I choose to stay out of politics unless a group’s politics clearly contradicts Scriptural teaching, and that is certainly the case when it comes to many progressives’ devotion to the “blank slate.” The blank slate is the belief that people are born blank, or tabula rasa. Tabula rasa means “blank tablet” or, more accurately, “scraped tablet.” As atheist and Harvard neuroscientist Steven Pinker put it, the blank slate is “the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.”[1] It is commonly attributed to the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), though in fact he used a different metaphor. Here is the famous passage from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.[2]
Similarly, William Godwin (1756–1835), one of the founders of liberal political philosophy, wrote that “children are a sort of raw material put into our hands,” their minds “like a sheet of white paper.”[3]
Thus, John B. Watson (1878–1958), the founder of behaviorism, wrote:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.[4]
Notice that there is no limit to shaping an individual once they are born. You can make them into a doctor, lawyer, beggar, or thief.
Many progressives hold this corrupt and idiotic notion because they suppose that humans are born without any innate nature. Rather, the way a person turns out is 100% the result of their environment. You’ll notice I didn’t write “his or her” environment. That is because these progressives believe that since people are born blank slates, a person’s genitalia is an accident of nature and so gender is not in any way innate but is rather 100% a product of environment. Therefore, people born with penises are still blank slates and so can have their penises removed so they can be surgically changed into women. These “women” should then be allowed in girls’ sports and locker rooms.
Similarly, if someone rapes and tortures little girls to death, since they were born blank slates, it’s society’s fault they became that way and so we shouldn’t harshly punish them.
Horrors of Holding the Blank Slate Belief
Violence
Violent criminals are often freed without bail only to attack again. For example, “A mom of three was executed in front of her kids less than 24 hours after her estranged husband was sprung from jail on no bail over a caught-on-camera beatdown she’d posted to her Facebook page in a desperate plea for help.”[5] But, if tabula rasa is true, then of course we should go soft on criminals because our society, our environment, made them that way. “Bill and Hillary Clinton convened a conference at the White House to learn about the research [on family environments], at which Mrs. Clinton said that “the experiences of the first three years ‘can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents themselves.’”[6] Pinker wrote, “The romantic notion that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous psychopaths who promptly murdered innocent people. And the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.”[7]
Theft
We’ve all seen videos of people shoplifting. One reason is that in California a thief can steal up to $950 dollars in merchandise and be charged with only a misdemeanor, “which means that law enforcement probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will let it go.”[8] According to tabula rasa, thieves aren’t acting out of innate selfishness; rather, our society has been unfair to them.
Gender confusion
In 2022, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked the Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, to define the word “woman.” Jackson replied, “I can’t…. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”[9] Many people claim that men can have babies. Women are losing sports scholarships to transwomen.[10] If blank slate is true, our society enables biological men to think they are women (and vice versa) and who are we to disagree? The environment enables blank slate children to choose their genders and so men can have periods and get pregnant. But Pinker is right: the “differences between men and women affect every aspect of our lives. We all have a mother and a father, are attracted to members of the opposite sex (or notice our contrast with the people who are), and are never unaware of the sex of our siblings, children, and friends. To ignore gender would be to ignore a major part of the human condition.”[11]
Injury to women
One teen girl was spiked in the face in a volleyball game by a biological male/transwoman and suffered a concussion and neck injury.[12] In an MMA fight a woman had her skull broken by a biological male/transwoman.[13] This follows from point 3.
Sexual harassment
Biological males are ogling and exposing themselves in women’s locker rooms. For example, swimmer Riley Gains said about trans swimmer Lia Thomas being in the women’s locker room, “We did not give our consent, they did not ask for our consent, but in that locker room, we turn around and there’s a 6’4″ biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we’re exposed to male genitalia.”[14] This also follows from point 3.
Adherence to failed economic theories
Increasingly more people are proclaiming the virtues of failed economic systems such as socialism and Marxism. Karl Marx wrote, “Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.” Mao Zedong, responsible for the deaths of millions, said of children, “A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” The communist Khmer Rouge—who murdered about two million people out of a total population of only five million—had a slogan, “Only the newborn baby is spotless.” Tabula rasa makes sense of Marxism: people aren’t innately selfish so if we take away private property, then no one will ever be jealous of another.[15]
Adherence to a utopian future
Progressivism is always ultimately utopian—thus, the progressives’ wet dream over John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” Lennon sang (following Marx) that we should imagine “no possessions” and no “greed.” There it is again: people aren’t innately selfish; society has made people selfish. But if you want to see that babies are selfish, just put two babies on the floor next to each other but give them only one toy. The Marxist will reply “Exactly! That’s why you make sure everyone has precisely the same toy!” Pinker wrote, “The most violent age is not adolescence but toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting, and kicking.”[16] So, “Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”[17]
Nonetheless, socialists believe that we should redistribute everyone’s possessions so that no one has any more than anyone else and then we’ll all “live as one.”
