Discussion Grounds

Greetings, Luke,

I have to agree with some of the comments that have been posted since your letter number 10, especially here and here. One of them said it would have helped if my last letter had been shorter, and I’ll accept that advice and correction. I got carried away with Pascal, plus it’s been a rough week with the loss of a friend. But I do want to recall for you the idea of this website, which is to keep our debate focused and somewhat disciplined. I wrote about one topic and received a response that covered just about everything you think is wrong with Christianity.

You wrote,

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

It appears to me you missed the point of what I wrote. Maybe it got buried in the glut of words I used. I’m going to repeat most of an entire paragraph in hopes it will come through this time:

The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is … a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was…. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting [Christianity] as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.

In other words, what you called for in your Letter 10, with all the accompanying invective implying its impossibility, is something I said I was working on in my Letter 9. Moreover, I said it was a first step. I’m well aware of the questions you raised in your last letter. They’re not new to me. I’m not going to try to answer them all at once, okay? I’m taking it a step at a time.

Apparently my last letter did not present a clear and coherent enough argument for you to respond to. You wrote,

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I’ll try to be more clear. But whatever floweriness there was in my last letter was there for a purpose: to represent or to call to mind what it means to be human. I didn’t want to dry that out like dust in some syllogism. Since you asked, though, I’ll be glad to clarify my argument, as follows.

To be human is to experience a paradoxical mix of awareness of dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites. This is not easily accounted for by naturalism and especially by evolutionary explanations for behavior. Evolutionary psychology is a pseudo-science in the first place, since it has little to no evidence to draw on for most of its conclusions. In the second place, even its supposed explanations fail to to explain adequately how the first arising of these paradoxical experiences took place. And in the third place, naturalism provides no ontological ground for the actual existence of things like dignity, truth, destiny, beauty, and value, or for their opposites, either, for on naturalism there is only matter and energy arranged in varying degrees of complexity, interacting according to necessity and/or chance. I don’t know how matter, energy, necessity, and chance can acquire properties of truth, dignity, value, or destiny.

Naturalism cannot actually deny the reality of these things, so it tries to accommodate them, but based on the evolutionary picture of organisms (including humans), the ultimate explanation for these things must resolve down to their contributions to humans’ reproductive fitness, or what Churchland called the Four F’s (feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing). This is a poor fit with what we know to be true about our experience of these things. We know they have more meaning and more reality than just perpetuating some set of selfish genes.

Further, the sense of human experience is that there is something higher toward which we ought to be striving, and that this something higher is real. On evolution it’s not real, it’s always a proxy or a scheme for producing more offspring, which is the only ultimate explanation for any behavior.

On Christianity,¹ the sense of greatness, dignity, higher purpose is grounded in a reality of having been created in God’s image. The paradoxical experience of failure is explained in our having fallen away from the ontologically genuine goodness of our origins. It makes sense, on Christianity, that humans have high intrinsic value and such a confusing mix of goodness and badness.

That’s the essence of my argument at this stage, and this is the portion of the discussion I’m asking you to interact with at this time.

1. Also on Judaism, for this comes from the part of the Bible Christians call the Old Testament, which we share with the Jews [↩]