Reading Literature through the Eyes of C. S. Lewis, Part 3

Photo by Dmitrij Paskevic on Unsplash

            Lewis readily recognized that not all values in literature were Christian, but that they often encouraged a sub- or anti-Christian morality. He acknowledges that “[t]he sub-Christian or anti-Christian values implicit in most literature [do] actually infect many readers” (“Christianity and Culture” 16). For example, Lewis lists some of the most common sub-Christian values in literature: honor, sexual love, material prosperity, pantheistic contemplation of nature, yearning for the past, and liberation of impulses (“Christianity and Culture” 21-2). Although he states that he cannot defend for the values of sexual love or the liberation of the impulses, he can make a case for the other four values, which “are all two-edged” in that they “may symbolize what [he] think[s] of them all by the aphorism ‘Any road out of Jerusalem must also be a road into Jerusalem’” (“Christianity and Culture” 22). Thus, Lewis recognizes that some of these values may lead the reader away from God; at the same time, however, he also recognizes that the opposite is also possible and even likely: such values may lead the reader to a recognition of God and salvation.

            To explain further this idea of sub-Christian values and the way they might lead a person to eventual salvation, Lewis offers an example of how the sub-Christian value of pantheistic contemplation of nature can be “two-edged.” Lewis explains, “There is an easy transition from Theism to Pantheism; but there is also a blessed transition in the other direction. For some souls I believe, for my own I remember, Wordsworthian contemplation can be the first and lowest form of recognition that there is something outside ourselves which demands reverence” (“Christianity and Culture” 22). Though it may ostensibly sound like a risk, considering he concedes that this “road to Jerusalem” goes both ways, the point Lewis makes has special significance for him personally. In fact, it was through the literature of George MacDonald, Christian fantasy writer, and Lewis’s love of myth that Lewis was persuaded to embrace theism as a viable alternative to atheism (Veith 139). For him, literature was a step toward theism, and theism a step toward Christianity.

            Lewis thus finds culture, and literature as one of its primary products, beneficial for both the Christian and the non-Christian reader. He states, “Culture, though not in itself meritorious, [is] innocent and pleasant, might be a vocation for some, [is] helpful in bringing certain souls to Christ, and [can] be pursued to the glory of God” (“Christianity and Culture” 28). Furthermore, Lewis states, “I agree with Brother Every that our leisure, even our play, is a matter of serious concern. There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan” (“Christianity and Culture” 33). Therefore, Lewis both defends the merit of literature and recognizes the importance responsibility of the reader to protecting both mind and heart when reading.

            Moreover, Lewis clarifies the relative importance the reader must place upon secular literature. He argues, “My whole contention is that in literature, in addition to the spiritual good and evil which it carries, there is also a good and evil of the second class, a properly cultural or literary good and evil, which must not be allowed to masquerade as good and evil of the first class” (33). To demonstrate, Lewis uses the following example: “I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it. The distinction does not seem to me a very fine one” (36). In other words, literature itself, when it contains sub-Christian values, should not be looked to as a primary, or spiritual, good; rather, it should be considered as a secondary good, given as high a value as possible below a spiritual value.

            In reading literary works, readers are stretching their imagination to experience God’s creation in a novel manner. Literature allows readers to better empathize with others, as it often encourages selflessness and love. Literature also teaches mankind about human life and reality in a way that other disciplines cannot. In stories, abstract ideas are fleshed out in concrete, real terms in a way that provides meaningful understanding for the reader. Most importantly, literature can assist readers in comprehending a variety of worldviews and in becoming more capable witnesses for Christ. Lewis advocated on the behalf of all such arguments for literature’s value.

            Ryken endorses Lewis’s viewpoint when he argues in favor of confronting worldviews embedded in literature. He argues that the encounter with worldviews both “gives us a historical perspective on our own civilization and spares us the naïveté of beginning anew with each generation” (Windows to the World 142). Furthermore, according to Ryken, an understanding of the worldviews

helps us understand people who live by them today . . . [and] gives us a knowledge of the alternatives from which to choose our own world view. C.S. Lewis has written that ‘to judge between one ethos and another, it is necessary to have got inside both, and if literary history does not help us to do so it is a great waste of labor.’ (Windows to the World 142-3)

Therefore, through encountering worldviews in literature, the reader gains not only a deeper understanding of various historical perspectives on life but also an authentic understanding of his or her own worldview.

