You're listening to Breakpoint This Week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian worldview. Today we're going to talk about a scandal in higher ed, a plagiarizing professor, lowering grade standards, and even erasing grades for incoming freshmen. We're so glad you're with us this week. Please stick around. Welcome to Breakpoint This Week.
From the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Coulson Center. John, what did you get on your SAT?
Well, I would tell you, but it would sound bad, but that was before they added the third part. Didn't they up the score like. I mean, I think it's been twenty years now, but Gosh, I have no idea. Longer than 20 years ago.
So, all I know is I took it. It's a HIPAA violation for you to ask that question. I took it on a morning where I did not. sleep the night before. This was very ill-advised.
I have vague memories of my parents being like, where are you? Come home. You have to take the SAT in the morning. And I was like, I'll be fine. And I didn't do as well as I'd hoped, but I did very well on the ACT.
So if you want to know that score, you can ask me and it won't violate HIPAA. I'm not going to volunteer it independently because that would be gauche. But if you want to know, just ask me, John, and I'll tell you. I'm begging you to ask me what I got on my ACT. He's not going to.
He's just going to.
Okay. I'm bringing this up because I want to talk to you about higher education.
So. There's been this sort of really tragic scandal that I know you and I have been following. over the past couple of weeks of a professor who it was promoted To being one of the youngest or the youngest, I believe, African-American or black professor at Cambridge University. I guess he wasn't American. And he had inflated his resume.
And also, it appears that he plagiarized a lot of his work. And as this was uncovered, he tragically took his own life. And this has led to a bigger discussion about standards in higher education. How we talk about it, what we expect, not just of our professors, but also of the students and of the schools themselves. And I'm sitting here this morning looking at a story from the University of Michigan, which has now announced it will no longer publish letter grades for incoming freshmen.
And they're being completely open about this. They're doing this to protect the mental health of the students. They're going to give freshmen only a pass or fail grade. And I think it's safe to assume that almost no one will receive a fail grade. That's difficult to imagine.
Incidentally, they're only doing this in their College of Literature and Arts, which I didn't study literature and arts technically, but I still take that personally. Like, they're not doing it in the engineering school. which I feel like is poignant, but What is going on in higher ed? Like are these stories connected? What's happening with our standards?
Well, look, there's a lot of subtext to all the examples that you just listed, and we need to get into them. And at least part of the Story I think it does involve the worldview ideas that have undergirded higher ed for a while, particularly certain areas of higher ed. And then also certain ideas that are kind of dominant within Uh elite culture, uh elite Western culture. And I think all those are really important things to talk about because, as we say, ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. And I think, in a very real sense, Jason R Day was a victim.
of bad ideas, his own bad ideas, but of course, he learned them from somewhere. It's, I think, most important to begin by saying this is an awful, awful, awful tragedy. whenever uh someone So loses. hope like he did. and direction and meaning and chooses to take his own life.
It's terrible. Saw the end this week also of an actress who has had such a troubled story since she was this really endearing and cute. Character in Remember the Titans. And I guess before that, I guess she was a baby in some commercials. I didn't know any of that.
I just. New Remember the Titans and And and I know there's still details coming out about or her death, but You know, it it some degree there there was this kind of troubled past. And every life is made in the image of God. Every life is eternally valuable because from conception to natural death. And should be treated as such.
And this is a tragic and an awful, awful uh development. In a story. And at some level, too, you have the reality. Of a celebrity-driven culture, when a celebrity kind of approach to life in the world, and characters become larger than life. We f we we won't want people to be characters as opposed to the you know, individuals and the pressure that that puts on them when there's an embarrassment.
to the scale that Jason Arday had experienced. Even then, the story is used to dunk on people on one end or rationalize the very ideas. That led to this consequential end. On the other hand, I mean, Ibram X. Kendi, famous for his anti-racism of the 2020, 2021, you know, that whole era.
you know, actually made the claim that the media lynched Jason R. Day. Which is just an insane and provocative and just flatly untrue thing based on. The actual details of the case.
So I want to begin there. And if listeners don't know the details, you know, here you had this. Basically, rising star at one of the three most prestigious universities on the planet. Typically, Cambridge is lumped with Oxford and maybe Harvard. And you could throw in University of Chicago if you want to add a.
a handful of others and and he is this rising star and it just all unravels in a hurry. His plagiarism is revealed. Turns out even claims he made about his own childhood were questioned by people who knew him back then. And it was just one thing after another after another. And that speaks to the ideas I think we need to talk about.
uh that we're at the root of this but it's just an awful terrible End to this? I don't know. I guess I was reminded of it, because I was following the story like you were, when all of these revelations were coming out, and he had not made this decision to take his own life. And you just want to. You know, hate the guy, you just want to be angry at him and so on.
And then this happens, you remember. You know, he's a human. He's a person.
Well, I mean, I got the sense as the stories were coming out of his plagiarism that he was sick because the.
Something's not right. Yeah. The things he was saying about his personal life were just delusional, like the races he had run, or he'd run so many miles in so many days. Yeah. Yeah, you're not wrong about that.
But I also think that, and that clearly, I think, played a role in this. I mean, but also, I think. When you ask about the state of higher education, Cambridge did this. The people who hired him at the university. are responsible.
for allowing ideology. to get ahead of reality. and prop him up in this sort of way. And I think that It's one thing, and many people have talked and written about the rot in higher education. They've talked about great inflation, they've talked about.
The way we think about students, and now the way we think about also scholarship and professors and things like that is being fundamentally broken. Then you have a story like this. You say, oh, it really is. You know, it really, really is. And that's to me why this is so absolutely tragic.
