Introduction to Worldviews, part 3 with Dr. Jeff Myers
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Dr. Jeff Myers: A reason people began to dispense with knowledge is: They felt there was a short-term immediate concern that trumped the need to grow in knowledge.
There’s a well-known evangelist named Dwight L Moody. There’s a college formed in his honor. One of our professors here at Summit teaches at that College. Dwight L Moody was an evangelist. And he believed that time was so short, that the world was going to be destroyed, that there was no point in doing anything that didn’t ultimately have the goal of evangelism. He put it this way:
“I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”
So, if the world is a wrecked vessel, there’s no more point in going to get a doctoral degree in studying economics then there would be in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it sinks. You could do it, but it’s pointless.
Now, we have a lot of people in our Summit community – we’ve had astronauts, warriors, there’s a Summit dad who is a famous race car driver – which is really interesting, Because, if you start to talk to people in different fields – artists and all these different people – and they don’t say to you, “Well, I’m a race car driver because I knew if I became really good at it, I would have a platform from which to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ”, or, “I’m going to become a football player and take 10,000 really hard hits from 330-pound lineman so that I can testify to the goodness of Jesus Christ.” People don’t usually think that way. They go into those fields because of something about that field that drives them and interests them. But, if Dwight L. Moody is right, the only reason you would try to find success in any endeavor is because you actually believe that if you create enough credibility for yourself, then you can share the Gospel; and you will have done what you’re supposed to do.
So, why would you get a doctoral degree in economics, and study for five years in school, and then spend every three years in your career trying to write a new academic paper that’s only going to be read by 500 people?
See, a lot of Christians look at that and say, “Now you’ve crossed the line. That’s useless. There is no point in that. There’s no point in becoming an artist because that’s not going to win any converts.” So, some people have this idea: Time is so short. Our only job is to make sure people go to heaven when they die. This world, itself, is irrelevant.
There’s another reason people don’t try to pursue knowledge, It’s because they believe that our job is to create an alternate reality. Shane Claybourne is what some people would call a Neo-Anabaptist Separatist. That’s the actual academic term. In other words, he believes Christians should withdraw from society, and create their own communities that are so attractive to the rest of the world that the rest of the world wants to come and join them. That is his fundamental belief about the world. He says things like this in his talks:
“Jesus taught that his followers… should not attempt to ‘run the world.’”
I don’t know anybody who’s saying that the followers of Jesus should actually run the world, so that maybe a little bit of a strawman argument. But the point he’s getting at is: If you asked him, “Should you vote?” No. You shouldn’t vote. To vote is to give power to a system that is inherently corrupt. It can’t be fixed. We have to create alternate communities and separate from the rest of the world. Should you join the military? No. You shouldn’t join the military. To join the military is to fight for a system that is corrupt. You should never do that. Should you join the police force? No. You should never join the police force, because you’re using force to support a system that’s inherently corrupt. We need to create alternate systems. That’s all Christians are called to do.
There’s yet another view that you see today; and it’s kind of a reformed view. Daryl Hart teaches at Hillsdale College. He’s a Presbyterian. He is a Reformed guy, but he says:
“Christianity is essentially a spiritual and eternal faith, one occupied with a world to come rather than the passing and temporal affairs of this world.”
So, from his perspective, the Bible is about eternity, not here. So you ask him, “Do you vote?” Yes. Do you have political viewpoints? Yes. What are they based on, if not Christianity? They’re based on “natural law”, he says. But there’s a lot of disagreement about natural law today, He would say, “But natural law is what it is. Just like there’s a law of gravity. If you jump off the top of a building you’re going to go down not up. It doesn’t matter how much you feel like going up, you’re not going to go up. You’re going to go down, unless you have some kind of a propulsion system. Just like there are laws of physics, laws of nature in the moral realm tell us what is what we can and cannot do.
But, because so many people disagree about those kinds of things, it’s awfully hard to figure out how you might act on that basis.
So, there are all these different viewpoints in Christianity. And, they range from the very-separatists to the very-integrated kind of view. From from the guy who’s trying to carve out intellectual respectability to the guy who wants desperately for people to love Jesus with all their heart.
So what are we supposed to do?
