Scriptorium Daily
The twentieth century loved to speak of “revolutions” . . . even in the area of thought. The outcome was not promising. In the history of ideas, I think it better to think of development as “biological” instead of as revolutionary. Ideas build on each other. In fact, if anything evolves, human thought evolves. The story of intellectual development is less the story of Kuhn-like paradigm shifts, then it is the tale of slow and gradual growth in understanding with many set backs as well.
If the Greeks were mistaken to believe that there was Golden Age of the intellect to which all humanity could only look back, then the modern notion of intellectual progress is just as deceptive. While humanity has gone forward in some areas, sensitivity to ecological concerns or issues regarding race, it is has decayed in others. This is true in every area. Just as the advent of processed foods has not been an unmixed blessing, so the easy availability of entertainment may not be good for us.
As a result, it is foolish prejudice to believe the ancients can teach us nothing. As Lewis argues in his Discarded Image and in a preface to When God Became Man, we are unlikely to imitate the mistakes of the past, but also likely to discover long lost virtues.
For example, the poetry of Dante demonstrates a sublime integration of every area of knowledge. His vision is a holistic one that has a place for every idea that he believed. His thoughts are presented in matchless poetry with precision and grace. His sublime art reminds us that not all change has been positive since his day.
This suggests that conservatism in thought is not a bad thing. Most intellectual changes are faddish and long forgotten. To quote a mentor, Sheldon Vanauken, “the up to date is forever dated.” Except in the cases of the staggering geniuses of history, such as Socrates, Shakespeare, Newton, or the Christ, progress is incremental. Such inspired genius is very rare.
Even the inspired genius owes something to his intellectual mother and father. Shakespeare is matchless, but he is not a theatrical Adam, parentless other than God. A Christian is, therefore, entitled to moderation in his view of intellectual progress. He is right to distrust announcements that, at long last, he must abandon the faith of his fathers or that all opposition has been refuted for all time!
He is a prudent, or moderate, man. The prudent man avoids intellectual defect and excess.
Moderation has become almost a dirty word amongst academics and Christians, because too many people confuse moderation with a lack of zeal or commitment. Many people who claim to be moderate are simply confused intellectually or being disingenuous about their views in order to keep the peace.
Aristotle would urge sanity in our pursuit of our goals. For the Philosopher, moderation meant avoiding excess or defect in areas not inherently base. (Nicomachean Ethics). He would remind us not to confuse moderation with a call to reactionary repetition of what has worked in the past.
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The great success of one science may tempt us to adopt standards of intellectual achievement in all areas. The literature professor is tempted to find “new things” in Shakespeare, instead of passing on the beauty recognized from old. The arts can teach us much about what it is to be human, but the methods and means of the arts are not the same as those of science.
Some believe that they should merely adopt the view of reality that makes the most sense of the matter and energy in it. They act as if there is some virtue in believing an uncomfortable truth, just because it is uncomfortable. Instead, I would suggest that we are well within our rights to root intellectually for the good and the beautiful as long as we reasonably can. Any other view does not take all of our humanity into account.
Christian educators, scientists, and theologians must never forget the importance of beauty and of the types of reason that persuade the human heart. Joy is a good reason to adopt a view, after all. A view of the world that leaves us cold hearted and full of toxic doubts and fears is no more desirable than one that ignores the mind.
I believe that God often speaks to our hearts through beauty and confirms His Word through intense religious experience. Ideally, this conforms to our best theories about the data that our senses deliver to us about the external world in one authentic and consistent whole. One thing confirms another in a bi-conditional relationship.
Sadly, in a fallen world things are never so simple.
It should be obvious to all Christians that Pascal was right. We do have to take the heart into account. I would suggest that just as elegance is valued in a proof of logic, so we can and should value beauty and elegance in a general view of reality.
Science itself is not the problem, of course. With all the problems, it has been more a blessing than a curse to mankind. The misuse of science or of the speculations of science is a problem, but one must not go too far in condemnation.
The chief problem with science for the Christian is being confronted by those who care less about what science actually discovers or does and more about establishing an official hegemony of philosophical naturalism over the sciences. The sociological pressures putting religious people constantly on the defensive has the intended effective of stamping out faith in many and weakening it in others.
All of us who are the products of the system must acknowledge this danger to our souls.
Many otherwise thoughtful people, some of them Christians, have forgotten that there is knowledge to be gained in fields outside of science. No amount of discovery by science of is will ever give them the ability to declare what ought to be. On this David Hume was right, but theists seem to be the only one who have learned the Scottish skeptic’s lesson.
