Upstream

Writing in the New York Times this week, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Karen Swallow Prior calls abortion “a failure for every woman and her unborn child—a failure of love, justice, and mercy.” She goes on to praise Texas’ controversial new heartbeat law as a call back to these ideals and a reminder of biological and ontological realities that American courts and legislatures have too long obscured.

Prior’s piece may have seemed bold to readers of the New York Times, but it accurately represented mainstream evangelical beliefs about the sanctity of life from the moment of conception. No major group is more opposed to abortion today than evangelicals, and together with conservative Roman Catholics, they now lead and fund the fight to end legal abortion in this country.

But it wasn’t always like this. Knowing our history can help us avoid fatal mistakes as we enter a new era of bioethical challenges.

It may seem like opposition to abortion is a natural result of conservative Christian faith and of a heavy emphasis on the authority of Scripture. But not that long ago, evangelical Protestants were anything but united behind the pro-life cause. Writing in the Huffington Post a few years ago, Jonathan Dudley chronicled how the major leaders, publications, and institutions of American evangelicalism fifty years ago either openly declared their support for legal abortion, or defended the permissibility of killing the unborn in certain cases. The piece’s title says a lot: “How Evangelicals Decided that Life Begins at Conception.” And he was basically right.

For instance, in 1968, just five years before Roe v. Wade was decided, Christianity Today held a symposium of evangelical leaders to determine “the conservative or evangelical position within Protestantism” on “the control of human reproduction.” In their joint statement, they concluded that “the performance of an induced abortion” is necessary and permissible under certain circumstances, among which they listed “family welfare, and social responsibility.” They continued: “When principles conflict, the preservation of fetal life…may be abandoned to maintain full and secure family life.”

Around the same time, the Southern Baptist convention largely concurred, calling on members of the denomination in 1971 to “work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

It’s tough to imagine an abortion that couldn’t conceivably be justified under these criteria. Yet this was the position of one of America’s largest evangelical denominations and America’s leading evangelical publication just before abortion became legal in this country.

So, what changed? It’s a long and complex story with many players, but it’s fair to say that Roman Catholics understood the gravity of the abortion issue and took the right position long before evangelicals did. It’s also fair to say that Catholic reflection on the sanctity of life helped bring evangelicals into the pro-life fold, and back to the historic Christian consensus on this issue—a consensus that goes all the way back to ancient documents like the Didache.

I bring up this history to illustrate that bioethical truths are not always as obvious to Christians as we imagine. Implications about the sanctity of life we think we see today in Scripture and science were not always so clear to evangelicals in past generations—not because God was silent on such issues back then, but because Christians often failed to do the ethical and exegetical reflection necessary to hear Him speak.

If we hold our pro-life convictions firmly today and believe that they truly are grounded in revelation, this past failure should humble us and make us much more sensitive to our current bioethical blind spots. All the more when we realize how fast our world is changing.

We live amid a bewildering array of new technologies and practices that tinker with, dispense with, or exploit human life in ways our grandparents couldn’t have imagined. In vitro fertilization, surrogacy, chemical abortions, contraception and sterilization, gender transition, human cloning and human-animal hybrids, physician-assisted suicide, stem-cell research, embryo-selective eugenics, and dozens of similar applications of science and medicine can leave us dizzy. And even though we confess that the Bible is sufficient to “equip the man of God thoroughly for every good work,” it addresses almost none of these practices directly.

How then do we distinguish between practices that are morally acceptable, and those that violate God’s design for our bodies and relationships? As we answer this question, we risk making one of two mistakes.

On the one hand, we might conclude that because the Bible nowhere explicitly addresses something like human cloning, God therefore has no opinion on the matter. We have Christian freedom to make up our own minds, because Scripture is silent on the issue.

It’s not hard to see where this laissez-faire attitude leads. Christians would quickly lose all meaningful public witness in the modern world if we restricted ourselves only to those moral questions dealt with by name in ancient Israel. Just because the Bible doesn’t explicitly mention a modern practice doesn’t mean it lacks the ethical principles to rightly judge that practice. Indeed, there is very little in the Bible about abortion. Yet that doesn’t mean God is silent on the murder of unborn children.

