Written by John G. West |
Friday, March 10, 2023
COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke “science” and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as “anti-science,” or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard. Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future. 

In 2007, I published Darwin Day in America, a critical history of social Darwinism in the United States and, more broadly, an exploration of the abuse of science in American public policy in the last century-and-a-half. In 2015, I wrote a new chapter for the paperback edition, highlighting a worrisome trend. I warned:
Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science — science so totalistic in its outlook that its defenders claim the right to remake every sphere of human life, from public policy and education to ethics and religion. PP. 385-386
Some predictions you don’t want to turn out to be true. Unfortunately, in my view we’ve gone pretty far down the path toward totalitarian science during the past two years.
I understand some readers may find this statement offensive. We have many different views about COVID-19 and the public policies designed to combat it. Our views are affected both by our understanding of the facts and by our own experiences. If someone you loved died from COVID-19, that tragedy will affect your view of the pandemic. If you or someone you love has been injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, that experience will influence you as well. If your small business or job did not survive the pandemic, ditto. Because of the pandemic’s deeply personal costs, it can be painful to engage in a candid discussion of the changes COVID-19 policies have wrought on our society.
Yet such a discussion is long overdue. Evolution News and Science Today focuses primarily on the scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical debates over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. But from the start, the impact of “scientism” on public policy, freedom of speech, and human dignity have been central to our mission as well. For the past two years, we’ve largely refrained from wading into the debates over COVID-19. In part this was because it was hard to weigh in on debates when the facts were so unclear. But it also was because the issue was so polarizing.
Now, after two years, facts are becoming clearer — and so are the momentous consequences of the pandemic for our culture. Those consequences are so serious that they can’t be ignored. That’s why from here on you can expect more coverage at Evolution News of the societal challenges raised by scientism during the COVID era. In this article, let me highlight just three.
1. The Dangerous Expansion of Government Power in the Name of Science
COVID-19 has been used as the rationale for an extraordinary expansion of government power in the name of science: lengthy “lockdowns” of businesses and churches, vaccination mandates, government-imposed discrimination against people based on their medical choices, government-encouraged censorship of dissenting scientific views, and more. Perhaps you support some of these policies as necessary. Perhaps you don’t. But even if you support each and every one of the policies adopted, you ought to be concerned by how they have been imposed. Almost none of the policies were enacted by legislative bodies after an open public debate. Almost all of the policies were enacted unilaterally by executive branch officials asserting emergency powers or by unelected public health officials immune from public accountability.
COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke “science” and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as “anti-science,” or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard. Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future.
The genie of unaccountable government power in the name of science has been let out of the bottle. Will we be able to put it back in?
2. The Dramatic Rise of Censorship in the Name of Science
The COVID era also has seen a dramatic rise of censorship in the name of science. We are told continuously now that “misinformation” or “disinformation” must be stopped. No decent person favors the spread of “misinformation.” But who is to judge what constitutes “misinformation”? Those warning of “misinformation” seem to assume that existing elites are always right, and so they should be in charge of determining what is true or false. But anyone conversant with the history of science or government knows that this claim can’t hold up to scrutiny. Neither elite scientists nor government officials have a monopoly on the truth. Truth often arises from dissenters. That’s why we have free speech in the first place.
We are also told that allowing free speech about COVID and related policies is too dangerous to permit. But the claim that speech is too dangerous to permit is always the go-to argument for totalitarians. If they had their way, we wouldn’t have free speech about anything.
Yes, there is misinformation in public discussions of COVID and many other topics. Some of it comes from private parties. Some of it comes from government officials. But the way to combat such misinformation is by adding speech, not suppressing it. As John Milton wrote in his famous defense of free speech, we are wrong to restrict free speech because we “misdoubt” the strength of truth in open debate. “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
Unfortunately, instead of defending free speech, we are seeing increased demands for the censorship of disfavored speech in the name of science. Arguments for science censorship have been made before about Darwinian evolution and climate change. But COVID-19 has raised the lobbying for suppression to a whole new level. The President and the Surgeon General are now actively pressuring journalists and tech companies to censor messages disfavored by the government. Taxpayer-funded NPR has all but urged medical licensing boards to strip medical licenses from doctors who offer dissenting opinions about COVID and its treatments. According to the Washington Post, the former head of the NIH, Francis Collins, believes we should “identify those who are purposefully spreading false information online and bring them to justice.”
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Leslie Land clearly had a growing conviction that God was calling him to the ministry, and the letters through the late thirties and the forties trace this. Lloyd-Jones spoke at Land’s induction to Melbourne Hall, Leicester, in 1947 and Land preached quite often at Westminster Chapel through the 1950s. Melbourne Hall continues to exercise a faithful ministry in the heart of Leicester, the most ethnically diverse city in the UK.

