Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Part I

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Floridians Prepare for Hurricane Milton: In the Wake of Helene, Citizens of the U.S. Face Another Massive Storm, and Our Prayers are With Them

Well all our hearts right now are on the State of Florida where Hurricane Milton is now bearing down on the state, it is expected to achieve landfall sometime later today, probably around Tampa, Florida. Certainly, they’re in the Hillsborough County area at this point. It is expected by the time it hits to be a category three storm, but it might be close to a category four storm, and we’re talking about a storm of immense power hitting an area, or at least at this point, forecast to hit an area that has not experienced this kind of hurricane action in about a hundred years. We are looking at something that’s really, really interesting and could be potentially very deadly, and that has to do with the existence of Tampa Bay.

Tampa Bay is a relatively shallow body of water, but it’s a massive body of water, and we’re talking about, well, you can just imagine the volume of water. If there is something like a 12-to-15-foot tidal surge, it could basically be like blowing water in a saucer. That’s the real danger to a city like Tampa and the larger environs of Hillsborough County, certainly near the coast and near the Bay. We are talking about what could be a deadly combination. We’re also talking about the second major hurricane with devastating impact to hit the United States in just a matter of a few weeks. We are looking at Hurricane Helene bringing such massive devastation, some of it in Florida, some of it throughout the southeast, but the most surprising and most devastating impact was in Western North Carolina, there in the Appalachian Mountains. The Smoky Mountains all of a sudden turn there in Western North Carolina into torrents of water that swept even towns away.

Now, we just have to hope and pray right now that this does not happen in Hillsborough County, Florida. Furthermore, the storm is forecast at this point to cross Florida and then to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean where it’s going to have to be recalibrated as to what happens next, but we are talking about the peninsula of Florida here, and we’re talking about a very dangerous situation. Quite honestly, we’re talking about this even as many of us have loved ones right there in the area, directly in the path. Thus, as we begin our day on this Wednesday, we recognize that there are those in our own country, sometimes in our own extended families who are endangered right now in the storm. It reminds us once again, biblically, of how small we are as measured over against how massive nature is. It’s not just nature existing in natural terms, it is creation as the product of a Creator, and it’s also the effect of sin, Genesis 3.

We have the doctrine of creation, and we have the doctrine of the fall very close in proximity here, and that frames the Christian worldview understanding, none of this is by accident, but at the same time, it is not given to us to discern what exactly is happening as these storms hit, or a natural disaster strikes. It is our responsibility as Christians to understand that we need to be there to preserve as much life as possible and to assist in as much reclamation and rebuilding as possible. Again, even as we begin this morning, our hearts are with those still recovering from Hurricane Helene. By the way, that’s going to be a very long process, particularly in regions like Western North Carolina, and our hearts go right now to those in the path of Hurricane Milton.

All kinds of debates about meteorology and climate change and all the rest are sure to follow, but right now, the main emphasis should be on saving as much life as possible and preserving as much property as possible, but let’s keep the priority straight, it’s the lives first, the property way down the list.

Part II

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Has the Human Lifespan Peaked? New Research Suggests Humans May Have Reached Peak Life Expectancy

Next, it’s important to recognize that there are some worldview debates going on all around us all the time, and some of it comes in the form of debates over climate change and the weather. Some of it comes in debates over human nature, even the human lifespan. The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline asking the question, “Have We Reached Peak Human Lifespan?” Dana G. Smith reports the story telling us that in 1997, the oldest human on record died at the age of 122 in France. The reporter then asked the question, “What are the odds that the rest of us get there too?”

Then immediately comes the answer, not high, “Barring a transformative medical breakthrough,” according to research published this week on Monday in the Journal Nature Aging,” as the article tells us, “The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest, Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.” Data from the United States we are told was also included, “Though the country’s life expectancy is lower.” The article tells us that while in all of those locations, life expectancies increased during the period, “The rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong where life expectancy did not decelerate.” In all the other places, in all the other places, there was a slowdown in the increase of the lifespan. The lifespan wasn’t getting shorter, but it wasn’t getting longer at the rate it had been for some time.

