I decided to read The Problem of Pain by C S Lewis as part of my preparation to preach on the Fall. I thought I’d read it before, but on reading it, I’m not sure I have read it all – there’s lots of material that’s really striking me as fresh and interesting that I don’t remember from before.
Chapter 3, on divine goodness, is particularly good – not new, but put with a clarity that is at times mind-blowing:
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some “disinterested”, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of his love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect”, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, nor the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. (pp. 34-35)
The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest “well pleased”. (p. 36)
If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes understanding. If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If he who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving – the election of man, from nonentity… (p. 39)
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love him… (p. 41)
It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures… but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream… If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows – the only food that any possible universe ever can grow – then we must starve eternally. (pp. 41-42)
Of course, to get the full impact of Lewis’ ideas, you need to follow his argument as a whole, rather than just a few scattered ideas in quotes on a blog. Blogs are no match for books – go and read it yourself!
Mack has just started a new Sunday evening sermon series, Mapping the Infinite, subtitled “Looking Deeper into God”. Over thirteen weeks, we’ll be covering the basic storyline and doctrines of the Christian faith, following the sermon titles of Mars Hill Church’s Doctrine series by Mark Driscoll.
The series is as follows:
As the subtitle to the series, “Looking deeper into God”, and the subtitle to each talk, suggests, the Christian faith is all about who God is and what God has done.
I’ll be preaching “Fall – God Judges” on May 17th, mainly from Genesis 3. I’m currently studying Genesis 3, as well as looking at the themes of the Fall, sin and judgement through the Bible, and try to work it through in own my life.
I’m really beginning to feel the weightiness of the subject. When I agreed with Phillip, who’s organising the series, to preach on the Fall, I had in mind the whole “problem of evil” aspect to it, and how the Fall “explains” evil. But as I’ve gone on, I’ve come to feel more and more the ache of the brokenness of our world, the horror of our sin, and become more convicted of how lightly I treat the seriousness of sin and God’s judgement. It’s very challenging on a personal level to prepare and to preach, so please pray that I will both preach a good sermon and that in preparing it, God will really change me and deal with the sin in my life.
As I study the Bible, think it through and read around the subject, I might post some of my thoughts and interesting snippets that I come across, particularly any intriguing tangents that won’t make it into the sermon. I plan to post my notes on it when I’ve finished too.
Many covers of George Orwell’s famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four aren’t that imaginative: 1984 in big letters and/or a gigantic eye, as in the cover to my copy of the book, right.
Over on the Retinart blog, Alexander Charchar set out to create something that would reflect the themes of the story better. You can read how he thought through a new design, and see the finished cover, in Reimagining Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’m impressed.
(HT to Dave Bish for the link to Retinart)
Or, Is materialism an optical illusion?
(Apologies for the delay in my blog posts on Creation and Evolution – my netbook was stolen when thieves broke into my house recently, which has set back some of my writing and blogging.)
In this post, I’m going to compare a Christian worldview and a materialistic worldview, and ask the question “how can we know that what we believe is true?” I think this will help show why there is no neutral position, and how we all depend on faith-based presuppositions.
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself… It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.”
– “The Suicide of Thought”, Orthodoxy by G K Chesterton
A materialist worldview – one that argues, usually on supposedly scientific grounds, that the material world is all that exists, and so there is no spiritual or transcendent reality – depends on the assumption that evolution would produce minds capable of reasoning correctly. But if the thoughts in our brains are no more than the movement of atoms, why should they have any more significant than the movement of wind through trees, as C S Lewis argued?
On the one hand, I think materialism doesn’t have anything like the empirical certainty that some atheists claim. On the other hand, I think G K Chesterton and C S Lewis overstate their case slightly. There seem to me various reasons why the materialist could reasonably think that his or her thoughts are actually true.
One possible reason is survival value. There is clearly a survival benefit to having reliable senses and reasoning abilities. If a dinosaur is about to eat you, and your senses tell you it’s a teddy bear, then you’ll be first in line when natural selection starts picking players for Team Extinction.
But what if believing something untrue can bring survival benefits? If this were the case, then we wouldn’t be able to trust our senses. It’s easy to imagine possible situations in which this could be the case – if you believe there are imaginary monsters in the forest, this might make you less likely to go blundering around in there into the path of a real tiger.
Religion is often explained by evolutionary psychology in terms of benefits like increased social cohesion and so on, which could confer an evolutionary advantage, whether or not those beliefs are true.
Similarly, our perceptions and reasoning might be distorted as a side-effect of otherwise beneficial genetic or behavioural traits. This is a possible explanation for optical illusions. Our brains are so well-adapted to spotting patterns, which is generally very useful, we often see patterns even when they aren’t there.
Could naturalism, the belief that everything can be explained in natural terms, be like an optical illusion? Our ability to spot patterns in nature is fine as far as it goes, but insisting that this must always be possible might be a similar delusion. How would we know?
From a purely naturalistic view of evolution, there is no guarantee that our beliefs are true or reflect reality. It’s possible that we can form true beliefs, just not certain. This isn’t a problem if naturalists are prepared to admit the fallibility of their beliefs, and admit that they make this leap of faith in trusting their own reasoning. But naturalism is often presented as being certain on “neutral” scientific and empirical grounds, which isn’t the case, even on naturalism’s own terms.
How does this compare to the Christian worldview? The Christian view of humanity is that we were created in the image of the God who created and who sustains the universe. He has given us minds capable of discovering truth and discerning the order of his creation, “Thinking God’s thoughts after him”, as the early scientist Kepler is reputed to have put it. The claim that we can have reliable knowledge of the world around us is consistent with the Christian worldview.
