Separation of Church and…..Art?

“The Arts Enrich Us All”, or at least, that’s what one series of public-service announcements proclaim. Some Christians disagree. They are, perhaps, wary of beliefs and philosophies that run contrary to the Bible, and they are right to be concerned. David Puttnam, producer of the film Chariots of Fire, once said, “Cinema is propaganda.” What he means by this is that the Arts often have a didactic purpose. They teach. The question is, what are they teaching? Is the message acceptable? Due to the incredible danger false messages pose to the young in faith or years, some Christians encourage separation from all of the Arts, at least as much as possible. (Now, I must be clear here. When I say “Arts”, I mean all art: painting, sculpture, poetry, novels, theater, movies, popular and classical music, digital works, etc.)

However, is the mere fact that a worldview- and sometimes an incredibly false one- can be portrayed and validated by a piece of art reason enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Suppose a piece of art does teach a false worldview. Cannot instruction and information be given (metadata, if you will) to teach a right perspective on a wrong worldview? I would say yes, mainly because I do it all the time. In my senior apologetics class, we frequently view television and movie clips and listen to music to evaluate its worldview by the standard of Philippians 4:8. I tend to think that it is one of the most practical things we do in that class because it teaches students to be wary of the message of the art in question.

However, let us consider for a moment the concept that “non-Christian” and “worldly” are not necessarily the same thing. I mean by this that something may be good and yet not be inherently Christian. Or, a teaching may be biblical without appealing to Scripture. Consider Aesop’s fables. They’re nice little stories for kids to learn moral lessons. This doesn’t make them fit for a worship service, of course, but they do fit in nicely with a foundational Christian worldview. They enhance the teaching of Truth, which is a wonderful thing. A movie, song, or painting may do similar things.

When God created the world, did He make everything “religious”? No, certainly not. He created mountains, stars, the music of birds, the ocean’s waves, and the cool breeze. He created a beautiful world. If we are truly made in His image, what is wrong with creating that which is non-religious? Nothing, I would argue. Christians should not avoid the Arts simply because not everything about the Arts is specifically religious, nor should they endeavor to produce art that is only optimistic and “happy.” Christianity has two themes: Fall and Redemption. So much Christian artwork is both religious and strictly redemption-oriented. This is not biblical. It is romantic. Reality is that we live in a fallen world, and we often have a problem with pain simply because we expect the Christian life to be gumdrops and lollipops. We cannot ignore Truth- all Truth, or else we are left with the stuff that children’s Sunday School material is made of. Biblical art should include both themes.

Ravi Zacharias tells us  that in C. S. Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress, Pilgrim has been trapped in the dungeon of The Spirit of the Age. The next morning, he is served cold milk. Pilgrim thanks his captor for his milk, but the villain tells him that he is being foolish, for there is no difference between the secretions of a cow. Cow milk and cow urine are no different. This troubles Pilgrim, for there seems to be some truth to that statement. Why do we make a distinction? Suddenly, Reason comes riding in on a white horse, picks up Pilgrim, and turns to leave. Reason says to the spirit: “Sir, you lie! You have failed to distinguish between that which is nourishment and that which is excrement.”

Let us endeavor to distinguish between nourishment and excrement in the Arts, for they are both present. Let us seek that which brings nourishment to the soul- body, mind, emotions, and spirit.

The Poetry and Artistry of Evolution

You’d probably assume that a blog post about biological evolution would deal with biology or some other related study. However, that’s not where I’m taking this discussion today. Today, I’ll be looking at the poetic and artistic aspects of the Darwinism movement. To be honest, it makes sense that a believable, coherent theory would have elements of the Arts, because humans have a way of describing anything that matters in with particular eloquence. It’s true, we often tell someone we care about simply “I love you,” but we all know there are much more creative ways of saying those three words. The music industry has blossomed thanks to that creativity.

Darwin’s Day in Court

Andrew Hill has written: “Compared to other sciences, the mythic element is greatest in paleoanthropology.” (in American Scientist, March-April 1984) Speaking sympathetically of that same phenomena in the same article, Ian Tattersall admits: “Paleoanthropologists are fond of telling each other ‘Just-So’ stories; and once in a while a little needling of this kind does no harm at all.” Milford Wolpoff is much less forgiving: ” When the only people who can comment are the discoverers or friends of the discoverers, there is no sense of independent observer. We’re not practicing science. We’re practicing opera.” His reasons for making that statement can be found here.

Two books, written by law professors, may be instructive at this point. Norman Macbeth, a Harvard-trained lawyer and non-creationist studied evolution for years and wrote a book Darwin Retried in which he demonstrated that evolution was a religion and was not of high enough quality to stand up in a court of law. Philip E Johnson, a law professor of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote Darwin on Trial. In his book, he came to four important conclusions about evolution:

1. Evolution is grounded on naturalism, not scientific fact
2. A belief that a large body of empirical evidence supports evolution is nothing but an illusion
3. Evolution is a religion
4. If evolution had been subjected to a rigorous study of the evidence, it would have been abandoned long ago

In response to Roger Lewin’s description of the Ancestor’s Exhibit in 1984 in which he spoke of the awe and emotion of the experience, Johnson commented:

“Lewin is absolutely correct, and I can’t think of anything more likely to detract from the objectivity of one’s judgment. Descriptions of fossils from people who yearn to cradle their ancestors in their hands ought to be scrutinized as carefully as a letter of recommendation from a job applicant’s mother…. The story of human descent from apes is not merely a scientific hypothesis; it is the secular equivalent of the story of Adam and Eve.”

Raining on Darwin’s Parade

Let’s turn now to Darwinism and graphic media. In the March 1998 edition of Antiquity, David Van Reybrouck, a student of the role of drawings in the propagation of Darwinism has made five observations:

1. Illustrations always go beyond the archaeological data
2. Illustrations always involve speculation on the part of the fossil discoverers, who advise the artists
3. Illustrations involve interpretations that rely heavily on unproven and sometimes doubtful theories
4. Illustrations are always nonobjective, yet they are trusted in a visual society such as ours
5. Illustrations are used extensively because they sell evolution effectively.

The most blatant lie ever told to help promote evolution is the “parade” of stages in supposed human evolution that we are all familiar with. The origin of this parade- or should I say charade?- of characters is an illustration in F. Clark Howell’s book Early Man, originally published in 1965. The parade was originally on a 36-inch foldout page within the book. What most people don’t realize that the parade is pure propaganda. It doesn’t exist. The original book makes it clear that the parade doesn’t tell an accurate story, and the author and publishers knew it. Evolutionists knew that the apes and ape-like creatures they had theorized did not walk on their back feet. The book clearly states in the text, but not on the chart: “Although protoapes and apes were quadrupedal, all are shown here standing for purposes of comparison.” Sizes of each proposed ancestor were not to scale, and they were shown walking, not simply standing as the author states. These small details make a world of difference when it comes to the believability of the theory. It’s clear deception. Yet it was- and still is, in some cases- included in advertisements and eventually became its own poster in classrooms around the world.

Holding Out for a Hero

Finally, I’d like to call your attention to Misia Landau’s book Narratives of Human Evolution. In her book, Miss Landau makes an interesting assertion: paleoanthropology is storytelling. She compare folk-stories and epics to Darwin, Huxley, Keith, and Haeckel’s descriptions of human evolution. Here’s some similarities she’s noticed:

