Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent: we use many adjectives expressing maximal qualities to describe the Christian God. We believe these words are necessary and accurate descriptions of God, but when we trace out their implications they sometimes seem contradict one another. These apparent contradictions are to be expected given our limited abilities of comprehension and the mystery inherent in God, but they are still worth puzzling out in our capacity as theologians.
Let us take two premises that I think most theists would agree with: God is all-powerful and God is the root of our moral nature. If the theist accepts these two positions he will run into a difficulty: are things good because God willed them, or does God will them because they are good? This problem, known as the problem of theological voluntarism or Euthyphro’s dilemma, traces its roots back to Plato’s dialogues.

At first glance, this seems like a meaninglessly abstract point. From our earthly perspective, we might only know that there is good and that we should pursue it; why bother thinking about the root of good if we might not be able to comprehend the answer? But let us consider the implications. If God wills us to do what is good, then goodness is independent of God. There would be a standard that is higher than God, something that God himself must live up to if he is to be a truly good being. This would appear to limit God’s power and be in conflict with our notion of God as omnipotent. Now, we can take the alternative position and assume that our conception of what is good comes from God’s will. In other words, God creates the standard we call “good.” But this is deeply unsatisfying to Christians, because we think of God as good and benevolent. If he decides the standards of good and benevolence, then what reason do we have to admire him? The motivation to love and admire God would be lost.
Euthyphro’s dilemma has been debated since it first appeared in Plato’s writings. The Christian Church is not united on the matter—Martin Luther and John Calvin argued for the primacy of God’s will over everything, including the standard of good, while Aquinas wrote in support of the view that God conforms to the rules of logic and justice.
Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne offers an interesting solution to this problem. Swinburne accepts Aquinas’s position that God does not necessarily make what is good. However, Swinburne makes the case that this does not need to limit God’s power. According to Swinburne, Euthyphro’s dilemma is really a confusion of our definition of restriction. Swinburne writes, “The suggested restriction on God is no more a restriction than it is a restriction on God that if he is to keep Jones a bachelor he must keep him an unmarried man.” God is by nature entirely good. If we do not say, for example, that God’s omnipotence places limits on him because it prevents him from being powerless, then we cannot say that God’s imperative to do good is a restraint on his behavior. It is thus inappropriate to engage in Euthyphro’s “chicken and the egg” discussion; God simply does not work that way.

This week I wanted to talk about my favorite Christian thinker, following up on Charlie’s post last week. Until my freshman year of high school, basically the only books I read were fantasy, science fiction, and spy/detective novels. But in high school, I discovered G.K. Chesterton, not knowing when I did that he would change my life. Chesterton was the first person I discovered who successfully treated Christianity as a reasonable and credible worldview. The insights contained in Orthodoxy- the first Chesterton book I read- were fresh and startling, and greatly increased my intellectual appreciation of Christianity. He convinced me that there was a good case to be made for the faith.

The most noticeable thing about Chesterton, though, isn’t his ability to draw out the rationality of the Christian faith. There are, after all, any number of people who can accomplish that project. It is instead Chesterton’s approach to the faith that attracted and continues to attract me. Chesterton’s posture towards Christianity was not primarily one of a rationally convinced thinker. Though he was committed to Christianity’s truth, it was not purely logical considerations that defined his faith. Instead, Chesterton’s writings conveyed an intense joy, gratitude, and peace. His books literally burst with life. The novelist and atheist Franz Kafka once said about Chesterton after reading only one of his novels, that, “He is so happy! I can almost believe that he has found God.” Indeed Chesterton himself said that “Joy…is the gigantic secret of the Christian,” and he seemed fully to grasp the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John that, “I came that they might have life and have it to the full.”

