Jurassic Arrogance

What We Can Learn From God Talk In Jurassic Park?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Dr. Michael Crichton was a brilliant critical thinker.  I’m not sure of his religious affiliations, but it seems to me that the ethical questions that he asks in his books are the same ethical questions that Christians have been asking since our Lord walked the earth.  Dr. Crichton’s work is just filled with admonitions about: Look, if you think you’re greater than God, this is what’s going to happen to you.  You get eaten by a T-Rex.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Dan in Minnesota is up next.  Hello, Dan.  How you doing?

Caller Dan:  Doing good.  How you doing, Mike?

Mike:  I’m well, thank you.

Caller Dan:  I was enjoying that story that you read from the New York Times about composting people.  I shouldn’t say enjoying; I should say being disturbed by.  It got me thinking of a quote –

Mike:  I hope you were disturbed by it.

Caller Dan:  Oh my, gosh.  I spent ten years as a combat medic.  I’ve seen some stuff and that, that made me queasy hearing it.  That was very disturbing, just the concept.  It did remind me of a quote from Jurassic Park, ironically enough: Our scientists were so busy wondering if they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

Mike:  You know what?  That is – was that Jeff Goldblum’s character?

Caller Dan:  Yes, it was.

Mike:  You know that – we must talk about this for a minute.  You know the author of Jurassic Park was Dr. Michael Crichton, right?

Caller Dan:  I had forgotten that, but yes, I did know that.

Mike:  Dr. Michael Crichton was a brilliant critical thinker.  I’m not sure of his religious affiliations, but it seems to me that the ethical questions that he asks in his books are the same ethical questions that Christians have been asking since our Lord walked the earth.  Dr. Crichton’s work is just filled with admonitions about: Look, if you think you’re greater than God, this is what’s going to happen to you.  You get eaten by a T-Rex.

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That’s what Jeff Goldblum says in another scene when what’s-his-name talks about Pirates of the Caribbean had problems.  He said: Yeah, but when the Pirates of the Caribbean broke down, the pirates didn’t hop on the ships and eat the tourists.  It’s all about the lack of humility and the arrogance of man because he thinks he can do something.  As you said, that doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Caller Dan:  Exactly.  There’s such a hyper focus on science does this, science does that.  Yes, when you’re breaking it down into physical components and you’re able to explain the physics, yay, good for you.  That doesn’t explain the why and the reason.  Just because we understand some of the mechanics doesn’t disprove God.

Mike:  One of the things you will learn, or that I am learning, and I’ve been deprived of this most my life, and I suspect that almost everyone else has, too, because it’s simply not taught any longer – the study of philosophy isn’t for everyone, certainly.  That doesn’t mean that it’s not for anyone.  Again, take your statement or the Jurassic Park statement about just because we can doesn’t mean we should.  Reverse that: Just because we’re not doing something doesn’t mean that we should.  We’re not learning how to think.  Our thinking is horribly unclear.  It doesn’t have clarity to it.  The reason it doesn’t is because we do not perceive from what are known truths.  If you’re going to make an argument about something, the strongest way to make an argument is to proceed from something that is known to be true.  It’s called a universal.  There are few people alive that make an argument on anything that is based on a universal; thus, most of our thinking is then based on a universal.

This is what happens, and we can apply this in our lives.  Most people that are hopping on social media today and yelling and screaming at their friends, and posting this story, and posting that story, and posting this opinion, and posting that opinion – the word post is just used.  It’s just become part of the vernacular now.  Post means I have an opinion and you have to acknowledge it.  That’s what post means.  I posted today.  And yes, I have used the terminology.  I’m trying to wean myself from it.  Maybe I have published – if you publish something, that sounds formal, doesn’t it?  Posting something just means I went to a board and screamed at everyone that was hanging around the board.  I told them: Shut up, this is what I think!

What passes for argument today is not argument because major premises are left out.  People just assume that everyone knows what their major premise is.  In other words, what is the absolute truth upon which I’m making this argument?  Then we proceed to the “if” part of the equation, and then the “then” part.  Few times are there – there’s usually a tit versus tat.  This is why tit versus tat is just horrible reasoning.  The Jurassic Park statement made by the actor – I’m sure it was in the book in some form – that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, it’s the same thing with opinion.

