Moral code

In one of his widely read books, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis maintains that there exists a "universal, cross-cultural moral code that is binding."  It's something that the West doesn't formally teach anymore.

It's universal and cross-cultural because all cultures hold to a similar ethic. When two people have a disagreement about whether one of them has acted unfairly, their argument is based on a standard that is outside either of them, that demands fair play.  Why?

Lewis develops the idea of a transcendent standard, or moral code, in Mere Christianity and in The Abolition of Man.  Louis Markos, professor at Houston Baptist University and Lewis scholar, explains how Lewis presents this moral code as evidence of a supernatural Creator  in the blog Civitate here.

Sustainable economic growth

Chris, an entrepreneur in Honduras, tells the story of his toy company, Tegu, when you play this video.

There are no miracles here, just lives of people who are involved with this effort to create wealth.   The poor - and all of us - need prosperity.  Where does it come from?  Human inventiveness, ingenuity, imagination and effort applied to available resources.

Rescuing NASA

Larry Bell, a professor at the University of Houston, heads their graduate program in space architecture.  According to Dr. Bell, NASA needs rescuing from "terminal public apathy."

His recommendation?  " . . the government should commercialize all future launch vehicle development and operations.  NASA can then direct its full attention to doing things it's very good at, such as planning future robotic and human planetary exploration missions . ."

Kennedy Space Center was a huge hit with our family when we visited a couple of weeks ago.

photo credit: Boeing

Meaning of the Gosnell trial

Bioethicist and physician Leon Kass "fears that American society risks becoming disrespectful of dignity and indifferent to degradation."  He believes in a "deep moral intuition" that recognizes evil.

"A funny thing happened to me in graduate school," he recalls. "My wife and I spent part of the summer of 1965 in Mississippi doing civil-rights work." The couple lived with a black farmer in Mount Olive, Miss., in a home that had no toilet or indoor plumbing. "I came back from this place with this conundrum: Why was there more honor, goodness and decency in these unschooled black farmers than I found in my fellow graduate students at Harvard, whose enlightened and liberal opinions I shared?"

"The answer, he eventually concluded, was that his black hosts displayed "the dignity of honest work and religion"—things he didn't often find among his highly educated peers, most of whom "were only looking out for Number One." Around the same time, Dr. Kass's reading of Rousseau, C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" (1943) and "Brave New World" (1931) . . led him to see that as science advances, morals don't necessarily improve; that the opposite might well be the case."

He sees the problem stemming from "scientism . . a quasi-religious faith that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name; that scientific knowledge gives you an exhaustive account of the way things are; and that science will transcend all the limitations of our human condition, all of our miseries." 

His view is that transcendent qualities like love and honor arise from outside the material world.  In contrast  to scientism, or materialism, this means that science is not sufficient to explain all of reality.  It's a biblical view (he's Jewish).

Faith in Creator makes sense

Philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College makes a good case for believing in the Creator of the universe in about five minutes, "God or Aethism - Which is More Rational?"

Liberated preference

When the genders have equality of opportunity, as in Sweden, what do they choose to do?  Here's the last point from that article:

"Sweden has gone farther than any nation on earth to integrate the sexes and to offer women the same opportunities and freedoms as men. For decades, these descendants of the Vikings have been trying to show the world that the right mix of enlightened policy, consciousness raising, and non-sexist child rearing would close the gender divide once and for all. Yet the divide persists.

"A 2012 press release from Statistics Sweden bears the title “Gender Equality in Sweden Treading Water” and notes:

• The total income from employment for all ages is lower for women than for men.
• One in three employed women and one in ten employed men work part-time.
• Women’s working time is influenced by the number and age of their children, but men’s working time is not affected by these factors.
• Of all employees, only 13 percent of the women and 12 percent of the men have occupations with an even distribution of the sexes.

"Confronted with such facts, some Swedish activists and legislators are demanding more extreme and far-reaching measures, such as replacing male and female pronouns with a neutral alternative and monitoring children more closely to correct them when they gravitate toward gendered play. When it came to light last year that mothers, far more than fathers, chose to stay home from work to care for their sick toddlers, Ulf Kristersson, minister of social security, quickly commissioned a study to determine the causes of and possible cures for this disturbing state of affairs.

"I have another suggestion for Kristersson and his compatriots: acknowledge the results of your own 40-year experiment. The sexes are not interchangeable. When Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, studied the preferences of women and men in Western Europe, her results matched those of the aforementioned Pew study. Women, far more than men, give priority to domestic life. The Swedes should consider the possibility that the current division of labor is not an artifact of sexism, but the triumph of liberated preference."

Fewer women at the top

The question raised in the last post was, "How can it be that societies like Sweden, where gender equity is relentlessly pursued and enforced, have fewer female managers, executives, professionals, and business owners than the laissez-faire United States?"

Swedish economists Magnus Henrekson and Mikael Stenkula suggest this answer: “Broad-based welfare-state policies impede women’s representation in elite competitive positions.”

