5. The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith
5
The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith
Apologetics is about persuading people that Christianity makes sense. C. S. Lewis, perhaps the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, describes the capacity the Christian faith has to make sense of things with characteristic eloquence and concision: “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.” Lewis’s point is fundamental to Christian apologetics: Christianity makes sense in itself, and has the ability to make sense of everything else as well.
Throughout his works—including his works of fiction—Lewis portrays a Christian way of seeing things as habitable, plausible, and persuasive. Once the world has been seen through a Christian set of spectacles, the relative inadequacy of other perspectives becomes clear. One of Lewis’s Oxford colleagues, theologian and New Testament scholar Austin Farrer, once noted how Lewis’s great strength as an apologist was to be able to bring out how belief in God is both reasonable and natural.
[Lewis’s] real power was not proof; it was depiction. There lived in his writings a Christian universe that could be both thought and felt, in which he was at home and in which he made his reader feel at home. Moral issues were presented with sharp lucidity and related to the divine will, and once so seen, could never again be seen otherwise.
The intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith is one of its greatest strengths, and it has considerable apologetic potential—as we shall see in this chapter. In claiming that Christianity makes more sense of reality than anything else, I am not suggesting other viewpoints are irrational. Most forms of atheism, for example, have their own distinct rationality, which some atheists—such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—prematurely and unwisely assume to be the only forms of rationality. Christianity, most apologists suggest, is able to make more sense of things than its alternatives.
A similar point was made by English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), best known for Brideshead Revisited (1945). After his conversion to Christianity in 1930, Waugh wrote to a friend of how his new faith allowed him to see things clearly for the first time.
Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.
Before coming to faith, Waugh saw only a distorted world of smoke and mirrors; after his conversion, he saw things for what they really were. He began the process of exploring this new world with excitement, enthusiasm, and wonder, as his later writings make clear.
So how are we to understand the rationality of faith? The reasonableness of the Christian faith can be demonstrated in two different, though clearly complementary, ways:
These two approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be used together in apologetics.
Let us now identify some lines of approach and reflections that are of central importance to apologetics as it seeks to demonstrate the rational plausibility of the Christian faith to our culture.
We can begin our reflections by thinking about the nature of faith.
Understanding the Nature of Faith
The rise of “New Atheism” in 2006 led to a new interest in the nature of faith. Why believe in God, when this cannot be proved with absolute certainty? One of the most familiar New Atheist sound bites was “faith in God is irrational.” For militant atheist Richard Dawkins, faith is about running away from evidence, burying your head in the sand, and refusing to think. Although many media observers initially responded positively to these critiques, closer examination has shown them to be remarkably shallow. This New Atheism turns out to have its own unproven—and unprovable—beliefs and dogmas, just like every other view.
Philosophical critics of the Enlightenment—such as Alasdair MacIntyre or John Gray—argue that its quest for a universal foundation and criterion of knowledge faltered, stumbled, and finally collapsed under the weight of a massive accumulation of counterevidence. The vision of a single universal rationality simply could not be defended or achieved. As human beings, we have no choice but to realize we must live in the absence of any clear, unambiguous, absolute, and purely rational truths. We must indeed articulate and defend criteria by which our beliefs may be justified; yet we must also realize those beliefs may lie beyond proof. They are, to use a phrase popularized by Harvard psychologist William James, best understood as “working hypotheses.”
An example will help clarify this point. Ethical statements, such as “rape is wrong,” cannot be proved to be true, either by reason or science. Nor can political statements, such as “democracy is better than fascism.” But this doesn’t stop us believing in—and acting on!—such moral and political beliefs. And this applies not just to personal ethics and political viewpoints. It also applies to important social beliefs such as justice. No nation or society can survive without a concept of justice. Yet it turns out we can’t prove—on the basis of pure human reason—that any specific notion of justice is right.
Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University, recently emphasized that any notion of justice depends upon a conception of the good life, involving a network of beliefs about human nature, values, and purpose. These beliefs, he rightly points out, simply cannot be proved. It is certainly true that some thinkers of the Enlightenment—that great period in western culture that proclaimed the supreme authority of reason—held that reason could indeed answer such questions definitively. But these views have been subjected to severe criticism in the twentieth century. Hardly anyone thinks that now. Questions about justice cannot be meaningfully answered without depending upon beliefs that ultimately cannot be proved. The Enlightenment dream of basing justice on pure reason has foundered. The idea of “pure reason” is a fiction; concepts of rationality are shaped by their cultural environments.
As Stephen Toulmin rightly points out:
The exercise of rational judgment is itself an activity carried out in a particular context and essentially dependent on it; the arguments we encounter are set out at a given time and in a given situation, and when we come to assess them they have to be judged against this background.
Many Enlightenment thinkers appear to have been shielded from this disconcerting fact by the limitations of their historical scholarship, which remained firmly wedded to the classical western tradition. But this illusion has now been shattered. At the end of his brilliant analysis of rational approaches to knowledge and ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre concludes that the sheer diversity of “rational” approaches to justice and ethics leads inevitably to the conclusion that “the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain.” Reason promises much, yet fails to deliver its benefits.
We could go on listing examples along the same lines. All of them point to the same conclusion, noted some years ago by the great Oxford philosopher and intellectual historian Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97). Berlin argued that human convictions can be broken down into three categories:
The first two categories concern what can be known reliably through the natural sciences on the one hand, and what can be proved through logic and mathematics on the other. “Proof” turns out to be limited to a very narrow category of statements, such as:
2 + 2 = 4
The whole is greater than the part.
The chemical formula for water is H2O.
The first two of these statements can be proved rationally, and the final one scientifically. The third category contains the values and ideas that shape human culture and define human existence—in other words, beliefs that give human life reason, direction, and purpose, and which cannot be proved by reason or science.
What sorts of things? In 1948, the United Nations reaffirmed its “faith in fundamental human rights.” Important though this belief might be, the statements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights cannot be proved, logically or scientifically. Nor can the belief that oppression is evil, or that rape is wrong. You just can’t prove these things. But people make them their life’s work, believing they are, in the first place, right and, in the second, important. As British literary critic Terry Eagleton points out in a powerful critique of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, “We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.” Belief in God is one of these.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga made this point years ago, with reference to the perennial problem of “other minds.” You can’t absolutely prove that other people have minds. But nobody’s unduly bothered about this. It’s a safe assumption, and chimes in with the way things seem to be. Plantinga then argues for a parallel between proving the existence of “other minds” and proving the existence of God. Neither can be proved, he argues, and good arguments can be raised against both—but to their defenders, both seem entirely reasonable.
Richard Rorty (1931–2007), probably the greatest American philosopher of the twentieth century, made a similar point in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Society some years ago, when he pointed out that
if anyone really believed that the worth of a theory depends on its philosophical grounding, then indeed they would be dubious about physics, or democracy, until relativism in respect to philosophical theories had been overcome. Fortunately, almost nobody believes anything of the sort.
His point? That we can commit ourselves to the great worldviews of our time without absolute proof.
Everyone reasonably believes certain things to be true, while realizing that these beliefs cannot be proved in the strict sense of that term. Critics of religious beliefs often suggest that “faith” is some kind of mental illness, limited to religious people. This is simply wrong. Faith is just part of being human. As the philosopher Julia Kristeva recently put it: “Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say ‘I believe,’ I mean ‘I hold as true.’ ” Beliefs about God, justice, and human rights all suffer from this alleged problem—just to mention three things to which many others could easily be added.