This raises the question, have we reached peak human lifespan? Now here’s what’s really interesting, when you look for instance at the Scripture, of course, there are some of the patriarchs and matriarchs who had massive lifespans into the hundreds of years, but we also see evidence of the average human lifespan was considerably shorter than that, less than a hundred years. Then we have seen modern medicine and other advances come, and we’ve seen better diets arrive, and we’ve seen people taking vitamins and watching their health. It turns out that with antibiotics and immunizations and any number of other things, people are living longer than we have in the past, and yet we also recognize that it tells us something that the advances are slowing down. That raises the question, at least in the minds of some medical researchers, is there a natural barrier that will not be transcended?

Now let me just pause for a moment and Christians understand, yes, there is a barrier that cannot be transcended. All around us are some, especially among the very wealthy and especially among the very liberal who have bought into the idea of transhumanism. At least a part of transhumanism comes with the idea that human beings can basically just live on in one form or another. Now you get down into the nitty gritty and some of these folks see us basically living on in some computer’s hard drive, but nonetheless, many of them actually believe they’re going to be able to defy death. They’re going to be able to come up with some kind of technological breakthrough that’s going to allow human beings to escape mortality. Here’s where Christians have to come back and say, “No, you’re not. Because that mortality is not just a natural limit. It is the verdict of a supernatural Creator.”

The distinction in Scripture between mortality and immortality, that’s not going to be transcended by any form of technology, but it is interesting to see the secular medical professionals and other health scientists debate this. S. Jay Olshansky identified as a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago led the study, “We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live.” How’s that for a blunt statement, by the way? As long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live. Now, as the article continues, it turns out this is a big and quite frankly, somewhat acrimonious debate among medical researchers. Some say, “No, we just scratched the surface. We are going to be continuing to expand and to lengthen the human lifespan.” Along come doctors such as this one, Dr. Olshansky who says, “Now, I think we have reached a rather natural limit. I just don’t see most of humanity living that much longer.”

You understand that both of these sides are basically arguing right now on purely materialistic and naturalistic terms. That is to say, they’re arguing just on the basis of cell biology and anatomy and physiology and modern medicine and immunology. The bottom line is it’s largely hypothetical, but it’s also largely absolute nonsense. There are a lot of very interesting points made in this article. There’s some favorite statements. Here’s one of my favorites, “Even if deaths from common diseases or accidents were eliminated, people would die of aging itself.” How’s that for bad news? You can escape illness, you can escape accidents, but guess what? You’re still going to get old and old is a problem when it comes to the lifespan in itself. Dr. Olshansky went on to say, “We still have declining function of internal organs and organ systems that make it virtually impossible for these bodies to live a whole lot longer than they do now.”

All the transhumanists out there and all the human longevity specialists out there who are hoping that human beings live to be say, 150, 200, 250, 300 years old, well, at least many of these doctors are saying, “You know, it’s not looking really likely.” Even where some say, “Well, it could be indefinite.” We say, “Well, no, I am definitely sure it cannot be indefinite.” There’s something else here, and that just points to the sterility, the emptiness of the naturalistic worldview. Basically, there are two worldviews here that are shown in their emptiness. One is that naturalistic worldview, everything is explained merely in natural terms without any supernatural reference. Then allied to that, materialism saying that the only reality that is, is the material reality. The desk at which I’m sitting right now, the dirt under your feet, that’s real stuff, and they say there’s nothing beyond that real stuff. Everything is just material or it’s not real.

