11AR16-12

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Apologia Report 16:12 (1,062)

April 6, 2011

Subject: Are "A staggering 30 percent of Americans” mentally ill?

In this issue:

ATHEISM - anti-supernatural magazine "examines the logic of hope"

CHRISTOLOGY - it looks like AR missed something really important

ISLAM - "it is through Muslim commentaries that the denial of Jesus' crucifixion has been attributed to the Qur'an"

ORIGINS - Church & State magazine reviews "Creationism's Evolving Strategy" in the courtroom

PSYCHOLOGY - What's wrong with you? "A staggering 30 percent of Americans are mentally ill in any given year."

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ATHEISM

"The Existence of God: Two New Proofs" by Lawrence Crocker, professor of philosophy at Dartmouth -- this playful jab at the readers of Philosophy Now magazine says it "examines the logic of hope." Crocker states that: "What each of my proofs seeks to establish is that you should *hope* for the existence of God - even if you are a firm unbeliever."

Not too far into his discussion, Crocker admits: "My proofs are entirely new only in their concluding to hope. Their ancestry lies in traditional proofs, although their forefathers would surely disown them." His first is a "variation on a theme of Pascal's" and his second, "a variation of the Cosmological Argument."

Crocker concludes that his first proof has "enough basis to hope rather than merely wish, even though that basis falls short of justifying belief. My second proof is the same. It provides a basis for hope in God without necessarily providing any justification for belief in God.

"The existence of something rather than nothing is a door to hope that the atheists have not been able to close tightly. Whether the doors labeled 'consciousness,' 'time,' and 'religious experience' might also be slightly ajar I leave to the reader." Philosophy Now, Jan/Feb '11, pp25-28.F

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CHRISTOLOGY

We received a jarring response to the Christology item in our last issue from Rob Bowman (Director of Research at the Institute for Religious Research <irr.org>): "I'm writing to express a caution about the review of Bauckham and Dunn that you cited in the most recent Apologia Report. Dunn's book differs in viewpoint from that of Bauckham (especially) and of Hurtado more than the reviewer apparently acknowledges (from your summary; I don't yet have access to the review). In the end, Dunn answers the question of his book title, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? in the negative (pp. 150-51). Notoriously, Dunn has argued for years that the idea of Christ's preexistence is a late concept in Christology, at the edges of the NT at best. For him, Jesus is functionally divine but apparently not ontologically God, a view reflected in this most recent book (pp. 132-36). Thus, as best I can tell Dunn advocates a heretical interpretation of NT Christology."

Many thanks to Rob for this counterpoint! (Shows how well-read I am on the subject! - RP)

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ISLAM

The Crucifixion and the Qur'an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought, by Todd Lawson [1] -- W. Richard Oakes, Jr., mentions some technical difficulties with Lawson's book in this review, but it is Oakes' summaries that stand out. "While the Qur'an denies Jesus' divinity in unambiguous terms more than thirty times, the denial of Jesus' crucifixion is based on a single ambiguous phrase ... which occurs only once.... Today's commonly held interpretation is that [the phrase] means that God placed Jesus' likeness on Judas Iscariot which confused the Jews into crucifying Judas instead of Jesus. Most people familiar with the topic understand that the Qur'an denies Jesus' crucifixion.

"Jesus' crucifixion has been explained by a number of Muslim scholars over the centuries, while comments, chapters and articles on this subject have been written by non-Muslims. ...

"Lawson's book declares that it is the first extended study that seriously considers Muslim scholarship concerning Jesus' crucifixion. His work advances our knowledge of what Muslim scholars thought about Jesus' crucifixion in several ways.

"Lawson begins by pointing out that the Qur'an only makes a single parenthetical reference to Jesus' crucifixion ... while hadiths [sayings of Muhammad] ... make no mention of Jesus' crucifixion at all; it is through Muslim commentaries that the denial of Jesus' crucifixion has been attributed to the Qur'an.

"Lawson builds on the argument ... that even though the ordinary Muslim may not read commentaries for himself, it is nonetheless this genre ... that has a profound influence on the worldview of today's typical Muslim.

"The Crucifixion and the Qur'an is also to be commended for the way in which it shows not only the proliferation of medieval Muslim exegesis, but also its diversity." Muslim World, 101:1 - 2011, pp119-121. <www.j.mp/gS1QVv>

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ORIGINS

"Creationism's Evolving Strategy" by Sandhya Bathija -- this review of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District legal decision <www.j.mp/92s8X>, and the state of origins conflict since the 2004 case began, focuses on an address by Judge John E. Jones to the militantly secular (and pro-evolution) group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. In summarizing the lawsuit, Bathija characterizes the fight "against a school board dominated by Religious Right operatives [and] stacked with 'young-earth' creationists. ...

"'At the end of the day, my decision ... in the Kitzmiller case was not a hard decision to make,' Jones said recently, explaining that it was obvious that the school board had acted unconstitutionally. 'The hard part came in the writing, in deciding how expansive to make the opinion. Did I want to tackle, 'Was intelligent design science or was it not science?'

"Nearly five years after he issued the 139-page decision in Kitzmiller, Jones reflected on that landmark ruling in an address to Americans United staff and members of the AU Board of Trustees in Washington Nov. 14. ...

"'I had a strong sense this [Intelligent Design strategy] was going to replicate someplace else,' he continued. 'I didn't want another judge to be uninformed and unenlightened, particularly from the great testimony that I benefited from ... and the good lawyering as well.' ...

"The concept asserts that human beings are so complex that they had to be created by a purposeful designer. Proponents of ID claim that as long as they do not identify the designer as God, the idea is acceptable for public schools." Church & State, Jan '11, pp11-13. <www.j.mp/eFIUyi>

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PSYCHOLOGY

"The Book of Woe: Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness" by Gary Greenberg -- from Wired magazine's teaser: "How do you define mental illness? According to the American Psychiatric Association, everything a practitioner needs to know is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a fat book that defines everything from depression to autism. [2] But now Allen Frances, the man who wrote the DSM, says psychiatry has gone too far. Frances accuses his colleagues of bad science and bad faith, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and padding the bottom lines of drug companies in the process."

The DSM "is the basis of psychiatrists' authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers ..." - well, you get the picture.

Frances "claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they'd go after the right ones - the serious errors in the DSM-IV. 'We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,' he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics - and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life's difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs. ...

"Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes. In 2007, a series of investigative reports [www.j.mp/5arNwQ] revealed that an influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids, the Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, failed to disclose money he'd received from Johnson & Johnson, makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal, or risperidone."

Greenberg notes "absurdly high rates of diagnosis - by DSM criteria, epidemiologists have noted, a staggering 30 percent of Americans are mentally ill in any given year...." Wired, Jan '11, pp126-136. <www.j.mp/hpm4GL>

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - The Crucifixion and the Qur'an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought, by Todd Lawson (Oneworld, 2009, paperback, 256 pages) <www.j.mp/gOrNpW>

2 - The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR, by American Psychiatric Association (American Psych Pub, Inc.; 4th ed., 2000, paperback, 943 pages) <www.j.mp/fv4SMy>

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