Breakpoint

John and Shane field a question from a listener who is wondering how to not only build a theology of being fired, but how he can evangelize his friends to build a theology of being fired. Shane then reads a question from a listener who responded to a BreakPoint podcast who was disappointed with how John approached dead naming. The piece was about Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page. John provides and understanding for the listener, and shares his appreciation to handle relationships appropriately. Finally, John responds to a question from a listener who desires to wrestle with racial issues, specifically in his church, without succumbing to Critical Race Theory.

John and Shane field a question from a listener who is wondering how to not only build a theology of being fired, but how he can evangelize his friends to build a theology of being fired. Shane then reads a question from a listener who responded to a BreakPoint podcast who was disappointed with how John approached dead naming. The piece was about Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page. John provides and understanding for the listener, and shares his appreciation to handle relationships appropriately. Finally, John responds to a question from a listener who desires to wrestle with racial issues, specifically in his church, without succumbing to Critical Race Theory.

In the book River Out of Eden, Oxford biologist and atheist superstar Richard Dawkins famously wrote: "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." Dawkins and other "new atheists" have long insisted that science has excluded the possibility of a creator or has, at least, rendered it unnecessary. Turns out this belief may be scientifically out of date. According to a new book, the biggest discoveries of the last century challenge a materialistic worldview and call science back to its theistic roots. Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen Meyer wrote two books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, that both argue against materialist accounts of biology. His latest book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, makes an even more ambitious claim. Three key twentieth century discoveries, argue Meyer, challenge materialist assumptions and point, not just to an intelligent designer, but to a transcendent God. He recently joined my colleague Shane Morris on the Upstream podcast to talk about the book. Not only were most of the founders of modern science devout Christians, the scientific method itself emerged from assumptions found only in a Christian worldview, such as the intelligibility of nature and the need to constantly test our fallen intuitions against the facts. Tracing science from its theistic beginnings, Meyer shows how it gradually lost its way and became tethered to materialism. Famed scientists like Laplace, Hume, and Darwin came to believe that the "God hypothesis" was no longer necessary to explain the natural world, that the universe required no cause beyond itself. Given the opportunity and enough time, living things could arise and evolve on their own. Since the conditions for life were simple and the universe had existed from eternity, here we are. These assumptions went largely unchallenged until the twentieth century. However, breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, and biology began to undermine materialism. For example, telescopes began to challenge the proponents (Einstein being one) of a steady-state universe. More and more evidence mounted that the universe was, in fact, not eternal, as many scientists had long assumed. If instead the universe came into being at some point in time, it must have had a cause outside of itself, To be clear, there must be a cause outside of space, time, matter, and energy. Another discovery was how finely tuned the universe is. The very laws that govern the cosmos, such as gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, and the cosmological constant, are precisely calibrated in such a way that makes life possible. There's not a compelling way to explain this "Goldilocks universe," one "just right" that could have been otherwise, within a naturalistic worldview. As English astronomer and former atheist Fred Hoyle put it, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics…" And then, there's the discovery Meyer has already devoted two other books to exploring: Materialists long thought that Darwin's theory was a silver bullet against design arguments. Darwin, however, knew nothing about DNA, the inner structure of the cell, or the crucial role information plays in the existence and propagation of life. The more we learn about them, the more outdated this "God is no longer necessary" hypothesis seems to be. Simply put, Dawkins got it wrong. The universe we live in has properties one would expect if it were, in fact, designed by a God who had us in mind when He made the place. As Myer's book shows, this assumption was an original conviction of many who launched and drove the scientific revolution. It's the conviction of a growing number of scientists today who are willing to challenge the powers that be and admit the design they see in the heavens, the laws of nature, and under the microscope. As Meyer puts it, "The evidence is crying out for a God hypothesis." Come to BreakPoint.org and we'll tell you how to get a copy of Stephen Meyer's The Return of the God Hypothesis. We'll also link you to his conversation with Shane Morris on the Upstream podcast.

Emilie Kao is the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. She is presenting at the Wilberforce Weekend. She will share her passion for protecting and defending the rights of children and how her campaign reflects the image of God. Emilie has defended religious freedom for the last 14 years. Kao has worked on behalf of victims of religious freedom violations in East Asia, the Middle East, Europe and South Asia at the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom and Becket Law. Previously, she worked at the United Nations and Latham and Watkins. Kao also taught international human rights law at George Mason University Law School as an adjunct law professor. She earned an A.B. degree in Near Eastern Civilizations and Languages at Harvard-Radcliffe College and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kao is a member of the Supreme Court Bar and the bar associations of California and the District of Columbia.

