What would you say if someone told you that you could determine whether or not you were allergic to peanut butter, or peanuts for that matter, by putting a dollop of peanut butter on the back of your right hand and extending it out parallel to the floor? And that if you could keep your arm straight then you were not allergic to the substances therein, and if you could not, then you were? Suppose someone told you that. What would you say?
Correct. You would say that such a person did not have a firm grasp on what constitutes what should be the clear boundary between superstition and real knowledge. Further, you might conclude that you must have met this person in a fortune-telling shack outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at an establishment called Madame Santoni’s.
But that is not necessarily the case — you may have met that person on the bus this morning, or he may work in the next cubicle at your high-tech engineering firm. He may exhibit a high level of intelligence, and be highly trained. But whether he is highly trained or not, he is certainly not highly educated. People who are highly educated don’t believe that wet streets cause rain.
At the root here is a failure in the Church — we have not provided a fully-orbed Christian worldview, and we have not insisted that the leaders in the Church be educated men. We generally insist on a high level of training for ministry, but you can train a chimp to get the banana he wants by pushing on a lever. Ministerial “training,” bah. Ministerial “training,” humbug. We need men in the Church who know how to think, and not men who could in principle be snookered by the kind of spectral evidence once on display in Salem. “She must be a witch. I go oww every time she looks at me! See? Owwwww!”
As Chesterton once put it, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. But in order to stand for that something, you have to be educated in it. If you are merely trained to stand for something, then you have been indoctrinated, not educated, and you are not “standing” for anything really, except in the way.
I was recently interviewed on national radio by some good conservative people, and in the course of the interview there was a feast of reason and flow of soul. That was all good, but the thing that struck me upside the head was some of the fruitcake commercials in between the segments. You want to know why liberals are running the country? Because a bunch of ostensible conservatives think that floride (or fill this in with your icky substance of choice) causes whatever it is they want it to cause, rules of evidence be damned.
And no, if you put the dollop of peanut butter on the left hand, you haven’t really addressed the problem.