1. From Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899), frequently anthologized.
2. From Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), poem 54.
3. For a phenomenological and comparative religion approach, see Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000); see also David Burnett’s Clash of Worlds (Grand Rapids, MI: Monarch Books, 2002), which focuses on religious worldviews.
4. A helpful collection of essays on the notion of worldviews is found in Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen, and Richard Mouw, eds., Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989); the essay by James H. Olthuis, “On Worldviews,” pp. 26-40, is especially insightful. Worldview analysis in general has recently been criticized not only for overemphasizing the intellectual and abstract nature of worldviews but for the implicit assumption that there is such a thing as the Christian worldview. Because any expression of a worldview, Christian or not, is deeply imbedded in the flow of history and the varying characteristics of language, this criticism is sound. Each expression of any general worldview will bear the marks of the culture out of which it comes. Nonetheless, Christians, especially Christians, in every time and place should be seeking for the clearest expression and the closest approximation of what the Bible and Christian tradition have basically affirmed. See Roger P. Ebertz, “Beyond Worldview Analysis: Insights from Hans-Georg Gadamer on Christian Scholarship,” Christian Scholar’s Review 36 (Fall 2006): 13-28. Ebertz remarks: “The resulting worldview . . . is not absolute and ahistorical. Nor is it a set of bare theological claims. It is rather a richly fleshed-out perspective that incorporates discoveries from the past and the present, as well as insights from believers and non-believers” (p. 27). The description of the Christian worldview that constitutes the next chapter should be understood in that light. Since the fifth edition of Universe, IVP Academic has published another helpful introduction: Tawa J. Anderson, W. Michael Clark, and David K. Naugle, An Introduction to Christian Worldview: Pursuing God’s Perspective in a Pluralistic World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017).
5. In the third edition of The Universe Next Door I confessed that long ago I took T. S. Eliot to heart. He is credited with saying, “Mediocre poets imitate; good poets steal.” The title for this book comes from the two last lines of an E. E. Cummings poem, “pity this busy monster, manunkind: listen: there’s a hell/of a good universe next door; let’s go.” See E. E. Cummings, Poems: 1923–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954), 397.
6. As Charles Taylor says, “All beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never before formulated” (A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007], 13).
7. See my Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), especially chap. 7, for an extended development and justification of this definition. It must be acknowledged that “worldview thinking” has come under attack in recent years. It is argued that it places too much emphasis on rational systems. I confess this is, in part, a reason for my added emphasis on worldview as a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart. I have consistently argued that a worldview is not a set of propositions from which we start, but rather an articulation of assumptions we may or may not be consciously aware of. For critiques of worldview thinking, see James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2016); Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 50-53.
8. See David Naugle’s extended description of the biblical concept of heart (Worldview: The History of a Concept [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], 267-74). The NRSV translates kardia as “mind”; the NIV translates it as “heart.”
9. Naugle, Worldview, 266.
10. Sire, Naming the Elephant, chap. 3.
11. For an approach to worldview analysis with an even more individual and personal focus, see J. H. Bavinck, The Church Between Temple and Mosque (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, n.d. [reprinted 1981]). Bavinck examines alternative worldviews from five foci: (1) I and the cosmos, (2) I and the norm, (3) I and the riddle of my existence, (4) I and salvation, and (5) I and the Supreme Power.
1. One of the most fascinating studies of this is Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), which argues that the Greek gods became “Christianized”; that, as Julian the Apostate said, “Thou hast conquered, O Pale Galilean.”
2. Several books on the Christian worldview have been published since the earlier editions of the present book. Especially notable are Arthur F. Holmes, Contours of a Christian World View (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983); Arthur F. Holmes, ed., The Making of a Christian Mind (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985); W. Gary Phillips and William E. Brown, Making Sense of Your World from a Biblical Viewpoint (Chicago: Moody Press, 1991); Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984); and Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995). My own Discipleship of the Mind (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990) elaborates themes from the present chapter. More recent are David Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004); J. Mark Bertrand, (Re)thinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007); Charles H. Kraft, Worldview for Christian Witness (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library Publishers, 2008); and Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008).
3. One classic Protestant definition of God is found in the Westminster Confession 2.1.
4. For a consideration of the theistic concept of God from the standpoint of academic philosophy, see Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941); E. L. Mascall, He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism (London: Libra, 1943); H. P. Owen, Concepts of Deity (London: Macmillan, 1971), 1-48. Other metaphysical issues dealt with here are discussed in William Hasker, Metaphysics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983); C. Stephen Evans, Philosophy of Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985); Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991); J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017).
5. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, “The Trinity,” in Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, ed. Everett F. Harrison (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1960), 531.
6. Many people puzzle over the issue of evil. Given both the omniscience and the goodness of God, what is evil and why does it exist? For an extended analysis of the issue, see Peter Kreeft, Making Sense Out of Suffering (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1986), and Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994). I have addressed this issue in chapters 12 and 13 of Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994).
7. This phrase comes from Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1972), 43. Chap. 8 of C. S. Lewis, Miracles (London: Fontana, 1960), 18, also contains an excellent description of what an open universe involves. Other issues involving a Christian understanding of science are discussed in Del Ratzsch, Science and Its Limits (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), and Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994).
8. NRSV translation.
9. Pascal, Pensées 10.148.
10. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1.
11. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry: Or, The Defence of Poesy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), 100-101. See also Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: Meridian, 1956); J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 37; and Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008).
12. Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism, trans. John W. Doberstein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 110.
13. The word logos as used in John and elsewhere has a rich context of meaning. See, for example, J. N. Birdsall, “Logos,” in New Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 744-45.
14. For more extensive treatments of epistemology from a Christian perspective, see Arthur F. Holmes, All Truth Is God’s Truth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977); W. Jay Wood, Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998); and chaps. 5-6 in my Discipleship of the Mind. More recent and especially helpful is John G. Stackhouse Jr., Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology (New York: Oxford, 2014).
15. See John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1984).
16. See, for example, the discussion of the fall and its effects in Francis A. Schaeffer’s Genesis in Space and Time (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972), 69-101.
17. To pursue the biblical teaching on this subject see John Wenham, The Enigma of Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985), 27-41.
18. Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 1.
19. Human flourishing is a term frequently used today to describe the proper end toward which human life should be directed. Each worldview, however, has a different conception of just what human flourishing involves and whether it is in any way tied to transcendence. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 16-20.
20. “God’s Grandeur,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 66.
21. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970), 216.
1. A brief but helpful sketch of the transition from Christian theism to deism can be found in Jonathan Hill, Faith in the Age of Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). See Charles Taylor’s massive A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007) for a detailed study of the transition from Christian theism through deism to naturalism.
2. John Milton, Paradise Lost 2.557-61.
3. Avery Cardinal Dulles, in “The Deist Minimum,” First Things (January 2005): 25-30, gives a remarkably lucid account of the rise and decline of deism.
4. Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton point out that “on the whole the Catholic church had no argument with Galileo’s theories as science.” Rather, it was actually more opposed to “Galileo’s attack on Aristotelian philosophy” than to any undermining of Christian belief. See The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 38-40.
5. J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 7.
6. Peter Medawar, “On ‘The Effecting of All Things Possible,’” The Listener (October 2, 1969): 438.
7. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London: Burns and Oates, 1961), 5:162-63.
8. I owe the terms cold and warm to philosopher Daniel Synnestvedt (private correspondence).
9. Peter Gay’s Deism: An Anthology (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1968) is a useful collection of writings from a wide variety of deist writers.
10. Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790, http://franklinpapers.org/framedNames.jsp.
11. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, part 1, chap. 10, first sentence.
12. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, quoted by Sara Sanborn (“Who Is Buckminster Fuller?” Commentary, October 1973, 59-67), who comments that “Fuller’s Benevolent Intelligence seems compounded out of the Great Watchmaker of the Deists and Emerson’s Over-Soul” (66).
13. François Fénelon, Lettres sur divers sujets, metaphysique et de religion, letter 5. Quoted in Émile Bréhier, The History of Philosophy, trans. Wade Baskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 5:14.
14. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.18.10 (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 2:425-26.
15. Bréhier, History of Philosophy, 5:15.
16. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man 1.17-22.
17. Pope, Essay on Man, lines 23-32; cf. lines 233-58.
18. From the standpoint of Christian theism there is much to commend in this notion of natural law. C. S. Lewis bases his opening argument in Mere Christianity on the universality of the notion of good and evil.
19. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man 1.289-94.
20. Pope, Essay on Man, lines 123-26, 129-30.
21. Dulles, “The Deist Minimum,” 29.
22. Pope, Essay on Man 1.145-46.
23. Others mentioned by Synnestvedt in private correspondence include The New Science by Giovanni Battista Vico (1688–1744), The Age of Louis XIV and Essay on Manners by Voltaire, Letters on the Study and Use of History by Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (1679–1751), and Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
24. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza, 1954). See also Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner, 1978).
25. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 122.
26. Michael White and John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (New York: Plume, 1992), 3.
27. Hawking, Brief History, 141.
28. Kitty Ferguson, Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of the Universe (New York: Franklin Watts, 1991), 84.
