Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis (and, incidentally, JFK and Aldous Huxley, which is explored in Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell). It’s times like these, especially in light of the Thanksgiving holiday that’s occuring tomorrow, that I like to remember the great benefits we as Christians, and particularly as Christian’s interested in apologetics, draw from the traditions which the giants of the faith have bequeathed to us.

In generations not so far-removed from our own, men like Lewis, Chesterton, and Francis Schaeffer paved a hard road through interminable and rediculous philosophies which brought challenges to their faith. That we can freely walk down that road now is something to be grateful for. Just think: when the disputes these thinkers engaged in come around and knock on our door (and believe me, they will, and do) we sit securely knowing that we can crack open Mere Christianity, or Escape From Reason and discipline ourselves in that knowledge so that we are able to respond to the challenges.

Furthermore, in facing new and heretofore unseen challenges we still stand on the shoulders of giants who propelled us towards the point that we are at now. Philosophies dead and gone are the bedrock of what creeps up out of the soil today. So be thankful, friend, that though you may go where no man has gone before, you walk also in places that were where no man had gone before when our fore-thinkers walked the earth.

P.S. Blackbeard also died on the 22nd, but that was 288 years ago.

This morning the frost that’s gathered overnight
Rests on every surface like salt;
On the car’s windows and hood,
On every curled brown leaf,
Across the driveway and the porch,
In the air; it’s white with cold.
In my breath, in and out.

It’s different every time I see it.
And how strange the world looks
Through millions of crystals
Distorting, glazing, crunching,
Or clarifying.

It is new while it lasts
And will be tomorrow if the weather is right.
It’s new each time I see it;
For as many times as it’s come
I wonder if it will ever grow old.

But today will be warm enough that
This first frost will burn off;
The steam is already rising slowly
From beds of stiff, heavy leaves,
And the sun won’t let this new place stay for long.

Already his bright shafts pierce patches on
The ground, where they mingle, cold and indifferent
With sparks just as bright.
Each cold dancing light is crying out
With joyful first breath and melts away
To the gutter, or the earth.

Come again, Come again,
Exultant lights,
Before sister snow
Covers your faces.

G.K. Chesterton never fails to amaze me. In fact, I’m really depressed that I hadn’t started reading his stuff until lately. I’m catching up now, though, so I might be able to read it all eventually. If anyone can be said to have a “rapier wit,” it is him. And the humor and beauty that comes out of his writing is hard to beat. Lately I’ve been reading The Everlasting Man and I usually don’t get through a single paragraph without hitting something enlightening, or inspiring, or heart-wrenching. I’m halfway through it now (it’s divided into two books) so I’ll probably post my thoughts on it soon.

Right now I want to explore a quote from another one of his works, Heretics, which, along with its successor, Orthodoxy, is probably a more familiar title. In this section Chesterton is examining a philosophy of the time, which I take to be some sort of prohibition sentiment, that says that one ought only drink wine for medical benefits and never to seek after pleasure in it. Chesterton responds by saying that drinking wine as medicine is the only truly dangerous and immoral way to use it. Why? Because in using it as medicine we are trying to get at something natural, something that we “ought not to be without; something that [we] may find it difficult to reconcile [ourselves] to being without.” Whereas in seeking after pleasure in drink we are seeking something unnatural and exceptional, something that unless we’re crazy we won’t chase after every hour of every day. To sum it up: “[i]t is easy to deny one’s self festivity; it is difficult to deny one’s self normality.”

Chesterton then expands on the idea of turning pleasurable drink into somber medicine. This type of seeking after a thing meant to be pleasurable because you need it is dangerous. We ought to drink because we don’t need it. That is the happiness of irrationality. To rationalize this happiness is to destroy it. Chesterton continues:

Walter Pater said that we were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simply for those moments’ sake. The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in “Tristram Shandy” or “Pickwick”, there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply “for those moments’ sake.” To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something with a violent happiness in it–an almost painful happiness. A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary. Once look at them as moments after Pater’s manner, and they become as cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.^[1]

Such a powerful message about true happiness. Do you find yourself assenting? Anyway, I want to examine just the sentence in bold. What is Chesterton contrasting here? “Gathering rosebuds while ye may” and “the immortal rose which Dante saw”; well, what are these things? The first you probably recognize. It’s from the first stanza of a poem by Robert Herrick called “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, and in its time was responsible, along with other of Herrick’s poems in this vein, for restoring interest in carpe diem verse; that genre which loves youth and despises old age, and extorts the young to take advantage of the time they have. Not an altogether wrong message, but wrong-headed all the same. I’ll quote the poem in full (because I can).

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles to-day,

To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,

The higher he’s a-getting

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times, still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time;

And while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may for ever tarry.

