hughbiquitous

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think Nietzsche was right about this much: “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” When all is said and done, I think the Salon.com interview with Paul Davies may go down as an example of this — even though it is more careless than deliberate. In that interview, Prof. Davies suggests that he’s found a way to reconcile cold, hard science with all the meaning and purpose that humanity craves. He does it with faulty arguments, but in so doing, he shows that arguments don’t always carry the day.

But this raises an important question: Why the need for reconciliation? The answer, I think, is that Davies is desperately trying to escape the fact that his preferred worldview — philosophical naturalism — necessarily renders our existence meaningless.

The Nature of Necessity

A thing is necessary if it could not have failed to exist. If a thing could have failed to exist, then it is not necessary, but contingent. Therefore, anything that starts to exist is necessarily contingent, because at some point, it did indeed fail to exist.

This is important for the questions Prof. Davies is raising, because he’s discussing the origin of the universe. If the universe has an origin, a starting point, it is contingent. But contingent on what? Here’s where the absurdity in Prof. Davies’ thinking comes in. He is saying that the universe is contingent on itself:

We can — if we try hard enough — come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naïve theist who says there’s a mysterious, unexplained God.

He affirms there must be an explanation for the universe, but he insists on finding that explanation within the universe.

The Line of Despair

The way I understand it, Francis Schaeffer used the term “Line of Despair” to describe what happens to a person when he “escapes” from reason and takes a “leap of faith” to make sense of the world. This isn’t faith in the biblical sense — biblical faith is about trust in objective realities. The leap of faith that accompanies despair is unconcerned with reality.

What is this despair? It arises from the abandonment of the hope of a unified answer for knowledge and life. Modern man continues to hang on to his rationalism and his autonomous revolt even though to do so he has had to abandon any rational hope of a unified answer. Previously, educated men would not give up rationality and the hope of a unified field of knowledge. Modern man has given up his hope of unity and lives in despair — the despair of no longer thinking that what has been the aspiration of men and women is at all possible. (Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape From Reason, found in The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, p. 236)

It strikes me that Prof. Davies has plunged beneath the line of despair and embraced it, taking a leap of faith into the unreal, non-rational world of convenient fictions that enable his “autonomous revolt.” It is at first irritating to hear him talk about a universe that created itself and in the next breath deride theology as naïve, but it becomes pitiable when you realize what’s going on in the darkened corners of his soul. He is in intellectual rebellion against God and against reality.

Paul Davies’ Leap of Faith

The interview with Prof. Davies is filled with the language of teleology. “Meaning and purpose” seems to be the overriding goal of his research — which is odd, considering his philosophical naturalism. Whatever else you say about him, you’ve got to agree that Prof. Davies is intellectually honest about the implications of his worldview: “Davies acknowledges that if we are stuck with philosophic naturalism, we are robbed of unique value and dignity, and we become one of many living organisms that are qualitatively indistinguishable,” Greg Koukl wrote in the Stand to Reason article, Chance & Dignity.

But the way he overcomes the incompatibility between teleology and philosophical naturalism is to embrace ideas that are wildly implausible, if not patently absurd. What makes a highly intelligent person make such a leap of faith?

I think it’s because the meaninglessness and purposelessness of naturalism is unendurably empty. You can’t live there. He knows it, and he can’t embrace it. But given a choice between a theological answer and a leap of faith into the absurd, he chooses the absurd.

The Tragedy

This is profoundly sad, because he is so palpably close to the truth. “All my career, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the universe looks not just beautiful but in some sense deeply ingenious. It looks like it’s been put together in a way that makes it work exceptionally well,” he said. Then, when asked if he wants to stay away from God, his answer is an elaborate “yes”:

I want to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician who is there within time, for all eternity, and then brings the universe into being as part of a preconceived plan. I think that’s just a naïve, silly idea that doesn’t fit the leanings of most theologians these days and doesn’t fit the scientific facts. I don’t want that. That’s a horrible idea.

Likewise, when asked if these wild theories became popular to “keep the whole idea of God at bay,” his answer was far less elaborate — “Yes.”

I can only turn to Paul for an assessment:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… (Romans 1:18-22a)

In my last post I was incredulous. Now I’m just sober. The beauty and genius revealed in the creation, together with the oppressive meaninglessness of living life as a cosmic accident, cannot overpower a sinner’s appetite for autonomy. Sin is a much bigger problem than anybody realizes.

Thank God for an invading Savior who has overridden my autonomy and revealed Himself as the ultimate reason and reality in the universe. May His fame spread far and wide.

If a person does not become what he understands, he does not really understand it.

— Søren Kierkegaard

At first this quote got me thinking about my understanding of the Gospel. Have I become what I have beheld in the Gospel of Christ? That’s a good question to be asking oneself. Sanctification cannot be mere intellectual assent. It must be the working out of a vital and vibrant faith—but this certainly includes the discipleship of our minds.

But then another thought hit me: what about the atheists, the naturalists, the materialists, the nihilists… have they become what they have understood?

I offer that they cannot. Their worldviews are incoherent and cannot be lived in. On those views, any notion of understanding is ruled out because it is immaterial: understanding is a supernatural phenomenon, so if you desire understanding, you must reject a merely naturalistic view of the world.

Rather than try to explain, I’ll let Professor Lewis do it (emphasis mine):

The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. 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.

— C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory