Breakpoint

In a recent article in Christianity Today, Judd Birdsall of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University analyzed the differences between how the Biden Administration has handled religious liberty concerns so far, and how his predecessor did. The article provides a critical lesson in how religious freedom is so often misunderstood, both in terms of the relationship between church and state and in terms of conscience rights across the board. First, there's the seriousness of the issue. Birdsall, in arguing that the State Department under President Trump had exaggerated claims of global religious oppression, described the different ways that the data can be measured and reported. This seems a strange statement to make. As a friend said to me in response to the article, "Whether it's 80% of the world's population or it's 56 nations that are in trouble, it is still a huge problem." Birdsall also took issue with tone and tenor difference between Trump officials and Biden officials, claiming that the previous administration was too boastful about its commitment to religious liberty. Instead, wrote Birdsall, America should be known for "not only a higher level of respect for religious freedom but also more honesty about shortcomings and actively addressing them." There's nothing in this statement I'd disagree with. But the answer doesn't hinge solely on humility without international action. Nor humility without acknowledging national shortcomings when it comes to restricting the religious freedoms of our own citizens. In the wake of the nationalism, totalitarianism, and religious-based oppression of the last several decades, we should acknowledge and celebrate the fact that the U.S. government finally put the first freedom at the forefront of its international relationships. In contrast,the Biden administration so far has followed the Obama administration's second-term tack in placing LGBTQ and abortion access concerns front and center in international dealings. A more humble government would stop targeting and restricting the conscience rights of private business owners like Jack Phillips and Barronelle Stutzman, or religious institutions like Christian colleges and orders of nuns. Birdsall accurately traces the history of these two competing views of religious liberty. The first he calls "The First Freedom" view, based on the place of religious freedom within the Bill of Rights. The other he calls "the Article 18" view, based on the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights definition of religious freedom. In the former view, religious freedom is the first freedom. It's the basis for many other freedoms essential for human and social flourishing. In the latter view, spiritual things are protected as a matter of personal choice, and it might be necessary to defer religious freedom to other human rights. Birdsall admits that the Biden administration holds an "Article 18" view of freedom, seeing religious liberty as something to be worked out in light of other freedoms, especially sexual freedom. That view is opposed right in the very first issue of Christianity Today in an article written by its founding editor, Carl Henry. Henry pondered the fragile basis for freedom in the West, arguing that champions of liberty far too often argued for it on a secular, individualistic basis. For Henry, this was woefully insufficient. The only hope for maintaining liberty, he thought, was for us to reorient ourselves to "the proper foundations of freedom." Religious liberty is properly understood as the first freedom, not as a mere side effect of other freeedoms. It guarantees other proper rights of citizens, religious or not, because it is based upon a particular vision of the kind of creatures we citizens are. In particular, that we do not belong—either in mind or body—to the state or to a particular interest group. We belong, in our consciences, to God. Any other basis of freedom subjects all freedoms to death by a thousand qualifications. To borrow from St. Anselm, there is an ontological primacy to religious freedom because itrelativizes the consistent but vain attempts of the state to claim preeminence. Of course it's true that God really does reign above all earthly powers, but you don't even have to believe that to know that without robust protections for religious freedom, all of our other rights will have no higher court of appeal than whomever currently holds the keys of power.