Here’s the other mistake: We might argue against something like gay adoption using only the Bible and its condemnations of homosexual relations. “God said it, I believe Him, that settles it.” And this might work in a more Christian society. But that is not the society we live in. More importantly, the Bible itself treats moral truths not as Divine fiats unknowable to anyone without special revelation, but as discernible truths attested by creation and written on the human heart. In a strict sense, we do not need the Bible to tell us that homosexuality, for example, is wrong, because as Paul writes, it is “unnatural”—it violates the evident design or law etched on our very natures and bodies. The Bible’s rules are not rules without reasons. And those reasons are plain even to unbelievers—plain enough, at any rate, to render them “without excuse.”

So, where does this leave us? And how do evangelicals avoid coming to the wrong conclusion on bioethical issues in our time, the way so many did fifty years ago on abortion? For that matter, how do we engage our neighbors and legislators on bioethical issues without falling into either of the errors I just described? How do we know what to say and think about the bewildering new technologies that confront us?

The answer really comes down to diligent study—of Scripture, science, and Christian ethical teaching both ancient and modern. The church must become again a place where the followers of Jesus think deeply about what’s right and wrong and why it’s right or wrong—especially when human life is at stake. We must draw on the resources of Christian communions that have gotten these questions right in the past (more Protestants need to pick up documents like Humanae vitae). And we must take advantage of the wisdom and experience available from organizations like the Christian Medical and Dental Association, whose “Bridging the Gap” bioethics curriculum was the subject of this week’s Upstream interview.

If we hope to speak on any of these issues with “love, justice, and mercy” as Dr. Prior puts it, we must never take the “ethics” half of bioethics for granted. Many who shared our profession of faith once did that. And we’re still living with the consequences to this day.

Brick Lantz and Bert Jones of the Christian Medical and Dental Association join Shane to introduce a powerful new group study curriculum designed to reintroduce Christians to bioethics, from beginning of life to end of life and everything in between.

“What am I gonna be when I grow up?” asks a song I listened to a lot in my middle school years. “And how am I gonna make my mark on history? What are they gonna write about me when I’m gone? These are the questions that shape the way I think about what matters.”

Maybe you know the song. The chorus is a prayer that God would teach us the “power of a moment.” And it’s a good way to phrase the question I explored this week on the podcast with Nathan Rittenhouse.

Nathan is just a few years older than I am, but he has realized something that it takes many young people, especially in our youth-centric culture, a very long time to grasp: that making a difference in the world is like a marathon, not like a hundred-yard dash.

It’s rarely the meteoric hotshot, the child prodigy, or the flash-in-a-pan sensation who has a long-term positive impact on the lives of others, much less all of society. Young people are often good at generating fifteen minutes of fame. The child actor, the singer with her first hit, or the high school activist touring the country demanding reform easily make the evening news. The cameras love them. There’s a reason the term is “poster child,” not “poster person.”

But give it a year or two, and what happens? Where are the young newsmakers of 2018 now, and what remains of their legacies? What contribution did teenage celebrities from even a few years ago make that didn’t fade with their looks, their record deals, or a bad return at the box office? And how difficult is it to think of young activists who faded into irrelevance as their cause faded from the headlines? If you’re like me, it’s not hard to recall a few names.

Sure, there the Josiahs, the Mozarts, and the Alexander Hamiltons, all of whom amassed impressive resumes before turning thirty. But these figures stand out precisely because they were exceptions to the rule. Maybe it’s a coincidence that all three died before reaching old age. And maybe not.

The point is that meaningful and lasting contributions to the world are usually the fruit of a life spent in study, practice, growth, and accumulating experience. With the exception of athletes, most people’s careers will peak in middle age, not in their twenties. And as a young parent, I’m also comfortable saying that the most worthwhile advice for raising kids comes from those at the end of the road, not the beginning.

But here we run into a paradox that all those who’ve ever dreamed big dreams know: taking the long view of life, and thinking on a scale of decades rather than years, requires living in the here and now, embracing small and humble vocations—in short, learning “the power of a moment.”

Whether it’s Dale Carnegie, Jordan Peterson, or David Allen, all of the worthwhile self-help authors I’ve read in the last year have one thing in common: They instruct their readers to break big goals down into easily attainable steps. They say things like, “Stop worrying about the future and start living in the here and now,” and “Set your own house in perfect order before you criticize the world,” and “You don’t actually do a project. You do action steps related to the project.” Good advice. As Nathan explained, strictly speaking, no one runs a cross-country race. They run individual miles, carefully rationing their stamina and pacing themselves—often willingly letting competitors pass them for a time—in order to reach the finish line.

