Living in a Darwinian World

We live in a Darwinian world. All of us do. I mean that we are subject to the laws of nature including all the pleasures, pains and impulses that come with them. None of us can escape this no matter how refined or virtuous we think we are. Even individuals who are great examples of worldly transcendence are forced to live with this world’s inexorable Darwinian pull.

This is neither all bad nor all good. Yes, it means that we come into this world selfish and uncaring. And it means that we are tempted throughout our lives to do whatever it takes to get ahead or to push our children to succeed. It also means that in our rush to achieve success we can pursue very parochial and profane things. This is the moral inheritance of us all. We might call these tendencies Darwinian sins.

But this same inheritance also means that we will care for our children and families. That we will try to work hard and be respectable citizens. It means that we will be watchful and aware of the world around us. It means that, in our better moments, we will plan for a rainy day. We might call these tendencies Darwinian virtues.

In general, we are pretty good at recognizing Darwinian sins. We probably don’t call them by this name, but we recognize them just the same. Noticing a selfish act in another person is second nature even if we can be quite slow recognizing one in ourselves.

Unfortunately, we often fail to recognize when our virtues are Darwinian too. This is unfortunate because trying to live in a Darwinian world, even as we profess to live Christian lives, can lead us down the road to hypocrisy.

An obvious example is the overzealous parent living only a nominally Christian life. Suppose this parent pushes his child to be his/her very best in athletic, academic and other activities. Obviously, this is not a bad thing by itself. It’s clearly a Darwinian virtue insofar as it seeks the advantage of one’s offspring. But this parent is very selfishly engaged in his child’s life and very blind to the teachings of Christ. There is no kindness nor forbearance directed towards the opposing team or to officials, nor is there understanding when a diligent child brings home a poor grade or fails to get the leading role in a school play. The command to love one’s enemies is an impossibility to this parent who cannot even feel concern for the school across town.

Darwinian virtues don’t have to be so stark, but they often lead in that direction. Attending church and trying to look respectably religious, even as this parent selfishly drives his family to success, is an act of hypocrisy. Darwinian virtues are never really Christian virtues in the end.   

Or take the well-meaning parent that notices a talent in her child and insists that her offspring is precocious – perhaps especially gifted, maybe even a genius. I well remember being a young father and feeling a certain likeness to this parental pride. It is natural. After a while, though, hearing this same well-meaning braggadocio from unnumbered kindred parents, it becomes quite tedious. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with being proud of your child. But you will look a long time before you find it justified in holy writ. There is no Christian doctrine of Darwinian pride.

The Christian parent is to teach faith, the honoring of parents and the reverence of deity. Nowhere is it written that Christ expects us to have the brightest, the most athletic or the most artistic offspring. This isn’t because the New Testament is silent about rearing children. On the contrary: in perhaps the harshest statement of all scripture, the Lord warns those who offend them that it would be better to have a grindstone wrapped around their necks and then be drowned into the sea. How many well-meaning parents have pushed their children to the point of offense in an attempt to appease an apparently virtuous Darwinian end?

Darwinian biology doesn’t measures success by how rich we get or by how healthy we keep ourselves (although this may be part of it). It measures success by our offspring. Darwinian success posits the survival of the fittest. Success is ultimately measured by how many descendants we leave behind.

We call adultery and fornication by their proper names: we call them sins. Yet in a Darwinian world these are expected behaviors. From a strict Darwinian perspective, the cultural circumstances under which a child is born doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that the child survives.

But what about abortion? Isn’t this a case where our argument fails? Many in our society seem to be OK with letting one’s offspring die. We may agree that we don’t normally see animals in the wild intentionally aborting their unborn offspring. But the fact of eliminating one’s offspring seems clearly anti-Darwinian. How can this unnatural act be considered a Darwinian sin?

The answer is not really that hard to see. A culture of abortion is a culture that fully recognizes the reality and legitimacy (if I can use that term) of extra-marital intimacy. It fully accepts the Darwinian impulse to reproduce at any cost, even if it ends up rejecting the results of this impulse.

We could give many examples regarding children. Let’s look instead at our attitudes about work. The Darwinian attitude is that hard and smart work will lead to success and allow us greater advantages both now and when unexpected events occur in the future. Most of us tend to agree with this perspective. Preparing for a rainy day is clearly not bad advice. Surprisingly, however, this sort of work is a Darwinian virtue.

This can be confusing because the argument is actually a conflation of a couple of things. It suggests that security comes from hard work, and it pretends to make us the authors of our own well-being. Christian doctrine recognizes the need for work. The Old and New testaments are fairly clear on this. But the purpose of work is not to get wealthy, or to secure our own future. We are to work because the sluggard has no place in Zion.

We are to work honestly and diligently. But it is really quite presumptuous to believe that we will be successful to the degree that we work this way – as if it were a law of Heaven. How many wealthy Christians are there in this world quite certain that anybody could be as good or well-off as they are if they only worked hard enough?

I know it makes a certain sense for someone who has worked hard to accumulate the comforts and conveniences of life to believe that their virtuous deeds have been the cause of their success. And the argument isn’t false at a certain level. It rings true as a Darwinian virtue.

