When Christians in Science Embrace Scientific Materialism

Welcome to ID the Future. I’m your host, Andrew McDiarmid. Well, today my guest is Dr. John west to discuss what happens when Christians and science reject historic Christian teachings and embrace the tenets of scientific materialism. Dr. West is author of a new book called Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why Christian Leaders Are Failing and what We Can Do About It. West is Vice president and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, where he serves as Managing Director of the Institute’s center for Science and Culture. His current research examines the impact of science and scientism on public policy and culture. Dr. West has written or edited 12 other books, including including Darwin Day in America, How Our Politics and Culture have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, the magician’s twin, C.S. lewis and science, Scientism and Society and Walt Disney and live action. Dr. West has also directed and written several documentaries exploring intelligent design and the debate over evolution. Dr. West, welcome back to ID the Future.

[00:01:15] Dr. John West: Andrew, it’s great to be here with you.

[00:01:18] Andrew McDiarmid: Well, what if American culture isn’t collapsing because of crusading secularists? What if it’s failing because leading Christians identify more with secular elites than with their fellow believers? Those are the provocative questions that you pose in your new book, Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, which exposes how influential Christian leaders are siding with their anti Christian cultural captors on everything from biblical authority and science to sex, race and religious liberty.

Today we’re going to unpack chapter two of your book, which you’ve titled Secularist Science: Stockholm Syndrome Christians Diminished Role for God and Creation.

Now, first, remind us, I know some people will know, but remind us what the term Stockholm Syndrome Christianity means and why you decided to write this book.

[00:02:07] Dr. John West: Yeah, well, this goes back to a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in the early 1970s where a number of bank personnel were held hostage. And it went on for a number of days. And then something strange happened. By the time it was resolved, many of the people who were held hostage seemed to identify more with the people who were holding them hostage than with the police and with the government. And they felt grateful to the hostage takers and, and this was sort of a head scratcher for people. And so they came up with this idea of the Stockholm Syndrome, which is basically where you, the victim ends up identifying more with the victimizer than with, you know, the non victims, you know, around in culture. And I should say that as an actual psychiatric or psychological diagnosis, this is quite controversial. It’s not really all that generally accepted, but it’s cultural shorthand. I’d say, you know, we use it in our society for people who have been, you know, in places where they’ve exerted a lot of pressure or been, you know, victimized, identifying with their victimizer. And so that’s sort of the key point that I play off on because the more I thought about helped explain something I had been seeing when I was a college professor at a Christian university, when I interact actually with my work at Discovery Institute with people, say, who are people of faith who just buy into the unguided Darwinian mindset when you would think that they might not. You know, why are these people so identifying actually with points of view that are actually inimical to their own stated beliefs? And you know, one way of understanding is, oh, they’re just to sell out or they’re just doing it because of fear or rewards. And I think there is some truth to that. But, you know, I met a lot of people who are perfectly sincere and I don’t think they certainly didn’t think that they were giving in to a secularist mindset because they were sellouts. They just genuinely ended up identifying more with the secularists than with their fellow Christians. And so I think the more I thought about it, you know, if especially you’re in a culture forming profession, so you go to become a professor or someone in the media or someone in Hollywood or in politics or public policy, you’ve spent your life, if you’re a Christian, going through grad school, interacting with peers who are largely hostile to your fundamental beliefs. And if you spend a lot of time with that, I think it begins to explain why at the end of it you may end up identifying more with those of your secularist peers than with your fellow believers. And I saw this all the time as a college professor where my colleagues would be very snarky and look down on the ordinary Christians because they’re stupid, they don’t quite get it. Whereas their sophisticated understanding, which was largely imbibed from their secular training, that they identified more with that than they did with their fellow Christians. So that’s what I’m trying to get at here, especially Christians in leadership positions. Why are so many of them identifying with really, I’d say a secularist mindset that you would think is actually fundamentally hostile to what their purported claimed beliefs are. Why are they identifying with that mindset?

[00:05:47] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, yeah, I do think it’s a real thing that can happen.

