I was appalled this week by a good friend who often acts as a check on my wilder moments, but this time roles were reversed—except he was right. He sent me a report showing that most North Americans are ceasing to read even the Bible. Almost all of us, me included, have reduced concentration spans and blunted critical faculties. Even Nobel laureates have commented that modern awards are less likely to be for stunning insights than for applied technology. This week I led a Bible study on John 13—the beginning of the upper room discourses. All in attendance had read the chapter, but no one could tell me how the chapter started. Apparently, no one taught them the basic first step of coming to grips with a text. Read it, close the book, write down the main points as you remember them and then look at what you missed. This was the first thing I did some years ago when I felt I had to know John 13-17 better. I failed the test! Good practice meant I found my first error quickly. Write down now without looking at a Bible how John 13 starts. The vast majority will say they had never seen that as important before.

This week, I also saw that Melanie Phillips, whose journalism I have appreciated over the years, released a new book with an intriguing title: The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It. It took October 7 and the subsequent reactions around the world to really wake her up. She had been a classical, liberal, Guardian journalist for years, therefore tacitly atheist with no interest in going to Israel. That has now changed. She is unconcerned by the flack she is getting, but she is incredibly concerned for the state of mind of the liberal elite who ought to know better.

Although evangelicals support Israel because the Bible tells us to, we are largely politically unaware in ways that would appall the founding fathers of the United States, who wrote the U.S. Constitution from the starting premise they were beings created in the image of God but fallen. Their greatest fear was the abuse of power, so they created a system of divided power that could only work if they cooperated.

What has happened to the Western world since the 17th century? Can you imagine a time when wise men were writing documents like the U.S. Constitution? Scientists had been expanding knowledge in the seventh century at an incredible rate, and many like Copernicus, Galileo, Keppler, Boyle, Newton and Leibniz were Christians. In this intellectual ferment, young men in their teens directed their energies to building amazing things like bridges, steam engines and roads. These young men were largely self-educated and hardly literate, but they were incredibly inventive and competent engineers. George Stephenson was illiterate when he built his first steam engine.

What made Western Europe so incredibly productive of new thought, inventiveness and energy between the late 13th century and the 19th century? I would argue that the rise of the universities and the arrival of Aristotelian logic from Spain awakened the dormant Western mind. Johann Gutenberg’s 1454 invention of the printing press (it is estimated 15 million books were printed in the subsequent 50 years, and the majority were Bibles) and Martin Luther’s rejection of abuses, like the selling of indulgences by the Roman church, led to the reformation. Luther’s brilliance in giving people the Bible in their native language led to intellectual ferment. Ordinary people began reading and thinking for themselves. The most read book was the Bible. Luther did not intend the “Reformation,” but God did.

America is the only country founded on Protestant theology, which naturally flourished as local congregations without the hierarchical structure of the Roman church that was necessary to restrain the medieval monarchs. John Milton beautifully expressed the effect of this new freedom within the church in Areopagitica: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” (When did you last hear vigorous theological argument in your church?) The founding of the U.S. was birthed through much argument built on a common biblical understanding of the nature of man and his redemption. The opening discussions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania were preceded by prayer! No other nation began in such a way. The government could leave and necessarily did leave small, distant communities to solve their own problems, knowing they were standing on millennia of Judeo-Christian moral teachings.

Melanie Philips argues that our ideas about rationality, conscience and justice are the result of Jews and Christians taking their religions seriously. I think she is right, and we must do a better job of giving reasons for our faith and defending the realism of our faith. Although Christians have often been mocked for their naïve faith, it is the modern politically correct multiculturalist who is espousing the fairy tale. This is particularly true of science and molecular biology. In the Cavendish laboratory of Cambridge University in 1953 when Francis Crick and James Watson “got” the structure of DNA, no one could have predicted it would destroy the Darwinian idea of development by random variation and natural selection as the explanation of all living creatures. It will probably still take a while for biology textbooks to grudgingly tell the truth, but they will.

For myself, it was a moment of unforgettable grace when I was taught the truth that we should never fear defending our faith in public because we are promised divine intervention. I was in Cuba in the 1990s with a group of Canadian physicians to take part in annual conferences for Cuban physicians basically aiming at updating medical education. After giving a lecture on some aspects of metabolic medicine, I was approached by a gentleman who turned out to be the head of the department of Marxism and Leninism. That was unexpected! Students had told him I believed Russia was collapsing because of moral decay—an insight I got from reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I was surprised he shared my opinion, but I was even more surprised with what he was doing. Most Cubans are much more Nationalist than Communist, and he feared for what was going to happen if the Russian economy collapsed and Russia no longer bought Cuban sugar. The return of the Mafia was what he feared most. His response was to introduce multicultural ethics into the curriculum, but the students went to sleep. He was told I argued that a multicultural society is a contradiction in terms, and I thought that without transcendence, ethics has no intellectual coherence. He came to ask me to debate with him the proposition that ethics and justice require transcendence to be rational. He wanted to see the concept in action. I could not refuse. I had one evening to prepare, and although I was reasonably confident, I knew there was a much better way to do it but had no idea what it was. The next morning as I got up to speak, my mind went blank except for one sentence, which I immediately understood was what I had been looking for the night before. The sentence was: “This message assembled itself.” I asked my translator to write it on the board in Spanish and then asked the audience what they made of it. They admitted its grammatical correctness, but it was nonsensical. I then crossed out the word message and replaced it with DNA and said, “But you believe this sentence because Darwin requires it, but it is the same sentence. DNA is an extraordinary message; indeed, it is a blueprint for the basic structure of every living creature. God needs only four letters in His alphabet, and He only uses three letter words. Put 300 such words in order and a protein is designed. There are 1.5 billion letters in the right order in your DNA; need I elaborate?” The audience applauded, because they had lived under scientific socialism long enough and knew immediately what I was going to do next. God is back in the public square, especially in science, and we need to celebrate that fact.

Now to tie these thoughts together. One of the great historical mysteries is the emergence of organized experimental science beginning in 14th century in Oxford, with its subsequent growth for almost five centuries and its apparent decline into applied technology in the last 50 years. In parallel, beginning late in the 19th century was the amazing production of wealth from and inventiveness consequent upon the exploitation of the free market and sophisticated financial skills. Lots of factors are involved, but a major one was to place truth above loyalty. Science for the new experimentalists depended on publication and replication. At present, the vast majority of scientific papers are not read. Blatant fraud takes at least 10 years to be proved, and then only if the fabricated data comes up against contrary results. This is not a question science can answer. It is a moral problem. The Jews were told to teach their children God’s commandments in order to flourish. They were warned they would lose their way without that obedience. Only grace brought them back. It was not an accident the Jews ran the banking for the first millennium of Christendom, because only they truly understood the essential requirement of promise keeping. Righteousness exalts a nation!

The moral for all of us? If your healthcare professionals don’t fear God and believe in judgment after death, you would be wise not to trust them.

To hear more from Dr. Patrick, visit johnpatrick.ca to listen to the Dr. John Patrick Podcast.