“For the early Christians the knowledge of the world began with the knowledge of God, and God could be known only in faith…Natural law is a minor tributary in Christian antiquity.”  (Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, pp. 161, 321)

Today most western Christians tend to place great weight on the possibility and importance of evidential apologetics.  That God’s existence and nature can be seen and known and proved through appeal to the created order seems both intuitive and biblical to us.  Thus we love the ontological argument, the argument from design, the fine-tuning of the universe, etc.  Yet I have found myself slowly moving away from an earlier optimism I possessed for both the usefuleness and the centrality of such argumentative strategies.  Like most long, slow fades away from one’s prior convictions, I find myself unable to give voice to many of the concrete, particular reasons that have prompted me over the years toward a more Barthian perspective on so-called “natural theology.”  But I have been enboldened in my stance of late by finding a much older predecessor than Barth to point to in my defense. 

Blaise Pascal, in his one-of-a-kind Pensees (every Christian should read this), repeatedly pulls the rug out from under those who would put their faith in evidential, rationalistic “proofs” for God’s existence and excellence.  To paraphrase Paul, if anyone had a reason for confidence in the flesh (i.e. the ability of reason to work its way up to God unaided), it was Pascal, the legendary philosopher and mathematician.  Yet he intentionally came to forsake this attractive pathway to the divine, as I believe the passages cited below demonatrate. 

What accounts for Pascal’s diminished view of creation’s inherent ability, apart from the gospel, to win over the minds and hearts of human beings to the reality of God?  I think the impetus for Pascal’s rejection of natural theology can be divided into two categories: ruin and revelation. 

First, because human beings are prone to futile idolatry and darkened in both mind and passion, the testifying witness of the created order is not so much absent, as ineffective.  Yes, the world cries out the glory of the eternal God, as Paul writes in Romans 1:18-32.  Yet in that same passage he also contends that sinful, twisted humanity inevitably distorts, corrupts and suppresses the silent speech of the heavens (Psalm 19).  I find this to be spectacularly true in personal experience.  Human beings on their own, from a million distinct vantage points in life among which the only common ground shared equally is the sin resident within each biased observer, cannot in actual practice come to know God through wisdom.  At best, nature can render us inexcusable, but it cannot enlighten us as long as we remain autonomously aloof from the God who unceasingly beckons to us through the gospel and the church.  As Camus pointed out in The Myth of Sisyphus, no one has ever yet died for the ontological argument.  Nor should they have.  But thousands have died for Christ.  And they should have; such decisions will be publicly vindicated on the last day.

Second, from the divine side of the ledger now, reason is not the chosen avenue by which God has appointed human beings to come to know him (1 Corinthians 1-2).  And at the bleark prospect that charges of fideism might be laid at my feet, let me state plainly here that I do believe reason is indispensable to knowing God.  But I do not believe it is primary.  The gospel, as both Origen and Edwards argued, has its highest and most proper proof within.  The beauty, power and goodness of the gospel flows from the story of Jesus itself, and not from any external standards, criteria or logical forays into that story by disinterested outsiders.  In hindsight, reason confirms the legitimacy and coherence of our faith in a thousand ways.  Yet reason was not, is not, and never will be our trailblazing pioneer into the knowledge of God whose prowess receives eternal adulation .  For by God’s own design, the world did not come to know the God of wisdom through wisdom, but rather only through the foolishness of what is proclaimed.  That is, the only true God only comes to be known through the heralding of the unbelievable message that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of all, having accomplished our salvation through his triumph over sin and death.  For Pascal, then, such a gospel necessarily has enormous epistemological implications.  If the God who saves us that way is the God we are talking about, then the process of knowing Him does not take essentially place through our own efforts and ability.  Knowledge of God is created, sustained and consummated according to the Spirit, and not according to the flesh.  Such a claim is not irrationalism, but simply the recognition that the knowledge of God does trade in goods that are fundamentally beyond the reaches of reason’s ambitious arm. 

Stanley Hauerwas provocatively argued in his Gifford lectures that Karl Barth–that fiercesome, caricatured enemy of all “arguments for God” which find their origin in isolation from the very gospel they seek to defend–actually turns out to be the natural theologian par excellence, because he starts with Jesus and is only then willing to look at the world.  Only from a tentative, humble committment to Jesus, assuming his story as my own story, can I then inquire of creation and see that it sings of the God who made it with any sense of certainty and coherence.  From any other position, creation will either seem to me futile and ruthless, or else to belong to a god other than the one that the gospel tells me of.  As Calvin famously put it, the Scriptures provide us with the reading spectacles we must wear if we hope to read creation rightly.  Otherwise God is still there, but we will not see his handiwork in proper focus. 

Hauerwas even argues that Thomas Aquina’s famous “proofs” for God’s existence in his Summa are not, as so often thought, actually proofs at all.  Instead, they are (in historical context) intramural attempts from within the community of faith to help Christians who already believe to understand how rational their faith indeed is.  Whether this is a justified reading of Aquinas I am in no position to decide, but I do find it to be utterly persuasive as an interpretation of what my experience (when I am most honest with myself) has been with arguments for God, as well as of the proper role of the gospel itself in creating and sustaining within us a knowledge of God that is Christ-centered through and through.  Which, of course, is the only kind of knowledge of God there really is in the universe. 