Lewis notes the significance of examining a worldview from the “inside,” which is made possible through reading stories and observing how various worldviews actually apply to the lives of those characters who adhere to them. Veith expands on this idea:

One of the greatest benefits of literature, as C. S. Lewis points out, is that it provides a way for us to enter into other people’s minds for a while, to allow us to understand what it feels like to live in a certain time or to hold to a certain worldview. Reading works by rationalists or naturalists or Marxists or existentialists can help us to understand these perspectives better from the inside and to identify the human needs they address (and fail to address). Such understanding is necessary whether we are attempting to refute these limiting worldviews or simply to communicate more effectively to the modern mind. (73)

Thus, Lewis reveals an important reason for why Christians should read literature: to step inside others’ worldviews to gain understanding of and connection to them.

Podcast: Emily Heady on the Christian Worldview, Ethics, and A Christmas Carol

In this special Christmas edition of the podcast, we sit down with Dr. Emily Heady to discuss Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Dr. Heady holds a Ph.D. in English Literature with a concentration in Victorian Studies. She also has a special interest in the work of Charles Dickens and has published articles and books exploring his novels. In this episode, Dr. Heady explains how A Christmas Carol relates to ethics and the Christian worldview.

Photo:  "A Christmas Carol, New York Public Library" By G. Ziegler. CC Licence.

Music:  “O Come O Come Emmanuel” by IKOS David Clifton with the choirs of Peterborough Cathedral. CC License. 

Intuiting the Beauty of the Infinite: Ramanujan and Hardy’s Friendship and Collaboration

The Man Who Knew Infinity, a recent movie based on a book of the same name by Robert Kanigel, recounts the short but remarkable life story of India’s great mathematical prodigy Srivivasa Ramanujan (henceforth SR). Although what follows is a response to the film, the book is well-worth reading, filled with luscious prose such as in this sample: “The Cauvery was a familiar, recurrent constant of Ramanujan’s life. At some places along its length, palm trees, their trunks heavy with fruit, leaned over the river at rakish angles. At others, leafy trees formed a canopy of green over it, their gnarled, knotted roots snaking along the riverbank.”

The movie begins by quoting Bertrand Russell (a character in the movie itself): “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.” It then shows SR in India, doing his mathematics (without much formal training) while trying to eke out a living for his family. His passion and talent for math are obvious; trying to describe maths (the preferred British abbreviation) to his wife, he says it’s like a painting, but with colors you can’t see. There are patterns everywhere in mathematics, he adds, revealed in the most incredible forms. Finding himself in need of someone who could understand and appreciate his ground-breaking work, SR wrote G. H. Hardy, legendary professor at Cambridge, and eventually Hardy invited SR to traverse the ocean and come work with him there.

This incredible opportunity required SR to leave his wife behind and endure the long journey and culture shock of moving to England, which contributes to a compelling narrative, with many twists and turns I’m not discussing but that make for a terrific, sometimes heart-wrenching tale. Despite the trials and challenges (including a war), what’s amazing was how much work SR and Hardy were able to do over the next five years—publishing dozens of groundbreaking articles.

The divergent worldviews of the two men make the dynamics of their friendship particularly fascinating to chronicle. SR was a devout Hindu whereas Hardy was a committed atheist—though the first time Hardy says this to SR in the movie (“I’m what’s called an ‘atheist’”), SR replies, “You believe in God. You just don’t think he likes you.” Incidentally, this is a key structuring question in C. S. Lewis’s moving novel Till We Have Faces: whereas both Psyche and Orual believe in the gods, Psyche believed they were marvelous and loving, but Orual thought they were only dark, unkind, and mysterious. In Rudolph Otto’s terminology, Orual was familiar with the tremendum aspect of the Numinous, but Psyche with both the tremendum (the awe-inspiring mystery) and the fascinans aspect of the Numinous. Fascinans is the aspect of the Divine involving consuming attraction, rapturous longing—and is often connected to the imagination, beauty, even poetry.