29. Another possibility is that scientists who see intelligence in the workings of the universe are panentheists. Panentheism is a sort of halfway house between theism and pantheism. In panentheism the universe is not God but in God. Or God is the mind of the universe, not equated with it but not separate from it. This worldview tends to be held only by highly intellectual people. Physicist Paul Davies, for example, was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. See his “Physics and the Mind of God: The Templeton Prize Address,” First Things (August/September 1995), 31-35; and also God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); and The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
30. See Antony Flew with Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007); and Gary Habermas, “Antony Flew’s Deism Revisited,” Philosophia Christi 9, no. 202 (2007), also online at www.epsociety.org.
31. See Flew’s response to Richard Dawkins’s suggestion in The God Delusion that Flew’s conversion is the result of old age not rational consideration (“Documentation: A Reply to Richard Dawkins,” First Things [December 2008], 21-22).
32. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga; June 1979–September 1982, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 345-46.
33. Havel, Letters to Olga, 346.
34. Havel has a profound understanding of his whole worldview; this has been analyzed in my Václav Havel: The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), now out of print.
35. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 162-63.
36. Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 164.
37. From a survey conducted in 1992 by students before my campus lecture.
38. To these reasons Dulles adds these internal tensions: “[1] If there is an omnipotent God, capable of designing the entire universe and launching it into existence, it seems strange to hold that this God cannot intervene in the world. . . . [2] If God was infinite in being, . . . was it not unreasonable to reject the notion of mystery? . . . [3] If God had never intervened in the world, His existence could only be, from a human perspective, superfluous” (Dulles, “The Deist Minimum,” 28).
39. Dulles says, “Although deism portrayed itself as a pure product of unaided reason, it was not what it claimed to be. Its basic tenets concerning God, the virtuous life, and rewards beyond the grave were in fact derived from Christianity, the faith in which the deists themselves had been raised” (“The Deist Minimum,” 28).
40. Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 106-7.
1. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747), in Les Philosophes, ed. Norman L. Torrey (New York: Capricorn, 1960), 176.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, for example, says, “Of course we find in the eighteenth century Paley’s famous argument that mechanism presupposes a God who is the author of nature. But even before Paley put the argument into its final form, Hume had written the retort, that the God whom you will find will be the sort of God who makes that mechanism. In other words, that mechanism can, at most, presuppose a mechanic, and not merely a mechanic but its mechanic” (Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [1925; reprint, New York: Mentor, 1948], 77).
3. The brash, anti-Christian, anticlerical tone of La Mettrie’s essay is of a piece with its antitheistic content, exalting, as it does, human reason at the expense of revelation. A sample of this from the conclusion to Man a Machine is instructive: “I recognize only scientists as judges of the conclusions which I draw, and I hereby challenge every prejudiced man who is not an anatomist, or acquainted with the only philosophy which is to the purpose, that of the human body. Against such a strong and solid oak, what could the weak reeds of theology, metaphysics and scholasticism, avail; childish weapons, like our foils, which may well afford the pleasure of fencing, but can never wound an adversary. Need I say that I refer to the hollow and trivial notions, to the trite and pitiable arguments that will be urged, as long as the shadow of prejudice or superstition remains on earth, for the supposed incompatibility of two substances which meet and interact unceasingly [La Mettrie is here alluding to Descartes’s division of reality into mind and matter]?” (177).
4. Strictly speaking, there are naturalists who are not materialists—that is, who hold that there may be elements of the universe that are not material—but they have had little impact on Western culture. My definition of naturalism will be limited to those who are materialists.
5. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4. Sagan goes on to say, “Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” For Sagan, in this book and the television series of the same name, the cosmos assumes the position of God, creating the same kind of awe in Sagan, who tries to trigger in his readers and television audience the same response. So-called science thus becomes religion, some say the religion of scientism. See Jeffrey Marsh, “The Universe and Dr. Sagan,” Commentary, May 1981, 64-68.
6. See J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 477.
7. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 13. Hawking’s conclusion is guardedly optimistic: “If we do discover a complete theory [of the universe] . . . it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God” (175).
8. For an update written in lay language, see Dennis Overbye, “Dark, Perhaps Forever,” The New York Times, June 3, 2008, sec. D, pp. 1 and 4.
9. La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 177. On the other hand, to define a human being as “a field of energies moving inside a larger fluctuating system of energies” is equally naturalistic. In neither case is humankind seen as transcending the cosmos. See Marilyn Ferguson, The Brain Revolution: The Frontiers of Mind Research (New York: Taplinger, 1973), 22.
10. Émile Bréhier, The History of Philosophy, trans. Wade Baskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 5:129.
11. Humanist Manifestos I and II (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1973), 16. These two manifestos, especially the second (which was drafted by Paul Kurtz), are convenient compilations of naturalist assumptions. Paul Kurtz, who died in 2012, was a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, editor of Free Inquiry (a quarterly journal devoted to the propagation of “secular humanism”), and editor of Prometheus Books.
12. John A. Garraty and Peter Gay, eds., The Columbia History of the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 14.
13. David Jobling, “How Does Our Twentieth-Century Concept of the Universe Affect Our Understanding of the Bible?,” Enquiry, September–November 1972, 14. Ernest Nagel, in a helpful essay defining naturalism in a mid-twentieth-century form, states this position in more rigorously philosophical terms: “The first [proposition central to naturalism] is the existential and causal primacy of organized matter in the executive order of nature. This is the assumption that the occurrence of events, qualities and processes, and the characteristic behaviors of various individuals, are contingent on the organization of spatiotemporally located bodies, whose internal structures and external relations determine and limit the appearance and disappearance of everything that happens” (Ernest Nagel, “Naturalism Reconsidered” [1954], in Essays in Philosophy, ed. Houston Peterson [New York: Pocket Library, 1959], 486).
14. La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 177.
15. Fredrick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London: Burns and Oates, 1961), 6:51. Among proponents of the notion that human beings are machines is John Brierly, The Thinking Machine (London: Heinemann, 1973).
16. William Barrett, The Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer (New York: Anchor, 1987), 154. Sherry Turkle, who has studied the effect of computers on human self-understanding, says that “people who try to think of themselves as computers have trouble with the notion of the self” (Carl Mitcham reports on her work in “Computer Ethos, Computer Ethics,” in Research in Philosophy and Technology [Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1985], 8:271).
17. Humanist Manifesto II states the situation generally with reference to the whole of nature: “Nature may indeed be broader and deeper than we now know; any new discoveries, however, will but enlarge our knowledge of the natural” (16).
18. Julian Huxley, “The Uniqueness of Man,” in Man in the Modern World (New York: Mentor, 1948), 7-28. George Gaylord Simpson lists humanity’s “interrelated factors of intelligence, flexibility, individualization and socialization” (The Meaning of Evolution, rev. ed. [New York: Mentor, 1951], 138).
19. Nagel, “Naturalism Reconsidered,” 490.
20. Physicist Edward Fredkin, for example, believes that even in a completely deterministic universe, human actions may not be predictable and there is left a place for “pseudo-free will” (Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods [New York: Harper & Row, 1988], 67).
21. Humanist Manifestos I and II, 17.
22. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 107.
23. A. J. Ayer, ed., The Humanist Outlook (London: Pemberton, 1968), 9.
24. Nagel, “Naturalism Reconsidered,” 496.
25. Humanist Manifestos I and II, 17.
26. John Updike, “Pigeon Feathers,” in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1959), 96.
27. See the essays in Hilary Kornblith, ed., Naturalizing Epistemology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) for a presentation and critique of various naturalistic ways to justify our claims to knowledge.
28. In Christian theism there is no necessary rift between words and things; this is because everything that exists except God himself has been made by the Word (the personal intelligence of God). See chapter 2 above. I have also discussed this aspect of theism in Discipleship of the Mind (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 87-94.
29. This shift in the content of ethical norms can be studied by comparing Humanist Manifesto I (1933) with Humanist Manifesto II (1973). Since 1973, of course, more shifts have occurred, most notably in the ascendance of a plea that homosexuality be considered a normal human condition with attendant moral rights.
30. La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 176, emphasis mine.
31. Humanist Manifestos I and II, 17.
32. Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, 145.
33. Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, 149.
34. John Platt in The Center Magazine, March–April 1972, 48.
35. Two other naturalists who attempt to build an ethic on an evolutionary foundation are Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), and James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993). Both explain how a moral sense may have developed; neither succeeds in avoiding the naturalistic fallacy—the attempt to derive ought from is.
36. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Time Inc., 1964), 190.
37. Walter Lippmann, Preface to Morals, 307. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind could be described as a sustained cry for the maintenance of some other basis for human values than commitment or human decision. Without seriously contending with an infinite-personal God who acts as the foundation for these values, it is difficult to see just how contemporary values will be able to be grounded in any firm absolute. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), esp. 194-216. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1984).
38. Garraty and Gay, Columbia History of the World, 3.
39. One of the most intriguing treatments of the origin of the universe is that presented by Hawking in A Brief History of Time.