What this means is that ironically, those who expect to change the world in their twenties are often precisely the people who aren’t focusing on the best way to spend their twenties. Meanwhile, those who answer, “I don’t know,” when asked, “what will you be when I grow up?” and instead work heartily at the responsibilities already entrusted to them are the most likely to succeed in the future. Jesus’ parable of the talents is paradigmatic, here: “The one who is faithful in a very little thing is also faithful in much.” The lesson we can take from this is that a person’s twenties are a uniquely important time in life—just not for the reasons our culture seems to believe.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a headmaster at a Christian school about the nature of education. Whether in presidential debates or parent-child talks, Americans often speak as if the purpose of sending our children to school is to help them get a good job someday. A few days earlier, I had seen an Internet meme suggesting that schools stop teaching algebra and world history and start teaching kids how to balance a checkbook, how to pay their taxes, and how to buy a house. The implication was that any subject without obvious economic payoff is useless. By contrast, my friend and I concluded that while getting a good job may be one result of education, it’s not really the purpose.

Understood rightly, education—including the college, training, and other life experiences gained in our twenties—is not about learning marketable skills. It’s about becoming wise and virtuous people who understand the world and are ready for responsibility. That means young adulthood is a uniquely important chance not so much to do meaningful things but to become a meaningful person. The most important question those finishing high school can ask is not, “What am I going to be?” but “Who am I going to be?”

No one should feel the pressure to change the world in the first decade of their adult lives because that’s not what those years are for. Rather, they’re a unique opportunity to show faithfulness in the little things and to become the kind of person who can answer the most meaningful calls to responsibility later in life. All of the reading, experiences, character formation, and friendships with which a wise young person fills these years can shape him or her into the kind of leader who will make a lasting mark on the world.

But here we come to the final paradox, and a realization that Nathan says caused him to make a career choice some would describe as a waste of potential: “Making a lasting mark on the world” doesn’t always involve headlines, Nobel prizes, or bestselling books. It can look more like what the Apostle Paul called a “quiet life, working with your hands.” It can involve raising godly children, loving your neighbors, and contributing meaningfully to the community and time in which God has placed you. It can look more like George Bailey’s “wonderful life,” than like his brother’s more glamourous one.

In the end, perhaps our very concept of what it means to “change the world” needs to change. That’s a reflection for another time. But we might start with someone who spent His twenties in faithful obscurity only to shoulder His biggest responsibilities later. If memory serves, He had some helpful advice about which treasures we should pursue, and where we should keep them.

Nathan Rittenhouse joins Shane to explain why, as his grandfather put it, “no one takes you seriously until you’re thirty,” and why for Christians who want to impact the culture for Christ, that’s very good news.

There’s a photo that circulated a few years ago on social media that really made an impression on me. A man perches beyond the railing of a bridge in London, plainly ready the jump. But a crowd of strangers has gathered, wrapping their arms around him through the bars of the bridge and even tying his legs and torso with ropes to keep him from leaping to his death. The man has turned around, away from the fatal drop and toward his rescuers. He is not fighting them. He seems to be weeping. According to reports, these good Samaritans clutched the suicidal man for over an hour until police arrived with a bucket lift to lower him to safety and transport him to a hospital.

I brought up this viral photo during my conversation with Dr. Matthew Sleeth because it illustrates in a simple yet stunning way how inadequate individual autonomy is when dealing with suicide. There is no moment quite like the moment when a person decides life is no longer worth living. It’s incomparable because of how much it reveals. At the point when, as Joseph puts it in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a person decides to throw away God’s greatest gift, our modern conceits about self-realization and esteem fall to pieces.

When you come to believe that your life is too miserable, your resilience too depleted, and your future too hopeless to continue breathing, a self-centered worldview has no more comfort to offer you—only a cold sendoff. You are, after all, the ultimate arbiter of your destiny, the “captain of your ship.” And if you have decided the voyage is over, then who is to say otherwise? Who can rightfully impose their view of reality and purpose on you? How dare they coerce and deny you the right to choose?

Yet the image of a crowd restraining a suicidal man—not with force so much as reaffirming arms and bonds he welcomed—this image drives us to the point of tears. And it makes it plain why consent and personal autonomy aren’t enough for a civilized society. We need each other. Sometimes we need a hand there to curtail our freedoms, to override our self-will, and to tell us life is still worth living when our imaginations fail. And without the intervention and care of others, they will inevitably fail.