I believe Chesterton means to say that “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is a way of saying to seek after moments of happiness as if they were the very breath of life, and thus makes a mistake in seeking after “the moment for the moment’s sake”. It is essentially just another way of saying “the moment will be gone and it you will have missed it if you don’t grasp it now.” That’s true of moments like those described, but it misses the point; and in creating the hunt for such moments, turns it into a journey filled with despair. Because how could you have great joy if you are forever seeking after that which you must necessarily lose? You will never gain every moment. And since the moments are fleeting and the trek down from their high emotion much longer than the moments themselves, you will forever be chained to such a search in futility. The further you get away from such moments the more desperately you seek them till you are an empty and useless hungry void.

So what about the second part, “the immortal rose which Dante saw”? Here Chesterton is paraphrasing a part of the Divine Comedy, specifically canto 30 (and maybe 31) of Paradise. I don’t have even a remotely good understanding of the Divine Comedy, and I haven’t yet started Paradise, but I shall venture an explanation based on what I’ve read nevertheless. In canto 30 Dante sees a vision of an endless “river of light” from which issue ‘living sparks” that sink down into the flowers along the banks, and then “plunge back into the torrent.” This vision is then expanded upon when Dante drinks from the river. He sees the whole host of the heavenly saints as an enormous, eternal, snow-white rose that expands, spreads and multiplies even beyond the size of the Sun. It appears that this vision is the result of trying to grasp the continuous flow of time to eternity in a static picture of a single moment for the purpose of intellectual as well as spiritual understanding.^[2]

So what Chesterton is saying is that great joy does not seek after temporal moments which must come and go, rather it finds in those short moments an infinity from which it draws its happiness, but then the moment is gone. “Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant” is a fantastic creed; and true, I think. We find great joy in the immortal things, or in the mortal things that we understand as immortal. If that is true then we must also find the greatest of joys in the greatest of immortal things: that which nothing greater than can be conceived: the God of Anselm, the God of Dante, and, dare I say, the God of Chesterton.

1. Chesterton. G.K. Heretics, Chapter 7.
2. http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0045.03#nt.ci030_ln88

In starting “The God Delusion Challenge” I figured that my first post would be over the first chapter, or section, but there was something in the preface that irked me. And as someone who can’t leave well enough alone, I won’t.

The preface of The God Delusion (hereafter “TGD”) is a laundry list of the chapter topics and the purposes which Dawkins says that they each serve. As the book was written to “raise consciousness” he hopes that each chapter will speak to different people, based on where they’re coming from, i.e. if they’re attached to religion because they never knew they could abandon that, he has a chapter on it; if they grew up “indoctrinated” into a certain religion, he has a chapter on it. I won’t deny that that’s a “noble pursuit”, as Dawkins says. He wants to get these ideas out there so people are made aware of them. More power to him.

Now the piece that irked me was his comment on the religious indoctrination of children. I was fully prepared to skip over it without comment and take up the issue once I got to the chapter dealing with it, but Dawkins was so passionate and unapologetically repetetive on this point that I decided to tackle it first. He says:

…if you hear anybody speak of a Catholic child’, stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know whwere they stand on economics or politics…I shall not apologize for mentioning it here in the Preface as well as in Chapter 9. You can’t say it too often. I’ll say it again. That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child. ^[1]

Does anyone notice what was conspicuously absent from that (albeit incomplete) list? The Atheist child. Now I’m going to give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would accept that if it is improper to label a child under any certain religious heritage then it is equally improper to label them Atheist… but it makes you wonder: would he? Or does he hold atheism over and above other belief patterns as the only safe bet for indoctrination? I guess we’ll have to wait till Chapter 9 to find out.

This topic also brings up something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: is indoctrination ever OK? Let’s say that a proposition, P, is true, and you know, beyond all necessary certainty, that proposition P is true. Would it be right to “indoctrinate” your child with assent to and belief in the truth of P? All other things being equal, would it be better for your child to be taught that P is true though they may not have an adequate understanding of P? Or would it be better to allow for the possibility of propositions with less truth content to take the place of P? I think it’s abundantly clear to everyone that if P is true and you know P is true, then safeguarding early assent to P would be good for your child. And actually, I think that we do this. Things that we know are true, and would be beneficial to our child to have belief in, we indocrinate into them though they may not have a full understanding. Just take a moment and think of all the do’s and don’ts your parents told you as a child that were beneficial though you didn’t understand (and might not have agreed!). Was it wrong for them to tell you not to play in the street? Should they have let you find out for yourself? Or is it the case that there are some things which it is dangerous to not indoctrinate your children with? (Stay away from strangers. Mind your manners.)