The road to hell, paved with good intentions, leads to some unpleasant travelling companions. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. This is BreakPoint. According to a recent article in World magazine, several Australian states have initiated or expanded the practice of euthanasia "down under." Similar measures were expanded across the Tasman by New Zealand last year, and across the globe in Spain, but failed in Portugal. Canada's death laws are being expanded through appeals to allow the mentally ill to die, while Holland and Belgium are still racing to see how far this road actually goes. Here at home, ten U.S. states have "death with dignity" laws. Every one of these laws advances by an appeal to compassion. It is merciful, we are told, to allow the ill to end their pain in death. Denying death to those who suffer robs human beings of their innate dignity and our future of "a happier world." Death can be, the rhetoric goes, a gift of love. Couched in explicitly moral terms, euthanasia is offered as the only ethical choice, opposite of heartlessness and cruelty. The word games played in the euthanasia debate would be impressive if they weren't so evil. Words such as "illness," "pain," "compassion," "mercy," and "dignity," are moving targets. It's the same game played by some of the worst villains in history. The movie Ich Klage An (or "I Accuse" in English) was released in German in 1941. In the film, the accused is a society and legal system that refuses to let a young woman die. Hanna Heyt, who suffers greatly from MS, wishes to end her pain. Her doctor refuses but her scientist husband complies. He's brought to trial for murder, only to level his own accusation against society for its heartlessness in the face of needless agony. With a few stylistic edits and updated production, one could easily imagine this compassionate appeal for "death with dignity" hitting a theater or streaming service today. It's all there: a fresh young face full of promise shackled by an incurable disease, making an earnest plea for a merciful end to her suffering. A husband's compassionate struggle to aid his loved one in getting what she wants, offering wise and carefully nuanced counsel to the resisting authorities. The anguished husband's accusation hits not just the judges, but an entire culture's supposedly cold heart. Ich Klage An was produced at the behest of the infamous Joseph Goebbels and his Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, with the goal of selling his new euthanasia program for the chronically ill and disabled. It worked. The movie was so compelling, the Allies banned it in 1945 for its role in enabling the Holocaust. Our idea of Nazi propaganda is probably more the goose-stepping hyenas in The Lion King but, as one commentator put it: … Ich Klage An comes across as a well-made, balanced melodrama. Unlike other propaganda films made during the time, there is little Nazi imagery or rhetoric. Yet dig a little deeper, it soon becomes apparent just how slyly and insidiously it pushes active euthanasia. The film and regime's same utilitarian view of human dignity advances so-called "death with dignity" laws in our age. And, like the German extermination initiatives, these laws expand every time they are tried. The debate begins with those near death, and quickly expands to those who are terminal, then to those with incurable disease, then to those with permanent conditions, then to the disabled, and finally to the depressed and mentally ill. First, consent is required. Then, it is implied. Finally, it is unnecessary. Those who advance euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide laws should have to demonstrate how their arguments differ from Nazi propaganda. If they don't, it's time to ask hard questions about this movement expanding so quickly around the world.

John and Shane field a question from a listener who is wondering how to not only build a theology of being fired, but how he can evangelize his friends to build a theology of being fired. Shane then reads a question from a listener who responded to a BreakPoint podcast who was disappointed with how John approached dead naming. The piece was about Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page. John provides and understanding for the listener, and shares his appreciation to handle relationships appropriately. Finally, John responds to a question from a listener who desires to wrestle with racial issues, specifically in his church, without succumbing to Critical Race Theory.

John and Shane field a question from a listener who is wondering how to not only build a theology of being fired, but how he can evangelize his friends to build a theology of being fired. Shane then reads a question from a listener who responded to a BreakPoint podcast who was disappointed with how John approached dead naming. The piece was about Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page. John provides and understanding for the listener, and shares his appreciation to handle relationships appropriately. Finally, John responds to a question from a listener who desires to wrestle with racial issues, specifically in his church, without succumbing to Critical Race Theory.

In the book River Out of Eden, Oxford biologist and atheist superstar Richard Dawkins famously wrote: "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." Dawkins and other "new atheists" have long insisted that science has excluded the possibility of a creator or has, at least, rendered it unnecessary. Turns out this belief may be scientifically out of date. According to a new book, the biggest discoveries of the last century challenge a materialistic worldview and call science back to its theistic roots. Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen Meyer wrote two books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, that both argue against materialist accounts of biology. His latest book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, makes an even more ambitious claim. Three key twentieth century discoveries, argue Meyer, challenge materialist assumptions and point, not just to an intelligent designer, but to a transcendent God. He recently joined my colleague Shane Morris on the Upstream podcast to talk about the book. Not only were most of the founders of modern science devout Christians, the scientific method itself emerged from assumptions found only in a Christian worldview, such as the intelligibility of nature and the need to constantly test our fallen intuitions against the facts. Tracing science from its theistic beginnings, Meyer shows how it gradually lost its way and became tethered to materialism. Famed scientists like Laplace, Hume, and Darwin came to believe that the "God hypothesis" was no longer necessary to explain the natural world, that the universe required no cause beyond itself. Given the opportunity and enough time, living things could arise and evolve on their own. Since the conditions for life were simple and the universe had existed from eternity, here we are. These assumptions went largely unchallenged until the twentieth century. However, breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, and biology began to undermine materialism. For example, telescopes began to challenge the proponents (Einstein being one) of a steady-state universe. More and more evidence mounted that the universe was, in fact, not eternal, as many scientists had long assumed. If instead the universe came into being at some point in time, it must have had a cause outside of itself, To be clear, there must be a cause outside of space, time, matter, and energy. Another discovery was how finely tuned the universe is. The very laws that govern the cosmos, such as gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, and the cosmological constant, are precisely calibrated in such a way that makes life possible. There's not a compelling way to explain this "Goldilocks universe," one "just right" that could have been otherwise, within a naturalistic worldview. As English astronomer and former atheist Fred Hoyle put it, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics…" And then, there's the discovery Meyer has already devoted two other books to exploring: Materialists long thought that Darwin's theory was a silver bullet against design arguments. Darwin, however, knew nothing about DNA, the inner structure of the cell, or the crucial role information plays in the existence and propagation of life. The more we learn about them, the more outdated this "God is no longer necessary" hypothesis seems to be. Simply put, Dawkins got it wrong. The universe we live in has properties one would expect if it were, in fact, designed by a God who had us in mind when He made the place. As Myer's book shows, this assumption was an original conviction of many who launched and drove the scientific revolution. It's the conviction of a growing number of scientists today who are willing to challenge the powers that be and admit the design they see in the heavens, the laws of nature, and under the microscope. As Meyer puts it, "The evidence is crying out for a God hypothesis." Come to BreakPoint.org and we'll tell you how to get a copy of Stephen Meyer's The Return of the God Hypothesis. We'll also link you to his conversation with Shane Morris on the Upstream podcast.