Atheist writers often fail to take account of the limits under which human reason has to operate, holding that their own convictions are rigorous, reliable, and responsible. They don’t believe anything, they tell us—they just limit themselves to what is right. Atheist apologist Christopher Hitchens declares boldly that New Atheists such as himself do not entertain beliefs. “Our belief is not a belief.” This is simply wrong, and I fear Hitchens is deluding himself. His critique of religion is clearly dependent on certain core beliefs that cannot be proved. In Hitchens’s case, his aggressive criticism of religion rests on certain moral values (as in “religion is evil” or “God is not good”) that cannot be proved, and that ultimately represent fiduciary commitments. Since Hitchens’s critique of religion is primarily moral, he is obliged to assume certain moral values he is unable to prove. All moral values ultimately rest on beliefs. In the end, Hitchens’s critique of Christianity depends upon and expresses his own beliefs—things he believes to be true and assumes some others will believe to be true, but can’t actually prove to be true either by logic or science.
Now there is much more to the Christian idea of faith than believing certain things are true. For Christians, faith is not merely cognitive (“I believe this is true”), but also relational and existential (“I trust this person”). It is not just believing that God exists, but discovering that this God is wise, loving, and good—and choosing to commit ourselves to this God as a result. As C. S. Lewis once remarked, you are not faced “with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence.”
Faith is thus about trust in someone, not just a belief that he or she exists. This point was made by Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), who emphasized that true faith in God was a “qualitative leap” from one way of existing to another. Christian faith is not the mere addition of one extra item to our inventory of the contents of the world—that is, God. It is about realizing and embracing the new “mode of existence” this trust makes possible. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s great geniuses. He had severe doubts about the point of “proving” God’s existence. He had, he declared, never met anyone who came to believe in God as a result of an argument!
This important point was anticipated in the writings of the great American Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). For Edwards, rational argument has a valuable and important place in Christian apologetics. Yet this could lead simply to a belief that God existed, without any transformative impact. As Edwards notes, some people “yield a kind of assent of their judgments to the truth of the Christian religion from the rational proofs or arguments that are offered to evince it.” But this does not necessarily lead to conversion or a “true faith.”
Edwards’s point is that someone might believe there is a God—but not believe in this God. It is a point familiar from the New Testament. “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19). There is a world of difference between rational acceptance and personal transformation. What converts people is not an argument, Edwards declares, but an “apprehension”—that is, an informed appreciation—of God’s glory, or a direct encounter with or experience of God.
[Arguments] may be greatly serviceable to awaken unbelievers, and bring them to serious consideration, and to confirm the faith of true saints; yea, they may be in some respect subservient to the begetting of a saving faith in men. Though what was said before remains true, that there is no spiritual conviction of the judgment, but what arises from an apprehension of the spiritual beauty and glory of divine things.
Yet conversion is ultimately the task of evangelism. Apologetics is about preparing the way for such a conversion by showing that it makes sense to believe in God. It’s about clearing away rubble and debris in the path of evangelism. We may not be able to prove—in the absolutely rigorous sense of the word—that there is a God. But we can certainly show that it is entirely reasonable to believe such a God exists, in that it makes more sense of life, history, and our experience than anything else—and then we can invite someone to respond to this loving God and trust this God’s promises.
Why Does the Reasonableness of Christianity Matter?
Why is this point so important? Why should we need to show that Christian belief is reasonable? Why not just assert it? One of the apologetic points we need to emphasize here is that it is difficult to defend ideas that seem countercultural—going against the grain of dominant cultural ways of thinking. Austin Farrer once suggested that C. S. Lewis’s remarkable success as an apologist was partly due to his ability to offer “a positive exhibition of the force of Christian ideas, morally, imaginatively, and rationally.” For Farrer, Lewis’s approach to apologetics showed how Christianity made sense of the deepest intuitions of the human mind, heart, and imagination.
Yet Farrer was particularly concerned to emphasize the importance of showing the reasonableness of faith. By this, Farrer did not mean that reason created faith, or that people came to believe in God on account of rational arguments. Rather, he wanted to emphasize how it is very difficult to defend the Christian faith publicly if it is seen to be irrational. Lewis’s great achievement, according to Farrer, was to demonstrate the reasonableness of faith in a way that facilitated its cultural acceptance.
Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.
To demonstrate the reasonableness of faith does not mean proving every article of faith. Rather, it means being able to demonstrate that there are good grounds for believing these articles are trustworthy and reliable—for example, by showing that the Christian faith makes sense of what we observe and experience. The Christian faith can thus be compared to a lens that brings things into focus, or a light that allows us to see farther and more clearly than we can manage on our own.
This point was emphasized by French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil, a Jewish thinker who discovered Christianity as an adult. As she reflected on the implications of her newfound faith, she came to the conclusion that faith in God illuminates reality in a far better way than its secular alternatives. The ability of a way of thinking to bring things into focus, or illuminate what is otherwise dark and obscure, is an indication of its reliability.
If I light an electric torch at night out of doors I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world.
The ability of a theory to illuminate reality and bring it into sharp focus is itself an important measure of its reliability. We see here a core theme of Christian apologetics: there are good reasons for believing Christianity is true, and one of them is the extent to which it makes sense of what we see around and within us. As Oxford philosopher Brian Leftow commented on his own conversion to Christianity, it seemed to allow things to be seen as they really were: “If you see things as they are from the place where you’re standing, you’re standing in the right place.”
So what about the sciences? Physicist-turned-theologian John Polkinghorne (b. 1930) makes a point of obvious relevance to our concerns in this chapter:
No form of human truth-seeking enquiry can attain absolute certainty about its conclusions. The realistic aspiration is that of attaining the best explanation of complex phenomena, a goal to be achieved by searching for an understanding sufficiently comprehensive and well-motivated as to afford the basis for rational commitment. Neither science nor religion can entertain the hope of establishing logically coercive proof of the kind that only a fool could deny.
Both science and Christian belief are committed to finding the best evidence-based explanation of what is actually observed and encountered in the world. For the Christian, apologetics is partly about affirming the conceptual resonance between the Christian theoretical framework and the deeper structures of the world, as uncovered by the natural sciences.
So does belief in God make sense? Or is it simply a delusion, a sad example of wish fulfillment on the part of lonely and longing human beings? As Lewis himself once commented, reflecting on his early beliefs as an atheist: “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” This issue has gained importance recently because of present debates in our culture. Although New Atheism, which burst onto the scene in 2006, has now lost much of its novelty value, the questions it raises continue to be discussed. Is belief in God a rational response to reality, or an outmoded delusion spread throughout the population by viruses of the mind, based on flimsy and naïve reasoning, and imposed by authoritarian institutions and individuals?
There is, of course, a more radical viewpoint: all human attempts—whether theist or atheist—to construct meaning or establish values are equally delusional. This decidedly bleak view of reality is found at many points in the writings of Richard Dawkins—as in his famous declaration that “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” We impose meaning and value on a meaningless universe. Meaning is invented, not discerned. This thought, as consistent as it is austere, is found by many to be unbearable.
In this chapter, we are considering the capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of things. In choosing to focus on the question of its rationality, I am not reducing Christianity to a rational explanation of things, nor implying that this is the chief of its theological virtues. I am simply making the point that our present cultural context has been shaped by the rise of aggressive assertions of the fundamental irrationality of faith, and it is therefore necessary to respond to these assertions in a measured and informed way.
The twentieth century saw a new intellectual energy injected into philosophical discussions of the rational and empirical evidence for God, partly catalyzed by new scientific understandings of the origins of the universe. Philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne reaffirmed the rationality of faith and reinvigorated traditional debates about reasons for belief in God. There is a growing consensus that belief in God is perfectly rational—unless, of course, you define “rationality” in terms that deliberately exclude such a belief.
