DBFA 600 Research Paper: Topic Rationale Assignment Instructions

DBFA 600

Research Paper: Topic Rationale Assignment Instructions

Some examples of topics can stem from the following: Children and Families, Faith and Families, Divorce, Child Welfare, Blended Families, Child Disorders and Faith Healing, Spiritual Family Therapy, Church and the Family System.

Overview

The paper topic must address the historical understanding of the subject matter along with the philosophical, moral, cultural or societal elements associated with the paper’s area of focus.

Instructions

A course of action to defend traditional family values must be included comparing and contrasting the significant aspects contributing to the argument of the topic as well as practical applications to family, faith, and the future. Here are some points to consider for your topic development:

· What is your topic?

· What is your thesis statement?

· Have you framed a problem or simply given an editorial opinion?

· Why does this framed problem not meet the traditional values of family?

· What are the defined traditional values of family related to the problem that has been framed in your topic and thesis?

· How is the topic selected relevant to the course and its application or contraction to current family, faith, and the future?

· What data based research validates the claims you have shared?

· Be sure that you are not pulling lines of what someone else says to validate claims as someone else’s opinion is not generalizable from person to person.

· Be sure to find research that studies a number of people and the data drives a conclusion.

You will submit a concise 300-word topic presentation which considers the above points. The topic rational should have a title page and a reference page which is not included in word count. The topic rationale should include at least five (5) supporting sources which are peer reviewed journal articles from the last five years. Websites and the course textbook can be used in addition to the peer reviewed articles, but will not count as any of the peer reviewed articles expected for the paper’s topic.

Your topic assignment requires you to submit a topic with a 300-word rationale detailing why the topic is relevant to the course and its application to current family, faith, and the future. Include at least five supporting sources.  I must approve your topic prior to submitting it for grading.  For this assignment, include both a title page, citations in your paper, and a reference list in current APA format. This assignment will be about 3 pages, including the title and reference pages.  Make sure to review the “Topic Paper Example” to help you properly format your paper. Some examples of topics can stem from the following: Children and Families, Faith and Families, Divorce, Child Welfare, Blended Families, Child Disorders and Faith Healing, Spiritual Family Therapy, Church and the Family System. (Please check the JFL library for other examples of topics by keying in specific words to assist in developing a topic and locating articles to support your topic along with course text).   

Please submit assignment in the following format:

·       Include title page in APA format with Running Head;

b)    Do not use personals experiences, or the words “I,” “you,” “me,” or “us” in your papers. Must be based strictly from library research.

1. Format paper in Times New Roman, 12-point font, with 1” margins all around paper.

2. Type paper in paragraph format (5-7 sentences per paragraph).

3. Remember citations are placed before the period in a sentence. Ex: Human Services professionals can assist in referring clients to additional resources (Woodside & McClam, 2015).  

4. Indent paper at the beginning of every paragraph.

5. Do not justify your paper. Align all paragraphs to the left side of paper.

6. Include a Reference page at the end of paper on a new page.

7. Submit paper in assignment area located in Module/Week Two folder. 

Remember that this is a Master's-level class, and the work should be indicative of graduate school learning. Additionally, please consider Bloom's Taxonomy, and academic writing when presenting works for this course.

This submission must be in current APA format with proper title page, headers, double spacing, etc. as required of any APA formatted paper.

Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.

,

The Universe Next Door

James W. Sire

Sire, J. W. (2020). The Universe Next Door. InterVarsity Press.  https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780830849390

The clock work universe Chapter 3

IF THEISM LASTED SO LONG, what could possibly have happened to undermine it? If it satisfactorily answered all our basic questions, provided a refuge for our fears and hope for our future, why did anything else come along? Answers to these questions can be given on many levels. The fact is that many forces operated to shatter the basic intellectual unity of the West.1

Deism developed, some say, as an attempt to bring unity out of a chaos of theological and philosophical discussion which in the seventeenth century became bogged down in interminable quarrels—even religious wars—over what began to seem even to the disputants like trivial questions. Perhaps John Milton had such questions in mind when he envisioned the fallen angels making an epic game of philosophical theology:

Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d

In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,

Fixt Fate, Free will, Foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.2

After decades of wearying discussion, Lutheran, Puritan, and Anglican divines might well have wished to look again at points of agreement. Deism to some extent is a response to this, though the direction such agreement took put deism rather beyond the limits of traditional Christianity.