The diametric difference in SR’s and Hardy’s ultimate worldviews proves to be related to a central aspect of the plot. Hardy is adamant about the need to show step-by-step proofs of SR’s conclusions, while SR is depicted as functioning on a much more intuitive level. I’m not concerned for now what artistic liberties the moviemakers might have taken in this regard, but it is true that SR would often write down the conclusions of his work and not all the intervening steps. There may be at least a partial explanation of this which is fairly prosaic: paper tended to be in short supply for SR in India. But it’s at least intriguing to consider the explanation advanced in the movie: SR possessed incredibly strong intuitive skills. Mystifying Hardy, SR could just see things that few others could and felt little need to offer the proofs.

Hardy—though incredibly impressed with SR’s abilities, likening him to an artist like Mozart, who could write a whole symphony in his head—repeatedly says that intuition is not enough. Intuition must be “held accountable.” Proofs mattered, to avoid projecting the appearance of SR’s mathematical dance or art as on a par with conjuring.

It isn’t that SR’s intuitions were infallible. His theory of primes, however intuitively obvious, turned out to be wrong. Still, though, many of his intuitions were eventually vindicated and proved right. One among other interesting questions that SR’s reliance on intuitions raises is how much discursive analysis they involve. It’s a vexed question among epistemologists whether intuitions are a lightning quick series of inferences, or something more immediately and directly apprehended. The quickness with which they come naturally lends itself to the latter analysis, but perhaps there’s something to the former option—particularly if much of the analysis is done beneath the level of conscious awareness. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, Sherlock’s inferences would come so quickly that Watson characterized them as resembling intuitions; likewise, realizing it’s sometimes easier to know something than to explain the justification for it, Sherlock himself recognized the way knowledge can have features that resemble more immediate apprehendings than just the deliverances of the discursive intellect. A couple of real-life Sherlocks, Al Plantinga and Phil Quinn had a dust up some years back on whether basic beliefs are formed inferentially or not.

The difference in Hardy’s and SR’s styles, we come to see, is related to their divergent worldviews. Exasperated at Hardy’s recurring disparagement of intuition as lacking in substance, SR finally blurts out, “You say this word as if it is nothing. Is that all it is to you? All that I am? You’ve never even seen me. You are a man of no faith. . . . Who are you, Mr. Hardy?” The underlying dynamic that brought this exchange to a head was the way SR connected his own identity to those intuitions. Hardy had asked SR before how he got his ideas. Now SR gives his answer: “By my god. She speaks to me, puts formulas on my tongue when I sleep, sometimes when I pray.”

SR asks Hardy if he believes him, and adds, “Because if you are my friend, you will know that I am telling you the truth. If you are truly my friend.”

In Till We Have Faces, we find a similar scene. Orual can’t see the gold-and-amber castle that Psyche tells her of, but Orual also knows that Psyche had never told her a lie. One issue here is testimony, and the conditions that need to be in place to take it as reliable. Of course someone could be telling the truth, the best they understand it, and still be unreliable—for perhaps they’ve unwittingly made a mistake, or they’re delusional or confused.

At any rate, Hardy’s reply is transparent: “But I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything I can’t prove.”

“Then you don’t believe in me,” SR responded. “Now do you see? An equation has no meaning to me unless it expresses the thought of God.”

Hardy remained skeptical of SR’s theology, but couldn’t dispute with the results. He would go to bat for SR to get him a fellowship at Cambridge, and in his impassioned defense of SR’s accomplishments he extolled his incredible originality, by which SR could apprehend so much truth otherwise missed. On Hardy’s view, the creativity and originality, though they provided SR a lens through which to see, didn’t subjectivize SR’s findings; rather, they were a tool for seeing farther and seeing more.

This contrasts with, say, Simon Critchley’s interpretation of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. On (Critchley’s) Stevens’s view, the only reality we experience is mediated through categories furnished by the poetic imagination, rendering our perspectives products of the imagination and, thus, subjective—yet still able to be believed despite their fictive nature. This is what some might call a more “postmodern” perspective than Hardy’s more traditional view that there’s an objective reality we’re able to discern, however imperfectly and through a glass darkly.

