Commentary

The drowning stranger illustration challenges atheistic morality

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This is by Matt from Well Spent Journey blog.

Excerpt:

Here’s a thought experiment.

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Imagine that you’re a healthy, athletic, 20-year-old male. It’s the morning after a thunderstorm, and you’re standing on the banks of a flooded, violently churning river.

You notice an object floating downstream.

As it moves closer, you suddenly realize that this object is a person. The head breaks the surface, and you see a panic-stricken elderly woman gasping for air. You’ve never met her before, but vaguely recognize her as an impoverished widow from a neighboring village.

You look around for help, but there’s no one in sight. You have only seconds to decide whether or not to jump in after her – recognizing that doing so will put your own life in significant peril.

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Is it rational for you to risk your life to save this stranger? Is it morally good to do so?

For the Christian, both of these questions can be answered with an emphatic “yes”.

The Christian is called to emulate the example set forth by Jesus, who not only risked, but sacrificed his life for the sake of others. The Christian believes that the soul is eternal, and that one’s existence doesn’t come to an abrupt end with death.  Additionally, he can point to the examples of countless Christian martyrs who have willingly sacrificed their own lives.

For the secular humanist, the answers to these questions are much more subjective. When I previously asked 23 self-identifying atheists, “Is it rational for you to risk your life to save a stranger?” only 4 of them responded with an unqualified “yes”.

Biologically speaking, the young man in our scenario has nothing to gain by jumping after the drowning woman. Since she’s poor and elderly, there are no conceivable financial or reproductive advantages involved. Evolutionary biologists often speak of “benefit to the tribe” as a motivation for self-sacrifice…yet the young man’s community would certainly place greater practical value on his life than that of a widow from a neighboring village.

Secular humanists argue that people are capable of making ethical decisions without any deity to serve as Moral Lawgiver. On a day-to-day basis, this is undeniably true. We all have non-religious friends and neighbors who live extremely moral and admirable lives.

In the scenario above, however, secular ethics break down. The secular humanist might recognize, intuitively, that diving into the river is a morally good action. But he has no rational basis for saying so. The young man’s decision is between empathy for a stranger (on the one hand) and utilitarian self-interest & community-interest (on the other).

In the end, there can be no binding moral imperatives in the absence of a Moral Lawgiver. If the young man decides to sit back and watch the woman drown, the secular humanist cannot criticize him. He’s only acting rationally.

When I read this, I was of one of the questions from one of my earliest posts, where I list a dozen interview questions to ask atheists. His question is very much like one of my questions. You may like the others in my list, as well.

It seems to me that on atheism, the only answer you can give for why you would do the right thing is “because it makes me happy”. And as we see with abortion – 56 million unborn children dead – it very often doesn’t make atheists happy to save someone else’s life. Not if it means any infringement on their own happiness. Every time an atheist votes Democrat, they are voting to declare that people who get in their way should not be saved. And atheists (the “nones”, anyway) are one of the largest Democrat voting blocs. According to the 2012 Secular Census, 97% of secularists deny that unborn children have a right to life. And the 2013 Gallup poll found that “nones”, people with no religion, are most likely to be pro-abortion. (Note that “nones” are not necessarily atheists, they may have some beliefs, but they are not observant). It’s not rational to inconvenience yourself to save others on atheism. You have one life to live, be happy, survival of the fittest.

Atheists like to help themselves to a lot of beliefs  that can only be grounded in a robust theistic worldview. Rationally-grounded morality is just one of those things. And I want to say to you that this is not morally neutral, or a simple failure of the intellect. It’s not just a failure to be intelligent. It’s not just simple ingratitude towards God. It’s the deliberate self-deception they engage in in order to preserve their autonomy to seek pleasure apart from any notion of objective moral values and duties. It’s very transparent if you know how to question them.

Atheists like to cash out their rejection of God as some sort of rational, cognitive process, but they typically choose atheism as a result of having their desires for pleasure or peer-approval thwarted, or maybe in university when they don’t want professors to think they are ignorant. It’s not a rational worldview, it’s just easier. Easier to pose as a “smart” person. Easier to indulge in sexual desires at college. Easier to put powerful amoral people at ease, by not judging them for their destructive views on social issues. Easier to not judge others, so that you won’t be judged yourself. Easier to speculate about untestable multiverses and unobservable aliens seeding the Earth with life, so that you don’t have to think about the judgement that comes after the self-delusion. It’s a worldview of speculate, speculate, speculate. Speculations are the way that they keep God away so they can do what they want, call that moral and feel good about themselves in the here and now. The goal is to get one more day where they can do as they please apart from God, and they’ll believe anything they have to believe in order to do that.