I leave you now to ruminate upon Pascal, and encourage those of us who have come to know God in Christ to only depend upon “arguments for God” in derivative, secondary ways.  What should we do with all the time on our hands we now find freed up?  Proclaim the Story.  And then live the Story together.  Nothing persuades the human mind and satisfies the human heart so much as when those things are done well, in conscious dependence upon the grace of God.

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#3: “‘Why, do you not say yourself that the sky and the birds prove God?’  No.  ‘Does your religion not say so?’  No.  For though it is true in a sense for some souls whom God has enlightened in this way, yet it is untrue for the majority.”

#189: “We know God only through Jesus Christ…All those who have claimed to know God and prove his existence without Jesus Christ have only had futile proofs to offer…In him and through him, therefore, we know God.  Apart from that, without Scripture, without original sin, without the necessary mediator, who was promised and came, it is impossible to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound morality.  But through and in Christ we can prove Christ’s existence, and teach both doctrine and morality.”

#190: “The metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake.”

#406: “We have an incapacity for proving anything which no amount of dogmatism can overcome.  We have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can overcome.”

#417: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ.  Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.  Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.”

#429: “This is what I see and what troubles me.  I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness.  Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety.  If I saw no sign there of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith.  But, seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state, where I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, she should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, they should be completely erased; that nature should say all or nothing so that I could see what course I ought to follow.  Instead of that, in the state in which I am, not knowing what I am not what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty.  My whole heart strains to know what the true good is in order to pursue it: no price would be too high to pay for eternity.”

#449: “Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the center towards which all things tend.  Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything…And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind: not just because I should not feel competent to find in nature arguments which would convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge, without Christ, is useless and sterile.  Even if someone were convinced that the proportions between numbers are immaterial, eternal truths, depending on a first truth in which they subsist, called God, I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation.

The Christian’s God does not consist merely of a God who is the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements.  That is the portion of the heathen and Epicureans.  He does not consist merely of a God who extends his providence over the life and property of men so as to grant a happy span of years to those who worship him.  That is the portion of the Jews.  But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy: who unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him.

All those who seek God apart from Christ, and who go no further than nature, either find no light to satisfy them or come to devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator, thus falling into either atheism or deism, two things almost equally abhorrent to Christianity.”

#463: “It is a remarkable fact that no canonical author has ever used nature to prove God.  They all try to make people believe in him.  David, Solomon, etc., never said: ‘There is no such thing as a vacuum, therefore God exists.’  They must have been cleverer than the cleverest of their successors, all of whom have used proofs from nature.  This is very noteworthy.”

C. Marshall: I take no issue with one way that you use #1. The rewarding nature of pious life apart from Christ does not strike me as that strange from a Christian point of view. That said, as I’m sure you realize, by admitting the intrinsic, natural reward that you get from living a life of community and service to others, this does mean that you’ll have to build a case for Christianity on more than its fulfilling life of humility and compassion. Your positioning Christ at the center of this “spectrum” of holy living might make sense but that will be a conclusion, I’m assuming, that we’ll reach through other avenues (like Scripture or the Resurrection as you later point out).

You have proposed, but by no means proved, that actively living out the life described by Christ would be the most fulfilling experience one could possess. I don’t think it’s fruitful to try to empirically examine that claim. I’m fine to just point out that there are many very fulfilled Christians and many very fulfilled people of other or not faiths, and leave it at that. So again, as I’m sure you realize, pointing again and again to the fulfilling lives of Christians will not be enough for me. It’s entirely conceivable that Christianity entails false propositions but leads to a life that is fulfilling for entirely naturalistic reasons.

Yet it seems as though Christians often rely on religious experience to motivate conversion. People (including you), when they hear about my spiritual struggles, often ask me if I have ever really lived as a Christian. I’m assuming that means living as the Gospels prescribe—and while it’s no short order to decipher how exactly that is, I’m assuming it means living a life of humility, service, and community. And that in this process I will come to know God personally and directly, aside from all of this tortuous intellectualizing.

Doesn’t this present an epistemological problem? I would imagine that you are not a Protestant because of specific intellectual problems you have with Catholic teaching, because I’m sure you can see that many Catholics are very fulfilled and faithful Christians. But have you ever tried living as a Catholic?

Or ditto with other religions? How many religions should I try living? How many lifetimes would that take? It’s not just an epistemological quandary, but a methodological nightmare. Why should I privilege Christianity?

Jordan Monge: I don’t think Christians should use fulfillment from “living out” Christianity as sufficient epistemological evidence for the authenticity of its metaphysical truth claims. The problem is rather that  most people do not deny Christianity because they have thought long and hard about Christ’s resurrection. Instead, they say something like, “Well, it’s foolish to save sex for marriage, so that’s why I disagree with Christianity” or “I don’t really think lust is that bad; Jesus must be wrong if he makes a big deal about it” or “I just really dislike the idea of hell.”