You know, call it what you will. I mean, I know the theory is controversial, but the just the idea of the slippery slope and the buy into ideas that at first you’re opposed to is a very real thing. And I do think we. We do have to be intellectually humble. We have to evaluate our ideas and our thinking regularly so that we don’t find ourselves buying into other ideas. Well, you were a professor at Seattle Pacific University for 12 years. The university was an important part of your life and your family. But you witnessed firsthand there what happens when Christian leaders and institutions abandon their core values to conform to secular culture. How had SBU changed from when you arrived there in the 1990s to the point where you left?

[00:06:43] Dr. John West: Yeah, well, in my book, I bookended. I mean, I had two interesting experiences when I was hired, and then at the time that I was leaving, that I think encapsulate, and then I’ll sort of dig deeper and sort of explain what it means. But when I was hired, one of my interviews was with the faculty committee that was warning me about how conservative, theologically conservative, the board of trustees was, and that I need to be concerned about that because, in fact, they had just turned down tenure for a theology professor because he was, I would, in my view, pretty heterodox. It was not really biblically orthodox, and the faculty were horrified, and they were warning me that I need to be concerned about that. And little did they know that. When I heard that, I said, wow, that privately said, that’s great. You actually have a board of trustees that. Trying to maintain the mission of the university. Of course, again, I didn’t tell the other faculty that, but. So that gives an indication of the core identity of SPU when I was hired, that although there already were fractures among many faculty, who I would say were really veering more towards secular materialism in various ways, even though they identified as Christians, the leadership of the school was pretty strong, and there was a strong contingent of very solid faculty and staff. And so that was great.

But it transitioned, and the full transition wasn’t until after I decided to leave. I sort of saw the writing on the wall. But let me give you, near the end of my time there, there was one of the most dynamic faculty who had been hired while I was there, actually in the sciences, who was a really solid Christian, actually was very supportive of Intelligent Design.

He was denied tenure, and I have to think, and the board by that time didn’t do anything on it, so he was pushed out. Fortunately, another university hired him at actually a more senior position.

So God was looking out for him. But it was a tragic loss for SPU, but that sort of signaled to Me just how dramatic change. And when I was coming in there, they were actually trying to eject people who weren’t fitting the mission of the school. By the end, they were actually ejecting people who really upheld the stated mission of the school. So what happened after I left is. So that continued so much so by 2021 and this was one of the things I was already starting to work on my book but it sort of solidified that I really wanted to write. This was in 2021, Seattle Pacific was in national news not for a good reason, but because they had a vote of the faculty that voted no confidence in the board of trustees because the board wouldn’t repeal the university stated standards on biblical marriage, that marriage should be between a man and a woman. And that’s where sexuality, the expression of sexuality should be reserved for. And the faculty voted no confidence in the board because they would not repeal that. And that was more than 70% of the faculty voted against a biblical understanding of marriage. Now when I was there, I don’t think it wouldn’t have been that stark. I think I would have hoped you would have had a majority who supported the biblical understanding of marriage. But that sort of shows in real time, a real data point that you really, you don’t have a Christian institution anymore when 70% of the faculty because reject a biblical understanding of marriage. I mean the faculty determine what goes on in the classroom. And if more than 70% of them reject what the Bible says on a very clear topic, you don’t really have a Christian school. And so that galvanized me because I saw a lot, you know, there were people wringing their hands. Well, how did this happen? You know, they were shocked. Well, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. And what I try to tell my book, because part of my book is, is the story of, of this Christian university and its fall from as a Christian university into something else. And how did that happen? Because I think a lot of people, alumni of the school and alumni of other Christian institutions, they wake up and they say, well that’s not the school I went to, you know, and they’re shocked. What they don’t realize it’s a long process. And what happened in 2021 with the vote against the board of trustees was not just something that happened just, you know, willy nilly out of nowhere. There had been a lot of earlier choices, especially by the board of trustees itself, that opened the door to that. And what most, I think if I have to say for that part of my book that I think is what I want to really communicate is that when it came to that Christian institution, I’ve seen this with others.

