Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women?

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting couple of articles earlier this year discussing the pros and cons of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It is clear to anyone who takes the time to look at history that humanity, and especially Western societies, underwent a fundamental change because of the separation of sexual activity from procreation.

In this article, Hoover Research Fellow Mary Eberstadt focuses on four myths that seem to still be prevalent today (especially by those with a certain political agenda) and she deftly knocks down each one.  The four she identifies are:

1. The "war on women" consists of tyrannical men arrayed against oppressed but pluckily united women.
2. If it weren't for the Catholic Church, no one would be talking about contraception anyway.
3. The "social issues" are unwanted artifacts of a primitive religious past that will eventually just fade away.
4. The sexual revolution has made women happier.

Eberstadt takes each of these in turn and shows how silly they are when looked at in real world contexts. She shows that even by looking at popular women's periodicals you can see these myths don't hold. You can read the short article here. 

Modern Civilization Cultivating Its Own Destruction.

Although this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge is is some forty years old, it is more apt now than ever before:

"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over—a weary, battered old brontosaurus—and became extinct."

Pater, Alan F. What They Said in 1975: The Yearbook of World Opinion (Beverley Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co, 1976). 480.

Offer Stories When Sharing Your Faith

Have you ever struggled in a conversation to make your Christian views known?  Have you ever been tongue-tied when someone objects to belief in God because of the problem of evil or the exclusive claims of Christianity? Don’t be too hard on yourself.  It can be difficult getting across all the aspects of a worldview as rich as Christianity, especially when you may not have had much training or practice.

However, there is a great book that can help you be an effective communicator when those providential opportunities to discuss your faith arise.  The God Conversation, written by J.P. Moreland and Tim Muehlhoff, is a compact, easy to read collection of illustrations and stories that you can use to communicate the reasons for your faith in an effective way.

The authors note that illustrations are one of the prime ways important concepts have been passed on throughout history. It is the main method Jesus used in His teaching. And these stories remain memorable to both the sharer and the hearer.

The book has eleven chapters covering five major themes: the problem of evil, competing religious claims, the fact of the resurrection, morality and ethics, and the creation/evolution question.  Each area looks at many of the common objections offered today and provides an illustration of why the Christian view makes sense.  By using clear examples where most people would agree, the effectiveness of the stories is easily seen.  But Moreland and Muhlhoff go beyond just the illustration as they provide the reader with extended discussion ideas and further develop the arguments.

I highly recommend The God Conversation, but not just for the evangelist or apologist. Facebook and social media today have made these kinds of interactions almost inevitable for every Christian who takes his or her faith seriously. By using stories such as these, you will find such engagements to be less contentious and more productive.  And you may even learn a little bit more about your own faith in the process.

Related posts:
In Online Dialogs, Asking Questions is Crucial!
Top Ten Neglected books for Apologist

Why Can't Christians Tell the Best Stories?

Image by feeb

Johann Sebastian Bach once said “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” Bach also said that he worked hard on his craft and those that worked as hard as he did should see results. Bach recognized that believers should excel in whatever they do as that would honor the Savior.  For much of Christendom, this maxim was followed.  The finest thinkers were Christians; names such as Augustine, Ockham, Anselm, Aquinas, and Pascal still play a central role in secular programs of philosophy. Science, too, saw Christians take the lead with such notables as Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Mendel, and Kelvin. And of course the world's great artists continually produced paintings and statues around biblical themes.

But that seems to have changed today.  Peter Kreeft put is best when he said:

"Christian thought is the most intelligent of all thought and Christian morality is the most holy of moralities. But Christianity no longer produces the world's most beautiful and arresting art. I think modern culture is rejecting Christianity not because they think it is stupid or wicked, but because it looks boring... It's pictures aren't moving pictures anymore. They don't move hearts. It's the secular media that makes them abject now."

Good art both reflects and drives the culture in which it is presented. It is at root a medium that engages the heart first, and then the mind. We know that the story tellers of today are the record producers and the movie directors; and we can see their influence at the fashion shows and at the ballot box.  However, Christianity seems to be markedly absent from making a significant impact in this day and age. We've settled for following the lead of those who hold views antithetical to Christianity.  I'm not satisfied with the ghettoed Christian music station or television channel. I'm not satisfied with the substandard and derivative work of Christian artists who are supposed to substitute for the secular flavor of the day.

Now, to be sure, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. LeCrae is topping the hip hop charts all over the place.  C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien's books are still masterpieces.  But we should see more.  We should be leading in the arts, not following.

So, I'd like to challenge you, Christian.  If you have a passion for storytelling, if you're an artist, filmmaker, writer or musician, work hard and take a risk.  Think about how to work hard and honor God while being meaningful. We need to move the culture of today.  In so doing we can move people more towards Christ.

Why Artificial Intelligence Isn't

photo by Fumi Yamazaki

I've had an off-and-on again discussion with an atheist friend of mine on the concept of the soul. Being an atheist, he routinely defaults to a naturalistic/materialistic understanding of the world and how things work. For example, he recently made the claim on my Facebook page that "The new thing that is emerging is 'machine life' (artificial intelligence). It will surpass us in intelligence." There are two claims being made in this statement, both of which I think are faulty and the first rests on the understanding of the second.  The primary claim that machines will someday be considered alive due to advances in artificial intelligence that are happening even now. The second is that this intelligence will allow machines to be smarter than us.

The problem here is one of language. We've heard people discuss sentience or intelligence as synonyms. Then, we see a new device, such as a smart phone or intelligence-assist devices and think that people are using the words in the same fashion.  But that is simply not true.  In the first sense, intelligence means to be able to comprehend the facts that are presented to you, to understand a concept. The biggest point of understanding is not the medium through which the concept is presented nor is it the reaction or outcome.  Understanding is an act of consciousness and consciousness has a specific kind of experience associated with it that machines can never have.

You see, machines simply are cause and effect loops. Given a specific input, a computer acts like any other mechanical device—it spits out a result based on preset programming.  This is true even if the programming has a randomizer built into it.  As computer programs become more complex we can be tempted to think the machines are "understanding" what is going on, but they aren't. They are merely acting like an extremely complicated Rube Goldberg machine and producing an outcome based on their prior programming.

Philosopher John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is a great example of the difference. Searle asks you to imagine a man inside a locked room with two slots in the wall. A Chines messenger will slip a question written in Chinese on a piece of paper through the door and in a little while the paper will be returned through a second slot with an answer inscribed at the bottom, also in Chinese.  The messenger and probably all observers would believe the man in the room spoke Chinese.  However, inside the room the facts are different.  The man actually speaks no Chinese at all. He just has a very large code book that will tell him "If this combination of characters appears on a piece of paper, then you should write this second combination of characters at the bottom and return the paper." The man inside the room has no idea what the question is or what the answer says. It is a qualitatively different experience than conscious understanding. (For a more detailed explanation of the Chinese Room and some great animation, see this page.)

This is exactly how artificial intelligence works.  Even the head of the Google Car project can teach you how to program your own self-driving car in just seven weeks. See the page at https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373 and look at the list of topics covered in the class.  All the programming features are simply rules in a code book that must be followed by the machine.  No understanding is required. The CPU in a computer is basically a Chinese Room, except the language is binary, 1s and 0s.

I don't think the label artificial intelligence will ever change; it's become too ingrained in our culture.  However, it still can be understood that the term intelligence can mean different things. If I say my cell phone is dead, I don't mean that at one point it was capable of biological life. In the same way if I say my phone is smart, I don't mean that it is capable of conscious understanding. We would do well to note the difference.