In Sweden, a parent has the right to work just six hours per day when (s)he returns to work following  the 16-month parental leave.  Extended leave and part-time hours allow more time to parent those children    -and they diminish the likelihood of upper level responsibility.  Move-up opportunity tends to come to those who give more to the job, understandably.

Author Christina Hoff Sommers says, "Generous parental leave policies and readily available part-time options have unintended consequences: instead of strengthening women’s attachment to the workplace, they appear to weaken it."  Read her article here.

One more observation should be made in connection with this story.

Glass ceiling: Sweden/America

Sweden holds gender integration as a national priority.  Parental leave from a job amounts to 16 months with pay, and government agencies (such as "Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality") exist to level the playing field for women.

But the question for feminists might be why the United States, with somewhat fewer gender equalization regulations, seems to be ahead of Sweden, the U.K., Germany, and others "when it comes to closing the gender gap in “economic participation and opportunity," (information from the World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2012).

"Though the United States has fewer women in the workforce (68 percent compared to Sweden’s 77 percent), American women who choose to be employed are far more likely to work full-time and to hold high-level jobs as managers or professionals. They also own more businesses, launch more start-ups, and more often work in traditionally male fields. As for breaking the glass ceiling in business, American women are well in the lead . ." (from the article, "Lessons from a Feminist Paradise on Equal Pay Day")

Some recent studies offer explanations that could surprise you -- or not -- in the next post.

Growth is good

When the "pie" of wealth in a nation or community gets bigger, we know that the risk takers who organized production and trade around their idea (entrepreneurs) make money. But they are not the only ones who are benefited.

They sell a product that appeals to consumers, who think it worth the price, and purchase it in their own self interest.  This is basic free trade.

And if the business is successful, it also provides jobs for employees.  Going back to the WSJ book review of Why Growth Matters:  "Over the past two decades, India's economic reforms . . . have pulled nearly 200 million people out of poverty."

A whole nation profits when their economic pie grows:  entrepreneurs, employees, consumers.

Wealth should grow

Today in Wall Street Journal online is a review of Why Growth Matters  by Columbia University economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya.  Their central idea:

"[India's] post-1991 transformation "from a basket case into a powerful engine of growth" . . .  unambiguously proves something that many on the Indian left remain in denial about: that a rapidly expanding economy is the best antidote to poverty."  

A "rapidly expanding economy" is another way of saying that the total pie of wealth, so to speak, is getting bigger.  This is a good thing.

Here's another review of the book by George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics 2001:

“Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya are two of the great intellectual lights behind one of the greatest miracles of economic history: the economic reform of India, and its subsequent takeoff.  It is not just the well-to-do who have benefited, but, especially, the poor.  The lessons from the spirit of 1991 are not just relevant for India today; they are also of prime importance for the billions of citizens of low income countries around the globe.”

Forgiveness

When you read about real forgiveness in real life, it may not be a pretty picture.  Catherine Larson discusses tragedy and hope in Rwanda.

Faith is

The faith of the Bible is rational, it makes sense, it explains humanity.  It has beauty and goodness.  It cannot be proved but there is much very good evidence for believing in the God of the Bible. There are also valid questions of doubt that can be asked, for which we don't have a perfect answer.

Other views of the world exist, and they try to answer certain questions we all ask.  But none of them are provable either despite the rants you may hear.

Get the answers to questions you have about your faith and other worldviews.  You will find satisfying answers, and you will find some questions still stay out of our reach.

But there is a choice to be made.  While you construct your life, will you live like God exists or like He doesn't?  Understand that a choice to do nothing is a choice.

Christianity starts with the choice to say yes to the God of the Bible Who sent Jesus Christ into the world to redeem us.

Faith isn't

When it comes to faith, a clarification is in order.  If it means a series of stories or "narratives" that we like to listen to, or a culture we enjoy, this is not enough.  If it's true for me but not for others, this is not enough.  It's not the faith of the Bible.

Darrow Miller explains the transformation he went through when his friend told him that "Christianity is true even if you don't believe it:"

"One of the milestones in my life was 1969 in L’Abri, Switzerland. Marilyn and I were studying  with the Schaeffers. We were living in the home of Udo and Debbie (Schaeffer) Middelmann. One Sunday evening Udo said to me “You know, Christianity is true even if you do not believe it!” These words were a shock to me. In church, in my discipleship program, and in seminary, I had been taught that Christianity was true precisely because I believed it."  (read the post)

"Pop culture's most popular tv show . . "

" . . is - brace yourself - The Bible."  This surpasses even American Idol for the same week.   Looks like a lot of people are interested in the Bible!

Acculturated says in this article that major movie studios still don't make much of an effort to produce for this audience.  There could be several reasons for this.  But it cannot be that faith-respectful work doesn't have an audience, that it cannot produce a profitable return.

Playing God

Is it arrogant to create new forms of life?  Is it playing God?  Lots of people might think it's just wrong.  Author Fazale Rana sheds some light on this issue, I think, so here are his own words from Creating Life in the Lab:

"The attempts of scientists and biotechnologists to "play God" are really no different from any other human creative activity.  Everything we do as human beings can be rightly understood as playing God because we are made in God's image (see Genesis 1:27).  In this sense we create because we bear the image of a God who is the Creator.  And since God made life, it was only a matter of time before we would discover how to make life from the materials and templates He provided . . .

