Propaganda Revisited

In this column, I want to establish that the mature Christian mind is best protected against propaganda.

Last year, as I watched in disgust as so many Americans were mesmerized by Obama's frighteningly dark drivel, I read Jacques Ellul's 'Propaganda'.  Much rang true, but I didn't have much background to question his evidence.

As I've mulled over how people choose to believe what they believe, I was reminded of some passages in his book.  He describes modern man as such:

Above all he is a victim of emptiness-he is a man devoid of meaning.  He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing - something to fill his inner void.

The main point to my four part series on rationality was that people choose to believe the most emotionally satisfying answers.  Furthermore, I believe that our ability to ascertain the true nature of reality is when we have little emotional stake in the answer.  If we emotionally need an answer to be true we will rationalize and even lie to ourselves to satisfy those emotional needs.  In general, if we are emotionally needy people, our ability to adhere to reality is diminished.

What I propose, and it will be left unproved until later posts, is that Christianity provides the ultimate path to emotional satisfaction because it prescribes optimal human behavior.  This optimal human behavior is what I call morality.  Reality, as described by Christianity, I will call the Truth.

If one rejects the Truth, one must be accepting a disreality, a non-truth, or more simply, a set of lies.  By pursuing a path that is suboptimal, one will inevitably suffer.  The pain we suffer because we have chosen to believe a disreality while living in reality wounds us emotionally.  The inevitability of pursuing a disreality is emotional emptiness.  This emptiness, as Ellul points out, leads one to believe more lies and more propaganda.

Empty people will fall prey to propaganda.  Inevitably they will be ruled by the propagandizers.  The emptier they are, the more brutal the rule over them will be.  They will be imprisoned by the lies they have told themselves to assuage their emptiness.  It truly is a hell of their own making. 

Only the emotionally satisfied mind can see reality as it is.  And, as I propose, only the Christian mind can be fully emotionally satisfied.

If God Does Not Exist, We Would Need to Invent Him

This morning I had a good conversation with a friend who reads my blog.  He helped me come to this conclusion:

If all reason is a tool for power, and therefore we should be skeptical of all reasoning because its origin can be corrupt and self-serving, then no human philosophy can produce objective truth.  However, if a mind, unaffected by the evolutionary process (or any other process leading to status seeking), produced objective truth claims, those claims could be believed.

Who fits this definition?  Only a supernatural being.

Could this supernatural being, be one of many gods?  Well, if it was, then we might be suspect of its motivations.  Greek mythology tells us of the constant warring in the heavens.  However, if there is one all-powerful, all-knowing God, status could never come into play because there can be no competition.  This God is the only one that can produce objective truth that can be believed.

Alien in the Gaps Fallacy

Those in the intelligent design camp propose there are proofs that God exists in nature. An example being the irreducible complexity in the anatomy of the eye or bacterial flagella. The common retort to these claims is to cite the God of the Gaps fallacy.
The God of the Gaps fallacy can be defined as - a tendency to postulate acts of God to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account.

This intelligent design line of thinking is, of course, a rather weak position. As soon as a scientific explanation is able to find an answer, the argument dies an embarrassing death. If one’s faith is built on one of these, it could be shattered in an instant. I’m not a microbiologist, so there may yet be a reason to be confident, but from a spectator’s viewpoint it seems rather tenuous.

The age old claim against God is the lack of evidence. Most people have some sort of mystical experiences, but these aren’t reproducible as required by science.

What shocked me, though, was the end of Ben Stein’s Expelled. When questioned by Mr. Stein, noted atheist scholar, Richard Dawkins, said that he thought it was possible that life had been brought to earth from another planet. This is the same person who believes that a belief in God is completely irrational.

I am agnostic on the subject of aliens, but his line of thinking seems a bit preposterous. We have been to the moon, we have been to Mars. We thought we found life on Mars, but we didn’t. We photographed the planets and their moons, and no visible life has been found. We have sundry instruments listening for rays and waves coming from outer space in hopes that there might be life on other planets. Yet, nothing. Absolutely nothing. The universe is deafeningly silent.

There is no evidence, yet many intelligent people assert that there is a probability. Surely, in all the universe, with billions of stars and planets, life exists somewhere else. Yet we haven’t seen a thing.

Even with this utter lack of evidence, Dawkins believes that it is a possibility that a race of super intelligent aliens, that we have never seen, nor have any evidence, went flying through the universe 5 billion years ago and dropped off some bacteria that evolved into us. Really? This is rational, but a supernatural being is not? We have barely scraped the universe which is why we haven’t found alien life, but by the same limited measure we can with certainty exclude a God. Really?

I dub this the Alien in the Gaps fallacy.

The Mystical Mind

We all have a certain lack of self-knowledge. We experience ephemeral emotions and events that we can not repeat, can not define, and can not fully grasp. There is a hole in our minds, and we all know it. We can’t put a label on it, but it’s there. Something is missing. Something is supposed to be there.

I recently listened to a podcast entitled “What Can Science Tell Us About God”. My flippant response is “nothing”, but I don’t hold that against theism, it’s more a condemnation of science.

Apologetics315 describes the podcast as:

Lewis Wolpert (Emeritus Professor of Biology, University College London) says there is no evidence for God whatsoever and religion finds its origin in tool-making. Russell Cowburn (professor of nano-technology, Imperial College London) is a scientist defending the Christian position.

Prof. Wolpert, the atheist, makes a comment at the 13:14 mark:

I want to tell you, you all, myself included, have a mystical aspect to our minds. We all have it. All people have it.

I’ve taken this a bit out of context so don’t think that he is admitted anything supernatural (he is actually arguing the opposite; that evolution created this aspect).

This got me thinking about the human experience. The lives we live inside of our minds and body are not well defined. Slowly, over the course of our lives we come to understand how the soup of chemicals effect us. What is joy? What is angst? We struggle at times to wrap our logic around the incoherence of our emotions.

My grandma died a few months ago and it was really the first time I had ever experienced loss. I was never terribly attached to our pets or to other family members who passed away. I empathized with others experiencing loss, but I had never felt it myself. I was surprised how vivid memories would sadden me abruptly weeks afterwards (even now as I write this I feel it again). Even with this recent experience I couldn’t think of anything to write in a condolence card today for someone I used to work with. It was his grandmother too, but I didn’t know what to say, and I hate being the 9th person to write, “Sorry for your loss.”

Science can tell me nothing about this. I can not sit and experiment with my emotions until I’ve codified every nuance. I can’t apply logic to feelings that have never occurred before. The gaps in my self-knowledge are immense. Why do I chew on pens? Why am I compulsive about some things and lax about others? What is the purpose of my life?

There is a great deal that I will never know, nor can ever know about myself. There is a great gulf in my mind. A great sea of the unknown.  Something is supposed to be there.

Where is this God, you ask? He's right there.