In the atmosphere of contemporary apologetics and atheist polemics, in which the conversations about God can so easily become sterile and repetitive, and devolve into a dull exchange of talking points, the works of Chesterton are a necessary corrective. His works, more than anybody else I have read, except perhaps those of his friend Hilaire Belloc, convey what it means to live an authentic Christian life. They show a man who exuded the wonder and the awe and the joy and the love proper to a Christian. He was trained as a poet, not as a logician, which goes a long way to explaining his writing style. But it also helps to account for the incredible ability his works have to convey emotion. I think now more than ever we need to read people like Chesterton, who remind us that we have a heart as well as a brain, and that Christianity is concerned with the whole person.

Today, Christianity is too often seen as something life denying. To read Chesterton is be to cured of this illusion. St. Augustine said of Christians that, “We are Resurrection people,” and Chesterton lived that truth of that statement. He said, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” Chesterton teaches us to be interested in everything- in life, in love, in beauty and joy, and most of all, in God. He forces us to reawake to the glory of this world. I have one piece of advice about reading Chesterton. Most people start with Orthodoxy or The Everlasting Man (called by C.S. Lewis “the best popular apologetic I know”), his two famous apologetics works. But I would recommend that somebody looking at Chesterton for the first time start instead with his novel Manalive. Among his works I have read, it is the best at demonstrating Chesterton’s essential approach to life and faith. Read it- but only if you are prepared to encounter someone who was, in my opinion, of the most fully alive men who ever walked this earth.

I first read C.S. Lewis when I was eight or nine years old. I read all seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia over one Christmas break. At the time, what I mostly appreciated about the books was the exciting adventure stories—the allegory about spiritual truths didn’t come through to me as much. After that, I didn’t read anything by C.S. Lewis for a long time, not until my sophomore year of high school. That year, I first read Mere Christianity, and I thought it was amazing. I was deeply impressed by Lewis’ ability to communicate complicated ideas in ways that were easily accessible, but at the same time captured the depth and the elegance of those ideas. He conveyed what he meant smoothly and clearly, but without a hint of reductionism. 

For me, Lewis was the first intellectual voice of Christianity. He was the first to inspire me to think deeply about my faith, and I began to read some of his other books. I think that I’ve read all of them now, and reread quite a few of them. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis addresses the question of how a good God can allow suffering. One of Lewis’ strongest objections to Christianity prior to his conversion had been the juxtaposition of nature’s cruelties with the idea that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being had created it. I also read The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis argues that people need to be taught the natural affections, such as love for good and hatred for evil; he opposes the modern ideologies that say that such natural values are worthless or invalid. The Four Loves is an explanation of the four kinds of love that man experiences: friendship, eros, affection, and charity, and how each of them is different and valuable. For the record, I don’t remember if I ever made it all the way through Miracles, which is pretty dense. It is Lewis’ philosophical argument for why miracles are not incompatible with science and our knowledge of the natural world.

 After reading so much of his writing, I gradually became disillusioned with him personally. His seeming ability to win every argument and answer every objection seemed to suggest a level of professorial sophistry. He was too certain of himself and of what he had to say. But recently, I have come to appreciate Lewis again. A large part of this renaissance was reading two more of his books: Letters to Malcolm and A Grief Observed. Letters to Malcolm is a collection of Lewis’ letters to a friend of his on the subject of prayer. They are personal letters, more raw and more candid than his philosophical works. In his letters, Lewis is articulate and clever but more vulnerable. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed shortly after the death of his wife. In it, he candidly and openly questions his faith, expressing his deep sorrow and real struggles. It is a very honest and affecting work.

After being given a chance to see him as a real human being, I now love Lewis again. He was a man who had thought deeply about his faith- perhaps more deeply than any of us ever will. Yet he remained, as Letters and Grief show, a true human being, vulnerable like the rest of us. In his search for God’s truth, he never lost his humanity. For all those looking for somebody to read, somebody who can help you to start your journey to the Truth, or somebody to continue the journey with, I cannot recommend Lewis more highly.

This week, I had the privilege of attending a philosophy lecture given by Professor Lawrence Crocker regarding God’s existence. In order to forestall any confusion, I will begin by stating that Professor Crocker does not opt for the traditional approach to the question of God’s existence. His arguments do not purport to prove or disprove God’s existence; his arguments do not even attempt to persuade anyone to believe in God. Instead, Professor Crocker merely wants to prove that it is reasonable for theist and atheist alike to hope for God’s existence.

