Congratulations to our colleagues with Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness program who have helped to overcome the disastrous “Housing First” approach to the homelessness crisis. The victory came with an Executive Order that President Trump signed yesterday. I want to suggest here how this remarkable outcome fits with what we do at the Center for Science and Culture.
From the Discovery news release:
As the nation’s leading think tank on homelessness policy, our organization has long called for the very action this Executive Order takes: rolling back the federal government’s failed, one-size-fits-all “Housing First” mandate. Despite President Obama’s 2013 pledge to end homelessness within a decade, the policy has led to a 34% increase in homelessness. The Biden Administration’s most recent Annual Homeless Assessment Report (December 2024) shows that unsheltered, street-level homelessness is growing at a rate that would double the crisis every five to six years without urgent reform.
Discovery Institute’s efforts on the issue go back to a report that Discovery Board Chairman Bruce Chapman commissioned in 2018. Journalism by Jonathan Choe and others has revealed the human cost of failed policy in Seattle and other American cities.
A Different Picture of Reality
Compared with previous approaches, the new Executive Order reflects a fundamentally different picture of reality. What should we call it? Harvard psychologist William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), spoke of an “unseen realm,” an “unseen order,” and how “our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” The unseen can be characterized in many ways: the spiritual realm is one. The policies that filled city streets with the wandering mad and addicted promoted a physical solution: Give them housing! Earlier administrations ignored a basic truth that I first heard articulated long ago by Discovery Senior Fellow Michael Medved: You can’t solve spiritual problems with physical solutions.
As the Fix Homelessness project summarizes, “This order [by Trump] marks a major shift by redirecting funding to treatment, recovery, and supportive services that foster healing and accountability.” That is, it shifts money from (largely hopeless) physical solutions to (much more realistic) spiritual ones.
Recognizing a reality that includes the spirit is the theme of much of what we do at the Center for Science and Culture, as that very name suggests. Examining natural science alone, in isolation from human culture — isolation from what it says to and about that culture — leads to many evils and absurdities. One example is the fight that evolutionists are putting up in defense of the myth, now tumbled, that humans and chimps differ genetically by only 1 percent.
Why the 1 Percent Myth?
Materialists insist on the 1 percent myth because it condemns human exceptionalism. The materialist view needs apes and men to be nearly indistinguishable. Casey Luskin has done heroic work in explaining and publicizing new findings from the journal Nature that show the difference is far greater, closer to 15 percent.
Yet either figure falls wildly short of the true divergence, which can’t be captured by examining DNA, the material genome, alone. As described in my recent book Plato’s Revenge, scientific evidence increasingly points to an immaterial source of information that shapes life, as biologists Richard Sternberg, Michael Levin, and others have argued. The philosopher Plato described something like that 2,400 years ago — an unseen order of patterns or ideas, beyond time and space — a concept in the process of being vindicated.
The Mind and the Brain
Similarly, in their new book The Immortal Mind, our colleagues Dr. Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary show from modern neuroscience that the human mind is not identical with the brain, a physical organ. Beyond it, an unseen realm, that of the soul, grants humans moral choice and the capacity for abstract thought. Verified near-death experiences are just one category of evidence that the immortal mind ultimately escapes the body.
Religious tradition teaches that the human soul rejoins a creator, a mind — the intelligence behind the cosmos. Intelligent design theory as a whole points to this mind that is responsible for the existence of the universe and for the wonder of life. Theories relying on material processes alone fail to explain all that.
While this is an intellectual truth, William James emphasized that recognizing the reality of the unseen was not enough by itself. The best outcomes for human beings lie “in harmoniously adjusting ourselves” to this recognition. The new approach to fixing homelessness is an important step toward turning that harmony into practical policy.