Inactive: Thomas C. Reeves
On Authority
Few lessons in life are more important than understanding where you go to find truth. When I was growing up, the search for authority was much simpler than it is today. Or so it seemed. We trusted our professors and memorized much of the assigned textbooks. Everyone believed that the New York Times and the Encyclopedia Britannica were authoritative. When weighing the value of books, we learned to choose the more reputable publisher. Few doubted the veracity of Time and Newsweek. Walter Cronkite’s pronouncements were venerated. On the deepest issues of life, you were expected to accept the teachings of your religious denomination. Catholics and Lutherans, among others, memorized the right questions and answers in order to be confirmed. Skeptics, cynics, and people with lots of questions were not the most popular people in town during the first two decades following the Second World War.
How vastly different is our own situation, as we try to distinguish fact from fancy and know right from wrong. Education at all levels today is saturated with ideology, and fashionable multiculturalism pretends to deny all certainty. Some of the best books are published by little known presses, and the most valuable articles often appear in small circulation magazines. The New York Times lost its objectivity decades ago, and best reveals its bias in the tirades of Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman.
Our churches today play only relatively minor roles in the affairs of an increasingly secular nation, and only the Roman Catholic Church has a catechism that spells out exactly and completely what it officially believes. Recent data shows that Americans switch churches the way people used to switch hats. This perpetual motion has more to do, one suspects, with popular music, friendliness, and glib sermons than religious dogma.
Millions today consult the Internet to find truth, often consulting those sources that are in harmony with one’s ideological views. Seeing only one side of an issue, of course, is not an educational ideal. Many, especially the young, consult Wikipedia, because it comes up quickly on Google. But as any sophisticated reader quickly learns, this source of information, open to revision by the public, is rarely the last word. (It has its strengths, however. Where else, for example, could one find so succinct and balanced an account of the life of Carole Landis?) Any interpretation of fact and fiction can be found on the Internet. In the beta version of its start page, Yahoo has included Astrology as a major source of information. Why not?
In the hard sciences and mathematics, of course, there is a solid body of knowledge that is demonstrably true and must be learned. But a great many scientists, ever so proud of their objectivity, also spout ideology. When asked about the larger meaning of their narrow findings, they often launch into opinions that cannot be verified with scientific scrutiny. A case in point is the theory of evolution. One of its critics, University of California law professor Phillip E. Johnson, published some interesting thoughts on the topic recently in Touchstone magazine.
Johnson notes that the great majority of evolutionary biologists point to idiot, random chance to explain existence. We are assured that “this remarkably complex instruction book, written with a billion chemical letters in a fantastically ingenious code, is the product, not of God’s intelligence, but of the mindless accumulation of random mutations by natural selection (differential reproduction).” This Darwinian mechanism somehow “has the creative power not only to write the instruction book, but also to evolve molecular machines that can understand the instructions and act upon them.”
In fact, Johnson states, this atheistic explanation of existence is a matter of faith, lacking the information to make it more than that. And this faith is strongly held within the scientific profession in large part because no one dares challenge it. “No serious scientist publicly disputes a professional consensus because those who dispute the consensus are not taken seriously.” Which is to say that it is professional suicide to challenge this particular dogma. When certainty abounds, “a scientific community sometimes feels it must present a united front and must dismiss dissenting arguments as unworthy of consideration so they do not achieve the legitimization that comes from being debated.”
If that is true of the scientific ranks, think how tenaciously the assumptions and beliefs of humanists and social scientists are held. It is no accident (or product of enlightenment) that leftist conformity has a stranglehold on academia. This tightly controlled faith in action is seen in speech codes and persecutions of conservative dissenters, of course, but it is viewed in its clearest light by the secularism and moral and aesthetic anarchy taught in the classroom by lock-step faculties.
How is one to find truth today? By tenaciously seeking it, on your own, in study and debate. Lots of informed, literate, probing, carefully reasoned debate, now almost impossible to find on campus or in the media.
- Wrong, wrong, wrong by Jonathan Dresner (March 25, 2008 at 4:46 PM)
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