Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 66

But among these million facts all flowing one way there is, of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural.

In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly an intellectual conviction; but it is a primary intellectual conviction like the certainty of self or the good of living. Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.

Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost.

If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of medieval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Medieval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But medievals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland. It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.

Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 51

In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social practice would be definitely illiberal. Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these (and we will take them one by one) can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression. In fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression—and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me. For some inconceivable cause a “broad” or “liberal” clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave. It is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the Serpentine? And this is not because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot be believed in our experience. It is not because “miracles do not happen,” as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith. More supernatural things are alleged to have happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago. Men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did: the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in modern psychology. Things that the old science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science. The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology. But in truth this notion that it is “free” to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism.

The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it. Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth-century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth. In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos. The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 24

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man’s theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 17

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.
A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grow-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here.  Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 6

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut. But the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is yet more strange. For it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not loose. They may well call their law the “chain” of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a madhouse. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say “thank you” for the mustard.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here.  Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 5

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s. Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.

A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here.  Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Science and Christianity are compatible

Michael Gerson, a columnist with The Washington Post, has recently written about the tension between science and some Christians, and says, correctly, that it is quite unnecessary. Real scientific findings don't threaten Christian belief, and it's too bad that so many Christians think that they do. Also, Gerson says, I believe correctly, that this stance will hurt the Christianity of the future, because the children of Christians are being asked, wrongly, to choose between their religious belief and the findings of science.

Gerson says it better.

An atheist philosopher concludes that materialism or naturalism doesn't explain everything, and can't

A splendid article (i. e., one that agrees with many of my biases), by one Andrew Ferguson, has been published in The Weekly Standard. The article is about a book by Thomas Nagel, prominent philosopher, and, by his own testimony, an atheist, who believes in the importance of natural selection, and an old earth. (The writer of the article agrees with Nagel on these points.) But the book's title is Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. (If you need a refresher on materialism, here is the Wikipedia article on that subject.)

What the article in The Weekly Standard says that Nagel has done is to resurrect common sense. Here are two examples, quoted from Ferguson:
"Materialism . . . is a premise of science, not a finding."

"Reductive materialism doesn’t account for the 'brute facts' of existence—it doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn't plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren't. These failures, Nagel says, aren't just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. 'There is little or no possibility,' he writes, 'that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.'" [emphasis in original]

Science has not, and cannot, disprove the existence of a Creator.

Thanks for reading. Read Ferguson!

Jerry Coyne's essay: Are Science and Religion really compatible? 2, reaction

A previous post considered an essay by Jerry Coyne, who argued that science and religion are incompatible.

I have found two interesting reactions to that essay. I am sure that there are and will be more such. Edge published responses by several people, most agreeing with Coyne, but not all. The responders included Karl Giberson and Kenneth R. Miller, authors of the books that Coyne was reviewing in his essay. David Heddle, of He Lives, analyzed Coyne's claims logically. So has Siris.

In any serious argument, the first thing that ought to be done is to define terms. (It often isn't done, unfortunately, but it ought to be.)

Coyne deserves credit here. He has defined some of his terms. He defines theism thus: ". . . the concept of a transcendent and eternal god who nonetheless engages the world directly and pays special attention to the real object of divine creation, Homo sapiens." In so doing, he explicitly excludes some of the most "liberal" "Christian" theology as pantheism, not theism, or Christianity. I agree with Coyne -- A christian should believe the ideas he includes in that sentence.

Coyne also defines creationism, by saying that "all" creationists believe:
1) in God.
2) ". . . that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process."
3) that humans did not evolve from apes, but were specially created.
4) ". . . they all adhere to a particular argument called "irreducible complexity." This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God. Blood clotting in vertebrates, for example, is a complex sequence of enzyme reactions, involving twenty proteins that interact to produce the final clot." (This is a central belief of the Intelligent Design movement.)

Here, we begin to see some problems with Coyne's definition. Most obviously, Coyne is reviewing two books, one by Kenneth R. Miller, who is, according to Coyne, a creationist, and, hence, trying to do the impossible, namely combine science and belief in God. Coyne explains how Miller rejects item 4 in Coyne's own list of what makes one a creationist. He also says that Karl Giberson, who wrote the other book Coyne is reviewing, writes that ID is both bad science and bad theology. In the same essay where he writes that "all" creationists share four traits, he also writes:
In fact, they exhibit at least three of the four distinguishing traits of creationists: belief in God, the intervention of God in nature, and a special role for God in the evolution of humans. They may even show the fourth trait, a belief in irreducible complexity, by proposing that a soul could not have evolved, but was inserted by God.

So, Coyne's definition of a creationist does not hold up, as he has undercut it in his own essay. The authors he is reviewing don't necessarily accept irreducible complexity, one of his four criteria for characterizing creationists, but only "may" show it, and that only in their belief in the origin of the soul.

It is also true that some believers, including Billy Graham, are willing to at least entertain the possibility that what separated humans from pre-human ancestors was not the creation of human bodies and minds and souls, but the special creation of a soul within a pre-existing type of pre-human creature. So the third part of Coyne's definition may not hold up, either. There those, possibly including Giberson and Miller, who would say that God miraculously created the universe with laws and emergent properties that allowed living things to evolve, perhaps even allowed life to originate, without special miraculous activity during those events. Thus, point two is not necessarily true of all those Coyne says are creationists, either.

Even if Coyne hasn't defined creationist as carefully as he might have, or has lumped gap theorists with various kinds of theistic evolutionists, IDers, and young earth creationists, and others, it is possible that his main idea has merit. Is it possible for a scientist to be a believer, or the reverse? He doesn't think so:
It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified.

I have noticed a gap in Coyne's definitions. He hasn't defined science. The quote above comes as close to such a definition as he gets.

There's another idea in Coyne's essay that needs some discussion. He writes:
"In a common error, Giberson confuses the strategic materialism of science with an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism."

By this, he means that ruling out supernatural explanations works for science, but, he implies, this pragmatic methodology doesn't necessarily imply that there is no such thing as the supernatural. Maybe not. I suspect that Coyne, although he says that there could be evidence that would persuade him of the supernatural, would finally reject it. At least one prominent evolutionary biologist has explicitly said that he would do so:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. "Billions and Billions of Demons," By Richard C. Lewontin. New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, vol 44, pp. 28+

Perhaps Coyne really doesn't have "an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism." I wonder. But Lewontin has, and I don't think he is alone. Richard Dawkins seems to have such a commitment, too. The link in the previous sentence is to the Wikipedia article on him, which says that he is an atheist, and a militant one. Antony Flew has accused him of such an absolute commitment.

If you start by ruling out, say, that air has weight, you are not going to publish articles and books that claim that it does. If you start by believing that there are no supernatural realities, it is very unlikely that you are going to write and speak as if you do. (The converse is also true, of course.) Hebrews 11:3 tells us that we understand how things were made by faith. Genesis 1:1 doesn't tell us when, how, why, or where things started. But it does tell us that there was a Who who started them. I have a commitment to a philosophy of supernaturalism. I admit it. Does that make me a bad scientist, or mean that I really can't be a scientist? I don't think so. I don't think Lewontin's unshakable commitment to materialism makes him a bad scientist, either. But Lewontin, Dawkins, or Coyne are probably not very reliable guides through the difficult waters of the interface between science and religion. (As an aside, Dawkins has recently reviewed Coyne's latest book.)

Thanks for reading. I will probably summarize the criticism of Coyne by He Lives, and discuss the responses by Giberson and Miller, in a subsequent post.

The third post is here.