This is a pretty interesting synthesis for it. This is from Thomas Aquinas. He was a theologian in the early church. So famous in Catholic circles that they don’t even call him Thomas Aquinas, they just say “Thomas” or “The Good Doctor”. And everybody knows who they’re talking about. Isn’t that nerdy? But, this quote is worth thinking about. He says:
“Grace does not destroy nature, but completes it.”
Is that really true? I went back to the passages that, earlier in my life, I thought proved that the world is irrelevant and all that matters is the eternal realm. And I started to realize I had misunderstood all those passages. Like Romans 8, where the Apostle Paul says:
All creation groans in anticipation as in the pain of childbirth so that expecting its renewal. (Romans 8:22)
I always thought it’s groaning because it’s dying, and that’s the end of it. But that’s not the kind of groaning it’s talking about. So, I started to go back and realize: maybe I had misunderstood.
So what should our response be?
A lot of Christians say our response should be: Jump in there and grab the reins of power before the thing goes off a cliff. A lot of people say that. But think what this looks like from the secular world’s perspective. Here are some quotes from fundraising letters identified by a guy named James Davidson Hunter:
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- “Christians didn’t start the culture war but… we are going to win it.”
- “In God we trust. Is it still true? I say it is, and I say we fight.”
- “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost.”
So, think from a non-believing standpoint for a moment. Look at those three statements. What occurs to you? How would you feel about that? It sounds like threats of force. You look at that and say, “These people are scary! They’re trying to take control! So, a lot of people reacted really strongly against this.
Well then, what should our response be?
I’m going to tell you a story about a piece of research that was done many years ago. 1961, I think, is when it was actually published. So, this study is done by a guy named William McGuire. He was a professor at Yale University. He had put together a laboratory in psychology and he was studying lots of things. For example, one question that really intrigued William McGuire was, “How is it that so many people are tricked by bad ideas? Why do bad ideas tend to spread faster than good ideas?” Like, if there’s a false rumor, that’s the fastest thing to go around the whole school. If there’s a true statement about something, it doesn’t go beyond four or five people. But false things, they spread really rapidly. So, why is that? He found – long before there was such a thing as an Internet, the same thing was true – that bad ideas spread faster than good ideas. He found, as he studied, this a suitable analogy: He said,
I think bad ideas spread faster than good ideas because bad ideas are like viruses.
So, think about virus theory for a moment. Can you take a pill and kill the viruses in your body? No. You can’t. Taking a pill won’t kill the viruses in your body. It can cut down on the symptoms that the virus will recreate in your body. It’s not like an infection – you can take a pill and actually kill an infection. But you can’t really kill a virus. So, what’s the reigning theory and how we stop viruses from hurting us? It’s called vaccination. The idea behind a vaccination is if you give a little bit of the virus in a relatively harmless form, your body will learn how to fight the virus. So that, when you’re attacked by the regular virus, you have been inoculated to it and have built up immunity to the virus. This is how it works with smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella.
Now this is what was really interesting to William McGuire. If it works in medicine, would it work with bad ideas? So, he decided to test it.
This is where it gets really interesting to me. How would you test this? Well, you have to give people a bad idea and see if they believe it. But that, in itself, is a bad idea. What if they do believe you? You’ve ruined them. You can’t ruin them just because they’re sophomore students trying to get extra credit in psychology. You have to be human about this. So, he actually said, “Alright, we will test ideas that are false, but relatively limited in their impact – such as brushing your teeth is bad.” They would test that idea and see if people would believe it. Because, if they believe it, they’ll not brush their teeth for three or four days. Then their girlfriend will tell them, “I’m breaking up with you if you don’t brush your teeth”, and they will start brushing their teeth again. And everything will be restored to normal.