Two weeks ago I had a conversation with a young man as he drove me to the Traverse City Airport in Michigan. As we passed apple orchards and corn fields, the subject turned to America’s suicide epidemic. He asked me what I thought was behind our current tide of so-called “deaths of despair.” I told him that it came down to a natural and supernatural answer. Naturally speaking, people have lost touch with one another. Community and connection are no longer the scaffolding of Americans’ everyday lives, and the resulting isolation has been deadly.

Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” which I’m still working my way through, documents the disintegration of mediating institutions. Where once our country teemed with voluntary associations that gave life rhythm and meaning for millions, now it echoes like the empty buildings of social clubs and civic associations. Venues in which strangers and neighbors could meet and share an evening have dwindled to near non-existence. In their place, glowing screens curate faceless social experiences that unite us with avatars of distant persons who know only as much of us as we choose to publish. These strangers almost certainly lack the insight (and probably the will) to intervene on our behalf when despair takes hold. They certainly can’t reach out and wrap their arms around our teetering forms.

The second part of my answer was supernatural. Along with the silent shells of Elks and Moose Lodges, Kiwanis, American Legion, and (thanks, Putnam) even bowling leagues, we see empty churches. America’s main streets and boulevards are lined with the moldering husks of Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Baptist congregations once packed with worshipers. Now these are little better than museums, warmed by visitors mostly at Christmas and Easter, and then only as a formality. Calling these “communities” would be laughable, were it not so sad.

Even evangelical congregations, packed as they may be into auditoriums in the suburbs, tend toward showmanship over discipleship. Consumers often enjoy a light show and TED talk, and maybe some hastily-brewed coffee in the lobby. But how many can point to a fellow Christian who knows their deepest struggles well enough to tell when they’re on the ledge, much less talk them down from it? Even the most sanguine megachurch pastors must admit they struggle to remember most names. Can they keep their congregants from jumping?

As I told my friend while we drove through Michigan, even a little connection would blunt America’s suicide epidemic. This is true not only because real friendship and human company make life worth living, but because they remind us that life’s value isn’t subjective, and therefore doesn’t depend on our circumstances.

In the opening chapter of “Hope Always,” Dr. Sleeth tells the story of two patients who were admitted to his hospital. The first was a young man full of promise who had chosen a .22 caliber bullet through his temple instead of a future. The second was a man a few years older who, despite being wheelchair bound from a neurological injury, was filled with joy and gratitude for life. He was admitted for an illness that had gotten out of control, but from which he soon recovered. Only after telling the story of these two young men does Dr, Sleeth reveal that they were one and the same.

Thanks to rapid and determined medical intervention, this patient survived his suicide attempt, much to the gratitude of his parents. Dr. Sleeth, who was an atheist at the time, recalls his wonder at seeing a quadriplegic patient relish life where an able-bodied young man once chose to throw his away. He recalls also his amazement when this young man’s parents embraced and kissed him for bringing their son back from death’s door, even if it was in a wheelchair.

It’s a powerful beginning to a book on suicide and an effective reminder that “quality of life” has more to do with who we are than how we are. Yet Dr. Sleeth doesn’t keep the real source of this young man’s newfound zest for life a secret. Christian faith, he explains, helped turn the human embrace of parents and doctors into a picture—perhaps even a means—of Divine love. For this remarkable patient, the realization that life has value irrespective of circumstances or psychological state came in the form of a physician who wouldn’t let him die, of parents who wouldn’t let paralysis spoil their joy, and of a God who wouldn’t let despair have the last word.

In the midst of a historic suicide epidemic, we need connection, with each other and with our creator, because autonomy is a literal dead-end. And when we feel those arms reaching through the bars to hold us back, we may find, like that man on the bridge in London, and the Dr. Sleeth’s patient, that we’re glad not to be in charge for once

Medical doctor Matthew Sleeth shares stories from the emergency room where he treated patients who tried to commit suicide. Shane asks Sleeth why the pandemic of suicide is so overlooked, and how Christians can step in the gap and be a force of life in a culture of suicide.