A second related problem comes from those afraid of science and so reject the Western tradition of reason and investigation altogether to avoid the excesses of scientism. Some love the lessons of the heart so well that ignore the realities described by the mind. This way lays the post-modern madness that infects so many humanities departments. Many Christian college faculties behave as if they must choose between the modern temptation to merely ape the sciences and the post-modern snare of ignoring them.
...An earlier and better film Metropolis by Fritz Lang gave a different and more Christian answer. This silent film argues that humanity cannot function without heeding the folk wisdom of the heart and the scientific knowledge of the head. He pounds home the point using apocalyptic and Biblical imagery about the destruction of a city that ignores either.
It is an absence of beauty that most harms the common residents of the Metropolis. Most of them have been reduced to serving a state as cogs in the state’s machine. While capturing perfectly the ugliness of the totalitarian German state to come, Lang missed the banal ugliness of hedonistic consumerism that dominates much of Western popular culture. If it provides short-term pleasure, then many no longer care for it is ugly.
Such folk not only heed their hearts, they learn to worship them. Perversely this only strengthens the hand of those who wish to ignore the wisdom of the poet and artist. Why listen to the artist when what he produces is kitsch or the artistic chaos that dominates too many modern art galleries?
In reaction, many engineers have created roads, buildings, and even entire cities that lack beauty. It is no accident, I think, that the extreme secularists of our own time, like P.Z. Myers, are so often insensitive to human things . . . to the symbols that give our lives meaning.
One problem feeds the other. The ugliness of the so-called “scientific man, who lacks poetry, repulses the artist and the consumerism of the artist produces no real beauty to attract the scientific man.
...The popular culture is addicted to subjectivity. As much as possible, people are less interested in what is true, good, or beautiful than in what they wish was true, good, and beautiful. Partly this is a result of a consumer driven culture. Companies spend a fortune telling people what they wish was true about themselves and not what is true.
Christians easily recognize the harm of reducing morality and truth to mere subjectivity. We have not been as good at recognizing the importance of beauty. In his Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis points out that this change has not come about so much as a result of argument, but because of a kind of intellectual propaganda in our schools. When I was in school, I received a handout where I was to identify all statements about beauty as matters of mere opinion.
The nearly universal American belief that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has had a profound impact on our educations. Fine arts classes too often are relegated to the “frosting on the cake” which are the first to be cut. Since musical and artistic preferences are merely in the mind of the teacher, there is no strong reason to pay someone to pass their eccentric preferences on to the next generation. Artists and musicians are reduced to entertainers.
Much is lost as a result.
I have elsewhere argued for the reality of beauty as an idea in the mind of God and for its importance. If we assume with most Christians at most places and at most times, that God has opinions about beauty to which we should conform, then our educational systems will change.
We will not teach our students in ugly rooms. We will value beauty, as the traditional Christian university did, as a good sign. Beauty cannot be divorced from truth and goodness without stunting the whole. Beauty has something to teach our hearts and through our hearts our selves.
In my own life, and in the life of any man or woman who has been “born again,” one intense and beautiful thing for which his view of reality must account is religious experience. Too often religious experience, and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, has been ignored in our thinking about science, religion, and ethics.
William James in the Variety of Religious Experience carefully describes the nature, limitations, and importance of religious experience. At the very least, James argues that religious experience suggests that the materialists are wrong. There is more than matter and energy in the cosmos.
Religious experience is of limited use in an apologetic, but of great use in living one’s life. Nobody can crawl inside my mind and know the quality and intensity of my religious experience. No human can know how clear and compelling certain experiences are. There are simply experiences so real, so intense, that the burden of proof is always going to be, for the person having the experience, on the skeptic.
Since the skeptic cannot share the experience, he or she cannot be persuaded by it. Of course, one’s interpretation of the experience may be wrong. One encounters the Divine and then tells the most likely story one can about what has happened. My Christian experience with all its intensity does not prove to that Christianity is true, but it suggests that something is up!
Even more compelling is the personal relationship with Jesus Christ that most of us in the room have. In the words of the grand old hymn, we “walk with him and we talk with him.” This might be wrong, but I am going to need a great deal of persuasion to accept that it is all in my head.
This experience is so similar at its best in so many ways to my discourse with other persons, human persons, that arguments against it run the risk of proving too much and inducing a belief in solipsism! If some make too much of their personal relationship with Jesus, thinking that their mere testimony should persuade everyone, intellectuals in the church may risk thinking it does too little.