40. Most scientists who are naturalists accept some form of evolutionary theory. Daniel C. Dennett is probably correct when he writes that “though there are vigorous controversies swirling around in evolutionary theory,” they are family squabbles. The Darwinian idea “is about as secure as any in science”; that “human beings are products of evolution” is an “undisputable fact” (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 19, 481). One scientist, a naturalist, who does not accept Darwinism or neo-Darwinism, however, is Michael Denton, author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1985) and Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2016). Among Christians many scientists and theologians, especially those associated with the American Scientific Affiliation, accept some form of evolution as both scientifically possible and consistent with Christian theism (see the countless articles in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation and Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith [the ASA’s retitled journal]). Further examples are Charles Hummel, The Galileo Connection (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985); Howard J. Van Till, The Fourth Day (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986); Howard J. Van Till, Davis A. Young, and Clarence Menninga, Science Held Hostage (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988). Three more recent books are especially helpful in sorting out the status of the current variety of judgments Christian scholars are making in regard to evolution: Darrel R. Falk, Coming to Peace with Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); Francis S. Collins, The Language of God (New York: Free Press, 2006); and Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God (San Francisco: Harper Perennial, 2007).
While methodological naturalism is still the reigning presupposition among most scientists—both secular and Christian—it has been seriously challenged by a number of scientists, philosophers, and cultural critics. W. Christopher Stewart explains the conflict between Christians in “Religion and Science,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 318-44. For those opposed to methodological naturalism and arguing instead for “design” or “theistic” science, see especially the following: biologist Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984); mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski, The Design Inference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999); Signs of Intelligence (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001); No Free Lunch (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); law professor and cultural critic Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993); Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995); The Wedge of Truth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000); and The Right Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002); and chemist and historian of science Charles B. Thaxton and writer Nancy Pearcey, The Soul of Science (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994). Two histories of the birth, development, and criticism of the “intelligent design” movement are Thomas Woodward, Doubts About Darwin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003) and Darwin Strikes Back (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006). Critiques of Christian arguments about evolution are found in Del Ratzsch, The Battle of Beginnings: Why Neither Side Is Winning the Creation-Evolution Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996); Science and Its Limits, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000); and Nature, Design, and Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
Six collections of essays by a wide variety of scholars also focus on this topic: J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994); Jon Buell and Virginia Hearn, eds., Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? (Richardson, TX: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 1994); William A. Dembski, ed., Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998); J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds, Three Views on Creation and Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999); Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000); and Robert T. Pennock, ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
41. Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, 143. Why Simpson should assign human beings a spiritual nature is not clear. We must not, however, take him to mean that they have a dimension that takes them out of the closed universe.
42. Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, 143.
43. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 146.
44. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 21.
45. See Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution and a Rational Faith, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007) for a Christian perspective on purpose in evolution.
46. A few naturalists like Carl Sagan believe that given the size and age of the universe, other intelligent beings must have evolved elsewhere in it. But even Sagan admits that there is no hard evidence for this view (Sagan, Cosmos, 292, 307-15). That was 1980; the same is true today.
47. A Christian humanist manifesto was published in Eternity, January 1982, 16-18. The signers included Donald Bloesch, George Brushaber, Richard Bube, Arthur Holmes, Bruce Lockerbie, J. I. Packer, Bernard Ramm, and me. Then, too, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman promote a form of Christian humanism they call “incarnational humanism” as a foundation for Christian education, especially at the university level; see their The Passionate Intellect (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
48. Humanist Manifestos I and II. Another, briefer compilation of secular humanist views, “The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles and Values,” appears on the back cover of Free Inquiry, Summer 1987.
49. This section on Marxism was written by C. Stephen Evans, University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Baylor University.
50. One of the best introductions to the many sides of Marxism is Richard Schmitt, Introduction to Marx and Engels: Critical Reconstruction (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987). A good introduction from a Christian point of view is David Lyon, Karl Marx: A Christian Assessment of His Life and Thought (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979). There is no substitute, of course, for the actual writings of Marx to really understand him, as well as the writings of Marx’s close friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Many of the most important writings are in Richard Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
51. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 60.
52. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 60.
53. An important Christian critique of naturalism is found in Johnson’s Reason in the Balance.
54. Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, 139.
55. Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, 166-81. From the early days of Darwin and T. H. Huxley, naturalists have placed much hope in human evolution. Some modern optimists are Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (New York: Bantam, 1964), 212-27; Peter Medawar, “On Effecting All Things Possible,” The Listener, October 2, 1969, 437-42; Glenn Seaborg, “The Role of Science and Technology,” Washington University Magazine, Spring 1972, 31-35; Julian Huxley, “Transhumanism,” in Knowledge, Morality and Destiny (New York: Mentor, 1960), 13-17.
1. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Pocket, 1981); The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (New York: Pocket, 1982); Life, the Universe and Everything (New York: Pocket, 1983); So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (London: Pan, 1984).
2. Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide, 173.
3. Adams, Restaurant, 3.
4. Adams, Restaurant, 246.
5. Adams, Life, 222. At the end of the fourth novel, which seems not nearly so poignant in its effect, we learn God’s final message to us: “We apologize for the inconvenience” (So Long, 189).
6. Adams may have the last laugh after all, for, as my mathematician friends tell me, 6 times 9 is 54 but can be written as 42 in base 13. Go figure!
7. My scientist friend Carl Peraino is one such person; he maintains a consistent naturalism but insists that this does not lead him to nihilism. See our dialogue in our Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).
8. John Platt, for example, thinks this is the only freedom a person really needs (Center Magazine, March–April 1972, 47).
9. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 211. Skinner’s behaviorism, always highly criticized, is now (several decades later) generally considered simplistic and inadequate as an explanation for human behavior.
10. Jaques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 98, 112.
11. Some scientists are wary of basing metaphysical conclusions on scientific concepts. Richard Bube, for example, argues that chance as a scientific concept is not the same as chance as a worldview (that is, metaphysical) concept, noting that in science chance is the term given to a scientific description that is “able only to predict the probability of the future state of a system from the knowledge of its present state” (Richard Bube, Putting It All Together: Seven Patterns for Relating Science and the Christian Faith [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995], 23). Scientific chance, then, labels a limit to knowledge rather than describes a characteristic of “reality” (i.e., makes a metaphysical statement). Such scientific chance then is compatible with the notion of a rational world, as understood by Christians and naturalists alike. But it is clear that chance often functions, even in the writings of scientists (notably Monod), in a worldview (that is, metaphysical) sense.
12. See Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 214-15; chap. 9, “Quantum Mysteries: Making Sense of the New Physics,” 187-219, is a lucid exposition of the issues involved.
13. The scientific concept of chance is vexed. The Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy holds that one cannot simultaneously determine with accuracy both the location and the momentum of any given electron. One can have precise knowledge of either, but not both at the same time. It is an epistemological principle. But many scientists, including Werner Heisenberg, drew ontological implications from the epistemological principle that are clearly not warranted. Heisenberg himself said, “Since all experiments are subjected to the laws of quantum mechanics, . . . the invalidity of the law of causality is definitely proved by quantum mechanics” (quoted by Stanley Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” in Chance or Reality and Other Essays [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986], 6-7). The implication is that not only is the universe not understandable at a fundamental level, but the universe is itself irrational or, even, unreal.
Heisenberg, along with at least some other scientists and popularizers of science, has moved from ignorance of reality to knowledge about that reality. I cannot measure X; therefore X does not exist. It is just such a movement from the limits of knowledge to the declaration that we have no justification for thinking we know anything that constitutes much of the postmodern pattern of thinking (see chapter nine of this book). Reality has to conform to the human mind in a theoretically completely knowable way or it does not exist. In fact, solipsism “has for long been recognized as an inevitable implication of the drastic meaning of Heisenberg’s principle” (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” 12-13).
One way out of the dilemma was taken by Niels Bohr, who insisted that “all statements about ontology or being must be avoided” (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” 8). As Jaki says, W. Pauli agreed “that questions about reality were as metaphysical and useless as was the concern of medieval philosophers about the number of angels that could be put on a pinhead” (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” 10).
Another way out, taken by Albert Einstein and other scientists, tried to get around the principle itself by finding ways of conceiving how measurements could be complete and accurate at the same time. Their attempt failed. All that could be said is, in Einstein’s words, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” 9). But this was more a pretheoretical commitment, a presupposition, than a conclusion drawn from successful theorizing from either laboratory or thought experiments. This then left the ontological conclusion to be drawn as many did: the universe is not fundamentally understandable (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” 8).
A premodern humility about the human ability to know might have prevented this rash and illogical move. Think of the apostle Paul’s caution (“now we see through a glass darkly”) and then hope (“but then face to face”; 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV).
The issue, Jaki concludes, boils down to a confusion of ontology and epistemology. “The science of quantum mechanics states only the impossibility of perfect accuracy in measurements. The philosophy of quantum mechanics states ultimately the impossibility of distinguishing between material and non-material, and even between being and non-being. . . . At any rate, if it is impossible to distinguish between being and non-being, then efforts to say anything about freedom and determinism become utterly meaningless” (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” 14).
