Response to PANDA's Nick Hudson: God and values
Is it possible to return to values derived from belief in God while throwing God himself out?
A couple of days ago Robert Malone published this excellent article on his Substack, written by the founder of PANDA, a “group…formed in response to the global political and public health reaction to COVID….to develop science-based explanations relating to the COVID crisis, and to test these hypotheses against international data.”
The author examines the COVID response, the errors of thinking and epistemology that lie behind it, and how we should respond. I strongly recommend it. But a part of it stuck in my mind, and hence this response.
In the author’s “what’s to be done” section, he states:
We have to show the positives of the alternative world to this utilitarian dystopia. What world is that? The world of values. Why is that world so dismissed? I talk about the God-shaped hole problem. We've seen a process of secularization. A caricature of God was presented to people, and they could not reconcile their modern minds to that. So they tossed out the whole of religion, with its evolved system of knowledge.
I was pleased to read this, because as a Christian I agree that the reasons for our societal deterioration are rooted in our secularization and rejection of God.
But I’m not on board with the theory that we can toss out the idea of an actual God, and somehow retain the values that we obtained from the idea of God.
The author says that “a caricature of God was presented to people.” He never really specifies what that caricature is, though we get some clues: “they could not reconcile their modern minds to that.”
Man believing he’s too wise and intelligent to accept God is not a new thing. But what do “modern minds” believe specifically that puts up a barrier to faith in God?
In our age, there are generally a couple of major objections: evolution, and sexual morality.
The fairly recent idea of evolution—that the world, ourselves, and everything we know developed out of nothing by itself—makes not believing in God plausible in a way it previously wasn’t. The fact that it is taught as settled science (though it is not by any means; a topic for another post!) makes it even more so.
Secondly, modern objections to God are often rooted in the sexual revolution, particularly the idea that God has proscriptions against certain sexual behaviour, especially homosexuality. Moderns can’t wrap their head around the idea that anyone might not approve of people “loving” (having sex with) anyone they please, at any time they please, in any way they please. It is extremely offensive to human self-believed autonomy and “freedom” that anyone might put limits on their sexual self-expression.
Our author believes that religions teach a “caricature” of God. “Caricature” implies that there is a reality. Does the author believe there is a “real God” who has been falsely portrayed, and if so, what is this God like? How does he know? It is interesting that the author, as a non-religious person, presumes to tell religious people that their idea of God is false.
Almost certainly, as the author is from a Western milieu (South Africa) he is referring to the Christian God, although that’s an important point to clarify as certainly not all ideas of God are the same.
Even to the religious people, it’s deeply unattractive to many of them to conceive of religion as an evolved system of knowledge embedding truth, because things were tried and tested. They wanted to read it as received dogma that’s incontrovertible, as part of a caricature version of the faith. So they don’t fight the people who leave because they don’t believe in the caricature. They want the dogmatic version of the religion to remain alive, even though it itself is very clearly, if you study comparative religion and religious history, an evolved system that therefore embeds spectacular knowledge that’s been good for society. So by canceling the God, by wiping him out because the bearded man in the sky is too far-fetched for many, you cancel the value system, creating a hole. What I like to refer to as the God-shaped hole. And into it comes Fauci with a spreadsheet. A utilitarian system.
Here we get a little more information about what the author believes is a “caricatured” idea of God: “received dogma that’s incontrovertible” and “the bearded man in the sky,” and about what he thinks the true nature of religion is: “an evolved system of knowledge embedding truth”. The implication is that we don’t need God for that.
I’d love to be able to find out what exactly he means by this. “Dogma” is a Roman Catholic term. If he’s saying that human religious teachings, which did not come from God, ought to be tossed out, I’m fully in agreement. But what he appears to be against is any idea of revealed, received truth about God. He wants to keep the things he thinks are good about religions—the “values” (which in itself is a problematic concept as not all religions have the same values)—but throw out any doctrine about God. Almost certainly, he means unpalatable teachings like God’s design for sexuality, the value of all human life, creation, hell, judgement, etc.
In other words, he wants to create God in his own image, keeping the things he likes and rejecting those he doesn’t. He thinks the values are good (without specifying what those are), but God himself is a bit passé. This is nothing new; humanity has been doing this from the beginning. Even “progressive” modern churches do this.