"Humility is key, because with humility comes the all-important reverence for God and an awareness of the innate moral weakness of human nature.

"The ability to create artificial life will usher in a brave new world, but it need not bring a future of icy darkness, a world that Christians fear or eschew.  It can be one we engage and embrace and influence for good."

Creation caretakers

"Scripture teaches that humans are to act as earth's caretakers (see Genesis 1:26-28 and 2:15).  The opportunity to design and re-engineer microbes to produce renewable resources will help us to carry out this mandate."

One of Venter & Smith's goals is to "engineer a synthetic bacterium that can generate hydrogen gas, providing a renewable form of clean energy."  I 'd gladly wait in line to fuel my car with something clean made in our own country rather than from imported oil, benefiting the environment and the balance of world power at the same time.

"The Bible also teaches that we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves (see Matthew 22:39). . . Surely providing treatment, comfort, and hope for the sick is one way we can love our neighbors.  Again, artificial microbes will play a role in finding new therapies and possible cures . . . ."

So there's a strong case to be made for the potential blessing mankind will enjoy from new artificial life forms.

But there's at least one more issue that must be addressed: "playing God."  Tomorrow.

Artificial life: excitement or horror

Continuing from Creating Life in the Lab:

Craig Venter became known for unconventional but effective methods that led to a race to map the human genome.  "Once again [he] has generated a mixture of excitement and horror among the scientific community and the public at large with the announcement that he, like Victor Frankenstein, has decided to create life in the lab."

In the horror category would be worries like these:  Is it arrogant to play God?  Will they wind up unleashing a disaster?  Will these new life forms get out of control?  Will this project prove that God is unnecessary?

"To accomplish his goal, Venter has founded Synthetic Genomics, Inc.  This new company is devoted to making artificial, nonnatural life - microbes that have commercial utility, particularly for the production of ethanol, hydrogen, and other forms of renewable energy."

Author Fazale Rana is in the excitement camp.  "It is just a matter of time before Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith produce Mycoplasma Laboratorium and multiple variants derived from this minimal life form . . . the floodgates will open. . . The creation of artificial life will be a boon for science and technology."

In addition to his practical take on artificial life, he has a distinctly Christian take on it.  Next post.

Artificial life

Biochemist Fazale Rana thinks that soon we will see the actual creation of artificial life.  Speaking from his viewpoint as a Christian, and in contrast to some opinions, he is just fine with this.

But exactly what is this new development going to be?  Creating Life in the Lab explains in a lot of chemical detail what scientists are working on.

Craig Venter's organization has set a goal to "engineer a synthetic bacterium" they will call "mycoplasma laboratorium."  So far they have "identified the minimum genetic requirements for life, synthesized the genomes of two simple microbes from basic chemical constituents, and figured out how to insert a synthetic genome into a bacterial cell."

"They have been able to combine all these steps to create a synthetic version of a bacterium.  All that's left is to use their methodology to make a novel, artificial genome and implant it into a bacterial cell, and the research team will have created the first artificial organism."

Always reforming

Alistair McGrath is a Christian British professor and author of a lot of good books (I've read some).  One is "Christianity's Dangerous Idea."

He says that the dangerous idea is the very foundation of Protestantism:  from the start and right up until now, that idea is that every Christian has the right to interpret scripture according to his own conscience.

Especially my Catholic friends will immediately see the inherent danger, which is instability.  But there's also inherent advantages of dynamism.

"There are dangers to the subjectiveness that comes with this form of religion, but, McGrath suggests, there are advantages as well. Protestant movements that are perpetually changing are usually also perpetually re-examining themselves, asking, “Could we do this better?” The principle of semper reformanda (always reforming) applies just as much now as it did in Luther’s day."  (from breakpoint.org)

Excuse

We have been traveling for a week and I have blown three days worth of posting, not good! Thanks for hanging in there with me, and we'll get back on track.

Without Babies

Demographics, statistical data of a population, is now a popular subject. It's gone from a narrow slice of esoteric interest all the way to a global concern.  Incredibly, we've gone from a prediction of too many people (The Population Bomb of the 1970's) to worrying about much fewer people.

Japan's birthrate is only 1.39 babies per woman, far below the necessary birthrate just to maintain a population (2.1).

A NY Times article last December reports that rural towns in Japan are bereft of young people, that typically over half of the residents are more than 65 years old!  Culture will change, it's inevitable.

When there's only two people under the age of 65 for every one over the age of 65, that's potentially quite a burden on the working one or two.

I've reserved a new book, What to Expect When No One's Expecting.  It opens with a quote from the Prime Minister of Hungary:

"If you are not able to maintain yourself biologically, how do you expect to maintain yourself economically, politically, and militarily?  It's impossible.  The answer of letting people from other countries come in . . that could be an economic solution, but it's not a solution of your real sickness, that you are not able to maintain your own civilization."