14. Jaki notes that knowledge, too, loses its foundation (“Chance or Reality,” 17).
15. Alvin Plantinga uses an argument of this type to reject Darwin’s “dangerous idea” that the human mind developed by means of natural selection—the survival of the fittest. See “Dennett’s Dangerous Idea,” Plantinga’s review of Daniel C. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), in Books and Culture, May/June 1996, 35. A full version of his argument is found in his Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 12. Ongoing development and critique of Plantinga’s argument can be explored in Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford, 2000); James K. Beilby, ed., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley, Knowledge of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009); Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford, 2011).
16. From a letter to W. Graham (July 3, 1881), quoted in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters (1892; reprint, New York: Dover, 1958). I am indebted to Francis A. Schaeffer for this observation, which he made in a lecture on Darwin. C. S. Lewis in a parallel argument quotes J. B. S. Haldane as follows: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms” (Miracles [London: Fontana, 1960], 18).
17. Lewis, Miracles, 109. In another context Lewis remarks, “It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t, all thought is discredited” (32).
18. From Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines, frequently anthologized.
19. Stanley Jaki comments on physicists who attempt to skirt this problem yet end as antirealists after all (“Chance or Reality,” 8-16).
20. Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox (New York: Seabury, 1974), 17-18.
21. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 194.
22. See Antony Flew, “From Is to Ought,” in The Sociobiology Debate, ed. Arthur L. Caplan (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 142-62, for a rigorous explanation of why the naturalistic attempt to get ought from is is a fallacy. One scientist who saw the paucity of physics to provide an ethical norm was Einstein, who “told one of his biographers that he never derived a single ethical value from physics” (Jaki, “Chance or Reality,” citing P. Michelmore, Einstein: Profile of the Man [New York: Dodd, 1962], 251).
23. In an outrageous section of his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett, with no foundation at all, universalizes his own subjective ethic: “Save the Elephants! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not by forcing the people of Africa to live nineteenth-century lives, for instance. . . . Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world [that is, not if it means they get to teach their children that the book of Genesis is literally true]” (515-16).
24. See Bloom’s discussion of values (Closing of the American Mind, 25-43, 194-215).
25. Richard Dawkins represents a common stance among naturalists. While he makes moral judgments (he rejects the notion that the weak should be simply allowed to die), he admits that he has no rational foundation for this judgment. Here is a naturalist who refuses to accept for his own life the logical consequences of naturalism. Nihilists with greater integrity bite the bullet (see Nick Pollard’s interview with Dawkins in the Space/Time Gazette, Autumn 1995, as reported in the Newsletter of the ASA and CSCA, July/August 1996, 4).
26. Franz Kafka, “The Watchman,” in Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken, 1961), 81.
27. One of Nietzsche’s epigrams in The Gay Science echoes Kafka’s parable: “Guilt. Although the most acute judges of the witches, and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was nonexistent. It is thus with all guilt” (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking, 1954], 96-97).
28. One could reply that such guilt (that is, guilt feelings) can be removed by Freudian psychoanalysis or other psychotherapy and thus there is something that can be done. But this merely emphasizes the amorality of human beings. It solves a person’s problem of feeling guilty by not allowing one any way at all to act morally.
29. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dell, 1970), 177.
30. I am indebted to Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism, trans. John W. Doberstein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 148-66, esp. 163-66, for this observation about nihilism.
31. Another way to put this argument is to point out that constructing sentences is such a fundamental act, such a paradigmatic affirmation of meaning, that to construct sentences to deny meaning is self-contradictory. Keith Yandell in “Religious Experience and Rational Appraisal,” Religious Studies, June 1974, 185, expresses the argument as follows: “If a conceptual system F is such that it can be shown that (a) F is true and (b) F is known to be true, are incompatible, then this fact provides a good (though perhaps not conclusive) reason for supposing that F is false.”
32. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Dell, 1962), 184.
33. Heller, Catch-22, 185.
34. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 196.
1. Albert Camus, L’Été, quoted in John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 3.
2. I am indebted to C. Stephen Board for this observation.
3. The theme to which I refer is the “will to power” ending in the notion of the Übermensch (the “Overman” or “Superman”), all that is left after the total loss of any transcendent standard for either ethics or epistemology. I will discuss this in the section on postmodernism (chapter nine).
4. Thus fulfilling Nietzsche’s “prophecy” in the parable of the madman. See chapter 9.
5. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; reprint, New York: Mentor, 1948), 49.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism,” reprinted in A Casebook on Existentialism, ed. William V. Spanos (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), 289.
7. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 289.
8. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 278.
9. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 278.
10. This illustration derives from Sartre, “Existentialism,” 283-84.
11. John Platt in Center Magazine, March–April 1972, 47.
12. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1961), 99.
13. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 115.
14. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 279.
15. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 289.
16. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 279.
17. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 280.
18. Sartre, “Existentialism,” 285.
19. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Random House, 1948), 35.
20. Camus, Plague, 108.
21. Camus, Plague, 9, 29, 277.
22. Camus, Plague, 174.
23. Camus, Plague, 175.
24. Camus, Plague, 227-28.
25. Camus, Plague, 230.
26. Camus, Plague, 120, 230.
27. Camus, Plague, 262-63.
28. Camus, Plague, 116.
29. Camus, Plague, 117-18.
30. Camus, Plague, 278.
31. The novel can and probably should also be read as a commentary on the Nazi regime, a plague on all of Europe and North Africa, not just Oran.
32. Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2000).
33. H. J. Blackham, “The Pointlessness of It All,” in Objections to Humanism, ed. H. J. Blackham (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), 123.
34. Blackham, “The Pointlessness of It All,” 124.
35. Edward John Carnell gives an excellent introduction to neo-orthodoxy and how it arose in The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1960), 13-39.
36. Camus, Plague, 197.
37. Camus, Plague, 196.
38. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958), 29-30.
39. Buber, I and Thou, 34.
40. Buber, I and Thou, 4.
41. Buber, I and Thou, 11.
42. Buber, I and Thou, 7.
43. Søren Kierkegaard, from a letter quoted by Walter Lowrie in A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942), 82.
44. Kierkegaard’s own stance regarding this is a matter of scholarly debate. Those emphasizing his rejection of the value of objective truth include Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 21-22, 35-39, and Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), 51-54. On the other side are C. Stephen Evans, Subjectivity and Religious Beliefs (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1978), and John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 74-123.
45. Buber, I and Thou, 96.
46. See Donald Bloesch, God the Almighty (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 166-67.
47. Grene, Introduction, 36.
48. Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1972), 37-88, esp. 79.
49. For a consideration of the current state of scholarship on the subjects treated by higher criticism, see Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996); Donald Carson et al., An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992); Raymond B. Dillard and Tremper Longman III, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994); Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007); and N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press): The New Testament and the People of God (1992); Jesus and the Victory of God (1996); and The Resurrection and the Son of God (2003).
50. Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible, in English Prose of the Victorian Era, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold and William D. Templeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 1211.
51. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in English Prose of the Victorian Era, 1248.
52. Carnell, Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, 168.
53. Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 39.
54. Luke Timothy Johnson, after a blistering criticism of modern attempts to malign the historical reliability of the Gospels (on the one hand) and to place too much emphasis on the facticity of the Gospel narratives (on the other hand), says, “The real Jesus for Christian faith is not simply a figure of the past but very much and above all a figure of the present, a figure, indeed, who defines believers present by his presence” (The Real Jesus [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996], 142). This is existentialist Christianity in contemporary dress; it is not necessarily in conflict with orthodox Christian theism, but it puts the emphasis on the living relational present at the expense of concern for historical fact.
55. The history of scholarly studies of Jesus parallels the intellectual history I have been tracing in this book. First there was the uncritical acceptance of the Gospels as reliable history. Then with the deists and naturalists (e.g., Ernest Renan) came the denial of the historicity of any supernatural events in Jesus’ life. This was followed by the neo-orthodox emphasis on the religious and existential significance of the story of Jesus, which was itself thought to be largely mythical (e.g., Rudolf Bultmann), and then by the radical reshapers, using an imaginative blend of naturalistic skepticism and speculative fantasy (e.g., John Dominic Crossan). Reactions to these naturalistic quests for the historical Jesus by both traditional theistic scholars (e.g., Ben Witherington and N. T. Wright) and modestly neo-orthodox scholars (e.g., Luke Timothy Johnson) are playing an important role in putting the historical study of Jesus on more solid ground.
56. Review of Resurrection: A Symbol of Hope, by Lloyd Geering, Times Literary Supplement, November 26, 1971, p. 148.
1. The present account of the twentieth-century swing to Eastern thought is painfully superficial. For more detail see the following: R. C. Zaehner, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism (New York: Vintage, 1974). A more expansive and scholarly examination is found in the essays collected in Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone, eds., Religious Movements in Contemporary America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). Stephen Neill in Christian Faith and Other Faiths (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984) surveys and evaluates several religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. A Christian critique of the Western trend toward the East is found in Os Guinness, The Dust of Death (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 195-234. In chap. 11 of Miracles (London: Fontana, 1960), 85-98, C. S. Lewis argues that even in the West pantheism is humankind’s natural religion, and his critique of this form of pantheism is helpful. See also Ernest Becker’s highly critical analysis of Zen Buddhism from the standpoint of modern psychoanalysis and psychotherapy theory in Zen: A Rational Critique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).
2. Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–1969). For texts of Eastern philosophy and religion see Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, eds., A Source Book in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Wing-tsit Chan, ed., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); and Lucien Stryk, ed., World of the Buddha (New York: Grove, 1968). For general studies of Eastern religions, philosopher Keith Yandell recommends Stuart Hackett, Oriental Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); David L. Johnson, A Reasoned Look at Asian Religions (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1985); Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth (London: Macmillan, 1986); Eric Lott, God and the Universe in the Vedantic Theology of Ramanuja (Madras: Ramanuja Research Society, 1976); and Lott, Vedantic Approaches to God (London: Macmillan, 1980).
4. Winfried Corduan, Neighboring Faiths: A Christian Introduction to World Religions, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012).
5. Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) once touched his disciple Naren (who later became Swami Vivekananda and traveled to Chicago for the first Parliament of World Religions, becoming as a result a major figure in the introduction of Eastern thought to the West); he fell into a trance and saw in a flash “that everything actually is God, that nothing whatsoever exists but the Divine, that the entire universe is His body, and all things are His forms” (Richard Schiffman, Sri Ramakrishna: A Prophet for a New Age [New York: Paragon House, 1989], 153).
6. From the Chandogya Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Juan Mascaró (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), 117.
7. Schiffman, Sri Ramakrishna, 214, quoting from Rolland Romain, The Life of Ramakrishna (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1931), 197.
8. Meditations of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (New York: Bantam, 1968), 18.
9. Mascaró, Upanishads, 83-84.
10. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: New Directions, 1951), 115.
11. Mascaró, Upanishads, 12.
12. Sri Ramakrishna, who yielded to the Hindu god Kali the categories of knowledge and ignorance, purity and impurity, good and evil, confesses to the difficulty of living beyond the duality of truth and untruth. But he does so for the love of Kali (implying a duality with hate), and he tells his disciples, “I could not bring myself to give up truth” (which implies a duality with falsehoods) (quoted by Schiffman, Sri Ramakrishna, 135).
13. In Siddhartha, for example, Siddhartha hurts many people as he goes on the path to unity with the One. But he never apologizes or confesses. Neither has meaning in his system.
14. Hesse, Siddhartha, 119.
15. Hesse, Siddhartha, 106.
16. Hesse, Siddhartha, 110.
17. Hesse, Siddhartha, 110-11.
18. Hesse, Siddhartha, 78.
19. Mascaró, Upanishads, 23.
20. Hesse, Siddhartha, 122.
21. Robert Linssen, Zen: The Art of Life (New York: Pyramid, 1962), 142-43.
22. Sigmund Kvaloy, “Norwegian Ecophilosophy and Ecopolitics and Their Influence from Buddhism,” in Buddhist Perspectives on the Ecocrisis, The Wheel Publication 346/348 (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1987), 69.
23. Zen master Myocho (1281–1337), “The Original Face,” in A First Zen Reader (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1960), 21.
24. This koan is often translated as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” but the word clapping does not occur in the Japanese.
25. Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Zen Koan (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1956), 44; D. T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove, 1964), 59, 99-117.
26. Suzuki, Introduction, 39, writes, for example, “Zen wants to rise above logic, Zen wants to find a higher affirmation where there are no antitheses. Therefore, in Zen, God is neither denied nor insisted upon; only there is in Zen no such God as has been conceived by Jewish and Christian minds.” See also pp. 48-57.
27. Charles Taylor notes the radical difference between what Buddhists and Christians count as “human flourishing.” The Buddhist notion requires individuals to “detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the extinction of self,” while Christians aim at “renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God” (A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007], 17).
28. In “Everything Is on Fire: Tibetan Buddhism Inside Out” John B. Buescher (who was raised a Catholic, pursued Buddhism for most of his life, then returned to his Christian roots) reviews ten books; his reflections dramatically portray both the parallels and the eventual vast differences between Tibetan Buddhism and the Christian worldview (Books and Culture [January/February 2008], 40-43).
1. In 1976 and even in 1988 I said “infancy”; in 1997 I first said “adolescence.”
2. Perhaps Sam Keen came as close as any in his brief article “The Cosmic Versus the Rational,” Psychology Today, July 1974, 56-59.
3. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1980), and Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York: Bantam, 1982). See also Capra’s The Tao of Physics (New York: Bantam, 1977). Ken Wilber has written many books, beginning with Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1977; 2nd ed. 1993); and, more recently, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996); A Theory of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 2000); the novel Boomeritis (Boston: Shambhala, 2002). These have been followed by a series of “integrating” books, including Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening (Boston: Integral Books, 2008). For a summary and analysis of Wilber’s system, see Douglas Groothuis, “Ken Wilber,” in The Evangelical Dictionary of World Religions, ed. H. Wayne House (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2018), and Tyler Johnston’s review of A Brief History of Everything in Denver Journal 5 (2002), www.denverseminary.edu/dj/articles02/0400/0404.php.
4. See especially three books by Douglas R. Groothuis: Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986); Confronting the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988); and Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1996); the latter deals with New Age concepts of Jesus. Various specialist organizations have been watching the development; among them are the Spiritual Counterfeits Project and Christian Research Institute. See, too, Ted Peters, The Cosmic Self (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), and a book whose title seems a bit premature: Vishal Mangalwadi, When the New Age Gets Old (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992). More recent analysis of young adult spirituality can be found in Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
5. James A. Herrick, The Making of the New Spirituality (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003). See also Carl A. Raschke, The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980).
6. See “Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier,” Time magazine’s cover story, March 4, 1974, which charted the interest in psychic phenomena—ESP, psychokinesis (the mental ability to influence physical objects), Kirlian photography (which supposedly shows the “aura” of living things), psychic healing, acupuncture, clairvoyance, “out-of-body” experiences, precognition (foreknowledge of events). A year later Saturday Review, February 22, 1975, paralleled Time’s coverage on a more sophisticated plane, suggesting that the popularity of the new consciousness ran deeper then than mere cultural fads such as the God-is-dead theology. News of New Age celebrations at the time of the supposed Harmonic Convergence (August 1987) were carried in many American newspapers and newsmagazines, some written with considerable tongue-in-cheek. The New Age generates public interest but not always public respect.
7. New Age Journal has gone through an interesting metamorphosis since its inception in 1974, when it began as a magazine published by self-confessed idealistic New Agers. Suffering the threat of extinction in 1983, its longtime editor has written (September 1983, p. 5), it got an infusion of funds and began to take on not only a new look—more professional design, slick paper, and four-color interior printing—but also a new editorial direction, focusing less on the more extreme exponents of New Age thought and more on the borders between the New Age and mainstream American culture. By June 1984 the change was signaled by new names on its masthead at key editorial positions. The magazine then reflected much more the established ground of the New Age than the cutting edge. One might interpret this change as signaling a coming of age of the New Age movement itself, an attempt to reach the average newsstand magazine buyer with the more palatable New Age ideas, or a commercializing of the New Age by middle-class management. Still, as a new editor (Joan Duncan Oliver) took the helm of the slick journal in August 1996, she reviewed the early issues and commented that the “focus has remained constant”; in the words of an earlier editor, “We are really talking about healing the spirit” (August 1996, p. 6). In 2002 the journal changed its name to Body & Soul, perhaps admitting that
the New Age was no longer new, retaining the slick pop magazine format and its by now health-oriented content. Editor comments: “For 28 years, New Age reported on the new elements of an emerging holistic movement—a movement that has now become a lifestyle for thousands, if not millions of Americans. Now as Body & Soul, we promise to continue this tradition, bringing you the best in holistic ideas, trends and news” (Body & Soul [March/April 2002], 6); in 2008 the magazine had continued in this pop-psych-spiritual vein. The history of the magazine is a study in commercialization: spirit has become dollars and flesh.
8. Time, December 7, 1987, 62-72.
9. MacLaine’s attempt, after leading many weekend seminars, to build her own New Age center in New Mexico had to be abandoned when “locals protested that the site was too environmentally fragile to accommodate the star’s building plans” (Time, January 10, 1994). Much later she recalls a Belgian hiker wanting to talk with her about “God and the universe and the meaning of life” and to have her “bless him.” She declined because “she didn’t like being seen as a New Age guru. That was the reason I quit conducting my traveling seminars. Too many people gave away their power to me” (The Camino [New York: Pocket, 2000]), 140). Still, MacLaine has continued her autobiographies. My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (New York: Bantam, 1995) focuses on her professional career; The Camino (2000) recounts the fantastic and fantastical events of a Spanish pilgrimage and the spiritual teachings of John the Scot, one of her spirit guides. Then MacLaine, along with her dog, has written Out on a Leash: Exploring the Nature of Reality and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2003). Finally in Sage-ing While Age-ing (New York: Atria Books, 2007), she recaps her life, speaks of living in ancient Atlantis, repeats her views on synchronicity, UFOs, and aliens, and predicts a massive transformation of human consciousness on December 21, 2012 (p. 231).