I’m going to do something a little different. I just talked with Sean Clifford, CEO of Canopy, which the Gospel Coalition called the world’s most advanced pornography filter. It was a frank discussion about the nature and impact of modern porn and how technology can fight for families, not just against them, and it’s relevant for everyone. We need that, because porn is a pressing problem for everyone. But I know nothing from experience about the hurt and struggles that porn inflicts on women. So as a man, I want to speak very frankly to fellow men. And women can keep listening, here. But just know that this is primarily directed to my brothers in Christ.

Men, its time to be afraid of ourselves. Seemingly every few months, another prominent Christian leader is caught in or confesses to inappropriate behavior, or a sexual addiction of some kind. It’s an endless drumbeat. The list of Christian men in ministry, whether pastors or apologists or speakers or authors, who have been caught in the net of sexual sin over the last few years is dizzying. It's nauseating. It's a punch in the gut.

Of course, the situation in the church is nothing unique. We're living through a cultural moment of reckoning over the sexual escapades of men in general, not just Christian men. The #MeToo movement encouraged women who've been victimized and harassed to flip the light switch on powerful men in entertainment, sports, journalism, and politics. Unscrupulous CEOs and doctors and congressmen who long enjoyed a kind of cultural permission to exploit those under their power are now scurrying for cover.

This long-overdue judgment day for abusers has prompted a second wave of revelations about sexual behavior that, while not illegal, is still unethical and immoral. And Christian authority figures have not fared well in the light of day. Whatever the actual statistics, the merciless repetition of pastor after author after apologist toppling for the same avoidable failures of the flesh gives the impression that sexual sin is eating the church alive. According to one survey, pastors are now less trusted by the public than daycare providers, doctors, military officers, and grade school teachers.

There's no appropriate reaction to this parade of scandals that does not start with falling on our faces before God and begging for mercy. We're in bad shape, and we need Divine help. We're supposed to be a "city on a hill," but those watching the American church right now probably see what looks to them like a mosquito-infested cesspool. This is cause for grief and repentance. It may even be time to take those biblical references to sackcloth and ashes literally, again.

But there's more to be said, and more work to do than just repentance. It's time for a revolution in the way Christian men see ourselves. We've had our chance to prove our mettle against sexual temptation. And we've failed, miserably. Even though many individual leaders of integrity remain, we have collectively proven ourselves incapable of acting in private in accord with the morals we profess in public. Sin is gobbling us up at an unsustainable and unconscionable rate, and swallowing our ministries, churches, and life work along with us. Something has to change.

Here's my modest proposal: Men, it's time to stop trusting ourselves. Stop trusting in your integrity and strength. Stop telling yourself that you would never surrender to temptation. Stop telling yourself you are better than the scores of Christian luminaries whose lives and families have disappeared in scandal. There is no moral chasm between them and you. You are not made of finer clay. Each of us is just one bad decision away from becoming the next stroke in the nauseating drumbeat of the church's public failures.

Let me say this dramatically to get my message across: You should get to the point where you are afraid to be in a room alone with yourself. I'm not kidding. As Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry put it, we have met the enemy and he is us. The devil isn't chiefly responsible for Christian leaders sacrificing their witness for momentary indulgence. We give him far too much credit, here. He probably has to do very little to get us to topple. As Uncle Screwtape quipped, "It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."

And what the devil has kept out of our minds for too long is this: We are weak. We are usually no match for sexual temptation. It pummels us, especially when we're certain we can get away with giving in. If you still think you have the integrity to deal with its onslaught on your own, I can only ask how many more high-profile resignations it will take for you to abandon your delusion and save yourself.

Christian men, it's time we stopped trying to be heroes. It's time we stopped going it alone. It's time we recognized how muscular the monster of sexual sin really is. It's time we had the courage to run.

That's right--run. Scripture says to flee sexual immorality. As in, turn tail and retreat. I don't think we've spent nearly enough time considering what this might mean. We remind me sometimes of the Eloi in H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine,"--a smiling, peaceful people whose screams fill the night as the Morlocks come to drag another one of us to their dinner table. And like the Eloi, we seem to have forgotten it all by morning. After each victim is dragged into the darkness, we go on with our lives as if nothing has happened--as if hairy, hungry monsters aren't returning for us come nightfall.

Sexual sin derives much of its destructive power from this notion that each pastor or evangelist who falls into its clutches is a fluke--that there is no essential connection in the seemingly endless chain of moral failings by Christian leaders. "It could never happen to me," we seem to be telling ourselves, "so I don't need to do anything differently."