Now, to make a jump, if there is a proposition of a religious belief B that is true, and all other religious beliefs are to some extent false or less true, then is it good to indoctrinate belief in this proposition into children? Well if it is the case that, given the truth of B, opposing religious belief propositions have an amount of inherent danger to them (reality of Hell, lack of nourishment of the soul, abandonment of prescribed moral values), then yes it is good to indoctrinate this belief. I’m going to take a guess here and say that Dawkins probably believes that indoctrination is wrong because the child grows up unquestioning of the belief and is thus ignorant and foolish. He obviously thinks this is true of religious believers. I would respond by saying that the indoctrination of religious belief and the indoctrination of an unquestioning attitude towards that belief are two very different things, though they are regrettably often taught at the same time.

But of course, this claim of mine only goes so far. The major rebuttals would be that 1) it is not abundantly clear that any given indoctrinatable proposition is true, and thus 2) we don’t have absolute certainty on this point. I would respond by saying that there ARE some indoctrinatable propositions we know are true, and valuable to teach to children, such as the ones I gave above. And though we might not have absolute certainty, we at the very least have a measure of certainty on the probability of some propositions. If we weigh the probability that a proposition is true against the danger of indoctrinating a child with a false belief, and against the danger of NOT indoctrinating a child with a true belief, what do we come up with? I guess that’s the question.

1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 3.

Yesterday I got a chance to have a good apologetically-oriented discussion with a few people on irc. It started out with someone asking if I believed that homosexuality was a sin, and I replied that yes, homosexual acts are sinful. It then sort of spiraled into a discussion on biological determinism, naturalism, and the nature of the soul. My basic argument was that:

1) It doesn’t matter how many theories are continuously propounded for biological factors which determine sexuality, because narturalism has still never given an adequate explanation of the mind and consciousness. If it turns out that you, your ego, are not your material brain then the whole house of cards tumbles.

2) Arguments offered from the existence of homosexual animals are nonsensical for the reasons above. It wouldn’t matter if we were 100% biologically identical to rats, if it were also the case that we were mentally different and that mental state contained the seat of desires, beliefs, etc.

The discussion then disintegrated into how one of the persons believed that God could not exist, but since the existence of God is irrational he could never provide a reasoned argument for non-existence. I pointed out that he could still make arguments for the irrationality, and also probabilistic non-existence arguments, which he partially assented to. Then I made the point that if he truly believed God did not exist but he could only ever provide mere assertions (which were numerous), and not a reasoned, full argument, then he was chained to an irrational belief for which he has no good reason to hold on to so dearly.

After that the claim was made that Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, had arguments that this person thought were good enough to make a case either for the impossibility or improbability of God. I said that if the persons opposing me would all assent to the arguments proffered by Dawkins, then I would read the book (which I just got last night from Amazon) and give a response.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And I will probably end up posting responses to chapters or sections on this blog so I can receive comments and constructive criticism. The book is almost 400 pages, however, and appears to have quite a bit of content so I imagine this will take a long time. Look here for updates to come.

Undercurrents of a sweet, sure morning
Flowing behind a night stretched tight across
The drumhead of the sky, when punched through by
Mindful words would they run, and fill my cup?

Today I’ve been browsing through some of G.K. Chesterton’s poems, which, like much of his writing, are fantastic. If you haven’t read The Battle of Lepanto, you must, you must, you must. The poem that I want to look at right now is titled (as is this post) To St. Michael in Time of Peace. It’s basically a one-sided conversation from the poet to Michael the Archangel, and describes various things related to him, i.e. the fight with Lucifer:

When the world cracked because of a sneer in heaven,
Leaving out for all time a scar upon the sky,
Thou didst rise up against the Horror in the highest,
Dragging down the highest that looked down on the Most High:

The part I really want to take a closer look at is this stanza on the incarnation. The wording, imagery and theological truth are profound. Here, take a read (remember: Michael is the “thou”):

When from the deeps of dying God astounded
Angels and devils who do all but die
Seeing Him fallen where thou couldst not follow,
Seeing Him mounted where thou couldst not fly,
Hand on the hilt, thou hast halted all thy legions
Waiting the Tetelestai and the acclaim,
Swords that salute Him dead and everlasting
God beyond God and greater than His Name.

OK. I recall when I was much younger I went to see a play put on at a local church. I believe it was my aunt’s church but that’s rather inconsequential. It was basically a nativity story but had a neat twist where the angels are all debating about how God is to come to Earth. Will he be a great magician? A mighty warrior? A fearless leader? A brilliant philosopher? No, he will be a babe. And of course the angels are astounded.

This stanza of Chesteron’s similarly echoes the wonder of of the inarnation. Not that He came as a little child, but that He came, and was able to come, at all. Angels and demons who are forever immortal gape with wonder at the everlastingly immortal God dying, and the whole world hushed for possibly the most beautiful word in the Greek language, or any language for that matter: tetelestai, it is finished.