But it is quite false as a Christian virtue. Everything we have comes as a blessing from God. And His promise is that He will take care of His humble followers. As Professor Nibley argued so poignantly many years ago: “work we must, but the lunch is free.” It is God that gave us life. And it is God, in the end, that allows us to live – whether with wealth or otherwise. You will work in vain if you think that God expects it of you so you can be rich. He is more likely to ask you to sell all that you have and give it to the poor – and then to follow Him.

I came across another example of this confusion a few years ago in the American South. We were at a business dinner in a restaurant where one of our party noticed someone at a distant table saying a blessing on the food. My colleague mentioned how hypocritical some people are about saying prayers. Her comment surprised me. Where I come from, giving thanks for a meal is the proper way to show respect to God. In public places, we might chose to pray silently and in a way that others would not notice. But prayers should still be said.

My colleague told us that in the culture of the South, many only pretended to be religious to show they were better than they really were. Sometimes the overt religious act (such as a prayer) is really only a ploy. I was reminded of Christ’s remarks about hypocritical Pharisees.

Darwinism is perfectly content to use religion as a means of promoting one’s self. Christ, on the other hand, requires that we put Him first and trust in Him. This devotion happens in the unobserved workings of the heart. It can never be hypocritical, or it never existed at all.

Why does any of this matter? Perhaps you have never been particularly interested in Darwin or his theories. My answer is that it matters because Darwin was right on certain points, just as he was often wrong. And sadly, many well-meaning Christians live their lives pursuing Darwinian virtues, oblivious to the fact that Christ expects us to strive for subtly – but very importantly – different ones.

So much of our religious journey requires us to take personal inventory on occasion. It requires that we ask ourselves the motives of what we do. Do we act out of convenience, following Darwinian drives, while our deeds are really only pious pretensions? Or do we honestly strive to follow the words of the Master?

It is difficult to overcome selfishness. We want to be recognized. We want people to be happy with us. And there is nothing necessarily wrong with these desires. But they are not desires that bring us spiritual strength. They are Darwinian virtues only.

Christ requires of us a selfless sacrifice. He requires that we serve Him alone and not ourselves. This is almost an impossible task in a fallen world – in a Darwinian world. But it is His gospel nonetheless.

Darwin has many followers and his theories have had very significant sway. Some of this has been quite valuable. It has allowed us to understand quite clearly what it means to live in a fallen world – the world that is our testing ground, the place we call mortality – the place of death.

But it is quite a contrast to think about these Darwinian realities in which we live and then to read through the Sermon on the Mount. There is probably no other literature in the world that opposes Darwinism to such an extent. If you are confused about Darwinian virtues and Christian virtues, all you need to do is read the 5^th, 6^th and 7^th Chapters of the Gospel of Matthew and ask yourself the following question: what is the world’s alternative. You might do this for every example Christ mentions and compare each one to the expected behavior at work or at school.

The doctrines of Christ are the loftiest and most divine truths the world has ever known. They have endured – and will continue to endure – because they are timeless. They are also timely. Too often, however, we understand them in simple, limiting or merely contemporary ways.

Perhaps we think that after accepting Christ, our worries are over, our place in Heaven is assured. This is very dangerous attitude. Mortality, by its very definition, is not over until we die. This is where Darwin’s laws reign supreme.

It matters a great deal that we learn to distinguish between Darwin and Christ. I don’t mean to demonize Charles Darwin. I doubt that he ever intended to have his name contrasted so starkly against Jesus. But there is little doubt that many manifestations of our ongoing moral apostasy are justified by the widespread Darwinian mindset so loved by the world today.

We have learned to recognize and reject the ways of Satan. Christianity has a long history countering his deceits. Today we have other sophisticated ones to deal with. Our continuing challenge is to follow the better way.

Faith and the Duke Experiments in ESP

Many of us occasionally intuit things that our normal senses fail to register. My first guess that this was a real possibility came when I was in junior high school. I was at that awkward stage in life when I started noticing girls and feeling very self-conscious. It was also a time that I became aware of many things I had ignored before.

One behavioral change that was quite common among my peers was the game of sneaking looks at cute girls. This was a game that I was too shy to participate in for the most part, although privately I did notice a couple of girls that I secretly liked.

It was at this impressionable time that I developed the odd notion that some of these girls could tell when I was looking at them even when it seemed that they couldn’t see me. I decided that they must have better peripheral vision than I had, although this didn’t explain the cases that involved looking completely in the opposite direction. I found it a bit ironic when, a few years later, a girl named Lisa (whom I admired) was in charge of testing peripheral vision and blind spots for a driver education class. I unreasonably assumed she had been given the job because of her feminine expertise.

I’m still a bit undecided on this issue. But I’m half convinced that women do have a better sense of being watched than men do. I hear them commenting on such things occasionally. Men almost never do. Of course such ability, if it is real, would be classified as paranormal. And in recent decades, the paranormal has been pretty much banished from serious discourse.

This is too bad. Some varieties of what has been called extra-sensory perception (or ESP) have been fairly convincingly established – like the ability to sense the image on a card without seeing it (sometimes called clairvoyance) or of the ability to detect what someone else is thinking or concentrating on (sometimes called telepathy). Other claims are a bit more sensational and not well established – like the ability to predict the stock market. Overall, it’s a shame that we aren’t paying more academic attention to these sorts of things. They used to be a lot more popular.

Both the US and Soviet military spent resources on paranormal studies – as did the Nazis. And between the two World Wars, it actually became somewhat respectable for universities to support these kinds of studies too.