Of course, this is where the biblical worldview immediately tells us that both of these are absolutely wrong. The naturalistic worldview is wrong because it denies a supernatural Creator. Nature doesn’t explain itself, it doesn’t exist on its own terms, by its own power. It is the product of a Creator who made it for his own glory. Then the second problem in materialism is it just doesn’t work that way. Materialism just can’t explain everything. If you believe materialism has to explain everything and you believe we really are just material creatures, then the quest to live forever becomes rather inevitable, doesn’t it? If this life is all there is, then we better make this life last a long, long time. Dr. Olshansky went on and made the second statement, I think it’s absolutely worth our attention as the article tells us, “The only thing that might radically lengthen life expectancy is if scientists develop an intervention to slow the aging process itself. Something he’s optimistic about,” says Dr. Olshansky.

In other words, the only real hope for anything that might make a material difference in lengthening the human lifespan is something we don’t know of yet, and yet you have to hold out the possibility he says that it just might be found. That’s something he says he’s optimistic about, and yet his earlier comments in the article indicate that he’s not all that optimistic after all. All this just goes back to underline the fact that if you hold to a naturalistic and materialistic worldview, then this world is all there is and what you have in terms of the stuff of yourself is all that you are or ever will be, and your stuff is one day simply going to dissolve and decay back into other stuff and you’re just going to be dirt in the end. Now you have, on the other hand, the scientists who say, “I want to avoid being dirt. I want to find a way to live forever.”

Again, I just have to say, I’m absolutely convinced from the Christian worldview that not only is that evidence of human pride, it is also evidence of humans lying to themselves. It’s important that we recognize that when we see an article like this appearing in the New York Times, wow, it explodes into our attention crying out the difference between the Christian worldview and alternative secular worldviews is, it’s night and day. It’s absolute and that’s where we are reminded that the modern secular worldview is in opposition to the Christian worldview at almost every single point and that’s not an accident. These worldviews hold together. We are as human beings and as we as Christians believe by the very determination of the Creator, we are pattern-seeking creatures. We are creatures looking for meaning, and we think logically in such a way that one way or another we try to bring our thoughts into a form of consistency. That means that Christians are called to a Christian consistency.

Part III

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Secular Morality Collapses Under Scrutiny: Materialism Is Incapable of Upholding a Binding Moral Code

But it also means that secularists seem to be drawn to a secularist consistency as well. Materialists are drawn to a materialist consistency as well, and that turns out to be a big problem. The evidence for that is found not in the New York Times, but in the magazine known as The New Yorker, the September 16, 2024 edition, so very current. I mentioned the New Yorker from time to time because it is the premier magazine of the cultural elite in Manhattan, so you know what you’re looking at here. And in that edition of the New Yorker comes an article by Manvir Singh entitled, “The Post-Moral Age,” then the question, “if Conscience is Merely a Biological Artifact, Must We Give Up on Goodness?” Now, it’s a very interesting article, and it is at least in part written in the first person by this evolutionary scientist.

The big point here is about morality, and that raises, well, it’s a question that we as Christians just can’t avoid being drawn to. What is this evolutionary scientist going to tell us about morality? What he tells us, the bottom line is that he used to believe in some form of real morality, but now he’s come to the conclusion that there is no real morality. Morality is just an illusion. Of course, in the larger worldview of evolution, then morality just becomes a part of the evolutionary process. Even as you look at some of the classical evolutionary theorists in the 20th century, they were arguing that what we call morality is just basically a survival mechanism. It turns out that if you love your neighbor as yourself, you’re more likely to live longer than if you don’t, and living longer means you can successfully pass on your genes. Never forget that, that is the bottom line of the mechanism.

You basically have to explain how babies come about, and so you’re looking at mating rituals and you’re looking at coupling patterns, and you’re looking at reproductive strategies. Yes, that’s why evolutionary theory is so sexy, but it has to be based upon a materialist worldview. That is to say the stuff is all there is. We are just stuff. There is no spiritual dimension, there is no soul. We’re not made in the Creator’s image because there is no Creator. We’re just the byproducts of a natural materialistic process. Humanity is just an achievement and by the structure of the evolutionary materialist worldview, only a temporary achievement at that. The point is that Dr. Singh had indicated that in the past, even basically committed to materialism, he had held to some form of continuing, we’ll say meaning to morality. He called his worldview Celebrationism. He says that he actually tried to codify it, writing what he described as a manic sprawling novel of that name.