This might be true if the enemy were out there. But he's not. He's in here. I am my own worst nightmare. The more alone I am with myself, the greater danger I am in. The more convinced my baser instincts become that they can enjoy one, small indulgence, the more certain it becomes that I will dive headlong into iniquity and eventually be discovered, to the ruin of the family, church, or institution I love.

Oh, I know. You think you will be able to hide it. You tell yourself, "just this once." You remind yourself that "everybody messes up, and besides, I deserve to cut loose a little."

You have already lost your life at this moment. Your concupiscent morlocks already have their claws in you. Before you even commit the act, or open your browser, or steal that sweet kiss, you are doomed. The act is just the terms of surrender. You are walking yourself into the death camp and choosing your guillotine.

Even your victories can turn to defeat. The battle may be going well. You may have defeated sexual temptation on your own, a few times. You may be reaping the blessings of obedience. You have the trust and admiration of those you love. They place you on a pedestal. They strive to imitate your integrity. You are a model Christian. Then you start pacing the parapets at night. A woman on her rooftop catches your eye. The next morning, it's all over.

Defeating this inner monster and stopping or at least slowing the nauseating drumbeat means doing more than living with our shields at the ready. It means more than cultivating inner virtue and habits of the heart, though these are important. It means being able to see the beginnings of temptation, to catch its shadow coming around the corner, and run. It means recognizing that you cannot beat it. You cannot stand against it on your own. Look how many better men than you have fallen! It means fleeing to where you know there are reinforcements, where the hosts of Heaven are strongest. It means dialing up a trusted confidant in Christ the moment desire is born, before it even matures to lingering thoughts, much less into full temptation!

Don't try to reason yourself out of your attraction to that coworker. Flee to a brother who will tell you that what you're feeling can never be allowed to flower. Find someone who will tell you that you must not even suffer such feelings to survive--someone who will help you stomp them out without mercy. "A man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken."

What I am proposing is something a little more radical than accountability partners. It is a fundamentally different attitude toward ourselves, one of everlasting mistrust and suspicion. Do not trust yourself. Do not believe in yourself. Do not even turn your back on yourself. Do not dare keep a secret.

This goes against everything our culture tells us, I know. And it goes against something still stronger than our culture: our pride, as men. We want to be seen as self-sufficient and strong. We want to be immovable rocks for God. But I am convinced that any man who thinks this way will become lunch-meat for the first sexual temptation that strikes him. You cannot stand on your own. You will not. None of us can, consistently, and reliably. That's why God gave us the Church. That's why He gave us each other. And that’s why I thank Him for the work and commitment of people like Sean Clifford and the rest of those employing technology to fight the filth that bombards us, rather than amplifying it.

Bottom line? Run, men. You are no match for yourselves. Take refuge in the help God has given

Sean Clifford joins Shane to talk about how sexual content online has changed, and how a next-generation Internet filter can protect families.  

Website: www.canopy.us

Upstream discount code: safer

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins famously defined biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” He has also remarked that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution made it possible for the first time to “be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” It’s important to understand what he means by both statements.

For many centuries, the “design argument” was a pillar of Christians’ apologetic for the existence of God. Looking at the natural world, specifically life, thinkers as diverse as William Paley to Thomas Aquinas to the Apostle Paul concluded that creation clearly testifies to purposive intelligence. Nothing about its structure looks purposeless or unguided. Aquinas, for instance, suggested in his fifth argument for God that just as an arrow (which lacks intelligence) nevertheless manifests an intelligible purpose or end, so too do created bodies, especially living things.

In more recent times, philosophers and apologists compared living things with machines, because there are many key resemblances. Living things contain analogues to pulleys and levers, electrical circuits, cameras and microphones, and require fuel, lubrication, and repair. Paley famously compared organisms with a functional watch, found lying on a heath, testifying to a designer. As science has advanced and we’ve peered deeper into the microscopic world, we’ve discovered a new universe of living wonders. Outboard motors and gears, automatic doors and gateways, transport mechanisms that appear to “walk,” and at the center of it all, a molecule like no other that stores and transmits the information necessary to build life: DNA.

In Dawkins’ mind, Darwin dispatched all of these arguments by proposing a mechanism through which random and mindless processes could slowly produce the appearance of design. Evolution by natural selection acting on random variations, concludes Dawkins, is a kind of “blind watchmaker.” By sorting through random copying errors over unfathomable stretches of time with no aim or purpose in mind, Darwin’s mechanism could—allegedly—produce the wondrous diversity of complex and elegant living machinery we see today.

