hughbiquitous

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

So concludes C. S. Lewis’s essay, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory.

I’m getting toward the end of that book and two things have become clear:

1. C. S. Lewis was a brilliant writer.
2. This is probably the best book of Lewis’s writings out there. More on that in another post someday…

Anyway, this was the closing of his transcendental argument. He showed that Christianity is true because everything else is demonstrably false, and Christ himself is compelling. Here are some longer quotes that capture the essence of how he made the point:

The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one…

…More disquieting still is Professor D.M.S. Watson’s defence. “Evolution itself,” he wrote, “is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?

…On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. I left that ship not at the call of poetry but because I thought it could not keep afloat. Something like philosophical idealism or Theism must, at the, very worst, be less untrue than that. And idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism. And once you accepted Theism, you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examined them it appeared to me that you could adopt no middle position. Either He was a lunatic, or God. And He was not a lunatic.

A while back I “quoted” J. P. Moreland very casually that he went back-and-forth on the age of the earth. I came up with the proper quote:

It is unproductive to try to believe something beyond your grounds for believing it and dishonest to act as if you believe something more strongly than you do. Overbelief is not a virtue. For example, I am far from certain on many Christian beliefs I hold. I lean toward the view that the days of Genesis are vast periods of time and not literal twenty-four-hour periods. But about two days of the week I flip-flop and accept the literal view. Based on my study, I cannot convince myself either way, and I’m about sixty-forty in favor of the old-earth position. Other beliefs of mine have grown in certainty over the years—that God really exists, for example. We should be honest with ourselves about the strength of our various beliefs and work on strengthening them by considering the issues relevant to their acceptance.

– J. P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind, p. 107

This bears a distant resemblance to something I found by D. A. Carson (author’s emphasis):

Francis Schaeffer wrote a little book that I have often found useful in helping some Christians move beyond entrenched positions. That book was called Genesis in Space and Time. He asked, in effect, a simple question: What is the least that Genesis 1-11 must be saying for the rest of the Bible to cohere, for the rest of the Bible to make sense and be true? That is not the same as asking what is the most that one can reasonably infer from these chapters. Rather it is one particular application of the old analogia fidei argument: the appeal to “the analogy of the faith” as established by the rest of the Scriptures is one crucial way to let Scripture interpret Scripture.

Taken together, the wisdom of these sages heightens my interest in boundaries over answers. Here are some candidates off the top of my head:

1. Any explanation of the age of the universe must affirm the authority of Scripture.

2. Any explanation of the age of the universe must account for the fact that physical evidence exists that suggests an old universe.

3. Any explanation of the age of the universe must reconcile the testimony of Scripture with the physical evidence; neither fideistic nor naturalistic solutions will suffice.

That’s a start, but what I’m increasingly struck by is this: If both J. P. Moreland and D. A. Carson are slow to make ambitious, definitive claims about answers to the age of the universe, then who am I to do so?

I don’t even go by my initials!

The only thing you ever play for is to be the best, regardless of the situation — preseason, postseason, regular season, in the playoffs or out of it… I don’t see how you can ever step out on the field and not care.

— Brett Favre

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

—Umberto Eco

Eco thinks it is not the world that is terrible, but our drive to make sense of it. It strikes me that he is cutting off the limb he is sitting on: in saying this, is he not attempting to make sense of the world?

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, 7 December 1941

September 11 for me was a wake-up call. Do you know what I think? A lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again.

Tony Blair, 26 July 2005