Emilie Kao is the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. She is presenting at the Wilberforce Weekend. She will share her passion for protecting and defending the rights of children and how her campaign reflects the image of God. Emilie has defended religious freedom for the last 14 years. Kao has worked on behalf of victims of religious freedom violations in East Asia, the Middle East, Europe and South Asia at the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom and Becket Law. Previously, she worked at the United Nations and Latham and Watkins. Kao also taught international human rights law at George Mason University Law School as an adjunct law professor. She earned an A.B. degree in Near Eastern Civilizations and Languages at Harvard-Radcliffe College and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kao is a member of the Supreme Court Bar and the bar associations of California and the District of Columbia.

In 2018, comedian John Mulaney closed out his opening monologue as host of Saturday Night Live with this quip about one of the strangest new normals today which didn't exist just a few years ago: "You spend a lot of your day telling a robot that you're not a robot." Artificial intelligence is one of the new normals of contemporary life. Every time we access data on the web, every customer service call we make, every ordering process we start involves not just using, but communicating with, a machine. Smart phones, smart cars, smart networks—artificial minds are now the gatekeepers of information, transportation, and commerce. In sci-fi, the story always ends with computers evolving past and outclassing human minds. Sometimes they're dangerous; sometimes they're helpful; and sometimes, most unsettlingly, they cannot be differentiated from humans. Lurking behind the fantasy is an important question: What happens if we create something that's smarter than us? Still, computer engineers and neuroscientists continue to push science fiction to science fact. The problem with these efforts, a recent article in the online magazine Salon notes, is that the quest for artificial intelligence tends to "treat intelligence computationally." Attempts to recreate and even surpass the computational abilities of the human brain have succeeded. Computers can now play games and analyze images faster and better than humans. At the same time, there's real doubt as to whether machines are anywhere near matching wits with their creators. According to a piece last year in The Guardian, "Despite the vast number of facts being accumulated, our understanding of the brain appears to be approaching an impasse." It's estimated that about 95 percent of brain activity involves what are called spontaneous fluctuations, or neural impulses, independent of both conscious thought and outside influence. That's a problem that shuts machines down. As the Salon piece puts it, "For computers, spontaneous fluctuations create errors that crash the system, while for our brains, it's a built-in feature." Uniquely human thought arises from this chaos, unpredictable and unreproducible. What we think of as intelligence—reason, logic, and processing—may instead be the end result of consciousness, not the means of achieving it. While Salon's analysis is helpful, it misses something essential. Their analysis assumes that the mind and the brain are identical, that there's nothing more to our minds than "meat." While this is a common assumption of a naturalistic worldview, it's a worldview that will never be big enough to explain human cognition, much less motivation and behavior. David Gelernter's analysis , given 20 years ago after the chess playing program Deep Blue beat the world's top player, says it better: How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind? … What are its apres-match plans if it beats Kasparov? Is it hoping to take Deep Pink out for a night on the town? It doesn't care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose. Or as philosopher Mortimer Adler noted over thirty years ago: "[T]he brain is not the organ of thought … an immaterial factor in the human mind is required." We've made great strides in understanding certain elements of our biology as well as our ability to imitate certain behaviors with machines. But, it's just that. Only an imitation. As Gelernter put it, "Computers do what we make them do, period. However sophisticated the computer's performance, it will always be a performance." The more we learn of the brain and of human consciousness, the more it affirms that humans are not just meaty machines.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this particular book, Charles Darwin addressed the questions he raised about human beings in his earlier book On the Origin of Species, specifically "whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form . . ." Not surprisingly, Darwin's answer was "yes." At that time, in 1871, genetics as we understand it now was completely unknown. Even paleontology was still in its infancy as a field of science. So, Darwin's work was, essentially, speculation based on very limited physical evidence. Darwin's successors were to find the evidence needed to support his conclusion. That task, as it turns out, hasn't gone all that well. At least that's the conclusion of a recent study published in the journal Science. Researchers from The American Museum of Natural History conducted the study and summed up its findings with this devastating headline: "Most Human Origins Stories Are Not Compatible with Known Fossils." According to the study's lead author, "When you look at the narrative for hominin [bipedal apes including modern humans] it's just a big mess—there's no consensus whatsoever … People are working under completely different paradigms." In other words, multiple explanations for human origins are all held as true, but many are incompatible and contradictory. They simply can't all be true. The problem is not a shortage of fossils. It's that, as the article put it, "many of these fossils show … combinations of features that do not match expectations for ancient representatives of the modern ape and human lineages." In other words, the fossils are so different that they cannot be ancestors of modern primates, much less human beings. And, this isn't just the reality when it comes to human evolution. As my colleague Shane Morris noted, "The more you look at the tidy evolutionary stories linking one group of organisms to another, the more you see this same pattern unfold." To be clear, this sort of thing just shouldn't happen in any scientific field. It certainly doesn't happen in other fields, at least not to this degree. The real-world "mess" described in the article flatly contradicts the unshakeable confidence that often characterizes naturalistic evolutionary statements about human origins. Almost every pronouncement ends with some version of "The science is clear about this," a sort of materialist equivalent of "Thus saith the Lord!" When asked how we can know that the current evolutionary narrative is true, scientist explainers quickly point to the fossil record and our nearest animal relatives, the great apes. However, as this study in the journal Science points out, the actual physical evidence for what the late philosopher Michael Stove has called "fables of evolution" is in scant supply. Given the lack of actual physical evidence, a bit more humility is in order. Paleontology isn't like physics or chemistry where the proof is in the laboratory pudding. There is ample physical evidence that it's called the atomic bomb. The best paleontology has to offer is an inference to the best explanation, with "best" being a relative term and (should be) subject to change depending on the state of the evidence. Bluntly, the evidence simply does not warrant the level of confidence that often accompanies Darwinian explanations of human origins. It certainly doesn't warrant what Michael Stove called the "calumny" that reduces human beings to little more than lucky apes, or even less. To their credit, the authors of this study on the science of human origins, just in time for the 150th anniversary of Darwin's book on human origins, acknowledge the state of evidence and admit the "mess." Darwinian evangelists should do the same.