Perhaps the most famous were the Duke Experiments conducted by Joseph Banks (J.B.) Rhine, a botanist who took up paranormal studies at Duke University. He became interested in the possibility of measuring paranormal activity after being impressed by comments made by Arthur Conan Doyle. Rhine ended up spending several years and much of his career studying clairvoyance. He categorized his area of study as a branch of abnormal psychology.

Based on his findings, Rhine claimed that 1 person in 5 had some extra-sensory ability. Sometimes gifted persons were aware of their abilities. Very often, however, they were not. Sometimes students would come to his lab to be tested and discover their ability for the first time using a simple card test that Rhine had developed. It was a fairly straightforward test using a deck of 25 cards. These cards consisted of 5 cards each of 5 different shapes (star, plus sign, square, circle, and wavy lines). Subjects were then asked to intuit the face of the card without seeing it. A purely random score would be 5 correct out of the 25 cards (a score that could be easily made if someone chose the same shape all 25 times, for example). Rhine then calculated the significance of the scores based on the number correct above 5 and the number of tests conducted for each subject.

Over the period of several years, Rhine studied hundreds of subjects. A handful of these were particularly gifted and averaged scores well above 5. In some cases correct runs of over 10 in a row were recorded. On three occasions, scores of 25 correct (out of 25) were reported – representing odds astronomically improbable.

Rhine’s recounting of these studies makes for fascinating reading. And for me, with an abiding interest in the religious principle of faith, I find a couple of things similar between them – I mean that faith and ESP have some things in common. I also see a couple of things that are quite (and importantly) different between them.

The first and most obvious similarity between ESP and faith is the importance of optimism. This is what Rhine has to say on the matter: “The better the investigator can communicate a wholehearted enthusiasm, confidence, and encouragement to the subjects, the better are his chances of success.”

Very often Rhine would test a subject who would record high scores at first and then, as the tedium of the studies wore on, would eventually record scores no better than random hits (close to a score of an even 5). Very few subjects could maintain high scores over the period of months and years. It wasn’t always easy to keep a subject’s confidence up. I am reminded of Peter’s initial effort at walking on water towards Jesus. Astonishingly, he succeeded at first and then he sank.

I believe that this principle of optimism, or confidence, also held true for the evaluators – even true for Rhine himself. This is suggested by the fact that these Duke studies often yielded successful results that other institutions were unable to duplicate. Over time this changed and Rhine’s successes were achieved by many other institutions and individuals. But among those that were successful there seems to have been an element of optimism in the validity of the studies.

One of the benefits of using Rhine’s ESP cards is that it is not an all-or-nothing test of clairvoyance. Subjects can score a card incorrectly and still get an indication of extra-sensory ability from the overall score. And as each subject is not told of the correctness of her “guesses” until the end of each run, there is little pressure in having to establish or maintain a sensational effort.

That said, there were only a few cases recorded where subjects were able to record more than just 5 or 6 correct in a row. It is easy to see why if you look at the odds. If a subject has a 1 in 5 chance of scoring each card correct (since there are 5 shapes to choose from), then the odds of getting 5 right in a row is a simple calculation of 1 in 5 multiplied 5 times. Or in other words the odds are 1 in 3,625 of getting a run of 5 in a row correct due just to chance. Or put another way, a subject without ESP ability would be expected to get 5 correct in a row only once every 3,625 tries.

Getting a run correct beyond this becomes exponentially less likely for every try. Even so, it wasn’t rare for a gifted subject to get a spectacular run on occasion – even a nearly impossible run. Yet, no matter how gifted the subject was, these unusual events could never be predicted or controlled.

For someone with a religious frame of mind, it’s easy to see the similarities between this truth and the principle of faith in the efficacy of prayer. Many people, like me, have great faith in prayer even though we don’t always see the hand of God in our lives. Sometimes our Heavenly Father seems to want us to handle things the best we can on our own. At other times, answers come in remarkable ways.

Just recently I found myself confronted with a small crisis in one of my research projects at work. I wanted to see if a molecule extracted from a particular bacterium could protect a plant from pests. Unfortunately, the day was windy and I was having trouble getting the solution where I needed it to be on the plants. So I decided I needed a bit of help from Mother Nature’s boss, and I said a prayer. Needless to say, the wind stopped and I was able to conduct my experiment.

These kinds of answers to prayers are not uncommon for me. As I look back on them, I realize that they are fairly insignificant from a certain historic or global perspective, but they are definitely important to me. And yet, it often happens that my prayers for much bigger issues seem to go unresolved.

Through the years, Kathy and I have often prayed for our handicapped daughter Alicia. Over time, though, our prayers have changed. We used to ask for her epilepsy and mental handicap to be fixed. Yet we never saw any significant change because of these prayers. We now pray for Alicia’s general well-being and for our own personal strength to help her. These prayers have a much higher success rate.  It is clear to us, that we can’t control how our prayers are answered any more than we can guarantee a successful “guess” in an ESP experiment. It seems clear that there are some things that we are not made (or meant) to understand with precision.

Another image stuck me as quite interesting in Rhine’s story. It involved research by Hans Bender at the University of Bonn in 1933. Dr. Bender had discovered a young woman (a graduate student) with extra-sensory gifts and he subjected her to several tests. Bender used different methods than Rhine. His cards consisted of letters instead of shapes. This woman also showed an ability to draw shapes of objects she could not see – shapes that an observer had identified. Her drawings were not always exactly like the image, but the overall similarities were unmistakable.

