John Myers received his B.S. degree in journalism from Auburn University. He is a member of the staff of Christian Leadership Ministries where he is the editor for The Real Issue and is responsible for a number of other publications. He and his wife have two children and live in the Dallas area.
In the beginning was "The Idea." Certain men said that humans are nothing more than products of chance, progress and adaptation. Their Idea left us, as humans, with no purpose or direction for our existence. But this simply presents an opportunity, they said: society is what we make it; we have control over our own destiny, and we can mold it into anything we like. It's time to evolve on our own terms, they said. Those who resist The Idea will be forced to conform, or fall by the wayside.
In the last century, The Idea has had devastating consequences. In this issue, Tom Bethell, a correspondent for the American Spectator, writes, "The belief that humans can be reformed by a manipulation of their environment, whether by legislation or within the laboratory, does still endure. Political elites today have very much retained their faith in the malleability of human nature."
But it is the academic elites who really wield the power in the arena of ideas, for they educate, and can indoctrinate, those who become politicians and every other type of leader in society.
A case in point: who did John's parents turn to for advice when their son's circumcision went awry? . . . the professors at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In a landmark case in 1963, professors advised the parents to simply make their son into a girl. You see, their belief (based on The Idea) was that human nature is malleable, and infants are born gender-neutral. Consequently, a sex-change operation took place, hormones were administered, and the boy's name was changed from John to Joantransformation complete!
That's all the world heard about John/Joan until today. Many other boys' lives were forever changed because of the "success" of this case. But, as you may have heard from a recent study, the case was not a success. The "girl" grew up insisting he was a boy, although his parents and doctors chose to keep the sex-change operation a secret from him. Eventually, at age 14, he decided he would have to commit suicide, or defy everyone and live as a boy. His father finally broke down then and told him the truth. Today, John is married and a father of three adopted children.
Ideas do have their place, until they drift past the line of truth to be championed as fact. In too much science, speculation has replaced research in an effort to promote The Idea.
In this issue you will read about the Cambrian explosion of life from the original research of Dr. Paul Chien, chairman of the biology department at the University of San Francisco. You will read that although the initial discovery of this "evolutionary big bang" was made in 1909, it wasn't until seven decades later that the public was made aware of the incredible details. Why the delay? What are we being protected from knowing, or assuming? Are we as a society not to be trusted with the facts?
Norris Anderson, a biology teacher and member of the Alabama Textbook Committee, in an in-depth investigation found that "this 'sudden' appearance of major body plans early in the fossil record is a phenomenon that is not mentioned in almost all of the current crop of biology textbooks."
Stephen Jay Gould, leading evolutionist and Harvard professor, wrote in Natural History Magazine in 1977 that "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology." Why keep it a secret? Because ideas have consequences,
and there is a great fear of the consequences in believing that a personal God exists and interacts with humanity. It is the fear of "Beyond here, there be dragons."
But that doesn't necessarily follow. Dr. Robert Koons, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, writes in this issue that "we need to consider that being a theist is not a hinderance to good science . . . but it may be a necessary condition for certain discoveries being possible at all."
More and more Christian professors are advocating the pursuit of pure science: reporting the facts as they are found, keeping nothing from the public, and making no attempt to validate one theory over another. Such ideals would make certain aspects of science something they have not been for over a hundred years: honest. And by all rights, Christians should be the ones to pioneer truth in science.