• The Hero’s Origin- The hero is typically leading a safe and untroubled life. He may be smaller or weaker than others. Think “Frodo Baggins.” In the story of evolution, the hero is a nondescript primate, perhaps living in the trees. Like Frodo Baggins heading out from the Shire with the Ring, the primate leaves the safety of the trees to walk on the ground, perhaps because of a larger brain or changes in the availability of food.
• The Hero Tested- In myths, the Hero is tested by predators, opponents, or his environment. In the Darwinistic myth, similar situations occur. “Indeed, the tests are specifically designed for that purpose: to bring out the human in the hero”, Landau writes.
• The Hero Transformed- Myths and even modern fantasy always add a sacred or magical object- a Ring of Power, the Master Sword, and Invisibility Cloak- to help a man become more than he was. In evolutionary theory, natural selection or a “magic twist” of genetic mutations (those are the words of Jared Diamond, who wrote an article about the movement of modern humans out of Africa in the May 1989 edition of Discover magazine) bestow upon the hero the intelligence or abilities necessary to become more than his ancestors.
• The Hero’s Death- The fatal irony of the average hero is that he dies due to pride through success. Most evolution tales include a warning to humans that we could become like our supposed ancestors if we aren’t careful. Richard Leakey devotes an entire book to that subject entitled The Sixth Extinction.

Frankly, I think J. R. R. Tolkien is a much better writer of this sort of material than the Darwinists. Let’s just leave it to the experts, ok, guys?

Evolution: A Logical Lightweight

At the AAAS convention in San Francisco, Carl Sagan once explained in his lecture “Velikovsky’s Challenge to Science” that science works in this way: “The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged.” The hypothesis “must survive confrontation with observation. Appeals to authority are impermissible. Experiments must be reproducible.”

That’s a pretty strange statement when you think about it. Evolution isn’t observable. It can’t be challenged in the scientific establishment without some serious ridicule taking place. Evolutionists appeal to the authority of the scientific establishment. There aren’t any experiments that are able to confirm evolution. It’s ironic to me, then, that Sagan would also make a very profound statement in that same lecture: “Not all scientific statements have equal weight.” How right he is. Direct observations of, say, the laws of physics, are far more weightier because of the tremendous amount of data verifying them. Unfortunately, the scientific establishment does not appear to behave this way, and the general public certainly isn’t aware of this concept. What we have are Darwinists acting as the high priests of our society. People- even highly-educated people- believe in Darwinism because scientists can’t be wrong.

How is Darwinism a sort of lesser science? Consider our interest in chimps. We study chimpanzees- their behavior, genetic makeup, and anatomy- because Darwinists believe that we are very closely related to them. Darwinists then use superficial similarities between humans and chimps to prove their assumptions. That is called begging the question in logic. They assume to be true the very thing they are trying to prove. Bereft of anything that Sagan would call a good basis for scientific study, a philosophical assumption has been foisted upon us as science. In reality, such studies on chimps would only attempt to shed light on humanity if evolution had first proven to be a correct assumption. Unlike Darwinism, intelligent design bases its theories on the evidence around us: information provided for our world through physics and DNA as well as the incredible complexity of the universe.

The logical fallacies don’t stop there, however. There’s a difference between historical and scientific evidence. In spite of the fact that scientists have performed numerous experiments on animals in an attempt to prove evolution through mutation, the obvious must be declared: just because mutations can be made to happen or engineered in a lab does not mean that they did happen in the past. That is a logical fallacy. That genetic engineering is possible in the present does not mean that it certainly did happen in the past. Scientists have proven it is possible; they have not proven that it occurred.

Suppose I gave you a pile of hammers and asked you to arrange them in a potential evolutionary sequence. You could start with small ones and work your way to larger ones, arrange them by claw types, group them into families based on what they are made of, etc. You could argue that you showed a pattern from simple to complex. The whole assignment, of course, would be bogus. There was no actual evolutionary relationship between the different hammers. They were designed with a particular function or purpose in mind. Curved and straight claw hammers, sledge hammers, ball pein, mason’s hammers, upholsterer’s hammers, and mallets are different because they are designed that way. Just because scientists can superimpose an evolutionary order on things does not mean that the evolutionary order is fact.