In Professor Crocker’s model, there are three levels of interaction between desire for a statement’s veracity and evidence of the statement’s veracity:  wish, hope, and belief. At the bottom level is wish, which only needs to be worthy of desiring and need not possess rational grounds—for example, I wish the sky was green. Hope, on the other hand, requires some degree of plausibility. It is rationally justified if evidence does not impugn its plausibility and if there is a sufficient reason for desiring the object of hope. Finally, on level three, belief requires enough evidence for justification, independent of desire. I can, for example, believe that I will fail tomorrow’s midterm without desiring it. Professor Crocker concludes that hoping for God’s existence is rationally justifiable but belief in God’s existence is not. He his variants of Pascal’s Wager and the Cosmological Argument to reach this conclusion.

First, Professor Crocker attempts to justify the desire for God’s existence. Doing so would satisfy the first condition for hope:  rational grounds for desiring the object. Using a modification of Pascal’s Wager, he states that the possibility of eternal life is worthy of hope because perpetual consciousness is intrinsically good.  He continues to state that a plausible necessary condition for eternal life is also worthy of hope and argues that God is the best explanation for eternal life, making God a plausible necessary condition. Thus, God is worthy of hope.

It should be noted however that the God Professor Crocker hopes for deviates from Christian orthodoxy. He specifically hopes for a universalist God, but another person could just as easily hope for something else. Thus, the nature of “the God worth hoping for” remains inchoate and nebulous at best. Professor Crocker states that a God who appeals comprehensively to individual preferences is superior than one who does not appeal to all preferences. For example, he says that an eternal life that lacks the restriction of wearing strange hats is better than one does possess such a requirement if one has a distaste for strange hats, and, hence, the former notion of eternal life merits greater hope. Consequently, the object meriting hope is always dependent on subjective preferences. A man can equally hope for either a God who gives eternal life universally or a God who only does so for people of a certain hair color. If God remains this undefined, He can be adumbrated into anything conceivable so long as it conforms to a person’s preferences, no matter how bizarre. If God actually exists, He may be a very different person than He is in Professor Crocker’s subjective hopes.

Professor Crocker’s conception of eternal life, which I will consider equivalent to Heaven, also differs from Christian thought. He believes that Heaven possesses infinite utility merely because it extends the human consciousness, allowing people to continue pursuing new activities. Nevertheless, in a Christian worldview, Heaven is desirable because it brings man into the eternal presence of His Maker. God is not desirable merely because He provides Heaven. It is God that makes eternal life meaningful, rather than eternal life making God meaningful.  

In Heaven we shall see the face of God

In conjunction with his first proof, Professor Crocker’s Cosmological Argument serves as evidence to bolster the probability of God’s existence. He rightfully observes that the existence of the universe raises profound philosophical questions which Richard Swinburne avers by saying that something that suggests the existence of God is “the fact of there being a universe at all, [and] how very odd it is, how unlikely a priori it is that there should be a physical universe” (Swinbune 118). Professor Crocker enumerates four possible explanations for the universe’s existence:  the universe is eternal, the universe was spawned by chance, the universe necessarily exists according to physical laws, and the universe was created by God. He considers the first two to be non-answers and the third to be erroneous because physical laws are absent in a material and energetic vacuum. In other words, without matter and energy, physical laws have no application. The fourth possibility remains the best explanation. Because Professor Crocker’s first proof establishes that it is desirable for God to exist, it is reasonable to hope that God exists.

According to Crocker, the question of God stops at hope. Belief remains unjustified despite Crocker’s concession that God is the best explanation for the universe. He uses an allusion to Agatha Christie in which there are ten suspects for a crime, and while one suspect is most likely the murderer, the degree of suspicion between this suspect and the others is too minute to warrant an accusation. Analogously, his rationale is that the probability for the proposition “God exists” is only marginally more probable than the proposition “God does not exist.” Thus, one need not commit to belief.