There was a story a couple, gosh, maybe it was last year. I think you and I talked about it at the time, but it was a study that came out from Harvard about grade inflation that was happening there. There's so many factors here, like how professors, a lot of times their job and their tenure is so closely tied with their student evaluations. Or parental approval more than it used to be. I was never once asked to fill out a student evaluation in college.
And I don't know if that was just me personally, which probably on the part of my professors was a good idea, but I would have loved to take my professors to task. I don't know if that's a new development or what, but you can see the interpolate, how this could very easily cascade into. Grades being fudged, professors not being motivated or incentivized to grade fairly because their jobs depend on, you know, the. the good well feelings of their students and their students' parents. Who are increasingly taking the side of their student rather than siding with the college?
Our tyranny of low expectations, all of these things. But this story came out from Harvard a while ago. About grade inflation there. And one of the researchers said to the Harvard Crimson: Our grades are basically meaningless. Like they, they've, this is what.
Over 80% of grades that are awarded at Harvard are A's, which means they don't mean anything. And they inter the Crimson interviewed a couple of students and I still remember one student saying, I'm really worried that after this report, our professors are going to change their grading strategy to be more competitive and I won't enjoy my studies anymore. It's not just that she thought that, it's that she thought that that was compelling. Like, and I want to take her seriously and charitably. I'm sad for her, but I think kids and their families are approaching college as something they're supposed to enjoy.
And I if I were to get really deep on this, I think the biggest issue here is that we've stopped looking at knowledge as its own good. and its own ends. And maybe the ease of knowledge today in the age of AI or the internet or whatever it is. has made it seem less good to us or less worthy of a pursuit. But I just think collectively, culturally, in a general sense, we don't consider seeking knowledge for its own sake to be good anymore.
And so You get things like enjoyment, and I want to go to the college that has the best facilities and the coolest dorms. As opposed to the most rigorous program, and that cannot be good for a culture.
Well, I think there's a couple of things. One is there's a case to be made that. You know, a grading scale needs to be changed, or it needs to be altered, or that learning is not properly imagined by grades. That doesn't mean it's properly You know, understood by enjoyment either. You gotta measure it somehow, surely.
I'm tempted to get on my old man hat and go, It's college, it's not supposed to be fun, you know, and you know, to which all the 90s movies are kind of coming back and going, Yes, it is.
So, you know, some of this confusion's been in the water for a long time. Maybe that's how it started. Animal House is responsible. I think it's also important to say it's not immediately clear how the great inflation issue is connected to the Jason R day. Issue other than if you keep digging and you get to the baseline, which is this understanding of knowledge, but also of identity.
If you look at The claims that were made in order to get the job that Arde was able to get. And then you add all the claims that were made in order to publish. They are all examples. of an idea. that identity.
who we are fundamentally as human beings. Is not something that is discovered. It's not something that's understood. Because it's not something that's given to us. It's not something that's built into the fabric of the universe.
by matter of who we are. There's not no such thing as a human essence. Even in a purely naturalistic framework. this idea that you know, kind of enabled by a Darwinian perspective that Humans are animals like all the other animals, just a different kind of animals that we also are the product. of an evolutionary process, set of processes that Gave us the capacities that we have, and that we're responding to the natural environment.
There's still a givenness to that understanding of human nature. And that was the vision. of humanity that dominated the 20th century. Near the end of the 20th century, the fundamental ideas of postmodernism Emerged and then increasingly were applied not just the truth, where truth was understood to be relative, but reality. And then eventually, it's got to actually play itself out.
And of course, if you remember, Francis Schaefer talked about that line of despair where ideas began and. Among elites, and then crept into the universities, and then crept into the cultural waters. That identity is something that is not discovered, something that's not. Learned because it's not given. It's something that has to be constructed.
So our fundamental Understanding. of who we are. Itself is something that we have to continually, our essence has to be continually constructed and continually. uh proposed and imposed on the world around us. Of course, Carl Truman has the definitive work on this in his book on expressive individualism.
where he describes it as the fundamental task of human beings according to this way of seeing the world. It is to create an expression of ourselves and impose it on the world around us. And then everyone else, everyone else. has the responsibility to accept that imposition. even while they're imposing their own identity on the world.
And I can't think of a more fundamental. Description At the root of the Jason R. Day story than this one. And it is tragic. Because of how it ended.
And again, ideas have consequences and bad ideas. Have victims, I think, is a truism. And it's expressed in this story. We're constructing a narrative of a childhood, constructing an identity. As somewhat gender fluid.
I don't know what his own identification was, but if you actually see kind of how he expressed himself. Uh even at um in this kind of high position of academic authority. Even and then the result, the the the um The response where you have other colleagues when his plagiarism was found out. saying yes, but he's still the victim. And and then ultimately after this terrible, tragic decision to take his own life.
Another so-called academic like Ibram X. Kendi, but also the mayor of London. You know, referred to him as the victim of this. And by the way, the individual who first exposed the plagiarism, and by the way, I don't think. He necessarily has a clean track record in how he did this.
There was certainly a vindictiveness in how this whole thing was pursued. He's now being treated as the person who did something wrong. And you put it all together, and you see at the heart of this is a postmodern vision. Of truth, of knowledge, of reality, and of identity that actually was applied. Like, this is how it's supposed to be done.
If there's anyone who exemplified, if he had any academic credentials whatsoever, it was embodying and expressing the fundamental ideas that had overtaken his discipline, that had overtaken the university, that had overtaken the culture in so many ways. And That that's where this came to is that this is how it plays out. And it butts up against reality. I mean, that's the thing about a worldview being too small. Is that it actually can't?