10. Bob Woodward’s revelation that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had sought the advice of Jean Houston, a well-known New Age counselor, caused a news bubble for a few weeks in the summer of 1996, but by December it had largely been forgotten. See Bob Woodward, The Choice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 55-57, 129-35, 271-72, 412-13. Advertisers have made use of the connection: Jean Houston’s photo and an announcement of a November 1996 seminar appeared with the note “friend/advisor to Hillary Clinton” in the Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1996, sec. 14, p. 11. Houston has taught philosophy, psychology, and religion at Columbia University, Hunter College, the New School for Social Research, and Marymount College, and is a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Some of her publications are listed in note 13 below.
11. Jerry Avorn interview with Robert Masters and Jean Houston, “The Varieties of Postpsychedelic Experience,” Intellectual Digest, March 1973, 16.
12. Avorn, “The Varieties,” 18.
13. Jean Houston, “Toward Higher-Level Civilizations,” The Quest, Spring 1990, 42. This general move has been the central theme in her several books, including Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self (New York: Dell, 1980); Godseed: The Journey of Christ (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1992); The Search for the Beloved (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987); A Mythic Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996); Jump Time (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000); and Mystical Dogs (Makawao, HI: Inner Ocean, 2002). Popular sociologist George Leonard, editor of Look magazine before it folded, predicted the same radical transformation and looked forward to “the emergence of a new human nature.” His faith is unshakable: “This new species will evolve” (George Leonard, “Notes on the Transformation,” Intellectual Digest, September 1972, 25, 32). Shirley MacLaine echoes this: both ordinary technology and “inner technology” have advanced, attesting to the “evolution of the human mind” and “a quantum leap in the progress of mankind” (Shirley MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing [New York: Bantam, 1987], 334-35; and Sage-ing While Age-ing, 191-92, 254).
14. “The Guru and the Pandit: Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber in Dialogue,” What Is Enlightenment?, Spring/Summer 2003, 86.
15. “The Guru and the Pandit,” 93.
16. Reading ancient texts in the light of contemporary interests without noting that these texts are being lifted from their intellectual and worldview contexts is a minor industry among modern pundits. In Godseed, for example, Houston reads Jesus in light of second-century Gnostic texts rather than the first-century New Testament documents. The apostle Paul would never confuse his own identity with that of Christ, but Wilber has him doing so: he turns “Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20) into “the ultimate I [of each person] is Christ” (Brief History of Everything, 132). I have discussed such misreadings, giving many illustrations, in Scripture Twisting (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1980), though not by drawing primarily on New Age sources. See also the discussion of Deepak Chopra later in this chapter.
17. Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 205; abridged in Psychology Today, October 1972. In 1983 (rev. 1993) Weil addressed a book on mind-altering drugs to teenagers and their parents. See his From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs, coauthored with Winifred Rosen, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). Here the authors distinguish between drug use (of which they approve) and drug abuse (which they warn against); most chapters on individual types of drugs end with “suggestions and precautions” for the use of such drugs. The chapter on mind-altering drugs, for example, details what one should and should not do to get the feeling of enhanced sensation that the drugs often evoke. Weil and Rosen note in the preface to the second edition that the first edition was banned from some libraries, though I found the book in our local suburban library.
18. Douglas Groothuis remarks that Timothy Leary, the most well-known drug guru of the 1960s and 1970s, “modified his famous credo of the 1960s, ‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out,’ to ‘Turn on, boot up, and jack in,’ commenting that personal computing is ‘the LSD of the 1990s.’” Nonetheless Leary still, at least occasionally, took LSD till near the end of his life. See Douglas Groothuis, “Technoshamanism: Digital Deities,” in The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1997), 105-20. Then too Eugene Taylor reported in 1996 that mind-altering drug use had been making a comeback (“Psychedelics: The Second Coming,” Psychology Today, July/August 1996, 56-59, 84). It is not clear whether this resurgence in drug use was connected with a New Age mindset or was primarily recreational.
19. Brad Lemley, “My Dinner with Andy,” New Age Journal, December 1995, 66. Weil’s books emphasizing health include Health and Healing: Understanding Conventional and Alternative Medicine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983); Natural Health, Natural Medicine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990); and Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Embrace Your Body’s Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). Spontaneous Healing spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list, with expected sales of 400,000 within a few months (Lemley, “My Dinner with Andy,” 66). Though he continues to give instructions for mild forms of meditation (e.g., Spontaneous Healing, 194-209), in his books on healing Weil seems to claim far less for alternative states of consciousness than he has in earlier books. Other Weil books include Marriage of the Sun and Moon: A Quest for Unity in Consciousness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Eight Weeks to Optimum Health (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Healthy Kitchen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); and Healthy Aging (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). For an analysis of Weil’s work, see Paul C. Reisser, MD, Dale Mabe, DO, and Robert Velarde, Examining Alternative Medicine: An Inside Look at the Benefits & Risks (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 140-61.
20. To investigate further the work of these psychologists and brain scientists without getting bogged down in details, see Marilyn Ferguson, The Brain Revolution: The Frontiers of Mind Research (New York: Taplinger, 1973), especially chaps. 1, 3, 6-12, 17, 20-23. Her bibliography provides a good start toward an in-depth study of the early New Age thinkers. The work of those listed in the noted paragraph can be examined in the following: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; reprint, New York: Mentor, 1958), lectures 16-17; C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933), esp. chap. 10; Abraham Maslow, Religious Values and Peak Experiences (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962); Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Stanislav Grof, “Beyond the Bounds of Psychoanalysis,” Intellectual Digest, September 1972, 86-88; for Andrew Weil see notes 17 and 19 above; John Lilly’s most interesting book is The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (New York: Julian, 1972).
21. Groothuis, Unmasking, 80; see his chapter on New Age psychology, 71-91.
22. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1973), and Unfinished Animal: An Adventure in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), and Passages About Earth (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); see also Thompson’s Darkness and Scattered Light (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1978), and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981).
23. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971); Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972); Tales of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); The Eagle’s Gift (New York: Pocket, 1982); The Fire from Within (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984); The Power of Silence (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); The Art of Dreaming (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); Silent Knowledge (Los Angeles: Cleargreen, 1996); The Active Side of Infinity (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); and The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Mexico: Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe (Los Angeles: LA Eidolona, 1998). The more recent of these books, while occasionally showing up on bestseller lists, did not have nearly the public impact of the first three.
Early on readers wondered if Castaneda had not created the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Don Juan out of his own fertile imagination; see the various viewpoints expressed by the critics such as Joyce Carol Oates anthologized in Seeing Castaneda, ed. Daniel C. Noel (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1976). Richard De Mille may be credited with convincingly unmasking the fictional character of Castaneda’s books; see his Castaneda’s Journey (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra, 1976). Nonetheless, in the foreword to The Power of Silence Castaneda maintains, “My books are a true account of a teaching method that Juan Matus, a Mexican Indian sorcerer, used in order to help me understand the sorcerers’ world” (8). Castaneda, always elusive, broke silence for an interview with Keith Thompson in New Age Journal, April 1994, 66-71, 152-56. Here he again defends his work as an anthropologist-participant, but in the process he makes comments that raise more questions than are answered. Nonetheless, anthropologist Clifford Geertz probably speaks for many of his colleagues when he says, “Castaneda’s books have no presence in anthropology” (quoted by Anupama Bhattacharya, “The Reluctant Sorcerer,” www.lifepositive.com/the-reluctant-sorcerer/). Confusion about Castaneda continued to characterize articles that appeared after news of his death. See, for example, Bhattacharya, “The Reluctant Sorcerer”; Keith Thompson, “To Carlos Castaneda, Wherever You Are,” New York Times, June 27, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/06/27/opinion/to-carlos-castaneda-wherever-you-are.html; and Peter Applebome, “Carlos Castaneda, Mystical Writer, Dies 72,” New York Times, June 19, 1998.
24. Capra, Tao of Physics, and chap. 3 in Turning Point; and Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York: Bantam, 1980). See Stephen Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” New York Review of Books, August 8, 1996, 11-15, and Victor J. Stenger, “New Age Physics: Has Science Found the Path to the Ultimate?,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1996, 7-11, for critiques of any attempt to draw metaphysical implications from physical theories such as quantum mechanics; see also Richard H. Bube, Putting It All Together: Seven Patterns for Relating Science and the Christian Faith (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 150-62; and Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 189-219.
25. See, for example, Thomas’s speculation about what happens to human consciousness at death in Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: Bantam, 1975), 60-61. His frequent mention of the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the earth is a single organism—is also common among New Age thinkers.
26. J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
27. An excellent discussion and critique of holistic medicine is found in Paul C. Reisser, Teri K. Reisser, and John Weldon, New Age Medicine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987). This book contains an extensive bibliography for those wishing to pursue the matter in depth.
