Notes
Chapter 1: Morticians of the Absolute
[1]. The original source from the Dictionary of Quotations is the Seattle Daily Times, May 7, 1962, 2. Gherman Titov: “Some say God is living here [in space]. I was looking around very attentively. But I did not see anyone there. I did not detect angels or gods. . . . I don’t believe in God. I believe in man, his strength, his possibilities, and his reason.”
[2]. Mortimer Adler, The Synopticon: An Index to the Great Ideas, vol. 1 (Chicago: Britannica, 1952), 543.
[3]. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).
[4]. On October 31, 1992, Pope John Paul II formally declared that Galileo was “not guilty” of the heresy charge brought against him by the Catholic Church.
[5]. Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), 447.
[6]. Friedrich Nietzsche, in Faru Förster Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche, vol. 2 (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1921), 656.
[7]. The superman is the one who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life’s terrors, he nevertheless affirms life without resentment. He is one who stands as a “this-wordly” antithesis to God. In her old age, Nietzsche’s sister saw Hitler as the one who epitomized that Nietzschean ideal.
[8]. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 125.
[9]. Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers (London: BBC Books, 1987), 247.
[10]. Quotation from table of contents for story by Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff, “The Thrill Killers,” Reader’s Digest (August 2003), 3.
[11]. Ibid., 183.
[12]. Malcolm Muggeridge, A Third Testament (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).
Chapter 2: Is There Not a Cause?
[1]. C. Bibby, Scientist Extraordinary: Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York: Pergamom, 1972), 41.
[2]. T. H. Huxley, Westminster Review 17 (1860), 541–70.
[3]. Jaki, Road of Science, 282.
[4]. See, for example, the works of William Dembski and Michael Behe among others. Numerous other scientists who question the claims of Darwinism jointly signed the Ad Hoc Origins Committee Document, stating, “We think a critical re-evaluation of Darwinism is both necessary and possible.” The document and signers can be found at Apologetics.org, http://www.apologetics.org/news/adhoc.html.
[5]. Mary Hesse, “Criteria of Truth in Science and Theology,” Religious Studies 11 (1976): 385–400.
[6]. Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature (London: Pelican Books, 1955), 187.
[7]. Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) was the first person to trace and describe this view of life-inherited traits in successive generations of living organisms.
[8]. R. J. Berry, God and Evolution (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 93.
[9]. The debate between “punctuated equilibrium” and the traditional phyletic gradualism, or synthetic theory, has prompted some very pertinent remarks. Stephen Jay Gould said, “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt” (“Return of the Hopeful Monster,” Natural History 86, no. 6 [1977]: 22–30). Elsewhere, he says in one of his regular columns in Natural History, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have only data at the tips and the nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils,” (Natural History 85, no. 5 [1977]: 14).
[10]. Berry, God and Evolution, 99.
[11]. Jaki, Road to Science, 287, 442.
[12]. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (London: SPCK, 1986), 74.
[13]. George Beadle, “Address at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club,” quoted in the Chicago Daily News (March 18, 1962).
[14]. Francis H. C. Crick, Of Molecules and Men (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 10.
[15]. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (London: E. T. Collins, 1973), 10.
[16]. Ibid., 167.
[17]. John Polkinghorne, One World (London: SPCK, 1986), 79–80.
[1]. Stephen Crane, “A Man Said to the Universe,” http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem582.html.
[2]. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 515.
[3]. Monism is the name given to a group of views that stress the oneness, or unity of reality. While some are partial monists, Shankara was an absolute monist, and therefore believed that the Absolute is beyond the sphere of predication. Brahman is the Ultimate Reality; all else is non-being.
[4]. Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 17–18.
[5]. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1987), 2.
[6]. See, for example, David Limbaugh’s well-researched indictment of the secular elite’s attempt to eradicate the influence of Christianity from public schools in his book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2003).
[7]. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (London: Unwin Books, 1967), 146.