The biggest problem were not the theological liberals or the outright heterodox people on campus. They did what they thought was right. I think they were wrong. The biggest problem was the board of trustees, which was filled with people who were personally biblically orthodox, but they made choices to basically do nothing and enable everything else. And if the one message I wanted, because a lot of more theologically conservative Christians tend to think that, oh, it’s just the big bad liberals who do this stuff. Well, no, One of the key takeaways of my book is that it’s the theologically, personally, theologically conservative leaders, whether they’re board of trustees or pastors or elders or deacons or board members, however you end up guiding your church, who actually are the determinate factor, who don’t actually live up to their own stated beliefs. And until I just. I’m speaking as a Christian, I know you have an audience of many people who aren’t Christians. But my book is targeted at the Christian community and, and there are definite references, as we’ll get into, to the ID debate. But one of my pleas to Christians who are concerned about some of these things is to realize that it’s not just the big bad theological liberals who are bringing about the result in their churches. It’s the people who know better who aren’t willing to do anything about it. And unless we realize that as Christians, nothing’s going to change.

[00:13:34] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, yeah, great points. Well, in the first third of your book, you lay out the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, and one of them is a diminished role for God in creation as exhibit A. For this symptom, you chose Francis Collins, arguably the most celebrated evangelical Christian scientist in America. How did he become so influential and well known?

[00:13:57] Dr. John West: Yeah, well, I think Francis Collins first became sort of part of the big public limelight as head of the Human Genome Project. So the encoding, the documentation of our genome. And so he was on the COVID of Time magazine. He was celebrated by President Clinton at the time. And then he ended up writing in, I think around 2006, a book called The Language of God, where he laid out his conversion story, which is very, you know, a powerful story, that he had not been a believer.

But then through reading CS Lewis and hiking out in nature and doing some other things, he came to belief in God. And so the Language of God became a bestseller. And maybe it wasn’t 2006, maybe it was 2004. 5. But anyway, in the early 2000s, he. And so that really catapulted him, especially among Christians. He became sort of what I’d say the equivalent of a rock star and was the, you know, he was the culturally acceptable Christian who showed that you could reach the top of the food chain when it came to science and power and who was a devout, you know, self identified evangelical Christian.

[00:15:14] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, well, and he’s admired by Christian leaders and laypeople alike as an exemplary model of a faithful Christian in science. But you write that his model for integrating faith and science is deeply flawed. You write that Collins has repeatedly failed to challenge the secular establishment in the areas of abortion and sexuality during his career as head of the National Institutes of Health. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:15:39] Dr. John West: Yeah, and I want to say I’m not questioning the sincerity of Francis Collins faith. I’m not in a position to do that. By all accounts, he’s, you know, a personable guy and I think he sincerely believes in Jesus.

But. And I also know that probably a number of people who are listening just find him a beloved figure and will finally be upset at me saying these things. Some of the things I’ve written about Francis Collins have, you know, some people get upset, but facts are facts and the records are records and he’s a public figure. And so what I would ask the people who bristle about what I’m about to say, well, read my book, go to the footnotes document and ask yourself if these are true facts that I’m saying.

Should you be reevaluating your emotional feelings on that? This is a great example of someone that we should follow because like I said, facts are facts. So we’ll get on to the Darwin ID thing in a moment, probably, but let’s look at other areas. So under Francis, Francis Collins served for more than a decade at the, you know, in the federal government at high, sort of high positions, especially the head of the National Institutes of Health. So he was really the most powerful scientist in the American government. And well, what did he do with that? Well, one thing is he spent millions of tax dollars to harvest body parts from aborted babies to create a fetal tissue hub so that we could experiment on those tissues at the University of Pittsburgh. And I want to be clear, these were not, I mean, this one, excuse it, but these were not just embryonic or, you know, babies that were one week old. And again, that in my mind wouldn’t excuse things.

These babies that were harvested their organs through abortion for research through our tax dollars. Thanks To Francis Collins were up to over 40 weeks in gestation. These are babies who would live outside the womb. In fact, I argue this is infanticide. And that was funded. But not only was it funded under Collins, he tried to hide it. When a group, a pro life group, tried to get documentation on this, the NIH under Collins refused to give it. They had to go to court. The only reason we know about what I just told you is because someone had to sue the NIH. So maybe Collins himself was embarrassed, I don’t know by what happened, but he was trying to hide it. That’s not all. The NIH under Collins funded gruesome experiments where they were splicing tissues from aborted babies onto mice, make humanized rodents, and in fact they scalped aborted babies scalps and grafted the fetal skin onto the mice. I mean, this is not a great example of the integration of, say, even basic ethics and science, let alone Christianity and science.