Emilie Kao is the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. She is presenting at the Wilberforce Weekend. She will share her passion for protecting and defending the rights of children and how her campaign reflects the image of God. Emilie has defended religious freedom for the last 14 years. Kao has worked on behalf of victims of religious freedom violations in East Asia, the Middle East, Europe and South Asia at the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom and Becket Law. Previously, she worked at the United Nations and Latham and Watkins. Kao also taught international human rights law at George Mason University Law School as an adjunct law professor. She earned an A.B. degree in Near Eastern Civilizations and Languages at Harvard-Radcliffe College and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kao is a member of the Supreme Court Bar and the bar associations of California and the District of Columbia.

Emilie Kao is the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. She is presenting at the Wilberforce Weekend. She will share her passion for protecting and defending the rights of children and how her campaign reflects the image of God. Emilie has defended religious freedom for the last 14 years. Kao has worked on behalf of victims of religious freedom violations in East Asia, the Middle East, Europe and South Asia at the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom and Becket Law. Previously, she worked at the United Nations and Latham and Watkins. Kao also taught international human rights law at George Mason University Law School as an adjunct law professor. She earned an A.B. degree in Near Eastern Civilizations and Languages at Harvard-Radcliffe College and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kao is a member of the Supreme Court Bar and the bar associations of California and the District of Columbia.