So that’s kind of his idea. So he brought in the students who were going to be in the research project. The first group, he didn’t give them any preparation or knowledge beforehand. He told them, “Go into the other room. You’re gonna hear a persuasive message. For the second group, he reviewed with them what they already knew to be true (i.e., Do you know brushing your teeth is good? Yeah. How do you know? Because when we were in the second grade, the big tooth puppet came to our class and ever since, we’ve believed.) So, the third group – he warned them there would be a coming attack. (Somebody’s going to try to persuade you that brushing your teeth is bad, just so you know.) Fourth group – he inoculated them. He said, “You’ll hear a persuasive message that brushing your teeth is bad. And the argument will be as follows: When you brush your teeth, it wipes away the saliva which is the tooth’s natural protective agent. Then he sent them into the room. He didn’t tell them anything more. Just sent them in the room. But now, they weren’t going to be shocked when they heard this message. They had heard it before. The fifth group, he showed them how to refute that message: If somebody tells you that brushing your teeth is bad because it wipes away the saliva which is the tooth’s natural protective agent – I just want you to remember that, strictly speaking, if we only ate raw fruits and vegetables, that would be true. But in our days of processed food, you have to brush your teeth to wipe away the food particles that otherwise could damage the enamel of your teeth. So, they got the argument, then they went in the other room. He had one group left. He said to them: This is true – you’re going to hear an argument that brushing your teeth is bad. The argument is, as I’ve told you it will be. But, there’s one more piece of information that’s critical for you – and you only – to know. That’s not the only argument you’re going to hear. There will be others and you need to learn to respond intelligently to those other arguments. Just like we’ve shown you how to respond intelligently to this one. At the end of the study, they asked the students: Did you believe the persuasive message, yes or no?
Which group do you think was least able to resist the persuasive message that brushing your teeth was bad? It would make sense it would be the first group, right? But, it actually is the second group. They found in the study, the group that didn’t prepare at all was not as likely to believe the message as the group that reviewed what was regarded to be true.
So, some people just don’t take it seriously, and it messes with the psychology students’ experiments and all that, and they just think that’s pretty funny. And I only know that because I was one of them.
But, this is really a stunning result: If you’re following this conversation, you realize that if the group that reviewed what they already know to be true is significantly more likely to be persuaded than the group didn’t have any preparation at all, there’s something what they already knew that ended up being used against them.
What do you think was going on in this situation? If this is going to even be brought up, then it must be the case. I was wrong all of those years. Maybe the tooth puppet was wrong. Maybe the scientific evidence is actually more persuasive. Newer is better, after all, so maybe this is better. You can see how people would talk themselves into rejecting that belief.
But, the point for the Christian community is a very serious one: I went to a Sunday School conference one time and I said, “Let me share with you something of this research. If this is true, and all you’re doing in your Sunday school curriculum is telling the same Bible stories over and over again, year after year, you’re not setting students up to successfully defend their faith. You’re setting them up to successfully reject it.”
I thought they would welcome this news. I have never been invited back to teach at the Sunday School Convention. It was just too threatening of an idea. But, what if it’s so? I mean, what if it’s true? Even if it is threatening? What if it’s true? What if it’s true that in order to successfully resist bad ideas, you have to be able to not only understand the bad ideas, you have to be able to respond to them. And you have to have thinking skills that enable you to be flexible in all kinds of different situations you might face.
That’s what we’re going to focus on. You’ll be amazed at how much more you know about the world of ideas and how many more ideas you can figure out, just as a result of these next few talks.
But all of the ideas in the world are based on the fact that everybody in the world answers some basic questions: What does it mean to exist? Where did we come from? Who are we, anyway? What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be human? Are human beings really any different? What is the good life? What happens when we die?
Here’s the point: Everybody in the world has to answer those questions. You don’t get a pass just because you don’t really care to think about that kind of thing. Everyday, when you wake up, the average American makes 10,000 to 20,000 decisions a day. Every day. You make decisions: Am I going to stop at that stop sign? For how long? Am I going to drive this way or that way? Am I going to get this to drink or that to drink? Am I going to eat this much of my food or am I going to eat less? Am I going to go back and get more?
We make thousands and thousands of decisions, but every one of those decisions is ultimately based on our answers to these questions in life. If you wake up in the morning and say, “The world is meaningless”, would there be any point in being nice to anybody around you? No. I mean, you wouldn’t be nice to them. Ultimately, you might be nice because you want them to be nice to you. But at the end of the day, when you review your 10,000 to 20,000 decisions, you’ll realize you just don’t give a rip about other people. Because you believe the world is meaningless. If you believe, on the other hand, people are made in the image of God, it changes the way you view everybody – other drivers, pedestrians, people you pass in the hallway… And you start to make those 10,000 to 20,000 decisions differently every day.
Does that make sense to you? So these ultimate questions are answered by everybody.
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