Let’s also talk about the gender madness. Collins oversaw grants to fund research using puberty blockers, filling kids with the chemicals from, you know, their non biological sex and sex destructive surgeries on children.

And he himself pledged to be, in his words, an ally and advocate of the LGBTQIA movement and urged all fellow employees to do the same. So it’s not just on the issue of ID and Darwin, which again, we’ll probably get to, it’s on a lot of other science issues where his track record objectively is just horrible.

[00:19:26] Andrew McDiarmid: Well, one group Collins has been willing to challenge publicly is his fellow Christians. In particular, Collins has engaged in a years long quest to marginalize and attack Christian scientists, scholars and laypeople who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution or who think biology shows evidence of intelligent design. To understand why he’s done this, it’s important to understand Collins theology with regard to the origin of biological life on Earth. Collins champions a perspective you call modern theistic evolution. Tell us what that is and how it’s symptomatic of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity.

[00:20:04] Dr. John West: Yeah, so theistic evolution, there are a lot of different varieties of it, but I’d say the dominant variety in more modern times has been trying to square unguided Darwinian evolution with theism, particularly if you’re a Christian with Christian theism. And so there were varieties of theistic evolution in the 19th century and early 20th century that tried to offer a guided form of evolution. But when neo-Darwinism rose to the forefront, really goes back to Darwin’s core that evolution is an unguided process, the development of life is an unguided process.

Theistic evolution in more recent decades has again, largely been about how do you square evolution as an unguided process with belief in God? And so that’s sort of the modern evolutionary theism project. And there are some different varieties. And I think Francis Collins doesn’t fully go into some of the extremes on it, but he certainly identifies with that, and we can unpack that some more. Basically, again, trying to square unguided Darwinian evolution with theism, particularly Christian theism.

[00:21:10] Andrew McDiarmid: Right. And the argument that blind material processes are responsible for life in the universe is actually a very old one. You trace it back to the Epicureans in ancient Greece. You also show that throughout recorded history, there’s been a strong defense of the argument for design in nature. How did this consensus encourage the rise of modern science?

[00:21:32] Dr. John West: Yeah, I probably go for some people too deep into this. I probably should have restrained myself in this chapter, but I couldn’t help myself. But go back to some of the. Really origin and root, as you say, the roots of this materialist understanding go back deep into. In civilization, as does the argument for design. But this consensus that nature was the product of design by God, by a supra rational creator, really was key to the rise of modern science. And there’s this quote from C.S. lewis that I think encapsulates it. We’ll unpack it a little bit. But he said men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a legislator.

And I think, you know, a lot of people use that quote, but I think it’s very profound. If you compare the creation stories from other cultures, from Babylon, from Egypt, Polynesian cultures, with the biblical creation account, you see something really stark, which is in a lot of the other creation accounts, nature is. Is really regarded as chaotic. It’s the result of the warfare between the gods.

And we sort of are accidental products of that, Almost sort of an afterthought. Whereas in the biblical account, you have this majestic account that not just human beings, but all of nature was this grand design purposefully by a master creator who created it in an orderly process, who envisioned it and then called it into existence, and then that it was created good. And really, if you go back to many of the founders of what we consider modern science, that idea that nature is not just chaotic or without rhyme or reason or based on accidental processes, that there is a logic to nature, in fact, that mathematics itself gives you a way of understanding the physical universe, that all came from this idea that nature was the product of a creator. And that gave them inspiration to why they could do science to begin with, why you could do, why you could find regularities, why you could do experiments to find scientific laws, why you could understand the inner workings of our bodies. Because our bodies weren’t just again, something that was slap dashed, that was running on accidental processes. And so again this is not reading things into history. This is going back to the scientists of the time, what they themselves wrote about nature and how they understood it and why they thought that they could make discoveries. And modern science has been so successful that I think we’ve often forgotten the prerequisites for it and the beliefs you need to have in order to be able to have that. So yeah, the idea of that God, particularly the biblical idea that there was a all wise creator who created things in an orderly fashion and that nature reflects his super rational mind was a great inspiration to science.