Commentary

Conservative professor Mike Adams on the decline of Campus Crusade

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Famous conservative professor Mike Adams is annoyed with Campus Crusade, let’s see why.

He wrote his first article to complain that campus clubs like Crusade don’t take stands on obvious moral issues like abortion.

He wrote:

Nearly half of the abortions in this country are performed on college-age women. According to Students for Life of America, 70% of all abortion-providing and abortion-referring facilities are located within five miles of a college campus. Given those staggering numbers, it would seem that campus ministries would be positioning themselves to do something about the problem. But most are doing nothing at all. If you don’t believe me, take the time to go to the Campus Crusade website and do a search for the word “abortion.” See what your search reveals.

So why are campus ministries largely silent on such a profound moral issue? Recently, I had a chance to ask a Campus Crusade director that very question. His response was that Campus Crusade is not “a politically-based organization.” That explanation is inadequate. In fact, it is demonstrably false.

Several years ago, a good friend of mine named Dave Sterrett gave a pro-life speech to a Campus Crusade chapter at a state university in North Texas. He was invited to speak by a student. During the middle of his speech, he was arguing that the unborn are fully human and have souls by quoting from the Gospel of Luke. His talk was clearly Biblical and not political in nature.

Nonetheless, when the Campus Crusade director arrived, he rudely shut the speech down.

The Campus Crusade director told Dave to come out in the hall after he shut down his talk. The Crusade leader then began to yell at Dave and told him, “I don’t know what your deal is talking about this issue. Get your books and get out of here.” He went even further calling the headquarters of Crusade, which then demanded an apology from Sterrett.

Shortly after I wrote about the incident, several members of Campus Crusade contacted me – but not to apologize for their mistreatment of Dave. They emailed to admonish me for writing about the incident – even though I did not call out the university or the chapter director by name. The fallout from the incident was revealing. It shows how far some campus ministries will go to avoid controversy – and that they often consider themselves to be above reproach.

The original incident was also revealing. The censored speech was not political so the problem cannot be that Campus Crusade is not a “politically-based” organization. The speech was morally and Biblically based. Does the rejection of the speech mean that Campus Crusade is not a “morally-based” organization? Or does it mean they are not a “Biblically-based” organization?

Of course it doesn’t. The incident merely shows that Campus Crusade has become a “comfort-based” organization. In other words, an over-riding priority is avoiding topics that might make people feel uncomfortable.

Now apparently the Crusade people are annoyed with him, and they are complaining – probably not by saying that they are going to be more bold about pushing for apologetics and Christian worldview, but probably by calling him mean and confrontational and conservative.

Here is the second article. He writes:

Dear Kaitlin:

First of all, I would like to thank you for joining my Facebook fan page and for weighing in on my recent article “The Campus Crusade for Comfort.” It is understandable that you would wish to defend your organization, which I criticized rather bluntly in my article. However, your accusation that my article was “un-Christ-like” and was written in a spirit that undermines “Christian unity” requires a response. Since you chose to proffer your criticism in a public forum, I’ll respond by using my weekly column.

Looks like I was right about how the Crusade leader would respond – like a feelings-based leftist. Adams then talks about how Campus Crusade abstained from praise hymns and prayers at an event in order to get government funding for it, and then writes this, which is even worse:

Subsequently, at the very school where Campus Crusade traded its religious freedom for student government funding, there was a lawsuit over a campus speech code. One of the plaintiffs was a fine Christian woman who fought to overturn a speech code that was being used to suppress conservative speech and which also posed a grave threat to religious organizations.

After she sued, homosexual groups erupted in anger – falsely claiming that she was defending “hate speech” by opposing the speech code. They defamed her, physically threatened her, and verbally abused her –all in the name of tolerance and diversity.

This time, Campus Crusade did not remain neutral. They weighed in. But, unbelievably, they weighed in against the Christian woman and in favor of those defending the speech codes. Later, Campus Crusade changed its name to appear more tolerant and less “offensive.” Clearly, they had placed “inoffensiveness” above religious freedom on their list of priorities.

Right after these unfortunate events unfolded I became embroiled in my own First Amendment lawsuit. In part, because I stood in unity with Christians and defended them against illegal policies, I was denied a promotion at my school.

With the support of numerous Christian organizations, I eventually won the seven-year legal battle. Two Christian legal firms paid my legal bills and countless other Christian ministry and policy groups publicly backed me. But one Christian organization remained conspicuously silent. Of course, I am speaking of your organization, the Crusade formerly named after Christ.