In 2018, comedian John Mulaney closed out his opening monologue as host of Saturday Night Live with this quip about one of the strangest new normals today which didn't exist just a few years ago: "You spend a lot of your day telling a robot that you're not a robot." Artificial intelligence is one of the new normals of contemporary life. Every time we access data on the web, every customer service call we make, every ordering process we start involves not just using, but communicating with, a machine. Smart phones, smart cars, smart networks—artificial minds are now the gatekeepers of information, transportation, and commerce. In sci-fi, the story always ends with computers evolving past and outclassing human minds. Sometimes they're dangerous; sometimes they're helpful; and sometimes, most unsettlingly, they cannot be differentiated from humans. Lurking behind the fantasy is an important question: What happens if we create something that's smarter than us? Still, computer engineers and neuroscientists continue to push science fiction to science fact. The problem with these efforts, a recent article in the online magazine Salon notes, is that the quest for artificial intelligence tends to "treat intelligence computationally." Attempts to recreate and even surpass the computational abilities of the human brain have succeeded. Computers can now play games and analyze images faster and better than humans. At the same time, there's real doubt as to whether machines are anywhere near matching wits with their creators. According to a piece last year in The Guardian, "Despite the vast number of facts being accumulated, our understanding of the brain appears to be approaching an impasse." It's estimated that about 95 percent of brain activity involves what are called spontaneous fluctuations, or neural impulses, independent of both conscious thought and outside influence. That's a problem that shuts machines down. As the Salon piece puts it, "For computers, spontaneous fluctuations create errors that crash the system, while for our brains, it's a built-in feature." Uniquely human thought arises from this chaos, unpredictable and unreproducible. What we think of as intelligence—reason, logic, and processing—may instead be the end result of consciousness, not the means of achieving it. While Salon's analysis is helpful, it misses something essential. Their analysis assumes that the mind and the brain are identical, that there's nothing more to our minds than "meat." While this is a common assumption of a naturalistic worldview, it's a worldview that will never be big enough to explain human cognition, much less motivation and behavior. David Gelernter's analysis , given 20 years ago after the chess playing program Deep Blue beat the world's top player, says it better: How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind? … What are its apres-match plans if it beats Kasparov? Is it hoping to take Deep Pink out for a night on the town? It doesn't care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose. Or as philosopher Mortimer Adler noted over thirty years ago: "[T]he brain is not the organ of thought … an immaterial factor in the human mind is required." We've made great strides in understanding certain elements of our biology as well as our ability to imitate certain behaviors with machines. But, it's just that. Only an imitation. As Gelernter put it, "Computers do what we make them do, period. However sophisticated the computer's performance, it will always be a performance." The more we learn of the brain and of human consciousness, the more it affirms that humans are not just meaty machines.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this particular book, Charles Darwin addressed the questions he raised about human beings in his earlier book On the Origin of Species, specifically "whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form . . ." Not surprisingly, Darwin's answer was "yes." At that time, in 1871, genetics as we understand it now was completely unknown. Even paleontology was still in its infancy as a field of science. So, Darwin's work was, essentially, speculation based on very limited physical evidence. Darwin's successors were to find the evidence needed to support his conclusion. That task, as it turns out, hasn't gone all that well. At least that's the conclusion of a recent study published in the journal Science. Researchers from The American Museum of Natural History conducted the study and summed up its findings with this devastating headline: "Most Human Origins Stories Are Not Compatible with Known Fossils." According to the study's lead author, "When you look at the narrative for hominin [bipedal apes including modern humans] it's just a big mess—there's no consensus whatsoever … People are working under completely different paradigms." In other words, multiple explanations for human origins are all held as true, but many are incompatible and contradictory. They simply can't all be true. The problem is not a shortage of fossils. It's that, as the article put it, "many of these fossils show … combinations of features that do not match expectations for ancient representatives of the modern ape and human lineages." In other words, the fossils are so different that they cannot be ancestors of modern primates, much less human beings. And, this isn't just the reality when it comes to human evolution. As my colleague Shane Morris noted, "The more you look at the tidy evolutionary stories linking one group of organisms to another, the more you see this same pattern unfold." To be clear, this sort of thing just shouldn't happen in any scientific field. It certainly doesn't happen in other fields, at least not to this degree. The real-world "mess" described in the article flatly contradicts the unshakeable confidence that often characterizes naturalistic evolutionary statements about human origins. Almost every pronouncement ends with some version of "The science is clear about this," a sort of materialist equivalent of "Thus saith the Lord!" When asked how we can know that the current evolutionary narrative is true, scientist explainers quickly point to the fossil record and our nearest animal relatives, the great apes. However, as this study in the journal Science points out, the actual physical evidence for what the late philosopher Michael Stove has called "fables of evolution" is in scant supply. Given the lack of actual physical evidence, a bit more humility is in order. Paleontology isn't like physics or chemistry where the proof is in the laboratory pudding. There is ample physical evidence that it's called the atomic bomb. The best paleontology has to offer is an inference to the best explanation, with "best" being a relative term and (should be) subject to change depending on the state of the evidence. Bluntly, the evidence simply does not warrant the level of confidence that often accompanies Darwinian explanations of human origins. It certainly doesn't warrant what Michael Stove called the "calumny" that reduces human beings to little more than lucky apes, or even less. To their credit, the authors of this study on the science of human origins, just in time for the 150th anniversary of Darwin's book on human origins, acknowledge the state of evidence and admit the "mess." Darwinian evangelists should do the same.

John and Maria discuss the rising tensions in the Middle East. They explain some of the finer points related to the conflict and why it requires sober thinking and a worldview big enough for the world. Maria then asks John for greater context on a number of stories from the week, and they discuss the sad state of many in the transgender community through the lens of a recent interview Ellen Page conducted with Oprah. John also provides additional commentary on a new movement calling some Christians to leave their churches. The movement is called the #LeaveLoud movement, and it urges people to leave churches they don't feel are encouraging them specifically related to race.