He then goes on to tell us that he grew up as an adherent of the Sikh religion, and he still identifies as a Sikh. That is S-I-K-H. He said, “I had grown up a good Sikh boy, I wore a turban, didn’t cut my hair, didn’t smoke or drink. The idea of a God that acted in the world had long seemed implausible, yet it wasn’t until I started studying evolution in earnest that the structures of religion and of everyday conventions began to feel brittle. By my junior year of college,” he wrote, “I thought of myself as a materialist, open-minded, but skeptical of anything that smacked of the supernatural.” Celebrationism, remember, that’s what he calls his theory at the time, “Came soon after it expanded from an ethical roadmap into a life philosophy spanning aesthetic, spirituality and purpose.” However, it turns out that he has now abandoned his own worldview of Celebrationism as he called it.

Now he simply says he really doesn’t believe in morality at all. He writes, “Celebrationism died soon afterward, just as observation and a dose of evolutionary logic revealed male burying beetles not as attentive fathers, but as possessive mate-guarders.” “The natural and behavioral sciences deflated my dreamy credo,” that is his creed, “exposing my lofty aspirations as performance and self-deception I struggled unsuccessfully to construct a new framework for moral behavior, which didn’t look like self-interest in disguise, a profound cynicism took hold.” What he’s saying here, he says, he gave up on Celebrationism and came to the conclusion that morality is just a mind game in which we basically rationalize our behavior, our own self-interest. He then takes us on a bit of a walk through Western philosophical history, David Hume, he says, “Chimed in two centuries later to argue that judgments of right and wrong emanate from emotion and social conditioning.”

He goes on to mention Kant and Hegel, who he says, “Saw morality as something that we derived through our own thinking, our own rational will.” He then speaks of the war between science and religion, and he cites Nietzsche and his thesis about the death of God. “As the pillars of Christian faith crumbled, Western morality seemed poised to collapse, Nietzsche loomed, but how did we do this? The madman in Nietzsche’s, the gay science asked, how could we drink up the sea who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun?” In other words, humanity has to come of age and forge a morality just based upon being human, merely human, all so human. He goes on to say, “It’s basically routine,” that’s his word, “for most educated Westerners to come to some kind of moral logic like his own.” Which is to say we’re basically driven by self-interest. That’s one of the principles of evolution.

We can call it morality, but it’s basically nothing more than disguised self-deception and self-interest. That raises the question, and he recognizes this, and that is simply the question, is there any kind of objective right and objective wrong? Is there any kind of genuine good and genuine evil? Is something like virtue real or is it just what we want to call what works for us in our own self-interest? This is really interesting stuff. For Christians, we recognize there couldn’t be more important questions than these because they point right back to the meaning of life. They point right back to whether or not there is a God who created us and to whom we will give an answer. It raises all the questions about moral relativism, or for that matter, what has been called in more recent decades, moral constructivism, and that is to say that we as a society just construct a morality that fits our own self-interest.

Here’s where we recognize that in that secular materialistic worldview, morality has to be a form of fiction. It’s just a coping mechanism that sometimes is just basically our own self-interest disguised as morality. Now, let’s ask ourselves the question as Christians. Is it possible for human beings to play moral mind games? Of course, it is. That’s found even in Scripture. It is self-deception. It is self-delusion. It defiance against the Creator. That’s why we are dependent upon God’s revelation to us in Scripture. That’s why we have to lean into the right disciplining of the moral sense that God put in us as a part of what it means to be made in his image. We understand that this is our responsibility, but we also have to understand as Christians that this effort to try to come up with any kind of secular morality, eventually, that ship crashes on the iceberg of reality, and that reality is indeed self-interest.