Yet it has become increasingly clear that reason can actually imprison humanity within a rigid and dogmatic worldview that limits reality to what can be proved rationally. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, it is significant that the dominant mood in western culture from the late nineteenth century onward has been “the rejection of reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit.” To limit oneself to what reason and science can prove is merely to skim the surface of reality and fail to discover the hidden depths beneath.
For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Logic and facts can only “take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief.” Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this—not contradicting, but transcending reason. Faith elicits and invites rational consent, but does not compel it. Faith reaches out to where reason points and does not limit itself to where reason stops.
The Philosophy of Science as a Resource for Apologetics
In narrating the story of his conversion in Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis makes it clear he did not come to believe in God as the result of a deductive argument, but rather by reflection on his experience. This thought leads us to think about how the methods of the natural sciences might be of apologetic value.
Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What “big picture” of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term “abduction” to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as “inference to the best explanation.” It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences. So how does it work?
Peirce sets out the process of thinking that leads to the development of new scientific theories or ways of thinking about reality as follows:
Abduction is the process by which we observe certain things and work out what intellectual framework might make sense of them. The great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes used this same method, although he mistakenly called it “deduction.” Sometimes, Peirce suggests, abduction “comes to us like a flash, as an ‘act of insight.’ ” Sometimes, it comes about through slow, methodical reflection, as we try to generate every possibility that might make sense of what we observe.
Peirce gives close thought to how scientists develop their ideas, and identifies this process as underlying the scientific method. Science begins by assembling a series of observations, then goes on to ask what framework of interpretation makes most sense of what is observed. It might be a theory passed down from an earlier age. Or it might be a completely new way of thinking. The question that needs to be answered is: How good is the fit between theory and observation? The phrase “empirical fit” is often used to refer to this correspondence between what is seen in the world and what can be accommodated by a theory.
For example, consider the movements of the planets against the starry heavens. These have been observed for thousands of years. But what was the best way of making sense of them? In the Middle Ages, it was thought that the best explanation for these observations was the “Ptolemaic” model, which held that the earth stands at the center of all things, so the sun, moon, and planets all revolve around the earth. By the end of the Middle Ages, it was clear that the observations didn’t fit the theory well enough. The Ptolemaic model was groaning and creaking, unable to accommodate increasingly accurate and detailed observational evidence about the movements of the planets. It became clear that a new approach was needed.
In the sixteenth century, Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler proposed that all the planets, including the earth, rotated around the sun. This “heliocentric” model proved much more successful at making sense of the movements of the planets against the night sky. The close empirical fit between theory and observation strongly suggested that this theory was right. It is still the standard model adopted by astronomers.
But it’s not just science that works this way. Peirce himself was clear that trial lawyers also depend on abduction for their professional successes. They must develop a theoretical lens that illuminates the evidence and brings it into sharp focus. The criminal justice system involves reaching agreement on the best explanation of the evidence laid before the courts. What is the “big picture” that makes best sense of the evidence? In the end, the theory that will persuade a jury is going to be the one that weaves as many of the clues as possible together into a coherent narrative.
We see here the quest for the big picture that makes sense of individual snapshots, the grand narrative that makes sense of individual stories, and the grand theory that connects the clues together into a satisfying and coherent whole. For what applies to scientific and legal theories also applies to our attempts to make sense of life as a whole—above all, to the question of God and human meaning. How can these approaches help with the apologetic task?
There are three main types of scientific explanation, each of which has considerable value in relation to apologetics: causal explanation, inference to the best explanation, and unificatory explanation. In what follows, we shall consider the apologetic potential of each of these.
1. Explanation as the identification of causes.
The first type of explanation is causal. Perhaps the most familiar approach to scientific explanation, this argues that A explains B if it can be shown that A causes B. So does this mean Christians believe God pokes around in nature, nudging apples so they fall from trees and then pulling them to the ground? No. God delegates causal efficacy to the created order. Thomas Aquinas develops the notion of “secondary causality” as an extension of, not an alternative to, the primary causality of God himself. Events within the created order can exist in complex causal relationships, without in any way refuting their ultimate dependency upon God as final cause.
