Because I am hypervigilant, trying to avoid being misunderstood, I go back and review what I have written to explain it better and avoid offense.

While I am clearly promoting, with this series of articles, the benefits of an objective, rational relationship with the creator, I know that one size does not fit all. With the last post, about the total lack of curiosity among van Gogh enthusiasts regarding the objective aspects of the artist over the subjective, I know that most Christians would never develop an interest in science the way I have stated it, and that is okay.

My wife, Denise, takes her relationship with God seriously, but if I really want to bore her, I will turn on a science program. Last night I watched 3 and 1/2 hours of the new Netflix series, Dinosaurs, and she wasn’t interested in one minute of it, much less interested in a Brian Greene lecture on String Theory, which I was listening to before that. She probably thinks I’ve lost my mind, listening to a five-hour lecture-debate with Gutsick Gibbons on paleoanthropology. However, these things do more for my relationship with the creator than a lifetime of attending Sunday morning church services, because nature is “God’s stuff.”

I want to be clear that I don’t have a problem if someone never has an interest in those things. It doesn’t make you inferior, from my perspective, in any way. However, if you look down on those of us who do love objectivity, not making any room in your churches for us, that is the problem. I bet everyone reading this right now knows of at least one person, a child, a nephew, or niece, a friend… or even yourself, who has left Christianity for good because that person had an analytical mind, as Peter Enns describes himself. They are not allowed to express it within the walls of a church without being condemned. Or, as Peter wrestled with, giving up that analytical way of thinking, seeking objective truth, because they have been led to believe that the creator of the rational cosmos is himself/herself irrational and mystical. I have found profound mysticism in the objective, rational cosmos.

The other thing I want to say, once again, is that I have no aspirations to be religious. I spent half of my life as a deeply religious person. I love to speak in philosophical terms because philosophy, like science, is the search for wisdom and objective truth, the exact same mindset as King Solomon, who God was so pleased with that He made him the richest man the world has ever known. Religion is about conformity, believing what you must believe despite the evidence. In that mindset, religion makes everything a moral problem if you don’t conform.

So, when it sounds like I am criticizing American Christianity, which I often do, unlike religion, I am not making it a moral problem. This is very liberating, because when I deconstruct someone’s way of thinking, I am not suggesting that I am morally superior or more intelligent; I am simply trying to follow the evidence. This was the way it worked in science when I was doing research. If people disagreed with you, it was always over the data, never personal. In science, you can have the greatest disagreement over a study’s conclusion, and then have a beer together. In that world, it would be bizarre to make it personal. But in religion, everything is personal, if there are disagreements. Most of my old evangelical friends stopped speaking to me, think I’m the devil, and am going to burn in hell… yeah, personal.

So, my point is that I’m not looking down my nose at Peter Enns, but I am expressing disappointment in the choice he is being forced to make because of the culture.

While I do not see this as a moral problem, I do think what we believe has real-world consequences. As I’ve shared before, the scientific revolution was started by a Christian, Thomas Aquinas, but when it moved into the Enlightenment and began to question Church dogmas based on the evidence, the Church responded by condemning objectivity in general and moving toward a subjective relationship with God. The secular equivocality of postmodernism is that there are no external truths; we create our own truths from our emotional experience. As the late Christian theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer predicted in the 1960s, this has led to a total loss of objective truth. Politicians, who have always told some lies, now live in alternative realities, and voters vote not for the politician who tells the truth but for the one who lies best. So my point is, while I do not make this a moral problem, per se, it can have devastating consequences.

Footnote: I mentioned that with a sudden doubling of my readership several weeks ago, I was going to try and add an adjunct video blog or podcast, which I prefer, but it barely got off the ground. I wanted to put it primarily on Substack, as well as here, and I learned that Substack requires that free videos must be fifteen minutes or less, and mine were about twenty minutes. It may be hard to believe now that I’m retired, but with my continuing battle with cancer, book writing, and cottage building, I am the busiest I have been in my life, more so than when I was working fifty or sixty-hour weeks in a medical practice. So, once again, I’ve tabled that project.

Have a great week,

Mike