If morality is just an expression of our own self-interest as individuals, or you could say also as groups, if morality is just our self-interest, then there is no right and there is no wrong. There’s just, I say versus what you say. Dr. Singh also recognizes that some modern moral theorists have said that there’s no objective content to moral judgments. All you’re doing is expressing your opinion. You’re just expressivist, or you might even be driven by say, aesthetics. I think this is a better-looking theory than that other theory. He writes, “In recent decades, all sorts of philosophers have added to the pool of adaptive theories about morality. Allan Gibbard he mentions, argues that moral statements such as killing is bad, actually express attitudes like “I don’t like killing.” Now let me be honest, I think, well, all human beings I know would rather live next to another human being next door who doesn’t believe in killing, even if that is a emotional statement. On the other hand, I think they’d rather live next door to someone who believes that God has said, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Dr. Singh also recognizes the gig is up when it comes to many of these games. He says, “Non-moral explanations, whatever their differences, obviate talk of moral truths, constructing them as dreamlike delusions.” Here’s where it also gets interesting, “Like the decline of religion, what’s often called the evolutionary debunking of morality can induce existential panic and strenuous efforts at circumvention.” In other words, once we come to the conclusion that the materialist worldview means there is no morality, then we panic and try to come up with some kind of morality because we understand we’ll only survive if there’s some kind of morality. Well, my point in turning to this article is not because this particular writer has settled the argument in the right way. I think profoundly it’s the opposite of the case.

I do think he indicates, in this very thoughtful article published in this very elite journal of say, high culture. I think he does admit that the gig is up when it comes to using moral language if we don’t really believe in morality anymore. I think the gig is up when materialists try to claim that they can come up with some kind of binding moral code merely out of material stuff, you can’t do it. I think it’s really important to recognize that when you look at an article like this, you do see something very, very interesting. You see a man, I think very honestly saying, “I tried a coping mechanism of coming up with this Celebrationism, this worldview I could construct, but once I really came to terms with the ultimate logic,” and as he sees the theory of evolution, he had to let that go, and now all he’s got is evolutionary self-interest.

That’s actually not all he’s got. He says, “I am, at least by all appearances, still a good Sikh. I have become a teacher, a husband, and a father to a new baby daughter.” Now that’s really important. He’s not just a materialist. He’s now a materialist who is a father. Here’s what I have to hope. I have to hope that looking into the face of that beautiful daughter, he realizes we cannot just be stuff. This little girl that he no doubt adores and absolutely loves is not mere stuff and the love that he feels for her and for his wife and they for their baby together is not an illusion, it’s real. This is where we as Christians need to understand that if you abandon the Christian worldview, you’re not left with any way to say that’s real, and you’re not left with anything honestly to understand about humanity with anything other than just say a human lifespan in mind.

Our affection for one another, the purpose for our existence, the way that we have a yearning for eternity, even as the Bible describes it that way, it tells us, we have a constant reminder all around us that this life is not all there is. It can’t be. As we bring The Briefing to a conclusion today, these last two issues we’ve discussed really do point the relevance and the urgency of the collision between the Christian worldview and the worldviews of the age. One of the articles in the New York Times, the other one in the New Yorker, but precisely because we cannot follow that merely materialist worldview, and precisely because we are Christians and precisely because we understand every single human being to be of infinite worth made in the image of God, we’re praying for the folks right now who are in the path of Hurricane Milton, where quite frankly, esoteric considerations such as these two articles have to take a far, far seat back in the bus in the great hierarchy of understanding that the first thing we need to do is try to keep one another safe.

As you consider a storm like this in its just massive dimensions, we can’t control it, but here’s the thing, we don’t think it’s an accident. We believe in one who can, and thus, that shapes our prayers for our neighbors as we consider those in peril in the path of Hurricane Milton. With that prayer, we end today’s edition of The Briefing. Thanks for listening.