Materialists often claim that the problem with human spiritual experience is that they can “explain it away” on materialist grounds. Even if this dubious claim is true, it is not surprising. It is very hard to refute a simple idea such as materialism as an examination of its opposite, idealism, shows.
Our primary experience is, after all, mental. What if we were to demand that the materialist prove the necessity of matter and energy as an explanation?
Oddly idealism of the sort advocated by Berkeley is widely rejected in our culture while materialism is widely accepted. I find it odd, because if one wishes to reduce everything to one type of thing, what the Pre-Socratic philosophers called an “arche,” ideas seem a better candidate. Descartes after all was at least arguably right when he claimed that it was impossible to deny one’s own existence.
Both idealism and materialism face serious philosophical challenges. However, there is a bias toward taking materialism seriously, as if we already know it is true, that suggests something important about the intellectual culture. There may indeed be a prejudice against any answer that seems to open the door to the possibility of Divinity and to Divine agency.
Reality is, in all probability, more complex than can be captured by such simple theories such as idealism or materialism. However, for the Christian it is surely reasonable to give at least some priority to his intense religious experiences. They are frequent, comforting, and work toward giving him a worthwhile and happy (in the Aristotelian sense) life. They also account in satisfying manner for the existence of the seemingly miraculous events that so many believers experience.
For a Christian our religious experience is a seminal point for our thinking about the world.
Belief in miracles is ubiquitous in the West, but many Christian academics are shamed faced about their commitment. If God has acted out of His personal will, then it means that not all of the past will be explainable without the knowledge of that Divine will. It might even present an insuperable barrier to understanding exactly how past events occurred. If God used divine power to open the Red Sea, then no scientific account that relies only on natural forces will ever be able to account for that fact of history. There will be a temptation to deny the fact, if only to preserve the theoretical completeness of our knowledge.
My colleague J.P. Moreland in his Kingdom Triangle has argued against this “thin view” of reality that is closed to the supernatural. He defends the possibility of a reasonable person using the miraculous and the prophetic in his daily life. The reaction of part of the Christian community was illustrative of the point.
Evidently, many fear that allowing for the possibility of miracles in the present world will automatically lead to accounting everything (or at least far too many things) to Divine agency. However, this is surely an overreaction. Materialistic explanations are good, so far as they go, and I am not about to abandon them because some have turned them into a basis for materialism. In the same way, Divine agency, which is after all merely a form of the personal agency that forms the basis of many causal explanations, can be abused, but need not be abandoned.
In historic events such as the Flood, Christians may have to be content with showing that there is evidence outside of the pages of Sacred Scripture that it took place, but never being able to give a fully naturalistic account of how it took place. What is needed is a good means to recognize acts caused by an agent from those not caused by an agent. How could we, at least in principle, tell if an event had been done, in the distant past, by an agent (even one other than God) as opposed to natural causes?
Must a theist always prefer any naturalistic answer (however improbable) to any appeal to divine agency (however likely given his other beliefs)? I think not unless we believe that theism and also Christianity are so much on the intellectual defensive that we cannot take any of our religious beliefs as true based on other religious beliefs for which we have stronger external evidence.
This will weaken our apologetic about the truth of Biblical events such as the Flood to nonbelievers only if we have accepted the dubious notion that we can convince a man to be a theist only by showing him that everything God did can be explained without recourse to His power!
However the Christian organizes his ideas, it must provide ample opportunity for the Divine to provide information and insight. In a culture that is rightly impressed with a certain kind of information (the factual or scientific) it is easy to underestimate the importance of another kind of aid to rational thinking: the motivating framework. We are in need of an epistemology that does not always put us on the defensive.
This is especially true when it comes to thinking about science and Christianity. Too often the Bible is treated as a story, but science is treated as the truth. It is not post-modern to suggest that all human attempts to deal with reality are a form of story telling; indeed it is precisely and gloriously pre-modern! This does not mean, however, that just any old story will do.
Though not right about everything, Plato expressed a proper understanding of what science does when he said:
“If we can furnish accounts no less likely than any other we must be content, remembering that I who speak and you my judges are only human, and consequently it is fitting that we should, in these matters, accept the likely story and look for nothing further.”
We are too often captives of an epistemology of skepticism that can never fit well with our faith.
This year I am determined to listen more, be more prudent, and try to learn from science, literature, and theology the truth, goodness, and beauty that can set me free to see the face of God. (more)