The problem is that most non-Christians (and even many Christians) live as slaves to sin. We struggle to stay pure or to serve the poor or to obey our parents, so we begin to rationalize our actions even though we know that they are wrong. Once this rationalization has taken place, THEN we say, “well, premarital sex isn’t really that bad, so Jesus must be crazy.” Sometimes it takes living something out in order to appreciate the truth behind it. Once you stop having sex, you realize the true love that can be found in a pure dating relationship. Once you start serving the poor, you appreciate how valuable it really is. But these are ethical notions that you can only truly appreciate once you’ve stopped being a slave to sin.

Obviously, I would recommend that everyone try to follow the commands of Jesus, simply for the reason that I think it’s the best way to live your life. But if someone said, “I wholeheartedly believe that Jesus is right for every ethical statement he makes, but he’s just so wrong about this whole “being the Son of God” business,” my response would be to discuss the “Son of God” business and not the ethical claims. The ethical claims wouldn’t be the issue.

I think I can do the same thing with other religions. I can look at their metaphysical claims about Joseph Smith or Mohammad or the world being on the back of a turtle, and reject their ethical claims on the basis of bad metaphysical claims. For the record, I have read parts of the Qur’an as well as parts of the Book of Mormon, although not the full text of either. Yet I didn’t read the whole Bible before becoming a Christian – I figured which parts of it were important and which metaphysical claims were key, and addressed those. And I never lived as a Catholic, but you’re correct in assuming that I have other doctrinal, theological reasons for rejecting Catholicism.

It's LOGIC!

To put all this another way: if a religion is true, then, if we follow that religion, we will lead a fulfilling life. Logically, we let”R” symbolize “if a religion is true,” “F” symbolize “we follow that religion,” and “L” symbolize “we will lead a fulfilling life” to get the paraphrase R ⊃ ( F ⊃ L). However, this statement is not equivalent to L ⊃ ( F ⊃ R) or “if we live a fulfilling life, then if we followed a religion, that religion must be true.” (My deductive logic professor would be pretty upset with me for changing the wording a bit, but you get the idea.

In order to demonstrate that antecedent “R” is false for a particular religion, we must find the consequent “( F ⊃ L)” false. In order to find “F ⊃ L” false, however, you must have a case in which the antecedent “F” is true and the consequent “L” is false. That is, you have to live out the teachings AND find that it does not lead to a fulfilling life. Most people, however, just say, “well, I don’t think it’s more fulfilling because x claim is silly” even though they haven’t trying to live out what Christianity claims about x. And that’s not a good way to go about criticizing Christianity logically. So if you want to criticize the ethics, go live it out and then you can try disproving the ethics. But if you take issue with other metaphysical claims, let’s have a serious discussion about those. I’d say that about almost any religion, not just Christianity.

If someone tried to assert L ⊃ ( F ⊃ R) – that a fulfilling life demonstrates the truth of a religion – I would strongly disagree. And if a Christian tried to argue this, I’d ask them to reconsider their logic. You could create a new religion, call it Christianiticalism, that held all the same beliefs as Christianity with the addition of the statement “DNA is made with uranium instead of oxygen”, and it would probably lead to an equally fulfilling life for any non-scientist. Yet its ability to offer a fulfilling life would not mean that “DNA is made with uranium instead of oxygen.”

So I don’t think you and I are in too much disagreement here. Note that I would ask you to consider living out Christianity in part because I have found Christianity much more fulfilling than atheism. As your friend, I want you to lead a fulfilling life and I believe that if you follow his teachings, then the truth will set you free. But you cannot simply be looking for comfort, you also have to be looking for Truth. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

“Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it.  It is even destructive.  Young people from my own flock have come home with a copy of La Nausee or L’Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief, when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible.  And they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what a misery it is.  And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them ‘proofs.’  I just won’t do it.  It only confirms them in their skepticism.  Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense…In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer.  I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things…So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon.  It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.  So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs.  Don’t bother with them at all.  They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.  And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them.  That is very unsettling over the long term…I’m not saying never doubt or question.  The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it.  I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.” (pp. 177-79)

Before weighing the relative merits of Ames’ convictions concerning the alleged dangers of defending one’s faith to spiritual outsiders, consider this strangely similar meditation from C.S. Lewis–himself undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and original intellectual defenders of the Christian faith in recent history!

“I have found that there is nothing more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.  No doctrine of the Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.  For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar…That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.” (“Christian Apologetics,” in Undeceptions, p. 76)

I wonder what your immediate, unmeditated reaction to these statements were?  If you are anything like me, it was something along the lines of “Yes, but…”  Both of these excerpts provoked insightful ”aha” moments for me, putting into words something I could only previously sense in a generic and vague way.  In hindsight, the legitimacy of what these statements affirm seems self-evident to me, especially in light of my own past experience with the realities they allude to.  Yet, at the same time, I would very much want to say more than just this.  To settle for only giving the warning and then to simply stop and move on stirs up discontent in me.  “But that’s not the whole story…”

Here, then, is what I find compelling about Ames and Lewis.  First, rationalism is a constant risk to which all we heirs of the Enlightenment are prone.  We may not even be conscious of it, yet we are regularly tempted into foolishly imagining that we can isolate our intellectual pursuits and logical grasp of the world from our emotional, social and spiritual condition.  It gives us a sense of power over our surroundings, and it is relatively easy.  Who cares what type of person I am or where my heart is at before God, for this (we implicitly think) has nothing to do with the accuracy of my mental evaluation of true and false or of good and evil. 

I do not have the space here to nitpick the profound self-deceptions that invariably attend this way of interpreting the matter, but suffice it to say that the Christian vision of humanity is irreducibly holistic.  Yes, arguments are important.  Thinking is crucial.  But these are not the only things that go into one’s relationship with God, and arguably not even the most important.  Consider the human dilemma as narrated by Paul in Romans 1:18-32 or Ephesians 4:17-18.  False thinking about God and about spiritual reality–at least according to Paul–is rooted in something more fundamentally awry about God’s image bearers: namely, hardness of heart, moral rebellion and spiritual darkness.  Typically truncated approaches to apologetics can in practice deny this state of affairs, mostly by treating bad thinking as the essence of human sin, rather than its by-product.  The deepest, most essential aspects of reality can only be seen by the humble, for God is God.  That the standard epistemologies on tap in the West today would feign to make all knowledge as equally accessible (at least in principle) to those who love evil and practice unrighteousness as to those who pursue justice, love mercy and care for widows and orphans should be of the gravest concern for the people of God.  Christians ought to be suspicious of any account of human knowing that ignores the undeniable moral dimensions of our created existence.

Indeed, a complex network of issues comprise what any given person finds persuasive and compelling about their ultimate perception of reality. For Christians with a committment to sharing the gospel of grace with others, how can we fail to acknowledge the importance of the inward work of the Spirit, of human love as the tangible marker of the love of Christ for us, of devoted prayer for the spiritually blind, and of the authentic witness of a community of Christ-followers actually living out the gospel in word and deed?  Lesslie Newbigin, who spent decades as a missionary in South India before becoming a famous theologian late in life in England, saw the futility and “disconnect” of merely contending for the objective validity of orthodoxy while denying (or at least neglecting) it in the moral and communal aspects of our existence:

“How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross?  I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 227)

If this is so, how then can we be satisfied with putting all of our proverbial eggs in one basket by only trying to argue people into the kingdom of God?  Does not our experience teach us to admit that while intellectual arguments are usually a necessary condition for believing in the crucified and risen Jesus, they are never a sufficient one?  Ames and Lewis both recognize this mistake for what it is and call it out. 

Second, both Ames and Lewis point to the insufficiency of the self as grounds for their rejection of the overconfidence of many an apologist.  It’s not that Christianity doesn’t make sense, or that we shouldn’t have good, sufficient warrant for believing the gospel over and above some other competing worldview.  Rather, the problem—and I’m assuming at this point that I have some degree of genuine self-knowledge of my own weaknesses and failures—is that I don’t want the validity of any person’s faith (including my own!) to rest ultimately on my cleverness.  If Christianity is only as solid as my subjective awareness of superior arguments for it and ability to articulate it, then good night are we in trouble.  Who hasn’t felt this agonizing doubt?  It would seem that even the Apostle Paul wrestled with such existential dilemmas:

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)

But here is the “more” I would also want to insist on in dialogue with Ames and Lewis.

Fideism is just as potentially harmful as the most extreme rationalism and, in the end, just as flat-out mistaken.  Ames the Barthian, of course, is more plausibly open to the charge of fideism than Lewis is, but regardless we must affirm that faith is not (as Locke argued) the opposite of knowledge, but rather only of sight.  Faith requires real warrant to be morally praiseworthy, and most of us intuitively know that simply believing something (anything!) for the sake of believing it is both intellectually bankrupt and ethically dangerous.

Turning to the New Testament writings, it is a salutary reminder to see how frequently the early Christians did indeed seek to defend the faith with compelling logic and demonstrable reasons to the surrounding world of skeptical unbelievers.  Of course they occupied themselves with a lot more than just this priority, but neither did they forsake it entirely to simply feed the hungry or be “authentic” in community with each other.  I know plenty of apparently genuine people who believe incredibly stupid things.  Neither authenticity nor social justice, in and of themselves, are any guarantee of possessing the truth, of not being self-deceived.  Therefore, Peter commands us to have a reason for the hope that is within us and to be ready to share it with others (1 Peter 3:15).  Paul spent an enormous amount of his time reasoning and seeking to persuade both Jews and Gentiles of the historical factuality of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the climactic fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures (see Acts 17:2, 17, 18:4, 19, 19:8-9, 24:25, 28:23-24, etc.).   It is impossible to deny the fact that many of the NT documents put forth reason after reason and argument after argument to convince their readers of the sturdy foundation available to them in the gospel.  Jesus himself constantly debates with people in his interaction with them.  How then are we exempt from this responsibility? 