This study is quite similar to a series of studies that the American author Upton Sinclair did with his wife back in the 1920’s. Sinclair’s wife was known to have telepathic abilities and would frequently demonstrate them to her husband who ended up writing a book about their experiments together. This book Mental Radio is full of the drawings of these experiments which consisted primarily of Sinclair drawing a random object (often something that he would find in a magazine or around the house) that he would then concentrate on. His wife, in another room, would then try to draw the same object by concentrating on what she thought Sinclair had in mind.

According to their own calculation, about a fourth of the attempts were quite good and impressively accurate. Several of them are illustrated in the book – including a six pointed star, a kitchen fork, a bird’s nest, etc. About half of the attempts were not extremely clear but similarities were noticeable – for example a shrub would have lines and circles similar to branches and leaves. And about a fourth of the attempts showed no similarity at all.

Sinclair did not know how to statistically evaluate the probabilities of these similarities. In fact, I’m not sure that statisticians today would be up to the task. How do you calculate the odds of drawing a random object out of countless possibilities? Clearly the odds of drawing a fourth of the objects correctly are extremely low and not due to chance.

But what about the many drawings that are only somewhat alike? Dr. Bender described some of these efforts as similar to object that you or I might see through dim light. There is a shadowy kind of similarity but crisp details and outlines are missing.

Consider this finding with the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly…” This remarkable image is the Apostle’s description of how we perceive Heavenly things in a fallen and imperfect world. It comes at the end of his magisterial treatment of charity and the gifts of the spirit. It comes just before his statement that, “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three…”

Faith isn’t a perfect knowledge of things. Sometimes we only get a glimpse, or a hint, or a suspicion. The outlines aren’t clear and yet we proceed. We were made to live much of our lives this way. We are not mere calculating machines that have to mechanically estimate probabilities or be completely convinced by logical certainty. We are beings that make many of our decisions on imperfect information. We make our best guess. We are forced to “see through a glass darkly”.

What makes this image particularly arresting is that in all probability, Paul is referring here to an early Jewish equivalent of a crystal ball or magic mirror. I know this may sound sacrilegious to some Christians but let me explain.

An important element among those that have extra-sensory gifts is the ability to dilute the sensory overload that normally exists all around us. The sights, sounds, odors, etc. that fill our world keep us focused on our immediate surroundings. Individuals that claim to be able to access things beyond these senses very often have to put themselves in a trance-like state to be more effective.

Various ways have been devised by mystics through the years to do this. Sometimes random ink blots on paper have been used. Sometimes gazing into an opaque glass or a crystal ball has been effective. At other times, forms of mirrors have been used.

These sorts of things, oddly enough, do show up in the Bible. Saul is known to have visited a type of soothsayer and the Book of Revelation contains references to magical stones and seals, etc. For our purposes, two Biblical references are particularly noteworthy. In the 44^th chapter of Genesis, Joseph has a favorite (and presumably expensive) cup secretly placed in his brother Benjamin’s bag. He does this in order to accuse him later of theft which will enable him to stay longer with Joseph who at this point has not revealed his own true identity. The account indicates that this cup is used by Joseph for drinking and for divining. And in fact it is an example of a well-known type of vision aid with ties to magic mirrors. In this case a silver cup is filled with water which acts as a kind of mirror.

Another reference is our account of Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. His statement of “seeing through a glass darkly,” is very likely a reference to gazing at various forms of glass as a visionary aid. This is what Professor Tenhaeff from the State University of Utrecht wrote about some of these kinds of attempts by clairvoyants to reduce sensory inputs: “Some subjects attempt to achieve a lowered level of consciousness by means of a crystal ball or a piece of glass… The use of the magic mirror to achieve a state of diminishing inhibitions and to stimulate the manifestation of paragnostic powers is mentioned repeatedly, not only in the ethnological literature but also by classical authors and those of the Middle Ages.”

Not only is Paul’s image of darkened glass appropriate as a metaphor for life and faith, it is likely a description of how he knew others to be looking for answers. I find this to be an impressive truth. To this day, over eight decades since the Duke Experiments have been conducted, the results of Dr. Rhine’s experiments are essentially ignored by the academy. And yet the best criticisms never take his rigorous testing methods seriously. For those of us (perhaps the 1 in 5) that have experienced paranormal things, this is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that the very fundamental principle of religious faith is also questioned by the same academy.

I don’t mean that every associate professor lacks faith or never succumbs to mystical hunches now and then. But the fact remains, that we cannot manipulate or control either faith or extra-sensory perception. And because of this, very few scholars are willing to bet their careers on such things.

Among religious believers, too, there is a hesitancy to acknowledge the existence of ESP. Part of this hesitancy may be due to ignorance of its similarities to faith. Other reasons are, I think, a little more fundamental. In particular, the historic relationship between organized religion (specifically Christianity) and the paranormal has often been strained.

This Christian history extends back to the very beginning when many of the Roman mystery religions practiced mystical rituals that were unacceptable to the early followers of Jesus. Later in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, it was the purveyors of the magic world view that often found them at odds with the established church.