I want to advance a highly condensed outline of the Teleological Argument in hopes that it will provide sufficient evidence to elevate hope into belief. Also, known as the Argument of Design, this argument posits that the perceived order manifest in the physical universe is best accounted for by a transcendental mind, or God. The laws of nature are derived from natural regularities—for example, the law of the conservation of energy, Newton’s laws, and Boyle’s law. These regularities are remarkable not only in the fact that they exist but also because of their mathematical precision and ubiquity (Flew 96). Each one is calibrated to extraordinary precision.  Craig cites Stephen Hawking who “estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball” (9-10). This is merely one of the many constants that govern the universe. This compounded with the reality that the specific confluence of individually finely tuned natural laws permits the emergence of life points to a Creator (Craig 9-10). According to Craig:

There are around 50 such quantities of and constants present in the Big Bang that must be finely-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it’s not just each quantity that must be exquisitely finely-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely tuned. (9-10)

Like Crocker’s version of the Cosmological Argument, the cause for a life-permitting universe can be ascribed to chance, physical law, or design from a Creator. The specified possibility for a life-permitting universe over a life-prohibiting one is so staggeringly infinitesimal and incomprehensible that appealing to chance as the universe’s cause becomes a rationally impoverished conclusion. Likewise, the claim that the universe is life-permitting due to physical law or physical necessity is immensely implausible. Nothing suggests that it is impossible for the universe to have been life-prohibiting (Craig 9-10). In the physicist Paul Davies words, “It could have been otherwise” (169). Only design plausibly accounts for the fact that the universe has the unique combination of physical laws and constants to support life.

The Teleological Argument justifies belief rather than mere hope because attributing the universe’s fine tuning to a Creator is vastly superior in plausibility to the other explanations. The Agatha Christie analogy does not hold because the evidence only points to a Creator. If belief is rationally justifiable, then the belief ought to be held whether or not it merits the optimal hope. If the God of Christianity exists and there is sufficient evidence of His existence, then it follows that we should believe in His existence regardless of whether or not He matches the God that we deem “worth hoping for.”

William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (New York:  Oxford University Press, Inc. 2004).

Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).

Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1992).

Richard Swinburne, Great Thinkers On Great Questions, ed. Roy Abraham Varghese (Oxford:  Onewold Publications, 1998).

The role of religion, especially Christianity, in America’s political process is a highly sensitive topic. Because Christianity is associated with hot button issues, like abortion and gay marriage, people shy away from talking about the social implications of Christianity. But I want to take a step back and a step away from these issues, and talk in this post about Christianity and social transformation generally.

I heard a story once from the Apologia’s past editor-in-chief Andrew Schuman about when he met a Marxist turned Christian. When the convert was asked why he had turned away from Marxism towards Christianity, his answer was that, “Marxism can’t change the human heart.”

I think there is tremendous insight in that comment. The twentieth century saw the rise and eventually the implosion of several political ideologies that were essentially utopian. These utopians thought that through some mechanism- usually political coercion- they could literally bring about Heaven on earth. They usually ended up bringing Hell instead- in the form of gulags and gas chambers. 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, famous writer and former prisoner of the Russian Gulags. He argued in a speech to Harvard that Christianity was the only thing that could save the world. 

There were many problems with these utopian regimes, but principal among them was that they forgot God and they forgot human nature. The endless drive to improve things through the political process is a valuable effort, but it can easily go wrong if one forgets about God and man. The reason is this: politics has limits which cannot be transgressed without terrible consequence. Politics can only do so much to improve society. It the end, it is the ordinary, everyday actions of human beings that will most determine the kind of society they live in. 

If we are ever to succeed in radically improving our society, we need something more than a good president. We need something that can reach into the depths of the human heart, with all its passions, both evil and good, and change it. We need somebody that can replace our heart of stone with a heart of flesh, a heart of love. That somebody is Christ. If we are ever to establish a kingdom of love and peace on this earth- that is, the Kingdom of God-we need more than politics; we need God Himself. 