[8]. Frederick W. H. Myers, Criticisms and Interpretations, Bartleby.com, http://www.bartleby.com/309/1001.html.
[9]. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 246.
[10]. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 100.
[11]. Adolf Hitler, in Norman Geisler, “Wretched Refuse,” Kindred Spirit, August 1988.
[12]. Charles Darwin, “Letter to N. Gray, June 5, 1861,” in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (1888, repr; New York: Basic Books, 1959), 2:374.
[13]. Darwin, “Letter to W. Graham, June 3, 1881,” in Life and Letters, 1:316.
[14]. G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying, ed. Robert Knille (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 267.
[15]. Robert E. Fitch, “The Obsolescence of Ethics,” Christianity and Crisis: A Journal of Opinion 19, no. 19 (November 16, 1959), 163–65.
[16]. Johnson, Intellectuals, 251. Dr. Norman Geisler has presented what is considered to be good evidence that Jean Paul Sartre became a theist in his last days; see his book Is Man the Measure? An Evaluation of Contemporary Humanism (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1983), 46.
[17]. Johnson, Intellectuals, 342.
[18]. William Shakespeare, The History of Troilus and Cressida, quoted in Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 39.
[19]. J. P. Stern, quoted in Magee, The Great Philosophers, 242.
[1]. T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 147.
[2]. Voltaire, Candide (New York: Bantam, 1967), 97.
[3]. Paul Waitman Hoon, Integrity of Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), 30. Hoon fuses his thoughts on the subject with those of Langdon Gilkey to express this tension between freedom and bondage.
[4]. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first written instance of the word boredom as occurring in 1852.
[5]. Chesterton, As I Was Saying, 265.
[6]. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Rupert Christiansen, Romantic Affinities (London: Sphere Books, 1988), 66.
[7]. James Simpson, in Peter Masters, Men of Destiny (London: The Evangelical Times, 1968), 36.
Chapter 5: Grave Doubts
[1]. William James, “The Sick Soul,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 163.
[2]. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), 41.
[3]. Malcolm Muggeridge, Conversion (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1988), 62.
[4]. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 3rd ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (1975; repr. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), 55:2, 56:1–7.
[5]. William Wordsworth, “We Are Seven,” ibid., 1367–69.
[6]. Winston Churchill, “The Grand Alliance,” Who Said What When (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 249.
[7]. Source and author unknown.
Chapter 6: Climbing in the Mist
[1]. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1956), 228–29.
[2]. Colin Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1985), 11.
[3]. For anyone desiring specific definitions and detailed descriptions of these categories, I would recommend Norman Geisler’s book Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1976).
[4]. See chapter 3, “The Anatomy of Faith” in Arlie J. Hoover, Dear Agnos: Letters to an Agnostic in Defense of Christianity (Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing Company, 1992), http://members.core.com/~tony233/Dear_Agnos.htm.
[5]. Descartes himself had a rather interesting approach to the senses. Starting from the vantage point of rational certainty, he argued for the existence of God. Having established that argument, he felt God would not be a deceiver and argued for the existence of an eternal world on that theistic basis.
[6]. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (London: Souvenir Press, 1973), quoted in Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (London: SPCK, 1989), 29.
[7]. If the reader desires a rigorous argumentation for theism, I recommend Norman Geisler’s Christian Apologetics or Philosophy of Religion. J. P. Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City combines superb scholarship in argument and counterargument fashion. In addition, see William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994). Craig has also participated in two excellent debates: “What Is the Evidence For/Against the Existence of God?” (with outspoken atheist Peter Atkins) and “Does God Exist?” (with renowned atheistic philosopher Anthony Flew). Both debates are available on video through Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta; www.rzim.org. For my purpose, I will not enter into that field because the nature of argumentation involved is more appropriately handled in a textbook than it is in an effort such as this dealing with the existential struggles for meaning. Ideally, these two different approaches complement one another. For this reason I recommend these resources as further study for a complete view of the arguments in defense of theism.
[8]. See Ronald N. Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 33.
