Insight on the News
‘Don’t Think About a Designer’
● When the Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald addressed the National Science Teachers Association recently, he made some startling admissions about “scientific” thinking. “We are living in a quite particular universe,” he began, “one that seems designed for the great deal of variation and development [necessary for life].”
But the Seattle “Times” report notes that “just as Wald seemed to be approaching the conclusion that the ‘quite particular’ universe was the work of a Creator, he abruptly turned away.” Why?
“Scientists are reluctant to recognize a design,” Wald said, “because they are eager to avoid the idea of a Designer, with a capital D. I, myself, don’t like to think about a Designer.”
Does this kind of thinking remind you of the popular image of three monkeys, each one with its hands over its eyes, ears or mouth? How similar to the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, of whom he said: “They look without seeing, and listen without hearing or understanding”!—Matt. 13:13, “New English Bible.”
Plato and the Soul
● A major church is changing its story on a fundamental “Christian” doctrine—the immortality of the soul. The German Lutheran “Evangelischer Erwachsenenkatechismus” (Evangelical Catechism for Grown-ups) admits that the source of this teaching is the “Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) [who] contended emphatically that there was a difference between body and soul.”
This new Lutheran catechism states: “Evangelical theologians of modern times challenge this combination of Greek and Biblical concepts. . . . They reject the separation of man into body and soul. Since man as a whole is a sinner, therefore at death he dies completely with body and soul (full death). The resurrection of the dead therefore has no connection with man, it is a completely new creation by God. Between death and resurrection there is a gap; the individual continues his existence at best in God’s memory.”—Pp. 189, 532, 533.
For decades Jehovah’s Witnesses have been considered heretics for teaching this about the soul. It did not take them centuries to realize what Evangelical theologians are just now admitting. Their study of the Bible itself rather than human philosophy revealed that “the soul that sins shall die,” and that the “dead know nothing” until the resurrection.—Ezek. 18:4, 20; Eccl. 9:5, 10, “Revised Standard Version.”
But if the immortal soul doctrine is founded on Platonic philosophy, how much more of what is passed off as “Christian” to unsuspecting church members is also rooted in similar falsehoods?
Coming VD “Panic”?
● “Science” magazine reports that now penicillin-resistant gonorrhea “is being transmitted world wide in a kind of great international exchange that nobody needs.” Also noting the continued epidemic spread of ordinary gonorrhea, “Science” says that “health officials really do not know what to do about it. Reasoning that they cannot stop its spread, because they cannot stop people from having sex, they are feeling something that could develop into panic if they had to cope with large numbers of resistant cases.”
Thus, because of the world’s sick moral climate, scientists and even clergymen reject as impractical the obvious remedy to the spread of venereal diseases. But the Bible’s advice to “flee from fornication” and to keep the ‘marriage bed without defilement’ remains the only truly practical way to be free of these loathsome afflictions.
“Science” also reports that sexually transmitted diseases differ from other infectious diseases in that “people do not develop any effective natural immunity to the disease after they have had it once. No one is certain why this is so.” Certainly this “abnormal” bodily reaction further supports the Bible’s observation that a person who “practices fornication is sinning against his own body.”—1 Cor. 6:18; Heb. 13:4.