There are many who would laugh at the idea that we need Christ to improve our society. Many would actually find such an idea dangerous, considering the checkered history of Christianity. But, as G.K. Chesterton writes in What’s Wrong With the World, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried…Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of.” 

If people want to understand what the Christian ideal really is and how much Christ really can change people’s hearts, there is one obvious place they can look. They can look to the Saints and the Blesseds. They can look to St. Francis instead of the Crusaders. They can look to Pier Giorgio Frassati instead of Franco. They can look to St. Francis Borgia instead of Rodrigo Borgia. The Saints show us that Christ can and does change hearts in marvelous ways. It is only through that transformation of heart that society will ever be transformed. 

For those who think that the Saints are too few to ever make a significant difference, I answer that, if that is so, they should set about swelling the saintly ranks this very day. Every single Christian by virtue of his or her baptism is called to sainthood. If we open ourselves up to God, we will eventually attain that goal, no matter how lofty it may seem to us now. When that happens- when all Christians begin the difficult business of becoming saints- then and only then will we truly see the Kingdom of God built up on this earth. 

Hatred, cruelty, injustice, greed – there is a lot in our world that is messed up. But Christians and non-Christians misrepresent God when they attribute all these things to the direct action of God.

Early Christian teachers [such as Tertullian, An Exhortation to Chastity, c210] talked about two ways in which God can will something, either positively or permissively. God’s positive or perfect will is what he really wants to happen.  For instance, God wants us to love each other [John 15:12]. God’s permissive will is what he allows to happen, which means everything that does happen. Consider a laborer who needs money to support his family. The laborer may be willing to do a particularly hard job that leaves him with blisters on his hands if it will enable him to put food on his table. He does not positively will to have the blisters, but he does permit himself to get them.

While God allows some evil things to happen, that does not mean that he positively wills them.  God has created a world in which people can freely and honestly come to know and love him. But a world with freedom seems to necessarily allow for the possibility of evil. The Bible is clear that there are things that happen that God is not happy about. For instance, In the book of 1 Samuel, God expresses his disappointment in Saul because Saul has not obeyed him [1 Sam 15:11].

The book of Job is very enlightening about what we do and do not know. Job suffers and attributes his suffering to the action of God [e.g., Job 16]. But Job doesn’t know the whole story. At the beginning of the book we learn that there is another character in the background, Satan. The book describes a conversation between God and Satan in which God gives Satan permission to act [Job 1]. In my view this conversation allegorically represents the fact that the world is set up in such a way that Satan does have freedom to act within certain limitations. Satan, as well as man, has free will. At any rate, there are things going on behind the scenes about which Job knows nothing. Job accuses God of injustice [e.g., Job 34:5]. God’s response is that Job doesn’t understand [Job 38-41]. Job ends up acknowledging that God is wise and he is not [Job 42:3].

Job arguing with his friends 

Ultimately, we are like Job.  We did not create the universe and we don’t know how to run it. Some things that seem to be bad may be directly caused by God for reasons that we don’t understand. But I think that most of these things come about of because of Satan, and even more because of sin, and which has its effects not only us but on the physical world as well. The Bible is clear that God is not responsible for this world’s brokenness, and that he plans to fix it [Genesis 3; Revelation 21]. When dealing with matters of evil and suffering, it’s best for us, like Job, to maintain an attitude of humility.

God has acted positively in sending his son to reveal God to us and to make a way in which we can be in relationship to him. The New Testament tells us that this love was God’s eternal purpose, his perfect will [Ephesians 3:8-12]. God’s very nature is love [1 John 4:16]. He makes the sun to rise over both the evil and good [Matt 5:45], and towards those who love and obey him, his love extends to a thousand generations [Exodus 20:6].