C. S. Lewis, of course, exerted an incredible amount of time and effort in his adult life to a robust intellectual defense of the Christian faith on a very public stage.  Many of us owe him our spiritual lives, under God.  It is, I trust, uncontroversial to claim that he would have agreed with what I have contended in the last two paragraphs.  With those reservations noted, then, the advice of both Lewis and Ames is worth listening to reflectively and seriously.  To paraphrase the final sentence of the excerpt from Lewis above, here is the attitude of the most compelling apologists–one that will deliver them from the impotency of their own cleverness and commend the gospel with power to those who hear: “Trust in the Lord will all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  Acknowledge the Lord in all your ways, and he will make straight your paths.  Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil” (Proverbs 3:5-7).

Recently, I have been reflecting on the concept of magic – on the face of it, a profoundly un-Christian and un-philosophical subject, but one which I have found to be very instructive.

G.K. Chesterton

My thoughts were prompted by a couple excerpts I re-discovered from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

“Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the ‘Laws of Nature.’ When we are asked why eggs turn into birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned into horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a ‘law,’ for we do not understand its general formula.”

That made me think: What, ultimately, is the difference between a magical world and a lawful (or nomological) one? What, that is, is the ultimate difference between our world and Narnia or Middle-Earth? I realized that I did not have clear answers to these questions – and, more importantly, that there were no answers for me to find. The wizard’s craft was just as orderly and determinate as the scientist’s – and perhaps more so.

In The Lord of the Rings, Lady Galadriel tells Sam that she does not know what the hobbits mean by “magic” – for those features of her world which we would deem magical are, for her, merely ordinary. After all, a magic mirror in her land behaves just as regularly and predictably as the (supposedly non-magical) weather in ours. One man’s magic is another man’s law: “[T]he cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.”

The inevitable conclusion is that our world is just one magical world among many:

“A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.”

Why is this all important? This is Chesterton’s opinion:

“All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual…. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.”

Our world is governed, not by irrevocable laws (such as those that govern thought), but by one brand of magic among many; it is governed arbitrarily, or (in the parlance of contemporary philosophy) contingently. In our world, the word “Mellon” has no special power; but it could just as well open the door of the mines of Moria. In our world, we have gravity; but we could just as well have anti-gravity.

None of these considerations should be taken as endorsements of what is typically meant by “magic”: trust in astrologers, mediums, and demons rather than in God. Such dark arts are repeatedly condemned in the Bible: Our trust is not in the dread spirits of the night, but in the living God of Light. Instead, my intention is mainly to show how we moderns have (yet again) turned reality on its head. We have placed our hope in understanding Nature to Her very roots, all the while despairing at ever knowing Her Maker. But our hopes are entirely misplaced. The magic that we call “Nature” is incomprehensible; it is only the Magician Who has been revealed to us.

We do well to study the Book of Nature; in such a world as ours, we might as well get a handle of some magic tricks. But we must not forget that we are studying the Book of Nature and not another grimoire only because God chose to cast one spell and not another – only because God said Fiat lux and not Abra Kadabra.

Via exapologist, a paper by philosopher Erik J. Wielenberg which is essentially a response to various theistic criticisms of atheistic moral realism (or, more precisely, “non-natural non-theistic moral realism.”) His view is that there are ethical brute facts, which are metaphysically necessary and require no grounding or justification.

I read the paper quickly, mostly because I could tell that the objections which Wielenberg addressed were not at all the sorts of objections that I would raise to atheistic moral realism. (My impression was that Wielenberg handled most of them adequately.) The sort of objection that I would raise to atheistic moral realism is essentially Mackie’s argument from queerness, which Wielenberg briefly discusses in his paper. It has been a while since I read Mackie’s paper, so I won’t attempt to reproduce his arguments. Instead, I will simply raise my own objection, which I think Wielenberg should address if he has not already.

Professor Wielenberg has written an entire book defending his atheistic moral realism, and probably appreciates my free advertisement.

Suppose there are such things as ethical brute facts even if God exists, as Wielenberg maintains there are. Wielenberg believes, that “pain is intrinsically bad.” In fact, Wielenberg believes that it is necessarily true that pain is intrinsically bad, even in possible worlds in which no beings capable of experiencing pain exist. (He makes this claim explicitly about another ethical brute fact: “The state of affairs that it is just to give people what they deserve obtains whether or not any people actually exist.”)

The claim, in other words, is that there are necessary ethical brute facts about the psychological states of contingent sentient beings like humans (pain, after all, is a psychological state).

The problem with this claim, to me, is that it is extremely bizarre. As far as I can tell, Wielenberg must believe that the entirety of human existence can be explained by science except for our moral beliefs, which concern an utterly different, non-scientific kind of brute fact (namely, the ethical kind). In an age when scientists fantasize about a Theory of Everything – a complete theory – a theory with no exceptions – such an exception for ethical brute facts is glaring.

Of course, atheistic moral realism could be true - but I see no reason, apart from a fear of moral nihilism, for it to be true. In my opinion, it would be much, much more ontologically elegant (and thus plausible) for the naturalist to reduce morality to psychology, rather than positing ethical brute facts that are not empirically discoverable.

(Let me put this another way. As far as I can tell, most scientifically oriented atheists would agree with the following principle: If something can be reduced, it should be reduced. There are, in fact, many scientists currently seeking to demonstrate that our moral beliefs can be explained purely in evolutionary terms. If Wielenberg accepts the general principle I just mentioned, he needs to explain why morality is not susceptible to the same sort of reduction that all sorts of other things have been. If he does not accept the general principle, however, he needs to explain why he is in disagreement with other atheists – especially when he believes that pretty much everything else about humanity can be reduced by evolution.)

