National Geographic and the 1980s

When I was born, my grandparents gave me the wonderful gift of a lifetime subscription to National Geographic magazine. In addition to supplying a curious young boy with many years of amazement over the wonders of creation, at 50 years and counting it must have been a great value—especially when one factors in the rampant inflation during that time.

As I grew older, I stopped reading National Geographic for about 15 to 20 years from somewhere in the mid-70s to the 90s. I still valued it at some level because I kept on changing my address as I moved. But spent very little time reading each issue, if at all. When I did finally start reading it again, I noticed it had changed. It was no longer a magazine about nature. It was a magazine with an agenda of proving to the world that God does not exist. Of course, it doesn’t say that out loud. Instead, it uses evolution as its proxy in its propaganda efforts by attempting to prove that every act of creation that Christianity might attribute to God was instead brought about by happenstance. See the 2004 article, “Was Darwin Wrong?” In case you are wondering, their answer is, “No. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.”

I noticed this again in an article, Worlds Apart, in the most recent issue.

The article is about the search for “exoplanets,” i.e., planets that orbit stars other than our sun. To date, we are told, more than 370 exoplanets have been “identified.” Not actually observed, of course, because they are too small and far away to be seen, but assumed to exist by inference through such data as gravitational disruptions and dimming of a star’s brightness. I’ll comment on what I think about these discoveries in another post.

Not being able to leave us in marveling at the possibility of other life-supporting planets, National Geographic had to finish the article by carrying on its jihad against God. It starts with the proclamation that “we now have reason to believe that billions of such planets must exist and that they hold the promise of expanding not only the scope of human knowledge but also the richness of the human imagination.” So far so good, because in fact a growing knowledge of space does tend to bring richness to the human imagination—that is why I liked the magazine as a kid!

But the article finishes with this:

For thousands of years we humans knew so little about the universe that we were apt to celebrate our imaginations and denigrate reality. (As Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, the mysticism of the religious visionaries of old arose from an “intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality.”) Now, with advances in science, it has become gallingly evident that nature’s creativity outstrips our own.

God, it seems, is a figment of the imagination of people not satisfied with the smallness of reality. However, with the scientific advances and growing knowledge of the universe over the last few centuries, God is becoming an artifact soon to be swept away into the dustbin of history. As the largeness of reality outstrips even our wild imaginations, we won’t need Him anymore.

I must confess here that I also changed over the 15 to 20 years that I didn’t read National Geographic. So I am quite sure that in the 1970s that I wouldn’t have understood what they meant by “nature’s creativity” much less objected to it. For my knowledge of who God is was even more limited then than it is today. So it could be that National Geographic hasn’t changed so much as I have.

Yet I don’t think this is entirely what happened. There was something about the 1980s that seemed to change just about everyone. It’s not that there hasn’t been a harshness in the national dialogue from a historical perspective—a look at the 1780s or the 1880s would dispel that notion. And there was certainly Watergate as a more recent example. But the division in the country did seem to grow significantly during the 1980s. My own thought is that the Left thought they had won the war after Watergate and didn’t really have to pay attention to conservatives or Christians. However, the 1980s brought on Ronald Reagan, a mainstream National Review, the Heritage Foundation and an unimagined—by the left—political ascendancy of the conservative movement that taught them otherwise. The political left all of a sudden felt its very survival was as stake. Thus was reborn the vitriol that characterizes many of the attacks on conservative principles and the Christian worldview today (of course, liberals are not the only ones guilty of leveling vitriol at opponents, but that is a topic for another day).

For what it is worth, that’s my take on it. But whatever the case, I am still trying to figure out what to do with my National Geographic subscription. William (son-age 6) can’t comprehend its atheistic propaganda—yet, but loves to look at the pictures and there will come a time that I have to do more screening of it. It may well be an educational opportunity to help him learn about other viewpoints and how to deal with them. But it might also be a lost cause. If that is the case, so be it, although I’d hate to give up the next 30 years or so (Lord willing) of my pre-paid lifetime subscription.