How Modern Society Turns Virtue into Vice

Our culture today has lost the concept of virtue. As I've written before, colleges have placed feelings above values, and relativism above moral responsibility. Because the only thing now considered wrong is the critique of another's actions, the concept of virtue has nearly disappeared from Western society. We feign virtuousness by boasting of our tolerance and demand a society where no one's choices are called out as illegitimate. But that misunderstands the very nature of virtue.

In this short quote below, J. Budziszewski explains just what virtue is:

If I said, “The excellence of a knife is its sharpness,” you would know what I meant: sharpness is the specific quality that enables a knife not just to cut, but to cut excellently. Another word for excellence is virtue. So you would also know what I meant if I said the virtue of an eye is clearness or that the virtue of a racehorse is swiftness. Clearness is what enables an eye to see excellently, swiftness is what enables a racehorse to race excellently. Once again we have a formula. A virtue or excellence of a thing (there may be more than one) is the specific quality that enables it to perform its function or proper work excellently and so achieve its highest good.

Like our last formula, this one too can be applied to mankind. How do we know whether a particular human quality, such as courage or ruthlessness, is a virtue or not? The proper work of a human soul is using and following reason. So the quality is a virtue only if it helps it to do so excellently. For instance, one virtue is theoretical wisdom, the discipline of mind which helps us reason our way to truth while avoiding error; another is practical wisdom, the discipline of mind which helps us reason our way to good choices while avoiding evil.

But here we run into a problem. It looks at first as though the only true virtues are intellectual ones. What about moral virtues, such as courage, justice, self-control and friendliness? Isn't there a place for them? Yes, for two main reasons. To understand the first one, remember that more than one thing is active in the human soul: not only the power of reasoning itself but also the power of feeling and the power of desiring. … Just as the intellectual virtues discipline the thoughts, the moral virtues discipline the feelings and desires. An example of moral virtue that disciplines the feelings is courage, whereas an example of moral virtue that disciplines the desires is self-control.

To sum up, the main reason the intellectual virtues are not the only virtues is that different virtues are needed to put each of the different powers of the soul in rational order. The second main reason is that different virtues bring the soul into rational order in different respects.1

Virtue is lost in our society because we no longer look at the entire person and his purpose for existence. Modern culture has elevated feeling above reason; the action or critique is wrong because it makes someone feel bad or it stifles his desire. Instead, one must understand what it means to be an excellent human being, which encompasses both intellectual and moral excellence. To not approach human excellence holistically turns tolerance into a vice, not a virtue.

References

1 Budziszewski, J. Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity, 1997. Print. 26-27.

Back to the Future and the Existence of God

We made it! It's finally 2015, that famous year Marty McFly visited in the 1989 Back to the Future sequel. For years, Internet blogs and commentators have been waiting to see the hoverboard, flying cars, and the Nike self-lacing shoes. Some of these are actually getting closer to being a reality, while others may never be seen.

I've always been interested in the way people envision the future. It actually says a lot about humanity. Sometimes, sci-fi writers get things pretty accurate; Jules Verne's submarines and Star Trek's flip phone/communicators are prime examples. But other times they get things terribly wrong. Two such predictions can be seen in Back to the Future II: flying cars and a fax machine in every room. The reason for this is not technological. Both flying vehicles and fax machines exist today. Instead, there are other considerations that come into play.

For me, there are significant parallels in the way people misunderstand the future and the way unbelievers misunderstand God. Using the flying cars and the fax machine examples from the movie, Let's briefly look at two ways people get God wrong.

People Overestimate Themselves

Let's begin with the flying car example. People have been predicting them almost as long as the Wright Brothers safely touched down at Kitty Hawk. But there are some incredible dangers that are attached to flying. First of all, safe driving requires the attention of the driver. But if you've ever commuted to work, you know that as people become more comfortable with their daily routines, they tend to over-estimate their ability and begin to drive and eat, drive and put on make-up, or drive and text.

With flying cars, however, there wouldn't be merely a single plane of traffic flowing horizontally, but there would be multiple planes where other vehicles could approach yours. Cars could merge from above, below, or diagonally. This is why we currently use air traffic controllers who watch all the planes in the sky and direct traffic. Now, imagine the millions of vehicles we use to commute all take to the skies. Who will make sure everyone is behaving appropriately in the sky? What kind of risk would a "crazy driver" place you in in the air? And, as Christopher Neiger notes, if your flying car breaks down, it will fall out of the sky and you can't drive them if the weather's bad.1

Similarly, when I talk with people about the existence of God, they over-romanticize their view of what God should or shouldn't do based on a very limited viewpoint. Some will say a God of love would never allow such and such. But God knows a whole lot more about us, our future, and our choices than we do. I don't think these pictures of God are taking into account how issues of human freedom work, the problems of all other world views,  and they underestimate the true immorality of most people.