A major problem is precisely what he refers to as the “God-shaped hole.” He seems to think this hole can be filled by “values”. It cannot. What human beings thirst for, what creates the God-shaped hole, is not a system of values or morals or behavioural guidelines. What we thirst for is meaning and relationship. Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Where did the universe come from? Is there anyone out there guiding things, or is everything random and chaotic? Where will I go when I die? How can I know how to live? Are there absolute truths? Is there an ultimate Love I can rely on, even when the entire world is against me?
Only the loving, sovereign, relational God of the Scriptures, the Father of Jesus Christ, the God who came down to earth in human flesh and died to redeem his creation, and who comes to live in us and empower us by his Holy Spirit, can fill that God-shaped hole. Otherwise, all you get is another spreadsheet, another system of “values” without any grounding in authority or reality.
So there should be some process developed to reassert the primacy of values and virtues, the old-fashioned way of thinking about the world; that there are things that are simply wrong, and we know that they're not acceptable by virtue of our cultures. Things which are taboo. And there are things that are right, things that are virtuous that we ought to be trying to do in the world. Even if we can't account for them in a detailed analytical fashion, we've inherited them, and that’s how we know. We're prepared to tinker with them on the margins, but we are not prepared to indulge in games that involved their wholesale cancellation.
What is this “old-fashioned way of thinking about the world” that the author wants to return to? He says they are from “our cultures”. But which ones? As with religions, the author does not specify. Cultural values are by no means universal; different cultures have wildly different taboos and virtues, and many of those he would certainly find repugnant. There are cultures where cycles of retribution killings between tribes are normal, where sexual abuse of children is routine, or it’s totally acceptable to kill your daughter if you catch her talking with a boy. And on and on.
The author is likely talking about a return to the “Christian” West (Christian in the sense of generally based on Christian truth, not that everyone was Christian), the culture he himself is from. Again, what he wants is the values that came from God’s revelation, specifically the Christian God, while not realizing that when you throw God out of the picture, you no longer have any grounding for those values.
The reality is that we did not simply inherit our values, in the West. The values that shaped Western society, such as the fundamental equality of all human beings, come directly from the Christian Scriptures. Historical amnesia has led us to forget what society was like before, and the reforms that have happened in societies where the Christian gospel made an inroads, or where Christian values were made part of the legal system. Some examples are the outlawing of the practice of Indian widows burning themselves alive on their husband’s funeral pyres; the outlawing of the transatlantic slave trade; and the broken cycle of revenge killings in Amazonian tribes who accepted Christ.
We always return to the fundamental problem of authority: what is your basis for deriving values that apply to everyone? Put a different way, who is going to define what’s right and wrong, and how? You may strongly believe that something is wrong, while someone else thinks it’s just fine. You could resort to “consensus”, but a majority of people believing something is right or wrong doesn’t make it so: look at Nazi Germany. You can refer to “inherited” values, but which ones? And why can or should they not be changed if a majority decide they should? “Inherited” values in the West include the value of marriage and that it should be between one man and woman for life. Would the author go that far? How do you keep from reverting to majority rule or relativism, which the author is specifically against?
Then the third M is an idea that's known as post-Modernism or post-Modern relativism. This idea that there isn't actually anything call reality or truth. In this view, all perspectives are subjective and there is no basis for adjudicating among them. What becomes accepted dogma is simply the dogma of the most powerful person in the room. There's no need to argue for a correspondence with reality. Reality is fabricated by a dominant narrative.
He is exactly correct, but what he doesn’t realize is that his worldview also doesn’t provide a method for adjudicating among perspectives. Only authoritative, revealed truth about the moral structure of the universe—a structure that exists and has laws just as inviolable and real as the laws of physics—can do that.
Science and evolution cannot provide a basis for morality. Science deals with observations about the physical world. Evolution specifically denies the existence of a God whose character is the basis for morality, and the nature of human beings as made in the image of that God, moral beings who are answerable to him.
Whether our author likes it or not, only God and his revealed truth provide the grounding in reality that his values system needs to keep from dissolving away like shifting sand.
Great article! Thank you for your clear reasoning to what, I too think, is the underlying foundation to the majority of the world’s current woes. “ Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools”. You just have to look about in any and all directions to see what that level of foolishness has brought us to. Each day we seem to find a new low point.
One way or another, the world will be brought back to a clearer understanding of our Creator. I fear very much it looks like it will have to be the hard way. But so has it ever been. C.S. Lewis put it very well: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Your writing style put me in mind of C.S. Lewis. Thank you for your efforts in the good fight.
https://rumble.com/vsbxhs-divine-image-destroyed.html