[9]. George MacDonald, The Curate’s Awakening (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1985), 161.
[10]. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19.
Chapter 7: With Larger Eyes Than Ours
[1]. C. S. Lewis has a strong point, arguing for the universe itself as a miracle. “If the ‘natural’ means that which can be fitted into a class, that which obeys a norm, that which can be paralleled, that which can be explained by other events, then Nature herself, as a whole, is not natural. If a miracle means that which must simply be accepted, the unanswerable actuality which gives no account of itself but simply is then the universe is one great miracle” (God in the Dock [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970], 36, Lewis’s emphasis).
[2]. Colin Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1985), 48.
[3]. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1978), 105.
[4]. Chesterton, As I Was Saying, 267.
[5]. J. Morley, Life of Gladstone, vol. 3, 535, quoted in Making Moral Decisions, ed. D. M. MacKinnon (London: SPCK, 1969), 48.
[6]. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 77.
[7]. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: ARK Pub., 1989), 80.
[8]. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” Who Said What When (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 125.
[9]. Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande, May 18, 1835.
[10]. Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 428.
[11]. Bernard Shaw, preface to “Imprisonment,” English Local Government, quoted in Making Moral Decisions, ed. D. M. MacKinnon (London: SPCK, 1969), 67.
[12]. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (London: SCM Press, 1963), 265–66.
[13]. From a debate between Dennis Prager and Jonathan Glover, “Can We Be Good without God?” Oxford University, March 3, 1993, included in Ultimate Issues, vol. 9, no. 1. This debate is available at http://www.dennisprager.com.
[14]. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” 119, 124:11–15.
[15]. Lee Iacocca, Talking Straight (New York: Bantam, 1988), 35.
[16]. Rudolph Bultmann, in Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 92.
[17]. For further comparison of Freud and Christianity (through the lenses of C. S. Lewis), see Dr. Armand M. Nicholi’s fascinating book The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (New York: The Free Press, 2002).
[18]. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven,” http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2204.html.
[19]. G. Wade Robinson, “I Am His and He Is Mine.”
[20]. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 197.
[21]. Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 77.
[22]. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1949).
[23]. Will Durant, Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon & Schuster), 602.
[24]. For those who would like to pursue the cumulative and persuasive evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, there are many excellent books. They deal with both biblical and extrabiblical evidence. I mention just a few here. Though written several years ago, the following books are considered classics and are well worth tracking down. R. T. France, The Evidence for Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986); John Warwick Montgomery, History and Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1965); Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1958); Terry L. Miethe, ed., Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). In the Miethe source the two debaters are Gary Habermas and Anthony Flew.
[25]. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1950), chap. 15.
[26]. Chesterton, “The Convert,” in As I Was Saying, 25.
[27]. Paul W. Hoon, Integrity of Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), 141.
[28]. Don Wyrtzen and L. E. Singer, “Finally Home.”
[29]. Blaise Pascal, “Section III: Of the Necessity of the Wager” in Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (1660; trans. 1907; Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1997), http://www.ccel.org/p/pascal/pensees/pensees04.htm.
[30]. Pascal, Pensées, chap. XII, 434.
Appendix 1: The Finger of Truth and the Fist of Reality
[1]. C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” in The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: HarperSanFransico, 1980), 59.
[2]. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, chap. 13, excerpt 54 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 134.
[3]. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (New York: Viking Press, 1938).
[4]. Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 54.
[5]. Words and music to “Dear Mr. Jesus” by Richard Klender. Song performed by Sharon Batts. See http://www.richardklender.com/ and http://DayOfTheChild.org.
[6]. Colin Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1985), 33.
[7]. Stephen Leacock, Literary Lapses (London: J. Lane; New York: John Lane Company, 1911), BrainyQuote, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/stephenbl105033.html.
Appendix 2: The Establishment of a Worldview
[1]. Arlie J. Hoover, The Case for Christian Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1976), 52.
[2]. Ronald Nash in Faith and Reason rightly considered these as needful for a worldview study.