Our ancestors living at this time made a real distinction between dark magic and white magic. The former was of the Devil. The latter included things like angels, deceased saints and miracles. But the distinction between dark and white magic was not always clear. There was a broad area of overlap that included such things as talismans, fortune-telling, dowsing, etc., Many Christians – especially rural congregations – lived in this area of overlap. These Christians were very often comfortable with ideas such as hunches and dreams – experiences that they were familiar with and that wouldn’t have been too different from certain kinds of clairvoyance and telepathy.

Today most Christians live in a scientifically informed culture that leaves us suspicious of both black and white magic. Not only do we wink at the thought of devils and angels but we dismiss the more commonly experienced manifestations of ESP. It isn’t scientifically or religiously acknowledged.

This is in a way a limiting development. It puts us outside of our heritage.We are no longer shackled by credulity and are not nearly as gullible as our ancestors must have been. Or so we imagine. 

And in at least one sense, we are probably more grounded doctrinally too. ESP is not a principle that leads anyone necessarily to God. Rhine worked at a respected institution founded by Methodists and Quakers (Duke University) but he became interested in clairvoyance from Arthur Conan Doyle. And Doyle was known to have often been critical of organized religion and of religious faith.

During recent decades, if you were to have patronized bookstores with large New Age holdings (a common occurrence, I might add), you would have noticed that titles dealing with ESP were stacked right next to titles dealing with black magic. This is fairly revealing. The people buying books on ESP were more likely to be interested in witches than in a Heavenly Father.

If former Christians would have been comfortable discussing telepathy and dreams after church – or buying a related book at their local Christian bookstore – modern Christians prefer talking about technology while leaving anything smacking of mysticism to the cultural underground. And while it might be doctrinally safer to separate these two worlds, it is also true that we are probably missing out on a very human – and a very Christian – part of our natures.   

There is no need to be ashamed of this. We were made to exercise faith and to act on hunches – even, dare I say it, on dreams. Of course we make mistakes while we’re at it. But if J.B. Rhine was even partially right – and I’m convinced that he was – than acting on these “extra” senses might not always be a bad idea. We might be right more often than we might think. 

References

For a fascinating account of the Duke experiments see J.B. Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind, published by Farrar & Rinehart, in 1937. Upton Sinclair’s book Mental Radio was published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1930. The quotes of Paul come from 1 Corinthians 15: 12-13. Tenhaeff’s quote comes from page 38 of Telepathy and Clairvoyance, Views of Some Little Investigated Capabilities of Man, published in 1972 by Charles C. Thomas, Publisher. 

Individualism and the Fabulous Animal

In one of the great statements against human naturalism, G.K. Chesterton argued that, “We can accept [man] as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal.”

This is quite an arresting image. It turns our traditional version of the fable upside down. And yet this tergiversation is obviously valid. Instead of the animal that talks, tells stories, laughs about the past or dreams about the future, we see human beings doing the same thing. And of course, this is fabulous, because animals (which supposedly include us) don’t do such things.

It is also a ringing challenge to those who deny human exceptionalism. And most captivating of all is that wonderful word “fabulous”. I say wonderful because in addition to the traditional sense of that word (of talking and thinking in ways that fabulous animals do - and in ways that non-fabulous animals do not) we are also fabulous because we can willfully transcend our mortal nature. We are also wonderful. Indeed, we are fabulous.

One of my favorite fables is Aesop’s fable of The Dog and the Wolf. In the story, a hungry and skinny wolf meets a fat and happy dog. The wolf asks the dog how he seems to be so well off. The dog replies that his master feeds him for watching the house at night and for keeping thieves away. And then the wolf notices the scar around the dog’s neck. He learns that the scar is from the rope that keeps the dog tied up during the day, and the wolf decides to leave. “Well,” says the wolf as he departs, “you can just keep your nice, fat happiness, I’ll take my skinny old freedom any day or night. I’d rather be free than fat.”

Chesterton asks us to consider why a talking and reasoning human being is no more remarkable than a talking or reasoning wolf. This is so obvious – or at least it should be – that we marvel at the institutional sophistry that ignores it.

Suppose for the sake of argument, however, that humans are no more remarkable than any other living species. This means, of course, that we inherited our likes and dislikes, our hopes and fears, and our many biological constraints from other forms of life.

This also means that even our most inspiring moral achievements: The Decalogue, Magna Carta, The Sermon on the Mount, etc., were only ways to enhance the reproductive success of their respective authors. It means that we are really only interested, one by one, in taking care of our own carnal self. We are forced by our biological history to be individualists.

Perhaps you don’t like the portrayal of this word “individualism” in such a negative way. Especially if you are a warm-blooded American, you believe that individualism is one of the great virtues of your heritage. I know that I most certainly do.

But the word “individualism” didn’t start out this way. Yehoshua Arieli has pointed out that the concept is of non-American origin and that it represented an ideology in direct opposition to our current system of values. To be an individualist meant to have an excessive regard to personal interests. In a word, to be selfish, even to the nth degree. It was individualism, for example, that was responsible for the abuses of the French Revolution. And it is individualism that is the enemy of our higher religious sensibilities.

Of course it is also individualism that lies at the heart of Darwinian naturalism. Each individual is inherently programmed to look after itself. Survival of the fittest is the epigram inscribed over the lintels of our modern institutions.

But in America we changed that meaning. After all, our ancestors came to this land with a personal optimism and dreamed of success. Some of them failed. But many of them didn’t. And through the years we have adopted a can-do attitude that not only recognizes magnanimous behavior, but has come to expect it.