Explain things when it's applied, when it's lived out in the real world. And gosh, it couldn't even. kind of manage his own expectations. I mean at the end of the day, Those ideas Basically say that What you impose on reality is all that matters.
Well, when that was challenged, it wasn't all that mattered to him. And it's awful. It's awful when you see these things play themselves out. That's interesting because couldn't you have imagined? And I wonder if.
you know the next time this happens if it doesn't go this far where a person this this kind of thing is revealed and then a person says, okay, so But I may as well have had that kind of childhood, or that might as well have happened to me because I feel like it did. I feel like the kind of person I want to tell you the story. I mean, well, that's what transgenderism is, but go ahead. I think that's an example. But remember when the, gosh, what's his name?
I think his last name was Laura, a con. uh congressional or state legislator in California who went after The private colleges, especially the Christian colleges in California, like Biola and CalBaptist and so on. And wanted to pull their access to Cal Grants, which was making an incredible. Amount of students able to attend schools like that. And what stopped his attack on these schools, and of course it had to do with the views on gender and sexuality that these schools.
Uphold. That's what stopped that attempt was that it would have such a negative impact on minority students.
Okay. He went and visited Cal Baptist, which is an enormous. One of the big Christian uh colleges, certainly one of the biggest in California, maybe the biggest. and saw the diversity among the student body. And so the and same thing at Biola, where basically he would be harming access for these minority students to access higher education.
And so he pulled back on it. But when he pulled back on it, do you remember what he said? He pulled back on and he goes. But it's still true. That we've got to do something about the horrible ways that they're treating these particularly sexual minority students.
It wasn't true. He didn't find any case other than having moral principles that applied to all students. Can't sleep with your girlfriend. That means you can't sleep with someone of the same sex, too. And you can't, marriage is between a man and a woman.
So you can't live together.
So these principles were being applied across the board. And there were moral standards, and he took it as personal attacks and thought that. There was discrimination and bigotry, I think is the two words that he used, was still true of these places where he found no evidence of it. Yeah. Yeah, I think you could see, you could, I could easily imagine another case like this where a person comes out and says, I, you know, I don't care if it.
It was physically impossible for that to have happened, or you know, whatever. It may as well have because I feel that way. And frankly, that would be. At least logically consistent. Like it would be interesting to see how that would be challenged.
Because if we are inventing our own identities, like you said, that's what we're, that's the job we're giving ourselves and each other, then where does that end? Then why can't you do that ad infinitum and include whatever you want? And The the Irony of that, I think, is that I think this just reveals something spiritually dark about all of this, which is when you give yourself that responsibility to Invent your own identity and constantly proclaim it to the world and make sure the world acts towards you accordingly. The result is you are only ever constantly thinking about yourself. And there is no quicker way to become miserable than to be constantly thinking about yourself.
And this, but this way of living and viewing life is sold to us as the road to happiness. That just feels so poetic and so spiritual to me. Like, this is clearly a spiritual darkness that the enemy is using in our time to infect people. And it works.
Well, look, I think there is this false notion that certain ideas can be protected in these sacred spaces, and that the university has been that kind of protected space where you could actually have. the freedom of thought to explore some of these taboo Ideas or unpopular or non-traditional views about the world. And I think that's the way. That the university has been sold to the modern world. And it stopped being true a long time ago.
And we knew that because countering views to the taboo views. We're now You know, not tolerated. It wasn't just a, well, we want to be a place where everything can be talked about. There was an awful lot of things. That were no longer allowed to be talked about.
And we have, of course, the history of free speech zones and. Safe spaces where people shouldn't be challenged in their views, and you know, hot cocoa and cookies in a student lounge after an election went the wrong direction.
So, you know, you already saw how that was unraveling this myth of the university.
Well, I don't know if you saw, just really quickly, there's a petition now in the UK for something that they're calling the Jason R. Day law or whatever it would be, which would say you cannot publish more than a certain number of stories. Like the news media can't publish more than a certain number of stories about an individual in a certain time frame. I did not see that. I don't know if that'll go anywhere, but yeah.
Man, what if that passed in the United States? That would undo the entire journalistic practice for the last. decade that does uh what's the average of stories on Donald Trump every single day. Oh, right. Nellie Bowles.
Or does it only apply to academics? Nellie Bowles at the Free Press was like, please pass that in the United States and we'll just be the ones that cover That's right. I uh I I that that is uh uh a remarkable thing. Um But yeah, I mean, I think that there is something that has been happening. And if we want to put this story in a historical Context, there's just a number of examples, one after another, after another, of just kind of how.
What's actually the state of higher education? Has has been a Has been exposed. I mean, we've had plenty that have demonstrated Like it's not producing the sort of understanding and knowledge. that we uh we we we were told It certainly had a I think it's been an infected by the the wider culture of entitlement. And self-esteem, and some of those things that are reflected in the great inflation you mentioned earlier.
I think you've got the fundamental rot of postmodern ideology. And of course, we're beyond postmodern if we're being. Specific, it's all rooted there in the challenge of reality itself that comes out of, I think, a postmodern. vision and an emphasis on kind of a full perspectivalism. uh and so on, but it's taken the form of a of a pretty intolerant you know, way of thinking about the world, and that has infected Disciplines.
And you're right. I mean, we used to joke 30 years ago that. when you find postmodernism i in all of its forms, It only Exists and you know, the English department in the humanities, because you can't do it in engineering. And that's always been true. But then there was a time when it seemed to be dying away, and then it came back in full force with this critical theory.
