one, and carry as needed. Instead, students are taught to make pyramids, in which they first add up the ones, then the tens, then the hundreds, then the thousands, then put them all together. Defenders say this method, which scorns memorizing “math facts,” teaches the concepts better. But it makes math harder, not easier, and it is doing nothing to improve test scores. I admit that classical education may be lagging in the math department. The new classical schools are doing little with the Quadrivium, the other four liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The Trivium, which is being implemented to great effect (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), has to do with mastering language and what you can do with it. The Quadrivium has to do with mathematics (yes, even in the way music was taught). This, I think, is the new frontier for classical educators. Yes, there is Saxon math, but it seems traditional (which is better than the contemporary), rather than classical, as such. Does anyone have any suggestions about what a classical approach to mathematics might look like?
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