If ethical brute facts are not empirically discoverable, how are they discoverable? How does Wielenberg know that his ethical beliefs are any better than anyone else’s? How did humanity as a species evolve to apprehend ethical truths at all? After all, if naturalism is true, human evolution was not affected at all by ethics. Thus, if E is an ethical brute fact, it is perfectly conceivable to me that humanity could have evolved such that most humans (including Wielenberg) strongly believe that not-E obtains. In other words, even if Wielenberg’s thesis is true, I do not see how he can escape a radical skepticism about his ability to discern ethical truths.

What advantage does theism give us with respect to these concerns? I think the existence of ethical brute facts becomes much less spooky if God exists – if our origins (and the origins of the universe) are transcendent and personal rather than (solely) natural and impersonal. And I am far from alone in having this intuition.

There is, admittedly, a lot more to be said (and a lot that could be done to organize my thoughts). But, if naturalism is true, I think the burden of proof lies on the naturalistic moral realist, not the naturalistic nihilist.

In other words, Christians and atheists offer different solutions to the mind-body problem, and (more broadly) to the question of the scope of science. In this post, I’d like to expand upon some of my thoughts on the matter.

Philosophers have been discussing the mind-body problem for millennia.

There are many things we can say about brains. A brain is a collection of particles; a brain extends over a certain area of space at any given time; a brain has a certain amount of kinetic energy; a brain undergoes chemical changes; and so on. These are all the sorts of things that we can say about any other physical entity, such as a boulder.

None of these things can be said about minds. A mind – whatever it is – is not a collection of particles; it does not extend over a certain area of space at any given time; in short, it has very little in similar with brains or boulders or any physical thing.

At this point, you might wonder whether or not I am begging the question. I would ask that you resist that intuition and consider the extent of the problem.

What would we need to provide a complete description of an atom (or, if you prefer, an even more fundamental particle)? Such a description might require recordings of position, electric charge, mass, and other physical characteristics. (For the purposes of my argument, which physical characteristics we choose to list is largely irrelevant.)

Consider, in turn, a complete description of a macroscopic object such as a boulder. Such an object could be described merely in terms of atoms and their relations with one another.

What about a human being? Can a human being be described merely in terms of relations among atoms – in terms of position, electric charge, mass, and other physical characteristics? A human body (or, more bluntly, a corpse) can, but a human being cannot. Human beings, after all, are self-aware, perceptive – conscious.

Is consciousness a physical characteristic? If it is, of what physical entity is it a characteristic? No one says that the individual atoms in our brain are conscious, and few (if any) people say that the individual neurons in our brains are conscious. Are our entire brains conscious? But a brain, physically speaking, is just a collection of neurons, none of which is conscious; they are merely (extremely) specific configurations of matter.

Perhaps we can say that consciousness arises from brains in some way – in other (more technical) words, that mental states supervene on physical states. The firing of some specific neuron causes some specific piece of my mental experience (say, the perception of the color red).

There are two main problems that I see with this point of view (call it the supervenience account) for the atheist.

The first is that other people’s mental states are empirically unobservable. There is a fundamental difference between a third-person perspective and a first-person perspective of the world. (This is a very important observation, because no scientific theory, to my knowledge, has been able to give a sufficient account of this distinction.) I do not know what it is like to be a bat, nor do I even know what it is like to be you – even if I am a neuroscientist who knows everything about your brain. The supervenience account, then, is a far cry from the neat monism that atheists might prefer.

The second problem is this: There is nothing physically special about brains such that an entire new category of being known as consciousness (or self-awareness, or perception, or what-have-you) would supervene on brain states. Brains, to a physicist, are hardly different from boulders. Thus, the supervenience account posits a relationship between brains and minds that appears completely arbitrary. How is the scientist (qua scientist) to explain this arbitrariness? I am not sure.

Much, of course, remains to be said on this matter – this post includes only some brief introductory parts on my part – but I hope that the problem for the atheist has been made clear.

All, however, are modern.

Sometimes, this is the Jesus that we want.

We all would like a more modern Christianity, would we not? So many problems arise because Christianity appears simply outdated. The Bible is so patriarchal, so anti-scientific, so violent – so pre-Enlightenment. Even Jesus, the gentle Lamb, was very harsh at times. Why did he claim that salvation could come only through him? Why was the old Law (supposedly instituted by an all-loving God) so stringent? Why did Paul never condemn slavery?

Thus, we ask: Why is Christianity not more modern? How is the Christian to explain the disparities between his creed and modern sensibilities? More than questions, these are accusations and arguments; the implication is that the difference indicates an irreparable flaw in Christianity, a failure to meet (modern) specifications.

Arguments of this variety, in my experience, abound. The hot-button religious controversies of our time (such as evolution, the role of women, and gay marriage) all concern divisions, not merely among modern men, but between “progress” and “tradition” – between a (perceived) biblical norm and a modern one.