Mood as well.
So there's a lot here to say. I did want to mention something that I think is at the heart of it as well. And I Oh uh This is an article that was put out, a sub stack, I think, from Alex Berenson. This week, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And he was talking about the incentives, both cultural incentives and financial incentives, that infect higher education, where, You know, I've often joked that the I don't know that there's a job where you have more constituents to keep happy than a Christian college president.
But he's talking about the larger incentives that all serve each other, but don't serve to actually advance. knowledge they don't serve to actually advance Education itself.
So it's an interesting substack of former. A professor of mine sent it out this week. And I thank him for that. It is a, I think, also gets to the heart of the structural issues. You got the ideological.
Framing of these things that infect the waters, but then you also have the structural things. Where things are actually built into the system, where it's a business and you gotta market it. And professors are incentivized based on their students achieving certain things. But if the students aren't ready to learn, they're not ready to be there. And they're not producing, then the professors are now incentivized to take shortcuts and one thing after another, after another.
It is a. A cross current of bad incentives that infect higher education. Look, this is not something that Christian colleges are immune from at all. This is why we've said this for a long time. Christian colleges are going to be Christian.
They've got to be Christian, they've got to be college, and they've got to be Christian colleges. It's more than three times as hard to really build it into the system, which is why I respect so highly those higher education. Those institutions of higher education in the Christian world that understand that, and they're not just decorating a normal education. With chapel, and they're not just shortcutting the educational part of it, and they are rare. I will say they are rare.
I know there's a lot of good intention in Christian higher ed. But the actual outcomes, it's a little bit more, I think, scarce.
So, um Yeah, so I'll do an early recommendation for that Alex Berenson piece if you're involved in higher ed. or interested in this, it's worth r worth the read. Let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week in just a moment. Hi, I'm Adam from Texas, and I'm a Cornerstone partner because now more than ever.
All followers of Christ must be able to stand up for their faith and speak truth and love to the hurting world around us. The Coulson Center has helped not just my wife and I become better apologists, but it has supported us in countless conversations with our children. My prayer is that they will be equipped to boldly engage with the culture and shine brightly for him and the world throughout their lives. If you would like to join myself and over a thousand other people in becoming a cornerstone partner, Visit Colsoncenter.org slash monthly. We're back on Breakpoint this week.
John, I want to talk now about belief in God.
So we're going to check in with the. This sounds like the introduction to a Sunday school class. We're going to talk about God. Of course we are. We all in the beginning.
Please open your textbooks. Please open your textbooks to meet. Whatever.
Okay, but seriously, I want to talk to you about belief in God. I want to talk to you about people who say they believe in God, who say they don't believe in God, and crucially, how certain or confident they feel about that decision. That's what's really interesting in the story I'm bringing up here.
So, this is, we're going to check in with Pew's religious landscape study. And we got to credit Ryan Burge, who's been covering this. Fewer people than in decades past in America say that they believe in God. But as Ryan Burge said in his piece on this, that's such a huge question to ask someone: do you believe in God? What do you mean by God?
What do you mean by believe? What do you mean by you? No, I'm just kidding. But all of those things need to be defined. And he, you know, of course, many, many more people would say they believe in some kind of intelligence or higher power than believe in the Christian God of the Bible, for example.
So there's a lot. Underneath that question. And one of the interesting follow-up questions in this Pew Landscape study is: How certain are you about that belief? And those numbers are really interesting.
So for example, here's how the results sit right now. 55% of respondents today said they believe in God. 6% said they don't. Those are the absolutely certain. answers.
So their second question. Was how certain are you? And 55% of people who said they believe in God said they were absolutely certain. Only 6% of people who said they don't believe in God said they were absolutely certain in that belief. That is really, really fascinating.
And, you know, I always am skeptical of surveys because I think. We've got to be realistic that what surveys are really measuring for better or worse is what people think they should answer to a question. And that is worth measuring because that has a lot of signals attached to it and we should know it, but it's not always accurately reflecting what a person really thinks or believes. But this follow-up question of how certain are you is a really fascinating kind of way to. Needle into that problem a little bit more.
Like I asked you a question, but now reflect on how confident you are in that answer. That's fascinating. It's very fascinating. And to your point, the research methodology in and of itself is a fascinating topic in the modern world. Cause look, in an age where these results are publicized, or sometimes you get stopped and asked, you know, by someone with a camera about your hot take on the street.
And all of these things often are reported as if they're all equally valid. You know, you could see that people really want to say, what should I answer on this? And also, I think, though, that there are research groups. that get underneath that. And they're pretty good at getting underneath that.
And really by asking better questions at times you can. And that's why I do think Ryan Burge has been such a helpful voice in all of this. Is that he kind of wants the cold, hard facts, and he oftentimes reported it. We had a great conversation. As you remember, at the Colson Center National Conference, sitting on there, he has the gift of spiritual gift of sarcasm, like I do.
So we had a really good time back and forth talking about some of these. These numbers. I think one of the things we got to start with, though, Maria, on this is that it only makes sense. That the headline on this has to do not necessarily with belief in God, but certainty about one's belief in God. Because that's the headline of all of these ideas that we just spent the last segment talking about, is a corrosion of certainty.
Not only that, but if you go to progressive. Part of the sermon series. of the last decade. has been We can't be certain about God. We can't be certain about Holy Scripture.