Another factor in the development of deism was a change in the location of the authority for knowledge about the divine; it shifted from the special revelation found in Scripture to the presence of Reason, “the candle of God,” in the human mind or to intuition, “the inner light.”3 Why should such a shift in authority take place?

One of the reasons is especially ironic. It is linked with an implication of theism which, when it was discovered, was very successfully developed. Through the Middle Ages, due in part to the rather Platonic theory of knowledge that was held, the attention of theistic scholars and intellectuals was directed toward God. The idea was that knowers in some sense become what they know. And since one should become in some sense good and holy, one should study God. Theology was thus considered the queen of the sciences (which at that time simply meant knowledge), for theology was the science of God.

If people studied animals or plants or minerals (zoology, biology, chemistry, and physics), they were lowering themselves. This hierarchical view of reality is really more Platonic than theistic or Christian, because it picks up from Plato the notion that matter is somehow, if not evil, then at least irrational and certainly not good. Matter is something to be transcended, not to be understood.

But as more biblically oriented minds began to recognize, this is God’s world—all of it. And though it is a fallen world, it has been created by God and has value. It is indeed worth knowing and understanding. Furthermore, God is a rational God, and his universe is thus rational, orderly, knowable. Operating on this basis, scientists began investigating the form of the universe. A picture of God’s world began to emerge; it was seen to be like a huge, well-ordered mechanism, a giant clockwork, whose gears and levers meshed with perfect mechanical precision. Such a picture seemed both to arise from scientific inquiry and to prompt more inquiry and stimulate more discovery about the makeup of the universe. In other words, science as we now know it was born and was amazingly successful.

At the same time, of course, there were those who distrusted the findings of the scientists. The case of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is famous and, in a quite distorted form, is often cited today as proof of the antiscientific nature of Christian theism. In fact, Galileo as well as other Renaissance scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) held fully Christian worldviews.4 Moreover, in Bacon’s words, knowledge became power, power to manipulate and bring creation more fully under human dominion. This view is echoed in modern parlance by J. Bronowski: “I define science as the organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in nature.”5 If this way of obtaining knowledge about the universe was so successful, why not apply the same method to knowledge about God?

In Christian theism, of course, such a method was already given a role to play, for God was said to reveal himself in nature. The depth of content, however, that was conveyed in such general revelation was considered limited; much more was made known about God in special revelation. But deism denies that God can be known by revelation, by special acts of God’s self- expression in, for example, Scripture or the incarnation. Having cast out Aristotle as an authority in matters of science, deism began to cast out Scripture as an authority in theology and to allow only the application of “human” reason. As Peter Medawar says, “The 17th-century doctrine of the necessity of reason was slowly giving way to a belief in the sufficiency of reason.”6 Deism thus sees God only in “Nature,” by which was meant the system of the universe. And since the system of the universe is seen as a giant clockwork, God is seen as the clockmaker.

In some ways, we can say that limiting knowledge about God to general revelation is like finding that eating eggs for breakfast makes the morning go well, and then eating only eggs for breakfast (and maybe lunch and dinner too) for the rest of one’s life (which now unwittingly becomes rather shortened!). To be sure, theism assumes that we can know something about God from nature. But it also holds that there is much more to know than can be known from nature and that there are other ways to come to know.