In real life, when Hardy died, one mourner spoke of his “profound conviction that the truths of mathematics described a bright and clear universe, exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with which the physical world was turbid and confused. It was this which made his friends . . . think that in his attitude to mathematics there was something which, being essentially spiritual, was near to religion.”

Hardy didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in SR and in the objectivity of mathematical truth. He wrote of his Platonism in his Mathematician’s Apology, and the movie captures this too. In one of his defenses of SR, he related the story of the way SR said mathematical truths are thoughts of God—a view parallel to, say, Plantinga’s view that modal and necessary moral truths are also thoughts in the mind of God. Then Hardy added, “Despite everything in my being set to the contrary, perhaps he’s right. For isn’t this exactly our justification for pure mathematics? We are merely the explorers of infinity in the pursuit of absolute perfection. We do not invent these formulae—they already exist and lie in wait for only the brightest minds to divine and prove. In the end, who are we to question Ramanujan—let alone God?”

Though math, on Hardy’s view, is discovered, not invented, it may take those with prodigious talents to uncover its deepest truths. Speaking of which, near the start of the film Hardy had said, “I didn’t invent Ramanujan. I discovered him.” Even more than the math, this is a movie about men and their remarkable friendship and fertile partnership across radically divergent and conflicting paradigms. The humanity of the film is its best feature of all.

After five years of collaboration between these unlikely friends, SR returned to India, having contracted a fatal disease—likely tuberculosis. Within a year he died, at the age of just 32. Hardy was crestfallen when he heard the news, and grieved the loss deeply. Near the end of the movie, he reflected on his collaboration with both SR and another colleague, Littlewood, saying he’d done something special indeed: “I have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.”

Paraphrasing Hardy, he once commented that out of 100 points, he would give himself 30 as a mathematician, 45 to Littlewood, 70 to Hilbert. And 100 to Ramanujan. In the year SR spent in India before his death, he poured his brilliant findings into another notebook. It was lost for a while, but when found, the importance of its discovery was likened to that of Beethoven’s “10th Symphony.” A century later, these formulas are being used to understand the behavior of black holes.

Mailbag: Why Do You Think Christianity is True?

Letter: Hello professor, I was just wanting to reach out to you and ask you for some guidance. I recently came across a post of the computer that stated this. Do you identife with a specific religion? If you do, ask yourself these questions: 1. Why did so many Gods and beliefs predate your own?   2. Why didn't your God choose a global revelation instead of a culture specific one? 3. Why were you born in the "right religion"? Now I am kind of stumped by these questions. Do you think, if you have time, could you give me your thoughts on them? Thanks, Billy

Response by Jonathan Pruitt

Hi Billy,

Thanks for writing to us at Moral Apologetics! Dr. Baggett has just left on vacation and so I’ll be responding to your letter. Let’s take these one at a time. The first question is “Why did so many Gods and beliefs predate your own?” The question as stated is imprecise, but I think the heart of the question is something like this: “As a Christian, what do you say about the fact that there are religions older than yours?” That’s a fair question and one we can offer several responses to.

First, we might ask what the problem is supposed to be. If there are religions older than Christianity, does that suggest Christianity is not true? I am not sure how an argument for that position might go. The age of the religion has little to do with the likelihood of it being true; what’s more important is the sort of evidence that gives credibility to the claims of the religion. Say, for example, that tomorrow all the stars moved in space so that from earth they spelled out, “Scientology is true.” That would make Scientology much more plausible than, say, Baal worship, even though the Baal religions are much older.

Second, if what the Bible teaches about God’s interactions with mankind is true, then the Christian God has been revealing himself to mankind since the beginning. Worship of the Christian God was the original religion, according to the Bible.  So the first question presumes a certain view of the development of religion and of world history in general that Christians deny. Worship of the Christian God is as old as mankind itself and so, in a sense, Christianity is the oldest religion.

The second question concerns the kind of revelation that the Christian God provides. The questioner seems to think that if a religion were true, then it ought to have “global revelation” pointing to its truth. I take it that this is a critique of the resurrection of Jesus, which happened at a specific time and place in history. This sort of revelation is what I suspect the questioner means by “local” revelation—sometimes this goes by the name “the scandal of particularity.”

