The Beautiful Music of Justice

“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  - (Excerpt from Dr. King’s last speech, before he was assassinated on April 4; see The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., NY, Newmarket Press, 1983, p. 94).

At Boston University, where I spent some of my graduate training, there lies smack in front of the Marsh Chapel, in the middle of the expansive campus, The "Free at Last Sculpture", in honor of BU's most famous alumnus. 

Dawkins, Shermer, Stenger and the like, center their arguments, whether they realize it totally or not, by confusing epistemological attacks on some god with indictments on the political failures of the God of Christianity or of Islam.

A reflection on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. is alone sufficient to refute that logic. Here, stands a man of men. A man that stood and fell on purely altruistic terms, that was not clouded by the religious institutions that have largely deserved the harsh criticisms of those of the Atheist faith.  Dawkins, in a mistake he repeats over and over again, crosses over from mechanistic explanations to metaphysical nonsense when he blindly shouts, "DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."  One of the reasons i truly admire Dawkins is, like the original founders of the new Atheism -- Nietzsche, Marx and Freud-- Dawkins maintains his integrity when thinking through the implications of the Atheist worldview. Dawkins, for example, would explain MLK Jr.s life away as an evolutionary misfiring -- like the antithesis of a sociopath -- a selfless compassion that is genetic suicide.

One of the many areas where Atheism has failed its followers is by being forced to dismiss justice as evolutionary illusion, since it follows that good and evil are co-ilusions, rooted only in subjectivity.  If your neighbor rapes and tortures your child, according to the materialist worldview, it cannot be objectively bad or evil. Justice can be nothing but illusory, perhaps an amorphous feeling that aids the group fitness of our species, but it, by definition, can be nothing beyond that.

One of the main reasons why I am a theist is precisely because both my intuition and my rationality, and I suspect yours, rejects the idea that justice is illusory. As a result, my worldview, that morality and justice are rooted in objective truth and reality, is the only consistent reality that reflects the reality I intuitively and rationally sense.

Put it a different way: as many Theists have eloquently argued, the same rational for trusting our intuitions and basic beliefs, are in the same ontological category as trusting our senses that they actually relay truthful information about our surroundings. Moreover, it is in the same ontological category as our ability to reason itself; unless reason and intellect are grounded in an objective source of reason and intellect, it would make no sense that we have any reason to trust our ability to reason. If you think otherwise, you simply do not understand evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin poignantly pointed this out after publishing his seminal "On the Origin of Species."  To accept that our logic can evolve naturally with no rooting in any logical grounds, to me, and to thoughtful Theists, at worst is total absurdity, and, at best, is a faith system I am simply not willing to put my belief in. To accept it as brute fact seems to me to be absurd to any open-minded, thoughtful person.

And beyond this, it would mean that one of our great American heroes fought and died for nothing;which would seem particularly peculiar in the light of today's inauguration event, which was dripping in sweet, cosmic irony.


Richard Dawkins, speaking as an intellectually honest materialist, would want you to believe that reality demands that MLK Jr. was just dancing to the music of his DNA: waltzing for freedom, bopping for human rights, two-stepping for justice, in a meaningless, random, uncoordinated chemical accident.

Huh.

On this inauguration day, as a fellow Theist, Barack Obama continues to fight for those things Dr. King is no longer here to fight for. And as a fellow human being, I choose to endorse that. Because what "ought" to be is something I cannot accept as just illusory; materialism offers nothing to humans, and takes everything from humans, explicitely free will, justice, love, and purpose. It is a false utopia -- it nicely gets rid of eternal judgement and sin (what person does not want to get rid of their responsibility to their Creator, Atheism is surely the easiest worldview for that). But it by necessity throws away all justice in the process.

If indeed as materialism claims, MLK Jr. was just dancing to the music of his DNA, a bullet might have ended that dance, but that music was as beautiful then as it is today. And, as Barack Obama took second-term office, that music could be heard playing loudly all over our Nation's Capital, and from redwood forest to gulfstream waters and across the globe. And, as surely as human beings continue to fight for the oppressed and the marginalized, that music will keep playing.

And no Dr. Dawkins, that music isn't the music of Dr. King's DNA. It is the music of justice. The composer is Christ and the orchestrators are people of Faith. And that music plays on today. And it will play tomorrow. And it will play until He is done wiping every tear from the eye of the oppressed and the marginalized and the poor in spirit, in the ages to come.

"This situation of the complication and the order to function of an organism, where the sum is greater than its parts (i.e. has a higher order), becomes more astonishing every year as the scientific results become more detailed. Because of this, many scientists are now driven to faith by their very work. In the final analysis it is a faith made stronger through the argument by design. I simply do not now believe that the reductionalist philosophy, so necessary to pursue the scientific method and, to repeat, the method which all scientists must master and practice with all their might and skill in their laboratory, can explain everything". Allan Sandage, eminent astronomer and born-again Christian in the late 20th century