First, I would like to say that I find Professor Murphy’s reinterpretation of the Christian account of creation very compelling, especially in light of the stress placed upon emergence in contemporary evolutionary biology. This model or one like it may be very important for negotiating the relationship between science and religion in the future. However, I would also raise some objections to this model.

In a post published last year, Peter Blair discussed the four causes, namely, the material, formal, efficient, and final causes. In short, these are the substance of which something is made, the design according to which it is made, the process by which the substance is shaped to the design, and the end to which it is created. Peter concluded that science can certainly account for the material and efficient causes of most things, but, at least in the case of humans, not for the formal and final causes.

According to secular evolutionary thought, no design or purpose inheres in anything. Professor Murphy seems to adopt this framework. This raises two questions. If we are not made according to a design, what makes us human? If God did not purposefully create us, how can it be that we have a purpose? On both points, Scripture seems clear. God created humans for a purpose. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” If science cannot investigate the metaphysical reality of formal or final causes, then we are justified in learning about those realities from other sources (such as the Scriptural account of design and purpose). Moreover, there need be no conflict between our acceptance of these aspects of our being and the scientific account of our evolution. Professor Murphy’s analysis is partly predicated on the idea that the traditional model of creation has become untenable, but this conclusion seems unnecessary. We can accept both modern science and the traditional creation model.  

Furthermore, the biblical account of creation seems to reflect God’s intentionality in the creation. As St. Augustine says, “It must therefore be that you spoke and they were made.  In your Word you created them.” In Genesis 1, God speaks the world into existence. “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” This implies that God knew what light was even before he had created it. In other words, there existed in the mind of God a design for light. Indeed, all substances and forces, even all true forms and purposes, must inhere in the being of God, even prior to their creation in the physical world. Therefore, it should cause us no difficulty that he creates by bidding them to come into being.

     Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent defense of the idea that nature embodies the intelligence of God (“Finding Design in Nature” Op-Ed July 7, 2005; “Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution” by Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, July 9, 2005), reveals the powerful attraction, especially to Christians, of the notion that the universe is a divine artifact.  But the theory of intelligent design generates constant unnecessary conflict between Christianity and modern science: every time scientists prove that a particular kind of natural order can be explained without reference to divine causality, science seems to thereby disprove the existence, or at least the causal efficacy, of God.  Every advance of scientific knowledge becomes a retreat of religious conviction.  What generates this zero-sum contest is that both Christians and their neo-Darwinian opponents share the assumption that God must relate to nature as artisan to artifact.  Yet the view that God made the universe is more Platonic than Christian. 

            Plato, especially in his dialogue Timaeus, relates what he calls “a likely story” about God making the cosmos by using the science of geometry to shape formless matter into the order of nature.  In Plato’s story, God is a divine craftsman who, like a human craftsman, is severely limited in his creative power.  According to Plato, a craftsman, whether divine or human, creates neither the form nor the matter of what he makes: he merely shapes a pre-given matter into an already existing form. God thus looks to the eternal ideas or “forms” and uses them to “inform” the eternal matter, just as a craftsman takes an existing design to shape some existing matter.  

            Plato’s theology has long had a profound influence upon Christian thought, especially his view that nature embodies the intelligent design of its maker.  Indeed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses.”  But is Plato’s view of God as a divine craftsman compatible with biblical, and in particular Christian, religion?  Although the Bible contains many casual references to God as our “maker,” the Bible also clearly distinguishes divine creation from human making.  Biblical scholars tell us that the Hebrew word used repeatedly in Genesis to describe God’s creation of the universe (bârâ’) is used only of God’s creative activity and never of human making.  Unfortunately, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, used by the early Christian Church, deploys the ordinary Greek verb for making (poiein) to describe divine creation. Nonetheless, some Christians, from Augustine in the fourth century to Michael B. Foster in the twentieth, have doubted whether the God of the Bible should be thought of as the maker of the cosmos. 

