Koukl on Relativism - On Video - FOR FREE!

It turns out that Google Video has Greg Koukl's classic lecture on moral relativism (this one in particular given for the Vertitas Forum). Everyone I know should watch and think about this. Greg is one of the most clear-thinking guys I know, and this is his forte, or at least one of them. Here it is.

UPDATE 4/17/07: I'm not sure if this video is bootleg and infringing on STR's copyright, or if they would be kosher with it. I should probably check - if it is bootleg, I'll take it off. Does anyone know?

House's Humanity

I don't watch TV much, but I do have a couple shows I really enjoy and watch rather religiously. My favorite show on right now is '24' - I like it not only for its intense pacing, (usually) inventive plot, and interesting character development, but also for the way it deals with ethical questions and moral theory played out in a sort of thought-experiment mock-reality.

The other show I watch fairly frequently is 'House' - though often the morality portrayed on this medical drama is questionable and should be viewed carefully. My interest with this show, however, is far more myopic; unlike '24' there aren't a number of reasons I find myself drawn to it. There's really only one: I think Dr. Gregory House's character, played wonderfully well by Hugh Laurie, is one of, if not the most interesting on television, and the other characters are great foils. In many ways, he is like a child that never grew up. In other ways, he is jaded beyond belief. I find his view of people, ethics, science, and God to be fascinating and instructive for me as I apply worldview analysis to his character.

For instance, last night's episode ended differently than all the others. Every time, House and his team have a last minute epiphany and diagnose the mysteriously (and ususally terminally) ill patient just in the nick of time. Not so last night. The patient died - died, in fact, directly as a result of a mistaken diagnosis and treatment by both House and Dr. Foreman that proved to be fatal. As Foreman was dealing with the guilt, he received the following advice from House: it doesn't matter how you feel. The numbers say that, though this kind of thing happens much more frequently to doctors in their line of work, they save many more lives and much more difficult cases than most other doctors, and the numbers don't lie. The guilty feeling is meaningless, because it is rooted in subjective emotion, and should be ignored.

As often is the case, though, House's quite inhuman comments collide headlong with his own very human actions. One of the subplots involved his best friend, his best friend's ex-wife, and their dog who lived with her but who wouldn't stop misbehaving since the ex-husband left. House had manipulated her for information, and then at the end of the show, after just having given Foreman this pep-talk on the illusory nature of guilt, ended up taking the dog in himself out of guilt. House's callous philosophical stance was undermined by his own undeniable humanity. He can espouse the outworkings of his presuppositions, but at key points in his humanity, he cannot live with them. This is the tension Francis Schaeffer spoke and wrote so often about:

...in fact, no non-Christian can be consistent to the logic of his presuppositions. The reason for this is simply that a man must live in reality and reality consists of two parts: the external world and its form, and man's 'mannishness', inclusing his own 'mannishness'. No matter what a man may believe, he cannot change the reality of what is...

...every man is in a place of tension. Man cannot make his own universe and then live in it...

...every man is somewhere along the line between the real world and the logical conclusion of his non-Christian presuppositions. Every person feels the pull of two consistencies, the pull towards the real world and the pull towards the logic of his system. He may let the pendulum swing back and forth between them, but he cannot live in both places at once. He will be living nearer to the one or to the other, depending on the strenght of the pull at any given time. To have to choose bewteen one consistency or the other is a real damnation for man.

Does Prayer = World Peace?

On Monday, my wife and I finally went on our postponed Valentine's date, and on our drive home saw a billboard that caught our attention. The billboard featured pictures of different people from obviously different faiths - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, etc. - all praying. The caption read, "A World at Prayer is a World at Peace." This is a well-intentioned sentiment from the well-intentioned Family Theater Productions, but it also happens to be a fatally flawed one.

On the face of it, in fact, this statement is patently false, if one takes "peace" here to mean the absence of war and aggression, or harmony and concord between individuals and groups (which I think is what they are getting at by globalizing it to the "world"), rather than a kind of individual inner peace. For example - Islamic suicide bombers pray fervently before strapping the bombs to their bodies. American soldiers pray fervently before entering the battlefield. (Note: I am not not necessarily drawing any moral equivalency between the two, but merely noting the presence of prayer in each scenario.) It doesn't seem to me that there is anything inherent in prayer in a generic sense that in any way ensures peace.

This also seem to view prayer from an anthropocentric, pluralist perspective. In other worlds, the focus seems to be on the human activity of prayer, rather than the object of prayer (God, Allah, etc.). Implicit in this statement and graphic, it seems to me, is the idea that it really doesn't matter to whom or what you pray, because really its the human psychological effect of prayer played out in the socio-political arena that makes for a state of peace in the world.

There certainly is a sense in which prayer can have a transforming effect on the one praying, but as a theist I can never lose sight of the fact that I am praying to someone independent of my own psychological state. The focus of prayer in my worldview is theocentric (God-centered), not anthropocentric (man-centered). And peace's common denominator cannot be prayer; the things that make for peace lie outside of this particular human endeavor. In fact, I believe a worldwide state of peace is by nature unattainable for a fallen world - the strife between each other stems ultimately from our own strife with our Creator.

Monotheists = haters?

Melinda Penner over at the Stand to Reason Blog commented today on a statement made by Ralph Peters in an op-ed on Real Clear Politics, latching onto an almost throw-away assertion made by Peters as he gave insight into the distictions among Muslims and how they impact the current situation in Iraq. Though not central to his main purpose, the comment he made ("All monotheist religions have been really good haters. We just take turns.") led Melinda to not only rightly question its accuracy, but also to articulate one of the best summary responses I have read to the assumption behind claims like this:

There is a common assumption these days that belief in God, conviction in the truth of one's religious convictions that logically means one believes others are wrong, necessarily leads to hate and violence. That is fundamentally wrong. What leads to hate or love is the nature of the God one worships and the tenants of the faith one practices. Monotheistic religions vary significantly in these details. Sometimes followers of religion carry out acts at odds with their religion. Religion can be abused and misused. And citing abuses cannot support wide-scale dismissals of religion.

More clear thinking like this is needed in the public square to dismantle faulty logic and assertions that go unquestioned in our confused age.