The Christian faith is thus evaluated according to a criterion of modernity. For many people I know, Christianity must either submit itself to modernity or be ignored entirely; the Church must be of the world to be in the world. The rich young ruler asked Jesus what must be done to inherit eternal life; modern man asks Jesus how it could possibly be fair for him not to inherit eternal life. David praised God for being made in His image; modern man demands that God recreate Himself in man’s image. God, once our Judge, is now on trial (to borrow C.S. Lewis’ analogy).

I do not mean to suggest that we should not question or probe Christianity, or that the modern Christian should blithely ignore the world around him and slavishly adhere to static doctrine. I only mean to suggest that we cannot dispose of Christianity simply by demonstrating that it is not modern; rather, we must demonstrate that it is not right. Put differently, if we are to argue against Christianity from modernity (from, say, distinctively modern ethical intuitions), we must have first presented an argument for modernity. That may seem obvious, but the distinction between our modern impressions and the truth is seldom made.

Why did Paul not explicitly condemn slavery? Was Paul fair to women? These are fair questions (ones I have often asked myself) that require honest answers. But we cannot reject Paul solely because modern Westerners largely condemn slavery; we must also argue that Paul himself should have condemned slavery.

To advance such an argument, of course, is to advocate for an objective morality that can be prescribed universally across cultural and religious lines. More to the point, to advance such an argument against the Christian religion is, in effect, to assert modernity itself as one’s religion. Of course, this would be nothing new; men throughout the ages have claimed to have obtained true moral knowledge. Yet every generation that has claimed such final revelation has been followed by a generation that laughed at its predecessors’ blindness. Why, then, do we continually attempt to mold Christ to twenty-first century man, as though twentieth century man had not attempted the same thing (and as though we expected twenty-second century man to follow us in lockstep)?

The irony here is (to me) inescapable; the very same modern zeitgeist that has nursed cultural relativism to maturity now sets itself up as absolute moral arbiter of the Christian tradition. The selfsame modernity that has taught us the importance of context demands that Christianity satisfy the whims of the modern Western world regardless of the ancient near Eastern perspectives from which it emerged.

No; a modernity that prides itself on its sensitivity to historical background must remember that the Bible was written by ancient men for ancient men, expressing ancient ideas in ancient languages. A modernity that prides itself on its universalizing tendencies must remember that the gospel message is intended not just for the twenty-first century professor, but for the twelfth-century peasant. A modernity that prides itself on its respect and toleration must be as respectful, tolerant, and open to the biblical ethos as it would be to a new Eastern philosophy.

A modernity that has questioned everything must begin to question itself.

Modern science has regularized our view of the world. The old dividing lines – the four humors; the sublunary and superlunary spheres; man, angel, and beast – have been erased. Everything is one, capable of being modeled by universalized mathematical laws; many physicists consider a Theory of Everything to be within reach.

Why bring God into the equation?

Is there nothing more to life than applied mathematics?

The late H.L. Mencken (an agnostic, ironically) said, “For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.” And I wonder if atheism’s elegant simplicity is really an elegant oversimplification – if its scientific (and often extremely reasonable) impulse to reduce and generalize reality to the result of a few fundamental laws glosses over how complicated reality actually is.

Did space-time begin with the Big Bang? If so, how? Why are the laws of Nature what they are? Why were the initial conditions of our universe what they were? Can physical reality explain its own existence? What about morality? Does it exist? If it exists, can it be “reduced” in the same way that all other phenomena have been reduced? (Wouldn’t the world be simpler if it just didn’t really exist?) What about minds? Are brains and minds the same thing? If they are, why can I see your “brain” but not your “mind”? If they are not, how can minds be explained solely by physical phenomena? Do we truly believe that every facet of the human experience – every oddity, every relationship, every composition – can be explained solely by the fact that humans evolved from lower apes? Does nothing transcend our mammalian minds?

I do not mean to say that only theists have offered substantive answers to these questions. But the impression I often get is that many non-religious people have not even considered these questions, as though the march of Science were inexorable and plenary. Such a belief, of course, is not elegantly simply but simplistic; it ignores a number of philosophical questions that truly cannot be reduced to answers drawn from the scientific method.

The truth is that the world is not so simple. If there is room in our understanding of reality for emergent minds and multiverses, there is room for angels and demons. And if there was ever a time during which the universe behaved according to different rules than those it follows now – can the universe possibly have followed the same “laws” during the Big Bang that it follows today? – then there may yet be a need for the God hypothesis. ]]> http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/secular-reductionism/feed/ 1 http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/divine-epistemology/ http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/divine-epistemology/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:00:52 +0000 J. Joseph Porter http://www.harvardichthus.org/?p=1838 This summer, I thought a lot about the problem of foreknowledge and free will. If God knows what we’re going to do beforehand – as certainly seems to be the case – how can our actions truly be described as “free”?

There is far too much to say about this problem in one blog post, and it would be above me to offer a full-proof solution here. But I would like to discuss one simple insight that I think is often overlooked.

Peter's Betrayal, Carl Heinrich Bloch

Most people have never thought about the problem of foreknowledge in terms of formal philosophical arguments; nevertheless, many of us have an intuition that perfect foreknowledge cannot be reconciled with free will.