     Despite his ignorance of the original Hebrew language of the creation story, Augustine clearly saw the immense chasm between divine creation and human making. “By what means did you make heaven and earth?  What tool did you use for this vast work? You did not work as a human craftsman does, making one thing out of something else as his mind directs….Nor did you have in your hand any matter from which you could make heaven and earth, for where could you have obtained matter which you had not yet created, in order to use it as material for making something else?  It must therefore be that you spoke and they were made.  In your Word you created them.”

     We must be careful of our metaphors: they shape us as much as we shape them. Far too many Christians have been trapped by the false analogies embodied in the metaphor of God as the maker of the universe.  The ancient Christian dogma that God created the world out of nothing, should have alerted Christians to the dangers of thinking that God is a craftsman who fashioned the world according to some pre-existent design. The whole notion of a “design” presupposes the Platonic dichotomy between form and matter: a design is an ordered form or algorithm that can be realized in various kinds of matter.  The design of a house or a computer can be realized in any number of different kinds of matter. Yet in divine creation, form and matter arise together spontaneously, unpredictably, mysteriously.

     In this sense, God is more like an artist than like an artisan.  An artisan knows in advance exactly what he or she intends to make and then executes the design; a creative artist, by contrast, does not know in advance exactly what he or she hopes to make.  Rather, through some unfathomable interaction of form and matter, something new and largely unpredictable emerges.  There are elements of craft in every fine art, but the emergent novelty of a fine art distinguishes it from the making of an artifact according to an existing design.  Even Plato ascribed the mystery of creative art, not to intelligent design, but to divine inspiration and artists ever since Michelangelo have compared their activity to God’s.  We don’t know much about how Michelangelo or Beethoven created their masterworks, but we do know that they didn’t know in advance what they would create.  The closest human analogue to divine creation may be human “procreation,” in which a unique being is the product, not of design, but of love.  Perhaps this is why so many Christians and others recoil at the notion of “designer” babies: these reproductive technologies reduce procreation to production.

      Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is an attempt to show that order can emerge without any orderer.  Indeed, we are all familiar with kinds of order, such as that found in language, in markets, and in common law, that are the by-products of human action but are not designed by anyone.  Rather than attack Darwin for undermining the Platonic myth of God’s craftsmanship and  divine “design,” Christian theologians would do better to see Darwin’s bold ideas about the creative power of evolution as an invitation to develop a new and authentically biblical understanding of God’s relation to nature.  That new account would begin by acknowledging that there are many ways for the evolving and unpredictable order of the universe to reflect divine activity without being the product of God’s design.

     Christianity is a rational religion. If anyone doubts this proposition, I would be happy to refer him or her to any number of writings which demonstrate its truth. And yet, Christians must go beyond mere rationalism if they wish to experience the depths and riches of Christianity. There seems to be a tendency to apply to Christianity a exceedingly strong rationalism that we would apply nowhere else in life. As Mr. Clark pointed out in his last post, most of our knowledge comes to us by two ways: on the testimony of others and by direct personal experience. I know of no way to prove that I am writing a blog post right now, nor do I know how to prove that 2+2=4. Yet I believe both those things. Reason, as G.K. Chesterton reminded us, is a matter of faith, since it takes faith to believe that our thoughts have any relation to reality. We know the importance of this more realistic rationalism in our everyday life, but we forget it when we come to Christianity. We refuse to accept the testimony of those who have experienced Christ in their lives and likely were we to experience Him ourselves we would dismiss it as an irrational aberration.

     Yet, Christianity is not irrational. It is, as I have said, rational, but it is also in some very important ways nonrational, or arational. We talk so much about reason today that we forget it only covers part of the human experience. It is not rational to open the door for another person you will never see again, it is not reasonable to fall in love. This is obvious to us. Yet, once again, it is a truth we forget when we come to the subject of Christianity. It is a most dangerous truth to forget. This is because Christianity is not primarily about becoming rationally convinced of a set of facts about the cosmos- though it is also that- but about falling in love. One can read all the books one wants about proofs for the existence of God, or about the historical evidence for Christ’s Resurrection- and I do recommend doing so- but one will have entirely missed the point if it is not understood that Christianity is about falling in love with a person, the person of Jesus Christ, God and man. God is not a theory, but a person. He is not a proof, but a being.

