Several months ago, I read Mark Noll's "The Scandal of the Evangelical
Mind", and it had a profound impact on my thinking and attitudes. As a
result, I often think about the scandal, noting how it is revealed in so
many aspects of evangelical behavior and, of course, in all its glory in
"creation science". After reading Mr. Roy's posts (with a mixture of
fascination and despondency) detailing the latest remarkable absurdities
emanating from YECism, I have been reflecting on the meaning of the
scandal in the context of individual minds.
If you haven't read the book (and you really should), the basic premise is
that "there isn't much of an evangelical mind", as a result of a sad
deterioration of intellectual engagement over two centuries of evangelical
history. It is only a slight oversimplification to say that Noll
attributes the whole disaster to the loss of self-criticism in the
analysis and incorporation of ideas. In any case, Noll painstakingly
details the evolution (heh) of the scandal in its historical context, and
his analysis is compelling in that frame of reference. In other words, I
think it's clear how evangelicalism as a whole has arrived at its current
state.
But what isn't clear to me is this: how does the scandal operate in an
individual? How is it that an individual believer is rendered credulous
and intellectually impoverished, lacking self-critical instincts and
unaware of compromises in his/her own intellectual integrity? (I hope
it's clear how YECism in general, and the recent proposals on this list in
particular, have sparked my interest in this question.) To be frank, I
see myself as still emerging from a comparatively mild case of the
syndrome, and I'm genuinely curious how this happens so systematically.
(No, I'm not discounting personal responsibility.)
It seems to significantly predate the obvious decline of American
educational quality, so that's not a good theory. My current working
hypothesis is that the loss of self-critical restraint made possible the
assimilation of some self-sustaining axioms into the dominating worldviews
(read theologies), and that these axioms are self-sustaining at least in
part because they inactivate self-criticism, perhaps by replacing it with
something else. The whole thing works as a feedback loop that is
self-sustaining and extremely well insulated. (I'm interested in cellular
and developmental biology and in signal transduction in particular. Can
you tell?) The key is that it has to work *on individual minds* just as
well as it works on a cultural level, because IMO the cultural insulation
is simply not strong enough to keep out competing ideas.
In other words, I'm proposing that the syndrome is not merely a cultural
phenomenon, i.e. a bunch of bad habits reinforced by imitation or peer
pressure. Rather, it operates on the level of individual minds, acting to
squelch self-critical intellectual restraint, perhaps taking the form of a
specific set of axioms that affect self-criticism in a feedback loop. An
interesting metaphor is HIV infection, with the invading agent taking out
the defense mechanism.
Does anyone else wonder about this? Am I making any sense?
Steve Matheson
matheson@helix.mgh.harvard.edu
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