28. See, for example, Jean Watson, Postmodern Nursing and Beyond (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1999); Vidette Todaro-Franceschi, The Enigma of Energy: Where Science and Religion Converge (New York: Crossroad, 1999); Barbara Blattner, Holistic Nursing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981); Margaret A. Newman, Health as Expanded Consciousness (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1986); Lynn Keegan, The Nurse as Healer (Albany, NY: Delmar, 1994); Dolores Krieger, The Therapeutic Touch (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979); Kathleen Heinrich, “The Greek Goddesses Speak to Nurses,” Nurse Educator 15, no. 5 (1990): 20-24. Two journals promote holistic nursing: The Journal of Holistic Nursing and Nursing Science Quarterly. For a critique of New Age nursing therapies see Sharon Fish, “Therapeutic Touch: Healing Science or Metaphysical Fraud?” and Sharon Fish, “A New Age for Nursing,” Journal of Christian Nursing, Summer 1996, 3-11; other critical articles appear in Winter 1998, Fall 2001, and Summer 2002 issues.
29. Lemley, “My Dinner with Andy,” 68; see as well the books written by Weil and listed in note 19.
30. Though he has been involved for a number of years, Chopra is a relative newcomer to the New Age health limelight; the story of his leaving the Maharishi Mahesh’s Transcendental Meditation movement and his rough reception by conventional medicine is told by Gregory Dennis, “What’s Deepak’s Secret?,” New Age Journal, February 1994, 50-54, 78-79, 128. Among his fifty books, see especially Quantum Healing (New York: Bantam, 1989) and Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (New York: Harmony Books, 1993) for introductions to his view of health. How to Know God (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000) examines the religious dimension of life. For an analysis of Chopra’s view of medicine, see “Deepak Chopra: The Think System and the Revival of Ayurveda” in Reisser, Mabe, and Velarde, Examining Alternative Medicine, 162-93; and Douglas Groothuis’s review of Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen/New World Library, 1995) in Christian Research Journal, Fall 1995, 51, 41. The Library of Congress credits Chopra with over twenty titles since 2000.
31. James A. Herrick’s Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008) analyzes the symbiotic relationship between science fiction and the religious consciousness of the Western world.
32. Shirley MacLaine calls Kubrick a “master metaphysician” in Dancing in the Light (New York: Bantam, 1985), 262.
33. Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; reprint, New York: Berkeley, 1968).
34. Jay Kinney, “The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick,” Gnosis Magazine, Fall/Winter 1985, 6-11.
35. The text of this latter movie reads well and has been published. See Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, My Dinner with André (New York: Grove, 1981).
36. Critical reviews came early in the movement. See, for example, the review of Weil’s The Natural Mind in New York Times Book Review, October 15, 1972, 27-29. Critical reviews of Castaneda’s work are legion. See Time magazine’s cover story, March 5, 1973, 36-45. Several more wide-ranging analyses of the whole movement toward a new consciousness deserve special mention for their penetrating insight: Os Guinness, The Dust of Death, Signature ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), chaps. 6-8; R. C. Zaehner, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism (New York: Vintage, 1974); Samuel McCracken, “The Drugs of Habit and the Drugs of Belief,” Commentary, June 1971, 43-52; Marcia Cavell, “Visions of a New Religion,” Saturday Review, December 19, 1970; and Richard King, “The Eros Ethos: Cult in the Counterculture,” Psychology Today, August 1972, 35-37, 66-70.
37. See Kate Maver, “Oprah Winfrey and Her Self-Help Saviors: Making the New Age Normal,” Christian Research Journal 23, no. 4 (2001), www.equip.org/article/oprah-winfrey-and-her-self-help-saviors; LaTonya Taylor, “The Church of O,” Christianity Today (June 14, 2008), https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/april1/church-oprah-winfrey.html; and Katelyn Beaty, “Another Brick in the Oprah Empire,” www.christianitytoday.com/news/2008/may/another-brick-in-oprah-empire.html.
38. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Dutton/Penguin Group, 2005).
39. Thompson, Passages About Earth, 124.
40. John Lilly calls the brain a “biocomputer” and man a “beautiful mechanism,” upsetting fellow new consciousness buff R. D. Laing (Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 4, 17, 29).
41. Capra, Tao of Physics, and chap. 3 of The Turning Point; Zukav, Dancing Wu Li Masters; MacLaine, Dancing in the Light, 323-24, 329, 351-53.
42. Weil, Natural Mind, chaps. 6-7, and Spontaneous Healing, 113, 203-7. Many, if not most, New Age proponents recognize the close affinity of their notions to those of the East, and some believe this to be a strong indication that they are on the right track, taking the best of both worlds. The syncretistic tendency of the East has already been noted in chapter seven.
43. Eugene Nida and William A. Smalley, Introducing Animism (New York: Friendship, 1959), 50. This brief pamphlet is a remarkable repository of information on modern pagan animism.
44. Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, p. xv.
45. Robert Bellah’s study of individualism in America illuminates one major force behind the New Age emphasis on the self as the kingpin of reality. See Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
46. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 210.
47. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 110.
48. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 51, italics Lilly’s. Laurence LeShan is more modest. He writes, concerning the way post-Einsteinian science views reality, that “within this view, man does not only discover reality; within limits he invents it” (The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist [New York: Viking, 1974], 155).
49. MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing, 192. MacLaine continues to wonder at the vague boundaries between dream and reality throughout Camino, esp. p. 304. See also Houston, Search for the Beloved, 25-26. The casual way MacLaine, Houston, and others use the I AM language of God’s self-revelation in Exodus 3:14 is deeply offensive to traditional Jews and Christians, for whom the term indicates a radical difference between the human and the divine, not the union of the human and the divine. David Spangler, spiritual leader at Findhorn, goes even further than MacLaine: “I AM now the Life of a new heaven and a new earth. Others must draw upon Me and unite with Me to build its forms. . . . There is always only what I AM, but I have revealed Myself in new Life and new Light and new Truth. . . . It is My function through this centre [Findhorn] to demonstrate what I AM through the medium of group evolution.” See David Spangler, Revelation: The Birth of a New Age (Forres, Moray, Scotland: Findhorn, 1971), 110, 121, quoted in Thompson, Passages About Earth, 173. Such writing echoes the words of the god Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (6.29-31). Thompson is hard put to know what to think of this strange elitist language, but he appears to see Spangler as one of the first of the transformed people of the New Age (Thompson, Passages About Earth, 174).
50. Deepak Chopra, The Third Jesus (New York: Harmony Books, 2008), 120; see also Chopra’s Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
51. Chopra, The Third Jesus, 25. The link here to postmodern self should not be overlooked. See later in the chapter on postmodernism, the subheading “The First Thing: Knowing to Meaning.”
52. Marilyn Ferguson, Brain Revolution, 344; “Life at the Leading Edge: A New Age Interview with Marilyn Ferguson,” New Age, August 1982; Weil, Natural Mind, 204-5. Sam Keen (“A Conversation . . . ,” Psychology Today, July 1973, 72) quotes Oscar Ichazo as saying, “Humanity is the Messiah.” Weil, by the way, says, “I am almost tempted to call the psychotics the evolutionary vanguard of our species. They possess the secret of changing reality by changing the mind; if they can use that talent for positive ends, there are no limits to what they can accomplish” (Natural Mind, 182). LeShan would seem to agree (The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 211-12). Thompson in Passages About Earth is optimistic throughout, but see esp. p. 149; twelve years later in “A Gaian Politics,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1986, 4, he expressed some reservations, noting that the spirit of the age had replaced “‘Star Trek’ and ‘Kung Fu’ with ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas,’ Joni Mitchell with Madonna, and ‘Close Encounters’ with ‘Rambo.’”
53. Wilber, Brief History of Everything, 156. Parallel to this are Margaret Newman’s remarks that “consciousness is coextensive with the universe and resides in all matter” and “the person does not possess consciousness—the person is consciousness” (Health as Expanded Consciousness, 33, 36).
54. According to Wilber (Brief History of Everything, 217-19), only one trained in a discipline like Zen is capable of judging whether or not what one is experiencing is a transcendent reality. Knowledge is state-specific; in our ordinary waking consciousness we are unable to judge the reality of experiences of oneness with God, the One, or the universe. Claims to the truth cannot be evaluated by ordinary reason; only the enlightened can know whether a claim is true.
55. Aldous Huxley, quoted in Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (1968; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1971), 249-51.
56. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 13.
57. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 22.
58. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 23. Note the inner contradiction in what Huxley has said. On the one hand, without a new consciousness humanity will not be able to survive on this planet; on the other hand, the self, if it just realized it, is the center of the cosmos. Since the cosmos is eternal (a notion implicit in Huxley’s system), the self is eternal. So why worry about life on earth? This why-worry attitude has been the position of the East for centuries; but it seems that when the West goes East for wisdom it cannot slough off all the Western baggage, one piece of which is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian notion that this present world (people on earth) counts for something.
59. Ken Wilber insists that science is valid in its own domain of physical reality; A Sociable God (Boston: Shambhala, 2005).