BASIC DEISM

As Frederick Copleston explains, deism historically is not really a “school” of thought. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries more than a few thinkers came to be called deists or called themselves deists. These thinkers held a number of related views, but not all held every doctrine in common. John Locke (1632–1704), for example, did not reject the idea of revelation, but he did insist that human reason was to be used to judge it.7 Some cold deists, like Voltaire (1694–1778), were hostile to Christianity; some warm deists, like Locke, were not.8 Some, like Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), believed in the immortality of the soul; some did not. Some believed God left his creation to function on its own; some believed in providence. Some believed in a mildly personal God; others did not. So deists were much less united on basic issues than were theists.9 Moreover, as we will see later on, some forms of popular deism, such as moralistic therapeutic deism, are thought of by some people as fully Christian.

Still, it is helpful to think of deism as a system and to state that system in a relatively extreme form, for in that way we will be able to grasp the implications various “reductions” of theism were beginning to have in the eighteenth century. Naturalism, as we shall see, pushes these implications even further.

Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge. . . . Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.18

As in theism, the most important proposition regards the existence and character of God. Warm deism—such as that of Franklin, who confessed, “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence” —retains enough sense of God’s personality that Franklin thought this God “ought to be worshipped.”10 But cold deism eliminates most features of personality God is said to display. He is only a transcendent force or energy, a Prime Mover or First Cause, a beginning to the otherwise infinite regress of past causes. But he is really not a he, though the personal pronoun remains in the language used about him. He does not care for his creation; he does not love it. He has no “personal” relationship to it at all. Certainly he did not become incarnate in Jesus. He is purely monotheistic. As Thomas Paine said, “The only idea man can affix to the name of God is first cause, the cause of all things.”11

A modern deist of sorts, Buckminster Fuller, expressed his faith this way: “I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call ‘God.’”12 But Fuller’s God is not a person to be worshiped, but merely an intellect or force to be recognized.

To the deist, then, God is distant, foreign, alien. The lonely state this leaves humanity in, however, was not seemingly felt by early deists. Almost two centuries passed before this implication was played out on the field of human emotions.

In cold deism the system of the universe is closed in two senses. First, it is closed to God’s reordering, for he is not “interested” in it. He merely brought it to be. Therefore, no miracles or events that reveal any special interests of God are possible. Any tampering or apparent tampering with the machinery of the universe would suggest that God had made a mistake in the original plan, and that would be beneath the dignity of an all-competent deity.

Second, the universe is closed to human reordering because it is locked up in a clocklike fashion. To be able to reorder the system, any human being alone or with others would have to be able to transcend it, get out of the chain of cause and effect. But this we cannot do. We should note, however, that this second implication is not much recognized by deists. Most continue to assume, as we all do apart from reflection, that we can act to change our environment.

To be sure, deists do not deny that humans are personal. Each of us has self-consciousness and, at least on first glance, self-determination. But these have to be seen in the light of human dimensions only. That is, as human beings we have no essential relation to God—as image to original—and thus we have no way to transcend the system in which we find ourselves.

Bishop François Fénelon (1651–1715), criticizing the deists of his day, wrote, “They credit themselves with acknowledging God as the creator whose wisdom is evident in his works; but according to them, God would be neither good nor wise if he had given man free will—that is, the power to sin, to turn away from his final goal, to reverse the order and be forever lost.”13 Fénelon put his finger on a major problem within deism: human beings have lost their ability to act significantly. If we cannot “reverse the order,” then we cannot be significant. We can only be puppets. If an individual has personality, it must then be a type that does not include the element of self-determination.

Deists, of course, recognize that human beings have intelligence (to be sure, they emphasize human reason), a sense of morality (deists are very interested in ethics), a capacity for community and for creativity. But none of these, while built into us as created beings, is grounded in God’s character. None has any special relationship to God; each is on its own.

Here there is a distinction between warm and cold deists. Deism is the historical result of the decay of robust Christian theism. That is, specific commitments and beliefs of traditional Christianity are gradually abandoned. The first and most significant belief to be eroded was the full personhood and trinitarian nature of God. Reducing God to a force or ultimate intelligence eventually had catastrophic results. In fact, as we shall see, not only naturalism but nihilism is the final result. Were the history of worldviews a matter of the immediate working out of rational implications of a change in the idea of the really real, a belief in an afterlife would have immediately disappeared. But it didn’t. Nor did a belief in morality; that took another century. So warm deists, those closest to Christian theists, persisted in the notion of an afterlife, and cold deists, those further away, did not.

In deism human reason becomes autonomous. That is, without relying on any revelation from the outside—no Scripture, no messages from God via living prophets or dreams and visions—human beings have the ability to know themselves, the universe, and even God. As John Locke put it, “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason has nothing to do.”14

Because the universe is essentially as God created it, and because people have the intellectual capacity to understand the world around them, they can learn about God from a study of his universe. The Scriptures, as we saw above, give a basis for it, for the psalmist wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). Of course, theists too maintain that God has revealed himself in nature. But for a theist God has also revealed himself in words—in propositional, verbalized revelation to his prophets and the various biblical writers. And, Christian theists maintain, God has also revealed himself in his Son, Jesus—“the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). But for deists God does not communicate with people. No special revelation is necessary, and none has occurred.

Émile Bréhier, a historian of philosophy, sums up well the difference between deism and theism:

We see clearly that a new conception of man, wholly incompatible with the Christian faith, had been introduced: God the architect who produced and maintained a marvelous order in the universe had been discovered in nature, and there was no longer a place for the God of the Christian drama, the God who bestowed upon Adam “the power to sin and to reverse the order.” God was in nature and no longer in history; he was in the wonders analyzed by naturalists and biologists and no longer in the human conscience, with feelings of sin, disgrace, or grace that accompanied his presence; he had left man in charge of his own destiny.15

The God who was discovered by the deists was an architect, but not a lover or a judge or personal in any way. He was not one who acted in history. He simply had left the world alone. But humanity, while in one sense the maker of its own destiny, was yet locked into the closed system. Human freedom from God was not a freedom to anything; in fact, it was not a freedom at all.

One tension in deism is found at the opening of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–1734). Pope writes,

Say first, of God above or man below,

What can we reason but from what we know?

Of man what see we but his station here

From which to reason, or to which refer?

Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,

’Tis ours to trace him only in our own.16

These six lines state that we can know God only through studying the world around us. We learn from data and proceed from the specific to the general. Nothing is revealed to us outside that which we experience. Then Pope continues, He who through vast immensity can pierce,

See worlds on worlds compose one universe,

Observe how system into system runs,

What other planets circle other suns,

What varied being peoples ev’ry star,

May tell why heav’n has made us as we are.

But of this frame the bearings and the ties,

The strong connections, nice dependencies,

Gradations just, has thy pervading soul

Looked through? or can a part contain the whole?17

Pope assumes here a knowledge of God and of nature that is not capable of being gained by experience. He even admits this as he challenges us as readers on whether we really have “looked through” the universe and seen its clockwork. But if we haven’t seen it, then presumably neither has Pope. How then does Pope know it is a vast, all-ordered clockwork?

One can’t have it both ways. Either (1) all knowledge comes from experience and we, not being infinite, cannot know the system as a whole, or (2) some knowledge comes from another source—for example, from innate ideas built into us or from revelation from the outside. But Pope, like most deists, discounts revelation. So we have a tension in Pope’s epistemology. And it was just such tensions that made eighteenth-century deism an unstable worldview.

Deism’s ethics in general is founded on the notion that built into human nature is the capacity to sense the difference between good and evil. Human reason is not “fallen” as in Christian theism; so when it is employed by people of good will, it results in moral discernment. Of course, human beings are free not to do what they discern as good; evil then is a result of human beings not conforming to their inherent nature.18

So much for human good and evil. But what about natural evil? Natural events—floods, hurricanes, earthquakes—bring disaster, massive pain, and suffering to many. Deists do not consider either human reason or the universe itself to be “fallen.” Rather it is in its normal state. How, then, can the normal universe in which we experience so much tragedy still be good? Isn’t God, the omnipotent Creator, responsible for everything as it is? Doesn’t this world reflect either what God wants or what he is like? Is God, then, really good?

