So, this morning, I started googling around to see if I could find any comments written by those involved in the show. Came up empty on that one, but I did come up with this lovely jewel from Touchstone Magazine (which is a theological journal for dialogue between Eastern Orthodoxy and Evengelicalism), and I must say:
Holy shit! It's embarassing to see this kind of smug scholarship in print. Granted, apologetics is essentially jingoism mixed with advertising, but SOME apologists are actually communicators and philosophers. But this stuff...well, http://www.touchstonemag.com/2004/09/skeptics-golden-rule-i-did-enjoy.html
| QUOTE (touchstone mag) |
| Shermer, the atheist, said that he found doing unto others as you have them do unto you was very important. Indeed, the Golden Rule is where evolution has brought us.....Evolution brought us the Golden Rule? Well, we know Who brought us the Golden Rule, so is Michael Shermer saying that Jesus was sort of the moral pinnacle of evolution? I also fail to see how one can avoid at some point admitting that there must be something more than pure material causes at work in the world if something like the Golden Rule must be the basis for human society. But if anyone can do it, perhaps, perhaps, Michael Shermer can. But on the other hand, if an atheist can see that Christ gave us the standard, perhaps he isn't far from seeing that in a very real sense it's because He himself is the Standard, the Second Adam by which the first Adam (and the rest of us) are measured. He isn't far from seeing this, I mean, if he doesn't avoid looking more closely at the Person of Christ, as did C. S. Lewis. |
Have the Evangelicals (and Orthodox) become so cloistered that they actually think this way?
I ran into this kind of thing as a Christian, and it drove me nuts enough that I wrote a book about it (which led to my deconversion). How can they NOT understand the substance of the skeptic's point - that this "Golden Rule" is found in ALL cultures since the keeping of written records. Even C.S. Lewis (who, despite his genuineness as a human being, his delightful way with words, his brilliance as a literary critic and sometimes as a novelist, was an appallingly bad theologian) pointed out in The Screwtape Letters that the idea of "divine revelation" of moral law was silly. Speaking of prophets, he said "The Enemy [God] sends them not to teach new things, but to remind them of what they already know." The idea being that moral sense is intrinsic to the beast (which, indeed, is bourne out by behavioral studies in animals with higher brain functions and language abilities).
I just don't get the narrowness -Lokmer