The critical point to appreciate is that the created order thus demonstrates causal relationships that can be investigated by the natural sciences. Those causal relationships can be investigated and correlated—for example, in the form of the “laws of nature”—without in any way implying, and still less necessitating, an atheistic worldview. To put this as simply as possible: God creates a world with its own ordering and processes.
But what of the origins of the universe? In the late nineteenth century, scientists tended to think of the universe as always having existed. Yet in the twentieth century, it became increasingly clear that the universe came into being in a massive explosion usually known as “the big bang.” Since the realization that the universe had a beginning, the philosophy of science has struggled to find an explanation of how something could come into existence from nothing. How can nothing be said to cause something? The widespread acceptance that the universe had a chronological origin significantly shifted the ground in favor of belief in a “first cause” and an intelligent designer. What caused the universe to appear? Perhaps the cosmos created itself. Perhaps it just happened. Or perhaps it was brought into creation by an agent—such as God. This proves nothing, of course, in the logically rigorous sense of the term. But it does give a new credibility to one of the most familiar traditional arguments for the existence of God, which can be set out like this:
2. The quest for the best explanation.
Since about 1970, it has been widely accepted that the fundamental philosophy of the natural sciences is the approach widely known as “inference to the best explanation.” The basic approach here is to ask this question: Which theory makes the most sense of what we actually observe in nature? There is an important debate in the philosophical literature over how you work out which is the best explanation: is it the simplest, the most elegant, or the most fertile? What “big picture” of things best corresponds to the evidence? Charles Darwin’s development of his theory of “natural selection” is now seen as a textbook case of this approach.
Two points stand out as being of supreme importance here. First, this approach recognizes that you can’t prove which is the best explanation. This is a matter of fiduciary judgment—of discernment—within the scientific community. We see this in the present scientific debate over the “multiverse,” where two radically different explanations are advanced for the same observations. Each has gathered support within the scientific community. But nobody really knows which is right. You have to decide which you believe to be right, on the basis of the evidence available—and realize the evidence isn’t conclusive enough to prove either option. (It’s inconvenient, but at least it means you treat your opponents with courtesy, instead of declaring they are deluded.)
Second, “inference to the best explanation” recognizes that there are potentially lots of ways of explaining things, and tries to agree to a framework by which competing claims can be resolved. Very rarely is it possible to prove a theory is right. But this isn’t always necessary. It’s just necessary to show that a theory is better than its rivals. To put this another way, many scientific theories can be said to be warranted or justified (in other words, have a good evidential basis), without thereby being proved.
God fits into this way of thinking with remarkable ease. Oxford philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, for example, argues that belief in God provides the best explanation of a wide range of things we observe in the world. In a similar vein, physicist John Polkinghorne notes that belief in God offers an explanation of “meta-theoretical” questions—beliefs on which science is obliged to depend but cannot itself demonstrate to be true.
3. Explanation as the unification of our view of reality.
Since about 1990, there has been growing interest within the philosophy of science in the notion of “explanatory unification.” This approach to scientific explanation has its origins in the 1970s, and tries to establish a common framework for what were once thought to be unrelated events. Since then, the method has been developed extensively and used to explain some core features of the development of the modern scientific method. Its basic theme is simple: we need to find a framework big enough to accommodate as much as possible.
This way of understanding scientific explanation is based on the observation that aspects of reality once believed to require different kinds of explanation can actually be accommodated within the same explanatory framework. James Clerk Maxwell’s famous demonstration of the unity of electricity and magnetism is an obvious example of this approach. Electricity and magnetism, once thought to be totally distinct, could be seen as two sides of the same coin. To explain something is to locate it within a wider context, allowing its interconnectedness to other aspects of reality to be understood. The question concerns which network of ideas establishes the maximum degree of interconnection between different scientific domains and theories.
