I think the most challenging aspect of my faith is when I listen to people who are supposedly intelligent proposing ideas that are silly. I mean, don’t we get this from all sides? Whether you’re looking at the political arena, education, sports, religion, science it seems we are awash in pure stupidity. Or, perhaps to be more charitable, I should say that we’ve lost any connection with common sense.
I know, I know—“you’ve talked about this many times before Creasman.” And you are right, but it is increasingly becoming a crisis in our world. As such, we have lost any real ability to maintain touch with reality. As a primer, let me remind you about the idea of common sense (man that just seems silly, doesn’t it, that I have to remind you about common sense, but if you could sit in my college classes where I teach, you’d know that this primer is really necessary, so here goes.)
In the 1751, Scottish minister and educator Thomas Reid established what is usually known as the “common sense” school of philosophy. Reid emerged from Scotland’s third great center for the Scottish Enlightenment, Aberdeen, where he was educated at Marischal College in the 1720s. It was to King’s College in Aberdeen that Reid returned in 1751 and from there became the central figure of this “common sense” idea.
When most people think of “The Enlightenment,” they usually quickly think of France and Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau. However, Scotland’s contribution to this period is equally impressive with such intellectual greats like Adam Smith, David Hume, and Francis Hutcheson as well as Reid. The greats of the Scottish Enlightenment were primarily educators or clergy (often both) and they used their positions for the main purpose of educating the masses to a new understanding of human knowledge. By the time of Reid’s return to Aberdeen, Hutcheson and Hume had already established the two moral poles about the state of man and Adam Smith had begun to synthesize the two great Scots in his work Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Reid was determined to be a verbal opponent of Hume’s views, his skepticism about man and the world. For Reid, common sense was available to all people (a fact that rebellious Americans would eagerly embrace in the coming decade) and his theories were in reality a battle-cry for human freedom. Reid’s phrase was made famous by Thomas Paine after Benjamin Rush encouraged Paine to use those very words as the title for his soon-to-be famous pamphlet about American independence.
For Reid, certain fundamental things, truths about the world, are (as he wrote and Thomas Jefferson borrowed) “self-evident.” Reid, who despised philosophy in general (quite ironic since he held the chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow), said he preferred to “let my soul dwell in common sense.” Reid thought that all humans contain the capacity for rational decisions. Both natural scientific facts and basic moral truths lie within this area of common sense.
Well, not any more. A few years ago, I was listening to the radio on a drive and I was confronted with a relatively intelligent host giving time and attention to an “expert” whose opinion about the origin of life clearly lay in the ludicrous. The guest, James Gardner, waxed philosophic with his “biocosm” theory. “The immense saga of biological evolution on Earth is one tiny chapter in an ageless tale of the struggle of the creative force of life against…the brute intransigence of lifeless matter,” he writes is his book Biocosm.
On the radio program, he stated “we’re part of a life cycle that began with a hyper intelligent entity which “evolved from creatures like us.” Uh, yeah. A “hyper intelligent entity that evolved from us?” So, we evolved into, let me see, a super intelligent creature that, hmmm, created us? He pressed on, implying such an entity could be conceived of as “an incredibly condensed point of matter and energy,” capable of triggering a big bang.
Accordingly, humans are not the end product of evolution but part of a larger function, serving like the mitochondria in cells, he said. Gardner laid out the case for the “Creator” being intelligence itself, an element of nature, rather than the mystical force ascribed by western religions. Are we all confused yet?
In the interview, Gardner was claiming that his best idea was that aliens (his word), what he considers “super intelligent life,” had sent out many, perhaps thousands, of pods of life to many planets, with the hope that such planets would allow for the pods to “take root.” So let me see, in this supposedly scientific thought that earned the right to be published and promoted on a national radio program, gambling little aliens (or would they be Predators? Or perhaps little E.T.s?) just happen to send out the building blocks of life looking for that perfect set of ooze in which to explode into life? Uh-huh. Over millions of years, of course.
Immediately, in my mind, was the thought, “and this idea somehow takes LESS faith to believe than in a Creator God?” What in the world is this guy smoking? How could any right thinking person, a person “containing the capacity for rational decisions” that are “self-evident” actually think this could be true? The sheer audacity of the idea leaves one unable to mount much of a response. How can you argue with someone stating that “2 + 2 = yellow dog?” Why would any common sense brain think like this?
One answer lay in what the host asked Gardner at one point. “Well, then who created the intelligent aliens?” Silence ensued. The best Gardner could come up with was that they had evolved, but he really had no idea. Even with this ridiculous proposal, we still find out that God is there. In the end, even with our super intelligent aliens, we find that a really Super Intellect had to be there first.
However, the simple answer takes us back to life change—intelligent aliens are not asking us to seek moral change for something better out of life. Thus it IS easier to believe in the aliens than it is to see the face of God. God expects something from us, and not the easiest thing either. Paul says as much in Romans 10, when he writes “For if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God.”
Of course, therein lies the trouble. God expects us to admit that we are needy. We need Him to help us get connected back to Him. Since 102% of the population is prideful, that is not an easy task. We usually refuse to admit that we have a problem. Particularly as men, this is an issue. My family laughs at my dad because he is one of those men who simply refuse to ever stop for directions. And he’ll argue endlessly that he was never lost. It is no wonder that comedians have made that concept the punch line for many jokes over the years. We are simply hardheaded and don’t like to admit that we have any needs at all. But of course God hammers this point with us over and over again, perhaps nowhere more forcefully than in Philippians 2:5-6 where we are told that “your attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God.”
As more and more of life seems to slip into the no-man’s land of the asinine, we are able to stand confident that God’s clear imprint, fingerprint as it were, is shining brighter and brighter. “Even the heavens declare the glory of God,” the psalmist wrote. We must commit ourselves to being the kind of common sense people who simply point out the “self-evident;” that we “are created” and “are endowed by their Creator.” Not dropped on the planet by a lucky E.T. who happened to find the best ooze in the galaxy. Sheesh—who writes this stuff anyway?