Relativism
There is no objective truth. As Pinker put it:
Relativism is entwined with the doctrine of the Blank Slate in two ways. One is that relativists have a penny-pinching theory of psychology in which the mind has no mechanisms designed to grasp reality; all it can do is passively download words, images, and stereotypes from the surrounding culture. The other is the relativists’ attitude toward science. Most scientists regard their work as an extension of our everyday ability to figure out what is out there and how things work. Telescopes and microscopes amplify the visual system; theories formalize our hunches about cause and effect; experiments refine our drive to gather evidence about events we cannot witness directly. Relativist movements agree that science is perception and cognition writ large, but they draw the opposite conclusion: that scientists, like laypeople, are unequipped to grasp an objective reality. Instead, their advocates say, “Western science is only one way of describing reality, nature, and the way things work—a very effective way, certainly, for the production of goods and profits, but unsatisfactory in most other respects. It is an imperialist arrogance which ignores the sciences and insights of most other cultures and times.” Nowhere is this more significant than in the scientific study of politically charged topics such as race, gender, violence, and social organization. Appealing to “facts” or “the truth” in connection with these topics is just a ruse, the relativists say, because there is no “truth” in the sense of an objective yardstick independent of cultural and political presuppositions.[18]
Mentality of a cult
All of these things and more are the result of a denial of basic human nature. Atheist and Harvard cognitive neuroscientist (I wanted to remind you) Steven Pinker explains:
The denial of human nature has spread beyond the academy and has led to a disconnect between intellectual life and common sense. I first had the idea of writing this book when I started a collection of astonishing claims from pundits and social critics about the malleability of the human psyche: that little boys quarrel and fight because they are encouraged to do so; that children enjoy sweets because their parents use them as a reward for eating vegetables; that teenagers get the idea to compete in looks and fashion from spelling bees and academic prizes; that men think the goal of sex is an orgasm because of the way they were socialized. The problem is not just that these claims are preposterous but that the writers did not acknowledge they were saying things that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety.[19]
This is why progressives are furious, incensed, irate, even violent when anyone challenges them. Challengers are threatening UTOPIA! We are threatening the only “heaven” adherents of the blank slate think they will ever be able to enjoy. Thus, for the progressive, government becomes their god and they can’t let anyone hurt their god! Pinker wrote, “Just as religions contain a theory of human nature, so theories of human nature take on some of the functions of religion, and the Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life. It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that it is based on a miracle—a complex mind arising out of nothing—is not held against it.[20]
Nonsensical
Blank slate belief lacks common sense. Pinker wrote:
I find it hard to credit that anyone with an acquaintance with biology, a pair of eyes, and a dose of common sense could really believe that men and women are indistinguishable, that children’s personalities are sculpted by their parents, that all individuals have the same native intelligence, that people can be trained to find anything as aesthetically pleasing as anything else, or that all aggression is a cultural fad. Yet these are the beliefs that respectable intellectuals are compelled to profess in public—while many of them, I can testify, profess very different beliefs in private.[21]
For example, an article in The Atlantic recently argued that separating sports by sex doesn’t make sense because it “reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.”[22] Nonsense!
Contradicts the Gay “Born that Way” Argument
Pinker wrote,“Not coincidentally, this is the main issue on which the politically correct position goes against the blank slate: If gay people are born that way, so the dubious argument goes, they can’t be condemned for making an immoral choice, as religious and cultural conservatives claim.”[25] If the blank slate is true then no one can argue that “gays were born that way.”
Anti Science
One of the most interesting contradictions is that blank slate adherents both espouse and dislike the theory of evolution. Pinker wrote about psychologists and sociologists of the 20th century: “But most of all they shared a dislike of instincts and evolution.”[23] But you can’t have it both ways. When the Christian asks how complex life arose, the skeptical psychologist or sociologist cannot point to evolution but then tell us that what evolution teaches about our will to survive is false.[24]
A Real Life Leason
Pinker relates a life lesson:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).