It is the individual, after all, that takes out the neighbor’s trash when she is on vacation. It is the individual that helps a handicapped stranger cross the street. It is the individual that decides, even in the middle of a hard day, to follow the admonitions of Christ.

Our greatest examples of human excellence are generally religious individuals. And we recognize their excellence in direct proportion to their examples of serving others. As Robert Bellah has pointed out, a prophet is never a private individual. Any truthful assessment of human nature must deal with these remarkable individuals just as they must deal with the egotist. It should be clear that individualism can be a lot of different things.

Individualism, like the wolf in Aesop’s fable, insists on personal autonomy. Unlike the dog that is tethered to its master’s decisions, the individualist decides to either follow a carnal nature or to follow a higher law. In a very real way, our individual response to the world determines what kind of fabulous animal we will be. We can remain guttered in the mortal nature “red in tooth and claw” or we can overcome our carnal instincts and live a remarkable life. Only as individuals can we decide to live a life that transcends our individual selfishness. Only as individuals can we decide to be charitable – or, to use the proper academic word, can we decide to be altruistic.

The altruist is the humanitarian that helps others when the offered help provides no benefit to himself. The altruist might be a young man who helps others to escape from a fire. It might be a women volunteering at a homeless shelter. Any non-reciprocal aid to a non-relative falls into this category of altruism. Needless to say, many human naturalists deny that any such thing exists. To them, any apparent altruistic act is merely a hidden attempt at winning favors. One wonders what sort of human beings these theorists think we are.

(In fairness, though, there has not been enough thought given to these two forms of altruism. I mean the spontaneous help given to a stranger (the type focused on by evolutionary theorists – perhaps because it is amenable to their theories) and the thoughtful transcendence of self that a determined religious commitment develops.)

There has been a great deal of academic posturing around this concept of altruism. This is because a great deal is at stake. On the surface, and for all practical reasons, charitable acts to others (especially to non-relatives) do not make Darwinian sense. And if this is true, then a great deal of the humanist argument fails.

It is a measure of our myopia that we even fall for these naturalistic arguments. The very reality of our individuality confronts us on every side, every day, and with everyone we meet. The denial of this individuality is no longer tenable. The biological laws of meiotic recombination make it so.

And yet this same ineluctable individuality forces us to acknowledge that we are very different from the rest of the created order. Our individualism greatly transcends a mere genetic reshuffling. It involves the will and our mental and spiritual awareness. And herein lies the great irony: that our institutional naturalism denies our fabulous nature even as our natural individualism insists upon it.

So next time you stop to talk to your dog, or to rub the sore around its neck, remember our friend G. K. Chesterton, and consider just what it all means. I think you will agree with us. We truly are fabulous.     

References

Chesterton’s statement comes from The Everlasting Man (the last paragraph of Chapter I, The Man in the Cave). My copy of The Dog and the Wolf is on page 17 of Aesop’s Fables, published by Easton Press, 1979. My summary of Arieli’s work on individualism comes from Gary Wills’s book Head and Heart, American Christianities, published by The Penguin Press in 2007. Robert Bellah’s point about prophets is on page 317 of Religion in Human Evolution (published by The Belknap Press in 2011).

Light Versus Darwin

Earlier this month, Kathy and I (now feeling somewhat like grandparents in our movie choices) watched the Blue Sky production Epic. It is a fun story of a beautifully animated forest caught in the struggle between the powers of light and the destruction of an evil (and dark) destroyer of life. I enjoyed it – especially the creative animation of the hummingbirds and walking sticks.

But mostly it has given me much to think about. This is because I have come to recognize that one of the great scriptures of the Restoration is about light. In part of what is called the Olive Leaf (Doctrine and Covenants section 88: 7-13) it states that:

“Which truth shineth. This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made. As also he is in the moon, and the is the light of the moon, and the power thereof by which it was made; and also the light of the stars, and the power thereof by which they were made; and the earth also, and the power thereof, even the earth upon which you stand. And the light which shineth, which giveth you light, is through him who enlighteneth your eyes, which is the same light that quickeneth your understandings; which light proceedeth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space – The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things…”

The story of a lush forest full of life, and the threat of a privation of light that causes death, is really not so very different from this doctrine of the “light of Christ”. And; interestingly, this all pervasive energy is also the theme of one of science’s greatest pursuits: the truth of the beginning of the universe.

As physicist Gerald Schroeder explains: “How can we explain that a bundle of “inert” energy – simplistically stated, superpowerful rays of light – became alive, other than to assume some nonphysical, that is metaphysical, input was involved?”

Of course, this is a debated issue. Or rather it is the unspoken possibility hovering over current discussions about the origin of the universe and of life. It is also a very obvious counter-reality to the modern creation myth that monopolizes our educational institutions: I mean Darwinian naturalism.

The Olive Leaf tells us that life is dependent on light. And, in fact, this is our own day-to-day experience of reality. The sun shines down upon the earth in such abundance that there is not room enough to receive it all. Just a small fraction of this solar output ever gets captured by plants and converted into living things.

Of course this is not the only form of sunlight that we, as living beings, depend on. Our bodies are made to function between a narrow range of temperatures, and the sun (because of its optimum distance from the earth) allows for this. Sunlight peruses our world, filling it with an energy that catalyzes innumerable transformations in every dimension. Truly “the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare” (Doctrine and Covenants 104:17).