John and Maria discuss the rising tensions in the Middle East. They explain some of the finer points related to the conflict and why it requires sober thinking and a worldview big enough for the world. Maria then asks John for greater context on a number of stories from the week, and they discuss the sad state of many in the transgender community through the lens of a recent interview Ellen Page conducted with Oprah. John also provides additional commentary on a new movement calling some Christians to leave their churches. The movement is called the #LeaveLoud movement, and it urges people to leave churches they don't feel are encouraging them specifically related to race.

For the last several years, China has become more aggressive to both the outside world and to its own people, particularly the people of Hong Kong, the Muslim Uyghur population, and, of course, Christians. While other countries may rank higher on Open Doors' "World Watch List," the economic might, global clout, and sheer population size of China make its treatment of religious minorities a matter of enormous concern. The history behind this growing and troubling reality was one that forged the life, testimony, and word of Pastor Bob Fu. Next weekend, Pastor Fu will become the latest recipient of the William Wilberforce Award, a recognition established by Chuck Colson to honor modern day heroes committed to Christ and just causes as was the famous British abolitionist. Pastor Fu is founder and president of ChinaAid, a Christian "human rights organization committed to promoting religious freedom and the rule of law in China." ChinaAid works to expose systemic persecution, harassment, torture, and imprisonment of Chinese Christians and human rights lawyers in China. It offers financial support to Chinese Christians persecuted by the Chinese government, and training for Christians and church leaders in China to help them defend their rights. Pastor Fu was to be recognized a year ago at the Wilberforce Weekend. That event, like every other live event of 2020, was a casualty of Covid-19. I wish that somehow, through God's gracious working in that difficult nation, Pastor Fu's life and work would've become less relevant to the headlines. Instead, the work of ChinaAid is more important than ever. In fact, when you think of Pastor Fu, the biblical phrase, "for such a time as this," should come to mind. Still, Bob Fu never intended that this would be his life. Born in Shandong Province to a disabled father and beggar mother, Pastor Fu fully intended to join the Communist Party after graduation and become a government official. God, however, had other plans. An American professor gave Pastor Fu a biography of a Chinese intellectual convert to Christianity that, he told the Wall Street Journal, "changed my life." After graduation, Fu and his wife Heidi became active in the house church movement. They even established a Bible school, using chairs he borrowed from a Communist Party school where he taught. The Communist Party didn't quite share Fu's sense of irony. He and his wife were jailed. Then, about a year after their release from jail, Heidi became pregnant with their second child. Because the one-child policy was still being vigorously enforced in China, they emigrated to Hong Kong which, at the time, was still under British rule. Fu was granted political asylum by the Clinton Administration in 1997. Just as the persecution of the Church has, at times throughout history, led to the unintended spreading of the Gospel, Pastor Fu's forced emigration expanded his impact. From his base of operations in west Texas, Fu operates what the Wall Street Journal has called "the most influential network of human-rights activists, underground Christians and freedom fighters in China." In fact, some of what ChinaAid has accomplished is the stuff of movies, including smuggling human rights lawyers and their families out of the country to safety. Through it all, Pastor Fu has earned a fitting nickname: "the pastor of China's underground railroad." The Colson Center is pleased to recognize the life, the work, the courage, and the testimony of Pastor Bob Fu, and to present him as the William Wilberforce Award recipient at the Wilberforce Weekend next week. If you aren't able to join us in person, we invite you to attend our online offering which features all of the sessions from the weekend, plus some additional online-only content, all for only $49. For more information, visit www.wilberforceweekend.org/online