This is a human projection just like everything else. And to be certain about God is to commit an act of violence. You know, if you get to the extreme. I'm pretty sure in 2020, it was like an act of white supremacy for a little bit there, but most things weren't. No, it was.
I mean, it ends up right in the intersectionality paradigm that it's really hard to keep up with. All of these things were connected. You're exactly right, but it took a lot of forms even before that, where we just can't be certain. We can't be certain, and to be certain about God is to be wrong about God. And you know, to again to cite Francis Schaefer's Way of tracing how ideas get into the cultural waters.
Look, you go back 100 years or so in liberal Protestant theology, and that's what they're saying. That they're casting doubt certainly on the truthfulness of Holy Scripture. And casting doubt on any potential of having certainty about what the Bible says. And then, but they're also saying things like, God is so other, we can't really know him. And of course, if you can't know what the scripture says about God, you can't know God because the scripture is kind of the source of information we have other than creation itself, which I think tells us an awful lot about God.
But again, there is this kind of growing sense that everyone is trapped in their own perspectives and we can't actually trust our own knowledge. About it, which made the whole task of constructing reality so tedious as well. Because if you can't trust yourself to know anything, then how can you trust yourself to know that you don't know? You can't trust yourself. That too.
And then to say, this is who I am. You know, it isn't that there is a little bit of an irony that there's. You see kind of this certainty by this is who I am. This is who I was born to be. And it emerges out of this philosophical tradition that says you can't be certain about anything to begin with.
But that's we're now kind of deep into the weeds. But but I also think too that to your point earlier, And Burge points this out, we're still at the point where People have a hard time. being certain that there is no God. Part of that, I think, is cultural, because if you're in Afghanistan. Saying I'm not sure whether God exists.
You're not just saying that. You're saying, I'm not sure whether that God exists, right? Because there's a conception of God that's so deep into the cultural waters. And I think that that would have been true 50, 75, 100 years ago in the United States. I'm not so sure it is for most people.
Anymore. I mean, there probably is a bit of a Christian norm about God that. is a permeating culture, but it's certainly not the theocratic vision that People accuse it of anymore. I mean, it's, it's not, you know, this undergirded the whole work of Michael Cromerty at the Ethics and Public Policy Center for so long when he would get media folks in a room and introduce them to evangelicals, you know, because they were writing about evangelicals and had never met one. And, you know, you hear them talk about religion and just get fundamental things wrong.
And, you know, all that reflects kind of the dissipation of. the belief in God. that has taken place in the American context in the last several decades.
So that has got to play into the certainty. But I, you know, you remember even in the heyday of the new atheist in the 90s. where this was a very popular movement. It got a lot of press. They, you know, could certainly get publishing contracts.
But when you actually surveyed people. It was really hard for people to say there's nothing. bigger than us. There's not a creator. And why is that?
I think that there's this thing that, even in all of these waters of uncertainty, That it's really hard to deny as the heavens declare the glory of God. At the very least, as cloudy as that can be because of cultural storms. When it comes to epistemology, how we know, when it comes to morality, how we're supposed to behave. There's still this sense that when I stand, as I think John Piper once said, I stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Very few people will look out and go, I am awesome.
You know, when you stand on the edge of the, when you look at a starry night, we caught a glimpse. I don't know if I even told you this, we caught a glimpse six months ago of the Northern Lights all the way here in Colorado. It was crazy. You know, and you My only exposure to the Northern Lights prior to this was the scenes on Alone, where they flash through. You're like, I want to see that.
Well, I got to see it. It wasn't that brilliant, but when you take a picture with it with your iPhone, it And it's just like, wow. You hold a newborn baby. You go through the process of carrying a child, I hear, or a husband watching your wife carry a child and then give birth. And there are things in your experience in life that push you out of yourself.
And it makes denying the supernatural. that much harder.
Now It obviously matters how you define the supernatural. That's step two. Number one, that God exists. Number two, who is God? That's the foundation of this stuff.
And that also, I think, lends itself when you have so many different voices telling you so many different things from God's a force, God's an energy, you're God like everybody else, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It certainty becomes even more elusive at that point.
So there's a lot of cultural storms here that are playing into it. It is I think that another kind of fascinating thing is that the belief in God is just resilient, even if it's corrupted and. screwed up and It's hard to deny. God's presence, which tells you an awful lot about the kind of God he is. He wants to be known.
Yeah, I agree. I have a big, big birthday coming up this year. I'm turning 20. And I requested. I want to see the northern lights.
That's my hope for this year. But all that aside, I had a friend this week. We were talking about this exact thing in my small group with church, and one of my friends, Is like a photographer and videographer, and he was just recently on a job in Montana. And he works with a group of people who are not believers. He's the only believer in the group.
And he said it was fascinating because the first day we got there, Everyone was like, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Like, unbelievable landscape, just admiring it in awe of it. And he was like, it took. maybe 12 hours for everybody to get bored of it. Like the next day, it was like, now we're back on talking about how much we spent on our shoes and, you know, how bored we are and what we're going to do tomorrow.
And he. He said, I just kept trying to steer, you know, as much as I could steer the conversation back to like, did you look out the window this morning? Did you see the sun? Did you see? Whatever.
And I think that's a cautionary tale because I agree that there are moments in life, both positive and negative. That point people to eternity that are unavoidable and that persist through every weird cultural dogma to the contrary. I mean, we're watching right now a horrible court case with this mom in Massachusetts. I heard mention you guys talk about briefly on. world, but I think that's an example of people feeling the weight of eternity through witnessing something that they can only call evil.
