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John Mark Reynolds has given me my best Christmas present this year. He has written a brilliant apologetic for Santa Claus in the finest Clarkian/Van Tillian epistemic tradition. (Or is it Vincent Cheung?)

(If you’ve never heard of presuppositional apologetics, you might still enjoy this, but just understand that this is hilarious in ways you won’t appreciate.)

It’s a bit of a straw man, but that’s allowed in satire.

John Mark, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Even to express doubts indicates a humanist, Enlightenment mindset. Santa comes to those who seek Santa. He chooses to reward his elite with special knowledge of Santa that they cannot doubt. Only then will their cognitive faculties work. This truth is evident in their failure to see Santa as we have seen him.

Everyone has presuppositions, but the mistake some people make is to challenge those presuppositions and to think about them! The mere fact that we like our epistemological cocoon is sufficient reason to stay in it.

The unbelievers ask for evidence, but there is no evidence they can understand. Only we can understand through the magic that Santa has given us. He will not give it to them, because they cling to human reason. They don’t realize that Santa hides from those who insist on thinking about him.

Santa comes to their house, but he wears gloves. He never leaves fingerprints that they can see. We could see his fingerprints, but we don’t bother looking since we already know they are there. We surely will not tell you about them, since that would be too much like philosophy.

The Santa doubters think they have an excuse, but it is good that Santa has left no evidence in nature for his existence.

Unbelievers cannot see him, but we can!

I’ve wondered recently about beauty. Why are some things beautiful and other things aren’t? Why is it that a thing can be beautiful to one person, but hideous to another? Why is it that beauty often defies definition, yet we know exactly what it means? How come immaterial things can be beautiful?

One oft-cited immaterial bearer of beauty is mathematics. Physicists and mathematicians reportedly wept over the beauty of Einstein’s proofs. Paul Erdős, the late mathematician, has said, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

The sublime beauty of mathematics is lost on those of us who have not paid the high price of admission to join the elite fraternity that includes men like Isaac Newton, John Nash, and countless others you’ve never heard of. This makes me sad, because it doesn’t take long before mathematicians turn into theologians when they behold the elegance of the way numbers relate to one another.

Exhibit A: Euler’s Identity. It is simply this: e^iπ+1=0. Impressed? Are you slack-jawed at the astonishing beauty of this equation? Few people are, but blessed are those who “get it,” I say. A mathematics professor at MIT, an atheist, has said of Euler’s Identity, “There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence.” I wish I could appreciate that. I feel like I’m missing out.

Erdős, also an atheist, said, “God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.” Here’s what he means: look at this picture of the prime numbers, plotted graphically. The white dots are primes; the black dots are non-primes. Notice a pattern? Click the image to see all the primes from 1 to 1,299,827 plotted like this.

Why should prime numbers line up like this? When numbers—which are uncreated and necessary (in the sense of “it could not be otherwise”)—exhibit an aesthetic like this, I can understand why mathematicians turn into theologians. Galileo reportedly claimed that “mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe.”

I have a faint idea of why he might say such a thing. But I daresay a musician could say the same thing about his art; C. S. Lewis had Aslan sing Narnia into existence. Similar claims could be advanced by a programmer or a painter or any manner of craftsman, I suppose. Whatever form beauty takes for a person, it stirs within the soul a desire for the One who possesses beauty without limit.

(Before we leave Galileo, let me digress from mathematics into astronomy to present Spiral Galaxy IC342. As one astronomy blogger put it, “If that doesn’t impress you, close this window, shut down your computer, go find a nice hole in the ground and lie down. You have no pulse.” And Yuri Gagarin went up there and claimed he didn’t see God. Like Ellie Arroway said in Contact, “They should have sent a poet.”)

In the end, I think beauty is an apologetic for God’s existence, a signal of transcendence that leads us home. As Lewis reasoned, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We desire beauty and we never tire of it; we never have our fill. Our appetite for beauty is never satisfied in this world, so the most probable explanation is that the beauty we desire resides elsewhere.

Augustine knew where to find it: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

See also: God by the Numbers (Christianity Today)

You know how sometimes you find a particular subject come up in all kinds of different places with no apparent connection between them?