In response, I will first say that I share the questioner’s concern. If God exists and he is good, then we should expect that he provides everyone with adequate reasons for believing in him. Of course, what the skeptic thinks are adequate reasons and what actually are adequate reasons are not always the same. As Paul Moser points out, we are often presumptuous when considering the evidence for God. We ask, “What evidence would satisfy me?” And we expect God to personally tailor the evidence to fit our expectations. We do not usually ask, “If God exists, how would he like me to know him?”

That said, I think God has given universally accessible reasons to believe in him. Let me give some examples. First, even if we take the resurrection which is supposed to be an example of a “local” revelation, the fact of the matter is that most people in the world are aware of the Christian claim to the resurrection of Jesus. Most people in the Western world even have the resources to conduct serious investigation into the veracity of these claims. So even though the resurrection is a localized event, it is open to investigation by a very large number of people.

The Bible also teaches that God does reveal himself universally. For example, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin, God’s righteousness, and the coming judgment (John 16:8). Paul says, “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). In his speech in Athens, Paul proclaims,

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ (Acts 17:24-28).

So the Bible clearly teaches that God reveals himself on a global scale and that he specifically arranged the world so that people would have the best chance at knowing him. The Bible teaches that God is intimately concerned with the salvation of the whole world and that he has actually revealed himself to every human being.

We also have highly intuitive theistic arguments which are universally accessible. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver. If there is a universe, there must be a cause to the universe. If the universe appears intelligently designed, then likely there is a designer. Those are just very brief and rough summaries of only three of the theistic arguments, but the point is that they rely on common sense and basic empirical observations; they are open to investigation by any human person. In that way, they provide a kind of universal (or global) revelation of God.

The third and final question is “How do you know you were born in the right religion?” Clearly, if a person inherits their beliefs from their parents, this does not make them true. But the fact that I learned Christianity from my parents does not make it not true, either. If the questioner intends to say that, he would be committing the genetic fallacy. But if we answer the question as asked, we can provide two kinds of responses. The first answer is that I know that Christianity is true on the basis of my encounters with the Christian God. The Holy Spirit has provided the conviction of the truth of the gospel to me. And I have direct awareness and relationship with the Jesus of the Bible. These provide good reasons for me to believe in Jesus. But I also know that Christianity is true on the basis of critical thinking and the use of evidence. I mentioned some of the theistic arguments earlier, but there are also good arguments that Christianity in particular is true. There are philosophical arguments, like the one provided by Moral Apologetics contributor Brian Scalise that says a Trinitarian (and therefore Christian) conception of God makes the most rational sense. And there are empirical and historical arguments, like the minimal facts case for the resurrection employed by scholars like Gary Habermas and Mike Licona. So I know that I was born in the right religion because I have encountered the living Jesus myself and because careful and fair analysis of the evidence leads me to that conclusion.

In sum, it seems that the questioner is concerned about why we should think Christianity is true given the many religions in the world. The bottom line is that Christianity is better evidenced and more plausible than any other worldview.

Podcast: Dr. Fred Smith on Worldview and the Implications for Morality

This week we’ll be hearing from Dr. Fred Smith. Dr. Smith is not only a tremendous scholar, but he is also an excellent communicator. He is able to make very complex ideas easy to understand. And I think you’ll agree with that assessment as you listen to what he has to say. The topic of discussion of this week has to do with worldview and its implications for ethics. Dr. Smith has spent a significant amount of time thinking about how worldviews shape us and he has recently published a book, Developing a Biblical Worldview.

In this first part of a two part series, Dr. Smith will explain exactly what a worldview is and then give some examples of how worldview shapes a person’s understanding of morality. In order to do that, Dr. Smith will give a thumbnail sketch of a variety of worldviews, including naturalism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Mormonism and show how these worldviews seem to generate a deficient view of morality.

This week we are continuing a conversation with Dr. Fred Smith. Dr. Smith is a professor at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and has taught courses on world religions. He also has a special interest in worldview and culture. Recently, he published a book, Developing a Biblical Worldview: Seeing Things God’s Way. If you’re interested in what Dr. Smith has to say about worldview today, you might check out the book for a more in-depth discussion.