Yet this is not the message we get when we look at the world through a Darwinian lens. Competition for limiting resources is here the rule of the day. It drives natural selection where only the best competitors are able to survive. This is the world of painful lives, of scheming and domineering neighbors, and of meaningless or soiled beauty. It is a limiting world that pays virtually no attention to light.

I don’t mean to imply that Light and Darwin are exclusive realities – that the contrast between abundance and death are either/or choices. Clearly we live in a world of both.

I do, however, mean to point out the contrast and to place it in front of a colorblind (or shall we say “myopic”) world. After all, light to most of us is warmth and optimism. It shines when we are awake, and softens when we wish to pause. It reflects a rainbow after our many storms.

But to a materialistic science it is hardly more than energized subatomic particles proceeding primarily from a star (in our case, the sun). It is theistically (and optimistically) neutral. Why bother, it argues, with such abundance. It’s just the way the universe happened to be. It’s just a matter of chance.

And yet, ironically, this “chance” of the materialist just happens to be a miracle itself. In fact it is the quintessential example of what the materialists themselves define as a miracle. The remarkable stories known as miracles – the ones handed down to us from sacred texts - are one-time events. Science refuses to address them because they are not reproducible. There is no way for science to understand causes and effects. Repetition is how science proceeds.

But when it comes to origins, science has decided to ignore this restriction. The origin of the universe is traced to the Big Bang singularity. The origin of life is traced to a primordial “soup” and a few strikes of lightning. These events seem to be miracles that even science seems to be unintentionally acknowledging. They are, after all, non-repetitious events.

Perhaps this denial occurs because light allows us to see what is (both literally and etymologically) obvious. And the materialist cannot accept a divinity that fills our very existence.

I love the story of Jacques Lusseyran. As a young boy in France between the World Wars, Jacque became blind but refused to let this diminish his life. During the second World Ward, he organized a youth resistance movement to Hitler; and later, as a prisoner at Buchenwald, he helped motivate his fellow inmates.

In his autobiography, And There Was Light, Lusseyran tells of the remarkable discovery he made soon after an accident left him blind. He at first began stumbling around – bumping into things. Then he discovered a light within himself and, “immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and peopled anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact for light was there. I felt indescribable relief, and happiness so great it almost made me laugh… I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separated in my experience. I have had them or lost them together.”

Like so many other truths about life, this relationship between light and joy is clarified by the experiences of a handicapped child. But I want to make it clear that this relationship is not a Darwinian imperative. Organisms can survive in a competitive world without joy just fine. It doesn’t come by being better than others – or more successful. A Darwinian pride my make us self-satisfied, but this is a very different thing than joy.

Joy comes from light – from that divine radiance that fills the universe with its overflowing abundance. Yes it is true that mortality can be limiting. This is our mortal Darwinian heritage. But it is also true that eternal joy depends on our refusal to live with this constraint.

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he states that, “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory” (I Corinthians 15:41).

It is sad that light and life are taken so much for granted. Instead, so many of us fixate on the stresses of a fallen and tenebrous world. And yet it precisely the contrast of darkness and light that helps us to see more clearly. The fallen world with its absence of light is merely a temporary backdrop set against the eternal radiance of God’s glory. The sun is awesome, but it is truly magnificent in the colored contrast of the looming night or the coming dawn.

For now, the important choice before us is quite clear. We are phototropic (not thanatotropic) beings. In order to be true to our nature, we need to choose the light.
References

Schroeder’s quote comes from page 21 in God According to God, published by Harper One, 2009. See Schroeder as well for the discussion on miracles (starting from page 16). Lusseyran’s And There Was Light was published by Little, Brown and Company, 1963. My quote come from pages 16-17.

Wheat and The Word of Wisdom

Earlier this year I got over a digestive problem that had bothered me for more than a decade. The solution was quite simple: I stopped eating wheat flour. Soon after changing my diet, the cramps, indigestion, and other unsavory problems disappeared. There have been other benefits as well. I can now do a good deal of physical work without waking up sore and achy. I am losing weight, eating bigger meals (but without wheat products) without stomach complaints, and hardly get discouraged like I used to. I feel a lot better.

For some time, I refused to imagine that my complaints might have been caused by Celiac disease. Of course, they seemed to fit the symptoms. But I resisted this possibility because of a single verse in The Word of Wisdom (in The Doctrine and Covenants) that states quite clearly that we are supposed to eat wheat: “Nevertheless, wheat for man…”

Then by chance (and my good fortune) I happened on a study showing the significant changes that wheat has gone through since the time the Word of Wisdom was given. It was this realization that motivated me to try living without modern wheat.

The story of how we got modern wheat involves a long history of genetic twists and turns. By the beginning of the 19^th Century, wheat had already been hybridized and manipulated for millennia. It would be quite misleading to claim that the wheat of Joseph Smith’s time was a pure and unadulterated grass. It wasn’t.

It was, however, a very different thing than what we eat today. And when I say “it” I really mean “they” because there are a handful of “wheat” species and a boat load of “wheat” varieties that find their way into the mills of people around the world.

The food that we eat today is primarily a product of the green revolution that has magically transformed the world’s diets within the last century. The plants that had fed us for so long were crossed with varieties that would have been confusing and counter-intuitive to earlier generations. Many of these crosses have produced very useful crops. We depend on them to survive. Others, however, can cause us a good amount of grief. Sadly we haven’t paid close enough attention to the potential harm of genetic manipulation. This negligence is coming back to haunt many of us today.   