Last fall, the Black Lives Matter organization quietly deleted a section of its website in which it professed an intention to: "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement." The statement was removed after public backlash, but the sentiment behind the statement seems to endure among some activists. Earlier this week, The National Council on Family Relations hosted a webinar entitled "Toward Dismantling Family Privilege and White Supremacy in Family Science." According to researchers, structures of public life in the United States—such as government support, healthcare, and education—that implicitly advantage nuclear families (two people committed to by marriage raising children) disadvantage other family arrangements. For these scholars, this is an example of privilege rooted in white supremacy. These scholars are correct in noting that families with a married mom and dad raising their children tend to fare better. In fact, kids with married parents are far less likely to experience poverty, social problems, emotional problems, and even incarceration. The problem is why these outcomes exist. A Christian worldview contends that these benefits are inherent to a nuclear family because it is God's design for the family. Stronger bonds, better social outcomes, better health, and higher rates of happiness are more common in the context of these relationships because that is how He created humans to do life together. Within a worldview that sees everything in terms of oppressor/oppression, these outcomes must be the results of a system that advantages some and disadvantages others. This increasingly influential worldview is derived from Marxist philosophy, which denies the idea of a given "human nature." Human behavior, Marx believed, is determined by the structures (particularly the economic structures) of a society. These structures tend to be oppressive. So, if the nuclear family tends to be the given arrangement of the bourgeoisie, it is bad by definition and oppresses other arrangements. What's not considered are the implications if there is such a design to human relationships, given by our Creator. For example, the nuclear family works for the good of women. No amount of webinars on "dismantling family privilege" can erase the fact that women exclusively bear children and women are disproportionately disadvantaged when families break down and they are left to care for children on their own. Why would these webinar scholars want to disadvantage women on purpose? Of course, those who wish to "dismantle" the nuclear family would agree that women raising children need support. If the most natural and obvious source of that support is old-fashioned, oppressive and dismantled, then this support must come from somewhere else. Obviously then, this becomes the state: a disastrously poor substitute for family. This reminds me of a progressive woman who tweeted: "If abortion is illegal then men abandoning their child should also be illegal. If this was a permanent decision for me then it is for you as a father also." To which someone replied: "Congratulations, you invented marriage." Eliminating families as antiquated or even (somehow) racist is not merely illogical for pragmatic reasons. It's cultural suicide. It's an idea that sociologist and philosopher Philip Rieff might call a "deathwork," one that exclusively tears down. It cannot build anything. It offers nothing in place of the family. Accordingly, we can and must distinguish between helping those in tragic family situations and incentivizing these situations as "alternative family arrangements." The answer is to recognize the truth about reality, truth that is available not only in Scripture but in everything we know about how families function and work. The goal is to do family better and to welcome more people into it, not to dismantle it. The Church should be the loudest voice celebrating and defending marriage and the family as God intended it. To do so is not to make an idol of it, as some claim, but to point to what is true and good. The church of today lives by lies when it pretends that God's design isn't important. We can celebrate this very good gift of God while also encouraging and supporting single parents and children in other situations. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Indeed, we must.