Last week, we discussed the nature of worldview in general and raised moral difficulties created by various non-christian worldviews. This week, we’ll be hearing Dr. Smith’s response to some objections raised to the Christian worldview and Dr. Smith will help us to see how the Christian answer to the worldview questions (Who we are? Where are we? What is wrong ? And what is the answer?) will help us turn back objections to the Christian worldview.

Photo: "Tower Optical binocular" By Ellie. CC License. 

Podcast: Emily Heady on the Connection between Literature, Ethics, and the Christian Worldview

Podcast with Emily Heady On this week's episode, we discuss the connection between literature, ethics, and the Christian worldview with Dr. Emily Heady. Dr. Heady explains what role morality and the imago Dei play in the reading and composition of literature. She also helps us understand the relationship between reading and human flourishing.

Order and Justice: Mystery Novels as an Apologetic for an Objective Moral Order

Mystery novels, taken as a whole, reflect at a deep level the truth of the Christian worldview. And yes, I mean mystery novels in general, not “mystery novels by Christian writers.”

Here’s why.

In any normal mystery novel (notice that I am omitting weird literary or experimental ones; those are the exceptions that prove the rule), certain ingredients are essential:

1. A crime.
2. An investigation of the crime.
3. A resolution of the crime.

All three conditions point ineluctably toward a moral universe, one in which right and wrong, good and evil, have objective meaning. Let’s consider each point.

1. A crime. In order for a mystery novel to be satisfying, the crime needs to be something recognizably wrong, not something that is merely illegal. For instance, building an office block in contradiction to the city’s zoning requirements is illegal, but in itself is not wrong. The investigation and fining of the culprits would be dull, to say the least. But what if the builders bribed a city employee to make fake permits? What if the architect was blackmailing the mayor into turning a blind eye? What if the people who started to investigate turned up dead? Corruption, blackmail, and murder are crimes, not against some statute created by a bureaucrat, but against the moral order. These things are wrong – and so we have a crime worthy of a mystery novel.

Murder is the gold standard, as it were, of mystery novels, because lethal violence against a human being means violence aimed at destroying a being made in the image of God, one who bears the imago Dei. Murder is objectively worse than, say, stealing the Crown Jewels. That is also why murder that includes torture or degradation of the victim is worse than simple murder.

However, murder seems to be losing some of its ability to shock and disturb in a culture that is saturated with visual images of violence and death, and that is losing its hold on the dignity of the human being. After all, the reason murder is murder, and not just killing, is that human beings have special dignity from being made in the imago Dei, the image of God. So if murder is losing its edge, how is a mystery writer to provoke that desired frisson of moral outrage, so that the reader will eagerly await the unmasking, capture, and punishment of the villain? My completely unsystematic and unscientific sampling of mystery novels suggests that child victims are ever more “popular.” In our jaded culture, we may not be moved by the death of an adult, but we are not so degraded (yet) as to be able to shrug off the death of a child. And in a culture that has become blasé about adultery and homosexuality, one of the few things left that can raise a genuine sense of moral outrage is child molestation. At least so far.

1. An investigation of the crime. As human beings, we are free to make moral choices – which means we can, and indeed must, be held accountable for those choices. In a materialistic world, there would be no point in investigating a murder. The murderer was acting in the way that the bouncing around of his molecules determined he would act, and the victim was acting in the way his molecules determined he would act, and the intersection of the two yields one of them being returned to his component molecules. So what? In a materialistic world, bound by determinism, a murder victim would be no different from the victim of a natural disaster. To investigate means to look for an active agent in a crime; to find the person whose free moral action caused the criminal event to take place.
2. A resolution of the crime. The most satisfying resolution to a mystery is for the criminal to be found and punished. The fact that we find a resolution necessary in a mystery novel points toward the moral reality of justice. It is not enough to know what happened; we want justice, not just on an intellectual level, but on a visceral, intuitive level. A mystery novel satisfies precisely when it provides for justice; when it does not, we are left unsettled, unsatisfied.