And that also, as much as beauty, tends to point us towards something outside of ourselves as well. I mean, for better or worse, take that for what you will. The cautionary tale of my friend going to Montana is To guard against distraction. And, you know, because those moments are there if we'll continue to look for them and notice them, but the more we allow ourselves to be distracted and lulled. We can miss them.
And I think the more we can focus attention on them and also help others to see them, the better we'll be. That's how Romans 1 describes the human dilemma: that what may be known about God is plain to them because God put it in creation, and that we suppress that truth by our wickedness. And both of those things are true. You reminded me in the Montana story of when I lived in Montego Bay, Jamaica for 11 months, right out of college. That's on the West Coast.
So literally I would Do a lot of walking. Every once in a while I'll take a taxi, but most of the time I would walk in and out of town. Basically, you're walking along the Uh the water and If you you know, most days I would catch the sun setting and to You know, the Caribbean, and it's breathtaking. And, but you're right. After two to three or four months, and think about it, if you live there, every single day.
you would stop noticing and I stopped noticing. In fact, I remember one. evening in particular. I'd probably been there eight or nine months at this point. And I'm walking back toward my home, and I'm in my own head.
I'm thinking about some things, and I'm just. you know, kind of lost and my head's down. And then suddenly I realized that everyone was looking at something. You know, when you kind of walk into a crowd, you're like, what's everybody looking at? Was it you?
Were they looking at you? They were not looking at me. They're like, who's the white guy? Yeah, who's the white guy? No, they were looking out towards the The the the the water It was, it was, it's just a really bizarre thing where I was like, everyone's looking at something.
Oh, they're looking at the water.
So I turned to look, and literally. My breath was taken away. It was the most beautiful sunset I'd ever seen. Oh. And it was the most beautiful sunset that they'd ever seen.
It was just this one, you know, where everything kind of came together right. And I'm sure there's an atmospheric explanation for all this, but. Uh it Captivated everything. And I think that's. What Romans 1 tells us, that we can suppress the truth.
I think to your point, a lot of times that's just plain distraction in our day and age. But also, God is able to break through. And a lot of times, God does break through, and God is kind for continuing to want to be known. And that gets to the question of what kind of God Is God? Who is God?
That he's the God who wants to be known. And On one hand, if he didn't want to be known, everything would be a human construction. We'd be just projecting ourselves onto the universe, which is what Protestant liberal theology has been teaching for 50 years. But if God wants to be known, He can break through our perspectives. He can break through being trapped in our own cultural norms and traditions and all that to actually reveal real things about himself, about his creation, and about us.
That's the foundation of a Christian worldview. That's why worldviews really. You know, begin with that question: is there a God and who is He? And that's very, very, I'd say, inseparable from questions of epistemology. By seeing real evil and saying, why do I perceive this as evil?
I mean, C.S. Lewis writes about this, right? My idea was that this line was crooked and the world was so unjust, and that's why I couldn't believe in God. And then it occurred to me. Why would I think it was crooked?
How would I know it was crooked? What is crooked? Yeah. And Mike Adams, a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, whose own story had a tragic end. But Mike's experience was as a nihilist, believing there is no such thing as good and evil, seeing the mistreatment of prisoners in a South American prison.
And that pushed him to look into what Chuck Colson had to say. about justice about morality Uh and that brought him to Christ and given that this is the 50th year of prison fellowship. Since Chuck founded that organization, I thought that was an appropriate reference point to undergird the point that you made. That you you know And and and yeah Even a sunset, right? If it was just the sun and not the clouds and not the darkness and not the color, right?
All that sort of contrast is one of the ways that we get the clarity that we need. And what are the ways that God reveals Himself? And thank God that God reveals Himself. God's really kind. We can't miss this.
God's really kind for revealing Himself. Because he didn't have to, right? One of the only things, the only sources of beauty, like what we're talking about, that I. truly never get, I don't think, distracted from or Like is, I'm never dulled to it, is looking at my kids. Like this morning, I always have to wake up my younger daughter.
My older daughter wakes up before everyone else. My younger daughter would sleep for all day. She's like me in that way. And I had to go wake her up, and looking at her face when she's asleep. Like, I truly still get butterflies in my stomach.
And I look at these people. More than anyone else on the face of the earth, more often and more intently, and probably in more moments of frustration than anything else in my life. But I still get butterflies when I just can't believe that their faces are the way that they are and how beautiful it is. And I have no doubt that that's a way God reveals himself to us as well. You need to have a little boy who turns 10 and has socks and smells that.
Because again, the contrast is. I have a little girl who's 10 who sits next to little boys who are 10 and I hear all. I don't know what it is. It is unreal. It is unreal.
I know. It is. I know, but they're still so beautiful. I know your little boy. He's beautiful too.
He's awesome. He's starting to shoot three pointers, and that's, I find that really awesome. But then his socks, dude, his socks. Yeah, well, his socks. It is hard.
That's the evil side of the coin. It is like venom. You know, that character in Marvel just kind of creeps and crawls all over the house. It is astonishing. Who am I?
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That's colsoncenter.org/slash study. All right, well, John, I want to talk about some questions. We got some really good, thoughtful questions this week that I want to bring to your attention.
So, let me read this first one here. This was in response to a breakpoint about The state of men in America. This person writes, You wrote, We have to work to connect more men to wives and children. How do we do this? I know two young women who are physically fit, attractive, well-spoken, fun, educated, good jobs, and really want to be married.
They regularly attend a mid-to-large size church. There have been only one man show any interest in one of them over the last two years. They say they haven't met anyone in over two years who they might be able to have a relationship with. Many of us are on the lookout for good men to introduce them to, but without luck. What hope do we have here?