     Christianity teaches that God so loved the world that He did not abandon us even when we abandoned Him, but He instead gave us His Son to draw us back into communion with Him. This is a teaching which is meant to move the intellect, yes, but also, maybe mostly, the heart. Living as we do in a hyper-academic community, the truths of Christianity will for most people here have to be grasped intellectually before they can move us in the depths of our beings. And that’s good. But the most important knowledge of Christ will come from experience, and from living in His love. That’s how we will really get to know Him. Those on the fence about Christianity should consider jumping down- you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. You won’t regret it.

One of the more spurious challenges to religious belief is that because religious beliefs are culturally transmitted (that is, because people adopt the beliefs of their parents and communities) they are unlikely to be intellectually grounded. Allow me to paraphrase one way this objection was recently put to me: “It is clear that culture is the determining factor in a person’s religious beliefs. There aren’t a lot of Christians in the Riyadh or many Muslims in Asunción.” My interlocutor’s implication in this instance was that people are not intellectually responsible for their beliefs, because their beliefs are not intellectually grounded. Rather, they are the product of cultural inculcation into a certain way of thinking. They believe in God according to a certain tradition because they were raised in that tradition. Some people who are suspicious of religion in general extend this line of argument to imply that because religious beliefs are culturally transmitted, they are unlikely to be justified or true.  

I will present three responses to this challenge. First, not all religious beliefs are culturally transmitted, and many people hold beliefs that their cultural communities do not share. Second, the cultural transmission of belief is not limited to religion, and when the same suspicion is applied to other kinds of received knowledge the position is clearly untenable. Third, a tradition can be intellectually grounded even if individual recipients of that tradition are unaware of its intellectual content.

Returning to my paraphrase of the objection under consideration, it is probably true that the population of Christians in Riyadh is low; there may be only a handful. However, that handful is significant. Religious outliers, people who hold beliefs that are countercultural, demonstrate that not all religious beliefs are transmitted culturally, even if most are. They demonstrate that religious knowledge can be claimed under the influence of intellectual conviction and in spite of cultural opposition. Of course, this intellectual mobility is not limited to Christianity. People raised by Christian parents can become intellectually convinced atheists or Muslims as well. If culture is not the sole determining factor for religion, then religious beliefs must contain intellectual content, and reasonable examination of this intellectual content plays an important role in the faith of religious outliers. 

Magdi Allam, famous Muslim convert to Christianity 

 Let us now consider the notion that because a belief is received according to tradition it is less likely to be reliable. Most of the knowledge that each of us possesses is received knowledge. We have been taught to accept certain propositions as facts (that is, true and justified beliefs), and we have accepted these facts on the grounds that the authorities in question were reliable. For example, I know that the speed of light is about 300,000 km/s, though I have not conducted or observed any experiments to confirm this. For me, the speed of light is received knowledge believed in according to the tradition of rudimentary scientific education. I was raised to believe that the speed of light is 300,000 km/s; therefore, I believe the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. To argue that my receipt of this knowledge according to tradition is grounds for its impeachment is clearly ludicrous. Why received religious knowledge should be disproportionately suspected is a question for the objectors. 

My beliefs regarding the speed of light are the product of rote memorization. In my case, they are not intellectually grounded. However, this situation adequately demonstrates my third response to the objection to Christianity under consideration. Individual ignorance is not evidence for intellectual bankruptcy. A skeptic of modern physics questioning me about the speed of light might conclude from my lack of intellectual grounding that there is no scientific basis for the claim that the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. However, he would be wrong. The speed of light has been established according to a rigorous intellectual process of which I am merely unaware. The same is often true of religious beliefs. Centuries of theological and apologetic development have endowed Christianity with an immense depth of intellectual content that escapes not only most skeptics but also most believers. Therefore, even if only its cultural flowers are visible, the intellectual roots of a religious tradition may run very deep.