I think that intuition generally follows a thought process something like the following: Whenever I know something about the future, I know it because something about the way the world is now means that the future must necessarily be a certain way. This is the only way I can truly know something about the future; in fact, knowledge of the future is impossible unless the future is determined by the past and present. So if God knows what our future “choices” will be, we really have no “choices” at all, because they have all been determined. I never could have done otherwise, and thus have no free will.

At the end of the day, this line of reasoning could turn out to be correct. But, for my part, I think it fails to distinguish between human epistemology – the processes by which humans obtain knowledge – and divine epistemology – the processes by which God obtains knowledge. It makes inferences about how God thinks about the future from human modes of thinking about the future, without pausing to consider the implications of such an inference.

If God were merely superhuman, I think such an inference would be valid, and He would have a genuine problem on His hands with foreknowledge and free will. But God is not superhuman; He is God. His ways are not just higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9), but fundamentally different from our ways. And there is no reason, therefore, to assume that God would “anticipate” the future in the same manner that we do, by deduction from the present.

By what other means, then, does He know the future? At the moment, I’m not completely sure; I haven’t given the matter sufficient thought. Perhaps God is “timeless,” as C.S. Lewis suggested in Mere Christianity: “[S]uppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call today.” Perhaps He has some other means more inscrutable to our imaginations.

Regardless, there is no prima facie reason to limit God’s epistemic tools to our epistemic tools – no reason, in other words, to think of God as the Old Man in the Sky. Thank God for that. ]]> http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/divine-epistemology/feed/ 11 http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/09/people-ideas-and-motives/ http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/09/people-ideas-and-motives/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:00:08 +0000 J. Joseph Porter http://www.harvardichthus.org/?p=1771 (Update: My friend CDK has reminded me that C.S. Lewis wrote an essay some time ago that discusses many of the points I seek to address here.)

A couple years ago, I got into a discussion with a non-Christian friend about the historicity of the Resurrection. When I recommended a few books on the matter, my friend scoffed: “Of course they think that; they’re Christians!” (I am paraphrasing.)

In my friend’s mind, Christians could not defend their point of view presumably because, as Christians, they had sacrificed any claim to objectivity.

I was pretty flabbergasted (and annoyed) by my friend’s remark. It was nothing more than an ad hominem attack that undercut any possibility of reasonable discourse on the matter; my friend was dismissing the scholarship of extremely educated historians because of their religious beliefs.

Why do people have these sorts of ideas about Christians (or religious people in general)? I can think of several different explanations: wariness of the subjectivity of religious experience, an appreciation of the fact that most Christians are raised as Christians and thus have Christianity somewhat thrust upon them, &c.

But the explanations don’t matter.

I believe in evolution, but I still don't think this is a fair characterization of creationists.

Such explanations form the basis of my friend’s decision to ignore the books I recommended. He looked at Christians’ ulterior motives – reasons why we believe what we believe apart from the validity of Christianity itself – and, assuming that such motives undergird (and thus undermine) any Christian attempt at persuasive argument, dismissed the books I had recommended outright. (To be fair to my friend, I have had discussions with him that were much more productive than the one described here.)

Of course, non-Christians are not the only people who do this. Some creationists have suggested that “Darwinist” scientists believe in evolution simply because they are demon-possessed. I have heard several Christians attribute atheism to pride on the part of atheists. People of all political stripes have accused their opponents of harboring undisclosed motives. And many people seem to think that I am a Christian only because my parents were missionaries. (Ulterior motives for beliefs, by the way, do not have to be malicious or deliberate. My friend certainly does not believe that Christian scholars are purposefully distorting the Truth when they argue for the historicity of the Resurrection – only that their judgment is being clouded by emotions or desires.)

What is the motivation behind people’s focus on motivation? In general, writing off those with whom we disagree is easy, whereas understanding their explanations for why they disagree with us is hard. It is more convenient for us to point to others’ motives than to engage and examine their ideas.

None of this is to deny that ulterior motives – emotions, predispositions, and what-have-you – exist; it would be foolish to pretend that they don’t. The point, rather, is that we can’t focus on people’s motives for believing certain things until we understand how people actually justify those beliefs.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that every conservative economist in the world has been paid a small fortune to advocate conservative economic policies. (I’m picking on conservatives because I’m conservative. The economic incentives of economists, by the way, is a very interesting topic.) That would look really, really bad for conservative economists – but it wouldn’t affect at all the truth of conservative economics.

Let’s consider a more realistic case. Many Christians believe in Christianity because of personal religious experiences. My friend and others might say that Christians’ reliance on such experiences is epistemically unjustifiable. (Some very able Christian philosophers would disagree.) But the fact remains that these religious experiences in and of themselves do not lessen the plausibility of the Resurrection.

In fact, the Resurrection could have happened even if all Christian historians and apologists were secret atheists. Similarly, evolution could still be true even if all “evolutionists” became young-Earth creationists. The reason for this is that ideas stand independent of the people who argue for them and the motives behind their arguments. ]]> http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/09/people-ideas-and-motives/feed/ 3