Conclusion
The blank slate philosophy is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Christians don’t agree with Darwinists about much, but when it comes to the blank slate philosophy, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Both evolution and Christianity hold that humans are self-seeking. Sadly, progressives and conservatives in government rarely, if ever, debate the underlying philosophies that drive their conclusions, and that’s why they rarely change each other’s minds. Let us Christians continue to proclaim that man is innately selfish (sinful), because if we give up on that, we will continue to suffer from the horrors foisted on us by progressive politicians.
Ephesians 2:1-3: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
Amen.
[1] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York, Penguin, 2002, 2016), 2, Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid., 5. Emphasis in original.
[3] Ibid., 11.
[4] Ibid., 19.
[5] Emily Crane, Reuven Fenton, Carl Campanile and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “NY man sprung on no bail in Facebook-posted beating executes wife in front of kids just hours later: cops,” New York Post, Nov. 1, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/ny-man-sprung-on-no-bail-in-facebook-posted-beating-guns-down-wife-cops/, accessed January 17, 2024.
[6] Pinker., 386.
[7] Ibid., 10-11.
[8] Lee Ohanian, “Why Shoplifting Is Now De Facto Legal In California,” Hoover Institution, August 3, 2021, https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto-legal-california, accessed 1-17-2024. For the $950 limits see “New California Laws Going Into Effect in 2025,” Judicial Branch of California, https://courts.ca.gov/news/new-california-laws-going-effect-2025, accessed 10-24-2025.
[9] Myah Ward, “Blackburn to Jackson: Can you define ‘the word woman’?,” Politico, March 22, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/blackburn-jackson-define-the-word-woman-00019543, accessed 1-17-2024.
[10] CBS/AP, “Three Connecticut girls who have run high school track have filed a federal discrimination complaint saying a statewide policy on transgender athletes has cost them top finishes in races and possibly college scholarships,” CBS News, June 19, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/connecticut-transgender-athletes-face-federal-discrimination-complaint-from-females-over-title-ix-violations/, accessed January 17, 2019.
[11] Pinker, 341.
[12] “She said she still struggles with the effects of her injuries, including impaired vision, partial paralysis on the right side of her body, unremitting headaches, anxiety and depression.” Yaron Steinbuch, “Injured North Carolina volleyball player urges transgender ban for female sports teams in schools,” New York Post, April 21, 2023, https://nypost.com/2023/04/21/nc-volleyball-player-urges-transgender-ban-for-schools-female-sports/, accessed January 17, 2024.
[13] Of the fight, Tamikka Brents said, “I suffered from a concussion and a neck injury that to this day I am still recovering from. Other injuries I still suffer from today include impaired vision, partial paralysis on my right side, constant headaches, as well as anxiety and depression.” Bhavesh Purohit, “When transgender fighter Fallon Fox broke her opponent’s skull in MMA fight,” Sportskeeda, https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-when-transgender-fighter-fallon-fox-broke-opponent-s-skull-mma-fight, accessed January 17, 2024.
[14] Kristina Watrobski, “Lia Thomas exposed ‘male genitalia’ in women’s locker room at swim meet, ex-swimmer says.” ABC 7 on Your Side, February 7, 2023, https://katv.com/news/nation-world/lia-thomas-exposed-male-genitalia-in-womens-locker-room-at-swim-meet-ex-swimmer-says, accessed January 19,2024.
[15] Marx and Engels did not explicitly embrace the doctrine of the Blank Slate in their writings, but they were adamant that human nature has no enduring properties. Pinker, 155.
[16] Ibid., 316.
[17] Ibid., 316, Ellipses in original.
[18] Ibid., 198.
[19] Ibid., X. Emphasis mine.
[20] Ibid., 2. Emphasis mine.
[21] Ibid., 434.
[22] Maggie Mertens, “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense,” The Atlantic, September 17, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/09/sports-gender-sex-segregation-coed/671460/?utm_content=edit-promo&utm_source=twitter&utm_term=2022-09-17T11%3A01%3A56&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social, accessed April 6, 2026.
[23] Pinker, 24. Regarding evolutionary theory Pinker found “that two out of three sociologists do not believe that the theory which explains the origin of all living things can tell us anything about our own social life.” Ibid., 434.
[24] First, competition. Natural selection is powered by competition, which means that the products of natural selection—survival machines, in Richard Dawkins’s metaphor—should, by default, do whatever helps them survive and reproduce. He explains: To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favors genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.” Ibid., 318-319).
[25] Ibid., 434.