But before those of us who are Christians get too self-confident, Christianity also teaches that sin distorts our ability to know the truth, just as sin damages and disrupts every area of life. So while the Christian worldview gives us reason to believe that our senses are generally reliable, we can’t count on them being infallible.
Does this mean that Christianity suffers the same problem as materialism, likewise offering no basis for certainty? In both cases, we need to recognise that we are fallible; our perceptions and our reasoning can both be mistaken, and this should bring a certain humility to all of us. But while our senses are not completely reliable, I think it’s reasonable to have faith that they are sufficiently reliable for us to believe that if we’re careful and meticulous, we can detect and correct some of our mistakes and make genuine progress towards the truth. This involves trust, however – reason needs faith.
Reason teaches us is that our reason alone can’t teach us everything. The most reasonable conclusion to come to, given how partial and fallible our knowledge is, is that we need to look for help from outside ourselves for knowledge. We routinely look to books or teachers or scientists (and maybe also artists or philosophers or theologians) for answers to things outside our own abilities to know and to investigate. When we accept their knowledge and insight, we are putting our faith in them; we see this as both sensible and rational.
But faith is only as rational as the object of your faith is reliable. This is where I think Christianity gives a greater basis for certainty concerning truth about life and reality. Christianity teaches that there is a God who there and who speaks to us. He reveals truth and helps us overcome the effects of sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the Christian faith, we can have knowledge of the truth because God reveals truth to us.
In the materialistic worldview, there’s no necessary reason why anyone or anything should have true or reliable knowledge – there is no outside perspective to rescue us from our mire of uncertainty.
But this raises the problem of how do we know whether God has revealed himself to us, and if he has, what is God’s revelation? Other religions, such as Islam, also claim to be God’s revelation to us – how do we know which, if any, are genuine?
Well, we need to use our perceptions of the world and our reason to try and discern which is true – faith needs reason! This might seem circular – where do we begin? But that’s the point – it’s possible to distinguish reason and faith, but when it comes to forming our beliefs, it isn’t possible to completely separate them out. The wheels on the epistemological bus go round and round, and in doing so move us forward towards the truth.
To summarise, I believe we gain knowledge by reason and faith working together to receive true revelation (i.e. knowledge from outside of ourselves). All three elements – reason, faith and revelation – are necessary for knowledge.
The Christian worldview gives a basis on which we can believe our reason is truthful though fallible, a basis on which our faith can be justified yet self-correcting, and a basis on which we can receive revelation with confidence that God speaks truth. A materialistic worldview gives only a shaky basis for believing our reason is reliable or our faith is justified, and no basis at all for any kind of revelation.
To look at the evidence for and against each worldview is beyond the scope of this particular blog post, though I hope to touch on some of the issues in following blog posts. But even if materialism is true, we could not be certain of it, whereas if Christianity is true, we can have confidence in God’s revelation to us.
I’m currently in Cardiff Students’ Union, and as I type, Doctor Who is filming in Blackwell’s bookshop downstairs – scenes that are either from the Christmas special, or Tennant’s last story.
Spoilers follow! You have been warned…
What I saw is really intriguing… the Doctor is at a book signing of A Journal of Impossible Things – which appears to have been published as a novel by “Verity Newman” (a name taken from Verity Lambert, the first producer of Doctor Who, and Sydney Newman, one of its creators).
There were banners up with a cover showing the fob watch, very similar to Pullman’s Northern Lights cover.
What’s more, Verity Newman is played by none other than Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson), who played Joan Redfern in Human Nature!
It’s clearly the present day, so either Joan has time-travelled and become a novelist, or this might be Joan’s granddaughter, who inherited the Doctor’s journal, and has turned it into a novel. Very intriguing!
Edited to add: I wandered back down, to find that filming had finished and was packing up. As I walked past the entrance to the bookshop, Jessica Hynes walked out, right next to me, almost bumped into her! There was an odd moment as I recognised her, she saw I recognised her, and I went “urk!” As she went to the car I said, “I really loved Spaced! Erm… that’s a bit of a rubbish thing to say, but it’s all I can think of at the moment”. But complimenting someone on their work is never rubbish, and she smiled and waved, which was nice. I hope I didn’t scare her too much!
Edited to add (2): You can see a lot more much better photos from some of the rest of the gang of Who fans who were there: Planet Gallifrey, Scooty’s photostream, Brigade Leader’s photostream.
This week’s Sunday Times contained an interesting article by Andrew Sullivan on the shifting religious scene in America, including the rise of atheism. It concludes that:
American Christianity, despite so many resources, has ignored its intellectual responsibility. And atheists, if this continues much longer, will continue to pick up that slack.
However, while this diagnosis seems to me to be sadly correct (and true of Christianity in the UK as well), I find the solutions it proposes to be unconvincing:
Religion must absorb and explain the new facts of modernity: the deepening of the Darwinian consensus in the sciences, the irrefutable scriptural scholarship that makes biblical literalism intellectually contemptible, the shifting shape of family life, the new reality of openly gay people, the fact of gender equality in the secular world.
Oh yeah? Assimilating to modern values hasn’t exactly done the church much good so far. While not all of so-called “the new facts of modernity” that Sullivan mentions are necessarily antithetical to historic, orthodox Christianity, the rush to adapt Christianity to contemporary thinking seems to me to be part of the problem.
Of course, reactionary rejections of modernity have distorted the Church just as badly, but in different ways. The Church must neither uncritically accept nor uncritically reject modernity and postmodernity, but be clear and confident in the Gospel and so able to engage with contemporary life constructively, accepting the good and rejecting the bad.
“To me all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It’s an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the work itself. That’s the reward. That’s better than money.”