For seven long years I heard not a single word of public support from a single member of Campus Crusade. When I won the case, I was deluged with calls and emails and handwritten letters from Christian leaders all across America.

But I heard not a word from Campus Crusade for months in the wake of the verdict.

Then, in mid-July, the final terms of my settlement were reached. It was reported in the local news that I would get a raise and a check for back pay while may attorneys would get a sum of $615,000. On August 1, 2014, I received the check from the State of North Carolina. On August 2, just 24 hours later, one of the local directors for Campus Crusade wrote me the following:

“Hey Mike. I hope your summer is going well. Would you be interested in having coffee with me next week so I could talk to you about joining my ministry support team?”

After I received that audacious email, I searched through my archives and read every single email correspondence I had received from that director over the course of seven years. There was no offer of prayer support in any of those emails. Nor was there any mention of the legal ordeal I was going through. He simply ignored the suit until the terms of the settlement became public.

In other words, your ministry and its leaders were never interested in unity. They never offered support in public or even in private. They only sought to profit financially from those who win battles Campus Crusade chooses to avoid.

The reason I am linking to this is because I experienced this kind of behavior from IVCF and Campus Crusade as an undergraduate and later as a graduate student. They opposed the introduction of apologetics at every point, and they were both anxious to appease the forces of political correctness. It was depressing. They were far more interested in getting people to show up than taking any sort of bold stand that might make some people uncomfortable. I think there are some IVCF and Crusade groups that may do a decent job. But if I were a student today, I’d head straight for the College Republicans and Ratio Christi if I wanted to get anything useful done. This blog was born out partly out of the anger I felt dealing with the liberal postmodern feminist leadership in those campus clubs when I was a student in college.

News

New study: how the hummingbird performs stunning feats of aerobatics

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Hummingbird in flight
Hummingbird in flight

New study reported by Science Daily.

Excerpt:

The sight of a tiny hummingbird hovering in front of a flower and then darting to another with lightning speed amazes and delights. But it also leaves watchers with a persistent question: How do they do it?

Now, the most detailed, three-dimensional aerodynamic simulation of hummingbird flight conducted to date has definitively demonstrated that the hummingbird achieves its nimble aerobatic abilities through a unique set of aerodynamic forces that are more closely aligned to those found in flying insects than to other birds.

The new supercomputer simulation was produced by a pair of mechanical engineers at Vanderbilt University who teamed up with a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is described in the article “Three-dimensional flow and lift characteristics of a hovering ruby-throated hummingbird” published this fall in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

For some time researchers have been aware of the similarities between hummingbird and insect flight, but some experts have supported an alternate model which proposed that hummingbird’s wings have aerodynamic properties similar to helicopter blades. However, the new realistic simulation demonstrates that the tiny birds make use of unsteady airflow mechanisms, generating invisible vortices of air that produce the lift they need to hover and flit from flower to flower.

You might think that if the hummingbird simply beats its wings fast enough and hard enough it can push enough air downward to keep its small body afloat. But, according to the simulation, lift production is much trickier than that.

For example, as the bird pulls its wings forward and down, tiny vortices form over the leading and trailing edges and then merge into a single large vortex, forming a low-pressure area that provides lift. In addition, the tiny birds further enhance the amount of lift they produce by pitching up their wings (rotate them along the long axis) as they flap.

Hummingbirds perform another neat aerodynamic trick — one that sets them apart from their larger feathered relatives. They not only generate positive lift on the downstroke, but they also generate lift on the upstroke by inverting their wings. As the leading edge begins moving backwards, the wing beneath it rotates around so the top of the wing becomes the bottom and bottom becomes the top. This allows the wing to form a leading edge vortex as it moves backward generating positive lift.

According to the simulation, the downstroke produces most of the thrust but that is only because the hummingbird puts more energy into it. The upstroke produces only 30 percent as much lift but it takes only 30 percent as much energy, making the upstroke equally as aerodynamically efficient as the more powerful downstroke.

Large birds, by contrast, generate almost all of their lift on the downstroke. They pull in their wings toward their bodies to reduce the amount of negative lift they produce while flapping upward.

Awesome design in nature!

So the question I have from reading the article is this. Do birds and flying insects have a recent common ancestor? I don’t have too many friends who can answer this for me, but I asked one of them and they both said there is no recent common ancestor for hummingbirds and flying insects. So this looks like another example of convergence – common design in two animals that don’t share a recent common ancestor.