The nature of things.

"And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries". Paul Simon - I am a rock.

"They became futile in their thinking". Romans 1:21.

So, there I was on you tube, re-visiting some material on science and faith to pass along to a friend, when I noted in the other videos column an item - sourly titled - that was seeking to demean the thinking of the person I was listening to.

I clicked on to this at the end of the video I was watching to see what kind of arguments were being made, and quickly discovered they were not actually attacking an argument by the person they were seeking to dismiss, but, initially at least, only his re-telling of an argument made by C S Lewis.

Here's the original version by Lewis himself:

“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” (The Defense of Reason).

Notice what He is stating here - if what we deem intelligence is merely a quirk of an a random process, what objective data (beyond our own senses) gives it the validity to be trusted as a means of genuinely defining and rightly understanding the nature of things, even in regards to the purely material sophistication of the world?

 The response to this argument on the dismissive video was pathetic. It stated that because we're made of the same stuff as what's around us (atoms and the like), these are therefore perfectly acceptable tools to employ to understand that manner of stuff, so Lewis and others who employ this manner of questioning are just plain wrong.

Another video I watched recently included a section in which Richard Dawkins and Neil De Grasse Tyson were discussing the nature and purpose of intelligence, and they raised a fascinating dilemma. If you look at the astonishing forms of life on this planet, very few (and they concluded, in a real sense, probably only one) has seen it beneficial to develop and employ the strange phenomena of intelligence. What makes this phenomena even more puzzling, they noted, is why, because from a naturalistic (survival and transmission of genes) perspective, it's clearly not required, so why is it there?

The truth is actually much stranger than fiction.

When Sir Fred Hoyle undertook his research into the proliferation of carbon in the universe, he realized that the hard data was telling him something he didn't expect, and didn't like - the very nature of the physical order had been toyed with in a manner that wasn't random. The numbers proved it. The atheist encountered the fingerprints of God.

Using our faculties is meant to cause us to stop and ponder what is really around us.

We all know that our senses give us information all of the time - a frame of reference that we implicitly trust because without that, the world would become entirely alien and life impossible, but honest evaluation of what we can see when we look hard enough, jolts us, because it tells us 1. There are clearly limits to what our faculties can comprehend and 2. Within those limits, there is information that points to deeper aspects of reality, beyond the purely utilitarian.

Naturalism wants to argue that such "aspects" are merely the result of ignorance, either due to our current lack of information, or, as in the case of the video I encountered, because the person making a case for more than the material is, in effect, ignorant, but what is often happening is the real argument isn't being heard by those seeking to dismiss it.

A classic example of this is how naturalism often "reads" what is deemed science and thereby believes it negates that need for theology.

Let me conclude by pointing to another of Lewis' superb arguments on this very subject.

In this tussle...

"Looking for the right one, when will the right one come along?"  Art Garfunkel.

It's a familiar story - the push of life's obligations against the pull of our deepest desires.

It's a miss-match of epic proportions.

How do we handle it?

Mockingbird contributer Charlotte Getz has written one wonderful piece on this this week.

I love her candor. I love her no-holds barred honesty. I lover her conclusions.

It makes sense of what the day to day is about, but far more importantly, it tells us that our deep in the depths of us yearnings and longing aren't meant to go away - they're meant to steer us to richer shores than we can currently even fully comprehend.

I'd love to just let rip about what Charlotte says, but I'll just enjoy the warmth of it, and encourage you to have a read for yourself - it's excellent.

When Church Fails

"Those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me".
Paul - Galatians 2:6

Some of you may have picked up on former gymnast Rachael Denhollander's story last week, regarding how she confronted her abuser with point-blank gospel truth about herself, God and forgiveness, but it turns out that this was only the first part in her story.

In an astonishing follow-through piece this week in Christianity Today, we learn of another dimension to her pain - caused by the failure of the church to support her.

The awful truth is not only was she not helped through the trauma of her experiences by the church she attended, she was actually cut off from membership simply because the church entirely failed in its call to minister to and aid a suffering member of its body, leaving her facing an even greater amount of suffering and vulnerability.

The CT article mentions the particular church group involved, but this is sadly not uncommon. Back in the 80's, Christian sociologist Ronald Enroth wrote a telling study into how commonplace such a plight was in America in the work, Churches that Abuse, showing how miss-application of presumed authority and teaching that permitted this created a plethora of damaged and broken people. Andrew Walker was to touch on some of the same manner of abuse which occurred here amidst similar schemes in his book, Restoring the Kingdom, but most of these abuses and their perpetrators have become forgotten some 40 years on, causing some to, mistakenly, think that such errors don't happen now.

Of course, the troubles don't always begin too extreme to begin with. A piece today on the Mockingbird website shows how easily this failure can become established.

 It all sounded so worthwhile in Paul's day.
Be a "super-spiritual" follower, not only having believed, but now, keeping all these requirements given to us by Moses himself.... my, won't that please God!

We totally fail when our best intentions become about anything but what Christ alone has done at the cross. That is what should cause us to lay ourselves down for each other, but we're so easily lead to thinking that we can make things so much better by our own spit and polish.
It doesn't take long before others are suffering as a result.

The church does something wonderful when it points away from itself to the weakness, the failure, the tearing truth of the cross. There and only there can life emerge from death.

Let's really learn something from Rachael's valuable work of speaking the truth in love.