Please help.
Well, look, I wish I could help those two young women specifically. I think this is kind of a cultural thing because we have basically punted and outsourced The job that I think the church probably should have kept and appropriated for. The last several decades, but we've all just kind of outsourced it to apps and to. you know, college and you know, you go somewhere that And what happened is is the traditional places where people could meet. stop being as personal.
And it didn't overcome the growing divide between young men and young women. It did not overcome the growing cultural norm of seeing marriage as a capstone instead of a cornerstone, as I think Brad Wilcox has so well argued.
So this mentality is just in the water. This is. This is the new norm is that you don't start thinking about that. And so I think one of the things we should do is help young people start thinking about it earlier and earlier. We should be abnormal in that way.
We should talk about what the cultural norm is and why the cultural norm is not healthy. In the same way, think about like not wearing your seatbelt or any of the other norms that have changed in our lifetimes. That we need a new norm, and the church can provide that new norm, at least within the context. Secondly, I think that we need to break at some level the cultural norm. that when you go to church, it is the personal experience between you and God.
This is something that has, I think, become a norm in how we do worship music and And how we do kind of this increasingly isolated, age-specific. Division of Sunday school classes or programming or whatever else. And I think we need more and more opportunities for young men and young women to go and meet each other. That was a place where some many non-Christians. would would would find themselves in And find Christ, and also find someone else at the same time, historically.
And I think that's increasingly, unfortunately, not the case. And so we need some more of those contexts. And in those contexts, to talk about marriage and children as if it's. A good thing. I would say that's an important aspect of this as well.
And and then in our own homes. I mean, look. The whole bowling alone phenomenon. that Robert Putnam wrote about and then I'm trying to remember the. Oh, there was a book called Sidewalks in the Kingdom that was trying to.
Overcome some of the ways that our own neighborhoods were built. Think about kind of these. Large neighborhoods where there's a garage in the front of the house. You go in, the garage shuts, nobody sits on the front, everybody sits on the back deck. There's no common space.
And I know a lot of neighborhoods now are different. Plenty have been built in Colorado Springs in the last 20 years where all that's changed. But that creates the norm that we don't share our homes. It's not a place of hospitality. We're not inviting people over.
So, that norm needs to change. I know I'm talking about really kind of high-level norm stuff, but the last one is: you got to help young men know how to do this.
So that's that's where my mind went. I sent you earlier, Albert Brooks had a column this week about the dating app Bumble, which I was unfamiliar with, but I guess when it, the selling point of Bumble, like its niche, was that on this dating app, only women could make the first move.
So women had to initiate a conversation, men couldn't make it. Nothing that was motivated to protect young women, right? It was. And it was plenty of creepsters, yeah. And it was reflecting like what a lot of women were saying was their preference because they were tired of dealing with constant aggressive or harassing messages from men.
But what ended up happening was it just wasn't working as well as they'd hoped. And so they hired. Actually, I was thinking of this when we were talking about the survey about belief in God, because again, women, I think a lot of women told Bumble and have told surveys that they do want it to be egalitarian. They do want to be able to make the first move. They don't want to give in to this whole antiquated idea that men should make the first move, but it turns.
Yeah. Maybe they were answering that question that way because they thought they were supposed to answer the question that way as a good feminist. And Albert Brooks, kind of from a. Biological, you know, quasi-evolutionary, you know, scientist tries to say, you know, this is probably so because women are looking subconsciously for evidence that a man can provide and that he's confident and has initiative and motivation. I'm not sure about all the evolutionary biology of that, but I can just say that I think for most women, it is pretty universally true.
That Men with confidence are more attractive to women than men without confidence. And that. Confidence can overcome almost any other perceived shortcoming, both on the part of the man himself and on the woman. And I think we have a crisis of confidence in young men. There's a ton of reasons for that.
Some of it earned, some of it culturally imposed. But I think if you could help young men, one of the things you have to tell them, easier said than done, but is. Act confident. Like be con go talk to girls. Go talk to them.
Be confident about it. Be open to rejection, but you've got to be confident. And I think that I see in my own church family, which is relatively small, but But a lack of confidence among a lot of young men that have every reason to be confident.
Well, look, I think you're right. There's a lot of reasons for it. One of those reasons is if they ever had the courage to be confident at some point, some of them have felt shot down and that undermines the confidence or they're part of life. That's part of it. It is, but I think that there also is a narrative that confidence is creepy.
Yes. Or it's inappropriate. And it's inappropriate. Yeah. But you're not wrong on that because I've had young men who I look at and I'm like, oh, you know, accomplished, even, you know, at least in terms of.
Um you know, at a good school studying 24. even in leadership positions at that school, literally asked me.
Okay, how do I talk to a girl? And then, how do I ask a girl out? Like, how would I do this? And I think part of that is how do I do that without getting in trouble for doing it? But also, just how do I do it?
I don't think we have seen the long-term Yet, the full long-term impact of this growing divide between young men and young women ideologically, culturally. There's just a million ways in which they're going different directions. And I think the church is going to have to be the exception. And that is going to include exactly what you're talking about. I think it also includes just creation theology.
I mean, think about. just the narrative that marriage is a good thing. Not marriage is a matter of personal choice if you want it. And oh, by the way, you're probably going to be miserable once you get there, right? And I think young married couples and old married couples have a role to play in showing the beauty of lifelong married love.
And then, also, from the pulpit, we got to start preaching it. We got to start teaching it. We got to start doing creation theology. I was over at Summit Ministries this week. I speak over there usually a couple of times a summer on.