While it is probably unfair to charge deism itself with the confusion illustrated by Alexander Pope, it is instructive to see what can happen when the implications of deism are exposed. Pope writes:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good;

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.19

This position ends in destroying ethics. If whatever is is right, then there is no evil. Good becomes indistinguishable from evil. As Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) said, “If God exists, he must be the devil.” Or, worse luck, there must not be good at all. For without the ability to distinguish, there can be neither one nor the other, neither good nor evil. Ethics disappears.

It is surely necessary to point out that not all deists saw (or now see) that their assumptions entail Pope’s conclusions. Some felt, in fact, that Jesus’ ethical teachings were really natural law expressed in words. And, of course, the Sermon on the Mount does not contain anything like the proposition “Whatever is, is right.” A deeper study of the deists would, I believe, lead to the conclusion that these early deists simply were inconsistent and did not recognize it.

Alexander Pope himself is inconsistent, for while he held that whatever is is right, he also berated humanity for pride (which, if it is, must be right!).

In pride, in reas’ning pride our error lies;

All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.

Pride still aiming at blessed abodes;

Men would be angels, angels would be gods. . . .

And who but wishes to invert the laws

Of order sins against th’ Eternal Cause.20

For a person to think of himself more highly than he ought was pride. Pride was wrong, even a sin. Yet note: a sin not against a personal God but against the “Eternal Cause,” against a philosophic abstraction. Even the word sin takes on a new color in such a context. More important, however, the whole notion of sin must disappear if one holds on other grounds that whatever is, is right.

If deists were to be consistent to the clockmaker/clockwork metaphor, they would be little interested in history. As Bréhier has pointed out, they sought knowledge of God primarily in nature as understood in the growing content of natural science. The course of Jewish history as recorded in the Bible was largely dismissed as legend, at least partially because it insisted on God’s direct action on and among his chosen people. The accounts of both Testaments are filled with miracles. The deists say miracles can’t happen. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), for example, produced The Life and Morals of Jesus, better known as The Jefferson Bible. His popular version excluded narratives of all the miracles. By such a procedure the Bible became largely discounted as giving insight into God or human beings or, especially, the natural order. Jefferson became the judge of what could be true or worthy of belief. At best the biblical narratives were illustrations of divine law from which ethical principles could be derived. Then, too, H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768) attempted “to reconstruct the life and preaching of Jesus with the tools of critical history.”21 And John Toland (1670–1722) argued that Christianity was as old as creation; the gospel was a “republication” of the religion of nature. With views like those, even the specific acts of history are not important for true religion. The stress is on general rules. As Pope says, “The first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial but by gen’ral laws.”22 God is quite uninterested in individual men and women or even whole peoples. Besides, the universe is closed, not open to his reordering at all.

Nonetheless intellectuals, historians, and philosophers with a basically deistic bent were, as Synnestvedt says, “fascinated by history.” He cites major works by seven major deistic scholars, including a History of England by David Hume (1711–1776), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), and Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794).23 All these “histories” are, of course, based totally on the autonomy of human reason; none of them appeal to perspectives derived from revelation. As a result they display a wide variety of interpretations of the meaning and significance of human events.

Because, unlike Christian theism, there is no orthodox deism, each deist is free to use reason, intuition, tradition, or whatever squares with his or her view of ultimate reality. Deists’ core commitments will thus reflect their personal passions or, in common parlance, what turns them on—the flourishing of their individual personal life, their family life, public life. Early deists such as Franklin and Jefferson took public welfare as a key commitment. Others like Paine combined their commitment to public life with a passion for their own personal freedom (and the freedom of everyone in the commonwealth) from the dictates of religion. But the more a deist becomes divorced from allegiance to a personal God, the less religious mores and traditional goals characterize their core commitments. As a result, societies themselves become more pluralistic and less socially cohesive. Thus the tie between deism as a worldview and freedom as a personal and social goal inspired the bloody violence of the French Revolution and spurred on the development of democracy and eventually the vast cultural diversification of American society. Each year the Western World, especially America, becomes more pluralistic than the year before.

MODERN DEISM

As can be seen from the above description