In some mystery novels, we desire mercy for the criminals – but even that points, again, toward a deep recognition of the moral structure of the universe. Only if justice is the basis for our relationships can mercy enter the equation, for mercy is precisely that which is not deserved but granted, setting the demands of justice aside. Without justice, there can be no mercy, only arbitrary decisions about who is punished and who is not.

In this way, any well done mystery novel points to the existence of a transcendent moral order, of good and evil, right and wrong, justice and mercy grounded not in the passing whims of a culture but in the eternal being of the Creator.

Image: Sherlock. M. Fortsch. CC licsense. 

Worldview as Explanatory Hypothesis

In the town in which I live resides a Harvard-trained academic neurosurgeon who, in 2008, was struck by a rare illness that put him into a coma for seven days, during which his entire neo-cortex shut down. Evan Alexander had mysteriously contracted E-coli bacterial meningitis, which attacks the brain. Just recently I met Alexander, who was doing a local book signing. He has written up the remarkable story of his experience in a gripping book—Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife—that has been featured on the cover of Newsweek. That he survived and without permanent brain damage is amazing enough, but perhaps that is not the most surprising part of his story. For during his coma, when the part of his brain responsible for thought and emotion was not merely malfunctioning but turned off and off line, Alexander recounts that he experienced a hyper-vivid voyage to another realm of existence where he claims to have gleaned profound insight into the nature of reality and the human condition—most importantly that an all-powerful, infinitely loving God is real. Irrespective of how veridical are all the features of his experience and his various interpretations of the experience, what is remarkable is that in his condition he was able to experience any conscious states at all.

Nobody was more surprised at this than Alexander himself, who admits that for the seven years leading up to this life-changing event, he had been a card-carrying materialist. He had heard his share of near-death experiences, and he had retained the conviction that an adequate scientific explanation would be forthcoming, an explanation predicated on the axioms of materialist reductionism, a thoroughgoing naturalistic paradigm. As a neurosurgeon, though, once he regained consciousness and came to understand the severity of his condition during the coma, he became convinced that no naturalistic account would do. As a scientist, he entertained a range of hypotheses to explain his memories—from a primitive brainstream program to ease terminal pain and suffering to the distorted recall of memories from deeper parts of the limbic system relatively protected from the meningitis inflammation, and seven more hypotheses—none of which, in his studied estimation, can explain the nature of his conscious experience during that coma on the assumption of a materialist worldview’s account of consciousness. Needless to say, the event proved transformative for him, unraveling the naturalistic paradigm that he has so long adopted and assumed, a viewpoint that is arguably the prevailing worldview among most contemporary philosophers and scientists.

That naturalism is a worldview means, among other things, that it is an explanatory hypothesis. To say a worldview is an explanatory hypothesis is to identify one of its most important functions: the epistemic task of providing, in J. P. Moreland’s words, “an explanation of facts, of reality, the way it actually is. Indeed it is incumbent on a worldview that it explain what does and does not exist in ways that follow naturally from the core explanation commitments of that worldview.” Moreland argues that such explanations must range over causal, epistemic, and metaphysical issues. A worldview is an expansive way of looking at ourselves and the world. Worldviews offer answers to questions about God, meaning, knowledge, reality, the human condition, and values. Naturalism is certainly a worldview, but is naturalism a religion? Here’s what Alvin Plantinga has to say on that matter: "[Naturalism] isn’t clearly a religion: the term ‘religion’ is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? How should we live? Can we look forward to life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. Naturalism isn’t clearly a religion; but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a quasi-religion." As I ponder such issues, I can’t help but think of the students at the Christian university where I teach. Unless they are told they must, when they are asked about their own worldview, very few of them will say anything about why they believe what they do. Nor will they tend to have much if anything to say about what explanatory power their worldview possesses. If they do broach the issue of why they believe their worldview, they tend to privilege psychological over philosophical or evidential categories. What students tend to do is just give a litany or perhaps one or two of their core convictions—God exists, for example, unlike what those atheists believe. What is especially hard to take about this, for me, is that this doesn’t just explain their answers coming into my introductory philosophy course, but going out too.