We’re told today: Everybody has an opinion.  It’s your right to have it and I’ll defend it to the death.  I will not defend the opinion that you are entitled to murder babies to the death.  Anyone that says that cannot possibly have considered or pondered the sinful, eternal consequences of saying something ridiculous by saying: I’ll defend your opinion to the death.  Would you defend the opinion that the Nazis had to the death?  If you would, then why would you fight a war against them?  They were simply having their opinion.  This is where this equivocation in thought comes in, or this poorly-conceived – it’s not conceived at all – attempts at reason come in.  When we lose the ability – and we do this by choice because our elite ruling, teaching masters tell us that we should.  When we lose the ability or surrender the ability to rely upon the known – this is what is important.  If we rely upon the known, the truth, the demonstrable, and then form and frame arguments from there, become better thinkers, and then when you marry that to your Christianity or theology, if you will, then it starts to become clear that the way that we think is in error.  If you want to arrive at other thinking or at clear thinking, there is actually a process.  We all know the name Aristotle, right, Dan?  What do we need Aristotle for?

Caller Dan:  I don’t even remember.  Between that and Galileo –

Mike:  No, no, no, Aristotle and Galileo, not in the same class.

Caller Dan:  I know, but I’m really not up on my historical philosophy, not even a little.  I’m sorry.

Mike:  Aristotle is the founder, if you will, of scholastic philosophy, or what we’re going to study at MikeChurch.com soon, philosophia perennis.  That was Aristotle’s gift to the world.  Aristotle was born and died a pagan.  That doesn’t mean that his application of philosophy as he understood it was not brilliant because it was.  What happened after Aristotle is, about 500 years later, Thomas of Aquinas came along and was quite possibly the most brilliant human who ever lived, second only to Christ.  Thomas of Aquinas was able to take Aristotle and then build on the teachings of Aristotle, build a Christian teaching method.

This used to be taught, I guess is my point.  You had your Tritium and Quadrivium.  That’s how kids were educated.  That’s what young men or even older men were educated on.  Everything else would just come into the realm of some kind of a discipline or of a work that you might endeavor in.  This is the point.  Education consisted of seven things.  After you learn those seven things, you would then be prepared to learn, to acquire knowledge on other disciplines, as we call them today.   You would first go through learning – in other words, children were not educated on what to think; they were educated on how to think.  They may have been taught the ABC’s or an alphabet so they could read what it was – they had to know how to read before they could learn how to think.  That was the basis upon which education is based today.

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We have decided in our modern conceit and arrogance that we don’t need that because we have computers.  We have machines that can do some of the thinking for us.  We even have machines that can correct our spelling, can correct our grammar as we type.  I tell people, if you want to see how stupid, how totally foolhardy and dumb modern man has made all of us and modernity has made all of us, turn

spellcheck off on all your computing devices. Turn it off.

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I had one friend, she reported back to me after doing it for a couple days.  She said: Mike, I love you, but I’m turning the spellcheck back on.  I stink at spelling.  I have to carry around a little pocket dictionary with the spellcheck off because I’ll be going: I don’t feel like opening a stupid app up just to remember that there are two N’s in millennia.  I bought a pocket dictionary and carry it around and I can consult it.

The point is, we’re depriving ourselves of the beauty of learning.  Learning is beautiful.  Short of praying and receiving the graces of our faith and of our Lord in our lives, learning brings happiness.  Now some are going to say, [mocking] “And it doesn’t matter what you learn either.”  Of course it does.  If learning certain things produces murderous behavior, then I would say that you shouldn’t learn those certain things, right?  “Well, if you’re tempered by such and such then you can . . . .”  That’s an “if.”  Again, that’s not clear reasoning.  That’s not clear thought.  Now you’ve introduced an “if” proposition into it.  I don’t know what the answer to an “if” is.  Do you?

End Mike Church Show Transcript