[00:24:55] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, yeah, it was definitely some of the fuel that, that ignited the scientific revolution. Well then Mr. Darwin came on the scene and introduced his proposed mechanism by which an evolutionary process could progress naturally without recourse to a creator. How did his ideas lead to the rise of scientific materialism?

[00:25:17] Dr. John West: That’s a great question. I think many people mistakenly believe that the, when they think about Darwin. Oh, his most significant contribution is the idea that he, it took a long time or even that it took a long time and you know, some creatures basically evolved into other creatures.

Those really aren’t the earth shattering concepts. There were other people who made some claims like that he wasn’t the first one. The really most consequential point was that he claimed it was an unguided process.

And even, you know, so you said natural process, let’s be clear because nature, nature and the idea of nature and natural is maybe, sounds good, you know, who’s against nature, who’s against things being natural rather than artificial? But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about really a materialistic process that is unguided and unguided by a guiding intelligence. And so that was his key claim. And if you read not just on the Origin of Species, but his book the Descent of Man, he was clear that for him this idea that there was this materialistic evolutionary process that did not have any specific guidance from God that explained everything according to him. It explained our biology, it explained cultural things like morality, marriage, even religion. He applies that and also in this idea, if we’re just the product of this blind, unguided, unthinking process we ourselves aren’t when it comes down to really rational creatures. We’re just dictate our actions and things. We have no free will or responsibility because we’re just dictated by our today we say our genes or our environment. I mean Darwin didn’t have an understanding of heredity the way we do, but so that we ourselves aren’t really, you know, not only is there not a God who’s a thinking being who can guide things, human beings really aren’t at the bottom thinking creatures. This is because we’re dictated by these same impersonal material processes. And so I mean this had wide why deplicability. I mean Karl Marx had sort of a love hate relationship with Darwin, but he thought Darwin provided in Natural History the basis for his views on dialectical materialism. And so this really led to this idea of scientific materialism. So materialism is the old idea going back to the ancient Greeks if not before that we’re just blind matter in motion, atoms in the void that are in accidental collisions. Again, there’s no guidance ultimately really there is no real rationality at the basis because it’s all blind accidental processes all the way down. And Darwin, when he came up with his theory of evolution by natural selection, he basically baptized old line materialism, which always was never believed by a majority of people because it’s just incredible. I mean just think about, look at a rock and look at a human being. There’s a cavernous gap. I mean you just people, most people did not believe in materialism but Darwin came along and said, well, oh, the best modern science can offer. I’ve now shown scientifically that materialism is true. And so I say Darwin was not the only one. There were other thinkers who led to this but he was a key plank in the rise of scientific materialism. Really this radical, this claim that modern science shows the proof of materialism.

[00:28:59] Andrew McDiarmid: Right. And this rise in scientific materialism we will see and will connect to Francis Collins and his ilk, you know, those who have fallen into the trap of Stockholm syndrome Christianity by you know, sacrificing beliefs they had to satisfy the march of secularism. And that’s indeed where modern theistic evolution comes from, which is what Mr. Collins espouses.

So I really want to unpack this more. I think we should end this episode and we’ll get into this in more detail in a follow up episode. But I want to continue unpacking with you, Dr. West, the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome Christianity, particularly as they relate to science.

[00:29:46] Dr. John West: That sounds great to me.

[00:29:48] Andrew McDiarmid: Well you can order your copy of this important new book at StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com. That’s StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com and in addition to ordering the book, there you’ll find practical tools to help you resist captivity yourself and stand for truth in your family, your church, and your community. It’s all at StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com. Dr. West, thanks again and I look forward to joining you for another helping of this very important topic that you’ve written on. Well, for For ID the Future, I’m your host, Andrew McDiarmid. Thank you very much for listening.

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