Marriage and family, and it's not how to do marriage, it's not how to get married, it's just what is marriage biblically, and also what we can learn from anthropology. And I just always am fascinated by how fascinated the students are. And these are good kids coming from good families. But you're talking about things like the inherent. Packaged deal of sex marriage and babies, and how that's a good thing, and how that impacts larger society, and all that, and what all the implications.
And you just see their minds start. Going, oh, because I think it is just deeply ingrained that at best marriage is a matter of personal private choice. And at burst, It is a cultural imposition, particularly on women, that's going to lead to misery. And, um But but I I also do see from that the the younger younger generation i mean Younger high schoolers and high schoolers, that there is an intrigue with this.
So I think there's an opportunity here. If it ain't the church, it ain't going to be anyone else. And I think it's part of our calling if we believe God's put us here. For such a time as this and this particular time and place. Good on this person, whoever wrote the question, for asking the question and wanting to do something about it.
recruit some help. And get to work in your church body. I think that's part of what we should be doing.
Okay, I want to get to the second question.
So you and I have talked many times on the program about IVF and the ethical quagmire therein. But this person wrote in about embryo adoption, which we've also talked about.
So we know that through the practice of in vitro fertilization, there are now millions of human embryos that are on ice across the country. And there are a few ministries where couples can adopt those embryos, so can have those embryos implanted and carry those children and give them a chance at life. This person is asking about the ethics of that. And I think there were two parts of their question. The first was that they've heard some arguments against embryo adoption because Doing that process itself is putting distance between the conjugal relationship between a man and his wife and procreation.
And then the other side of the question is that does embryo adoption Kind of in a roundabout way, support the economic functioning of the IVF industry? And should that make it problematic for us?
So, how would you answer that? Yeah, it's a it's a great question and I'm hearing it more and more. And I'll I'll state my claim pretty clearly. Uh not everyone will ag agree with this. Not all of the my people I consider to be.
You know, close colleagues and dealing with big fertility and artificial reproductive technologies run amok, even agree. I've heard hesitation. From some of them that I find surprising, because I think that the ethics of this are relatively clear.
So let me address it on. Kind of in an order here. First, having to do with does it fundamentally divide the conjugal relations? Of the adoptive couple that are bringing them in in terms of leading to procreation. You know, in a Christian framework, the the sexual union has a good in and of itself.
Outside of procreation, I think that procreation is an inherent good. a result of the fall, a consequence of the fall is that Some people find themselves, some couples find themselves infertile, struggling. to conceive. And when that happens, they experience it as the tragedy that it is because it's like something's missing because.
Something's missing. But we wouldn't say that because we know this couple cannot conceive, that they should not. engage in the sexual union, you know, because the sexual union Even if there is this permanent disability of some kind. that will always prevent conception That sexual union still serves that couple in its unitive purpose, even if it doesn't in the procreative purpose. In terms of participating in this Industry.
which is what big fertility has become. I get the tension there. I can only think of it, though, as being likened to Abolitionists who were willing to spend their own money to buy slaves in order to set them free. In a sense, they were supporting the industry. But At the same time, they were freeing a human being, has infinite value.
And think about, for example, those who oppose child sex trafficking around the world by going and purchasing them. In order to set them free.
Now, what you also want them to participate in, and some of them are able to do it, and some of them are not. Is working with local law enforcement in order to set up the people who are perpetrating these evils and put an end to their evil by putting them in prison or whatever. I'd love for that eventually to be the outcome that additional work can be done. to end big fertility in the way that it does its evil. But I can't escape the fact that when you're talking about a million and a half or two million embryos.
that are in freezers. These are human beings. And I adopt the strategy here that Scott Klusendorf, a pro-life apologist, often talks about of trotting out the toddler. If we weren't talking about a million and a half or two million children, That were at the embryonic stage in freezers, but we were talking about a million and a half or 2 million two-year-olds. that were behind cages.
And say, well, if I can save that one, that one, and that one, isn't that better than not saving that one, that one, and that one? And I think the answer to that is an unequivocal yes, because we're talking about human beings. And I think in a sense this is A reflection of Bonhoeffer's understanding of ethics in a fallen context, this idea that we have to do what we have to do in the tempest of the living. For him, I know the old song that I learned in Sunday school: it's never wrong to do right, or it's never right to do wrong, to do right, to do what's right to do. That was an old song I learned as a Baptist.
And Uh I but I don't think that acts. Of itself, even if you're participating in an industry that needs to be brought down. And I don't know, by the way, any adoptive parent. of a snowflake baby is as they're called, a snowflake embryo. would say that they're happy.
That the process exists and the industry exists that led to their child. being adopted.
Now there have been revelations of mispractice, malpractice among those even providing this service to couples. And it's horrific, horrific stuff.
So I get the industry itself is I think evil at a level that it affects other things. And even those who kind of started their adoptive agency out of maybe an altruism of trying to help these kids can be corrupted by it. I think there's some evidence that that's happened. But Freeing a human being from a prison? Bring a child?
from basically being sentenced to Permanently be frozen, or eventually donated to science, or eventually be discarded. If I can help that one. I think we got to do it. in as much as we can. the process itself is justified.
Absolutely.
Well, thanks, John, and thank you to our listeners who've sent in comments and questions. If you'd like to do that, please go to ColsonCenter.org and click on contact us. We would love to hear from you and maybe interact with your feedback in a future episode. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week. From the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stone Street.
Wishing you a great week. We'll see you all back here next time. God bless.