People Underestimate the Glory of God

Another classic scene in BTTF II is when Marty McFly is fired from CusCo and fax machines all over the house relay the message. We look back and laugh at the scene now. While most folks yearn for a flying car, not really thinking through all the dangers they bring, I know of no one who is demanding a fax machine in every room! But in 1989, fax machines were still considered a great business innovation; no longer did you have to wait for documents to be sent via mail, but they could be instantly transported to anywhere as long as the recipient had a machine of his own. It would be natural that such technology would extend to the home environment.

Then the Internet happened.

With email and scanners, fax machines are redundant. Add to that laptop computers, wireless connectivity, and the ability to go online via your mobile phone, and fax technology is pretty much obsolete. It is actually a hassle for most people to retrieve a fax unless they sign up for a service that delivers it to their email account. But, we can't blame the script writers of BTTF II for not predicting the online explosion that we've experienced in the last 15 years. The underlying communications structure of the Internet, TCP/IP, was only beginning to be established in the late 80s2, and the Tim Berners-Lee wouldn't invent the language of the World Wide Web for another year.3

I believe many people suffer from the same problem with believing in God. In his book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, Paul Vitz offers the "Defective Father Theory" and provides many examples of notable atheists throughout history who had such difficult relationships with their father than partially caused them to see God in a similar light.4 Other people cannot grasp how one can be happy and still live without whatever specific vice they desire to hold on to. Still more cannot see that the world to come will be much more glorious than anything we can envision today. Their view of heaven is just a bigger version of the world they now experience; they see a fax machine heaven instead of an Internet one.

As we jump into 2015. I pray that you would be open to God's leading in your life. Don't underestimate His love for you nor overestimate your need for Him. Perhaps this year won't take you where you anticipated. That's OK. It may very well be that God has a much better plan for your life than you can foresee. And you may be able to use these ideas to share God's love with others. While movies like Back to the Future are fun, they really do offer a way to open conversations about issues of eternal consequence.

References

1. Neiger, Christopher.  "Top 5 Reasons You Don\u0027t Want a Flying Car"  03 October 2011.  HowStuffWorks.com. Web. http://auto.howstuffworks.com/5-reasons-you-dont-want-flying-car.htm 02 January 2015.

2. Stewart, William. "TCP/IP Internet Protocol." Living Internet. William Stewart, 1996. Web. 02 Jan. 2015. .
3. W3C. "Tim Berners-Lee." W3C. W3 Consortium, 10 Sept. 2014. Web. 02 Jan. 2015. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/.
4 Vitz, Paul C. Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. Dallas: Spence Pub., 1999. Print.
Image courtesy Ewen Roberts and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

2014 Top Ten Apologetics Blog Posts

This year the Apologetics Notes blog has really exploded. I switched to a daily post format, and you all have responded by continuing to come back to read the various articles and topics that we talk about. There are well over 20,000 pages read every month and the audience is growing daily.

The growth is also reflected in the most popular blog posts, all of which were published in the second half of the year. Some posts are straight apologetic while others, such as the Ann Coulter piece or the Hillsong article, focus on topical events. But every one was enthusiastically shared across social media.

Without further adieu, here are the ten most popular blog posts of 2014:

Article	Pageviews
10 Conflicting Beliefs of Modern Atheism	2805
The Missing Piece in the Hillsong Controversy	2255
Christianity is a Thinking-Man's Faith	1812
Why Naturalism is Simply Unbelievable	1284
Morality Relies Upon God's Character, Not Simply His Commands	1176
Atheist insults believers and is stunned at the result	1093
Atheists contradict themselves by seeking invocations	994
History Testifies that Jesus Worked Miracles	701
Ann Coulter is Wrong-People are More than Numbers	691
One Reason Why Jesus Cannot be Mythical	684

Get Smarter by Practicing Doing Nothing

Soon, we will begin a new year and all the weight loss ads will appear. Some will ask you to join a gym while others will promise amazing results with little or no effort on your part. Since inactivity is part of the cause of weight gain, I would hope that people would approach such claims with great skepticism. However, there is a way you can improve yourself that takes little to no physical exertion whatsoever. In fact, to improve you will have to limit your activity quite stringently. You need to practice doing nothing.