There are lots of problems with this, and I’ve talked about them before with other guests on Upstream. Check out, for example, my conversation with philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. But there’s one challenge to Darwin’s theory that stands out as basically insurmountable: the origin of the first life. You see, Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain life’s existence—it assumes it, and then tries to explain the diversity of life from there. But it offers no real account of how life or the struggle for survival began in the first place.

Darwin certainly speculated about it, in a way that sounds impossibly naïve to modern microbiologists. In an 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker, Darwin wrote:

"But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes…”

Darwin wrote this having no means of peering inside cells, having no understanding of the countless processes and mechanisms involved in even the simplest living thing, and with no knowledge of DNA or

the laws of inheritance. But that was 150 years ago. Surely evolutionary biology has made huge advances since then in its study of the origin of life. Right?

Well, in my conversation this week with synthetic-organic chemist Dr. James Tour, we explore precisely that question, and come to a stark conclusion: science is further today from understanding how life could have arisen through purely material processes than it has ever been. In his words, if anyone tells you differently, “they’re lying.” And if you ask them for details, “you’ll see them start to sweat.”

Whether it’s the combination of chemicals at the right time and place, the transition from those chemicals to the compounds necessary for life, to the production of diverse proteins, to the assembly of the cell itself, to the origin of a functional system of cellular replication, science has utterly failed not only at showing how such a process could occur in a “warm little pond,” but has failed even to replicate it through intelligent engineering under ideal laboratory conditions.

Dr. Tour is pretty passionate about exposing this mystery, and no wonder. We constantly hear talk from people like Dawkins triumphantly proclaiming that the mystery of life and its origin is settled, and God is no longer necessary. Yet with no material process or even plausible theory for how non-living chemicals can spontaneously transform into living organisms, that kind of rhetoric is worse than irresponsible. It’s dishonest.

This is usually the point at which advocates for the older design theory meet with a retort: “You’re just resorting to a ‘God-of-the-gaps’ argument.” In other words, the only reason we infer intelligence of any kind involved with life’s origin, much less a Divine intelligence, is that science cannot currently explain life’s origin. But science is always advancing, and just as Darwin discovered the law of natural selection, it may be that future scientists will discover processes by which chemicals can turn into cells. The fact that a mystery current exists isn’t by itself a reason to propose God did it. That’s an argument from ignorance.

And that would be true, if the case for intelligent or even theistic design rested on ignorance, alone. But as I discussed before on Upstream with both Stephen Meyer and Logan Gage, that’s not how modern design arguments are made. Rather than an argument from ignorance, advocates for intelligent design make a positive, abductive inference to the best-known explanation. And that best explanation in our uniform and repeated experience is mind, intelligence, or conscious purpose. Put simply, we don’t argue that God created life because we have no other explanation, but because life exhibits precisely the sorts of features we only observe in products of purposive intelligence. And a purposive intelligence that precedes life itself—barring speculation about prebiotic aliens—would be very much like the God of theism.

At this point materialists will object that proposing a supernatural entity as an explanation for natural phenomena is unscientific. And here we get to the very bottom of the debate—a questions C. S. Lewis tackles in his astonishing little book, “Miracles.” The belief that material causes are the only type of causes active in our world—that matter and energy are, as Lewis glibly puts it, “the whole show”—that belief is itself an assumption that cannot be supported or tested by materialistic science. It is, in other words, self-refuting.

Yet without this prior commitment to materialism, it is far from obvious why God’s creative and intentional power is out-of-bounds as an explanation for life. With all due respect to Dr. Dawkins, maybe living things give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose because—they were.

Where and how did life begin? Can naturalistic evolution account for it?

Synthetic organic chemist and Rice University professor Dr. James Tour explains that the typical naturalistic explanation for the origin of life–that there was some primordial soup, lightning flashes, then molecules came together and formed a cell, which evolved into more complicated life–is “fallacious” and “a bunch of nonsense.”

As Dr. Tour tells Shane Morris on Upstream, “If any scientists” claim to know the process by which life came about, “they are lying.”

In this fascinating interview, Dr. Tour explains the extraordinarily complex sets of building blocks and processes that had to come together to form life in ways we still cannot explain.