60. MacLaine, Out on a Limb (New York: Bantum Books, 1984), 74, and It’s All in the Playing, 265; Castaneda, A Separate Reality; LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 34; Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 25; Albert Rosenfeld, “Mind and Supermind,” Saturday Review, February 22, 1975, 10; Wilber, Brief History of Everything, 156, 240; Klimo, Channeling (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1987), 174-76; Chopra, Third Jesus, 23.
61. MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing, 188.
62. MacLaine, Dancing in the Light, 309.
63. MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing, 331.
64. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 110.
65. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 5.
66. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 89.
67. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 180; also see 10, 54.
68. Ferguson, Brain Revolution, 61-63.
69. Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, 297-98.
70. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 17-18.
71. Others do, however, emphasize the continuity, if not unity, of the self, the visible and the invisible universe. See Ferguson, Brain Revolution, 21; Thompson, Passages About Earth, 97-103, 166; Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 211; Wilber, Brief History of Everything, 156, 240.
72. Allusions to her past lives occur throughout MacLaine’s writings, but a sort of litany of them appears in Dancing in the Light, 366-84.
73. Castaneda, Teachings of Don Juan, 32, 136-38; Separate Reality, 51, 140, 144, 158-59; Journey to Ixtlan, 213-15; Tales of Power, 46, 87-89, 239, 257.
74. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 27, 39, 55-57, 90-91, 199.
75. MacLaine demonstrates this in It’s All in the Playing, 191-93.
76. See Lilly’s chart (Center of the Cyclone, 148-49) detailing and describing his, George I. Gurdjieff’s, and I. K. Taimni’s various levels of consciousness and their labels.
77. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1991), 3, as quoted in James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 306. Bucke also mentions “a quickening of the moral sense,” but this is unusual, as we shall see below.
78. Again, see Lilly’s various levels (Center of the Cyclone, 148-49).
79. MacLaine, Dancing in the Light, 350, italics hers. Houston had such an experience at age six: “It seemed to me as if I knew everything, as if I was everything” (Godseed, xvii).
80. Ferguson, Brain Revolution, 60. See also the descriptions in Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, chaps. 11-18; James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 292-328; LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 86-87, 250; Zaehner, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism, 89-94; Wilber, Brief History of Everything, 156, 240; virtually every discussion of altered states of consciousness will mention many, if not all, of those characteristics. For a more scientific approach to the characteristics of altered states of consciousness, see Arnold M. Ludwig, “Altered States of Consciousness,” in Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings, ed. Charles Tart (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969), 9-22.
81. MacLaine, Dancing in the Light, 202-3, 242-43, 248-49, 269, 341-42, 345, 351, 363-64, 383; and It’s All in the Playing, 173-75.
82. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 306; Thompson, Passages About Earth, 29, 82; Wilber, Brief History of Everything, 189, 233, 235; Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 20, 171, 180; Huxley, Doors of Perception, 39. Wilber, for example, says the more evolved is the better: “The Base Moral Intuition is protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span” (Brief History of Everything, 335). Evil is possible inasmuch as “we want to be whole [have rights] without being a part of anything [have responsibility]” (333).
83. Chopra, Third Jesus, 209.
84. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 55; see also 51, 54-58, 133-40.
85. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 54.
86. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 24-25, 33, 88-90, 169; and Castaneda, throughout his first four books.
87. MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing, 162-71.
88. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 35; L. Huxley, This Timeless Moment, 275-88; Weil, Natural Mind, 83, 95.
89. Keen recounts Ichazo’s notion of the “fall” of man in “Conversation,” 67.
90. Grof, “Beyond the Bounds of Psychoanalysis,” 86-88; Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 17, 35; LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 232-64; James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 306; Zaehner, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism, 44.
91. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). For an explanation of her views and a critique from a Christian perspective see Phillip J. Swihart, The Edge of Death (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987), 25-31; this book contains a useful bibliography of books on near-death and other out-of-body experiences.
92. Raymond J. Moody Jr., Life After Life (New York: Bantam, 1976). Some New Age bookstores have a special section dealing solely with out-of-body experiences.
93. MacLaine, Dancing in the Light, 353-59, 366.
94. MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing, 166.
95. See Christian critics Swihart, Edge of Death, 41-82, esp. 67-69; and Mark Albrecht, Reincarnation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982); for a secular humanist perspective see Melvin Harris, “Are ‘Past-Life’ Regressions Evidence of Reincarnation?,” Free Inquiry, Fall 1986, 18-23; and Paul Edwards’s three-part article “The Case Against Reincarnation,” Free Inquiry, Fall 1986, 24-34; Winter 1986-1987, 38-43, 46-48; Spring 1987, 38-43, 46-49.
96. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 13.
97. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 140. See also Huxley’s novel Island, where he gives many of these new consciousness notions a fuller, imaginative treatment.
98. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, 39. The omitted sentences suggest several nonoccult alternatives, including conceptual relativism.
99. Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1951), 57.
100. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, 58.
101. Stuart Chase, foreword to Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, vi.
102. Robert Masters, Intellectual Digest, March 1973, 18. That his conclusion does not follow from his illustration is beside the point here.
103. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1946), 7.
104. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 7-8.
105. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 8.
106. LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 43. He is relying on Bertrand Russell for the list, but he documents from his own experience and that of clairvoyants he has interviewed.
107. I strongly suspect that there is nothing but a metaphoric relationship between the concept of complementarity used by scientists and the version of conceptual relativism advocated by LeShan and other new consciousness theorizers. See Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” and Stenger, “New Age Physics,” cited in note 24 above, for confirmation. But it is always a good rhetorical ploy to appeal to the prestige of science—even while advocating a worldview that, if practiced, would destroy scientific initiative.
108. The whole of Wilber’s Brief History of Everything is devoted to an elaboration of this schema.
109. Erwin Schrödinger, quoted in Ferguson, Brain Revolution, 19. Of course, if there is no way of measuring the truth of a model of reality, there is no way of measuring its falsity. So the idea that all our models of reality are wrong is a denial of all meaning and a case of ciphered nihilism (see Thielicke, Nihilism, 63-65). To say there are no “true models” of reality in science is not a devastating criticism for those who understand scientific description as providing valid insights into what reality is like but not what reality is (see Bube, Putting It All Together, 15-20).
110. For a different view of the notion of complementarity, see Donald MacKay, The Clockwork Image (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1974), 91-92; and Bube, Putting It All Together, 167-87.
111. See Ferguson, Brain Revolution, 83; Weil, Natural Mind, 67; LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 99, 124, 139, 150; James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 308; Ichazo quoted by Keen, “Conversation,” 70; Lilly, Center of the Cyclone, throughout.
112. LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 125.
113. Weil, Natural Mind, 67. This pragmatic criterion also governs the judgment of Charles Tart and Jon Klimo (Klimo, Channeling, xiv, 23).
114. Weil, Natural Mind, 48, 87.
115. R. D. Laing, quoted by Peter Mezan, “After Freud and Jung, Now Comes R. D. Laing: Popshrink, Rebel, Yogi, Philosopher-King?,” Esquire, January 1972, 171.
116. Laing in Mezan, “After Freud and Jung,” 171.
117. Laing in Mezan, “After Freud and Jung,” 171.
118. Carl Olson’s “Chopra’s Christ: The Mythical Creation of a New Age Panthevangelist” is a long, detailed, critical, and logically and theologically astute review of The Third Jesus, www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/colson_chopra_may08.asp.
119. Chopra, Third Jesus, 8-10.
120. As Carl E. Olson puts it, “No arguments are given, no scholars are quoted, no effort is made to show how and why Chopra accepts one verse [of the Bible] as authentic while dismissing others as somehow distorted or corrupted for ideological ends” (Olson, “Chopra’s Christ”). There are no end of creditable books on the Jesus of history. Chopra might have consulted the work of N. T. Wright, some of whose massive scholarship is found in the series, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 3 vols., The New Testament and the People of God (1992), Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), and The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003); all are published by Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Paul Barnett, Is the New Testament Reliable? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985) is a more popular but still scholarly book.
121. Chopra, Third Jesus, 39, 73.
122. Chopra, Third Jesus, 125.
123. Chopra, Third Jesus, 125-26.
124. Pope, Essay on Man 1.95.
125. Thompson, Passages About Earth, 99.
126. At this point there is little difference between B. F. Skinner and William Irwin Thompson; see Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 180-82; and Passages About Earth, 117-18.
127. Wilber, Brief History of Everything, 336. By “human holon” Wilber means the whole/part complex that constitutes a human being.
128. See, for example, Matthew 7:21-23; Luke 10:20; Acts 8:9-24; 13:8-11; 19:11-20; Galatians 5:19-21; James 3:13-18; Revelation 21:8. See also J. S. Wright and K. A. Kitchen, “Magic and Sorcery,” in New Bible Dictionary, ed. I. Howard Marshall et al., 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1961), 713-17.
129. The word valid goes through some interesting permutations in LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, 99, 108, 150, 154, 210.
130. Perhaps Thielicke would call it ciphered nihilism; see Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism, trans. John W. Doberstein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 36, 63-65.
131. Samuel McCracken, “The Drugs of Habit,” Commentary, June 1971, 49.