Glutens (and related gliadins) are often large proteins found in the endosperm of wheat grains that do not dissolve easily in our bodies after being consumed. Our modern wheat varieties have many times more of these proteins than did earlier forms. This gluten accumulation was not really intentional. The proteins were compounded primarily when the chromosome number of wheat varieties doubled and then tripled in the course of hybridization events spanning decades.

Through this process, the leavening of bread was improved. The gluten proteins helped make the bread flour sticky, enabling it to keep air bubbles (created in the process of fermenting yeast) from escaping – allowing for the bread dough to rise. Glutens essentially allowed us to move beyond unleavened bread.

The oldest form of wheat (and presumably the first wheat eaten by our ancestors) is einkorn wheat. It has the typical compliment of genes found in living things (a pair of each chromosome – referred to as a diploid condition). It has a fairly hard grain and doesn’t produce enough seeds per plant to make it economically appealing. It is believed to have been used in soups and stews. It is a rarely used today.

Another group includes wheat species that have come about by hybridizing varieties so that a doubling of the chromosomes occurs (tetraploid wheats). Durum wheat and emmer wheat are tetraploid examples. They still have fairly hard grains but have more gluten proteins – not enough, however, to allow for the fine flours that modern bakeries generally demand.

Then there are softer wheat grains found among the species with a tripling of the typical genetic content (hexaploids). As expected, these have quite a bit more glutens. These softer wheat varieties comprise the bulk of the wheat used today. And it is the flour of these varieties that are particularly troublesome to people like me.

Earlier this year I decided to try baking a loaf of einkorn wheat bread. I wanted to know if eating a diploid wheat (with fewer glutens) would upset my stomach. I found a source online, ordered a small bag, and made a loaf after it arrived. The loaf was a bit dense but savory and, when eaten warm, was a real treat. I made a peanut butter and jam sandwich that tasted wonderful.

Then I waited for the grief that I have come to expect after eating wheat products. But nothing happened. I ate another piece of bread and still felt fine. Then I decided I needed to try a tetraploid wheat – the kind that would have been used by our ancestors of previous generations.

Some of these species include emmer and durum wheat. They are a bit easier to find than einkorn wheat but are still specialty products and are quite a bit more expensive than your typical wheat. That said, I found a source of emmer wheat grains and ground the kernels myself in our small hand mill.

My loaf of emmer wheat bread came out of our bread-maker smelling very nice and grainy. I ate a piece and again waited for the trouble to begin. It didn’t. I was again pleased to know that I could eat this older wheat without difficulty. I was also pleased to know that I could enjoy the wheat known to the world at the time the Word of Wisdom was given.

I’m not sure if I will continue baking emmer wheat bread or try using a less-expensive gluten-free alternative. Time will tell. In the meantime, I have learned a lesson: dietary wisdom needs to be a dynamic pursuit. We should know this already. Christians enjoy eating ham even though – as religious descendants of Judaism – it might have been forbidden.

As Latter-day Saints we eat a good deal more meat than one might expect we would – considering passages found in the Word of Wisdom. Is this because we have better ways to preserve meat today? I’m not sure. Maybe we should eat less meat.

And so it is, I’ve discovered, with wheat. I have no doubt that wheat was, for most of our human history, the proper mainstay of our diet. I’m also convinced that it should no longer be the case. I think our uninformed scientific recklessness has ruined it – at least for many of us.

Here are a few sentences from a group of wheat scientists describing the situation in straightforward (and unemotional) prose:

“During the last decades, a significant increase has been observed in the prevalence of CD [Celiac disease]. This may partly be attributed to an increase in awareness and to improved diagnostic techniques, but increased wheat and gluten consumption is also considered a major cause. Over 100 years ago, breeders started to systematically cross and select bread wheat for higher yields, adaption to climate changes, better bread-making characteristics, and improved disease resistance. Little information is available about the breeding history of landraces on these aspects”. (See the reference from Van den Broeck et al.)

So there it is. We have taken a food that once enjoyed the approval of Heaven and tried to improve it. And not only have we tried to improve it, we have done so without even worrying about the consequences. This should certainly be a cautionary tale. No wonder the Lord’s dispenses dietary advice as a “word of wisdom”. It is something we need to keep working on and thinking about with a good deal more humility than is our wont.

References

The reference to wheat in The Doctrine and Covenants is found in the Word of Wisdom (Section 89:17). Wheat Belly by William Davis was published in 2011 by Rodale. Jerold A. Bietz provides a useful hint on gluten accumulation in: Genetic and Biochemical Studies of Nonenzymatic Endosperm Proteins; in, Wheat and Wheat Improvement, Second Edition, Madison, Wisconsin, 1987. On the variability of wheat gluten genetics see Mapping of Gluten T-Cell Epitopes in the Bread Wheat Ancestors: Implications for Celiac Disease by Oyvind Molberg et al. Gastroeneterology 128 (2005): 393-401. Michael Pollen’s recently published book Cooked contains an interesting discussion on leavening. The significant article by Hetty C. Van den Broeck et al. (Presence of celiac disease epitopes in modern and old hexaploid wheat varieties: wheat breeding may have contributed to increased prevalence of celiac disease) was published in Theoretical and Applied Genetics (November, 2010), Volume 121 (8): 1527-1539.