It is not difficult to see how this resonates strongly with a central theme of the Christian faith. For Augustine of Hippo, God was like an intellectual sun illuminating the landscape of reality, allowing us to see its deep structures and to figure out our own place within them. A similar theme is found in the writings of C. S. Lewis.
Making Sense of Things: A Case Study
To explore this further, we shall consider how effective the Christian way of seeing things is at making sense of what we observe. How good is the fit between theory and observation?
So how can we make sense of the shape of history and the distinctive features of human culture? A number of controlling narratives have been proposed to make sense of these. One of them, favored by New Atheism, is that of the progressive improvement of the human condition through the erosion of religious superstition, and the emancipation of humanity from all taboos and arbitrary limits. It has recently become much more difficult to sustain this metanarrative in the West, as the manifest failings of western liberalism have become increasingly clear. Indeed, it is significant that this metanarrative is one of the chief targets of Eagleton’s recent withering critique of New Atheism.
Eagleton describes the “dream of untrammeled human progress” as a “bright-eyed superstition,” a fairy tale lacking any rigorous evidential base. “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.” It is interesting that Christopher Hitchens ends his polemic against religion with a plea for a return to the Enlightenment, especially the form it took in the eighteenth century. The myth of a lost golden age, it seems, persists in this most unlikely of quarters. Yet we are surely called to question fictions about both human individuals and society, even if these fictions are deeply embedded within the secular western mindset.
The New Atheist grand story (or metanarrative) is that of the former enslavement of humanity to primitive superstitions. Through the intelligent application of reason and science in the last few centuries, humanity was able to break free from this age-old oppression and enter a bright new world of liberty and enlightenment—a bright new world that is now threatened by the reemergence of what are darkly referred to as “superstition” and “irrationalism.” Religion has made an expected and unwelcome comeback. Something needs to be done to restore the situation before it is too late!
Like all the best stories, this narrative has the virtue of simplicity. Yet it quickly loses value when it proves incapable of accommodating history as a whole, rather than a few carefully selected snippets. Religion was meant to have died out in the West years ago. During the 1960s, European sociologists predicted the imminent advent of a secularist world order with much the same confidence as an earlier generation of Soviet political theorists proclaimed the historical inevitability of Marxism-Leninism. “The most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology and psychology” unanimously declared that “their children—or surely their grandchildren—would live to see the dawn of a new era in which, to paraphrase Freud, the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown.”
Except religion hasn’t disappeared. Many now argue that it is more influential than ever, despite the social controls being used to minimize its social impact within much of western Europe. The Soviet Union has fallen apart, its enforced secularism now replaced by a religiously active and zealous group of nations. And that’s what’s frightening the New Atheists. Their metanarrative is facing a challenge. It doesn’t work.
The Enlightenment metanarrative fails to explain anything important. As Richard Shweder recently pointed out, it has “a predictive capacity of approximately zero.” Religion might turn out to be a delusion, Shweder dryly remarked—but it seems to be a delusion with a future. “The popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.”
The Enlightenment story of meaning, on which New Atheism is so dependent, now looks about as realistic as the earlier Marxist assertion of the historic inevitability of socialism. The resurgence of religion in many parts of the world where it was repressed by atheistic governments is an obvious indication of the vulnerability and fragility of this story of meaning. In any case, the idea of “historical inevitability” is really a sociological judgment, which has little to do with what is intellectually or morally right or wrong. Whether a sociological development is “inevitable” or not has little bearing on whether it is right. A cultural or historical development may be inevitable only as a passing historical phase, rather than as a permanent development.
