There are a lot of terrible things that happen in the world, even in our own lives. How do we account for inexplicable suffering, sadness, bad situations that are not getting better? If you don’t have a doctrine of the fall of mankind, which broke the world and cursed it, these questions must eat away at your view of the competency of God at being God. After all, why can’t he superintend the world well enough to keep such disasters from happening, why do thing suddenly go wrong for no apparent reason? But if you believe the world is deeply broken because of a primordial act of rebellion against God, then suffering becomes intelligible as a part of the fall out of that original act of rebellion. People suffer because this world is broken by sin.
Tag Archives: Apologetics
A Unique Revelation of God’s Love
“And you say, ‘Well the religions of the world say God is a God of love.’ Don’t you believe that. Buddhism doesn’t believe that God is personal. Neither does Hinduism really. And actually one time I remember having a dialogue, a public dialogue, with the Muslims–Muslims and Christians together–and we talked about God’s love. And the Muslims are willing to say ‘We believe in God being merciful,’ but when I brought up the Christian idea from the Bible, ‘God is our spouse, God is our lover, God is our father, God is our friend, God sheds his love abroad in my heart.’ And our Muslim friends said, ‘That is disrespectful. We would never talk about God that way.'” -Tim Keller, sermon “The God Who Is”
The Arid, Irrational Creed of Atheism
“As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational. Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.” -A.N. Wilson, “Religion of hatred”
Why, “Just having a good time” doesn’t work as a philosophy of life
“You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab – only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.” – C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age”
Thoughts on a Response to C.S. Lewis and “Spilled Milk”
I was recently doing some study for a membership class at church, and I came across this critique of C.S. Lewis’s “spilled milk” argument against atheism:
I appreciated the post because it did make me think, and at least for my own personal processing of the argument, I wanted to offer a brief response. I’m not really taking up the cudgels against the author. This is for me (and I suppose any who read my posts).
First, thoughtful as the post is, I’m not sure it has grasped the point Lewis was making. I would appeal to these paragraphs for proof of the confusion.
Suppose you did spill a jug of milk, and suppose that somehow, inexplicably, it did produce a map of London….Would it ultimately matter that you cannot explain how the map appeared? Would that have any bearing on the usability of the map itself?
Well… yes it would matter, because this isn’t actually about milk or maps, it’s about rightly namely the universe that we live in. Asking why we have minds that work is actually another way into the question of whether there is a God and for what purpose did he make us. Lewis’s whole argument is that atheism has no ability to account for the origins of the mind, but Christianity does and therefore Christianity is a more probable account of the universe. So, yes it does matter (a lot) how we explain the origins of the mind.
Second, to say, as this post seems to, that ‘my experience of rationality tells me it is reliable’ is actually a viciously circular argument. It assumes the conclusion, rather than proving it. To overturn Lewis’s argument, you have to provide a competing, compelling, and coherent account for the (metaphysical) origins of the mind in an atheistic universe. That is the only way. Until such a time as that happens, uncomfortable as it may be, atheists must live with Lewis’s problem.
Third:
But hold on a second. If you can’t trust your own thinking, and if you therefore cannot trust the arguments leading to atheism, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that you similarly cannot trust the arguments that led to a belief in God? Why does the inexplicability of human cognition invalidate arguments for atheism, but not also invalidate arguments for the existence of God?
Here again, I wonder if Mr. Carter has missed the point of Lewis’s argument. Lewis is not arguing that nobody can trust human reason. He is saying that apart from a proper accounting of where reason comes from, atheism has no logical basis for trusting it. This is why saying: “who cares where it comes from, it works” really misses the point.Also, the appeal to experience (which is a circular argument) doesn’t address the crux of Lewis’s point which is how do you know that your mind isn’t lying to you? Again, a metaphysical account of where they came from and why we have them would be very useful here.
And that argument does not apply to Lewis because he can supply such an account for the origins of human reasoning. Because atheism hasn’t provided a coherent account, it has a different set of problems to deal with.
Finally:
Lewis was a man of literature, and clearly not a man of science. If he had studied biology, he would have understood that the selective pressures of evolution are not completely random, even if the process of mutation is. There is an illusory appearance of intelligence produced by the forces of natural selection whereby living things develop capabilities which give them advantages over their environment. In the case of higher mammals like ourselves, we have developed advantageous cognitive abilities which, very much like that analogous map of London, have gotten us places where we want to go.
True enough; Lewis was a man of literature, and not a man of science. He was also not a theologian (which is why he gets himself into trouble in theology too, sometimes). But in his defense, he did believe in evolution, so I don’t think he would’ve felt brushed back by these comments about biology. If anything, such observations about science would’ve made him hammer his point more. How do you account for such a rational, coherent, progressing evolutionary process in an undesigned, atheistic universe?
The block quote is fascinating to me precisely because it illustrates the failure of atheism to grasp what it needs to do to establish itself as a credible philosophy. Appealing to science and evolution is not it. In fact, logic would show us as much. A-theism (no-God-ism) is a metaphysical claim. Evolution is not a metaphysical claim, it is a scientific theory. So, appealing to evolution to vindicate atheism doesn’t make sense.
Atheism’s issues are metaphysical. That is what Lewis is arguing in the illustration. Atheism will always be stuck explaining how a meaningless, undesigned, uncared for universe could somehow ‘just happen to produce’: 1) meaning that isn’t us lying to ourselves over and over again, 2) morals that we should care about and treat as universal to everyone, 3) reliable scientific laws that came from nowhere but somehow happen again and again for billions of years and do not appear to be disappearing as suddenly as they came, and 4) unseen laws of logic and rationality that also happen again and again and are here just as firmly as the scientific laws are. This is the battlefield that atheism stands or falls on, not science.
And I would say that answering, “I don’t know where these things come from, but they are just here, so let’s go with it” (in addition to be a circular argument) is a curiously weak answer from a philosophy that has always insisted it is more concerned for logical precision and a humble, intellectual curiosity than any religious worldview. At least in this case, it seems like Lewis the Christian was more curious about the origins of human logic than an atheist was.
Reality is
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick
Strong and Kind
We can be strong in our message, “but there is never an occasion to be unkind.” -Ravi Zacharias
Christianity and Science
No God, No Common Sense
“The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.” -Father Brown, in The Oracle of the Dog, G.K. Chesterton
The World’s Most Murderous Century
“In the world’s most murderous century [the 20th], about one hundred million human beings were killed in war, another hundred million under political repression, and yet another hundred million in ethnic an sectarian violence.” -Os Guinness, The Case for Civility
A Pilgrim's Theology 