It pains me to admit this, but perhaps this sad state of affairs gives me an opportunity. At present I administer a worldview pre-test and post-test to my students in this particular class. The course has for one of its major goals greater clarity on worldview—articulating it, defending it, etc. We cover quite a few ways in which they can do these things better, but the results at the end of the course are generally disappointing, revealing nominal improvement at most much of the time. What I intend to do to ameliorate the situation is to hold their feet to the proverbial fire. For whatever reason, they often do not seem to be connecting the dots, despite our encouragement for them to do so. I am less convinced they can’t than that they simply are not. And if they think they can get away with the bare minimum, sad to say, they usually try, which means the post-test tends not to show their best work. Students at this age—with their philosophy of education, their pragmatism, their time constraints, and their still-forming pre-frontal cortex—often need their hand to be forced. Formerly I would refrain from requiring a minimum word length on the post-test, reasoning optimistically that surely students would avail themselves in an “essay assignment” as part of the final exam to show what they know. I figured they would relish the chance to knock it out of the park. What I have found too often instead are a series of strikeouts or, at best, weak singles. The internal motivation I had assumed would animate them on such an assignment frequently fails to materialize. If am I right, the problem is more about this issue of motivation than that of competence. So, one obvious way to address this situation is to require the post-test essay to be at least a specified minimum length. That’s an easy fix.

The second change I’m planning to implement, though, will be far more important, I’m convinced. Once again, since students tend to focus on the content of their beliefs, the assignment needs explicitly to force their hand to consider questions of evidence. Students tend to be steeped in the lingo of social science, so it needs to be clarified to them that the issue is not the origin of their beliefs—culture, parents, church—but rather their truth and evidence. So what I intend to do is to follow Moreland’s characterization of worldview as explanatory hypothesis. I intend to leave behind saying a worldview is primarily a matter of one’s beliefs and convictions about God, the world, and the human condition—which invariably lends itself to superficial first-order analysis and mindless litanies. No, the function of a worldview is to explain. Talk about that, I intend to tell them, and then to remind them of the specific ways in which they can do so. What can better explain facts that most all of us—theists and atheists alike—believe in and common sense can apprehend? The human capacity for rational deliberation, free will, objective moral truths, real guilt, and moral responsibility? Arguments, philosophical and otherwise, for the ability of theism to explain such realities better than atheism are both cogent and compelling. This is the very stuff we spend so much time in class on all term long. One of the books I have my students read in the course is C. S. Lewis’s Miracles, the third chapter of which is the famous “argument from reason,” the topic of Lewis’s famous debate with famed Wittgenstein student Elizabeth Anscombe, and an argument that in recent years has been updated by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Victor Reppert. The import of the chapter is the intrinsic problem naturalism has accounting for rationality. In a recent book by atheist Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, he makes a similar point; this is not just an argument only theists can see. In the fifth chapter of Miracles Lewis shows that naturalism has an equally hard time making sense of objective morality. Morality and rationality, however, are comfortable fits in a world created and sustained by a loving and personal God. Elsewhere in the course we spend time exploring how naturalists lack the resources to make sense of genuine free will in the world as they envision it—yet without free will, there can be no genuinely authoritative morality. For theists who believe that, as a prerequisite for loving relationship, God has conferred on human beings, made in his image, the capacity for free choice, it all makes excellent sense. Classical theism can simply explain free will, rationality, and morality better than can naturalism; the evidence is on the side of theism.

But today’s Christian students, starting well before college, are breathing the air of a culture that, each day in a myriad of ways, proclaims the irrationality of a life of faith. Even the locution “faith” has been co-opted to convey connotations of an Enlightenment-foisted distorted view of faith as bespeaking a lack of evidence. Biblically, faith is nothing of the kind, but rather principled trust in God’s faithfulness to do all he has promised to do, principled for being rooted in God’s track record of faithfulness. If we do not wish to lose a generation of Christian young people to the corrosive effects of skepticism and cynicism, postmodernism and the quasi-religion of naturalism, we need to help them know not just what they believe, but see why. They must, and fortunately they can, come to understand that they are eminently justified to hold a Christian worldview because, as an explanation of life’s most important and undeniable realities—from love to logic, from cognition to consciousness—it is second to none.