New Atheism often accuses those who believe in God of holding on to “unevidenced beliefs,” in contrast to the rigorously proven factual statements of “enlightened” atheists. Yet what of its own belief in human progress? Eagleton dismisses this myth as a demonstrably false pastiche, a luminous example of “blind faith.” What rational soul would sign up to such a secular myth, which is obliged to treat such human-created catastrophes as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and apartheid as “a few local hiccups” that in no way discredit or disrupt the steady upward progress of history? The difference between Christianity and New Atheism seems to lie in their choice of so-called unevidenced beliefs and controlling myths. Neither can be proved; this, however, does not prevent us from making an adjudication about which appears to be the more reliable and compelling.
So what of a Christian reading of culture and history? Two controlling themes here are the ideas of humanity as, first, created in the “image of God” and, second, sinful. While theologians and religious communities differ in the relative emphasis placed upon these two elements of a Christian understanding of human nature, they are nevertheless the twin poles of any Christian attempt to make sense of the enigmas and puzzles of how we behave, as individuals and in society.
We find ourselves excited and inspired by the vision of God, which draws us upward; we find ourselves pulled down by the frailty and fallenness of human nature. It is a familiar dilemma, famously articulated by Paul: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:19). From a Christian perspective, it is clear we must recognize at one and the same time a greater destiny or capacity in humanity than most political systems or philosophies allow, and a correspondingly great capacity to fail to achieve such aspirations.
This way of thinking allows us to frame the complex picture we see of human culture and history, characterized by aspirations to greatness and goodness on the one hand, and oppression and violence on the other. Many have commented on the profound ambiguity of history and the havoc it wreaks for naïve theories of the goodness of humanity. Terry Eagleton is only one of a series of recent commentators to point out the darker side of contemporary human culture and history.
As a species, humanity may indeed have the capacity for good; this seems matched, however, by a capacity for evil. A recognition of this profound ambiguity is essential if we are to avoid political and social utopianism based on naïve, ideologically driven, nonempirical value judgments about human nature. As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote so presciently in 1931, on the eve of the rise of Nazism, a naïve view of humanity leads to political utopianism, in which “progress” potentially leads to catastrophe:
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
Erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends.
Moving On
In this chapter, we have reflected on the apologetic importance of demonstrating the “reasonableness” of faith. Nobody wants to embrace a faith that is utterly mad! Some Christians suggest that, since Paul speaks of the gospel as a form of “foolishness” that confounds worldly knowledge and wisdom (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:18), there is no point in using rational means to defend the gospel. Yet this clearly represents a misreading of Paul’s concerns about the situation in Corinth on the one hand, and his understanding of the role of the “mind” in the Christian life on the other.
Paul’s concerns at Corinth were complex. The church was in danger of being influenced by early forms of Gnosticism, which held that individuals were saved by a secret, arcane knowledge. Others at Corinth prized intellectual sophistication and were not prepared to tolerate anything that seemed to lack this or any other mark of cultural erudition. Paul rightly rejects any such notions, insisting the Christian gospel must be taken on its own terms, even if it counters prevailing cultural notions of acceptability at Corinth. Yet this is about challenging secular notions of wisdom, not abandoning human notions of rationality!
Paul insists that Christians “have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), which he distinguishes from alternative approaches to wisdom already present at Corinth. A “Christian mind” is a distinctive mindset, a way of thinking shaped and nourished by the Christian faith. It is not about a quest for exotic or arcane knowledge, nor the exaltation of academic arrogance, nor a lapse into the discredited rationalism of eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It is about allowing the light of Christ to shine upon our intellects, so that the transforming power of God’s grace might renew our minds as well as our souls. It is the outcome encouraged and intended by God as we seek to serve him in the world.
So how does the gospel make sense of things? How are we to understand and apply its deep appeal to our reason, feelings, imagination, and longing for meaning? In the following chapter, we shall consider eight major lines of apologetic engagement, each of which has its own role to play in helping the gospel gain a foothold in contemporary culture.
For Further Reading
Evans, C. Stephen. Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
McGrath, Alister E. Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things. Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 2011.
Morris, Thomas V., ed. God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.
Wright, N. T. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.