As many have noted, we live in an age of distraction. Our world is a noisy one, with video screens and always-connected capabilities robbing us of any time alone with our thoughts. We have become more and more dependent on such distractions, as one study found "Ninety five percent of American adults reported that they did at least one leisure activity in the past 24 hours, such as watching television, socializing, or reading for pleasure, but 83% reported they spent no time whatsoever 'relaxing or thinking.'" 1 So it's no wonder that the researchers found that most people found sitting in a chair and thinking for ten to fifteen minutes was not an enjoyable experience and a significant number chose to administer small, painful electric shocks to themselves rather than simply think about something. 2,3

Deep Thinking Versus Distracted Thinking

You may jump to the conclusion that it's the younger generations that are more incapable of uninterrupted thinking, but in "Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind", Timothy Wilson and his co-authors found that the age of the participant (ranging from 18 to 77) or whether they performed the test at home or in a lab setting made no difference. The only real difference in helping people "gain better control of their thoughts with meditation and other techniques, with clear benefits."4

I agree that deeply thinking about a particular problem or issue is a lost skill and one that every believer should seek to cultivate. The Psalms are replete with commands for us to meditate on the Scriptures and the works of God5 to help us better understand Him and our place in the world. Therefore, I want to offer some tips on ways you can practice thinking about an issue more deeply. These are just ways I try to approach certain problems I mull over as I work through them.

1. Ensure You're Exposed to Rich Ideas

The first step in thinking well requires you to get in the habit of taking in ideas that you may not have previously been exposed to. The best way to do this is to develop a habit of reading. You don't have to read for huge chunks of time, but simply read regularly. Plan in getting ready for bed and spend the last 30 minutes every evening reading. This will help you wind down from the day and it will also improve your sleep. You should read actively, with a pencil in hand and marking up your books. If you disagree with the author, write it in the margin. If you think a point is confusing, note that too. You don't have to look up a word or reference at this point, just read. Choose some classic works of fiction and choose some non-fiction. Mix it up. You'll find that there are many different ways people approach certain issues. All of this helps you to think about ideas in different contexts.

2. Mull over the ideas to which you've been exposed.

Next, pick a particularly intriguing or difficult idea and start thinking through it. You should do this at a different time than your reading. Morning is always good. In my devotional time, I try to meditate on a different aspect of God's character each morning. I've taken a list of the different names of God and use it to contemplate that aspect of his character. I really try to think about what it means for God to be the Lord Our Banner. What aspects of God does such a title reflect? How do those aspect impact me in my walk? This is my very first action in my morning prayer time.

With other ideas, I usually try to find a time where I will have limited distractions to think over an issue. The key is to focus on one thing. How does that idea fit in with your understanding of the world? Does it have implications for other beliefs that you hold? What are three reasons to reject such an idea? Would such a concept be true under any circumstance? Can you outline an argument in your head for or against that view? Who else would be considered an expert in that topic and have you looked at what they would say? All of these questions will help you explore that topic much more deeply than simply taking the author's word for a particular point of view.

3. See how your previous ideas work with your new thoughts.

Lastly, as you take in new ideas, you'll want to see how well those mesh with previous ideas you have. Are there any points of connection? Sometimes, new insight will be gained by taking two ideas that seem disparate and trying to connect them in some way. For example, I was once reading an opinion piece lamenting the fact that the candidates for the various offices in the city of Los Angeles were almost exclusively male. The pundits were decrying this as a travesty, making the point that women add a voice and an influence that men cannot replicate. I was also working on some questions about same-sex marriage and it really struck me how if each sex offers unique views that are necessary to the well-being of governance, then it should be more true that two parents of different sexes offer unique views that are necessary to the well-being of any children that are raised, which prompted this post.  However, that's just one example of how new ideas can form when you think about an issue more deeply and carefully.

References

1. Wilson, Timothy D., et. al.  "Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind." Science 4 July 2014: 75-77. Print.
2. Wilson, 2014, 76.
3. Pomeroy, Ross. "Some People Prefer Electric Shocks to Thinking Quietly by Themselves" RealClearScience. RealClearScience, 13 July 2014. Web. 29 Dec. 2014. http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/07/some_people_prefer_electric_shocks_to_thinking_quietly_by_themselves.html.
4. Wilson, 2014. 77.
5. For examples, see Joshua 1:8, Psalm, 1:2, Psa. 4:4, Psalm 77:6, Psalm. 119:23-27, Psalm. 145:5.

Is Christmas a Pagan Holiday? (Podcast)

Every Christmas and Easter the charge is made that these holidays were originally pagan celebrations that Christians usurped for their own purposes. Is this true? Are Christmas and Easter nothing more than an attempt to convert unbelievers by allowing them to keep their festivals? As the holiday season approaches, we'll show why such a charge can be easily dismissed.

• Is Christmas a Pagan Holiday? - Part 1
• Is Christmas a Pagan Holiday? - Part 2
• Is Christmas a Pagan Holiday? - Part 3
• Is Christmas a Pagan Holiday? - Part 4