As cases of suffering and evil come to my attention on many fronts, William Lane Craig’s Q&A page at Reasonable Faith this week addresses the question, “Why Does God Permit Suffering to Continue?” The question specifically asked about Amos 4:6-11. Dr. Craig comments,

As for the passage from Amos, it reminds us powerfully, as C. S. Lewis put it, that Aslan is not a tame lion. People often say that God doesn’t send suffering into our lives but merely allows it. The passage you cite explodes that fairy tale! The ancient Israelites didn’t understand that the calamities that befell them were in fact a severe mercy sent by God for their own well-being, but their intransigence short-circuited the good purpose that God had in mind… non-Christians, used to a Santa Claus God, won’t understand this sort of tough love. But it’s not really difficult to grasp when you reflect that any finite amount of suffering is worth enduring in order to gain eternal joy and to avoid eternal ruin.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the true meaning of Christmas is the arrival of God in the flesh—Incarnation Day, you might say. But how should that shape the way we live on a daily basis?

Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio writes that there are those who are thrilled when it doesn’t, and they have much to cheer about these days. When Christians keep the Gospel safely tucked away in the world of the invisible, it leaves the Gospel without any evidence to commend it:

More than just a logical precondition for the Atonement, the Incarnation also establishes the trajectory for our new life as a truly human life. There is a theological link between confidence in the full humanity of Jesus and a recognition of the ramifications of our salvation across the full range of our own humanity, across all of the ways in which we engage God’s creation.

Much of modern culture, with its Gnostic undertones, alienates us from creation and its givenness. Theologian Colin Gunton sees the affirmation of the Incarnation as essential to our enthusiastic participation in creation and therefore in cultural life. “A world that owes its origin to a God who makes it with direct reference to one who was to become incarnate — part of the world — is a world that is a proper place for human beings to use their senses, minds and imaginations, and to expect that they will not be wholly deceived in doing so.”

Christians have the only account of human and natural origins that can give cultural life meaning. But even after 2,000 years of opportunity to reflect on the Incarnation, many contemporary Christians persist in believing in a Gnostic salvation, a salvation that has no cultural consequences. In such a dualistic understanding, our souls are saved, the essential immaterial aspect of our being is made right with God, but the actions of our bodies — what we actually do in space and time — are a matter of indifference if not futility. Salvation is an inward matter only. It affects our attitudes and some of our ideas. But insofar as our cultural activities have any Christian significance it is as mere marketing efforts — things we do to attract others to our essentially Gnostic salvation.

Believing in a gospel that has few earthly consequences is, ironically, just the sort of state our secularist neighbors would wish us to sustain. They, too, are dualists, believing that religion may be a fine thing for people, so long as they keep it private. Their secularism isn’t threatened by Christians as long as they aren’t too “Incarnational.” As long as the cultural lives of Christians aren’t significantly different from those of materialists and pagans, secularism is safe. Christians may pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” but as long as they don’t actually do anything that demonstrates how such a petition should affect their political, economic, and cultural activities, the Enlightenment legacy is safe.

Keith Plummer quoted Myers on his blog and added:

I wouldn’t be surprised if some believers initially reacted to this line of thought negatively, considering it too theological, theoretical, and/or picayune. But I suspect that if that is our reaction, it is because we are not accustomed to being challenged to think and live in a manner that is thoroughly and consistently Christ-centered.

Excuse me while I take John Piper’s advice and preach to myself (but I invite you to listen in)…

It is good to keep a safe distance from “the world”—as in “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We are called out to be separate and holy. But as William Pitt asked William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace, “Do you intend to use your beautiful voice to praise the Lord or change the world?” Pitt’s question spotlights the absurdity of this false dichotomy.

No, “for God so loved the world” is all about diving in. We must engage the world, wrestling with its problems and bearing witness to the only solution, the only name given under Heaven by which we are to be saved. He is the one we celebrate this Christmas, the one who left his heavenly throne and entered the world with all its suffering and evil. We, his servants, are not greater than our master.

The sad news just continues to pour in. One of my college friends writes about the Ebola outbreak in Uganda that has claimed the life of one of their World Harvest Mission colleagues.

It seems that one of the missionary doctors gave an Ebola patient an oxygen mask because the patient was suffocating from fluid in the lungs. He didn’t stop to put gloves on. Now he’s dead.

Like D.A. Carson said, you’ve got to be prepared for suffering and evil. (If you’ve never heard his sermon, On Being Prepared for Suffering and Evil, please listen — your attention will be rewarded: Part 1 & Part 2.) Once you’re in the middle of something like this, it’s too late to break out your theology textbook for answers. So decide now to trust God. It’ll be too late if you wait until the time comes.

As for me, I trust God more than I hate suffering and evil. But I really hate suffering and evil. A lot.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:18-25, ESV)