Ian Shaw, Professor Emeritus at the School for Business and Society of the University of York, UK, has just done the church a great service by writing a well-researched book on the life of Leslie Land, a rather forgotten pastor in mid-20th-century England who influenced his generation and the next more than most of us could imagine.
The book, Leslie Land: His Life and Ministry, will be published through Joshua Press, an imprint of H&E Publishing, later this year. He has graciously accepted to answer some questions about Leslie Land and this new biography.
What inspired you to write this book?
Well, I guess there may be direct and more distant inspirations. It must have been the early 1950s when, as a little boy, I first heard Leslie Land. I was sixteen when he left his church in Leicester, in the English Midlands. A small group of us went to visit him one Saturday morning, uninvited. It must have been the first time a pastor had talked to me as one Christian to another. I never forgot. When he died after a long illness in 1985, I wrote a couple of obituaries. The seeds were sown.
Over the last decade I have transcribed and published a series of his studies on the second advent of Christ, and written a series of articles about him, but it was the awareness that I had probably the most complete deposit of information about Leslie Land that eventually pushed me to make a fuller record.
Can you give a brief overview of Leslie Land’s life?
The facts – as much as we know them – are readily told. I tell the story in the opening pages of the book. Tracing his life is like a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces. He was brought up in Derbyshire, an English county. ‘William Leslie Land, born 20 January 1903 at Wirksworth; son of Samuel Land, retired Draper and Outfitter. Educated at the Grammar School, Wirksworth. Admitted 1 March 1921.’ So reads the Christ’s College, Cambridge, Admissions Book.
He became a science teacher at a private college on the south coast of England and quickly rose to be the Headmaster, when still in his thirties. He left the college just after the Second World War and after a brief spell at a church in the south of England was called to Melbourne Hall, Leicester, where he stayed for fourteen years until 1961. He suffered the early onset of a serious degenerative illness and died in 1985. His wife, Katherine, survived him for a few years as did their son, Peter, who himself had lifelong learning and social disabilities.
How difficult was it to gather information for this book?
Katherine Land, who I never spoke to face to face, was shown one of the obits I wrote. She asked someone to mail to me a small number of artefacts from his ministry – his annotated bible, some sermon notes, and so on. Someone else – a man who had been a minister in Leicester at the same time as Land – mailed to me some reel-to-reel tapes of Leslie Land. I felt a kind of obligation.
Another unusual factor is that Melbourne Hall at that time produced a monthly church magazine of sixteen closely typed pages. Three or four of these pages would be taken up with an extended outline of a Leslie Land sermon. The church would bind the magazines between hard covers every three years. I don’t know any other church that would do that. One way or another I was given all but one of the bound volumes covering his ministry. So, although he never wrote anything for publication – despite Martyn Lloyd-Jones urging him to do so – there is a rich archive of his ministry.
Preserving the archive is, as it happens, one of the challenges regarding Leslie Land, and one I have not been able to resolve. I have a significant number of audiotapes of his ministry and have had them digitised, but they need a permanent home.
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Written by R. Albert Mohler Jr. |
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Why? Because the Christian faith underlines the two realities of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Both are absolutely necessary to Biblical Christianity, and both are absolutely necessary to the Christian worldview in every respect. But though both are necessary, they are not equal. Human responsibility is real, but it exists only within the transcendent reality of God, and within the context of his unconditional providence. The reality of God’s providence is something many Americans, and no doubt many Christians, think about with far too little seriousness.

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump represents one of those rare historical moments when fundamental truths are clarified. Yesterday’s attack at President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania shocked the nation and the watching world, and it instantly revealed so many essential truths.
First, life and death can come down to a matter of a millimeter. The video of President Trump grabbing his ear and then diving onto the platform will be indelibly etched into the nation’s historical memory. Just the slightest deviation in the path of that ammunition round would have changed a bleeding ear into a dead former president, even as Trump is just days from his official nomination as the Republican candidate in the coming election. How can human life be so fragile as that? But the fragility of life is essential to our understanding of the gift of life. In a world of sin and evil, assassins and pathogens, every breath we take is a gift. At some point, a single breath will be our last.
For Donald Trump, his last breath could have come yesterday, broadcast to the entire world. Thankfully, that was not the case. But why? Those who hold to a purely materialistic and naturalistic worldview have no answer but luck, which is a major doctrine of secular theology. But Donald Trump (and the watching world as well) must surely know in his heart that something far greater than luck preserved his life. Speaking to the press, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., acknowledged the hairline distance that separated life and death in the assassination attempt: “Fate stepped in.” Interestingly, it was President Trump himself who clarified the issue, posting on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” Indeed, it was God and God alone, for God alone is the sovereign ruler of the cosmos.
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